Peter Emmerson

Lecture 1

Introduction: European Modernization.

I hope you find what follows readable and understandable – if not we can discuss any of the following in next Monday’s seminar. I apologize for any linguistic errors in what you are about to read – it was done quite quickly.  Also, if you spot me using ‘the’ or an ‘ism’ in what follows, don’t hesitate to let me know.

This module’s theme is interconnectedness, process and change. With this in mind I am going to write these blogs in process language.  What I mean by process language is that I will rely on verbal language that emphasizes what we ‘do’ so as to avoid using ‘thing’ words such as ‘the’ which as far as I’m concerned objectify and stultify sociological evidence, removing all life’s energy from those we study.

Unlike Durkheim I don’t believe there are any sociological ‘things’ or what he termed ‘social facts’ such as ‘the family’ or ‘suicide’. Unlike Marx I have no reason to believe that there is anything that we can identify as ‘the ruling class (bourgeoisie)’ or ‘the working class (proletariat)’.  In using ‘social facts’ and ‘class’ as concepts, both Durkheim and Marx imposed a rigid philosophical grid that severely limited their capacity to engage with and understand processes as diverse and dynamic as those corresponding to real people’s lives.  Our use of philosophical techniques in this manner is endemic in our culture and is quite well described by Foucault as ‘dominant discourse’.  In other words Durkheim and Marx were doing what everyone else did at that time in ‘classifying’ social evidence according to discursive rules dictated by Descartes’ philosophy that demanded things be named and structured.  Whilst I’m not certain that Foucault is right about dominant discourses (I prefer heuristics – see later in this paragraph), episteme etc., I think there is plenty of evidence that we adopt certain ways of speaking, writing and so on that are designated correct by those with authority, the criminal law being a prominent example: anyone needing to use legal knowledge will be seriously disadvantaged if they cannot translate what we call legalese: hence the enormous fees charged by many lawyers.  Similar patterns occur in academic life.  In using philosophical method Durkheim and Marx were following an established trend which is still in use today developed by natural historians such as Linnaeus, who ordered botanical/natural things according to reproductive system etc.  Our knowledge is handed down to us from forebears.  As with everyone else Durkheim and Marx were philosophically conditioned: Durkheim heavily influenced by Kant, Marx by Hegel.  Philosophical heuristics (ways of doing; heuristics are like an app on your phone) are ingrained in our experience – for example, it is taken for granted that being rational or logical is best.  This conditioning is so deep that we assume such ideas are ‘natural’: religious and mathematical discourses have equivalent status in our culture.  Why are religious, philosophical and mathematical heuristics so important that we teach them to our children as a matter of course?  They all have one thing in common; they are methods for discovering absolute truths.  These truths have enormous force, in part because they get of rid doubt, they are incontrovertible!  As such they and are seen to exist above and beyond ordinary, mundane existence, not susceptible to human interference: if you are a Christian then whatever Jesus taught is true; Pythagoras’ theorem is still as true now as it was 2500 years ago.  It is argued that these principles of certainty are seminal to all that we are; they structure our habituses (personalities) and in so doing provide us with a feeling of control.  Without such feelings of control we would arguably, as Durkheim usefully drew to our attention, be very vulnerable to disorientation, suicide and social breakdown.  This belief that philosophical, religious and mathematical absolute truths structure our experience was challenged by Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber & Parsons but not rejected.

One other very important feature of philosophical, religious and mathematical heuristics is that they are human self/mind oriented and seriously idealistic. To put it another way, they are comparatively short of realistic content.  I believe that all three techniques are designed to develop absolute truth heuristics to provide us with enough certainty to take control of our debilitating capacity for cognitive dissonance (mental anguish) and fear: they steer us away from comparative uncertainty.  However, absolute truth heuristics contrast starkly with our daily, reality-oriented, comparatively uncertain experiences such as going shopping – who wouldn’t be able to justify keeping something that was stolen accidentally? – only getting my own back on companies that exploit cheap labour!  In everyday life situations idealistic and realistic heuristics work interdependently structuring how we operate.  However, a habitus dominated by idealistic heuristics being heavily influenced by absolute truth heuristics is correspondingly less engaged with daily sensory experience: an interesting example would be a nun who according to religious principle spends long periods contemplating God, shunning material wealth and shopping.  People whose habituses are structured by absolute truths are authorized to ignore and contradict dissonant realistic experiences and plough on regardless: we call it conviction or being dogmatic, depending on whether or not we agree.  Such people are less sensitive to realistic influences.  Nonetheless, people with habituses structured by seriously idealistic absolute truth heuristics are able to develop heuristics capable of useful engagement with realistic problems such as finding a means of talking to people beyond hearing distance: I am thinking of physicists, chemists and the like who deploy mathematical heuristics to engineer remarkable technologies such as mobile phones.  Even so, a mathematically structured habitus seems less useful for biologists, and more pertinently for our purposes, sociologists.  Why is this?  I think mathematical absolute truth heuristics allow sufficient engagement with problems that can be explored systematically, planetary movement and chemical reactions being good examples.  However, when you tackle more complex and dynamic problems such as weather forecasting such heuristics are much less useful: meteorologists have needed non-systematic, non-linear mathematical heuristics to improve our ability to predict our weather.  It is, I believe, reasonable to argue that life-forms are at least as complex and dynamic as weather.  To explore biological or sociological problems will require mathematicians to develop non-linear heuristics capable of modelling life processes rather than systems.  It may well be that sociological problems are too complex and dynamic to allow useful engagement even using non-linear mathematical heuristics.  Nevertheless, analysing sociological evidence using processual heuristics, does offer a way out of our sociological block.

A lack of viable mathematical heuristics has serious implications for sociologists because it means they are much more reliant on philosophical (logical) absolute truth heuristics, and to some extent, theological (supernatural) truth heuristics. My argument is that philosophical heuristics are far too idealistic and systematic to engage adequately with non-linear, dynamic social data, and concomitantly, get in the way of sociological development.  Accordingly, we are stuck in 1960s sociology still overwhelmingly dominated by philosophical systematic heuristics as were Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber & Parsons.  Elias, and to a lesser extent Bourdieu, is different.  He has provided a platform for developing a processual sociology that dispenses with damaging philosophical and theological approaches.  However, to date there has been much resistance to extending Elias’ platform as sociologists generally remain inextricably committed to ancient academic habits.  Accordingly, I felt it necessary to include Foucault in this module even though he was a philosopher (historical), not a sociologist at all.  However, I believe his profound influence on sociologists including Giddens and Bauman has been damaging because in promoting a continuation of old idealistic habits, it has stopped sociologists developing more realistic process heuristics that may facilitate better engagement with sociological problems.  Using notions pre-fixed by ‘the’ or suffixed by ‘ism’ such as ‘the class system’ or ‘racism’ imposes an idealistic, rigid philosophical way of seeing.

Too many influential theoretical sociologists seem to have forgotten that Comte, Marx, Durkheim and Weber were developing an engineering (scientific) approach, that was side-lining philosophers. Not unsurprisingly, as with all pioneers, they could only distance themselves and sociology so far from ancient habituated philosophical heuristics that until they came along had been seen as sacred, unquestionable facts.  They pointed out in their various ways that these unquestionable facts actually emerge from our day to day experience of living, not from some supernatural influence, or its secular alternative; a universal, underlying, rational algorithmic system.  In developing a more realistic, engineering approach to human problems they were taking us in a very radical and precarious direction, away from ancient idealistic, absolute certainties and undermining those who prospered by them: a hundred years or so earlier, Comte, Marx, Durkheim and Weber may well have been burned alive as heretics for their explanations of religious behaviour.  Rates of changes were occurring that challenged certainty heuristics, especially those of a theological and philosophical kind.  These were documented in this lecture.  Sociology developed interdependently with stupendous changes concomitant with a decline in feudalizing processes.  Trading and exploitation took on global proportions.  Democratizing processes accompanied religious reformation, republican government, state formation, commercialization, industrialization, urbanization.  All these developments involved engineers in partnership with mathematicians.  On present evidence here in Britain, priests have lost out big time as supernatural heuristics seem less and less useful to our way of life.  Philosophers and their heuristics still have significant influence as Giddens and Bauman testify.  It is my belief that unless we as sociologists can adopt a process approach we will doomed to continue a philosophical dialogue that began in ancient Greece, stuck in idealistic debate, perpetually discussing racism, sexism, the class system, capitalism, socialism ad infinitum.