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
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
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)
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)
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
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.
“…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.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
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.
Friday, February 11, 2011
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_)
"...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.”
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.”
Monday, February 7, 2011
"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."
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"
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.
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.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
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!
"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!
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
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).
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).
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