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.

During my sabbatical, I have had the luxury of reading in a leisurely fashion, without courses and writing projects in mind, going where my interests take me. It has been a pleasure and, as it happens, a fruitful practice. Without intention, it has led me to a new project, as I have already reported: an exploration of the unresolvable dilemmas built into the social fabric, the study of the social condition. Today, another example, the tensions between religion and politics in modern society: I returned to this problem reading Nachman Ben Yehuda’s latest book, Theocratic Democracy: The Social Construction of Religious and Secular Extremism.

Ben Yehuda, my old friend and colleague, is studying in his book Jewish extremism in the Jewish state. He investigates deviance in the religious community as a way to analyze the conflict between the religious and secular in Israel. Central religious and political commitments in Israel as a matter of the identity of the national community pose serious problems. Not only has the recognition of Israel as a Jewish Democratic state become a key demand and obstacle in negotiations with the Palestinians: it has become a problematic challenge to the relationship among Israeli Jews. Nachman, an occasional Deliberately Considered contributor explores this. His central findings are presented in part 2 of Theocratic Democracy, on the deviance and the non-conformity of the ultra orthodox, and part 3 on cultural conflict in the media.

In part 2, a selection of “illustrative events and affairs” is presented, among many others: a 1958 affair surrounding the building of a swimming pool for mixed, male and female, bathing, in ultra-orthodox rendering the “abomination pool,” and the 1981 ultra-orthodox attack on an archaeological dig of the City of David, near the old city of Jerusalem, leading to a series of conflicts, ultimately resulting in the fine tuning of the law of archaeology. During 1985-6, there were Haredi attacks on advertising posters.  Further, there were attacks on movie theaters open on the Saturday Sabbath, and many other attacks against free secular activity understood as abominations according to religious orthodoxy. Most heart rendering are the reports on controversies revolving around the question of who is a Jew? (And therefore, who has full citizenship rights in the Jewish state). Some of the tensions have had less to do with principle, more to do with raw politics and corruption: thus, the decade long controversy concerning the Ayeh Deri. I particularly liked Chapter 7 “Themes of Deviance and Unconventionality,” which presents media reports from 1948 to 1998 in alphabetic order from ‘”Archeological Excavations to “Violence in the Family.” Using the alphabet demonstrates how broad and deep his selected examples go.

Ben Yehuda’s careful analysis of how these various events and affairs were reported differently in secular and the religious mass media is especially important. He shows how the tensions between subgroups in the society are perpetuated by how the groups perceive their connections and conflicts and how these are reported. Thus, for example,

“In 1987 Yeduit Aharonot reported:

‘A yeshiva student spat on a woman soldier because of an immodest dress and called her ‘slut.’ A police officer arrested the offender….About 30 other yeshiva students ….attacked the police officers in order to free the arrested yeshiva student. Police arrested 10 of them.’

Hamodea’s version was that the yeshiva student was arrested because he ‘was badly offended when [he saw] that near the [Western Wall] a woman soldier …offended the holiness of the place in public. The yeshiva student was arrested when he expressed his protest.’”

Agency and responsibility are reversed, confirming each side in its attitude towards the other. I am struck by how in this, and the many other media accounts Nachman reviews, the fundamental tension in the Democratic Jewish state is reinforced by the media, and this is not necessarily the result of bad will or tendentiousness (though it may sometimes be).

Many critics of Israel take from this situation proof that the secular Zionist project is fundamentally flawed, moving religious Zionists to emphasize the religious side of the Jewish state and secular critics to post or anti-Zionism (especially when considering the Palestinian problem). My friend is less radical, more moderate and modest in his appraisal.

Ben Yehuda believes that the conflict in “a theocratic democracy [by which he means “a democracy with strong theocratic colors in some areas”] … can be managed, mitigated and handled, but it cannot be ‘solved’ at a reasonable social price.” And that this implies “instability, never-ending negotiations, and chronic tensions, and requires politicians to have the dexterity and skills to keep such a political structure viable.”

As far as the Israeli case, I remain perplexed.  Considering that the fundamental tragedy includes the Palestinians, I think that the conflict may be beyond the dexterity and skills of any politician, that the relationship between democracy and religion is truly complex. But as I read Theocratic Democracy, a difficult title naming a very difficult political situation, I think that my friend is exploring a very important general issue, his is a case study of the inherent tension between religion and politics, an important element of the social condition, and he is right that the only way to understand the social condition is by theoretically and politically muddling through. There are no easy answers.

On the one hand, societies in general are based on common cultural commitments and understanding, and these are quite often religious, while on the other, the conflation of politics and religion makes an autonomous politics impossible.

Israelis struggle with this, as do many political communities. Tocqueville considered this social condition in the opening chapters of volume 2 of Democracy in America. It is a fundamental problem in the Muslim world, obviously in Egypt today. Perhaps the case of Turkey demonstrates that political leaders with dexterity and skills can address it. But even in the U.S., which Tocqueville believed had resolved the religion – politics dilemma long ago, the conflicts persist, sometimes as comedy, as revealed in the season of the “war on Christmas,” but looming as a tragedy, as Catholics, Jews and Muslims, among others, have been excluded by some from full citizenship in our society’s history.

I particularly appreciate that Nachman addresses an important case of the social condition revealing complexity, eschewing easy theoretical and political answers.

I am embarking upon a new project, the investigation of the social condition, highlighting dilemmas that are inevitably built into the social fabric, and exploring the ways people work to address them. Some examples:

It is obviously important for a democratic society to provide equal opportunity for all young people. The less privileged should have the advantages of a good education. This is certainly a most fundamental requirement for equal opportunity. On the other hand, it is just as certain that a good society, democratic and otherwise, should encourage and enable parents to provide the best, to present the world as they know and appreciate it, to their children: to read to them, to introduce them to the fine arts and sciences, and to take them on interesting trips, both near and far. But not all parents can do this as effectively, some have the means, some don’t. Democratic education and caring for one’s children are in tension. The social bonds of citizenship and the social bonds of family are necessarily in tension. This tension, in many variations, defines a significant dimension of the social condition.

Another dimension of the social condition was illuminated in a classic lecture, “Politics as a Vocation,” by Max Weber: the tension between what he called the “ethics of responsibility” versus the “ethics of ultimate ends.” We observed an iteration of this tension in the debate about Lincoln, the movie. In politics there is always a tension between getting things done, as Weber would put it, responsibly, and being true to ones principles. Ideally the tension is balanced, as it was portrayed in the film: Lincoln the realist enabled Thaddeus Stephens, the idealist, to realize his ends in less than idealistic ways. A wise politician, Weber maintained, has to know how to balance, ideal with realism. But this tension goes beyond individual judgment and political effectiveness. Establishing the social support to realize ideals is necessary, but sometimes the creation of such supports make it next to impossible for the ideals to be realized. Making sure that educational ideals are realized, for example, equal educational opportunity, requires measurement, but the act of measurement can get in the way of real education. Making sure that funds distributed by an NGO to disaster victims can get in the way of getting the funds to the victims. Most generally, organizing to achieve some end establishes the conditions for those who have their particular interests in the organization itself to pursue their interests. NGOs often provide for a comfortable standard of living for its employees in impoverished parts of the world, sometimes this gets in the way of realizing organizational ends. But this isn’t a new development: Robert Michels described this in the early 20^th century, as “the iron law of oligarchy.” I suggest that we think of this as a dilemma built into the social order of things.

I think one of the most fundamental manifestations of the social condition animates the work of Erving Goffman. He explored the power of the Thomas theorem more intensively than any other social theorist. If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. Goffman was particularly interested in how in their expressive behavior people managed to define social reality.

The dilemma arises when people disagree about the reality, are ambivalent about it, or even want to flee from it. A prime example is the concept and apparent reality of race. It’s a social construction, as every college freshman comes to know. It’s a fiction, but a fiction that we cannot ignore, a fiction that we continue to treat as real. becoming a social fact. To pretend it doesn’t matter even as it does, is to flee from enduring social problems. But attending to the problems of race carefully has the unintended consequence of furthering its continued salience in social life. Recognize race and it continues to be real. Ignore race, and it is likely that you will ignore its continued negative effects. Controversies over affirmative action policies revolve around this dilemma of race.

I worry when political actors pretend that the complications of the social condition can be easily overcome, following one formula or another, with negative political consequences. This is what motivates me to explore the topic, why I feel compelled to do so. I am concerned that bad sociology also pretends that these tensions are easily resolved, often with a theoretical slight of hand. I am planning on working on this topic, developing a more adequate approach to the social condition, with my colleague, Iddo Tavory. We will start next semester by integrating the topic into our classes.

I will be teaching an undergraduate seminar on social interaction next semester and a graduate seminar on Erving Goffman. Although I regularly teach these courses, I have now my new special theme in mind. The dilemmas cannot be definitively solved, although schools of thought and political programs often purport to do so. Thus, the courses will present a critique of politics and sociology, along with an outline of a distinctive approach to the discipline.

As I teach these courses, I will be working with Tavory. We have already had some interesting discussions about the social condition and hope to continue them not only, as we already have, over coffee, drinks and meals, but also with our students. We are planning to visit each others classes next semester to this end, bringing students into the discussion.

I am particularly excited about this project. It makes the near end of my sabbatical more bearable. I think sociology can help us make sense of the human comedy and its tragedies; working on this directly with my colleague and our students makes the normal academic life well worth living. And note regular Deliberately Considered readers: this approach to sociology helps explain this magazine’s project of public discussion beyond intellectually gated communities.