Peter Emmerson

 6.2

 If we learn Elias’ lesson it is that when doing science we should speak in reality congruent ways such as relative certainty or relative uncertainty that relate to continua not dichotomies. Going beyond these limits we fall prey to the traps of idealism, into which it is so easy and comfortable to fall; the place where Homo clausus lives and sleeps in dichotomous reverie, not haunted by the doubt that accompanies a closer association with reality, secure and comfortable in the certainty of pure being. Marx missed the point when bemoaning capitalist people’s lack of critical awareness; religion is not the opiate, it is but a feature of a broader and more profound danger, a trap that Marx himself fell into – idealism. Safety lies at either end of the dichotomous rainbow where in a dream state ‘all’ is possible, where ‘I’ can be separated from ‘we’. I have found it all too easy to fall into the trap of using non-process words such as nouns, epitomised by dichotomies which are so entrenched in our language conventions: there are undoubtedly such instances still undetected in this essay. There is a need for constant vigilance to avoid such ‘trains to nowhere’. But just as importantly, there is a requirement for creativity so as to find new process words that will make doing social science less idealistic in future. If these things can be done we may be able to develop a more realistic sociology that will be engineered to detect more quickly the difference between science that is useful and pseudo-science that is too shrouded in ideals and too distant from reality to get a better hold on social problems.

This is not to suggest that in using a process approach the problem of how to produce more valid and reliable sociological evidence will be solved, but it does offer a sociological, scientific way of moving on from the impasse that emerged during the 1970s as Parsonianism and Marxism went into decline, and sociology was re-cast as another member of the humanities.