Heroic Sociology

Just finished Peter R Berger's Invitation to Sociology, a Humanistic Perspective (1963) and was reasonably impressed. Had I read in in my 20's I would have been much more, since Berger draws a lot from Sartre's philosophy.

The main theme is something like this: social structures are sort-of role plays though we are most often unaware of it. At their worst, these role plays reinforce unjust social structures, like (Berger's examples) racial discrimination, homophobia and capital punishment.

Where does Sartre come into the picture? Sartre's idea of bad faith means that a social actor gives in to roles and expectations and behaves as if he/she had no choice but to act in a certain way. In Berger's examples these can be acts of anti-semitism, humiliating homosexuals or being an instrument (judge, jury) in sentencing criminals to death.

The role of heroic sociology is of course to reveal the arbitrary and ideological roots of all these institutions (racial discrimination etc), thus forcing us to see that we can make choices outside of our roles.

This a nicely built framework, and one can really appreciate Berger's discourse and examples from sociology's classics (Veblen sounded particularly interesting). But one can always nitpick. Could someone be a racist by choice? Could one support capital punishment without any bad faith, i.e. by saying for example "I understand my position as a judge, I could do otherwise, but I prefer to sentence this person to death"?

I should not finish this blog entry by sentencing anyone to death, so let's think about society and liberation in general. After all it's been more than 50 years since Berger's book was published, and many things have changed (say, a black U.S. president and same-sex marriages). In general there are at least some indications that societies have become more liberal over the years. In other words: the role plays that once were deadly serious and scandalous are probably met with amusement now. Here are some examples just off top of my head.

Lady Chatterley's Lover, published 1928. An upper class lady has a relationship with a gardener. Current counterpart: Sex and the City.

Midsummer Dances, a book by Hannu Salama published 1964. Mr Salama was sued and convicted for blasphemy due to a couple of paragraphs in this book. The paragraphs are mainly silly jokes of the drunken/jubilant dance-goers, they hint that Jesus and his disciples had been gay.
Current counterpart: South Park.

Edit: I'm not very versatile. I seem to have written about sociology almost 10 years ago in this blog already. But Berger's book is better than the textbook I read at the time. I had wondered how people seemingly change their opinions really quickly according to social context or financial gain. Of course everyone is an opportunist, never being one would make one unbearable. But Berger asks cleverly: when we say one thing in the morning, another in the evening, are we lying or deceiving ourselves? According to Berger, we are deceiving ourselves. It's easier. Lying would require us to constantly keep checking the different versions of the story/identity that we have to maintain.

Socrates' Law of the Jungle

I noticed that I haven't updated this blog for more than a year! Consequently, my reading/re-reading of Plato's dialogues seems to be going really slow, since I tend to write about them.

Gorgias is another dialogue with some forgotten gems (forgotten at least by me). Socrates discusses the role of justice with a couple of "sophists", teachers of the art of persuation. We know from high school that Socrates does not appreciate the sophist style of philosophy.

The sophists state that they empower a person to serve his own interests. This leads to discussion about the morality behind these interests. Callicles, a politician, puts down an argument of natural rights: "nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior."

Socrates does not buy the argument. Instead, his doctrine is "it is better to suffer from injustice than to be unjust", and his demonstration of this is actually quite clever. Earlier in the discussion he has established that the medical science and the system of justice work for human betterment (if done right). Polus, a sophist, says indirectly that his art can help you get away with a murder. Socrates finds that committing immoral deeds and avoiding a punishment is like not going to see a doctor when one is sick: "May not their [the perpetrators'] way of proceeding, my friend, be compared to the conduct of a person who is afflicted with the worst of diseases and yet contrives not to pay the penalty to the physician for his sins against his constitution, and will not be cured, because, like a child, he is afraid of the pain of being burned or cut".