Can Sociology Save Us?

The Sense of Sociability: How People Overcome the Forces Pulling Them Apart is a sweeping, ambitious book that attempts to synthesize insights from generations of sociological analysis, and thus to provide the tools we can use to help “humans live together more happily and more effectively.” With years of introductory lectures in sociology at the University of Toronto under his belt, Lorne Tepperman is able to present his findings in an easily digestible style, admirably suited for a popular audience unschooled in the social sciences. His book attempts to harness the insights of social research in order to improve human social life—turning theory into practice. The Sense of Sociability is subtler than most such works. Although his project is to bring people together, Tepperman repeatedly emphasizes the central conundrum present in such a project: every divisive force—race, class, religion, nationality—is on some level a uniting force as well. He quotes Immanuel Kant: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

Much of the rest of the book, however, cheerfully sheds this pessimistic note and bounds forward into the thicket of social life armed with a positivist approach that is, in a way, charmingly old fashioned. Tepperman’s social scientific world view is sunny, optimistic, untouched by the darker cautions against Enlightenment views of science that have been voiced, over the generations, by such diverse figures as Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault. For Tepperman, science is “disinterested,” its objectivity ensured by scientists whose sole goal is to describe the world, free of value judgements. Science is progressive, casting aside all obstacles to knowledge: superstition, prejudice, tradition, belief. Despite decades of fashionable postmodernist definitions of science as a discourse of power, Tepperman is quite content to insist, in a tone remarkably free from stridency, that science seeks nothing other than the truth. As the book progresses in its analysis of a variety of social structures—the family, racial and ethnic groups, nations, churches—Tepperman fervently desires to demonstrate that sociology can save us.

Social salvation, for Tepperman, is a function of objectivity. He has not come to condemn the world, but to explain it. In his introduction, Tepperman is careful to distinguish his two “hats”: a “citizen hat” and a “sociologist hat.” Citizens have “ideals,” they feel “moral outrage,” they like to “encourage good social behavior” and discourage the bad. Sociologists, however, must put aside morals and values, because such words are “outside the sociologist’s professional vocabulary.” Sociologists do not “blame,” they discover what “works” and elucidate the “root causes” of problems.

In places, The Sense of Sociability rigorously maintains this division. Central to the book’s project is the argument that “inequality is bad for people.” The word bad, however, must not be seen as a moral judgement. Keeping his sociologist hat firmly placed on his head, Tepperman (like the British sociologist Richard Wilkinson) insists that inequality causes quantifiable material and psychological harms (mainly through the material medium of cortisol, the stress hormone): poor health, crime, addiction, depression. Logically, then, inequality causes dysfunction: a community or society fails to work when it contains the ill, the addicted and the depressed. On the surface, then, we have an admirably “objective” scientific means of assessing the health of societies: a certain number of sick and addicted people equals social pathology.

But keeping up this kind of objectivity is not easy, and thus it is not surprising that Tepperman’s citizen hat occasionally sneaks out of his closet. Although Tepperman is aware of the divisive nature of national identity, he cannot resist proclaiming that “Canadians are by and large a moderate people, who tend to avoid conf­lict (much more, say, than Americans).” To illustrate how politics can tear people apart, he cites the election of Stephen Harper as “setting groups against one another.” By contrast, the election of Barack Obama in the United States showed that “electoral politics do sometimes work the way they are supposed to.” Social conservatism is labelled as nothing other than “prejudice” (via a detailed summary of Theodor Adorno’s theory of the authoritarian personality). Social conservatives, most likely because of deeply f­lawed parental “socialization,” cannot help but have pathological tendencies to “hold people responsible for their own problems and prefer a government that stays out of people’s lives.” Add praise of the Swedish social welfare system, and a distinct conclusion develops. Sociology seems to have (objectively) validated a liberal, progressive, welfare state–oriented world view. Moreover, traditional morality, religion and conservative politics are, unfortunately, scientifically proven to be harmful to your health.

It must be made clear that Tepperman is no strident partisan—all of his conclusions are presented in conciliatory tones. He most obviously seeks to bring reasonable people together. Moreover, there is much to be said for his progressive liberalism, and his obvious, deeply felt concern for inequalities that persist even in the most wealthy of nations. Nonetheless, it is not clear that Tepperman’s is the best strategy for convincing those who disagree with him: his implicit argument seems to be that those who are not with us are on the wrong side of science. The large numbers of libertarians and conservatives in the U.S. and Canada will presumably find it difficult to read a book that dismisses them as potentially authoritarian.

The Sense of Sociability may also unfortunately lose many religious believers. “We know,” Tepperman writes, “that religion can be a form of social control.” Perhaps this “we” refers to sociologists, wearing only their sociologist hats, but there is an implied assertion that those in the audience know such things as well. They also, presumably, are quite prepared to agree that religion encourages “meekness and submissiveness,” that it is “rigid and unyielding,” and that it is violent, fosters division and oppresses women. Given centuries of hatred and bloodshed, Tepperman’s audience may indeed wonder, as Tepperman does, whether society has any place for religion at all. Here, however, the audience will be surprised: He will not dismiss religion entirely. If properly stripped of its worst conservative, misogynistic and divisive elements, and when properly reconfigured to embrace the more appropriate values of “sophistication,” “social activism,” “environmentalism” and “multiculturalism,” religion will become acceptable again and be allowed to play a role in integrating society.

Tepperman’s refusal to condemn religion out of hand is an act of sociological generosity, given the evils he has enumerated. Unfortunately, it is also beside the point, especially for the religious believers he may seek to persuade. As the theologian David Bentley Hart once trenchantly observed, people are not religious. They are Christians, Muslims, Jews or Hindus, who have a specific faith grounded in a specific theology, with specific values to guide their decisions and actions. Most importantly, they do not believe because religion is beneficial in some grand utilitarian social calculus. Catholic Christians, Orthodox Jews and fervent Muslims are not going to jettison their theologically grounded and centuries-old beliefs on the role of women because doing so would be useful to society as a whole. Using utilitarian arguments against strongly held convictions is about as useful as telling progressive atheists to pray for inequality to end.

One wishes that Tepperman had examined more closely the philosophical premises of his own point of view. Tepperman contrasts religion and science in Enlightenment terms: religion is all about “people who lived hundreds or even thousands of years ago”; it believes in “eternal and everlasting truth”; it considers questions such as the existence of God that resist “logical interpretation of empirical evidence.” Science, on the other hand, “abjures commitment to traditional beliefs,” and is thus f­lexible, is future-oriented and produces a form of knowledge that is “subject to testing in the real world.”

These dichotomies might have been rendered in a less Manichaean fashion. After all, Tepperman might have taken into account the Nietzschean argument that science proceeds according to a religious faith in the existence of truth; or he might have wondered, as Foucault did, whether scientific discourse is merely the newest, and most insidious, mechanism for social control. Positivism itself, as a method, has a venerable lineage going back at least to Auguste Comte, and it is worth remembering that Comte, at the end of his life, was so taken by his own scientific method that he created an entire religion of humanity out of it, complete with scientific saints, scientist-priests and the “High Priest of Humanity.”

Tepperman’s critique of religion would have been strengthened if he had not sought to wrap his own positivist world view in a cloak of objectivity. Instead, he should have fully acknowledged and argued for the philosophical principles on which he stands: namely that human beings are no different from plants or animals, that they are subject to the same inf­lexible natural laws that govern the universe. When Tepperman writes that people can be labelled and measured, or that social structure is like gravity, he cannot empirically, objectively prove that this point of view is better than the religious. He needs to argue this philosophically, while also acknowledging that Christians and Jews, for example, base their understanding of society on very different premises, such as that human beings are made in the image of God and possess free will.

It is also entirely appropriate to suggest that all sociologists should conscientiously avoid smuggling in the very values they so stridently claim to avoid. Take Tepperman’s argument about inequality. On the surface, it is purely disinterested—inequality causes quantifiable and empirically observable harms. An egalitarian society would thus be known by its fruits: measurably fewer incidents of illness, crime, addiction. Ergo it would work. Leaving aside the question of whether any such society is possible, why should these harms be the measure of functionality? Tepperman merely comments that no society sees any of these harms as good, but this is an insufficient argument. If you ask people from a variety of communities how they would judge their own success, you will come up with different criteria: maintenance of core beliefs, preservation of tradition, even longevity. Why should we choose Tepperman’s standard over theirs? Tepperman should make his case more clear.

Tepperman assumes we care about murder and violence and addiction and mental illness. And he is right. But this rests upon an unacknowledged value system that is traditional, moral and, yes, even religiously derived. If it is possible to bring in Nietzsche one more time, we can see that Tepperman’s whole project affirms those unacknowledged Judeo-Christian values that persist even in the most secular of societies. If we believe that people are essentially equal in principle even if they are not equal in fact, if we worry about the sick or addicted or depressed, if we insist that societies should do their best to care for the weakest among them—these beliefs cannot be derived from any combination of empirical insights. They come from an external value system that determines both the questions we ask and the way we interpret the evidence. If we wish to preserve those values, then we have to uncover and examine them as rigorously as we do the empirical findings in which they are embedded.

There is a remarkable passage in Tepperman’s book, in which he quotes a mass email sent from the president of the International Sociological Association. A major philosophical dispute has been apparently resolved in sociology, and now “determinism is dead in the social sciences.” Tepperman cannot but agree, and insists that sociologists must not view people as though they were “electrons” or “fruit f­lies.” And yet, it seems, the temptation to determinism is not easily overcome. There are many passages in Tepperman’s text where people have no choice—their behaviour is governed by the “gravity” of social structures, the “scripts” written for social roles, and indeed the “cortisol” that arises in stressful situations.

Determinism will die a hard death in the social sciences. Many sociologists are, of course, turning away from positivism and embracing ethnographic and historical methodologies that seek to account for human agency and consciousness. But the allure of determinism remains strong, in part because of that deeply humanitarian but ultimately tragic impulse that Fyodor Dostoevsky ascribed to the Grand Inquisitor: the impulse to see free will as the cause of human suffering. To an intelligent and educated person observing humanity from above, the masses appear weak, ignorant and incapable of bearing the burden of freedom—thus all of the ceaseless suffering in the world. How much better to convince people to relinquish all of the religious and traditional moral doctrines that insist on the radical individual freedom to choose between good and evil? How much better if people were to see themselves as passive products of a badly designed social system? Then, those of us who are wise could fix the social system, providing the proper incentives and disincentives to make the rest behave. Tepperman, at times, falls prey to this impulse. If only we could cast aside traditional morality and religion, he suggests, we could see that “evil” is actually pathology, and that criminals and addicts are not free human beings who made poor choices but rather are unfortunate products of inequality. And then the system could be fixed so that greater harmony could result.

The comparison here is a bit exaggerated— Tepperman’s is no utopian project. He clearly insists that equality is elusive and that to achieve it requires continual struggle. Nonetheless, what are we to make of the incredible optimism at the end of the text, where he suggests that human beings are essentially capable of creating harmonious societies without the guidance of a state? “Without interference from bad government and other malign influences,” he writes, “people can work out a good deal of their lives themselves.” It is not clear how this follows from the preceding arguments in the book. After all, who will run the human rights commissions that make Canada such a moderate country? Who will provide the universal health care and the social insurance system that he praises as the essence of a functional society?

The implicit resolution to this conundrum seems to be that the world would need little government if everyone were to approach the world more scientifically—if everyone were more progressive, secular, tolerant, egalitarian, environmentally conscious and liberal. No doubt. The Sense of Sociability makes the best possible case for this point of view, and it is a valuable, comprehensive sociological account of the troubles that plague modern societies. Nonetheless, will it convince the skeptical? To quote the underground man in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground: “I suspect, gentlemen, that you are looking at me with compassion; you tell me again that an enlightened and developed man, such, in short, as the future man will be, cannot consciously desire anything disadvantageous to himself, that that can be proved mathematically. I thoroughly agree, it can—by mathematics.” Many will need more proof than that.