"Happy" New Year and all that....

I guess it all depends on one's perspective or the kind of year one has had. Even though I am not particularly known to be a misanthrope - not even a mild one - I have never figured out what the fuss is all about. A long time ago, after having my senses assaulted by too many robotic and ritualized "A Happy New Year!", I almost mustered the courage to mutter "Mind your own business, please." I am sure some well-wishers are quite sincere, but my peculiar reaction to what everyone seemingly enjoys, possibly has to do with an allergy to ritualized, mass-manufactured behaviour. And perhaps more than a strong dose of profound pessimism about the horrors of life and the obvious vileness of "human nature". But since as the famous quip from Marx goes, "nothing human is alien to me", do have a happy new year :)

The Occupy Wallstreet Movement 1

Barely a few weeks before the OWS, in a piece in the New York Times, a number of social scientists argued that the protests that erupted in Britain and Greece were unlikely to occur in the United States. Their views were a commentary on the depressing fact that given the demoralization of the marginalized, most people were likely to individualize their problems and would more likely be depressed or suicidal than engage in public protests. They were, in Mills' words, unlikely to connect "personal troubles" to "public issues of social structure". These social scientist cannot be blamed for not anticipating the OWS. After all, what they expected to happen, has been the norm rather than the exception. As somebody towards the end of the remarkable documentary _The Yes Men Fix the World_ remarks, perhaps the muscle that allows one to think critically about one's marginalized position and the social factors responsible for it, has atrophied in most people. Perhaps, it simply had to do with the "dull compulsion of labor" - the increasingly impossible struggle to make ends meet.

As can be expected, the mainstream media did not disappoint by predictably ignoring OWS, then by labelling it as "incoherent", "leaderless", with no "clearly defined goals" etc. Others, who could usually be counted on for supporting the movement for at least having the courage to exercise long atrophied muscles, were either silent or labeled them as "romantics" who allegedly did not quite understand what they were up against. Regardless of which direction the OWS takes or whether or not it has any tangible effects that will satisfy those demanding exacting benchmarks and parameters, surely the very fact that some actually reacted against the "world as it is" (to use the title of Chris Hedges's important book) is an encouraging first step.

Response to the Occupy Movement

As the momentum for the Occupy Movement grows, so does the official response to it. A sampling of the response:

Oakland "Veterans for Peace" veteran's critical injury

UC Davis students get pepper-sprayed


New York Occupiers get pepper-sprayed

Wall Street Bankers respond

Images from Occupy Toronto 4

Images from Occupy Toronto 3

Jeffrey Sachs and Niall Ferguson "debate" the Occupy Movement

The economist Jeffrey Sachs and the historian, Niall Ferguson "debate" the Occupy Movement:

Jeffrey Sachs on Occupy

And here, in the London Review of Books, Niall Ferguson meets his match in Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra on Niall Ferguson London Review of Books

David Suzuki on the Occupy Movement

David Suzuki's off the cuff remarks in Montreal - before he made formal speeches in Vancouver:

David Suzuki on Occupy

occupy toronto 2

images from occupy toronto

occupy toronto

As Occupy Toronto entered it's third week, the spirits of the occupants in the two hundred or so tents in Toronto's St. James park continue to be high. The unrelenting rain and the unseasonably cold weather have not put a damper on the enthusiasm of the camped out activists. Specific tents house a library, an information centre, a food station, a media relations centre and a logistics unit. On a cool crisp Sunday morning, many activists are already up. Some are singing on the gazebo that has become a stage; others line up for coffee and toast; yet others are busy with a very public meeting, discussing strategies for the next few days. A young man in his early twenties tells me that he was an engineering student, obssessed only about his grades until he encountered philosophy and began to think about social equity.

A Ryerson University psychology major, also in her twenties, recounts the process that led to her taking an active interest in social issues beyond the class-room. Many tell me that the numbers who have joined the residents of "a city in a park" has grown over the past week. While the long term effects of this movement are as yet unclear, it is heartening to see a wide swathe of people from all walks of life convert, in the words of C. Wright Mills (who else?), "personal troubles" into "public issues".

martin nicolaus and "fat cat sociology"

At the American Sociological Association's annual meetings in 1968, Martin Nicolaus, a graduate student, literally shook up the faux "scientific" sociological establishment with his "Fat Cat Sociology" presentation. Later, he taught Sociology at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby on the outskirts of Vancouver (set up, as he points out by the conservative Social Credit government to generate "human capital") during its tumultous years but left after many faculty members were either under fire or were getting fired for their anti-war activism. He went on to translate Marx's "Grundrisse" - an incredible accomplishment for which this native German speaker was more than eminently qualified.

I am not the only one to have wondered whatever happened to this proverbial thorn in the side of the powerful. Thanks to Google, I finally managed to locate him. His site is the proverbial treasure trove for those interested in the social history of scoiology and his reflexive takes on Sociology, sociologists of all stripes and his life so far. It is also a treat for photography enthusiasts such as me. Those who live for sociology, not off it, will enjoy his site:

martin nicolaus


Enjoy!

G. W. Domhoff on the Legacy of C. Wright Mills' _The Power Elite_

G. W. Domhoff on the living legacy of C. Wright Mills' _The Power Elite_

Domhoff on the legacy of Mills

The Public Sociology of Tony Judt

There are times when one can present an argument that is not particularly new for those who are tuned into issues of social justice. However, once in a while, the manner of enunciating and expressing an existing viewpoint can make it novel and new. Such is the case with Tony Judt’s remarkable book _Ill Fares the Land_ (Penguin, 2010) It is a riveting account of the present condition of the United States and how it came to be this way. He provides an eloquent big picture account of the economic and political transformation of the United States and its implications for the future. This is Public Sociology at its best – comparable to Richard Sennett’s work. Unfortunately Judt died at the prime of his intellectual life. Buy a copy for yourself and a copy each for all your friends and loved ones!

Fukushima Again!

Today the Japanese authorities admitted that more than double the amount of radiation than was announced earlier, had escaped from the Fukushima nuclear reactors. During the crisis itself, the fact of meltdowns was never admitted head on and euphemisms such as "near meltdown" etc. were floated. Now, the Japanese nuclear safety agency admits that meltdowns occurred in not one but three reactors. In the first reactor, the meltdown occurred within five hours after the first quake hit.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13678627

Meanwhile, most are not aware of the fact in September 2002, Mr. Nobuya Minami, President and Mr. Hiroshi Araki of the Tokyo Electric Power Company resigned after allegations of safety cover-ups were proven. Indeed, according to a Japan Times report referenced below, there have been regular cover-ups since 1995. Following a pattern, the President of TEPCO naturally apologized to the residents near the Fukushima Plant and promised better safety procedures:

"It is deeply regrettable that we have seriously damaged public trust, and I would like to apologize to the public and local residents (of areas close to the reactors)."

Earlier Monday, company sources said about 100 Tepco employees are suspected of being involved. Some of the damage, which earlier reports laid to wear and tear, has reportedly been secretly repaired.

The earliest falsification occurred in 1986, and the coverups are suspected to have continued through the mid-1990s, the sources said.

Minami said, however, that judging from the circumstances and the sequence of various events, the falsification cases may have continued after 1995"

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20020903a1.html

Such disasters of course cannot be blamed, as some commentators have, on the specific individuals and their alleged managerial deficits. The insatiable demand for energy and the pressure to generate profits regardless of the social costs are the key factors. Added to this if of course the fact of radio-activity, and the brute fact that there are no off buttons when it comes to nuclear reactors.

Same as it Ever Was! Talking Heads, Obama and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Obama and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Like a bizarre ritual, every few years or so, some allegedly fresh thinking and policy initiative for addressing the Israel-Palestine conflict is announced. The usual sound-bites are propped up by, well, the usual props and photo-opportunities. This time around, the claim has been that President Obama broke new ground by actually mentioning the pre-1967 borders. In actuality, what was new was Prime Minister Netanyahu’s public and very categorical dismissal of President Obama’s invocation of 1967 as the pivotal year. Never before has an Israeli Prime Minister summarily rejected an American president’s viewpoint without the usual diplomatic cushions. President Obama promptly backtracked and qualified what exactly he meant by his invocation of the pre-1967 borders and in turn, Prime Minister Netanyahu naturally affirmed his scripted support for “peace”. The much-touted alleged “breakthrough”, surprise, surprise, rapidly mutated to the enduring stalemate that all political leaders invariably promise to overcome. Needless to add, the realities of oil, gas and cynical global geo-politics will continue to ensure a seemingly endless repetition of the mirage of breakthroughs that are unlikely to materialize. Talking heads will continue to chatter about alleged "breakthroughs".

Nuclear Catastophe and Debates in Absurdistan

In the wake of the ongoing overt nuclear catastrophe in Japan and the not so evident mess at all the nuclear energy generating plants, the so-called "debates" over the pros and cons of nuclear power have begun. Over the past we weeks, an "expert" on BBC has dismissed the idea that there is anything inherently dangerous with nuclear energy. CNN too has followed the same path, but by allowing a Greenpeace representative to rebut. The problem is that even though most issues come in shades of gray, when it comes to nuclear energy, there is only one viewpoint - this technology is inherently dangerous. Yes, all other technologies invariably come with some risks that can be minimized and managed. Yet most other technologies generate risks in the context of use. Nuclear technologies on the other hand, come inbuilt with risks, even in the context of so-called normal, safe, managed use. As long as we cannot figure our what to do with the steady accumulation of radioactive waste, any talk of managing risks is just talk. If anyone has time, they should seek out Langdon Winner's path-breaking article on "inherently political technologies".

It is not just the nuclear industry that is pushing hard for an image makeover during this critical moment. Their rivals - coal and natural gas industry - are inundating the TV networks with adverts to capitalize on the nuclear tragedy in Japan. The industry spokespeople as well as the self-appointed experts all hammer away at the "fact" that an industrial society needs energy and one has supposedly no choice but manage the risks associated with these technologies. None of them of course talks about the ecological impossibility of carrying on with absurd goal of unlimited economic growth.

Social Scientific Intervention in Libya

The Harvard University political scientist Stephen M. Walt laments the fact that in the heated debates over the latest American led war and attempts at “regime change” in Libya nobody has bothered to consult what “social science” has to tell us about the probable results of such interventions. Predictably he cites zillions of empirical studies aided as he points out by ever more "sophisticated research design" to conclude that “these various scholarly studies suggest that the probability that our intervention will yield a stable democracy is low, and that our decision to intervene has increased the likelihood of civil war.” In making this claim, he neatly demonstrates the real limits of certain varieties of social science. Where one might ask, did he obtain his presumably rock solid empirical data to to claim that the real intention of this intervention is indeed to facilitate a “stable democracy” in Libya? Even while intending to be skeptical of the dominant worldview orchestrated by the official pronouncements, he falls for it, with the proverbial hook, line and sinker.

The non-debate over whether or not armed intervention will or will not magically create instant democracy continues to resurface with uncanny predictability. Such simulated debates ensure that nobody gets the "picture" by shifting attention, possibly unintentionally, to the "frame". Such steering away of any discussion of the picture to the frame, if successful, constitutes a very effective way of exercising power - an insight from the great Canadian/American sociologist Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis: The Organization of Human Experience, 1974.

C. Wright Mills on the facts of power and the ways of powerful

"The view that all is blind drift is largely a fatalist projection of one's own feeling of impotence…The view that all of history is due to the conspiracy of an easily located set of villains, or of heroes, is also a hurried projection from the difficult effort to understand how shifts in the structure of society open opportunities to various elites and how various elites take advantage or fail to take advantage of them. To accept either view--of all history as conspiracy or of all history as drift--is to relax the effort to understand the facts of power and the ways of the powerful“ C. Wright Mills

Japan's Nuclear Boy

The Japanese nuclear boy

Tokyo Governor Ishihara, the tsunami and "Divine Punishment"

For many years, the Governor of Tokyo, Ishihara Shintaro has been railing against the Koreans and Chinese in Japan. Criticisms of his rants have been muted. Indeed when he recently announced that he may not run for a fourth term, most Tokyo residents were disappointed and urged him to reconsider. Now, one of the most egoistic Japanese politician claims that the devastating tsunami was divine retribution meted out to the Japanese people for apparently being too “egoistic”.

He said the tsunami was needed “to wipe out egoism, which has rusted onto the mentality of Japanese over a long period of time.”
“I think [the disaster] is tembatsu (divine punishment), although I feel sorry for disaster victims,” he said.

Not to be outdone, the Rev. David Yonggi Cho, the Korean senior pastor of the Yoido Full Gospel Church – the world’s largest church – pointed out that recent Japanese quake and tsunami arew without a doubt, “God’s warning” – apparently because, in his view, “the Japanese people shun God in terms of their faith and follow idol worship, atheism, and materialism, it makes me wonder if this was not God’s warning to them.”

Needless to add, Glenn Beck could hardly be expected to stay out of this muscular one-upmanship! He (surprise, surprise!) claimed that the earthquake could be a "message from God". Posing as the intellectual he craves to be, he injected the mandatory nuance by pointing out: "I'm not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes," but added: "I'm not not saying that either."

Yes, there is indeed the danger of propagating manipulative yet unadulterated crap while criticizing it, yet…

The politician and the pastor were blasted by their fellow citizens. Presumably Glenn Beck was cheered on by his supporters drunk on tea. Quite unexpectedly, possibly for the first time in history, Tokyo Governor Ishihara, offered his "deep" apologies for his comments. He has of course never apologized for his verging-on- -the-racist rants against the Chinese, Koreans and other “foreigners”. They don't have a vote.

"Secular" commentators were not faring any better. According to the CNBC host Larry Kudlow:

"The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll, and we can be grateful for that," Kudlow said, quickly adding: "The human toll is a tragedy; we know that. But these markets, all these markets - stocks, commodities, oil, gold - there is no major breakout or breakdown."

Naturally, he later apologized on Twitter: "I did not mean to say human toll in Japan less important than economic toll. Talking about markets. I flubbed the line. Sincere apology."

Nuclear Radiation detected in Tokyo and Saitama

Earlier today, there were reports of radiation spreading to Yokosuka city, south of Tokyo. Now there are reports of radiation in Tokyo and Saitama too. According to the Governor of Tokyo, Ishihara Shintaro : "I received a report this morning that there was an important change of data," Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara said at a news conference. "I heard that it will not immediately cause health problems." He did not elaborate on whether he had heard anything or received any reports about long term health problems…radiation in Tokyo

Capitalizing on Nuclear Disaster in Japan

The radioactive dust will take a while to settle in Japan. While most people are still struggling to come to terms with the tragic disaster that continues to unfold global investors have begun eyeing and buying up stocks of Japanese companies that have declined in value.

"We're looking to spend more in Japan," Alex Motola, co-manager of the Thornburg International Growth Fund, said on Tuesday. "You can't easily set aside the human element in a tragedy like this but as an investor you've got to find the best place for your capital...Motola said he's buying beaten-up shares of some Japanese technology companies with strong sales outside of Japan. He declined to name them" here

Fukushima, Nuclear Catastrophe and the Precautionary Principle

The "precautionary principle" or the better safe than sorry approach cannot obviously be applied to all technological innovations - the divining of the relative costs and benefits of any technology cannot never be an unambiguous affair. Then there is always the issue of costs and benefits for whom?

However, when it comes to nuclear energy, nothing is better than the better be safe than sorry maxim. But just because the problems with some technologies are transparently self-evident, will not in and of itself put a damper on the absurd talk of nuclear reactors being the alleged solution, via something called "clean energy", for global warming. Over the past few years or so, the nuclear energy industry has been been using the climate change issue to peddle its deadly wares. While the proverbial "wake-up calls" might put many to sleep, the unfolding tragedy at the Fukushima reactors exemplify the inherent risks of nuclear energy. The tragic effects of the quake and the tsunami are now compounded by the radiation spewing from the reactors.

Meanwhile, as AP reports, radiation has been detected as far Yokosuka, south of Tokyo. American service personnel posted at the bases in Yokosuka and Atsuki have been advised to stay indoors for the time being:

"WASHINGTON – More U.S. military crews were exposed to radiation Tuesday as the Pentagon ramped up relief flights over a Japan reeling from an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis.

The Defense Department said the Navy started giving anti-radiation pills to some of those exposed, and Americans on two military bases south of Tokyo were advised to stay indoors as much as possible. Meanwhile, U.S. aviation and energy officials also worked with Japanese counterparts on the nuclear developments.

With more aid for victims on the way, the U.S. Navy said it was redirecting three ships to work in the Sea of Japan on the country's west coast rather than risk the hazards of radiation and the debris field in the waters off the east coast.

Sensitive air monitoring equipment on the aircraft carrier USS George Washington detected low levels of radioactivity from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant as the carrier sat pier-side at Yokosuka, Cmdr. Jeff Davis, a spokesman for the U.S. 7th Fleet, said Tuesday.

While he said there was no danger to the public, the commander recommended military personnel and their families at Yokosuka and Naval Air Facility Atsugi limit their outdoor activities and seal ventilation systems at their homes as much as possible."

Yokosuka

Nuclear Nightmares in Japan and Beyond

In the wake of the partial (so far as we know) meltdown at three nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan, there is talk in the media, of a resurgence of alleged “debate” over nuclear energy. Predictably, slick supporters of the nuclear industry have already started pointing out that Japan represents an unusual case – one of the most intense quakes in world history and tsunamis. Some such supporters are even attempting to turn this growing tragedy into an advantage by claiming that despite the intensity of the quakes and tsunamis, the very fact that there is no immediate total meltdown yet, should be taken as confirmation of the overall safety of nuclear reactors in general. They also point out that the Fukushima reactors are over forty years old - presumably the the designs of the new reactors render them destruction proof.

However, the fact remains that even under conditions of “normal” operations, nuclear reactors represent unmitigated risk. Indeed, as long as the issue of the safe disposal of nuclear waste is resolved – and it is hard to see how this issue could ever be addressed – any nuclear reactor, whether functioning normally or malfunctioning, is literally a proverbial dead end. Conventional wisdom would have it that in Japan there is a consensus among the citizens over the “value” of nuclear reactors. Not so. There are many grass-roots organizations that have over the years contested – without much success of course – the proliferation of nuclear reactors in Japan. One of the more prominent anti-nuclear organizations is the Citizens Nuclear Information Centre (http://www.cnic.jp/english/) based in Tokyo. Just last January, five activists went on a hunger strike to protest the building of a new nuclear reactor – the Kaminoseki Power Plant in Yamguchi prefecture http://www.panorientnews.com/en/news.php?k=716 There are more than 55 active nuclear power plants in Japan and many more facilities that help in the processing of nuclear material for the plants. It is one of those ironies of history that after the two atomic bombs that devastated Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the country is yet again affected by the same technology.

Meanwhile, according to some of the live blogs/tweets on the BBC website (14th March, 2011):

• 2001: A senior nuclear industry executive has told the New York Times that Japanese nuclear power industry managers are "basically in a full-scale panic". The executive is not involved in managing the response to the reactors' difficulties but has many contacts in Japan. "They're in total disarray, they don't know what to do," the executive added.

1844: Mikan in Tokyo writes: "There is a growing sense that the Japanese government is not telling us the true story. On one end, there is the Japanese media that plays down the nuclear drama and focuses on human drama, and at the other, the foreign media is up-playing the nuclear disaster. In my company I heard at least half the essential staff is being sent to Hong Kong, Singapore or even Sydney. I am preparing to leave Tokyo and/or Japan. So are many of my friends. There is a sense of deserting Tokyo as soon as possible.

• 2022: A Russian diplomatic source has told the Interfax news agency that Moscow is "awaiting trustworthy information regarding the situation at Japanese nuclear power plants" from the authorities in Tokyo. The source said Russian officials had not ruled out that the Japanese were playing down the possible threat for fear of causing panic among members of the public. Moscow planned to send seismologists to Japan to assess the situation on the ground so it could be "a thousand times more sure that everything is safe", the source added.

The "Big One" - An Earthquake of magnitude 9 hits Japan

As everyone who has been following the news will know, the quake that hit Japan recently, was the strongest one since the advent of seismic measurements in the country. It is also apparently the fifth strongest quake in history. In popular coverage of the quake and the tsunami, the label “natural disaster” is frequently applied. This label, while not entirely false, does not entirely capture the many social dimensions of such catastrophes. If an earthquake of such a magnitude had hit a crowded city in India, the casualty toll would have been unimaginable. The relatively milder quake in Haiti last year claimed about a quarter million victims immediately and many more in its wake. It was the same tragic story when quakes hit China, Iran and Pakistan over the past few years. The fact that Japan is a “developed” society with a state that has the power to enforce building regulations designed to withstand strong quakes, has made a tremendous difference. Most commentators have pointed out the amazing resilience of buildings despite the incredible intensity of this particular quake. It is also a testament to the importance of long term state initiated and orchestrated planning that advocates of the so-called “free market” rail against. In societies with tremendous social inequalities that translate into substandard housing if at all, and hardly any building regulations, the results are not surprisingly disastrous. Depending on the social structure and the distribution of resources, the same “natural” quake can have very different consequences. Japan of course, also has a long history of quakes and as historian Gregory Clancey points out in his insightful book _Earthquake Nation_ (2006), seismology is Japan’s major contribution to the world of science. Regular quake drills in schools, countless emergency shelters all over the country and tremors pretty much every week, have ensured that most Japanese cannot ever shake off quake awareness. Psychologically, most Japanese have been prepared for the “big one”.

British Prime Minister David Cameron carries the "building blocks of democracy" to Egypt

The proverbial dust (and sand) had no chance of settling before the Conservative British Prime Minister landed in Cairo, accompanied by arms manufacturers. Representatives from major arms and aerospace outfits such as BAe Systems, Qinetiq, Thales the Cobham Group, Ultra Electronics, Rolls Royce, Babcock International Group and Atkins joined Cameron on his trip. Around the same time Defence Minister Gerald Howarth and fifty other British companies were participating at an arms expo in the United Arab Emirates. A Libyan contingent was in attendance.

Many newspapers such as The Independent (UK), the Indian Express, the Daily Mail etc. rightly decried the "hypocrisy" of it all and, Sarah Waldron, a representative of the Campaign Against Arms Trade called in an "absolute disgrace". While such critical comments are indeed needed, in an era of business as usual and "just trying to make a buck", nothing should come as a surprise. In response to the criticisms, Mr. Cameron's response was predictable. According to the Daily Mail, he "reasoned" (so to speak): "You cannot expect every country in the world to provide for its own defence, so it is perfectly logical for us to have a defence trade.’ In practically the same breath he also proclaimed that he was in the region with "building blocks of democracy" in tow. In 2004, Mr. Tony Blair embraced Col, Gaddafi in Tripoli. Naturally, lucrative arms sales and oil deals followed barely a few weeks later. Today, there are reports that the current British government approved the sale of sniper rifles to Libya barely months before its army and mercenaries began gunning down civilians (http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20110223/tuk-libya-uk-approved-export-of-sniper-r-45dbed5.html). Naturally, while meeting the new generals in charge of Egypt and introducing representatives of arms manufacturers, Mr. Cameron also exclaimed that Col. Gaddafi's actions were nothing less than "completely appalling" (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8338236/Libya-vicious-repression-is-appalling-says-David-Cameron.html). Meanwhile, Jeffrey Cox, the Deputy Attorney General of Indiana was fired today for tweeting that police should use live ammunition on protesters in Wisconsin.

Needless to add, C. Wright Mills, who analyzed the military-industrial complex, a term that was first used by President Dwight Eisenhower, would not have been surprised.

Clip from President Eisenhower's speech:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY

Wisconsin Governor Walker, C. Wright Mills and a baseball bat

The details of the conversation between the prank-caller who pretended to be the billionaire David Koch and Gov. Walker of Wisconsin would come as a surprise only to those who believe in the pluralist model of politics of Robert Dahl variety so trenchantly criticized by C. Wright Mills. In his early writings, Dahl argued that despite the presence of elites and powerful interest groups, at the end of the day, it all balances out for the common good. C. Wright Mills took issue with this particular characterization of politics, most famously in his _The Power Elite_ (1956) and other essays. President Dwight Eisenhower's warning about a "military-industrial complex" that constituted one of the sources of Mills' sources, was predictably dismissed by the usual suspects as, surprise, surprise, a paranoid "conspiracy theorist".

Technically, "conspiracy theories" seek to explain every movement, from inception to outcomes as the result of conspiracies. One need not be a card-carrying "conspiracy theorist" to recognize that powerful interest groups do indeed conspire, even though the precise outcomes of their strategic machinations are more often than not, beyond their control. One need not be the proverbial rocket-scientists to make sense of the goings on in Wisconsin as a continuation of actualizing the non-attainable neo-liberal utopia of a dog-eat-dog, winner-take all, robber-baron, so-called free market capitalism. It is the attempt, at all costs, to actualize the "there is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families" claim of Margaret Thatcher and her ideological bedfellows.

The prank-call, although not quite essential for cutting through the ideological tea brewed by the tea party folks, does help - despite the spin that for sure will be imparted by the likes of Glenn Beck and his ilk.

Excerpts from the conversation between Gov. Walker and Fake Koch: (from the Washington Post: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2011/02/governor_walkers_office_confir.html)

"Beautiful, beautiful," the Koch impersonator replies. "You gotta crush that union."

"Then the fake Koch says this: "Bring a baseball bat. That's what I'd do."

Walker doesn't bat an eye, and responds: "I have one in my office, you'd be happy with that. I've got a slugger with my name on it."

FAKE KOCH: What we were thinking about the crowds was, planting some troublemakers.

WALKER: We thought about that. My only gut reaction to that would be, right now, the lawmakers I talk to have just completely had it with them. The public is not really fond of this.The teachers union did some polling and focus groups...

FAKE KOCH: Well, I'll tell ya what, Scott. Once you crush these bastards, I'll fly ya out to Cali and really show you a good time.

WALKER: Alright. That would be outstanding. Thanks for all the support and helping us move the cause forward."

And, Rachel Maddow on Gov. Walker here on: youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7e4bj5rrd8

Pluralism in politics? To be fair to Robert Dahl, the promoter of the pluralist model, he tempered with optimism about fair-play by penning _How Democratic is the American Constitution?_ (2002)

Veblen the Wobbly

Without comment - C. Wright Mills writes so well, any comment would be superfluous if not actually obscene.

“…it has been fashionable to sentimentalize veblen as the most alienated of american intellectuals...but veblen's virtue is not alienation; it is failure. modern intellectuals have made a success of alientation, but veblen was a natural born failure. to be conspicuously alienated was a kind of success he would have scorned most. in character and in career, in mind and in everyday life, he was the outsider, and his work the intellectual elaboration of a felt condition.

he was almost a foreigner, except if someone had told him, "if you don't like it here, go back where you came from" it would have to be wisconsin or minnesota. he was born in 1857 to norwegian immigrants in wisconsin and he was moved to minnesota by his father, an artisan-farmer...

.the next year he went to johns hopkins for graduate work and he took his phd at yale. no job was available for thorstein veblen. he went back to the farm. he married a girl from a family of university administrators. still no job. for six or seven years he lived in idle curiosity. the farm was no place for a scholar, although on the veblen farm scholarship was not out of place. in 1891, veblen went to cornell for further graduate work, and shorts thereafter finally got his first academic job at the university of chicago. he lived eccentrically, and his wife kept going away and coming back again. girls, we are told, liked veblen, and he did not really object. he was requested to resign. with his wife again, he got a job at stanford, where the chicago story was more or less repeated. his wife now gone for good, veblen began to teach at the university of missouri, where he wrote four of his five best books while living in the cellar of a colleague's house. after world war I, he lectured at the future haven for refugee scholars, the new school. he was not a successful lecturer. then he went to stanford and lived in a shack in the nearby woods, where he died alone on august 3, 1929.

there is no failure in american academic history quite as great as veblen's. he was a masterless, recalcitrant man, and if we must group him somewhere in the american scene, it is with those most recalcitrant americans, the wobblies. on the edges of higher learning, veblen tried to live like a wobbly. it was a strange place for such an attempt. the wobblies were not learned, but they were, like veblen, masterless men, and the only non-middle class movement of revolt in twentieth-century america. with his accute discontent and shyness of program, veblen was a sort of intellectual wobbly.” (Mills, "Thorstein Veblen", 1953)

From:

C. Wright Mills, _The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills_ Selected and Introduced by John H. Summers (Oxford University Press, 2008)

An excellent collection of mostly previously unpublished essays - some as "drafts" for _The Sociological Imagination_. With a very insightful introduction by John H. Summers.

Tweeting in Tunisia

Here we go again! Is society determined by technology or does society determine technological innovations and their uptake? With the regime change in Tunisia – mis-labelled as “revolution” – debates over the role of social media have re-surfaced. Such debates reinforce the misleading idea that there are clear-cut boundaries between “technology” and “society”. Another way of looking at the issue is that technologies are forms of social relations that bind people together in particular configurations even as they enable or constrain social action. To claim that the regime-change in Tunisia could not have occurred without Twitter and Facebook is as misleading as the claim that social media had nothing to do with it. Freedom of the press was the official policy but in practice, censorship and control of print and electronic media were particularly pronounced in Tunisia. The dramatic inequality in a country that was by all economic indicators quite well off, combined with corruption verging on kleptocracy was quite obviously the key factor that ignited the protests after a poor street hawker set himself on fire. At the same time, the protesters' use of social media to communicate discontent and to connect for demonstrations demonstrates the seamless web of technology as social relations. The issue of either technology or society is simply a non-issue.

Without Comment - Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison:

"...the interests of art and democracy converge...and while fiction is but a form of symbolic action, a mere game of "as if", therein lies its true function and its potential for effecting change. For at its most serious, just as is true of politics at its best, it is a thrust toward a human ideal. And it approaches that ideal by a subtle process of negating the world of things as given in favor of a complex of man-made positives"

(p. xx, Introduction to _Invisible Man_)

Wards of Awards

Words such as modesty and humility are not usually associated with the writer Sir Salman Rushdie. Quite some time ago, someone in possession of more than a mere mean streak suggested that a Nobel Prize would actually make Salman Rushdie quite angry. He might exclaim: “Why after so many years? And why just one, not three Nobels?”

When the list of those who would willingly prostrate themselves before the Queen for the honor of adding Sir to their names was announced, the not-yet-Sir Salman exclaimed that he was “humbled” by the news. A few days ago when he finally got the chance to kneel before royalty, he almost stumbled. A “case of nerves”, he explained later. Somebody who had never passed up a chance to take a swipe at the pretensions of Empire and its hangers on was now tamed and domesticated. Privamavda Gopal, writing in The Guardian, described Sir Salman as a shadow of “his own creation Baal, the talented poet who becomes a giggling hack coralled into attacking his ruler's enemies.”

Quite in contrast was the response from the black British poet Benjamin Zapaniah who when approached with an offer from Tony Blair to receive the Order of the British Empire (OBE), refused to mince his words: “Me? I thought, OBE me? Up yours!” As he explained later, in a piece published in The Guardian, “there is a part of me that hopes that after writing this article I shall never be considered as a Poet Laureate or an OBE sucker again.” He ranted against those rant against "the establishment" until they are offered some award or the other. Then of course they offer “pathetic excuses” such as "I did it for my mum"; "I did it for my kids"; "I did it for the school"; "I did it for the people" etc. He recalled that “I have even heard black writers who have collected OBEs saying that it is "symbolic of how far we have come". His response to the letter from Tony Blair offering him an OBE was conveyed by the poem:

Cause every laureate gets worse
A family that you cannot fault as muse will mess your mind,
And yeah, you may fatten you
Don't take my word, go check the verser purse
And surely they will check you first when subjects need to be amused
With paid for prose and rhymes.

Zapaniah ended his piece with a final jab: “Stick it, Mr Blair - and Mrs Queen, stop going on about the empire. Let's do something else.”

Along the same lines, when the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh found out that his book_The Glass Palace_ had been short-listed for the Commonwealth Literature Prize, he swiftly wrote a letter of protest to the committee. In his letter he demanded that his book be withdrawn from the short-list and reminded the committee that “the issue of how the past is to be remembered lies at the heart of _The Glass Palace_ and I feel that I would be betraying the spirit of my book if I were to allow it to be incorporated within that particular memorialization of Empire that passes under the rubric of "the Commonwealth".

The co-optation and neutralization of colorful critics, raconteurs and assorted shit-disturbers without whom the blandness of life would be unbearable will of course continue. Some like Christopher Hitchens can be tamed even without such awards. However oxymoronic it might sound and regardless of how pissed off his colleague Keith Richards and his other admirers were, Sir Mick Jagger is now a fact of life.

At about the same time when Salman Rushdie was going down on his knees, it was also announced that the media’s demon of the year Robert Mugabe had been stripped of his knighthood. Apparently this was also the case with the Romanian dictator, Nicolai Causescu who was “de-knighted” barely a few days before his execution. Thus are villains either glorified or vilified, depending on the ever-changing realities of real-politics.

Maintaining one’s integrity and resisting such rewards for ensuring good behaviour is of course easier said than done. However it has been done. When awarded the Nobel Prize in 1964, Jean Paul-Sartre issued a polite version of “stick it.” He pointed out that “it is not the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form."

The only other person who has refused the award is the Vietnamese Le Duc Tho, who shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize with the famous peacenik, Henry Kissinger. The fact that the latter actually received the Peace prompted the now famous one-liner from the singer-songwriter, satirist and ex-MIT faculty member, Tom Lehrer: “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.”

"Sex, Lies and Social Science" Richard Lewontin and Edward O. Laumann

"New York Review of Books, 20th April, 1995


To the Editors:

We are puzzled by the review of our book, The Social Organization of Sexuality [NYR, April 20], because it is professionally incompetent and motivated by such an evident animus against the social sciences in general. We do not think it appropriate for a biologist, even a noted population geneticist whose empirical work is on the Drosophila fruit fly and other “simple” animals, to review a book that describes its principal task as formulating a social perspective on human sexual conduct in the United States. The notion that an economist, a sociologist or a physicist should review professional work on population genetics would properly be greeted with derision. Lewontin’s professional qualifications are of relevance in discussing his review since he himself asserts that his role as a scientist grants him the authority of special expertise for commenting on specific aspects of our book. Nowhere is that basis in expert knowledge evident in the innuendo and diatribe that constitute his review.

The central premise of Lewontin’s review is that people routinely and pervasively lie about sexual behavior—indeed, it would seem all aspects of their lives—and thus none of the data from our survey of 3,432 people can be taken seriously. But Lewontin relates no systematic empirical information to substantiate his claim. Rather, he relies on a set of rhetorical devices that tendentiously advance his assertions.

Lewontin opens the review with an argument based on a false analogy. He discusses at length the problems of credibility in autobiographical statements and then asserts the analogical equivalence of autobiography and the self-reports given in response to our questions. The reader by now is supposed to be thinking, “I certainly would not tell anybody that I had sex with my spouse last night while clutching a yellow rubber ducky. I’d lie—at least about the rubber ducky.” But autobiography, by definition, involves the public disclosure of the identity of the person. This sets in train all the motivations to create a favorable self-image in the minds of others and perhaps some of the outcomes Lewontin asserts. In contrast, we went to great lengths to guarantee the privacy, confidentiality and anonymity of our respondents’ answers as well as to provide a strong rationale for an individual to be candid and honest with us. We spent a great deal of time worrying about how we could check the reliability and honesty of our respondents’ answers. While we readily admit that we were not always successful in securing full disclosure, his false analogy simply misses the point altogether.

Lewontin’s next move is to provide an instance demonstrating the data’s invalidity by discussing the large discrepancy between the average numbers of partners reported by men and women and the logical impossibility of such a situation assuming that they are recruiting their partners from a common pool. In the 52-page chapter devoted to the numbers of sex partners, we explicitly discuss (on p. 174) the undesirability of using averages (means) to summarize the central tendencies of distributions as skewed and narrowly concentrated (with long, unevenly distributed tails) as these are. In addition, we explore in considerable detail the reasons for this discrepancy. Lewontin argues that if we could not get this “simple fact” right, it is evidence that all else is spurious. Error is a problem in all observations (including those in biology), how it is dealt with and its public recognition is the test of science. His decision to rest his case on this single issue without reference to its context forces us to conclude that he willfully misrepresented our analysis.

But he isn’t satisfied with this. In an obscure footnote in the middle of the review that has no obvious relevance to our work at all, he mentions The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray, the controversial book on racial differences in intelligence. Here we are being subjected to guilt by association. All readers of the Review surely know exactly what to think of these infamous social scientists. And we are insidiously being tossed into the pot with them for no other reason than we too are social scientists.

Finally, we have Lewontin’s discussion of our finding that 45 percent of men between the ages of 80 and 84 claim to have sex partners. He chuckles at our credulity in reporting such patent nonsense, being just one more instance of our hopeless gullibility of believing everything we are told by our respondents. Now this is a rather nice instance of his tendentious and misleading use of our data to support his central claim that everybody is lying about their sex lives. The survey in question, the General Social Survey (GSS), is a widely known, high-quality, regularly conducted survey that professionally knowledgeable people rely on for estimating social trends of various sorts. It is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and has been subjected to regular scientific peer review for some twenty years. To the professional social scientist, it is well known to be a household-based sample that excludes the institutionalized parts of the population. Any number of census and other highly regarded survey studies have also noted that, due to differential mortality and other factors, older women are progressively more likely to be living alone. By age 70, about 70 percent of women report, in the GSS, no sex partners in the past year. Older men, in contrast, are far more likely to be living with someone—the sex ratio is increasingly in their favor so far as the surplus of older women to older men is concerned. It is therefore not at all surprising that noninstitutionalized men in their eighties—presumably healthy enough to be living on their own—would have a fair chance of reporting that they have a sex partner. We discuss at length in the book the different meanings of sexuality across age, time and social circumstance. We believe the answers are hardly likely to be crazed lies by sex-starved octogenarians who are posturing like teenagers for the edification of credulous social scientists.

The review is a pastiche of ill-informed personal opinion that makes unfounded claims of relevant scientific authority and expertise. Readers of The New York Review of Books deserve better.

Edward O. Laumann
John H. Gagnon
Robert T. Michael
Stuart Michaels

Department of Sociology
The University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois


R.C Lewontin replies:

It should come as no surprise to the readers of The New York Review that the authors of The Social Organization of Sexuality did not like what I wrote. I confess to having amused myself over the last couple of weeks by imagining what their inevitable letter would contain. I was sure that they would challenge the competence of a biologist to judge social science, as indeed they have. I also imagined, and hoped, that they would raise a series of substantive objections to my characterization of their methodology, backed by various pieces of evidence of which the review took no account, so that we might engage in a revealing unpacking of the issues. In this, alas, I was too sanguine. Their letter makes no arguments, but relies on their disciplinary authority while repeating unsubstantiated and doubtful claims.

It is reasonable that Laumann et al. would have preferred to have their work reviewed by a member of their own school of sociology, someone sharing the same unexamined methodological assumptions. They could then avoid the always unpleasant necessity of justifying the epistemic basis on which the entire structure of their work depends. Their assertion of my incompetence, however, is off the mark. It is both temperamentally and ideologically repugnant to me to provide advertisements for myself, but as I do not want Laumann and his colleagues, or other readers of the review, to avoid confronting the issues by a facile dismissal of my expertise, I am obliged to provide a CV. Although a biologist, I have a graduate degree in mathematical statistics and have taught the subject for forty years. About 10 percent of my technical publications, including a textbook of statistics, have been devoted to problems of statistical sampling, estimation, and hypothesis testing. More important, my biological work must be classified as methodological, my chief contribution to the field having been an analysis of the deep epistemological difficulties posed by the data of evolutionary genetics and the introduction of new experimental approaches specifically designed to overcome the ambiguities. Finally, my work on epistemological problems, produced both alone and together with philosophers of science, appears in standard philosophical journals.1 Whatever may be at issue here, it is not competence.

Laumann et al. complain that the results of sample surveys were falsely analogized with autobiography. Either they do not understand the structure of analogical reasoning or, as is more likely, they were so annoyed by the review that they read it only impressionistically. No such analogy was drawn, nor was any argument from analogy made. On the contrary, autobiography, repressed memory, and survey interviews were given as three different examples of a general problem of deriving objective information from self-report. I drew a contrast between the possibility of verification in the first two cases and the virtual impossibility in the last. Here our authors touch on the central methodological issue. It is their view that, although people may lie or exaggerate in autobiographies because they are trying to create a public persona, they will tell the truth in anonymous interviews, because there is no motivation to manipulate the impression that strangers have of us. Is it really true that quantitative sociologists are so divorced from introspection and so insensitive to social interactions that they take such a naive view of human behavior? Do they really believe all those things they hear from the person on the next bar stool or the seat next to them in the airplane? The Yellow Kid, who made a living from fleecing the gullible, used to say that anyone who could not con a banker ought to go into another line of work. Maybe, but before giving up, they should try professors of sociology. Putting aside subjective questions, haven’t they even read the voluminous literature on the sociology of fashion? It is ironic that a student of “simple organisms” has to instruct those who inquire about human beings about the complexity of their objects of study.

First, Professor Laumann, people do not tell themselves the truth about their own lives. The need to create a satisfying narrative out of an inconsistent and often irrational and disappointing jumble of feelings and events leads each of us to write and rewrite our autobiographies inside our own heads, irrespective of whether anyone else is ever privy to the story. Second, these stories, which we then mistake for the truth, become the basis for further conscious manipulation and manufacture when we have exchanges with other human beings. If the investigators at NORC really do not care what strangers think of them, then they are possessed of an insouciance and hauteur otherwise unknown in Western society. It is precisely in the interaction with strangers who are not part of their social network, and who will never interest their lives again, that people feel most free to embroider their life stories, because they will never be caught out.

Laumann et al. try to minimize the impact of the observed discrepancy in the number of sexual partners reported by men and by women. There is an attempt at obfuscation in a remark by Laumann and his colleagues about averages not containing as much information as more detailed frequency descriptions. True, but irrelevant, because in their data men consistently report more partners across the entire frequency distribution. Anyway, Laumann et al. do not deny the discrepancy. Indeed it is they who brought it up and discussed it in the book, and it is they, not I, who offered as the most likely explanation that men “exaggerate” and women “minimize” their sexual promiscuity. Then they try to discount the impact of the discrepancy on the study as a whole. After all, it is just one false note, and we cannot expect perfection. People may lie or fantasize about how many sexual partners they have, but we can take everything else they say at face value.

But this neatly ignores the fact that this comparison provides the only internal check on consistency that the study allows. I nowhere claimed that “all else is spurious,” but rather that we are left in the unfortunate position of not knowing what is true when our only test fails. Then, in an extraordinary bit of academic chutzpah that turns the usual requirement for validation on its head, Laumann et al. say that it is up to those who question the data to demonstrate their unreliability. For years those of us who work on “simple” organisms have sheepishly accepted the burden of supporting our own claims, and the failure of the sole internal check on the validity of the data usually creates a certain difficulty in getting one’s work published. Autres pays, autres moeurs.

I would not want to claim that we learn nothing from people’s answers in sex surveys. One thing that they seem to establish is that individual fantasies follow cultural stereotypes. In the French equivalent of the NORC study involving over 20,000 telephone interviews, French men reported four times as many partners as French women!2 Of course, it may be that with the greater distance offered by the telephone, men feel freer to “exaggerate,” but that explanation doesn’t offer much solace to those who think that anonymity breeds truthfulness.

While Laumann and his colleagues believe that men exaggerate while they are aged between eighteen and fifty-nine, they (backed by the peer review panels of the National Science Foundation) seem to have complete confidence in the frankness of octogenarians. Perhaps, as men contemplate their impending mortality, the dread of something after death makes lying about sex seem risky. We must, however, at least consider the alternative that affirming one’s continued sexual prowess in great age is a form of whistling in the dark.

Far from having “an animus against the social sciences,” I have considerable sympathy for the position in which sociologists find themselves. They are asking about the most complex and difficult phenomena in the most complex and recalcitrant organisms, without that liberty to manipulate their objects of study which is enjoyed by natural scientists. In comparison, the task of the molecular biologist is trivial. Living organisms are at the nexus of a large number of weakly determining causal pathways, and the classic method of studying such systems is to exaggerate the effect of one pathway while holding the others constant. When such experimental manipulation is not possible we have no recourse but to stand off and describe the system in all its complexity. The inevitable consequence is that the structure of inference is much looser and it becomes extremely difficult to test our explanations. How much worse is the situation of those observers whose objects of study have consciousness and who depend on the objects themselves to report on their own state.

The division between those who try to learn about the world by manipulating it and those who can only observe it has led, in natural science, to a struggle for legitimacy. The experimentalists look down on the observers as merely telling uncheckable just-so stories, while the observers scorn the experimentalists for their cheap victories over excessively simple phenomena. In biology the two camps are now generally segregated in separate academic departments where they can go about their business unhasseled by the unbelievers. But the battle is unequal because the observers’ consciousness of what it is to do “real” science has been formed in a world dominated by the manipulators of nature. The observers then pretend to an exactness that they cannot achieve and they attempt to objectify a part of nature that is completely accessible only with the aid of subjective tools.

Richard Sennett has formulated better, and with more authority than I could, the ideological issues in sociology. (Is he, too, incompetent?) He is, of course, right when he insists that quantitative information is important in sociology. Data on birth, death, immigration, marriage, divorce, social class, neighborhood, causes of mortality and morbidity, occupations, wage rates, and many other variables are indispensable for sociological investigations. My “meat cleaver” was never meant to sever those limbs from the body of knowledge. But it does not follow that collecting statistics, especially survey statistics with their utter ambiguity of interpretation, is sociology. A better model is Chevalier’s Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses.3 Chevalier’s realization was that social phenomena could not be understood without the demographic statistics, but that these numbers can have no interpretation in themselves without a coherent narrative of social life. For contemporary life we have our own experience to help us understand the numbers. For the past we depend on literature, so the locales, characters, and events in the novels of Balzac, Hugo, and Sue form as much a part of the evidence about nineteenth-century Paris as the schedules of mortality and the tables of wage rates.

Even though the world is material and all its phenomena, including human consciousness, are products of material forces, we should not confuse the way the world is with our ability to know about it. Like it or not, there are a lot of questions that cannot be answered, and even more that cannot be answered exactly. There is nothing shameful in that admission."

Physics Envy, "Sex, Lies and Social Science"

"To the Editors, New York Review of Books

In the course of Richard Lewontin’s brilliant essay “Sex, Lies, and Social Science” he remarks that if the study he reviewed is typical of American scientific sociology, then this discipline must be in “deep trouble.” That’s putting it mildly. American sociology has become a refuge for the academically challenged. Some universities have closed their sociology departments; many have decided the discipline merits little new money.

Yet mere stupidity cannot explain the analytic weaknesses of studies like the NORC sexuality project; nor do social scientists so very gainfully employed in such shops simply misunderstand the scientific enterprise. The difficulties with this research, like the larger troubles of sociology, are political.

The British prime minister Margaret Thatcher famously declared a generation ago, “There is no society, only individuals and their families.” In an eerie way, much positivistic sociological research subscribes to this anti-social nostrum. It does so, as in the NORC study, by not probing subjects which resist quantification; the usual disclaimer is that while such matters as the relation of sex and love may be important, they cannot be scientifically researched. Here is where politics enters; there’s something comforting about sacrificing reality on the altar of research. The “dull science”—as Michel Foucault called American sociology—legitimates dissociation from the entanglements, contradictions, and difficulties of actual social experience. Dull knowledge has the same positive political value in Gingrich’s America as it did in Thatcher’s Britain. Lewontin complains of the superficiality of the NORC analysis, but maybe the very promise of a calming superficiality is what attracted so much money to this project.

However, if Lewontin’s exposé is just, he uses a meat cleaver where a scalpel would have served him better. Is quantifying social phenomena an inherent evil, as at points in his essay he seems to suggest? Lewontin surely wouldn’t deny that the Census Bureau provides useful and necessary information. In principle, survey research has its uses, in revealing how people think about themselves. (I found it both interesting and cheering that 45 percent of men between the ages of 80 and 84 in the NORC study reported still having sex with a partner, even if the aged have confused fantasy with fact.) Method per se isn’t the issue.

I wish Lewontin had put his attack in a larger historical context. From its origins in Social Darwinism and the Progressive movement, American sociology has struggled with the contrary claims of those afflicted with physics envy and researchers—whether deploying numbers or words—more engaged in the dilemmas of society. In that struggle, midwestern Protestant mandarins of positivist science often came into conflict with East Coast Jews who in turn wrestled with their own Marxist commitments; great quantitative researchers from abroad, like Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia, sought to disrupt the complacency of native bean counters. In the last twenty years, more interesting “hard” sociological research has been done in medical, planning, and law schools, and better research on culture and society in the humanities departments, than in sociology departments. The intellectual enterprise of sociology is hardly represented by the dumbed-down study Lewontin rips apart.

What places like NORC command, like other reactionary enterprises, is money. To defend themselves, the minions of these institutions will undoubtedly attack Lewontin for being anti-empirical, which will miss exactly his point, that their brand of science represses trenchant social evidence. My worry is that this repression is more than an academic evil. Sociology in its dumbed-down condition is emblematic of a society that doesn’t want to know too much about itself.

Richard Sennett
Department of Sociology
New York University

April 20, 1995"

"Grand Theory"

In _The Sociological Imagination_, C. Wright Mills provided a scathing critique of "grand theory" - formal "theoretical" propositions that are almost completely unhinged from any social phenomenon or context. In the work of the classical sociologists, "theory" and empirical analysis were seamlessly conjoined such that they enriched and informed each other even as they provided insights about society and social change. Unlike the classical thinkers, practitioners of "grand theory" specialize in pitching their claims at such a level of vacuous generality that it has little relevance for understanding the social world.

Consider the infamous grand theoretical explanation of social inequality offered by Kingsley Davis and Wilbert E. Moore:

"Social inequality is thus an unconsciously evolved device by which societies insure that the most important positions are conscientiously filled by the most qualified persons." (American Sociological Review, Vol. 10, 1945)

In responding to this absurdity masquerading as "theory", the Harvard sociologist George Homans quipped "this...statement is a good example of the lengths to which functionalism will lead otherwise intelligent men. As Dante would have said: Let's not talk about it, but look and pass by."

Seriously discussing such absurd claims would ironically legitimize the very ideas that one seeks to criticize.

On Jargon and "repressive lucidity"

The problem of jargon in transforming insightful ideas into opaque, indigestible syntactical and semantic sludge is not new. The apparently incurable disease of deploying jargon to elevate one’s personal status or that of a discipline presumably through expert, esoteric knowledge has been around for a long time. The emergence and popularity of fields such as certain extreme, perpetually on the cutting-edge postmodernist strains of “cultural studies” among others have only injected a new life force to an affliction that was never really in danger of extinction. One clear winner of an annual “bad writing contest” organized by the Australian journal Philosophy and Literature illustrates this point with unintended lucidity:

"If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to "normalize" formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality."

Not surprisingly, committed as he was to nudging meaningful democracratic practices along, C. Wright Mills - the man from Waco, Texas - not only fumed against a “serious crisis in literacy” but also offered some remedies for what he called “socspeak”. As he famously put it:

“It has been said with authority that there is a serious crisis in literacy, a crisis in which social scientists are very much involved. Is this peculiar language due to the fact that profound and subtle issues, concepts, methods are being discussed? Is it really necessary to your proper work? If it is, there is nothing you can do about it. If it is not, then how can you avoid it? Such lack of intelligibility, I believe, has little or nothing to do with the complexity of subject matter and nothing at all with profundity of thought. It has to do almost entirely with certain confusions of the academic writer about his(her) own status.

To overcome academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose....clarify your own answers to these three questions:
(1) How difficult and complex after all is my subject?
(2) When I write, what status am I claiming for myself?
(3) For whom am I trying to write?

My first point, then, is that most "socspeak" is unrelated to any complexity of subject matter or thought. It is used – I think almost entirely – to establish academic claims for one's self;”

His solution, based on advice he received from his Columbia University colleague, the great literary critic Lionel Trilling was:

“You are to assume that you have been asked to give a lecture on some subject you know well, before an audience of a leading university, as well as an assortment of interested people from a nearby city. Assume that such an audience is before you and that they have a right to know; assume that you want to let them know. Now write.
Avoid the Byzantine oddity of associated and disassociated concepts and mannerisms of verbiage. Avoid using unintelligibility as a means of evading the making of judgements upon society – and as a means of escaping your readers' judgements upon your own work."

Mills’ diagnosis of the problem and his eminently sensible solution is unlikely to satisfy everyone. When called up on their compulsive use of totally avoidable jargon, many social scientists and humanities scholars predictably complain about alleged double standards. They argue that critics of jargon in the social sciences and the humanities dare not extend their critique to cover the natural sciences. Such arguments about unfair victimization is however demonstrably false. The use of “jargon” or “technical terms” in the natural sciences, quite unlike other fields, more often than not, does contribute to the reduction of ambiguity and contributes to relatively clear communication. For better or for worse, there is a shared understanding of the precise meaning of technical terms within specific scientific communities, even though these shorthands may indeed appear as opaque jargon to those not inhabiting the same social and cultural world the scientists. And yes, one need not minimize the real complexities and challenges of linguistically representing any object or idea. However despite these well recognized challenges, technical terms in the natural sciences do facilitate precise and effective communication. This is hardly ever the case for the the humanities and the social sciences. Such is the nature of the social world we inhabit. The repeated attempts at standardizing concepts and technical terms – the project of Walter Wallace a sociologist at Princeton University comes to mind - are designed to fail. Such is the very nature of the social world we inhabit and necessarily struggle with. Wallace's project of standardizing the precise meaning to concepts such as "alienation", "exploitation", "class", "status" etc. is non-starter - and if pushed through by some determined scholar-bureaucrats, will contribute to "one-dimensional" sociology.

Must we then avoid using “technical terms” altogether? As someone who struggled against the prevalence of "rationality without reason", Mills’ response to this eminently reasonable question was unsurprisingly, quite reasonable:

“But, you may ask, do we not sometimes need technical terms? Of course we do, but "technical" does not necessarily mean difficult, and certainly it does not mean jargon. If such technical terms are really necessary and also clear and precise, it is not difficult to use them in a context of plain English and thus introduce them meaningfully to the reader.”

Mills’ point is unlikely to appeal to those afflicted either with physics envy or its analogue, a certain extreme strain of “cultural studies”. The members of the latter community will no doubt gleefuly point to the complexities of language and the very real difficulties of representing complex ideas with any measure of clarity. In the past, some have even denounced “repressive lucidity” – the “idea” here apparently being that the social world is so complex that any attempt at lucidity would invariably lead to nothing but platitudes - possibly pre-digested rough drafts of the Reader’s Digest. It is true of course that the social world is more complex than what is conveyed by pre-fabricated, vacuous sound bites available through the mass media. However it need not be so. For those whose linguistic gymnastics are not motivated primarily by visions of academic career capital to be accumulated in a ruthlessly competitive environment might benefit from a re-reading of the above quote from C. Wright Mills. The irony of course is that those who rail against the spectre of “repressive lucidity” also happen to be the ones who are no doubt genuinely befuddled as to why the likes of reactionary right-right wing ranters such as Rush Limbaugh, Dinesh D’souza, Anne Coulter and Glenn Beck among others simultaneously attract large audiences and laugh all the way to the bank.

It is unlikely that Mills’ appeal for lucidity will appeal to everyone. Yet there is no shortage of scholars whose commitment to communicating their democratic ideals was never hamstrung by paralysis induced by anxiety over the alleged repressive qualities of lucidity. David Riesman, Richard Sennett, Terry Eagleton, Aijaz Ahmad, Perry Anderson, Orlando Patterson, Russell Jacoby, Edward Said, Vijay Prashad, Craig Calhoun, Tony Judt and Susan Sontag are not the only names that come to mind. Without questioning the genuine democratic and critical impulses that fuels the work of many of the scholars who insist on inflicting opaque, patently undemocratic texts on their potential readers, there is something to be said for sheer seductive emotion appeal of the sentiment so accurately identified by Mills:

"…to write in this way is to say to the reader (often I am sure without knowing it): I know something that is so difficult you can understand it only if you first learn my difficult language. In the meantime, you are merely a journalist, a layman or some other sort of underdeveloped type.”

Some of Mills’ colleagues did indeed refer to him as a “mere journalist” presumably to shore up their own sense of self as presumably real, professional scholars. Most likely, Mills took these put-downs as compliments. He no doubt wanted his work to be widely read, as indeed they were, but his ambition was not simply to acquire academic celebrity status. Unsurprisingly, he had no use for the one strategy adopted by would be vacuous prima donnas. As the sociologist Zygmunt Baumann pinpointed it, this strategy consists largely of the widespread phenomenon of “turning to the latest fads, exegesis of the pronunciamentos of the most recently crowned idols, chasing the themes everyone chases at the moment, only to join another hunt before the former is over, always the loudest barking hound” contributes to a heady intoxicating brew that perpetuates the proverbial vicious cycle – at least for those who disagree with the nonsensical claim about “repressive lucidity”. As for some self-obssessed postmodernists who insist on penning tortuous sentences, they need to be reminded of the fact that the term “postmodern” was coined by none other than C. Wright Mills!

Peter Berger's _Invitation to Sociology_

C. Wright Mills' _The Sociological Imagination_ was my first encounter with Sociology. Encounter is not quite the right word. Even though I did not quite grasp many of the allusions - not even "grand theory" - it was a life-changing text in many senses of the term. Soon after, somebody recommended Peter L. Berger's _Invitation to Sociology_. The decision to pursue Sociology, made after reading Mills, was now sealed. Naively imagining that the dominant core of sociology would be along the lines suggested by Mills, Berger and Goffman, I was naturally shocked to encounter the widespread methodological fetishism for quantification in the discipline. While pursuing and, successfully completing a degree in biology and physics, I was (at that time!) quite familiar with statistics and even appreciated its relevance and importance for making sense of some of the issues addressed by sociologists. But I was not mentally prepared for what I encountered. But then again, there was always the insightful writings of a David Riesman and a Daniel Bell among others....

As Berger put it:

"The prominence of statistical techniques in American sociology today has, then, certain ritual functions that are readily understandable in view of the power system within which most sociologists have to make a career. In fact, most sociologists have little more than a cookbook knowledge of statistics, treating it with about the same mixture of awe, ignorance and timid manipulation as a poor village priest would the mighty Latin cadences of Thomist theology. Once one has realized these things, however, it should be clear that sociology ought not to judged by these aberrations...it is quite true that some sociologists, especially in America, have become so preoccupied with methodological questions that they have ceased to be interested in society at all" (pp. 11-13)

From Berger's _Invitation to Sociology_ (1963)

Given his keen interpretive acumen and sociological insights, it is difficult to believe that the same author penned the bizarre _The Capitalist Revolution_ (1986).

The Delhi Metro - Public Transportation in Neoliberal Times

The narrative of “India rising” has captured the imagination of many middle-class Indians. The desire to be validated on the global stage is palpable. In an attempt to channel and transform this desire into votes and support for the privatization of public enterprises, the incumbent political party BJP coined the slogan “India Shining” during the 2004 general elections. A majority of the Indian electorate however confounded the confident pollsters by voting the BJP led coalition out of power. The recently concluded 2009 general elections continue the trend of reaction against neo-liberal globalization. For the first time in decades, an incumbent party – the Congress - was re-elected partly due to a number of initiatives aimed at sections of the population whose lot has worsened considerably under the neo-liberal regime.

While much of India, firmly inserted into the circuits of global capital is not exactly “shining” as the BJP claimed, the residents of its capital Delhi are literally on the move. The spanking new public transportation system or the Metro, built over a cost of over a hundred billion dollars, on budget and amazingly enough, ahead of schedule, has finally arrived in Delhi. The Delhi Metro does not and will not spell the end of the indescribably chaotic traffic on Delhi’s roads. In addition to the over five million private automobiles that make Delhi one of the most vehicle dense cities in the world, a bewildering variety of transportation devices ranging from the ubiquitous three-wheeler scooter taxis to cargo hauling vehicles powered by horses, oxen and humans. They compete road space with the public buses notorious for killing and maiming would be passengers, motorcycles and scooters transporting entire families, bicycles, human powered rickshaws filled with noisy school-kids, jay-walkers, the uniformed school children on rickshaws, the stray dogs, the donkeys, the camels and the occasional elephant. And of course there are the cows that blithely ignore everything and rest right in the middle of the roads after feasting on the seemingly endless supply of political posters pasted on the walls of the city. The message “Honking is a Disease”, displayed on giant billboards has no effect on drivers. In Old Delhi, street vendors of all kind ply their trade - from street-dentists to lingerie – on the sidewalks, forcing pedestrians on the deadly and fume infused roads. Given the incredible variety of transportation devices, any attempt at untangling the gridlocks by enforcing lane driving, is bound to fail. As it unsurprisingly does, when occasionally officials apply computer simulated theoretical models to grim street realities. There is no need to wonder what the Delhi traffic might have been without the construction of the long overdue Delhi Metro.

The fact that the Metro was eventually constructed has to do with the unintended consequences of a number of social factors. Prior to the full insertion of the Indian economy into the circuits of global capital, only the elite and the upper middle classes could afford to own cars. The vast majority of the world’s seventh largest city had to contend with the beyond overcrowded public buses to get to work. Commuting at rush hours meant playing the cat and mouse game of trying to guess how far off from the designated stop the bus driver would decide to slow down long enough to disgorge harried passengers and to prevent new passengers from alighting. Those who could divine the driver’s intention correctly would scramble in, some precariously holding on to the bars at the entrance, while others who were unlucky enough not to make it would nevertheless consider themselves lucky for surviving the experience with only bruised limbs, frayed shirts sleeves and nerves. When the public Delhi Transport Corporation buses could not cope, private contractors were handed out licenses to operate commuter buses. The drivers of these notorious “Blue Line Buses” better known to the public as “killer buses” were under constant pressure by their owners to speed so they could do more runs per day. The mandatory speed governors installed on the buses were of no use. On average, the privately owned public buses were responsible for over a hundred fatalities and countless injuries every year. On one particular day, a Blue Line Bus killed seven and badly injured another eight. The driver, himself a victim of pressure from the owners of the private buses deployed for public service, was almost lynched on the spot by the enraged public. Mass demonstrations against the state of public transportation were held for many days after. Before the Metro began operating, the grim daily toll was about five commuters killed and over a dozen injured by the public buses. To ensure more runs and thereby profits, the public buses moved literally at breakneck speeds. The so-called liberalization of the economy and with it, the relatively easy availability of credit to the middle-class led to the dramatic increase in the numbers of cars on the roads. The experience of being caught in traffic gridlocks that followed soon after is not very easy to capture in words. The steady blast of noxious fumes emanating from a variety of under maintained vehicles, the unrelenting beeping from all sides, the constant pressure from vehicles trying to squeeze into any available space, and of course, the street hawkers screaming on top of their voices, selling everything imaginable, from fresh coconut slices to pirated Rushdie novels. Together with the local Ambassadors, overpriced and horribly dented BMW’s and other powerful automobiles capable of accelerating dramatically, are literally going nowhere. The cars and their passengers fume too, endlessly reminding the unformed drivers to be careful, hoping against hope to avoid deep scratches on their prized possessions. The liberalization of the economy has led to changes in the regulatory framework of the credit system and many more people can now afford cars. However omnipresent gridlocks that are not without negative economic consequences were literally denting the very economy and the cars that had promised privatized mobility to the middle classes.

What appears to be lost in the rush to privatization is the fact that even when judged by the narrow standards of profitability the public sector undertakings such as the gargantuan Indian Railways and now the Delhi Metro are performing better than many of the leading private enterprises. During the 1940’s, the Bombay Plan cobbled together by the leading seven private industrial enterprises had made the case for active state intervention and regulation for the development of indigenous industrial capacity in India. Their argument was that until the private sector was strong enough to handle large projects, massive public sector enterprises should stay. The currently pervasive myth ignores this fact in its presentation of the economic liberalization programme as a long overdue unshackling of private enterprise from an unwilling Indian state that was always ideologically against private enterprise. It is ironical that the horrendous traffic jams unleashed by the increasing privatization of the economy has once again demonstrated that importance of public sector enterprises such as the Delhi Metro.

On entering the Metro, one is literally transported to a quite different world. Away from the noxious fumes unleashed by the vehicles in various states of disrepair, it is actually possible to breathe on the Metro and the only sounds one hears are either the announcements on the public address system or the animated conversations of commuters who are still getting used to the fact that they will make it to their work-place or appointments on time! In this brave new underground world, quite in contrast to the chaotic situation on the roads, people actually queue up to buy the tokens and to board the trains. The occasional resistance to this emergent transportation culture is sometimes enforced by the numerous uniformed employees of the Delhi Metro as well as the beefy security guards armed. When compared to the residents of other large cities, the people of Delhi do not have a strong reputation for being particularly helpful to strangers. Inside the Metro however, strangers asking for help or being helped by others, is a common sight. Fellow commuters provide unsolicited tips on how to buy tokens and some even go to the extent of hand-holding the slightly intimidated yet visibly impressed elderly who, at the last moment hesitate when confronted by the steep, rapid escalators. The commuters whose rush to catch a train is interrupted by such acts of kindness of strangers are on their part, by Delhi standards at least, remarkably patient. A team of over three hundred volunteers, members of the Delhi Metro Citizens’ Forum, try to deal with the delinquents who grab seats reserved for the elderly or throw trash around. Billboards announcing another association called the “Friends of Metro” dedicated to helping fellow commuters and to keeping the system clean can be found on many stations. Quite in contrast to the world outside, all the stations and the trains are spotlessly clean. During the pre-Metro era when making it to an appointment in Delhi on time was quite an accomplishment invoking the Indian Stretchable Time instead of the Indian Standard Time was a handy excuse. It is now actually possible, if one is so inclined, to be on time for one’s appointment. As the stress on the roads eases up due to the million or so commuters using the subway daily, even the elites who so far have largely ignored the Metro will run out of excuses for being late. In addition to punctuality the Delhi Metro is engendering many other social changes in its wake. Gender relations, unlike in the larger Indian cities, always under strain in Delhi, are undergoing a subtle but noticeable transformation. “Eve teasing” or the misleadingly benign euphemism for the rampant sexual harassment of women by so-called roadside Romeos appears to be on the decline. In the past, such harassment of women thrived on the relative spatial as well as the social segregation of the sexes and was a nightmare for single women trapped in overcrowded buses. The Metro brings the sexes together, which while it can create further problems down the road, is for the moment at least, literally creating new forms of gendered sociality that was unthinkable in Delhi barely a few years ago. Quite unexpectedly, the backbreaking occupation of human powered rickshaws has received a new lease of life. For many emaciated male migrants uprooted from the rapidly transforming rural hinterland, the physically demanding task of ferrying of commuters to and from the Metro stations is the first grim taste of precarious employment in the bustling capital of over seventeen million residents. The state of the art high-tech public transportation system symbiotically co-exists with the human powered rickshaws.

For the moment at least, the horrendous traffic fumes that have earned Delhi the dubious distinction of being one of the most polluted cities in the world, have been reduced considerably. When compared to a decade ago, it takes a bit longer before the eyes reacting to the pollution, begin to tear. Although close to a million commuters use the train, the number of private automobiles added daily to the roads continues to grow. The gridlocks that have not yet disappeared are unlikely to be untangled until the elites of Delhi embrace the Metro. In India, more so than in other places, given the fact that the private car is simultaneously a device for transporting the body as well and the status of its owner, this cultural transformation is unlikely to happen overnight. However, the enormous cost in terms of time, energy, frayed nerves, clogged roads and respiratory systems might just break the current elite resistance to the culture of public transportation.

C. Wright Mills Re-Loaded?

Steve Fuller, The New Sociological Imagination. London: Sage Publications,
2006. 240 pp.

Over half a century ago, BBC Radio broadcast a series of lectures by C. Wright
Mills that were later published as The Sociological Imagination. In this book,
reprinted many times over the years, C. Wright Mills provided a provocative,
trenchant and compelling critique of the prevalence and the poverty of
‘grand theory’ and ‘abstracted empiricism’ in sociology. Motivated largely
by the goal of charting out plausible alternatives to the emergent narrow
professionalism in sociology, Mills famously described the ‘sociological imagination’
as the ability to connect troubles and issues, biography and history
and the range of their intricate relations. As he pointed out, within that range
the life of the individual and the making of societies occur; and within that
range, the sociological imagination has its chance to make a difference in the
quality of human life in our time. He also convincingly argued that ‘the sociological
imagination’ was not necessarily the provenance of card-carrying sociologists and indeed held out the hope that it would, in due course, emerge as the common denominator of any serious reflection on the social condition of humanity. To a large extent, various versions of ‘the sociological imagination’
have indeed informed the work of intellectuals across the various
disciplinary divides and beyond. Despite the fact that they may be unaware
of it, contributors to serious magazines such as The Nation, Harper’s, New
York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, London Review of
Books, The New Yorker, etc. constantly deploy the ‘sociological imagination’.

Since the publication of The Sociological Imagination and the dozens of
reprints of it that followed, many sociologists have constantly worried about
the impact of their work in providing plausible accounts of the social world.
While some sociologists continued with the relentless formalism and abstracted
empiricism that Mills criticized, others vented their anxieties about the trajectory
of the discipline and its role or lack thereof in informing public debates
over contentious issues. Despite some transformations of the discipline in the
1960s, intellectual anxieties about the discipline as well as confidence about
its future continued to be expressed from a variety of perspectives, in a variety
of publications (Collins, 1986; Halliday and Janowitz, 1992; Calhoun, 1992;
Cole, 2001; Marshall, 1990; Horowitz, 1993; Patterson, 2002; Levine, 2005;
Jacoby, 1987; Bryant and Becker, 1990).

However, though Mills penned avigorous and hopeful defense of the importance of the sociological perspective,he harbored deep doubts, even at the height of his tragically brief career, about the direction in which the discipline seemed to be headed. Among other issues, he was most concerned with its practitioners’ obsession with a narrow, over-professionalized focus where little attempt was made to trace
the interconnections between micro- and macro-aspects of social life. As he
recounts his experience at a typical graduate student orientation at Columbia
University:

"I simply sat in a chair in a corner and one by one these guys would
come up to me, sort of approaching the pariah – curiosity stuff. They
were guys working on their Ph.D.’s, you see, and after they’d introduced
themselves, I’d ask, ‘What are you working on?’ It would always
be something like ‘The Impact of Work-Play Relationship among the
Lower Income Families on the South Side of the Block on 112th Street
between Amsterdam and Broadway.’ And then I would ask ‘Why’?"
(Mills and Mills, 2000: 12)

At roughly about the same time, another ‘big-picture’ sociologist, Barrington
Moore Jr at Harvard, was writing about the dominant style of sociological
research that found its way in the leading journals of the discipline. Like Mills, he drew attention to the "many generalizations that social scientists seek with a technical apparatus and logical rigor that contrasts ludicrously with the results" and to illustrate this point Moore quoted from a recently
published paper in the American Sociological Review. According to the
author of a paper titled ‘Male Sex Aggression on a University Campus’:

"...the experience of being offended was not altogether associated with
trivial situations as shown by the fact that 20.09 per cent were offended
by forceful attempts at intercourse and 6.2 per cent by aggressively
forceful attempts at sex intercourse . . . A 3 _ 3 table yielding a Chi
square significant at the .05 level suggests that episodes of lesser offensiveness
are concentrated in the fall and more offensive in the spring."
(Moore, 1958: 129–30)

Despite the many outstanding individual sociologists who consciously sought
to address the issue of ‘why’, incorporating causality and meaning, there
seems to be little doubt that the dominant trend, partly reinforced by the
reward structure within the discipline, has been to shy away from asking the
big questions. It is not only a question of heeding Mills’s warning to prospective
sociology students to avoid the fate of becoming ‘mere specialists’. After
all, specialists do provide invaluable empirical material that plays a very
significant role in the production of ‘big picture’ sociology. Rather, it is a
question of raising the issue of ‘why’ in a self-conscious manner to generate
a measure of clarity about the social world.

Over five decades since Mills’s important attempt to get sociology back
on the rails, many social and intellectual transformations have occurred.
Against the backdrop of these intellectual and social upheavals, the issue of
rethinking sociology in particular and the very concept of the social and
human sciences in general has been the preoccupation of a number of intellectuals
(Wallerstein, 1996). With the emergence of the ‘new biology’ and a
particular strand of environmentalism that seeks to position humans as just
another species within the larger natural order and disorder, the very idea of
a social and human science has been questioned by a number of scholars. In
light of the new biology, biosocial theories of human behaviour and neuroscience,
a number of questions have emerged. Are humans really that unique
that we need anthropocentric social science divorced from biology to understand
them? If we take a broader view of the natural world and the position
of humans within it, would evolutionary biology and neuroscience, rather
than social science, not make better analytical and environmental sense? It is
not just the scientists who are raising such questions. Indeed the evolutionary
psychologist David Barash in a book titled Madame Bovary’s Ovaries:
A Darwinian Look at Literature (Barash and Barash, 2005) has sought to
promote what he and his co-author daughter call ‘Darwinian literary criticism’.
Many literary critics such A. S. Byatt (2006) promptly jumped on this new professional bandwagon, even as other practising natural scientists such as Raymond Tallis (2008) among others have trenchantly criticized this intellectual turn. Within the scientific community as well, there is a wide diversity
of opinion about the exact implications of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
There has been no shortage of acrimonious debates on this issue. Richard
Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, for example, read and interpret Darwin in
quite a different way than do E. O. Wilson, David Barash, Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer. Some intellectuals appear to accept the idea that even though there is no need at this particular point of time to scrap the social sciences completely, the very idea of a field devoted exclusively to the human species smacks of arrogant and self-righteous anthropo-centrism.

In _The New Sociological Imagination_ Steve Fuller takes up the challenge of
defending the besieged social and human sciences.. His important book raises a number of critical issues that cannot be avoided if one seeks to make serious sense of the texture and trajectory
of the global condition of humanity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barash, D. and Barash, N. R. (2005) Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look
at Literature. New York: Delacorte Press.

Bryant, C. G. A. and Becker, H. A., eds (1990) What Has Sociology Achieved? London:
Palgrave.

Byatt, A. S. (2006) ‘Observe the Neurones’, The Times Literary Supplement, 22
September.

Calhoun, C. (1992) ‘Sociology, Other Disciplines and the Project of a General
Understanding of Life’, in Halliday and Janowitz (1992) Sociology and its Publics.
Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, pp. 137–95.

Cole, S., ed. (2001) What’s Wrong With Sociology? London: Transaction.

Collins, R. (1986) ‘Is 1980’s Sociology in the Doldrums?’, American Journal of
Sociology 91(5): 1336–55.

Halliday, T. C. and Janowitz, M., eds (1992) Sociologists and its Publics. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.

Horowitz, I. L. (1993) The Decomposition of Sociology. New York: Oxford University
Press.

Jacoby, R. (1987) The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe.
New York: Basic Books.