Peter Berger – Jeffrey C. Goldfarb's Deliberately Considered http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com Informed reflection on the events of the day Sat, 14 Aug 2021 16:22:30 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.23 The Social Condition: The Third Intellectual Project http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2013/01/the-social-condition-the-third-intellectual-project/ http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2013/01/the-social-condition-the-third-intellectual-project/#comments Fri, 11 Jan 2013 20:29:08 +0000 http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/?p=17207

Sociologists face three distinct intellectual projects in their work. They are well aware of two of them, but the third remains in the shadows. The two standard projects are the study of the social construction, and the study of social effects. The third, the study of the predictable existential dilemmas we face, is the one Jeff Goldfarb and I are working to develop in our work, what we call “the social condition.”

As every undergraduate student learns after her first introduction to sociology, our world is socially constructed. People constantly give meaning, together, to a world that may not have an intrinsic meaning to it. In its deepest form, the one that Berger and Luckmann saw so well over 45 years ago, social construction is an existential drama. It is not only that, as undergraduates quickly learn to recite, identities are constructed by a social world (gender and race being the favorite examples). This is, of course, true and important. It is, rather, that our entire existence, as so far as it is meaningful, must be socially constructed and re-constructed. Like a shoddy plane over the void of meaninglessness, we construct a meaningful world—a world in which human existence, institutions and identities make sense. We may not do it actively the whole time, as, after all, we are born already into a social world that precedes us, and so into a world of meaning. And yet, meaning is always in danger of collapse. In liminal situations—when planes hit the twin towers, when children are slaughtered in their school, or simply when a loved one dies—we suddenly see how rickety our world is.

The second sociological project is that of “social effects,” the intellectual project that has come to define most sociological work. Here, sociologists note that we encounter social categories and processes as a reality that is beyond us. And this world that we encounter is far from equal. Sociologists thus study how social categories predictably affect the way different people encounter their worlds, and their chances to thrive within them. To take a particularly poignant example, Devah Pager . . .

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Sociologists face three distinct intellectual projects in their work. They are well aware of two of them, but the third remains in the shadows. The two standard projects are the study of the social construction, and the study of social effects. The third, the study of the predictable existential dilemmas we face, is the one Jeff Goldfarb and I are working to develop in our work, what we call “the social condition.”

As every undergraduate student learns after her first introduction to sociology, our world is socially constructed. People constantly give meaning, together, to a world that may not have an intrinsic meaning to it. In its deepest form, the one that Berger and Luckmann saw so well over 45 years ago, social construction is an existential drama. It is not only that, as undergraduates quickly learn to recite, identities are constructed by a social world (gender and race being the favorite examples). This is, of course, true and important. It is, rather, that our entire existence, as so far as it is meaningful, must be socially constructed and re-constructed. Like a shoddy plane over the void of meaninglessness, we construct a meaningful world—a world in which human existence, institutions and identities make sense. We may not do it actively the whole time, as, after all, we are born already into a social world that precedes us, and so into a world of meaning. And yet, meaning is always in danger of collapse. In liminal situations—when planes hit the twin towers, when children are slaughtered in their school, or simply when a loved one dies—we suddenly see how rickety our world is.

The second sociological project is that of “social effects,” the intellectual project that has come to define most sociological work. Here, sociologists note that we encounter social categories and processes as a reality that is beyond us. And this world that we encounter is far from equal. Sociologists thus study how social categories predictably affect the way different people encounter their worlds, and their chances to thrive within them. To take a particularly poignant example, Devah Pager recently showed how having a criminal record affects the hiring of black men. To do so, she trained a group of black and white graduate students, and sent them with near identical resumes to find an entry-level job. The only real difference in their resumes was that half of the white and half of the black graduate students had a criminal record on their resumes. The results were chilling, though perhaps not as surprising as we would wish. White men without criminal records were the most hired, but after them were white men with criminal records, only then came black men without criminal records, and trailing them, with almost none hired, were black men with criminal records. In a country with such high level of incarceration of young black men, her work shows not only how racism operates, but how nigh impossible it is for black men who “paid their debt to society” to become re-integrated into the legal economy.

These two intellectual projects are, of course, crucial. They are important for sociologists, for whom they are the stock in trade; but they are also crucial for any of us who attempts to understand the world we live in.

But focusing on these intellectual projects may present a picture that is all too predictable. While it is true that we construct our world and live with the effects of its construction, we also live a life that is riddled with choices, with dilemmas, with angst. These dilemmas, and the way we answer them, is often the choices we are most proud of, the moments that define our personhood, as well as the type of society in which we live.

Although how we answer the dilemmas our lives present us is not something that a sociology can answer, sociology can focus on these moments—on the predictable tensions and dilemmas that we face. These dilemmas are built into the social fabric of our being in both large and small ways. Writ large, as Goldfarb has noted (see here and here), we can, for example, think about the inherent tensions of democracy that structure our political dramas. Our institutions and ways of life are contradictory, and living through them is not following a smooth script, but a minefield of difficult choices.

I tend to think about smaller moments. And here too, I find them riddled with tensions. Take, for example, what happens when we start an activity—be it learning to box, learning the guitar, falling in love, or become religious. All these activities have a strong experiential aspect to them. When I studied Orthodox Judaism, I was struck by how powerful the experiences of newly religious Jews are. Even in the most mundane of rituals, when they had to say a blessing before having a cup of water, some of my friends felt a deep experience of the divine. In a different key, the same goes for more profane activities and relationships. And in both cases, experience slowly becomes routinized. Prayers are learnt by heart, music pours from the guitar effortlessly. On the one hand, mastery then has its own seductions—the ease, the control, how movements that were once challenging becomes almost automatic.

But these seductions are beset by challenges—for the person who had powerful religious experiences when he converted, becoming an adept means losing some of these moments. Instead of exuberance, religious experience becomes more fleeting, something felt only at intervals. Gaining mastery, then, is also losing something. And the balance of what is lost and what is gained is a hard one. Some people leave religion when experience changes; some try to take it up a notch, becoming stricter and stricter as a way to sustain the tension and excitement that they are in danger of losing.

But whatever they do, the conditions of this tension are predictable. Social research, in this key, doesn’t show solutions, but points to moments of deliberation, of uncertainty and angst. Studying the social condition cannot tell us how to solve these moments. It can, however, tell us where to expect them, and point us in the direction of describing and analyzing the existential dilemmas people traverse.

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Academia: Reflections of an Undergraduate Student in Pakistan http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2012/06/academia-reflections-of-undergraduate-student-in-pakistan/ http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2012/06/academia-reflections-of-undergraduate-student-in-pakistan/#comments Tue, 12 Jun 2012 16:22:36 +0000 http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/?p=13734 “Do you think it matters, Daniyal? Do you think anybody cares about your senior project? All that matters is the people around you, and your senior project doesn’t make a difference to anyone.”

All I could do was to look at my friend with a blank expression, completely stunned and humbled. These words weren’t spoken with the least bit of aggression, as one might think. Rather, they were delivered with a straight, honest face and in a soft-spoken manner, and still managed to convey all the seriousness in the world. The words struck me more so for two reasons. Firstly, I consider my undergraduate senior thesis to be the culmination and high-point of a grueling intellectual journey undertaken over five years. Secondly, my project is dedicated to my friends because they have often been my most ardent supporters as well as my harshest critics during this journey. Yet, there she was, a friend mind you, effortlessly reducing my best academic work to a heap of worthless trash!

In retrospect, her attitude towards a piece of academic writing and a person who aspires to be an academic was not surprising at all. Current opinion on the value and worth of the institutional home of the academic — the university — is far from being conclusively positive. My friend had recently experienced and witnessed some of the worst tendencies of academia at a conference at which she presented a paper. Rather than asking a question about the presentation, a philosophy instructor in the audience had chosen to speak to my friend in a patronizing manner, suggesting that her interest in her chosen subject of inquiry was worrisome, thinking that it was unhealthy for a girl of her age.

Thus, understanding the source of her disdain towards my project was not difficult. Academics and university professors aren’t always worthy role-models, to say the least. Many people I’ve spoken to insist that academics don’t really do anything, just talk; and you can bet there’s going to be a lot of self-serving conversation (at academic conferences, for example, not to say that there aren’t constructive conferences). No wonder academics are often . . .

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“Do you think it matters, Daniyal? Do you think anybody cares about your senior project? All that matters is the people around you, and your senior project doesn’t make a difference to anyone.”

All I could do was to look at my friend with a blank expression, completely stunned and humbled. These words weren’t spoken with the least bit of aggression, as one might think. Rather, they were delivered with a straight, honest face and in a soft-spoken manner, and still managed to convey all the seriousness in the world. The words struck me more so for two reasons. Firstly, I consider my undergraduate senior thesis to be the culmination and high-point of a grueling intellectual journey undertaken over five years. Secondly, my project is dedicated to my friends because they have often been my most ardent supporters as well as my harshest critics during this journey. Yet, there she was, a friend mind you, effortlessly reducing my best academic work to a heap of worthless trash!

In retrospect, her attitude towards a piece of academic writing and a person who aspires to be an academic was not surprising at all. Current opinion on the value and worth of the institutional home of the academic — the university — is far from being conclusively positive. My friend had recently experienced and witnessed some of the worst tendencies of academia at a conference at which she presented a paper. Rather than asking a question about the presentation, a philosophy instructor in the audience had chosen to speak to my friend in a patronizing manner, suggesting that her interest in her chosen subject of inquiry was worrisome, thinking that it was unhealthy for a girl of her age.

Thus, understanding the source of her disdain towards my project was not difficult. Academics and university professors aren’t always worthy role-models, to say the least. Many people I’ve spoken to insist that academics don’t really do anything, just talk; and you can bet there’s going to be a lot of self-serving conversation (at academic conferences, for example, not to say that there aren’t constructive conferences). No wonder academics are often guilty of having inflated egos, which would put the most proud of monarchs to shame. Moreover, academics often have a (well-earned) reputation for being dreamers whose “work” isn’t really of much worth. They don’t really live in the “real world” (or so we are told).

This is not only the view of those who remain outside the university as an institution, but also of those who are very much part of it. Let me cite a few examples from the field of study with which I am most familiar. With regards to economics, Robert Heilbroner and William Milberg have written that “at its peaks, the ‘high theorizing’ of the present period attains a degree of unreality that can be matched only by medieval scholasticism” (The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought, pg. 4). John Kay (Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics) wrote an essay last year on the state of economics and concluded it with a remark about economists’ “work” during this last economic crisis: “Economists – in government agencies as well as universities – were obsessively playing Grand Theft Auto [a video game] while the world around them was falling apart.” In a similar vein, an article published in 2009 by The Economist on the state of economics was titled “The other-worldly philosophers.” Of course, even though these observations are restricted to economics as a discipline and as a profession, I wouldn’t hesitate to think that they are indicative of the culture of academia in general. In doing so, I am following Peter Berger, who in his article on the state of sociology, says:

“In diagnosing the condition of sociology, one should not view it in isolation. Its symptoms tend to be those afflicting the intellectual life in general.” [Peter L. Berger, “Sociology: A Disinvitation?,” Society (November/December 1992): 18.]

What does all this mean for my (and others’) aspirations of being an academic? Despite the above observations, the fact remains that academia as a world in itself is very real and its influence is far-reaching, extending into society, politics and economics no less. The crucial question is this: Can academics – and the university as an institution – still engage with society in a meaningful and constructive manner? A dialogical relationship with society at large is a must if universities are to remain relevant to modern society in general and to the varying, specific cultural contexts in which they are individually situated.

Another friend recently asked me something to the following effect: “So after this undergraduate experience, have you become disillusioned with academia?” My answer to this question is both yes and no. Yes, there are many narrow-minded ideologues and pseudo-intellectuals whose work and teaching make students like me (who are not yet truly entrenched in academia like many of our professors are) question the supposed worth of academia. At the same time, there are academics whose work informs and contextualizes public debates and conversations so as to make them more constructive and relevant. That is, they do help improve our understanding of our world and of ourselves.

One of my teachers recently said to me that the best writing is that which is informed by an academic perspective, yet is accessible to an educated non-specialist. This remark encapsulates for me the idea of a “public intellectual”, which perhaps serves as a more worthy model than that of a “pure academic.” Far from being an “other-worldly philosopher”, the public intellectual is not a permanent resident of the proverbial ivory tower – more like a visitor. While enthusiastically participating in the town square adjoining the tower, he does bring to his discussions in the former the perspective he gains from trips to the latter. Conversely, his view of the town square from above is consciously shaped by his experience on the ground in the town square. That is, the public intellectual allows his academic work and his engagement with the public at large to re-shape and complement each other in a dialectical manner.

Periods of change and transition offer us good opportunities to reflect on the past. Having just finished undergraduate studies spanning half a decade, I’d say my experience of academia has been a mixed bag. There certainly has been a certain amount of disillusionment, but I have no doubt universities and academics still have a lot to offer. However, to remain relevant and to be able to contribute, current and future academics will do well to listen closely to the voices – coming from within and without academia – which are expressing dissatisfaction about the current role of academia (or the lack thereof) in helping societies across the world grapple with major concerns of the day. Ignoring these voices will only undermine their own value as academics and of the university as a major institution.

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