Is “neoteny” a word you just knew off-hand? Golly.

It sounds as if you’re saying that the mechanism for the development of indefinitely retained juvenile characteristics is different from that speculated (it’s not due to the lack of available training from adults), but not that barking may not itself be a juvenile characteristic. (I only want to ask about that in particular since I remember that, too, being speculative.)

Also: it’s my opinion that two links to two separate Language Log entries in about the same minute is a desirable goal for almost any subject.

I have to say that I’m disturbed by this ridiculous simplification of sociology, as I was disturbed by Nate’s generalizing in his last post. Good sociology does not offer any of the things you’ve suggested — particularly not “quick fixes.” David Brooks is a poor example of the field. Of course sociology will disappoint you if you keep reading writers like him. I’ve recently recommended Foucault to Nate and I would recommend him to most readers here.

I’m not just saying this because I studied rhetoric and sociology. (Though if the next is a post criticizing creative writing as a field of study, I might be inclined to actually get straight to work on those studies instead of meandering around here for a while!) What bothers me most is that you’ve both taken a few cases (in Nate’s post, one instance of bad writing) and used them as opportunities to unfairly criticize entire fields. From Thea’s article on Wes Anderson: “Before I identified as a woman of colour and started applying anti-oppression criticism to every inch of pop culture I could get my hands on, I loved Wes Anderson.” I’m failing to see how one instance of bad writing means English as a field of study is a “horror” or that sociology’s “work (at least in the popular form in which I digest it)” applies to all of sociology. How are either of these positions any less examples of forcing the evidence to fit a flawed argument than Thea’s accusations of racism in the films of Wes Anderson?

Nate, I see that you acknowledged on the other post that this isn’t something that applies to all of the study of English. You must have posted that while I was drafting this response.

Mike G: I suppose there are different kinds of pablum in different kinds of forums. But as to the worth of newspapers, to me they seem like they’re mostly entertainment. Their value, insofar as they had it, was always their publicness—that they were places where people could tell stories (ostensibly factual, but of course only partial) and be read by a large number of others. They continue to serve this function and they can be pretty good aggregaters of data and first-hand information, though of course “new media” is getting in on the act. For what it’s worth, I thought this piece did a pretty good job of what newspapers are best at doing. It’s only accidental, of course, that it appeared on the Times’s website and not some other.

I went through similar reactions to Nate and have thus far decided not to come down on one side or the other. This supposedly new stage of human development is pretty similar to what the European aristocracy has experienced throughout history. Of course, we don’t have as much genuine leisure, since we have to work a lot of the time (the competitive pressures of which Brooks speaks). I asked that question, “who’s to say it’s bad?” in seriousness, although I didn’t answer it. I could go either way; sadly, this sort of work doesn’t help us find an answer.

Thanks for the links. I liked this passage in particular: The rhetoric of science journalism — and sometimes the rhetoric of science — all too easily engages a sort of pop-Platonism that seems to be deeply connected to the way that we think about natural kinds. As a result, small (but statistically reliable) differences in group distributions are seen as essential properties of the groups themselves, and therefore of all the individuals that make them up. Or at least, all the normal or typical individuals. Intellectual and social mischief often ensues. It points out the foolishness inherent in asking, well, what’s everyone else doing, and shouldn’t I be doing that to become happy?

So, is aimlessness good? Is having our perceived goals destroyed revelatory of our essential nature? Yeah, it can be. I suspect that the kind of wisdom we see embodied in a lot of Wes Anderson’s movies—that old structures are hollow and things we though would make us happy, such as worldly acclaim, wealth, and making art, don’t always suffice—is what lots of young people are coming to, without the unnecessary political veneer the hippies applied to their similar realizations. And I suppose that’s a good.

But then I think about moderation. And thoughts like those in the first paragraph here. Maybe having a moderate, human goal is good, perhaps on the same level that marriage’s limitations open up new freedoms. Maybe the alienation of individualism doesn’t give us greater insight into the essential human conditions than seeking moderate human goals. I guess I would have to say that casual sex and career-driven striving probably distract more from the condition of essential aloneness than does life within older human structures. Happiness doesn’t allow one to ignore the difficulties and pains of existence; it requires coming to know them. Exposing those faults early, and not obscuring them beneath unquestioned structures, is good. Alienation and dehumanizing toil are less good.

Amanda: Glad someone took me up on my outrageous claim. (I’m still waiting on Jess.) I’m admittedly quite the amateur when it comes to sociology, and I hope I made that clear, in addition to acknowledging the subjectivity of my critique by using the the term “frustrating.” I certainly fall into the category of people mentioned here. But I think I allowed that sociology can do a kind of good work—perhaps its proper work—when I said that it can measure data to its heart’s content. That’s fine and, for some purposes, I’m sure, useful.

My main criticism is of its work and how that inevitably leads to misinterpretation: “it seems to deal with themes that resonate with our experiences (happiness, love, aging, etc.), but bases its analyses and conclusions on grounds utterly unsuited to producing accurate reflections on human needs and desires.” That is, it deals with themes that have to do with individuals, but limits its tools to those unsuited to dealing with individuals. Sociology may set out to deal with data, but it leads inexorably to people making normative decisions based on its conclusions. So, while I take the chance here to critique a popularization of sociology’s work, I charged sociology with allowing such harmful misinterpretations as Brooks makes, by its nature. No doubt, good scientists aren’t to be blamed for taking data sets and drawing limited conclusions based on them. But surely a science can be charged with even the limited fault of being “frustrating” for investigating an area that will be important to the rest of human beings, but only doing so in a partial and, for many, unhelpful way.

As an analogy: can we blame the science, if not necessarily the particular scientists, that produced atom bombs? In a certain sense, no, it’s just a collection of human knowledge; the moral decisions that govern its use are to blame for ill effects. But once its products are around, our moral decisions are irretrievably altered, even to an inhuman scale. Shouldn’t we want to critique the line of inquiry that led to these harmful effects? Not to say, “atomic science is evil,” but to say, “here are its limitations and pitfalls?”

I guess I’d ask, as a starting point on sociology: do you disagree that sociology deals with themes essential to human experiences? I can certainly see how one might.

I think I probably got the word “neoteny” from Desmond Morris, or else from some other book I read in high school about chimpanzees or evolutionary biology or early humans.

I forgot to answer your other point: yeah, I think it may be correct that barking is a juvenile characteristic. It’s one of the bundle of traits that appeared in the tamed foxes after generations of breeding for docility, and I think the whole lot of these traits are present in their wild forbears only in pups.

Amanda: Was Foucault a sociologist? Was Nietzsche a sociologist? How about Bataille?

I have not read that much Foucault—a lacuna I hope to address soon—but from what I have, I am not sure that he was either a social scientist or a philosopher. A more vague term like “thinker” seems better, perhaps. Maybe Joe can enlighten us here.

But more broadly these are difficult questions pointing to the problem of what sociology is and ought to be. My sense is that, as with the term “conservatism,” there may be a depressing gap—a seemingly unbridgeable chasm—between these two: a good deal to be admired in the idea itself, but an “actually existing” reality that is quite debased.

I should emphasize that I am quite the tyro in this domain and speak here with a curious mix of hesitation and force. It’s not for lack of trying, however. I looked into auditing a graduate-level introduction to the classic sociological thinkers (Tocqueville, Comte, Weber, Durkheim, Pareto, Simmel, Tonnies) at two well-regarded institutions this semester and was quite demoralized. Both courses used textbooks and read only small passages from the thinkers themselves, instead focusing on the kind of repugnant, trendy, identity-niche-focused secondary literature that pervades the contemporary humanities and social sciences—“Real Sweat, Virtual Reward: The Protestant Ethic in MySpace,” or “Transgender(ed) Commun(iti)e(s): Revisiting Bisbee Arizona’s Haven for the Re-Assigned Two Years Later,” or what have you.

I may have better luck at Harvard, but I am not optimistic—I recently saw a textbook they use at the “prestigious” Kennedy School and I swear it was the kind of thing I’d use to teach civics to a bright tenth grader.

HB: I pretty much agree with you about the ease with which quantitative sociology is abused. Even in think tanks, there are plenty of people who fail to apply or properly emphasize the basic caveats with regard to social science data. On a philosophical level, the caveats may be severe indeed, thereby casting grave doubt on a lot of things we seem to take for granted. There is a very good passage that I can quote later that addresses this issue and (hopefully) some of the larger questions about modernity pointed to by you and Nate.

“I guess I’d ask, as a starting point on sociology: do you disagree that sociology deals with themes essential to human experiences? I can certainly see how one might.”

Is there really a science that doesn’t deal, to some extent, with something essential to human experiences? Geology, biology, chemistry, anthropology, psychology, and so on are surely all dealing with something essential and I find it hard to imagine a field of study that doesn’t do this! I think sociology is no exception. For me the question is whether sociology attempts to simply observe, describe, and quantify social action or if it is indeed looking for ways to “fix” society. I don’t know the answer to this question, but I think you’ve pointed to why an attempt to only observe, describe, and quantify will fail when you say, “So, while I take the chance here to critique a popularization of sociology’s work, I charged sociology with allowing such harmful misinterpretations as Brooks makes, by its nature.”

Jess: You’re probably right to call Foucault a thinker, and I suspect he would have resisted (or perhaps did resist) being classified as sociologist or philosopher or anything else as much as he resisted being classified as structuralist and post-structuralist. But certainly his writing about different social institutions and power has a tremendous influence on sociology (and rhetoric, too, in his examinations of language and power.)

I’m curious whether sociology is truly more prone to abuse in the gathering and application of data than other social sciences.

Amanda,

I’m sure you’re right that Foucault was quite influential on contemporary sociology.

Understand that my formative window into these questions was Philip Rieff, who tried (and failed) to revitalize the idea of sociology as a fundamentally moral field of study. His worldview was rooted in a deeply conservative philosophical anthropology, one that I would imagine is quite anti-Foucauldian in its import. For example:

“The unique quality of our lives refers not to an alternative space but to so many spaces opened up that even the least cultivated are aware of the vast emptiness inside: all our symbolics are manufactured for instant use; none are constraining; all oppose constraint, which is itself the main conceptual term of opposition to the opening up of new interior space, within which humans get a different sense of themselves and others. Because mental events are compound inhibitions and releases from inhibition, cultural revolutions are massive changes of mind. Sociologically, the metaquestion is never ‘to be or not to be’; rather, our metaquestion is ‘to act or not to act.’ The predicate of sociological analyses of the moral should be that ‘Man,’ the most capacious of ideal types, is capable of everything. That predicate, the possibility of action without limit, must lead sociological analyses to insights that are defensive, against the very predicate of its special understanding. (Fellow Teachers, 21)

Nate and HB: The passage I wanted to find was from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, but unfortunately I do not have time to summarize the relevant chapter with any justice, or provide quotes that will do so. All I can say is that Chapter Seven, “‘Fact’, Explanation and Expertise,” and Chapter Eight, “The Character of Generalisations in Social Science and their Lack of Predictive Power,” are really extremely helpful on these questions. Beg or borrow, but don’t steal.