WHAT SOCIOLOGY HAS TO OFFER
March 2004
I did my graduate work at both the University of Utah and Columbia University with a sociologist with the grand Irish name of Thomas Francis O'Dea. While he lived in Salt Lake City Tom often exercised at a downtown gym. One day while relaxing in the steam room after a noon workout he was accosted by a somewhat belligerent local businessman who wanted an explanation of exactly what Tom was up to “up there” at the University. “Are you teaching some kind of socialism?” the man demanded to know. “What is this sociology stuff, anyway?”
Tom was more than a bit feisty; he came from a working class background and, after serving in World War II, had taken just 12 years to go from Harvard freshman to full professor—an achievement that ordinarily would have taken at least 20. He had authored three books and established a national reputation, and he was not one to suffer fools lightly. And so he replied, “I draw a full year’s salary to answer that question.”
I recall this story for two reasons. One is that even now, nearly half a century later, an understanding of sociology is still not well established, much less embedded, in the American popular consciousness. As sociologist Peter Berger has pointed out, occupational humor—even if derisive—only works against the background of some minimal level of public awareness. So, how many jokes have you heard about sociologists lately?
The other reason is that, like the businessman, many people still confuse sociologists with social workers and socialists, two groups whose activities are often already mixed up in people's minds. And while I rue this confusion along with sociology’s absence from the conventional wisdom, there is a valid explanation for both. That explanation lies in difficulty of appreciating what C. Wright Mills so aptly called the “sociological imagination.” My own experience over four decades of teaching is that even those students who major in sociology often require several years of graduate study to fully grasp its perspective.
The early 20th century American sociologist, Charles Horton Cooley, opens the door to this perspective in two succinct sentences:
An individual is an abstraction unknown to experience, and so likewise is society when regarded as something apart from individuals.... “Society” and “individuals” do not denote separable phenomena, but are simply collective and distributive aspects of the same thing....
Cooley’s statement is an excellent place to begin articulating the unique vantage point offered by the sociological perspective. Americans seem to have an innate resistance to it, especially those Americans who are fervently committed to the morality of laissez faire capitalism—to pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. My suspicion is that these difficulties in understanding derive from our widely held but rather naive ideas about individualism, ideas that are strongly nurtured by our common culture and political ideologies of both left and right.
A clue to this naiveté can be found in an error that Cooley himself unwittingly makes in the first part of his statement—that “an individual is an abstraction unknown to experience.” Cooley is mistaken here in two important ways. The first is that we believe that we do know and experience individuals; the second is that we believe that we experience these individuals not as abstractions but as real, concrete entities. We believe these things because of the human tendency toward what philosopher John Dewey called “misplaced concreteness” as well as to what some wag subsequently referred to as a “hardening of the categories.” That is, we tend to see the world in terms of its immediate, physical appearance, and since people appear to come individually packaged in separate corporal containers called bodies we mistakenly conclude that people are such separate entities. And once committed to these mistaken perceptions, we tend to persist in them, often oblivious to all kinds of evidence to the contrary.
Furthermore, we Americans display a passionate predilection—eloquently sacralized in our Declaration of Independence—to see a group as “really” just an assemblage of individuals who have voluntarily agreed to forego some of their individual “unalienable rights” in order to create—and become members of—that particular group.
In other words, we tend to assume that individuals exist first, and that groups then come into being if—and usually only if—these individuals transfer some of their innate and “unalienable” personal and independent sovereignty to the group. Thinking they have thus created the group, the individual members conclude that they are equally free to withdraw from the group whenever they might choose. Perhaps nowhere is this view sponsored more perilously than by those who argue that the Constitution guarantees an “unalienable right” to bear arms. A bumper sticker often displayed by such advocates states: “Guns Don't Kill People; People Kill People.” That of course is true—so far as it goes. The fact is that people kill people—and in the United States, especially, they do so mostly with guns. To argue that the group—the larger society—has no prerogative to impose restrictions on individual behaviors is clearly silly, if not absurd.
Quite likely each of us can remember some occasion in our youth when we thought up what we were convinced was the invincible argument against what we were equally convinced was an unjust parental demand: “I don't have to do that (whatever it was) because I didn't ask to be born!” What we were proclaiming, of course, was that the family's rules didn't apply to us because we had never agreed to belong to the family group and therefore their rules were not binding on us. But, of course, as each of us quickly found out, how wrong we were....and how wrong we ultimately are, when we try to assert that argument. The French sociologist Emile Durkheim provided a very instructive name for this fundamental characteristic of those groups into which we are born—he called it “the uncontracted contract.”
The shrewdness of both Cooley and Durkheim is in their recognition that we are both individual and social at the same time. If fact, Durkheim reversed what so many of us in the West see as the usual—and thus presume to be the “natural”—relationship between the individual and the group. It is not the individual’s existence but the group's existence that is primary, Durkheim claimed; only after the group’s version of reality is established are the group's members then granted whatever degree of individualism the group deems appropriate. Durkheim would explain the emphasis on individualism in America as much more the result than the cause of American society; in the U.S. individualism is a primary group value. Here is a fine irony which we may not be particularly keen in appreciating. Yet we actually acknowledge this causal sequence when we claim that our group—we Americans—really believe in the value of the individual.
So we are forced to concede Cooley’s observation: an individual is an abstraction—there is in reality no such thing as an individual conceived of as separate from others. The sociological perspective argues for a much more inclusive frame of reference. It requires that we attend to the complexities created by all those other people who are connected to us and to whom we are connected—all those mostly “anonymous others” upon whom we rely everyday in countless ways in order to accomplish our “individual” goals. The sociological perspective informs us that all human situations are inherently and ineluctably social.
The social institutions that arise out of these intricate social memberships hold a powerful sway over our actions, even while we think those actions are motivated solely by individual considerations. Karl Marx famously summed up this powerful truth when he said that men and women are free to choose, but they are not free to choose any way they wish.
Each of us has already been shaped—“trained up,” as it were—by these ubiquitous social institutions in which we spend the great majority of our time: earning a living, educating our children, enjoying our families, worshipping our gods. They markedly shape our lives in countless ways of which we are never fully aware.
In turn, our belonging and participation in these organizations animates and empowers them. What they ultimately consist of is the dynamic collective synthesis of our own individual behaviors, behaviors which most often run along the well-worn paths of expected behaviors created by those who have preceded us.
And so it turns out that most of us do what those anonymous others want us to, at least most of the time. This is the primary trick that every society plays on its members—getting us to want to do what we are going to have to do anyway. What happens in that process is that we embrace that most fundamental of all human inventions: the rules. Sociologists call these norms. We usually follow these norms, these directing-paths-of-least-resistance not just because they usually work, not simply because they are readily available, or even because they might be physically enforced. Our conformity is much more a result of volition, of desire, of emotional commitment. And also, perhaps, of a lack of that individualism we so strongly believe in.
Herein lies a question that has long intrigued sociologists—why do we humans embrace the norms so passionately? An immediate answer is that certain concrete rules—especially the “here and now rules” of everyday life--are constantly in use by the people very much like ourselves in whose midst we quite literally find our selves. A more complete answer would acknowledge that vague sense each of us has of the “open-endedness” of life and the ways in which rules shelter us from drifting aimlessly upon the vast sea of human possibility.
At an even more fundamental level, this inherent human reliance on the group’s norms—our dependence on the group—comes from an underlying core of anxieties to which each of us is susceptible, however inchoately. This core has been identified by a wide array of people in many different ways and by many different names. It is referred to in such diverse sources as Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be, Peters’ and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence, Erik Erikson’s Insight and Responsibility, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. At base it is comprised of three primordial human fears: that the unpredictable might break through my stable world at any moment; that however much I might surround myself with others I am finally alone; that I am never completely certain how it all is supposed to make sense.
Such basic fears can only be relieved through an extended and constructive collaboration with others. It is society that enables its members to allay these anxieties, to transcend these fears. It does so by satisfying the human needs that counter each of these fears: needs for order, for membership, and for meaning. Every society and every group provides its members with a convincingly substantial foundation to build their lives upon: order—a stable frame of reference of “what’s what;” membership—an explicit sense of identity and belonging; and meaning—intimations if not explicit recipes for direction and purpose.
The inevitable human interdependence required to sustain these three staples of human existence endows groups with their compelling attractiveness as well as their tremendous power. That we cannot exist as individuals without these social essentials means that our beliefs, and the actions our beliefs lead to, will always be shaped by the groups to which we belong.
Given this intricate social complexity, we might be tempted to conclude that we were better off not seeing the world from the sociological perspective after all. But that is just not so. While the sociological perspective informs us that we are to a large extent captured by the very forces we think we control, it also provides us with the tools to at least manage if not direct those forces. Ironically, we might well be oblivious to both forces and tools were it not for the insights offered by the sociological perspective.
By enabling us to see more, and to understand what we already see even more fully, sociology—in fact, all those sciences which struggle to comprehend human behavior—enables us to construct a more complete and multifaceted picture of our human situation. Through the sociological perspective we are better prepared to formulate and explore more effective answers to the increasingly complex problems of both our “individual” and our collective lives in the world.