First an admission: I loved Ana Siljak’s Angel of Vengeance so much I gave it to my sons as Hanukkah gifts last year, possibly making me Canada’s single biggest fan (and buyer) of the book. That said, sociology is different: not literature, literary criticism, cultural studies or popular history but a systematic, empirical attempt to understand the social world. From this perspective, sociology no more needs quotations from Nietzsche and Dostoevsky (or John the Baptist, come to that) than does nuclear physics, genetics or molecular biology, let alone carpentry, metalworking and the other skilled trades. We have had that particular discussion: it was called the Enlightenment. And there are two cultures, as C.P. Snow said: science and non-science (whether that non-science is a humanities discipline, a religion, a superstition or something else).
Epistemologically, I consider postmodernism a kind of hocus-pocus, a shell game, not a serious approach to the real world. Ancient Greeks dealt with the postmodernist premise millennia ago when they noted that you can’t trust a Cretan who says all Cretans lie. True, the world is littered with uncertainties and untruths, and people generally hold different perceptions of reality—that’s a fact. However, that fact does not privilege the varied views to equal status in science, or in sociology. Sociologists struggle against this confusion, this noise, to find repetition and patterning in the fog of data.
Siljak’s review makes two substantive points I must address in the little space available. First, she suggests that religious values undergird all our perceptions and judgements, so it is impossible to have a value-free—much less, non-religious—understanding of the world. Second, she paints me as eager to dismantle government and have The People run about free, possibly naked, making messes as they go. This is a misreading of my text and, especially, a failure to understand the relationship between my book’s penultimate and final chapters (on politics and social movements, respectively).
On the first point, note simply that religious doctrines vary widely while core human values (health, safety, fair treatment and social inclusion, among others) are seemingly universal and invariant; so I don’t see how religion can claim credit here. On the second point, I fully recognize the need for government in a modern society. However, I reject the media-fed tendency to idolize self-styled titans, corporate kleptocrats and suits that masquerade as elected officials. I claim that ordinary people make history; all the rest are an often-costly obstruction. My argument is that ordinary people need to claim their power.
It is not sociology’s job to save us. We humans will have to save ourselves, with occasional help from sociology. Perhaps humanity may not get along as well as I expect, based on sociological evidence. But to doubt the importance of the task is to live in the dark. To imagine priests, Great Men or postmodern savants will solve the problem for us is to ignore history.
