How to Think Better about Social Justice: Why Good Sociology Matters 1032616288, 9781032616285

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsement
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Preface
1. Learn About the World Before Changing It: Why We Need Sociology
2. Acknowledge Uncertainty: Learning from Multiple Theories
3. Don’t Treat Ideology as Science: The Problem with Critical Theory
4. Distinguish Between Facts and Values: The Limits of Sociology
5. Be Willing to Make Tradeoffs: Dealing with Warring Gods
6. Make Room for Opposition: The Reality of Pluralism
7. Accept Imperfection: The False Promise of Utopia
8. Embrace Humility: A Case for Classical Liberalism
Index

Citation preview

“In this important and timely book, sociologist Bradley Campbell challenges his home discipline to be clearer and more intellectually open than it has been in recent decades. Campbell goes beyond simple criticism, however. In How to Think Better About Social Justice: Why Good Sociology Matters, he provides us with a much-needed road map to get there.” Ilana Redstone, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Faculty Director of the Mill Institute, University of Austin, USA “Does sociology have a role in the struggle for social justice? In this engaging and accessible book, Bradley Campbell provides insightful, clear-headed guidance as to what sociological expertise can and cannot contribute to tackling the difficult moral and political problems of our age, or indeed any age.” Mark Cooney, Professor of Sociology, University of Georgia, USA

How to Think Better About Social Justice

Those who are pursuing social justice too often fail to incorporate the insights of sociology, and when they do make use of sociology, they often draw heavily from claims that are highly contested, unsupported by the evidence, or outright false. This is a shame because learning to think sociologically can help us to think better about social justice. Sociology can point us to possibilities for social change, but it also calls attention to our limits. It can provide us with hope, but it should make us cautious. Any vision of social justice rooted in sociology, then, would likely place a high value on intellectual and moral humility. Classical liberalism can offer normative and institutional support for this kind of social justice, so despite the attacks on liberalism that have come from both the right and the left in recent years, we should hesitate to abandon it if we really want to make the world a better place. Bradley Campbell is a professor of sociology at California State University, Los Angeles. His work examines moral conflict, including violent conflicts such as genocide as well as nonviolent conflicts on college campuses over politics and free speech. He is the author of The Geometry of Genocide: A Study in Pure Sociology and co-author of The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars. He has also co-authored op-ed articles about contemporary moral conflicts that have appeared in Time, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the New York Times.

Routledge Advances in Sociology

This series presents cutting-edge developments and debates within the field of sociology. It provides a broad range of case studies and the latest theoretical perspectives, while covering a variety of topics, theories and issues from around the world. It is not con­ fined to any particular school of thought. Subaltern Workers in Contemporary France To Be Like Everyone Else Olivier Masclet, Thomas Amossé, Lise Bernard, Marie Cartier, Marie-Hélène Lechien, Olivier Schwartz, and Yasmine Siblot Cultural Values, Institutions, and Trust Seung Hyun Kim and Sangmook Kim The Experience and Fear of Violence in the Public Realm Hegemonic Ideology and Individual Behaviour Charlotte Fabiansson Cultural Sociology of Cultural Representation Visions of Italy and the Italians in England and Britain from the Renaissance to the Present Day Christopher Thorpe Truth Claims in a Post-Truth World Faith, Fact and Fakery Erkan Ali Doing Public Scholarship A Practical Guide to Media Engagement Christopher J. Schneider How to Think Better About Social Justice Why Good Sociology Matters Bradley Campbell For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routle­ dge-Advances-in-Sociology/book-series/SE0511

How to Think Better About Social Justice Why Good Sociology Matters

Bradley Campbell

Designed cover image: Shutterstock | zef art First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Bradley Campbell The right of Bradley Campbell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-61628-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-58299-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-61627-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781032616278 Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

For Darla

Contents

Preface

x

1

Learn About the World Before Changing It: Why We Need Sociology

1

2

Acknowledge Uncertainty: Learning from Multiple Theories

17

3

Don’t Treat Ideology as Science: The Problem with Critical Theory

30

4

Distinguish Between Facts and Values: The Limits of Sociology

44

5

Be Willing to Make Tradeoffs: Dealing with Warring Gods

57

6

Make Room for Opposition: The Reality of Pluralism

70

7

Accept Imperfection: The False Promise of Utopia

83

8

Embrace Humility: A Case for Classical Liberalism

95

Index

105

Preface

I didn’t become a sociologist to write about social justice. Though I was concerned about right and wrong, both in my own life and in the life of the larger society, I didn’t come to sociology hoping to change the world. I came looking for knowledge. Sociol­ ogy was supposed to be the science of social life, and I hoped it would help me better understand human behavior, including my own. It has, I think, and in principle this kind of knowledge should also help us in our social justice pursuits. The problem is that when activists and policymakers try to pursue social justice, they often rely on the most politicized forms of sociology rather than the kind of scientific sociology that’s shaped my thinking. Maybe they do so because they’re looking for easy answers about how to make the world better, but one thing you’ll realize as you learn more about the social world is that there usually aren’t any easy answers to social problems. So, I’m writing about social justice because I believe sociology can help, and I hope you’ll join me in exploring the relationship between sociology and social justice and in learning about some of what sociology has to offer. As we’ll discuss, if you’re going to try to make the world a better place, you’ll do well to follow these eight tips: 1) Learn about the world before changing it; 2) acknowledge uncertainty; 3) don’t treat ideology as science; 4) distinguish between facts and values; 5) be willing to make tradeoffs; 6) make room for opposition; 7) accept imperfection; and 8) embrace humility. A small part of Chapter 3 has been previously published online at Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books as part of a review of Mark Cooney’s book Execution by Family, and a small part of Chapter 6 was published at the National Association of Scholars’ website Minding the Campus as “Diversity Training and Moral Education.” Larger parts of Chapters 2 and 4 were first published as articles in the journal Society: “Social Justice and Sociological Theory,” published in 2021 in Volume 58, Issue 5, and “Anti-Minotaur: The Myth of a Sociological Morality,” published in 2014 in Volume 51, Issue 5. I thank the editors of Society, first Jonathan Imber and later Daniel Gordon and Andreas Hess, for publishing those, and I thank the publisher, Springer, for permission to use that material here. I’ve also presented some of these ideas in presentations at Wellesley College and at North Dakota State University. “Dignity in an Era of Victimhood and Incivility,” a talk I gave for the Freedom Project at Wellesley, dealt with some of the ideas about dignity that I discuss in Chapter 6, and “Social Justice, Sociology, and Moral Humi­ lity,” a talk I gave for the Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth at North Dakota State, dealt with some of the ideas presented in Chapters 2 and 8. I thank Kathryn Lynch and everyone else associated with the Freedom Pro­ ject, as well as John Bitzan, Clay Routledge, and everyone else associated with the Challey Institute, for their invitations to speak and for their hospitality, and I’m grate­ ful to all the faculty and students I met for engaging with the ideas and helping me to sharpen my thinking.

Preface

xi

I’m grateful to everyone who has contributed to my understanding of sociology over the years, especially to my Ph.D. dissertation adviser, Donald Black, who has done more than any sociologist I know to advance our knowledge of human behavior. Donald is an advocate for scientific sociology as well as one of its top practitioners, and his theories of social control and conflict are powerful and revolutionary. He’s also one of the clearest thinkers I know of—a model of clarity, in fact—which I’ve especially appreciated in a field full of so much confusion. I’m also grateful to Jason Manning, an irreplaceable friend and my occasional co­ author. I’ve benefited from our conversations about sociology and morality over the years, and here I follow up on some of the ideas we introduced in our book The Rise of Victimhood Culture. And I’m grateful to Pamela Paresky, another occasional co-author, who’s also a wonderful encourager and bridge builder. Pamela and I have written about free speech and about Covid policy, and we’ve emphasized how important it is to acknowledge uncertainties and tradeoffs and also to learn even from those who dis­ agree with us. I’ve explored some of these ideas further here, and I’m grateful to Pamela for spurring me to think about them more. I’m grateful for the work of the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) in facilitating conversations about classical liberalism, and I’ve learned a lot while participating as a panelist at some of their events and as an IHS Senior Fellow for the Study of Liberal­ ism and a Free Society. I’m especially thankful to IHS for the Sabbatical Research Fellowship that made it possible for me to write this book. My Routledge editor, Neil Jordan, and the anonymous reviewers also made the book possible, and I’m thankful to them for their support and their thoughtful comments. Thanks are also due to all my family—to my brother and sister and especially to my mother, Sandra McCall, and to my late father, Rodger Campbell, for their unfailing love and support. My wife, Darla, deserves more thanks than I could possibly find the words for. I’m grateful for her love, for our life together, and for our shared passion for learning. I’m inspired by the intensity of her care and generosity toward her family, friends, and colleagues, and also by the way she reaches out to help others who are neglected or in need. Darla has a special concern for refugees and for human trafficking victims, and she pursues social justice in these areas as we all should—with compassion and delib­ eration. This book is dedicated to her. Bradley Campbell Pasadena, California August 2023

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Learn About the World Before Changing It Why We Need Sociology

The world could be a much better place, but it could also be much worse. Depending on your personality and your politics, you might be more hopeful about the possibility of making things better or you might be more fearful about making them worse. These hopes and fears likely shape your attitude toward social justice. The problem, though, is that talk of social justice too often fails to move beyond our attitudes. It fails to move beyond what our personalities or political ideologies might lead us to think about the world and about the possibilities for changing it. It fails to take seriously even the most basic insights of sociology. This is a shame because sociology, properly understood, can aid us in our efforts to make the world a better place. It can help us identify what changes are possible and what their effects will be. I think sociology is necessary, in fact, for effective social justice, and that learning to think sociologically can help us to think better about social justice. Sociology can give us a better idea about what is reasonable for us to hope for and what is reasonable for us to fear. But learning to think sociologically doesn’t mean accepting every claim made by a sociologist. Taking sociology seriously doesn’t mean always taking sociologists ser­ iously. Sociology is a fragmented field, much of it corrupted by political ideology, and sociologists have often been a source of confusion rather than clarity in thinking about social justice. Social justice activists too often ignore important sociological insights, but at other times they draw heavily from claims made by sociologists or other social scientists even though those claims are highly contested, unsupported by the evidence, or outright false. To think better about social justice, then, we need to learn from sociology, but we also need to learn to identify and avoid bad sociology. What can we learn from sociology about the pursuit of justice? First, sociology helps us to better understand the world, and we should want to learn about the world before changing it. Without knowledge of the world, we have no reason to think the changes we make will bring about the good results we desire. They might even lead to disaster. Second, we need to acknowledge uncertainty. We need to admit when the science isn’t settled. In a field as fragmented as sociology, we should hesitate to treat any theoretical perspective as the final word on things. Sociology offers us multiple ways of thinking about societies and about human behavior, and we should examine each of them and take multiple perspectives into account. Third, we shouldn’t treat ideology as science. As we’re seeking knowledge about the world, we need to take into account how much support we actually have for our ideas. Political ideologies like Marxism or liberalism make claims about social reality, but we need to examine whether those claims have any scientific support. Fourth, we should distinguish between facts and values. We should recognize the limits of sociology and acknowledge that some of the most important questions we have about social justice are questions that sociology can’t DOI: 10.4324/9781032616278-1

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answer. Though sociology can help us describe and explain the world, and in doing so perhaps help us better achieve our moral goals, we can’t derive our moral goals from sociology. Fifth, we need to be willing to make tradeoffs. We might be trying to shape social institutions according to our values, but our values are often in conflict with each other, and we have to make decisions about how to balance them. Sixth, we have to recognize that our values aren’t always shared by others, and that any complex society will have a lot of moral diversity. In trying to improve the world, we need to make room for opposition; we need to be able to manage conflicts in a world of disagree­ ment. Seventh, we need to accept imperfection. Since our knowledge about the world will never be perfect, since we’ll always have ideals that conflict with one another, and since there will always be people who disagree with us, we have to realize that no utopia is coming. Any social justice rooted in reality cannot have perfection as its goal, only improvement. Eighth, and finally, given all the above, any vision of social justice rooted in sociology would likely value intellectual and moral humility. Sociology can help us if we’re trying to improve the world, but if the knowledge it gives us is imperfect, if it can’t adjudicate between different moral claims, and if one thing it tells us for sure is that any society we’d recognize as a perfect society would be impossible, then we should probably be modest about ourselves and modest about our goals. We probably shouldn’t be trying to completely re-make society any more than we should be trying to preserve it in amber. This means, I’ll argue, that we should probably be as skeptical of radical politics as we are of reactionary politics, and in particular that we should look more favorably at classical liberal ideals and institutions. Many social justice activists have come to see free speech, free markets, the rule of law, and other ideals of liberal democracy as antithetical to social justice. This is espe­ cially true of activists who draw from critical theory, a sociological perspective that views the social world in terms of oppression and victimhood. Critical theorists see liberal institutions and norms as furthering injustice toward women, racial minorities, sexual minorities, and many other oppressed groups. In this view the path to liberation is in the dismantling of these institutions and norms, but I argue that this view results from a misunderstanding of society and that policies derived from it are sure to fail. I argue instead that classical liberalism is better than any other political framework we know of at enabling us to pursue social justice with humility. Again, my argument is that if we’re going to think clearly about social justice, we need to do the following eight things: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Learn about the world before changing it. Acknowledge uncertainty. Don’t treat ideology as science. Distinguish between facts and values. Be willing to make tradeoffs. Make room for opposition. Accept imperfection. Embrace humility.

These are all corrections to errors that seem especially likely when our pursuit of social justice is informed by critical theory, but they aren’t limited to that. There’s plenty of confusion about social justice to go around. We’ll explore each of the tips for better thinking about social justice in the chapters that follow, but we’ll start here with the first one: Learn about the world before chan­ ging it. First, we’ll review some attitudes and debates about social justice, then we’ll

Learn About the World Before Changing It

3

look at definitions of social justice, and finally we’ll look at the relationship between sociology and social justice. Sociology and social justice aren’t the same thing, but sociology can help us learn about the world we’re hoping to change.

Attitudes Toward Social Justice When you think about social justice, what do you think about? You probably think about efforts to make the world a better place—about efforts to change social norms or institutions—but depending on your view of social change, your reaction could be positive or negative. At one extreme, you might be inspired, or at the other, horrified. If your reaction is positive, maybe when you think of social justice you think of someone like Martin Luther King Jr. and of his leadership in the movement for civil rights for Black Americans. You may think of the “I Have a Dream Speech” King gave in 1963, during the era of Jim Crow laws in the American South, in which he laid out a vision of rising “from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice,” and in which he declared, “Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.”1 You might also think of King’s calls for peace—“We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence”2—and you might marvel at the restraint of King and his followers and at their effectiveness in making progress without bloodshed. You might also be inspired by King’s personal example, as someone who lost his life in service to his cause, and you might think of his final speech, in 1968 on the night before his assassination, in which he quoted the Hebrew prophet Amos in calling for justice to “roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”3 If your reaction to the idea of social justice is negative, maybe you think instead of someone like Communist leader Pol Pot, whose efforts to transform Cambodia involved the killing of nearly 2 million people, about a quarter of Cambodia’s entire population. Pol Pot and the Communist Party of Kampuchea, known as the Khmer Rouge, embraced a version of Marxism that combined xenophobia and primitivism with Marxist ideas of class conflict.4 They believed Cambodia had been corrupted by foreigners, by urbanization, and by the population of “new people,” who included ethnic minorities such as the Vietnamese and Muslim Chams, but also urban dwellers, intellectuals, professionals, Buddhist monks, and many others who were part of the majority Khmer ethnic group. These new people were said to be the oppressors of the “base people,” the supposedly uncorrupted Khmer peasants. From 1975 to 1979 the Khmer Rouge tried to completely re-make society, to start a new era beginning with what they called the year zero. And as they tried to transform Cambodia according to their vision of justice, ordinary Cambodians experienced dis­ aster—starvation, forced labor, torture, and mass killings. In sharp contrast to Martin Luther King, the Khmer Rouge enthusiastically embraced violence as a means of social change. According to Pol Pot, it was “better to kill an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake.”5 If Martin Luther King Jr. and Pol Pot are at the extremes for most of us—as positive and negative examples of the pursuit of social justice—they’re also outside of our ordinary political debates. Most of us won’t run into many people who don’t have at least some admiration for Martin Luther King, and we won’t run into many fans of Pol Pot. But in between those extremes we may have very different reactions to the same people, or the same policies, seeing them either as exemplars of social justice or as warnings of its dangers. Supporters of US President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” welfare programs, for example, are likely to see them, whatever their flaws, as successful

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in providing better lives and more opportunities for the poor and vulnerable, while critics may argue that the programs created relationships of dependency or that they created a bloated administrative state. These kinds of policy arguments also shape people’s attitudes toward social justice. Those who are hostile to the Great Society programs, for example, may be hostile to the very idea of social justice if that’s what they associate with it.

Social Justice and Its Discontents When talking about social justice, people often fail to understand the other’s perspec­ tive and end up talking past each other. If you think positively of social justice, you might wonder how anyone could object to making the world a better place, and if you think negatively of it, you might wonder how anyone could embrace what has so often led to failure. The use of the term ends up causing confusion if people have different things in mind when they think of it. In 2010, for example, the conservative television and radio host Glenn Beck instructed his radio listeners to look for the phrases social justice and economic justice on their church’s website, and if they found them, to “run as fast as you can.”6 Beck said the phrases were “code words,” apparently for leftist political ideology. Beck represents one reaction to social justice, a reaction seen almost exclusively on the political right—to reject the idea of social justice entirely. It’s no surprise, then, that progressive Christians expressed outrage over Beck’s comments, but what I find more interesting is that many conservatives also expressed disagreement. For example, Albert Mohler, a theologically and politically conservative evangelical who is currently the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote that Beck’s statements were “hard to defend,” that they “lacked nuance,” and that Beck had been “reckless.” Mohler affirmed the value of social justice, writing that justice, both social and private, is mandated by God. “God is perfectly just,” he wrote, “and the Bible is filled with God’s condemnation of injustice in any form. The prophets thun­ dered God’s denunciation of social injustice and the call for God’s people to live justly, to uphold justice, and to refrain from any perversion of justice.”7 But while disagreeing with Beck, whose primary concern, according to Mohler, seemed to be political, Mohler also expressed reservations about how the issue had been covered, and about the place of social justice in the lives of Christians. Mohler said that his concern was the “primacy of the Gospel of Christ,” and that “the church’s main message” must be the Gospel, which he said is “not a message of social salva­ tion” though it “does have social implications.” He said Christians should seek social reform, but that they may “debate the proper and most effective means of organizing the political structure and the economic markets.”8 The dispute between Beck and Mohler was about the relationship between social justice and Christianity, but it illustrates that even conservatives like Mohler who would otherwise be sympathetic to Beck might still hesitate to reject the very idea of social justice. And this is true of many others who have concerns about the discourse sur­ rounding social justice, whether they’re on the right or left politically. Many of them even make arguments similar to Mohler’s—that social justice is good, but that it’s not the highest good. Or they might argue that it’s not the highest good in every context. For example, in their book Unassailable Ideas: How Unwritten Rules and Social Media Shape Discourse in American Higher Education, sociologist Ilana Redstone and public policy professor John Villasenor discuss the trend toward requiring applicants for faculty positions at American universities to submit “diversity statements” detailing their contributions and plans to contribute to diversity, equity, and inclusion—key

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concerns of many social justice activists. In examining such a requirement at the Uni­ versity of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), which assesses contributions to diversity for faculty hiring and for each level of promotion, Redstone and Villasenor say con­ tributions to diversity are worthwhile, but that it’s a problem for UCLA’s hiring process to favor “candidates who are studying topics that happen to line up well with diversityrelated issues.”9 They ask us to imagine a Ph.D. mathematics student who has pub­ lished groundbreaking papers and advanced her field. “Are the best interests of society or a university really served,” they ask, “by placing this person at a substantial dis­ advantage in the faculty application process because she hasn’t done any of the things that a university wants to see in a diversity statement?”10 Though faculty who make contributions to diversity might advance social justice, it’s not clear why this should take priority over academic pursuits in one’s field of study. And even if we’re going to make moral rather than academic pursuits a priority, it’s not clear why we would elevate particular social justice goals such as diversity, equity, and inclusion over other moral values. Redstone and Villasenor ask, for example, why faculty are not required to submit “charity statements” or “community engagement statements.” Surely, they say, “there’s a strong case to be made that part of being a good citizen and role model is engaging in charity,” and surely “people who devote time and effort to better their communities are vital to the health of any society.”11 But we have diversity statements rather than the others because the university is prioritizing one value above all others, above other moral values as well as intellectual ones. “It is possible to be a strong believer in the value of diversity,” Redstone and Villasenor say, “while also posing the question of why this topic in particular is the one that warrants this sort of social engineering of future faculty members.”12 Similarly, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that social justice should not be the main goal of a university. A university’s telos, its purpose, should be the pursuit of truth, not the pursuit of social justice. Truth and social justice are both valuable, he says, and universities can pursue both, but because truth and social justice may come into conflict, a university can’t have a dual telos. In cases of conflict either truth or social justice must give way. And because universities have increasingly implemented the demands of activists to adopt social justice as their telos, Haidt says “the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable.”13 Though they’re coming from very different places, we might think of Mohler, Redstone, Villasenor, and Haidt as pro-social-justice critics of contemporary social justice activism and discourse. As we’ve seen, one argument from such critics is that social justice must be subordinated to other values—at least in some situations. But along with this argument—that while social justice is good, it’s not the highest good—such critics commonly also make the argument that while social justice properly understood is good, some forms of it aren’t. What they usually have in mind is forms of social justice influenced by critical theory. Currently much social-justice-oriented scholarship and activism draws from this approach in viewing society as a system of oppression and in embracing a morality focused on liberation. Sometimes the connection is explicit. Occidental College, for example, has a Department of Critical Theory and Social Justice, and “at the heart of the program,” according to the department’s website, “is an interrogation of inequality and systems of power.”14 Education professors Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo, in their book Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, are also explicit about the connection. They argue that most people fail to understand “what social justice is and what might be required to achieve it,” and Sensoy and DiAngelo see themselves as combatting a form of “society-wide social

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justice illiteracy” that “prevents us from moving forward to create a more equitable society.”15 Their objective, they say, is to “provide a foundation for developing social justice literacy,”16 and as they make clear, they believe they are providing this founda­ tion with an analysis of social justice based on critical theory.17 We’ll talk more about critical theory in later chapters, but as Sensoy and DiAngelo note, this perspective is rooted in the work of several early-20th-century anti-capitalist German scholars who drew from Karl Marx, Max Weber, and other social theorists to try to understand inequality in contemporary societies. Their insights were later com­ bined with the work of French postmodern philosophers, and then later, in North America, with “antiwar, feminist, gay rights, Black power, Indigenous peoples … and other movements for social justice.”18 According to Sensoy and DiAngelo, many of these social justice movements “initially advocated for a type of liberal humanism (individualism, freedom, and peace)” but quickly rejected it because “the logic of indi­ vidual autonomy that underlies liberal humanism … was viewed as a mechanism for keeping the marginalized in their place by obscuring larger structural systems of inequality.”19 Sensoy and DiAngelo also note that critical theorists’ tendency to view norms and structures as contributing to inequality applies to science as well. Critical theorists, they say, “raised questions about whose rationality and whose objectivity underlies scientific methods.”20 They even question “the idea that objectivity is desir­ able or even possible.” The idea is that “knowledge is reflective of the values and interests of those who produce it.”21 The critics of this brand of social justice see it as misguided, even harmful. For example, in his book Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth, the evangelical Christian scholar Thaddeus Williams says that for the sake of clarity we need to dis­ tinguish between two types of social justice, which he refers to as Social Justice A and Social Justice B. Social Justice A might involve efforts to “abolish human trafficking, work with the inner-city poor, invest in microloans to help the destitute in the devel­ oping world,” and so on. Williams sees this as real social justice, and he sees it as compatible with and required by Christianity, but he says the term social justice has in recent years “taken on an extremely charged political meaning,”22 and the new form of social justice, Social Justice B, “has been enshrined in many minds not as a way but the way to think about justice.”23 Williams sees Social Justice B, which is rooted in critical theory, as largely incompatible with Christianity. For example, he says that instead of emphasizing our common humanity, Social Justice B breaks “people into group iden­ tities,” that instead of advocating charity, it “inspires in its followers a quickness to take offense,” and that instead of viewing all human beings as sinners before God, it “credits guilt on the basis of one’s skin tone, condemning people because of their group identity.”24 Williams argues, then, for rejecting Social Justice B in favor of Social Jus­ tice A, and he points out ways to distinguish between the two.25 As we saw earlier, religious and secular arguments about social justice often resemble each other, and just as Williams argues that Social Justice B—which, following Sensoy and DiAngelo, I will call critical social justice—is incompatible with Christianity, free speech activist and attorney Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argue that certain aspects of it are incompatible with cognitive behavioral therapy, and separately, Haidt argues that it can be incompatible with ancient wisdom. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a technique for dealing with depression and anxiety by helping people to avoid cognitive distortions such as magnification (exaggerating the importance of something) and mind reading (assuming someone has negative thoughts about you). In their 2015 Atlantic article, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” and in their 2018 book of the same title. Lukianoff and Haidt argue that the ideas derived

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from critical social justice, such as the idea of focusing on small slights called microaggressions, go directly against the advice of CBT. They teach people to magnify and to mind read, for example, so many critical social justice ideas are likely to increase depression and anxiety among the people they’re supposed to help.26 Elsewhere Haidt says the idea of microaggressions “teaches students the exact opposite of ancient wisdom.”27 Ancient philosophies and religions teach that “we react to the world as we construct it in our own minds,” and that because “we are overly judgmental and outrageously hypocritical,” we “need to reduce our moral certainty and cultivate generosity of spirit.”28 “Microaggression training,” though, “tells students that ‘life is exactly what you think it is—you have a direct pipeline to reality, and the person who offended you does not, so go with your feelings’.”29 Others make similar arguments about the incompatibility of critical social justice ideas with other important values and institutions. For example, linguist and political commentator John McWhorter30 has argued that certain critical social justice ideas are incompatible with true antiracism, political scientist Francis Fukuyama31 has argued they are incompatible with liberal democracy, and I, writing along with sociologist Jason Manning32 and elsewhere with psychologist Pamela Paresky,33 have argued that they are incompatible with free speech. And as critical social justice has spread throughout the English-speaking world and to some extent beyond, scholars outside the United States have raised similar concerns.34 In France, for example, a number of prominent intellectuals and politicians have dismissed the ideas of critical social justice as imports from the United States, and they’ve seen them as threats to French notions of republicanism and secularism.35 You might wonder why there are so many different criticisms of critical social justice. Can it really be incompatible with Christianity, cognitive behavioral therapy, ancient wisdom, and French secularism? Or is it just that its critics will use any weapon to hand to attack it? I think the right answer is that the critical social justice perspective is incompatible with so many ideas and perspectives because it’s so comprehensive in its critique of the status quo and of other ways of viewing the world. The idea is that all social institutions and norms are set up so that they enable oppression, so critical social justice activists want to see revolutionary changes in religion, therapy, science, law, and in other institutions and norms. Critical social justice is meant to be radical. It’s meant to be incompatible with other commitments. It’s meant to challenge those who want anything other than radical change in some sphere of life. This includes anyone with a commitment to sociology. To some extent I agree with Sensoy and DiAngelo, since I also think there’s a lot of confusion about what social justice is and how to pursue it, but as a sociologist seeking scientific understandings of the social world, I think that by relying on critical theory, Sensoy and DiAngelo are actually contributing to the social justice illiteracy they’re trying to combat. Your social justice literacy will be improved not by learning critical theory, but rather by incor­ porating the insights of the more scientific versions of sociology that critical theory seeks to undermine. But before we further consider the relationship between social justice and sociology, let’s do something that should be even more fundamental to social justice literacy: Let’s be clear about what we mean by social justice.

The Idea of Social Justice Any discussion of social justice quickly runs into the problem of how to define it. The economist Friedrich Hayek said he had tried for ten years to find out what social justice meant and failed. He concluded that the idea was an “empty formula, conventionally

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used to assert that a particular claim is justified without giving any reason.”36 Similarly, the Catholic journalist Michael Novak said social justice is most often “an instrument of ideological intimidation,” that it is “a term of art whose operational meaning is, ‘We need a law against that.’”37 I think Hayek and Novak were exaggerating, but the problem is real. Just try finding a definition of social justice on the websites of all the various centers and institutes for social justice at American universities. For example, I can’t find any definition at the websites of the University of Oklahoma’s Center for Social Justice, Georgetown Uni­ versity’s Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching, and Service, Case Western Reserve University’s Social Justice Institute, or at the University of Tennessee’s Center for the Study of Social Justice.38 But is social justice really all that unusual in this respect? People might also be reluctant to give clear definitions of fairness, tolerance, wisdom, love, and other moral concepts, and they might also use the concepts as weapons in political conflicts rather than as tools for serious moral analysis. This is frustrating, but it doesn’t lead most of us to reject these concepts altogether. The term social justice was coined in the 1800s by the Jesuit scholar Luigi Taparelli and then taken up by other Catholics, other Christians, and eventually, by secular scholars and social movements. Social justice is still important to Catholic teaching, and some of the clearer definitions out there are from Catholic sources. For example, Ron Krietemeyer of Catholic Charities says social justice is “about collective action aimed at transforming social institutions and structures in order to achieve the common good.”39 Catholic publisher Gregory F. Augustine Pierce points to and expands upon the adage that if you give a man a fish, he can fish for a day, but if you teach him to fish he can fish for a lifetime. He says that if we’re thinking of social jus­ tice, not just individual justice, we need to add that if you “organize a fishing industry that operates justly … the entire society will eat forever.”40 Social justice, he says, is based on the notion that every society’s “rules and institutions have consequences on the individuals and sub-groups that make up the society,” and that those rules and institutions sometimes “have to be changed or improved so the society can function better, or more ‘justly,’ for all its members.”41 Similarly, Jason Manning and I have suggested that we think of social justice as the idea “that laws, policies, and social institutions—not just individual behaviors—are part of the moral sphere.”42 If we are concerned with social justice, we evaluate institutional arrangements in terms of how well they contribute to human flourishing, fairness, equality, or whatever else we see as morally desirable, and we try to improve them when we can. The idea of social justice is older than the actual term, but according to historian David Johnston, even the idea is much more prominent in modern societies than it was in the past. “In the vast bulk of ancient writings that touch on questions of justice,” he says, “the idea that the primary contours—the terrain—of the social world might be reshaped to conform to human design never arises.”43 The idea gradually began to emerge among Greek and Roman philosophers, but the older idea, that “the basic contours of the social world are determined by nature,” was still a strong competitor, and with the collapse of the Roman Empire, it remained the dominant idea for many centuries.44 As people began to have more confidence in their ability to understand the world, though, they began to think more about how they might change it. Accordingly, in the 18th century reflections on jus­ tice began to deal with this question: “How can human beings redesign and rebuild the terrain of the social world so as to make that terrain itself just?”45 Understood this way, social justice is not a particular idea about how institutions and societies should be organized; it is just the idea that the way they are organized is of moral concern. Understood this way, it doesn’t make much sense to reject social justice.

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Social justice seems useful as a moral term, and it seems inevitable that anyone who thinks at all about the world sociologically—anyone seeking descriptions and explana­ tions of social arrangements—would also, when thinking about the world morally, reflect on the desirability of those arrangements and consider how they might be altered.

Sociology and Social Justice Sociologists have always been divided about what the aims of sociology should be. The key question, according to sociologist Jonathan Turner, has been whether sociology should “be an activist discipline devoted to the direct engagement of social problems or a scientific discipline committed to producing verified knowledge.”46 Though there’s certainly been a long history of activism in sociology, I follow Turner in thinking of sociology as a scientific discipline. If sociology is indistinguishable from social activism, then not only will it fail to contribute to our knowledge about the social world, it will also fail to add anything new to our pursuit of social justice. But if sociology is scien­ tific, the knowledge it produces can aid our reform efforts. In fact, from the beginning of the discipline, there have been sociologists who have argued that effective reform is possible only with sociological knowledge. If you’re trying to reorganize society to reduce violence, say, or inequality, you need to know the conditions that lead to peace and violence or equality and inequality. Just as you wouldn’t try building and flying an airplane without first knowing something about physics, it makes sense, as sociologist Axel Van den Berg puts it, “to try to understand the world a little better before rushing off to change it.”47 The idea of sociology as a science of social life was that the old ways of thinking about the social world were inadequate. Humans had already begun to gaze upon parts of the physical world in a new way, using observation and logic to identify patterns such as the rotations of planets and the speed of falling objects. The early sociologists claimed the social world was another part of observable reality and that we could study it similarly. And if the social world could be understood like the natural world, it could be manipulated. The natural sciences provided new insights about reality, and in doing so they enabled new technologies. Technologies manipulate the world toward human ends—faster travel, faster communication, deadlier weapons, etc.—and if the natural sciences could make such new wonders possible, surely the social sciences could as well. Sociology as a science thus offers the promise of social technology to enable us to live happier lives, to have more peaceful relationships, and to distribute resources more fairly. It raises the hope of social justice.

The Promises and Failures of Sociology Auguste Comte, the 19th-century French philosopher who coined the term sociology, envisioned sociology as a science that could aid our efforts to redesign the social world. Comte actually preferred the term social physics, which hints at his idea that sociolo­ gists would discover general laws of social life just as physicists had discovered laws governing objects in the natural world. Comte thought of sociology as a science that could be as successful as the natural sciences, and in fact he saw it as the “queen of the sciences” because it had come along last, as the culmination of our turn to science as a way of understanding things, and because it promised to help bring about a new and better society.

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In one sense Comte is an exemplar of thinking about sociology and social justice. He was right about the difference between sociology and social justice and about the con­ nection between them. Knowledge of the world is different from evaluations of the world or from efforts to change it, but we need accurate knowledge about the world if we’re going to effectively change things. As Comte put it, “Man’s study of nature must furnish the only basis of his action upon nature; for it is only by knowing the laws of phenomena, and thus being able to foresee them, that we can, in active life, set them to modify one another for our advantage.”48 In another sense, though, Comte serves as a warning of how wrong sociologists can go in their pursuit of social justice. Comte’s life was not what you might expect of someone who had warned of the need to center efforts at social change around an understanding of general social laws that would be discovered by sociologists. In what seems like a rejection of his own advice, he ended up behaving more like a prophet than a scientist, and he set about trying to re-make the world despite having made little of the intellectual progress he had envisioned for sociology. Comte valued progress and order, and his comprehensive vision for a new society involved a restructuring of every institution, including the family, the government, the economy, and religion. In the new society those involved in production would control the government, while scientists would control the new religion—with sociologists as its high priests. Some of Comte’s ideas and decisions toward the end of his life may have resulted in part from madness or dementia, but it’s clear that his religious ideas were also connected to his longstanding sociological ideas.49 Comte believed that a new positivist stage of human development, in which science would be the predominant form of knowledge, was replacing the metaphysical and theological stages, which were based on philosophy and religion. But he believed that something like religion—a new positivist “Religion of Humanity”—would need to pro­ vide the kind of social order that the Catholic Church had provided in the Middle Ages. We can better understand where Comte was coming from, according to sociologist Andrew Wernick, if we compare Comte’s concerns about modern society to those of Friedrich Nietzsche, a thinker most of us are more familiar with. In his book Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity, Wernick says that “Comte’s positive faith in Humanity is suspended over the abyss which Nietzsche inscribed with ‘the death of God’, to which it can be interpreted as both a panic reaction and a strategic response.”50 Comte and Nietzsche were both atheists who were concerned about what they saw as a crisis of nihilism occurring along with the loss of religious belief. For Nietzsche, this meant that people had to learn new ways to live in a world without meaning, and he envisioned exemplary individuals, overmen, who would create new values. For Comte, though, the crisis caused by the decline of theistic religion was temporary, and a new, nontheistic, scientific religion could provide meaning and order. As Wernick puts it, “Rather than pushing perspectivalism or nihilism all the way, Comte strenuously reacts, in the medium of a traumatized ex-Catholic sensibility, against the threat of ‘anarchy’…. Comte followed the ‘secularising’ path of those who sought … to extract from Christianity—indeed from all religions—Love as the rational kernel of its ethic, and Humanity as the truth of its God.”51 Part of Comte’s design for a new society, then, was a design for a new religion, which involved a calendar, sacraments, sermons, saints, holidays, and priests, all centered around the worship of Humanity. This new religion was to be the means by which scientific and moral knowledge were transmitted, and it would inspire people to lives of service. And though it was “a complete, even preposterous failure,”52 and though it certainly never became a widespread movement, much less a major social institution,

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Comte did in fact found this new religion. He even declared himself its high priest and spent the rest of his life lecturing “to rag-tag groups of laypersons, sending decrees to his disciples and even missives to the Pope in Rome.”53 At this point he was “widely regarded as a fool,” and he was thought to have given “a bad name to the very field of inquiry that he had named.”54 Turner says that “Comte’s biography might be seen as a precursor to what would happen in the history of American sociology, as science was abandoned increasingly in favor of a quasi-religious zeal.”55 He also says, though, that despite Comte’s failures we should still take seriously his vision of the “development of theory … that could be used to remake the world.”56 “Radical ideologies, personal biases, intuition, being a humanist, and many other motivating forces,” Turner says, “will not really help people; applications of the principles of social science will.”57 If Comte was right about this, though, how did he go so wrong in acting upon his vision? I think we can identify flaws in Comte’s approach—flaws that were perhaps there from the beginning—that can serve as a warning for us as we think about how to pursue social justice. Comte was out over his skis, so to speak, in acting as if his hopes for sociology had already been achieved. Sociology was in its infancy, but he thought the smidgen of sociological knowledge he had discovered was enough to guide a rede­ sign of society. And his vision of what sociology could do was always too grandiose. I don’t think he was wrong to think that sociology could be a science in the same sense as the natural sciences, but the natural sciences themselves often proceed slowly and laboriously, and the knowledge they produce is often partial and provisional. Sociology can help in our social justice efforts, but the kind of knowledge sociology gives us will rarely be comprehensive enough or certain enough to justify any effort to completely re-make society. It would simply be impossible to know all the effects so many changes would have, and many of the changes would be irreversible. And even when we’re making smaller changes and our knowledge gives us a good idea about their likely effects, it’s unlikely we’d ever have agreement about social change. Even if we can agree on the facts, we’ll always have different values—different ideas about how to make tradeoffs between competing values and different ideas about what our goals should be. Comte’s vision of sociology is inspiring, and much of it is correct, but he seems to have lacked an awareness of how limited our knowledge about the social world is always likely to be, and of the limits of science itself. An awareness of these limits might have led him away from the idea of any grand redesign of society and toward patience, humility, and restraint in his social justice efforts. Comte said we must learn about the world before changing it, but then he set about trying to change it without having actually learned very much. Fortunately, we can learn from what Comte got wrong as well as from what he got right. And perhaps as we try to avoid what was comical or pathetic about Comte while embracing what was brilliant, we should try to do the same with the discipline he named. Sociology can be as bizarre a discipline as Comte was a person, and its practitioners often behave like they aren’t sure whether they want to be scientists or prophets. Sociologists today don’t declare themselves the high priests of Humanity, but some do refer to themselves as “activist-scholars” (or “scholar-activists”), an indication that like Comte they are on a mission to change the world.58 In many ways the American Sociological Association (ASA) also tends to display a bent toward activism over science. Some of the themes of recent ASA meetings, for example, were “Real Utopias,” “Interrogating Inequality,” “Is Another World Possi­ ble?,” “Rethinking Social Movements: Can Changing the Conversation Change the World?,” “Engaging Social Justice for a Better World,” and “Emancipatory Sociology.”

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And perhaps this is no surprise considering the activism of some of the ASA’s presidents. Mary Romero for example, called for activist scholarship in her ASA presidential address,59 and former ASA president Joe Feagin is the co-author of a book called Libera­ tion Sociology, a term apparently intended to bring to mind “liberation theology,” a Marxist-inspired movement within the Roman Catholic Church.60 Similarly, another past ASA president, Michael Burawoy, has called for a public sociology, a “sociology” intended “to transform the world.”61 Burawoy hasn’t always been consistent about what public sociology is, but it seems clear that he means for it to advance leftist political goals. Public sociology is “part of a strategic plan,” sociologist Mathieu Deflem writes, “to subsume sociology under one ethico-political vision.”62 Sociologist Christian Smith comments similarly on the “conspicuous absence of … internal diversity and pluralism” and says that “nearly everyone who is attracted to ‘public sociology’ appears … committed to one basic outlook on reality: a liberal, progressive, leftist view.”63 It may seem like a stretch to compare the ideological commitments of contemporary sociologists with Comte’s efforts to found a Religion of Humanity. Today’s activists tend not to be fans of Comte or of his positivism, after all, and his concern for social order isn’t driving their commitments. But in both cases we see activism getting way ahead of the pursuit of knowledge. And just as Comte’s religion was a secular one—an attempt to have a sense of the sacred without any belief in the supernatural—the activism of con­ temporary sociologists, though secular, also tends to have sacred sensibilities. Christian Smith, in his book The Sacred Project of American Sociology, says that American sociologists share a commitment to a moral enterprise, and that American sociology thus acts as a “sacred movement.”64 This moral enterprise—which involves support for the equality, emancipation, and affirmation of human beings, along with the belief that radical social change is needed and can be accomplished through “pop­ ular progressive social movements and social-democratic state programs and regula­ tions”65—is sacred for sociologists in Émile Durkheim’s sense of something that is set apart from the ordinary. Even sociologists who aren’t political activists tend to see their work as advancing the same moral aims the activists are trying to advance, and they give these moral aims priority. Smith says that American sociology often acts as a kind of secular religion, then, and if he’s right, then Turner is right to compare con­ temporary sociology’s failures to Comte’s personal failures. Our positive lesson from Comte, remember, is simple: We need to learn about the world before changing it. But the negative example of Comte’s later life reminds us not to skip over the first step in our zeal for change. It’s easy to convince ourselves we’ve learned enough, even when our knowledge is sketchy or untested. We need sociology because it can give us insights that can help us think better about social justice, but we have to keep in mind that sociologists can also give us bad ideas that would only make things worse.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

NPR, “Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’.” Ibid. CNN, “Here Is the Speech.” Jones, Genocide, pp. 397–399. Quoted in Chanda, “Killing Fields of Cambodia.” Quoted in Siegel, “Christians Rip Glenn Beck.” Mohler, “Glenn Beck, Social Justice.” Ibid. Redstone and Villasenor, Unassailable Ideas, p. 72. Ibid.

Learn About the World Before Changing It 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

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Ibid., p. 74. Ibid. Haidt, “Why Universities Must Choose One Telos.” Occidental College, “Critical Theory and Social Justice.” Sensoy and DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal?, p. xix. Ibid. Ibid., Chapter 2. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 29. Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising, p. 4. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 163. The Christian writer and sociologist George Yancey, in his book Beyond Racial Gridlock, also offers a Christian critique of what Williams would call Social Justice B. Yancey examines several models of racial reconciliation, including the “white responsibility” model, which is rooted in critical race theory and emphasizes the role of institutions in perpetuating racism. Yancey sees this model as flawed because it absolves racial minorities of all responsibility for racial reconciliation, because it alienates whites who would otherwise be open to reconcilia­ tion, and because it ignores the fact that all human beings are sinful. Yancey also sees flaws in other approaches, including more conservative approaches such as colorblindness, and he proposes what he calls a “mutual responsibility” model that he believes is more compatible with Christianity (Yancey, Beyond Racial Gridlock). Lukianoff and Haidt, “Coddling of the American Mind”; Lukianoff and Haidt, Coddling of the American Mind. Haidt, “Unwisest Idea on Campus,” p. 176. Ibid. Ibid. McWhorter, Woke Racism. Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents, Chapter 5. Campbell and Manning, “End of Academe”; Rise of Victimhood Culture, Chapter 7. Paresky and Campbell, “Psychology’s Language and Free Speech Problem.” Goodwin, “Can Britain Survive”; John, “The Anti-Woke Crusade”; Kaufmann, “Canada Is the World’s”; Nagle, “Will Ireland Survive.” Onishi, “Will American Ideas Tear”; Williams, “The French Are in a Panic.” Hayek, Social Justice, Socialism, and Democracy, p. 3. Novak, “Defining Social Justice.” The University of Wyoming’s Social Justice Research Center is an exception. Though in the past they had a 169-word paragraph about social justice that never got around to defining it (Campbell and Manning, Rise of Victimhood Culture, p. 187, n. 4), they now define social justice as “the advancement of a just society by challenging injustice and valuing diversity so that all people have a right to unbiased treatment and a fair allowance of community resources.” And they go on to describe what this looks like: “A just society exists when individuals’ well being is not constricted based on gender, sexuality, religion, political affilia­ tions, age, race, belief, disability, location, socioeconomic circumstances, veteran status, or group membership” (University of Wyoming Social Justice Research Center, “What We Do”). Even this definition, with its hodgepodge list of identities that’s clearly a product of committee meetings, would seem to be, as Hayek put it, an “empty formula.” Quoted in Droel, What Is Social Justice?, p. 18. Pierce, “Note from the Publisher,” p. 8. Ibid., p. 7. Campbell and Manning, Rise of Victimhood Culture, p. 188. Johnston, Brief History of Justice, p. 107. Ibid., p. 111. Ibid., p. 115. Turner, “The More American Sociology Seeks,” p. 457. Van den Berg, “Public Sociology,” p. 69. Comte, The Positive Philosophy, p. 43.

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49 Wernick says that “Comte’s embrace of a Humanist religious conviction is haunted by mad­ ness,” but he also says “a psychological reduction of Comte’s thought would scarcely do it justice. It would bypass his effort to reflect on his own crise cérébrale as source material for a scientific theory of human nature” (Wernick, Auguste Comte and the Religion, pp. 106–107). 50 Wernick, Auguste Comte and the Religion, p. 6. 51 Ibid., p. 7. 52 Ibid., p. 5. 53 Turner, “The More American Sociology Seeks,” p. 458. 54 Turner, Theoretical Sociology, p. 16. 55 Turner, “The More American Sociology Seeks,” p. 458. 56 Turner, “Social Engineering,” p. 108. 57 Ibid., p. 109. 58 See Hern, “Navigating the Borderland”; Romero, “Sociology Engaged in Social Justice”; and Weber, “An Activist and a Scholar.” 59 Romero, “Sociology Engaged in Social Justice.” 60 Feagin and Vera, Liberation Sociology. 61 Burawoy, “Critical Turn to Public Sociology,” pp. 317–318. 62 Deflem, “Public Sociology.” 63 Smith, “Comparing Ethical Naturalism,” p. 600. 64 Smith, Sacred Project of American Sociology, p. x, n. 4. 65 Ibid., p. 12.

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University of Wyoming Social Justice Research Center. 2023. “What We Do.” Available at: http s://www.uwyo.edu/sjrc/what-we-do/index.html. Van den Berg, Axel. 2014. “Public Sociology, Professional Society, and Democracy.” In The Public Sociology Debate: Ethics and Engagement, edited by Arianne Hannemaayer and Christopher J. Schneider, pp. 53–73. Vancouver: UBC Press. Weber, Clare M. 2006. “An Activist and a Scholar: Reflections of a Feminist Sociologist Negotiating Academia.” Humanity and Society 30 (2): 153–166. Wernick, Andrew. 2001. Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity: The Post-Theistic Program of French Social Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Thaddeus J. 2020. Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask about Social Justice. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic. Williams, Thomas Chatterton. 2023. “The French Are in a Panic Over Le Wokisme.” The Atlantic, February 4. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/03/fra nce-tocqueville-democracy-race-le-wokisme/672775/. Yancey, George. 2006. Beyond Racial Gridlock: Embracing Mutual Responsibility. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books.

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Acknowledge Uncertainty Learning from Multiple Theories

Learning about the world before setting out to change it isn’t as easy as you might think. As we saw with Auguste Comte in Chapter 1, even those who recognize the need for sociological knowledge in their social justice pursuits may hastily conclude they already know enough for a societal overhaul. Believing the science is settled, they may ignore ongoing debates about the perspectives they’re drawing from, and they may ignore rival perspectives. In Chapter 1 we also talked about the education professors Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo,1 and we saw that they believed they were combatting social justice illiteracy by grounding their idea of social justice in critical theory. The idea is that you need the insights of critical theory to effectively pursue social justice. And Sensoy and DiAngelo are by no means alone in this. We’ve seen that it has become common for the word social justice to refer to this kind of critical social justice.2 Who is right? Does critical theory deserve a prominent and exclusive place in guiding our social justice pursuits? Is it settled science? No, critical theory isn’t settled science, and that’s true apart from whatever merits it has. In the next chapter I’ll discuss some problems with the critical theory approach in particular, but what I’m saying in this chapter applies to other sociological approaches as well. We need to draw from sociology for our social justice pursuits, but we have to acknowledge when our theories are uncertain and provisional. This doesn’t mean we can never learn anything about the social world, and it doesn’t mean we can never choose between competing theories. But we do need to be aware that sociology is a divided field where even the most successful theories are hotly contested. It’s not just that there are competing theories about various subjects; it’s that there are competing theoretical perspectives—different and sometimes incompatible ways of thinking about society and about human behavior. In this chapter we’ll look at some of the competing theoretical perspectives in sociology, and we’ll look at how each might lead us to think differently about social justice. Sociology can help us better understand the social world, but if we draw too narrowly from the range of sociological theory, we might ignore problems with the theories we’re drawing from and overlook many possibilities for effective reform.

Social Justice and Sociological Paradigms The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, said that scientific revolutions were rare events in the history of science where the dominant paradigm of a discipline—that is, the “entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given [scientific] community”3—is replaced by a new paradigm. DOI: 10.4324/9781032616278-2

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More relevant to understanding sociology, however, is Kuhn’s discussion of what he calls pre-paradigmatic science.4 If we alter Kuhn’s definition of a paradigm slightly to include any general framework in which theories are formulated (rather than one shared by the entire community), we can think of science in this period before the emergence of a dominant paradigm as multi-paradigmatic science since there are usually several paradigms—several competing strategies of explanation.5 And that’s the current state of sociology. There’s no dominant paradigm, only a number of competing strategies of explanation. As you might expect in a field with little consensus, there’s not even agreement about what the different paradigms are, though there’s a lot of overlap between the various lists sociologists have put together. Daniel Rigney identifies eight metaphors of society that undergird different sociological perspectives: Society as a living system, society as a machine, society as war, society as a legal order, society as a marketplace, society as a game, society as theater, and society as discourse.6 Randall Collins discusses four sociological traditions: The conflict tradition, the rational/utilitarian tradition, the Durkheimian tradition, and the microinteractionist tradition.7 Jonathan Turner says there are nine broad approaches to sociological theorizing: Evolutionary theorizing, systems theorizing, ecological theorizing, conflict theorizing, interactionist theorizing, exchange theorizing, structuralist theorizing, cultural theorizing, and critical theoriz­ ing.8 Donald Black identifies eight sociological paradigms, or strategies of explanation: Conflict theory, phenomenological theory, motivational theory, neo-Darwinian theory, rational choice theory, opportunity theory, functionalist theory, and pure sociology.9 There are a number of other ways of classifying sociological theories, too, and they overlap substantially, but here I’m drawing most explicitly from Black’s typology, and I discuss how six of the sociological perspectives he identifies can inform ideas of social justice.10 These are some of the most commonly used perspectives in sociology, and each goes about explaining human behavior using different assumptions and employing different concepts: Conflict theory explains human behavior as a struggle for domina­ tion, phenomenological theory explains human behavior with subjectivity, motivational theory explains human behavior with the psychological impact of social forces, rational choice theory explains human behavior as the least costly means to a goal, opportunity theory explains human behavior with what is possible, and functionalist theory explains human behavior with its contribution to the needs of the group.11 None of these are explanations of human behavior themselves; they are frameworks that theorists use to develop explanations. And while none of these frameworks can provide answers to fundamental moral questions, different ways of thinking about human societies and human behavior are likely to lead people toward different ways of thinking about social problems and to different ways of addressing them. Conflict theory has inspired activists to call attention to oppression and to fight for liberation. Critical theory is a conflict theory, so this is the approach that informs so much pre­ sent-day social justice activism, but other approaches can lead to other ways of think­ ing about social justice. People who focus on human subjective experience as the key to explaining human behavior, for example, might promote increased understanding as a way of improving the world. Those who believe social forces shape individuals might want to alter social forces to make people better. Those who believe people are driven by self-interest might want to incentivize good behavior and de-incentivize bad beha­ vior. Those who see people operating in a world of possibilities and constraints might try to create more opportunities for virtue and fewer opportunities for vice. And those who think of healthy societies as interdependent systems similar to organisms might want to increase social solidarity.

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We’ll look more at each of these strategies of explanation and at the strategies for social justice they might inspire, but first let’s start with the broad theoretical perspec­ tive that informs critical social justice activism—conflict theory.

Power and Conflict: Can We Liberate the Oppressed? Conflict theory “explains human behavior as a struggle for domination.”12 And typi­ cally conflict theory assumes that social life involves clashes of interest, that clashes of interest involve zero-sum outcomes where one side’s gain is the other’s loss, that domi­ nant groups gain at the expense of others, and that radical change is the only way to reduce the power of dominant groups.13 Karl Marx was the first to use this approach. In every society there has been a system of class relations, Marx said, and social institutions benefit the dominant class at the expense of others. Classes have different interests, then, and the conflict between them is what drives historical change—or as Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels put it in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”14 Marx believed that in the past, struggles between classes have resulted in new class systems with new dominant classes, but that this wouldn’t be true of the struggle against capitalism. The idea was that when the proletariat (the wage laborers), rise up against the bourgeoisie (the capitalists, who own the means of production), they would take control of the government and col­ lectivize the means of production. This would put an end to class and lead to a new kind of society, where people would contribute according to their abilities and take according to their needs. And though at first the proletariat would use the power of the state to seize control of production, afterward the government would wither away. When Marxists analyze capitalist societies, they’re not trying to determine whether or how much capitalists exploit workers. That’s an assumption of the theory, so the exploita­ tion is treated as a constant. Instead, they’re trying to show how social arrangements lead to exploitation, even if those social arrangements might at first look fair. Thus, Marxists have argued that the idea of equality before the law came about with the rise of capitalism and that this idea actually enables inequality. Agreements between capitalists and workers appear legitimate under this system because they are treated as agreements between equals, even though the disparity in power between capitalists and workers means workers are in no position to bargain. In this case the idea of equality disguises the inequality of the rela­ tionship. It helps to prevent people from understanding the workers’ exploitation. Marx offered a new way of understanding societies and of understanding historical change, but his predictions have mostly failed. The clash between capitalists and workers didn’t lead to the failure of capitalism and to revolution. And in those noncapitalist societies where communist parties gained power and collectivized the means of production, doing so didn’t lead to the new kind of society that Marx envisioned. Governments didn’t wither away, for example. Instead, communist reformers in Russia, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere established totalitarian governments that were among the most intrusive and violent governments in history.15 Abolishing class in the Marxist sense also didn’t put an end to conflict and exploitation. Political elites ruled over the masses in the new societies, and they often turned on one another as they pursued power. The economic systems that the reformers established also failed, leading to famine and shortages of basic goods, and eventually governments led by communist parties collapsed or made reforms. True believers in Marxism may be unfazed by any of this. They may think capitalism will still collapse and the revolution is still coming. They may argue that the revolutions

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in Russia, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere were not real communist revolutions and their governments were not real Marxist governments. Marxism has not failed, they might say; real Marxism hasn’t been tried. But another tack for those sympathetic to Marxist analysis is to accept much of Marx’s framework while rejecting many of the specifics. This could mean accepting Marx’s class analysis while rejecting his hope for change, but more com­ monly it means accepting the conflict framework while rejecting Marx’s emphasis on class alone as the source of oppression and the driver of historical change. For most of today’s critical theorists, it’s not just class, but also race, gender, sexu­ ality, religion, disability status, immigration status, and much else that give some people power over others. Otherwise, the analysis is similar. The idea again is that the oppression of disadvantaged groups is a constant to be assumed rather than a variable to be explained. Just as social institutions benefit capitalists at the expense of workers, they benefit whites at the expense of persons of color, men at the expense of women, heterosexuals at the expense of gays and lesbians, the cisgendered at the expense of the transgendered, Christians at the expense of Muslims, the able-bodied at the expense of the disabled, the native-born at the expense of immigrants, and so on, in an interlock­ ing system of domination. Contemporary critical theory, also sometimes called inter­ sectional theory, thus follows Marxism in calling for a radical reorganization of social institutions. But for critical theorists it’s not enough just to deal with class or with any other single source of oppression, whether it’s race, gender, or something else. The goal is to put an end to the entire system of oppression. Critical theorists also follow Marxists in analyzing interactions and institutions— including those that might at first appear innocuous or even liberating—as sources of oppression. Laws, prisons, and wars contribute to oppression, but so do cultural prac­ tices and even ordinary conversations. One idea, which we discussed briefly in the last chapter, is that members of oppressed groups frequently experience microaggressions, small slights that make their lives unpleasant and block them from success.16 When a woman enters a corporate meeting room and sees portraits honoring past CEOs who were all men, this might be a microaggression.17 Or it might be a microaggression when whites in conversation ask Asians where they are from.18 These things contribute to people feeling marginalized, the idea goes, and they add up. As we saw in the last chapter, those who don’t accept the critical theory framework may reject the idea of microaggression for various reasons. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, for example, believe the idea is likely to cause harm by encouraging ways of thinking that lead to anxiety and depression. But microaggression is just one of the con­ cepts derived from critical theory that outsiders often find unfamiliar and objectionable. Others include cultural appropriation19 (such as when members of dominant cultures adopt the clothing styles or eat the foods associated with marginalized cultures), hetero­ normativity20 (when someone makes a statement that implies heterosexuality is normal), and white fragility21 (when whites are defensive over being confronted with their racism and privilege). Another concept that can be jarring to outsiders is the idea of white supre­ macy.22 In more mainstream contexts white supremacy refers to things like the Jim Crow laws that once segregated whites and Blacks and banned Blacks from certain places, and white supremacists are Ku Klux Klansmen and others who favor such laws. But critical social justice activists often talk about mainstream institutions today as “white suprema­ cist institutions,” and they speak of those who oppose revolutionary change as “white supremacists.” It’s not that they believe these people are Klansmen or that the Klan or similar groups run mainstream institutions. It’s that they see society’s institutions as pro­ tecting the advantages whites have over persons of color, and this is the sense in which those institutions and those who defend them contribute to white supremacy.

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By now most people are familiar with at least some of these concepts. Increasingly they aren’t just the argot of critical theorists or student activists; concepts like microaggression, cultural appropriation, and white supremacy have made their way into workshops at uni­ versities and corporations and into the mainstream media and into public debate. The result is that social justice often becomes synonymous with this particular theoretical approach. But there’s not much justification for relying so heavily on an approach that isn’t even dominant within the field of sociology. Nothing compels us to accept this framework and reject all the others. If we understand human behavior primarily in terms of power and conflict, we’ll probably want to know how we can fight oppression, but if we look at human behavior differently, we’re likely to look at social justice differently. We’re likely to ask different questions about how we might improve the world.

Human Subjectivity: Can We Promote Understanding? What if we started not with the idea that conflict drives human behavior, but instead with the idea that subjectivity does? Subjectivity, or consciousness, is difficult and per­ haps impossible to fully understand, but it has to do with our inner experiences. If we’re talking about your subjectivity, we’re talking about what it’s like to be you or what it’s like for you to do certain things.23 Phenomenological theory explains human behavior with subjective experience.24 Phenomenologists tend to see people as creators of their own social worlds,25 and they may see the free will of human beings as undermining deterministic explanations. They may be more interested in describing what it’s like to experience a behavior than in explaining it. The determinism of other approaches is usually what leads us to think about how we might go about altering the social world, so the anti-determinism of phenomenology means that its possible contribution to social justice is more limited, or at least less apparent. Some phenomenologists do try to explain behaviors, but those explanations are less deterministic than most social science. For example, in his book Seductions of Crime, sociologist Jack Katz describes what attracts people to criminal behavior. He looks at what it’s like to commit various crimes. Consider the typical case of homicide, where one person gets angry at another and kills the person on the spot. Katz says that from the standpoint of the killers these are “righteous slaughters.”26 The killers, responding to insults, adultery, and other behavior that both offends and humiliates them, see them­ selves as meting out justice to wrongdoers. It’s the experience of moralism, anger, and humiliation that leads to the killing. Or consider shoplifting. Katz says that from the standpoint of the typical shoplifter, stealing an item from a store is a “sneaky thrill.” The attraction of it is the experience of secretly getting away with something deviant. Phenomenological theorists don’t see these experiences as the result of socialization or some other social force; they result from internal forces—from subjective experience. They don’t explain how someone suddenly becomes motivated to engage in crime or some other behavior. Katz says it’s a kind of magic.27 Perhaps as phenomenological theories help us to better understand how violence, discrimination, and other behaviors that we might wish to reduce are experienced by their perpetrators, we could develop ways to help would-be perpetrators develop new understandings of their situations. But if phenomenologists are correct about the mysterious and non-deterministic properties of subjectivity, we would have limited success. Phenomenological theory isn’t likely to help us much in trying to change people or their behaviors, but the idea is that it still helps us understand people better. Phenomen­ ologists may see their work as advancing social justice in that it gives dignity to the

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subjects. Their work treats people as having agency, and it interprets the meaning of their behaviors. For example, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz sought to provide thick descriptions of human behavior within particular cultures, and in his article “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” he argued that the cockfights in Bali could be seen as symbolic reenactments of Balinese status conflicts.28 The reader comes to see that some­ thing that might have looked irrational and barbaric at first is actually purposeful and meaningful in the context in which it occurs. Phenomenologists may see this kind of cultural translation as promoting tolerance. Phenomenological theory might also aid us in better understanding our political opponents. In works such as Culture Wars and Before the Shooting Begins, the sociol­ ogist James Davison Hunter carefully describes the worldviews of orthodox and pro­ gressive opponents in contemporary cultural conflicts and shows that their failure to understand one another inhibits conversation and compromise.29 That people fail to understand their opponents is a concern beyond just culture war issues. Sociologist Chris Martin says that epistemic egocentrism commonly prevents understanding across political ideologies, since we evaluate others as if they shared our information and our concerns. Martin refers to a study that showed that while liberals tend to value authority less than conservatives, liberals and conservatives both thought these differ­ ences were much greater than they actually were: “Liberals believed that conservatives were obsessed with authority, while conservatives believed that liberals disdained authority.” Their egocentrism and lack of empathy led them astray. As Martin points out, “If a liberal uses himself or herself as a reference point, thus framing morality egocentrically, he or she will assume a conservative holds moral positions that are diametrically opposite his or her own, thus rating conservatives as far more different than they actually are.”30 If epistemic egocentrism, along with the tendency of people to imagine the worst of their political adversaries and to treat them as enemies,31 helps fuel the political polarization of recent years, then phenomenological theory, to the extent that it accu­ rately portrays the perspectives of its subjects, holds the promise of increased under­ standing and empathy.

The Impact of Social Forces: Can We Make People Better? Another possible starting point for understanding human behavior is to look at how society shapes individuals. This perspective, which Black calls motivational theory, is so widespread and so basic to sociology that it’s seldom even recognized as a separate perspective alongside conflict theory, phenomenological theory, and the other theories we’re looking at in this chapter. Motivational theory explains human behavior “with the psychological impact of social forces.”32 The idea is that institutions and interactions affect the minds of indi­ viduals and motivate them to engage in certain behaviors, whether that’s altruism, violence, religion, or some other behavior. Motivational theory is just as individualistic as phenomenological theory in the sense that behavior stems from motivations, but motivational theory is more deterministic in the sense that the motivations that affect behavior are social products.33 Motivational theory is thus compatible with one kind of reformist project: That of shaping moral character so that people engage in more virtue and in less vice. Black points out that motivational theories come in four forms. Learning theories explain motivations as the result of socialization, bonding theories explain them with the presence or absence of attachments, compliance theories explain them with social

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pressure, and strain theories explain them with psychological discomfort. Whatever the nature of the explanatory mechanisms, the idea is that individuals are shaped by their social environments. The task for reformers drawing from this approach, then, would be to discover how they might alter social environments to reduce motivations toward behavior they see as undesirable and increase motivations toward behaviors they see as desirable. This could mean educational reform, changes in foster care, and other efforts to better socialize children. It could mean communitarian policies that seek to promote the kinds of social ties that encourage prosocial behavior. It could even mean more fundamental institutional change, as advocated by Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld in their book Crime and the American Dream. Messner and Rosen­ feld argue that the United States has high rates of violent crime compared to other advanced industrial democracies in part because of an institutional imbalance where the economy is valued more than institutions such as the polity, the family, and edu­ cation. This leads to a highly competitive society in which crime flourishes, but altering the institutional imbalance, such as by strengthening social welfare programs, would reduce crime.35 Those who draw from motivational theory in pursuit of social justice might focus on institutions, then, but they would do so in terms of how those institutions impact individuals. This tends to be the approach of liberal reformers rather than revolution­ aries. Usually, such reformers are optimistic about the ability of the insights of social science to help reduce suffering and injustice and optimistic that this is possible by modifying current social arrangements rather than destroying them.

Human Self-Interest: Can We Incentivize Good Behavior? Yet another way of thinking about human behavior is to assume people are self-inter­ ested, that they usually think their actions will benefit them in some way. If this is true, people respond to incentives. They do what’s rewarding and avoid what’s costly. Rational choice theory explains human behavior as the least costly means to a goal. It focuses on the interests of individuals, but it’s different from motivational theory in the sense that it treats the characteristics of individuals more as a constant than a variable. Rational choice theorists may assume that individuals are pursuing their own happiness, for example, and that what explains variation in their behavior isn’t varia­ tion in their goals; it’s variation in their interests. Something that might help them achieve their goals on one occasion might not on another. Rational choice theory is the dominant paradigm in economics, and it tends to be associated with free market perspectives. Economists and rational choice sociologists, though, have applied this type of thinking outside the marketplace—to religion,36 to romantic relationships,37 and to many other areas where people might at first seem to be behaving irrationally. Rational choice theorists might recommend a variety of poli­ cies across the political spectrum, but whatever their recommendations, the central task for those drawing from rational choice theory to pursue social justice is to determine how social arrangements might best incentivize what they see as good behavior and make costly what they see as bad behavior. The goals are modest—to change behavior, not character—since there is no assumption that virtue and vice stem from character. Enlightenment reformers of the 18th century used this approach to argue for changes in the legal systems of the time.38 The deterrence theory of crime and punishment proposes that people are less likely to commit crimes the more certain, swift, and severe the punishment is. The idea is that punishment makes crime costly—not in the interests of the would-be criminal. To do this, punishment just needs to outweigh the benefits of

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the crime, so the reformers argued for reducing the harsh penalties in effect at the time. The certainty of punishment is much more important, and this often puts con­ temporary deterrence theorists at odds with both liberals and conservatives, since they favor frequent use of the justice system, which liberals might be concerned about, but they oppose the harsh penalties conservatives might favor.39 Other applications of rational choice theory have similarly led to policy proposals that challenge conventional thinking. In his book The Logic of Collective Action, the economist Mancur Olson40 addressed the different individual interests related to private and public goods. With private goods, it’s clearly in people’s interest to protect and take care of whatever they own. But public goods are owned collectively—they’re available to everyone. It’s therefore not in anyone’s individual interest to contribute to protecting public goods, even though they derive a benefit from them. This is known as the freerider problem. Everyone would be better off cooperating and contributing, but it’s in everyone’s individual interest to let others do it. One thing this means is that larger groups will not naturally pursue their group interests, and this is one reason Marx was wrong to think the working class would perceive its interests and then revolt. There is always the danger that public goods simply won’t be provided or protected, but just as incentives or punishments might alter the likelihood of someone committing crime, inducements and coercion can ensure the provision of public goods. Rational choice theory is often used to defend free markets, then, but Olson’s analysis helps us understand why the free market will fail when public goods are involved. His analysis shows why labor unions are likely to fail if they are completely voluntary, for example, and why government involvement might be needed to protect the environment. Another rational choice theorist, the economist James Buchanan, showed in his book Politics as Public Choice why politics often fail.41 Individuals who are involved in poli­ tics—voters, politicians, and others—act according to their own interests, so we can think of politics as a competitive marketplace. Politicians compete for votes, for example, and they do so by spending money on things voters like. It’s not in the self-interest of voters to pay taxes, though, so politicians end up borrowing and spending rather than reducing spending or raising taxes. This is rational for everyone involved, but only in the short run. For those pursuing policy changes, these kinds of theories could serve as essential starting points, or at least as correctives enabling them to better pursue their goals. Social institutions aren’t changed in a vacuum; individuals are involved, and one runs the risk of not anticipating the effect one’s policies will have, or how they will be dealt with in the political realm, without taking into account the immediate and individual interests of all those involved.

Possibilities and Constraints: Can We Create Opportunities for Virtue? Regardless of whatever reasons people might have to engage in various behaviors, some things just aren’t an option. Another possible starting point for understanding human behavior, then, is to look at the possibilities and constraints people have in a given situation. Opportunity theory explains human behavior with what is possible. Opportunity theorists assume certain motivations and goals, and the idea is that certain social con­ ditions prevent or enable people from achieving those goals. In criminology this might mean assuming the motivation to commit various crimes, but explaining variation in crime with factors that make the crimes easier.42 The layout of a store could encourage shoplifting by placing valuable and small objects where they’re easy to reach, or the layout of a neighborhood could encourage burglary by providing routes where burglars could travel on foot without a high likelihood of being seen.43

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Just as people may have the motivation to commit crime but not the opportunity, they might desire friendships across cultural boundaries without the ability to form any. The sociologist Peter Blau pointed out that when the numbers of different population groups differ, the numbers of friendships possible across those groups is limited. In areas where whites greatly outnumber racial minorities, for instance, most whites, regardless of their preferences, wouldn’t have the opportunity for an interracial friendship.44 Whether someone is seeking to reduce crime or increase racial integration, opportu­ nity theory points to the need to consider what’s possible under certain conditions. The task for those using the approach to pursue social justice is to find ways to alter the opportunity structure. The idea wouldn’t be to change hearts and minds, or even to incentivize virtue, but simply to make virtue possible more often and vice impossible more often. And while the use of opportunity theory in this manner might be limited, it’s likely to be effective. It’s also an area where it’s easy to see a clear distinction between ordinary justice and social justice. If two neighborhoods have different rates of crime not because of the motivations of potential criminals but because the design of one prevents many opportunities for crime, people might seek to alter the design of the high-crime neighborhood, or at the very least to design new neighborhoods differently. The design of neighborhoods might become a moral issue—a social justice issue. But it may not have been bad intentions or bad behavior that led to the different designs in the first place. No one would have behaved unjustly when they built the neighborhoods, and we would still blame individual criminals for their crimes. It’s simply that better information would now make it possible to reduce harm, and with that knowledge, doing so might become a moral imperative.

An Interdependent Society: Can We Increase Solidarity? We started with conflict theory, and we saw that those who draw from some forms of conflict theory see society as a system of oppression and seek in their pursuit of social justice to liberate the oppressed. We’ve seen that this is just one of many theoretical perspectives, and that rather than seeing human behavior mainly in terms of conflict, we can look at it as product of subjective experience, social forces, the pursuit of selfinterest, or the distribution of possibilities and constraints. These approaches all differ from conflict theory, but we might think of functionalist theory as conflict theory’s exact opposite. Functionalists focus on interdependence rather than conflict. The idea is that social institutions benefit the society as a whole rather than only one group at the expense of others. Functionalist theory explains human behavior with its contribution to the needs of the group.45 Functionalist theorists think of society like an organism, with distinct and necessary parts that contribute to the functioning of the whole society, much like the heart, lungs, skin, and central nervous system of a human body contribute to the needs of the whole organism. The sociologist Talcott Parsons used this strategy when he identified the basic problems all societies needed to solve—extracting resources from the environment, establishing goals, regulating relationships, and getting people to do their part for the group—and pointed to the way social institutions such as the econ­ omy, the political order, law, religion, education, and the family solve these problems.46 If motivational theory tends to be associated with liberal politics and conflict theory with radical politics, functionalist theory is most associated with conservative politics. It’s true that many functionalists have been liberals and that many functionalist analyses—such as the sociologist Émile Durkheim’s argument that crime strengthens social solidarity47 or the sociologist Kingsley Davis’s argument that prostitution strengthens

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the family48—are contrarian takes that would offend many conservatives. Still, since the gist is that social institutions provide stability and meet social needs, functionalists tend to point to what most people would see as the positive and prosocial aspects of social institutions rather than their negative and oppressive aspects. Conservatives also tend to be concerned with social order and suspicious of radical change and the chaos they fear it will produce, and functionalist analyses often point to the conditions leading to social solidarity, social stability, and harmonious relationships. Liberals and radicals might question whether conservatives concerned with preser­ ving or strengthening social institutions for the common good are pursuing social jus­ tice at all, but many conservatives accept that society is to some extent malleable and that the design of social institutions should be of moral concern. To the extent that they resist change, they may simply be more cautious than others because of the harm and injustice they think will occur along with the weakening of social institutions. In their efforts to protect institutions, they’re trying to strengthen what Haidt, in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, calls moral capital—“the resources that sustain a moral community.” These include “inter­ locking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological mechanisms and thereby enable the com­ munity to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible.”49 Con­ servatives tend to value moral capital over diversity, equality, and other things valued more by liberals and radicals. Perhaps they’re wrong about the tradeoffs, and perhaps the functionalist view of society is limited or distorted. But functionalist analysis might even be able to help those on the left more effectively change society toward the ends they value. However you alter social institutions, when you’re finished you still face the problem of preserving the new social order you’ve created. As Haidt says, “if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble.”50

A Fragmented Field: Can We Acknowledge Uncertainty? Current social justice activism, even in its institutional forms at universities and cor­ porations, often draws from only one of the many theoretical approaches in sociology, as if conflict theory, and the particular version known as critical theory, had become dominant and its claims uncontested. Meanwhile the field of sociology has long been saturated with perspectives on society and approaches to explaining human behavior. These various paradigms can each provide ways of thinking about and pursuing social justice that differ from those used by critical social justice activists. Fighting systematic oppression is but one possible aim of social justice, and people with broader moral concerns and a broader awareness of strategies of bringing about change might also wish to improve the world by promoting understanding, by altering social forces to motivate people toward better behavior, by making sure that good behavior is incenti­ vized and bad behavior isn’t, by increasing opportunities for virtue and decreasing opportunities for vice, or by strengthening social institutions and social bonds. Social justice activists who draw their understanding of society from a tiny sliver of sociological theory run the risk that their efforts will be based on a distorted understanding of reality. While it would be irresponsible to try to reshape society while ignoring sociology entirely, it’s also irresponsible to do so while ignoring most of the field. Whether or not the multi-paradigmatic nature of sociology is healthy is another matter. If we follow Kuhn in seeing the dominance of a paradigm as a sign of a mature science, then it’s not. But whether it’s healthy or not, and whatever the reasons for it,

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it’s the state sociology is in currently, and it does no good to pretend otherwise. We can’t just declare a dominant paradigm. That would have to established with evidence and through consensus, and currently that doesn’t exist. Dealing with a fragmented, multi-paradigmatic field may be hard, and it may be unsatisfying to find that with much of our knowledge about ourselves and our societies contested, there just aren’t many easy answers to our problems. But if we’re serious about improving the world, we need to be willing to face social reality as we find it.

Notes 1 Sensoy and DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal? 2 In the last chapter we saw that some of the critics of critical social justice argue for a different form of social justice, but other critics, because they also conflate social justice with the form based on critical theory, reject the idea of social justice altogether and may even use the term pejoratively, such as by referring to social justice activists as social justice warriors (Ohlheiser, “Why ‘Social Justice Warrior’”). 3 Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 175.

4 Ibid., p. 17.

5 Compare Black, “Epistemology of Pure Sociology”; Ritzer, “Sociology: A Multi-Paradigm

Science.”

6 Rigney, The Metaphorical Society.

7 Collins, Four Sociological Traditions.

8 Turner, Theoretical Sociology, Chapter 9.

9 Black, Lectures in Contemporary Sociological Theory.

10 My use of Black’s typology rather than one of the others frames the discussion, but since there is a great deal of overlap between the typologies, my argument does not depend on the typology used. However exactly one divides up the main sociological perspectives, these dif­ ferent perspectives will give us different ways of thinking about social justice and different possibilities for reform. 11 Black, Lectures in Contemporary Sociological Theory. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” p. 473. 15 Rummel, Death by Government. 16 Sue, Microaggressions in Everyday Life. 17 Ibid., p. 26. 18 Ibid., p. 32. 19 For example, see Ziff and Rao, Borrowed Power. 20 For example, see Warner, “Introduction.” 21 DiAngelo, White Fragility. 22 For example, see Newkirk, “Language of White Supremacy.” 23 Compare Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” 24 Black, “Dreams of Pure Sociology,” p. 357, n. 36. 25 Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality. 26 Katz, Seductions of Crime. 27 Ibid., p. 4. 28 Geertz, “Deep Play.” 29 Hunter, Culture Wars; Hunter, Before the Shooting Begins. 30 Martin, “How Ideology Has Hindered,” p. 223. 31 See Edsall, “What Motivates Voters”; Paresky, “Why Do Democrats and Republicans”; Sotirakopoulos, Identity Politics and Tribalism, pp. 21–26. 32 Black, “Dreams of Pure Sociology,” p. 357, n. 36. 33 Ibid., p. 357, n. 36. 34 Black, Lectures in Contemporary Sociological Theory. 35 Messner and Rosenfeld, Crime and the American Dream. 36 Stark, “Rational Choice Theories of Religion.” 37 Blau, Exchange and Power in Social Life. 38 For example, Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments.

28 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Acknowledge Uncertainty For example, see Leovy, Ghettoside. Olson, Logic of Collective Action. Buchanan, Politics as Public Choice. Cohen and Felson, “Social Change and Crime Rate Trends.” Felson and Clarke, “Opportunity Makes the Thief.” Blau, “Fable about Social Structure.” Black actually calls this strategy “systems theory,” and he refers to systems theory and the approach he calls neo-Darwinian theory together as “functionalism,” but I follow many others here in using functionalism to refer to systems theory alone. Turner, Theoretical Sociology, pp. 352–354. Durkheim, Rules of the Sociological Method, Chapter 3. Davis, “Sociology of Prostitution.” Haidt, Righteous Mind, p. 292. Ibid., p. 294.

References Beccaria, Cesare. 2009. On Crimes and Punishments. Philadelphia, PA: Seven Treasures. Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books. Black, Donald. 1995. “The Epistemology of Pure Sociology.” Law & Social Inquiry 20: 829–870. Black, Donald. 2000. “Dreams of Pure Sociology.” Sociological Theory 18 (3): 343–367. Black, Donald. 2001. Lectures in Contemporary Sociological Theory (SOC 506). Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia. Blau, Peter. 1964. Exchange and Power in Social Life. New York: John Wiley. Blau, Peter. 1980. “A Fable about Social Structure.” Social Forces 58: 777–788. Buchanan, James M. 2000. Politics as Public Choice. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Cohen, Lawrence E. and Marcus Felson. 1979. “Social Change and Crime Rate Trends: A Routine Activity Approach.” American Sociological Review 44: 588–608. Collins, Randall. 1994. Four Sociological Traditions. New York: Oxford University Press. Davis, Kingsley. 1937. “The Sociology of Prostitution.” American Sociological Review 2 (5): 744–755. DiAngelo, Robin. 2018. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Durkheim, Émile. 1981. The Rules of the Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method. New York: Free Press. Edsall, Thomas B. 2018. “What Motivates Voters More than Loyalty? Loathing.” New York Times, March 1. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/01/opinion/negative-partisa nship-democrats-republicans.html. Felson, Marcus and Ronald V. Clarke. 1998. “Opportunity Makes the Thief: Practical Theory for Crime Prevention.” Police Research Series Paper 98. London: Home Office. Geertz, Clifford. 1972. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Daedalus 101 (1): 1–37. Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books. Hunter, James Davison. 1991. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books. Hunter, James Davison. 1994. Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America’s Culture Wars. New York: The Free Press. Katz, Jack. 1988. Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions of Doing Evil. New York: Basic Books. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chi­ cago Press. Leovy, Jill. 2015. Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America. New York: Spiegel and Grau. Martin, Chris C. 2016. “How Ideology Has Hindered Sociological Insight.” The American Sociologist 47: 115–130.

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Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1978. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” In The MarxEngels Reader (Second Edition), edited by Robert C. Tucker, pp. 469–500. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Messner, Steven and Richard Rosenfeld. 2012. Crime and the American Dream (Fifth Edition). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83 (4): 435–450. Newkirk, Vann R. II. 2017. “The Language of White Supremacy.” The Atlantic, October 6. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/the-language-of-white-sup remacy/542148/. Ohlheiser, Abby. 2015. “Why ‘Social Justice Warrior,’ a Gamergate Insult, Is Now a Dictionary Entry.” Washington Post, October 7. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-in tersect/wp/2015/10/07/why-social-justice-warrior-a-gamergate-insult-is-now-a-dictionary-entry/. Olson, Mancur Jr. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Paresky, Pamela. 2020. “Why Do Democrats and Republicans Hate Each Other?” Psychology Today, March 9. Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/happiness-and-the-p ursuit-leadership/202003/why-do-democrats-and-republicans-hate-each-other. Rigney, Daniel. 2001. The Metaphorical Society: An Invitation to Social Theory. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Ritzer, George. 1975. “Sociology: A Multi-Paradigm Science.” The American Sociologist 10: 156–167. Rummel, R. J. 1994. Death by Government. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Sensoy, Özlem and Robin DiAngelo. 2017. Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education (Second Edition). New York: Teachers College Press. Sotirakopoulos, Nikos. 2021. Identity Politics and Tribalism: The New Culture Wars. Exeter: Societas. Stark, Rodney. 1994. “Rational Choice Theories of Religion.” The Agora: Newsletter of the Rational Choice Section of the American Sociological Association 2 (1): 1–5. Sue, Derald Wing. 2010. Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orienta­ tion. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons. Turner, Jonathan. 2013. Theoretical Sociology: 1830 to the Present. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Warner, Michael. 1991. “Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet.” Social Text 29: 3–17. Ziff, Bruce and Pratima V. Rao. 1997. Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

3

Don’t Treat Ideology as Science The Problem with Critical Theory

As we saw in the last chapter, sociologists draw from a number of competing approaches to explain human behavior, so if we want our social justice pursuits to be informed by sociological knowledge, we need to make sure that we’re not treating one particular approach as settled science. We need to be aware of the full range of perspectives. This is one problem with relying too heavily on critical theory. But another problem has to do with critical theory itself. Critical theory, you’ll recall, is a version of conflict theory, and conflict theory tends to be the most overtly ideolo­ gical of the various sociological paradigms we discussed in the last chapter.1 For example, Marxists tend to subordinate scientific aims to political ones. As Marx him­ self said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”2 Critical theorists tend to take a similar approach. As we’ll see, the ideological nature of critical theory frequently leads to distorted understandings of the world, and those who use this approach may end up treating claims that have little empirical support as if they were proven facts. Of course, this isn’t the first time political ideology has clashed with science, and any other ideological version of sociol­ ogy—classical liberal sociology,3 for example, or Christian sociology4—would run into the same problems. But why? What’s wrong with ideological sociology, and why does it lead to ideas about social justice that would make things worse? These are the questions we’ll address in this chapter, but first, let’s think more about the differences between ideology and science as forms of knowledge.

Ideology and Science The sociologist Jonathan Turner, in his textbook Theoretical Sociology, says that what ideology and science have in common is that they’re both empirical forms of knowl­ edge—they refer to the observable world—but where they differ is that ideology is evaluative and science is nonevaluative. In other words, ideologies are critiques of the observable world, and they say how things should be, while sciences simply describe and explain the observable world.5 Turner is identifying the pure form of each type of knowledge, but as he points out, in reality they’re not usually so neatly divided. “The boundaries between these types of knowledge,” he says, “are often open, or at least permeable.” And this means that “the boundaries between these forms of knowledge can also be confrontational.” Turner says that in sociology there has been a “contentious and controversial relationship … between ideology and science.”6 This happens because ideologies are primarily mor­ alistic7—concerned with right and wrong—but those moral concerns about how the social world should operate are intertwined with beliefs about how it actually does operate—about the causes of particular problems and the effects of particular policies. DOI: 10.4324/9781032616278-3

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From the standpoint of science, though, what’s missing is a proper scrutiny of these beliefs or a revision of them in light of new evidence. Ideologies refer to the observable world, but they’re less evidence based than science. Ideology and science come into conflict because our moral concerns and political commitments often lead us astray in understanding the world, and then when someone challenges those understandings, we may treat the challenge as an attack on our values or as an impediment to improving the world. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has said, “morality binds and blinds.”8 Our shared morality helps us form ties with other people; it helps us create and sustain groups of all kinds. But in binding us together, morality can also blind us. Just as we come to like and trust our ingroup—those we’re close to, and those who share our culture—we come to dislike and distrust outgroups.9 At the extreme this ingroup solidarity and outgroup hostility can lead to blood feuds,10 torture,11 terrorism,12 genocide,13 and other kinds of violence,14 but even at ordinary levels it can lead us to be credulous of false claims by our ingroup even as we reject out of hand valid claims by outgroups.15 It can also lead us to moral grandstanding, “the use of moral talk for self-promotion,”16 since we’re often rewarded by our ingroup for telling them what they want to hear. And it can lead us to falsely accuse outgroups of crimes and other offenses.17 All this becomes worse as we become more explicitly political, forming and participating in groups of likeminded people to defend and promote our values. Political discourse is routinely dishonest, for example. “The political arena is second only to warfare,” says the sociologist J. A. Barnes, “as a domain where lies are expected, do in fact occur, and are to a substantial extent tolerated.”18 And politics commonly dulls our thinking—or more bluntly, as the political philosopher Jonathan Marks puts it, “Politics makes most of us stupid. It moves even those who aren’t stupid to say stupid things.”19 It should be no surprise that ideology and science come into conflict. At the extreme, ideologues may seek to suppress scientific ideas that they see as a threat to their poli­ tical goals, such as when the Soviet Union, under Joseph Stalin, rejected Mendelian genetics and Darwinian natural selection in favor of the ideas of Trofim Lysenko. Believing that Lysenko’s ideas could help dramatically increase crop yields, the Soviets promoted Lysenko and declared scientists who dissented from the new orthodoxy to be enemies of the people. As science writer Sarah Zielinski points out, “the results were inevitable: Soviet biology slowed to nearly a halt until a series of crop failures and resulting food shortages resulted in the forced removal of Lysenko.”20 The conflict between ideology and science is often more subtle, though. It occurs as soon as ideology begins to shape science. Some degree of this is inevitable. Ideological bias affects how social scientists perceive the world, and it can affect what they choose to study, how they define their concepts, and how they interpret their findings. This is less of a problem when there’s competition between scientists with different ideological perspectives, which gives scientists an incentive to be vigilant in reducing the distortions of ideological bias and makes it more likely that distortions and errors will be corrected over time. It’s a much bigger problem, though, when there’s not enough ideological diversity to get these kinds of incentives and corrections.21 In addition to ideological intolerance from outside forces and ideological bias shap­ ing scientists’ perceptions, those who value science should also guard against ideologi­ cal takeover. This happens when scientists simply become ideologues and their theories become indistinguishable from political ideologies. As Turner points out, “many sociologists believe that theory must contain an ideological component; it must criticize undesirable conditions and advocate alternatives.”22 Even without external pressure of the kind that the Soviet Union imposed to promote Lysenkoism, then, a field can become politicized by internal forces—by those who subordinate science to politics.

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Critical theorists in particular tend to see all knowledge as ideological, and they see science as reinforcing the dominant ideology and furthering oppression. As we dis­ cussed in Chapter 1, for example, critical theorists Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo question whether “objectivity is desirable or even possible.”23 Critical theorists see themselves as exposing oppression. Their goals aren’t the goals of science, and often they aren’t seeking to evaluate their ideas according to the standards of science. But what are the standards of science? What are scientific sociologists seeking to accom­ plish? What makes for a valuable scientific idea? Let’s consider those questions now, as we think more about what makes science distinctive.

Scientific Theory Science describes and explains the observable world. When people think of science, it seems they often think of scientific methods—experiments, surveys, and other ways of observing the world. This is certainly an important part of what makes science scien­ tific, and we’ll talk about the goals of scientific methods in a moment, but at the heart of science is theory. The word theory isn’t used consistently, even among scientists, but in general we can think of it broadly as all aspects of science other than observation, or we can think of it more narrowly as explanation. Theory requires creativity, and if we use the broader definition, it includes things like paradigms and typologies as well as explanations. Paradigms, as we discussed in Chapter 2, are strategies of explanation, and they include conflict theory, functionalist theory, and rational choice theory. These are frameworks for explaining things rather than explanations themselves. Typologies are classification systems—frameworks for describing things. In sociology, for example, there are typologies of suicide (such as Émile Durkheim’s typology of egoistic, altruis­ tic, anomic, and fatalistic suicide),24 typologies of authority (such as Max Weber’s typology of charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal authority),25 and typologies of societies (such as Gerhard Lenski’s typology of hunter-gatherer, horticultural, agri­ cultural, and industrial societies).26 Typologies can be valuable in themselves in that they aid us in describing the world. Still, the ultimate goal of science is explanation, so the best typologies are those that prove helpful in explaining things, just as the best paradigms are those that people actually use in generating successful explanations. An explanation is sometimes just called a theory, but a set of related explanations might also be called a theory. As Donald Black puts it, “An explanation orders a fact with a general proposition.”27 In other words, it shows how some observation about reality fits into a larger pattern of relationships. Consider, for example, Durkheim’s theory of suicide. Durkheim said that suicide is more likely at the lowest and highest levels of social integration and at the lowest and highest levels of moral regulation. The proposition describes the relationship between what Durkheim was trying to explain— variation in suicide—and what he was explaining it with—variation in social integra­ tion and moral regulation. This, Durkheim said, could explain a number of facts. For example, it explained why Protestants in Europe at the time had higher rates of suicide than Catholics. This was because Protestants were more individualistic and thus less integrated than Catholics, and their higher rates of suicide fit the general pattern whereby suicide is more likely at low levels of integration. Note too how Durkheim’s explanation of suicide relates to the other aspects of the­ oretical work in the broad sense. Durkheim’s paradigm here is what Black calls moti­ vational theory. As we discussed in Chapter 2, motivational theory explains behavior as the outcome of social forces impacting and shaping individuals. And as the sociologist Jason Manning points out, the logic of Durkheim’s theory is that sociological

Don’t Treat Ideology as Science

33

variables—how much individuals are integrated into groups and the amount of moral regulation the groups exert on them—motivate individuals to suicide, “whether this is due to an inability to justify one’s life without attachment to something greater or the frustration of having one’s passions overly stimulated or violently choked.”28 Note also how the explanation relates to Durkheim’s typology of suicide. Because suicide occurs not only at very low levels of integration, but also at very high levels of integration as well as low and high levels of moral regulation, Durkheim identified four types of suicide with four different causes. The type that occurs at the lowest levels of integration, the type that Durkheim believed was occurring more among Protestants than Catholics, is what he called egoistic suicide, a result of too much individualism. Altruistic suicide, on the other hand, occurs at the highest levels of integration, when people are ready to sacrifice themselves on behalf of the group, anomic suicide occurs where moral regulation is at its lowest and social norms are too weak to give people a purpose in life, and fatalistic suicide occurs where moral regulation is extreme and people seek to escape their constraints. The paradigm and the typology aren’t just free-floating ideas, then. Durkheim wasn’t just coming up with new ways of thinking about human behavior; he was also trying to explain human behavior. But was he successful? To answer this, we have to have some idea of what would make for a successful explanation. There’s certainly not complete agreement among scientists about how to evaluate theory, but some criteria have more agreement than others. And though the terminol­ ogy sometimes differs, there’s a great deal of consensus around the idea that a good theory is one that is general, simple, testable, and valid.29 We should think of these as matters of degree rather than absolutes. The more general a theory is, the broader array of facts it applies to. A statement about suicide in all times and places, for example, is more general than just a statement about suicide in modern America. A statement about all violent self-harm would also be more general than a statement about suicide only, and a statement about all violence would be more general still. The more you can explain, the better the theory. But we should also say the more you can explain with the least information, the better the theory, because in science we prefer simpler explana­ tions over more complex ones. With a simpler explanation, you get more bang for your buck, so to speak. A theory that explained suicide with only one variable, for example, would be simpler than Durkheim’s, which explained it with two.30 We want general and simple theories, then, but we also want testable and valid the­ ories. When we make a statement about how variables are related, we should be able to make observations—perform “tests”—to see if our statements are correct. Durkheim’s idea that suicide is more likely when there are very low levels of integration is testable, for example, to the extent that we can measure both suicide and integration.31 Testa­ bility is crucial in that if a theory is untestable in principle, it has little scientific value.32 But it can also be hard to know initially just how testable a theory is, since technolo­ gical advances can improve our measures. Ultimately, though, we need a theory that’s not just testable, but also one that has been tested and is valid. A theory is valid to the extent that observations conform with what the theory predicts, and ultimately, this is the most important of the criteria for evaluating theory. A general, simple, and testable theory would hardly be of any value if it were completely wrong. If we’re aiming to be scientific, these criteria can give us a common framework. Still, since we often have to make tradeoffs between different criteria, it’s not completely straightforward. For example, there might be a point where making a theory simpler or more general makes it less valid, and then we have to decide whether it’s worth it. But in using these criteria we can at least be clear about what we’re trying to achieve.

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Don’t Treat Ideology as Science

Durkheim’s theory of suicide, for example, is simpler, more general, and more testa­ ble than much of what is called theory in sociology, and in that sense it deserves the acclaim it’s received. It’s more valid than many theories, too, though here it comes up short in some places. For example, Jason Manning, in his book Suicide: The Social Causes of Self-Destruction, refers to a number of predictions derived from Durkheim’s theory that have turned out to be correct, such as Durkheim’s idea that downward mobility (a loss of wealth or some other kind of status) would lead to suicide, as well as others that have turned out to be incorrect, such as the idea that upward mobility would also lead to suicide.33 Manning, like other sociologists of suicide,34 has been able to incorporate aspects of Durkheim’s theory into his own theory of suicide while rejecting others. This is how science proceeds. Revision in the face of new evidence is normal. Durkheim didn’t fail because he developed a theory that wasn’t 100 percent correct. He succeeded in developing a highly scientific theory, a theory that inspired future theorists and researchers, and a theory that was testable and therefore could be wrong. But what if we treated the theory as if it must be completely correct? What if we treated the theory as if right and wrong were at stake, as if criticism of the theory were immoral and therefore invalid, as if subjecting the theory to scrutiny would increase suicide or cause some other harm? In that case we’d have a full-blown ideology, not a scientific theory.

Scientific Methods Scientific theory is about organizing and explaining our observations, but methodology is about how to make observations. Whether we’re simply describing the world or whether we’re testing our theories, we need to make sure we’re not making errors. Or rather, since we’re always prone to making errors in our observations and can’t avoid them entirely, we need to reduce error as much as possible. In many ways scientific theory gives us a different way of thinking about reality. In our ordinary lives we don’t necessarily prefer simple statements to more complex ones, for example, and we might not reach for general explanations when we try to account for someone’s behavior. But methodology isn’t really about a different way of observing things; it’s more about ensuring that our observations are careful and systematic. It’s about reducing bias in our observations so that other observers, if they’re also careful and systematic, should get the same results. Mostly, we’re aware of the kinds of things that increase our confidence in our observations, even if in our normal lives we’re inconsistent in applying them. If we wanted to know how many birds we saw yesterday, for instance, we’d be more confident in our answer if yesterday we had made an effort to count the birds we saw and record the results than if we just tried to remember. The same would be true if we wanted to answer whether there were more birds this week than last week: We’d be more con­ fident if we’d been counting. We’d also be more confident if other people had been counting and recording their observations too, and if their observations lined up with ours. And we’d be less confident of someone’s count if they had a strong motivation toward a particular outcome—such as if they were trying to win an argument or a bet. We make a lot of errors in our ordinary observations, but we generally know how to reduce errors if we want to. A popular sociological methods textbook begins by identifying some common errors of inquiry, such as inaccurate observation, overgeneralization, and selective observa­ tion. And the textbook identifies some ways we can overcome these tendencies. We can make our observations more accurate, as I’ve said, by systematically recording them.

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We can avoid overgeneralizing—observing a pattern and believing it applies more broadly than it does—by replicating studies to make sure we’re getting the same answers each time. And we can avoid selective observation—where we more often notice those things that conform with our prior beliefs about the world—by deciding in advance of any study how many observations we need to make to reach a conclusion.35 The techniques of social research are based on principles like these, and they’re just a means of ensuring we’re observing the same things and therefore that we can develop a shared knowledge.

Evaluating Ideologies We’ve talked about what science is and how to evaluate scientific claims, but how do we evaluate ideological claims? So long as they are simply about right and wrong, about what should or shouldn’t be, we can’t evaluate them with the tools of science at all. As we’ll discuss more in the next chapter, we can’t say whether moral claims are true or false in any scientific sense. Whether societies should be capitalist or socialist, whether or not they should provide public education, and whether or not they should execute murderers are all moral questions. But as noted previously, in practice ideologies involve empirical claims as well. Sup­ porters of capitalism make claims about how capitalism works, supporters of public edu­ cation make claims about the economic value of formal education, and opponents of the death penalty make claims about the effects of the death penalty. These are claims about observable aspects of reality, and though activists may treat them as obvious or settled truths, we have no reason to accept them if they haven’t been subject to scientific scrutiny. It shouldn’t matter whether we share the politics of those making the claims or whether the claims will be helpful to our political cause. We shouldn’t treat ideological claims as if they’re scientific findings or theories, but we can try to think about those claims scientifi­ cally. We might then find a reason to reject them outright, to accept them, or what’s often more appropriate given the uncertainties common to scientific knowledge, to accept them in part or to accept a modified version of them. As we saw with Durkheim’s theory of suicide, even the best ideas may need a lot more work. If we’re going to think better about social justice, when we come across claims by scholars, activists, or anyone else, we should first try to understand what kind of claim it is. Is it a factual claim? Is it the definition of a concept? An explanation? If it’s not clear, we might think about how we could make it clearer. And then we can think about how to evaluate it.

Evaluating Ideological Facts Those who are trying to advance a political cause may point to what they see as injustices or advocate policies they think would promote justice. In doing so they make factual claims, but they commonly fail to examine those claims critically or to examine the methodology behind them. When we’re sympathetic to the cause, we’re prone to accept such claims without asking for evidence. Examine the evidence, though, and we might find that it’s weaker than we’ve been led to believe. Activists might be overgeneralizing from a single study, or they might be misinterpreting it, or the studies might be poorly constructed, or the evidence might be mixed. And sometimes there’s no evidence at all. Some facts seem to come out of thin air. For example, many activists seeking to raise awareness of domestic violence have claimed that Super Bowl Sunday is “the biggest day of the year for violence against

36

Don’t Treat Ideology as Science

women,”36 or they have made similar claims, such as that abuse hot lines and women’s shelters receive more calls on that day than on any other. But in 1993 Washington Post reporter Ken Ringle found that there was no evidence at all for these claims and little evidence for anything similar. Several domestic violence experts Ringle interviewed said they didn’t know of any such evidence. Even an expert who had been quoted in support of the claim said he’d been misquoted or misunderstood. A related claim about football and domestic violence also turned out to be wrong. Sheila Kuehl of the California Women’s Law Center had told reporters that there was a study that showed that “police reports of beatings and hospital admissions in Northern Virginia rose 40 percent after games won by the Washington Redskins.”37 When Ringle interviewed one of the study’s authors, though, she told him that the number of women admitted to hospitals for certain kinds of injuries was higher than average after Redskins wins, “but certainly not 40 percent.”38 The claim about Super Bowl Sunday isn’t valid, and it’s not even clear where it came from originally. Still, 22 years after Ringle’s article, people were repeating it, as Alice Robb documented in The New Republic. As Robb found, there’s some mixed evidence linking the Super Bowl to domestic violence, but even that doesn’t support the idea that it’s the most violent day of the year. One study, for example, found an increase of domestic violence among members of the US Armed Forces on Super Bowl Sunday, but also on holidays such as New Year’s Eve, Memorial Day, and the Fourth of July, but a study of calls to a women’s center found no increase on those days.39

Evaluating Ideological Concepts The claim about the Super Bowl is a straightforward factual claim, even if there’s no support for it. But a lot of ideological discourse isn’t so clear. Often, for example, people act as if they’re making claims about the world when they’re in fact just arguing over concepts. This is common when people talk about violence, as they may want to use different terminology depending on whether they approve or disapprove of an act of violence, or perhaps depending on whether or not they are sympathetic to the per­ petrators. In the summer of 2020, for example, as Jason Manning and I pointed out in an article for Areo magazine, arguments over whether there were riots in American cities seemed to have more to do with politics than with any consistent definition of rioting. Protesters had gathered in a number of cities in response to the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, and certainly most of them didn’t riot. They sang, chanted, held signs, and so on, to express their anger over the killing and to draw attention to their desire for social reform. But others blocked traffic, took things from stores, set fires, or attacked police officers. Similar behavior in other contexts has often been called rioting, but in this case many people resisted the term. Writing at Mother Jones, Daniel King said that newspapers referring to such beha­ vior as rioting were using “coded language” and “turning to headlines and tropes his­ torically used to single out and vilify communities of color protesting police brutality.” He went on to quote favorably another journalist saying, “Riot vs. rebellion/uprising is all in the eye of the beholder.”40 Meanwhile, some of those who were less sympathetic toward the rioters made a similar argument, but in reverse. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, the criminologist Barry Latzer had no objection to calling the arson and the attacks on police rioting; instead, his objection was to calling them protesters. “Mr. Floyd’s tragic death is, for them, a pretext for hooliganism,” he said.41 Manning and I were interested in these arguments in part because for many years we’ve taught courses in the sociology of violence, and we’ve taught about rioting as a

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form of violence. We were also interested because we study moral conflict, and what we were seeing in the argument over what was a riot was a moral argument masquerading as a descriptive one. The idea seemed to be that rioting is bad, and therefore we can’t call anyone whose cause is just a rioter. Or from the other side, protesting is good, so anyone who riots can’t also be a protester, and they can’t have even been motivated by a just cause. This kind of discourse adds more confusion than clarity, and it has no place in sci­ ence. Remember that conceptual work such as the development of typologies can be very important to science. A typology can’t be right or wrong, but it can be more or less useful. Typologies help us make sense of the world and to organize our observa­ tions, and good typologies can provide a foundation for good explanations. When we’re trying to understand things scientifically, Manning and I said, “we need to have clear definitions that allow us to classify similar behaviors consistently, regardless of whether we approve or disapprove of the cause that gave rise to these behaviors, whether we approve or disapprove of those involved, and whether we approve or disapprove of the behaviors themselves.”42 What you want out of a typology of violence is objective definitions of concepts like rioting, terrorism, genocide, and so on, so that you can distinguish them from one another and identify the situations that lead to them. An example is the historian Roberta Senechal de la Roche’s typology of collective violence, which includes rioting along with several other forms of violence and distinguishes rioting as a kind of one-sided violence by a crowd.43 Using Senechal de la Roche’s definition, much of the behavior following the Floyd killing was rioting, as were early­ 20th-century anti-Black riots such as those in Springfield, Illinois in 1908 and Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, as well as anti-police riots such as the Watts Riots of 1965, and the Los Angeles riots of 1994. As Manning and I put it, “Using consistent definitions that enable us to see the common features of events we may evaluate differently helps us to compare present and past events, to compare and contrast them with other forms of behavior, and better understand and explain them.”44

Evaluating Ideological Explanations Remember that our goal in science is explanation. As important as it is to describe the world, we ultimately want to explain it. Activists often want to explain things as well, but their ideological goals commonly shape their explanations. As with factual and conceptual claims, though, we can evaluate explanatory claims using scientific stan­ dards. For example, in his book Execution by Family: A Theory of Honor Violence, the sociologist Mark Cooney shows how an explanation of family honor violence that he calls “patriarchy theory” fails to explain very much. And part of the problem with patriarchy theory is that it “tends to be self-consciously political.”45 Family honor violence, as Cooney defines it, is “physical force inflicted by a family on one of its members for undermining the family’s moral status.”46 It can occur, for example, when a young woman’s brothers kill her because she’s had premarital sex, and the killing restores the status the family lost due to the woman’s behavior. Family honor killings are usually directed against women or girls, and patriarchy theorists see these killings as a product of patriarchy—that is, male dominance. They see them as one of many forms of violence against women that arise from and reinforce the dominance of men over women, and their goal is often to call attention to these killings in the hope of eliminating them. Family honor killings do occur in patriarchal families and communities, so this is an important part of explaining them, but the problem is that highly patriarchal societies

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are much more common than family honor violence. Moreover, not all the targets of family honor violence are women or girls, and patriarchy can’t explain the killing of a disobedient son. It should be clear that any powerful explanation would need to bring in other variables, but patriarchy theorists sometimes resist this for ideological reasons. They resist cultural explanations of family honor killings, for example, because they believe, as Cooney puts it, that “to attribute honor violence to a culture’s values is to imply the backwardness of the people who carry that culture and the superiority of Westerners who do not.”47 And because most of those who practice family honor kill­ ings are from Islamic cultures, patriarchy theorists are sensitive to the possibility of justifying or increasing Islamophobia. Cooney points out that the resistance to cultural explanations partly arises from a confusion about the relationship between cause and blame. Whether one thing causes another is a scientific question, but whether someone should be blamed for it is a moral question. Thus, “to attribute honor killing to culture is not to denounce the culture.” And “when sociologists treat cause as blame the usual result is to dismiss some expla­ nations out of hand and embrace others,” depending on one’s politics.48 It might also be the case that the resistance to certain kinds of explanations arises not because of one’s own confusion about the logical relationship between cause and blame, but because one expects others to conflate the two. Perhaps people resist cul­ tural explanations of family honor killings because they believe they will lead to cul­ tural intolerance even if they understand there’s no logical reason they should. In any case, this isn’t the way to evaluate explanations. As Cooney notes, “When certain causal arguments are dismissed from the start what goes missing is an assessment of their factual merits.”49 Patriarchy theory falls short as an explanation not because it’s completely wrong; it just fails to explain very much about family honor violence. It’s a general, simple, and somewhat testable explanation, but it’s not high in validity. It’s at best a weak expla­ nation of why some societies have family honor violence and others don’t, but it doesn’t explain why offenses by men sometimes result in honor killings, and it doesn’t explain at all why even in societies where there’s family honor violence, the same offense might lead to an honor killing on one occasion but not another. Cooney’s theory, though, does explain these things, and it does so by bringing in other variables. Family honor killings occur under conditions of male dominance, to be sure, but other kinds of inequality are also important, such as the dominance of the community over the family, the family over the individual, and the old over the young. This helps us understand why the targets are most often young women perceived as disobedient in some way to their fathers or other family authorities, and it also helps us understand why even under these conditions families usually resist killing a disobedient daughter unless they’re pressured to do so by the surrounding community. It helps us to understand not just why we see honor killings in some cultures, but also more precisely when and where they’ll occur. And the theory is able to do this partly because it’s not ideological. As Cooney points out, his theory “has no politics. It is not liberal or conservative, radical or reactionary, Islamophobic or Islamophilic, Orientalist or Occidentalist.” It simply “treats the morality of honor as something to be explained.”50

Evaluating Critical Theory As we’ve seen, we don’t want to simply accept claims because we’re politically aligned with those making them. No matter how many times a factual claim is repeated, no matter how insistent people are in defining a concept a certain way, and no matter how

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39

much conviction people have in a particular way of explaining things, we’re not com­ pelled to go along with it, and given how easily politics leads people to discard the standards of science and to misunderstand or misreport even basic facts, we should be skeptical when people seem to be trying to advance a political goal. And given the activist bent of contemporary American critical theory, it shouldn’t be too surprising that when we do subject its claims about the world to the standards of science, we find that despite the popularity of many of those claims, they seldom hold up. Critical theory, remember, is a paradigm, a type of conflict theory. Paradigms are much like typologies in that we evaluate them mainly in terms of their usefulness. We can’t evaluate the paradigm directly; instead, we want to look at the concepts and explanations developed by critical theorists and evaluate them as we’ve discussed above. We want to know whether they help us describe and explain the world. What we find is that critical theory, much like many other forms of conflict theory, offers a lot of concepts but few testable explanations and even fewer valid ones. In the previous chapters we’ve talked about microaggressions—the slights, often unin­ tentional, that critical theorists say are frequently directed against and harmful to those who are members of marginal groups. And we’ve talked about the claims by critics of microaggression theory that the focus on microaggressions may be more harmful than the microaggressions themselves. But psychologist Scott Lilienfeld’s critique was more fundamental than that. Lilienfeld said the problem with microaggression scholarship— what he called the “microaggression research program”—is that it fails as science. He argued that the concept isn’t clear enough to provide a good basis for research and that measuring microaggressions through subjective self-reports is inadequate. Moreover, the research on the topic fails to support the idea that all or most members of minority groups have a negative interpretation of the statements that are commonly labeled by researchers as microaggressions, or the idea that such statements reflect prejudice or aggression, or the idea that they negatively impact the mental health of the recipients— all core assumptions of the microaggression research program.51 We tend to see something similar with other ideas drawn from critical theory and related perspectives. In recent years, for example, trigger warnings have become popular in activist circles and even in some classrooms. The idea is that warnings about discus­ sions of things such as violence and racism help prepare those who might be “triggered,” or emotionally disturbed, by such discussions due to their experiences with trauma. But psychologists Payton Jones, Benjamin Bellet, and Richard McNalley conducted an experiment testing the effects of trigger warnings, and they found no evidence that such warnings help trauma survivors (and some evidence that they may actually harm them).52 In fact, historians Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder say they “are not aware of a single experimental study that has found significant benefits of using trigger warnings.” What the research shows, instead, is that for individuals with and without trauma, trigger warnings “do not alleviate emotional distress” and “do not significantly reduce negative affect or minimize intrusive thoughts, two hallmarks of PTSD.”53 Even concepts that point to observable aspects of society—and therefore might be useful in helping us understand the world—sometimes have highly ideological alter­ native meanings that obscure things more than they clarify them. For example, the term white privilege can be used to refer to something real and measurable. It could refer to the advantages that members of majority groups have relative to minority groups in any society or setting, for instance, or it could be used as a shorthand to refer to average differences in wealth or other forms of status between whites and Blacks in the contemporary United States. But the problem, as sociologist Chris Martin points out, is that those who use the term often forgo any caveats.54 They assert, or at least

40

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seem to assert, that whites have advantages compared to all other groups, and on all dimensions. But in fact Asians have higher median incomes than whites, Blacks and Asians have better mental health than whites, and Hispanics have better physical health.55 Again, the actual use of the term is more ideological than scientific. Those who use it this way seem more concerned with labels—which groups are victims, which are privileged—than with making sense of the complexities of contemporary racial and ethnic relations.

Implementing Bad Ideas Despite the fears of some activists that reporting certain facts or explaining things a certain way will lead to harmful outcomes because they embolden hatred or intoler­ ance, it seems more likely, as we discussed in Chapter 1, that if we want to change the world for the better, we need good information about it. Raising awareness about domestic violence might be helpful in reducing it, for example, but does it really seem likely that the myth of Super Bowl Sunday ultimately does a better job of raising awareness than telling the truth? Is it a good idea to try to raise awareness with bad information about its occurrence? And does unclear thinking and communication, such as an inconsistent use of the term riot, really help to reduce injustice? Does an incom­ plete and very weak explanation of family honor killings help with prevention efforts more than a powerful explanation of when and where those killings occur? Likewise, if ideas such as those about microaggressions, trigger warnings, and white privilege fail when they’re treated as scientific claims, isn’t it likely that they’ll fail when they’re used as the basis for diversity training and other interventions intended to pro­ mote social justice? If we just act on the basis of these ideas because we believe the cause is just, we run the risk of spending a great deal of political and institutional energy pro­ moting incorrect ideas that might even harm the people they’re intended to help. And this seems to be what’s happening. There’s little evidence of the effectiveness of the diversity training now common at schools and workplaces, and there’s some evidence they cause harm. The main effect of training that emphasizes the idea of white privilege, for example, seems to be to make liberals less sympathetic toward low-income whites.56 So, when confronted with ideological claims, we don’t need to resist them auto­ matically, but we certainly don’t need to blindly accept them. We can’t assume they’re harmless, since if people accept them they’ll probably begin implementing them sooner or later. Remember what we learned from Haidt and from Marks: Morality blinds us, and politics makes us stupid.57 Morally charged arguments about the world often don’t even make sense, but we can think about them and clarify them if necessary, and then we can evaluate them. In evaluating them, we can use the standards of science. If what’s being offered is a typology, if it’s just an attempt to win a moral argument by changing the terminology, then we can discard it, but we can think about how we would define things in a way that would be useful to developing a theory. If what’s being offered is an explanation, we can evaluate it according to its generality, simpli­ city, testability, and validity. If it’s an empirical claim, we can look to the existing evi­ dence, and if there isn’t much, we can think about the best ways of gathering evidence. Scientific standards are still the best way of evaluating factual and theoretical claims. And social justice activists should welcome the scrutiny. Remember, we need to under­ stand the world if we’re going to effectively change it. We should heed the lesson of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union. While confusion and misinformation might help win allies in the short term, in the long term our policies will fail if they’re based on falsehoods.

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Notes 1 There are important exceptions, though, such as the more scientific conflict theories devel­ oped by Ralf Dahrendorf (“Toward a Theory of Social Conflict”) and Randall Collins (Conflict Sociology). 2 Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” p. 145.

3 For example, Klein and Stern, “Sociology and Classical Liberalism,” pp. 48–51.

4 For example, Scimecca, Christianity and Sociological Theory.

5 Turner (Theoretical Sociology, p. 8) also identifies religion and logic, along with ideology and

science, as among the four basic types of knowledge. In Turner’s typology, religion and logic deal with what can’t be observed directly with the senses—spirits or the afterlife in the case of religion, or pure mathematics in the case of logic. Unlike ideology and science, then, religion and logic are nonempirical, and what distinguishes them is that religion is evaluative and logic is nonevaluative. 6 Turner, Theoretical Sociology, p. 9. 7 As Chris Martin (“How Ideology Has Hindered” p. 116) puts it, “an ideology typically represents an institutionalized vigilance for transgressions of certain values.” Thus, “feminism is an ideology vigilant to unjust treatment of women, environmentalism is an ideology vigi­ lant to ecological harm, fascism is an ideology vigilant to disruptions of ‘proper’ social and political hierarchy, and so on.” 8 Haidt, Righteous Mind, p. 191. 9 As Randall Collins (Sociological Insight, p. 28) says, “For sociologists, conflict and solidarity are two sides of the same coin. Groups often have the most solidarity within when they are mobilized against an enemy without.” 10 Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers, pp. 81–82. 11 Einolf, “Fall and Rise of Torture.” 12 Black, “Geometry of Terrorism.” 13 Campbell, Geometry of Genocide. 14 Senechal de la Roche, “Collective Violence as Social Control.” 15 Campbell and Manning, Rise of Victimhood Culture, pp. 114–115. 16 Tosi and Warmke, Grandstanding, p. 6. 17 Black, Moral Time, pp. 131–132. 18 Barnes, A Pack of Lies, p. 30. 19 Marks, Let’s Be Reasonable, p. 29. 20 Zielinski, “When the Soviet Union Chose.” 21 Compare Duarte et al., “Political Diversity Will Improve.” 22 Turner, Theoretical Sociology, p. 9. 23 Sensoy and DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal, p. 29. 24 Durkheim, Suicide. 25 Weber, “Politics as a Vocation.” 26 Nolan and Lenski, Human Societies. 27 Black, “Epistemology of Pure Sociology,” p. 830, n. 6. 28 Manning, Suicide, p. 147. 29 Black, “Epistemology of Pure Sociology”; see also Cooney, Execution by Family, pp. 194–196; Manning, Suicide, pp. 157–158; Popper, Logic of Scientific Discovery; Walsh, “Occam’s Razor.” 30 Sociologist Barclay Johnson (“Durkheim’s One Cause of Suicide”) argues that Durkheim’s two variables, integration and regulation, are actually aspects of the same concept and should be combined. Johnson’s alteration of Durkheim’s theory, then, makes the theory simpler. 31 For example, in his test of Durkheim’s theory of egoistic suicide, Kevin Breault compared the suicide rates of US counties with several measures of integration, including church member­ ship rates and divorce rates (Breault, “Suicide in America”). 32 This is because if a theory is completely untestable, we have no possibility of ever assessing its validity. 33 Manning, Suicide, pp. 31–33. 34 For example, Abrutyn and Mueller, “Toward a Cultural-Structural Theory”; Danigelis and Pope, “Durkheim’s Theory of Suicide.” 35 Babbie, Practice of Social Research, pp. 6–7. 36 Quoted in Ringle, “Debunking the ‘Day of Dread.’” 37 Ringle, “Debunking the ‘Day of Dread.’” 38 Quoted in Ringle, “Debunking the ‘Day of Dread.’”

42 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Don’t Treat Ideology as Science Robb, “Does Domestic Violence Really”

King, “Reliably Racist Cherry-Picking.”

Latzer, “Don’t Call Rioters ‘Protesters.’”

Campbell and Manning, “When Is a Riot Not.”

Senechal de la Roche, “Collective Violence as Social Control.”

Campbell and Manning, “When Is a Riot Not”

Cooney, Execution by Family, p. 56.

Ibid., p. 5.

Ibid., p. 56.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 57.

Ibid., p. 194.

Lilienfeld, “Microaggressions: Strong Claims.”

Jones, Bellet, and McNalley, “Helping or Harming?”

Khalid and Snyder, “The Data Is In.”

Martin, “How Ideology Has Hindered,” p. 121.

Ibid., p. 122.

al-Gharbi, “Who Gets to Define.”

Haidt, Righteous Mind, p. 191; Marks, Let’s Be Reasonable, p. 29.

References Abrutyn, Seth and Anna S. Mueller. 2018. “Toward a Cultural-Structural Theory of Suicide: Examining Excessive Regulation and Its Discontents.” Sociological Theory 36 (1): 48–66. al-Gharbi, Musa. 2020. “Who Gets to Define What’s Racist?” Contexts, May 15. Available at: https://contexts.org/blog/who-gets-to-define-whats-racist/. Babbie, Earl. 2007. The Practice of Social Research (Eleventh Edition). New York: Thomson Wadsworth. Barnes, J. A. 1994. A Pack of Lies: Towards a Sociology of Lying. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Black, Donald. 1995. “The Epistemology of Pure Sociology.” Law & Social Inquiry 20: 829–870. Black, Donald. 2004. “The Geometry of Terrorism.” Sociological Theory 22 (1): 14–25. Black, Donald. 2011. Moral Time. New York: Oxford University Press. Breault, K. D. 1986. “Suicide in America: A Test of Durkheim’s Theory of Religious and Family Integration, 1933–1980.” American Journal of Sociology 92 (3): 628–656. Campbell, Bradley. 2015. The Geometry of Genocide: A Study in Pure Sociology. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Campbell, Bradley and Jason Manning. 2018. The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Campbell, Bradley and Jason Manning. 2020. “When Is a Riot Not a Riot?” Areo, June 9. Available at: https://areomagazine.com/2020/06/09/when-is-a-riot-not-a-riot/. Collins, Randall. 1975. Conflict Sociology: Toward an Explanatory Sociology. New York: Aca­ demic Press. Collins, Randall. 1992. Sociological Insight: An Introduction to Non-Obvious Sociology (Second Edition). New York: Oxford University Press. Cooney, Mark. 1998. Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence: New York: New York University Press. Cooney, Mark. 2019. Execution by Family: A Theory of Honor Violence. New York: Routledge. Dahrendorf, Ralf. 1956. “Toward a Theory of Social Conflict.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 2: 170–183. Danigelis, Nick and Whitney Pope. 1979. “Durkheim’s Theory of Suicide as Applied to the Family: An Empirical Test.” Social Forces 57 (4) 1081–1106. Duarte, Jose L., Jarret T. Crawford, Charlotta Stern, Jonathan Haidt, Lee Jussim, and Philip E. Tetlock. 2015. “Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 38. doi:10.1017/S0140525X14000430. Durkheim, Émile. 1951. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. New York: The Free Press.

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Einolf, Christopher J. 2007. “The Fall and Rise of Torture: A Comparative and Historical Ana­ lysis.” Sociological Theory 25 (2): 101–121. Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books. Johnson, Barclay D. 1965. “Durkheim’s One Cause of Suicide.” American Sociological Review 30 (6): 875–886. Jones, Payton J., Benjamin W. Bellet, and Richard J. McNalley. 2020. “Helping or Harming?: The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals with Trauma Histories.” Clinical Psychological Science 8 (5): 905–917. Khalid, Amna and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder. 2021. “The Data Is In: Trigger Warnings Don’t Work.” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 15. Available at: https://www.chronicle.com/article/ the-data-is-in-trigger-warnings-dont-work. King, Daniel. 2020. “The Reliably Racist Cherry-Picking of the Word ‘Riot.’” Mother Jones, June 1. Available at: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/06/the-reliably-racist-cherry-picking-of-the -word-riot/. Klein, Daniel B. and Charlotta Stern. 2006. “Sociology and Classical Liberalism.” The Indepen­ dent Review 11 (1): 37–52. Latzer, Barry. 2020. “Don’t Call Rioters ‘Protesters’.” Wall Street Journal, June 4. Available at: https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-call-rioters-protesters-11591293310. Lilienfeld, Scott. 2017. “Microaggressions: Strong Claims, Inadequate Evidence.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 12 (1): 138–169. Manning, Jason. 2020. Suicide: The Social Causes of Self-Destruction. Charlottesville, VA: Uni­ versity of Virginia Press. Marks, Jonathan. 2021. Let’s Be Reasonable: The Conservative Case for Liberal Education. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marx, Karl. 1978. “Theses on Feuerbach.” In The Marx-Engels Reader (Second Edition), edited by Robert C. Tucker, pp. 143–145. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Nolan, Patrick and Gerhard Lenski. 1999. Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology (Eighth Edition). New York: McGraw-Hill. Popper, Karl. 2002. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Routledge Classics. Ringle, Ken. 1993. “Debunking the ‘Day of Dread’ for Women.” Washington Post, January 31. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/01/31/debunking-the-da y-of-dread-for-women/62e0f24b-9b9c-4cd4-b07c-57095018c7ec/. Robb, Alice, 2015. “Does Domestic Violence Really Increase on Super Bowl Sunday.” New Republic, January 30. Available at: https://newrepublic.com/article/120917/super-bowl-sunda y-domestic-violence. Scimecca, Joseph A. Christianity and Sociological Theory: Reclaiming the Promise. New York: Routledge. Senechal de la Roche, Roberta. 1996. “Collective Violence as Social Control.” Sociological Forum 11 (1) 97–128. Sensoy, Özlem and Robin DiAngelo. 2017. Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education (Second Edition). New York: Teachers College Press. Tosi, Justin and Brandon Warmke. 2020. Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk. New York: Oxford University Press. Turner, Jonathan. 2013. Theoretical Sociology: 1830 to the Present. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Walsh, Dorothy. 1979. “Occam’s Razor: A Principle of Intellectual Elegance.” American Philo­ sophical Quarterly 16 (3): 241–244. Weber, Max. 1958. “Politics as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, pp. 77–128. New York: Oxford University Press. Zielinski, Sarah. 2010. “When the Soviet Union Chose the Wrong Side on Genetics and Evolu­ tion.” Smithsonian Magazine, February 1. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/sci ence-nature/when-the-soviet-union-chose-the-wrong-side-on-genetics-and-evolution-23179035/.

4

Distinguish Between Facts and Values The Limits of Sociology

If we want to describe and explain the world, I’ve argued, we should turn to science, not ideology. Sociology, as the science of social life, can help us in our social justice pursuits because it can help us better understand human societies. But as we turn to science for answers to certain kinds of questions, we also need to be aware that there are questions that science can’t answer. The sociologist James Hunter and the philosopher Paul Nede­ lisky say that in this sense we can think of science like a metal detector: “A metal detector cannot tell you everything about what’s buried at the beach, but it can tell you about the buried metal things.” Likewise, they say, “science may not be able to tell us how to live, but it can tell us about physical reality and its laws.”1 Remember that science can’t answer moral questions, questions of right and wrong. If we’re going to think better about social justice, then, we need to distinguish clearly between factual statements and value judgments. We need to be clear about the limits of sociology.

Value-Free Sociology and Its Discontents A number of prominent sociologists, including Max Weber,2 Peter Berger,3 Donald Black,4 and Jonathan Turner,5 have argued that sociology should be value free (or value neutral). Weber, for example, saw it as a matter of “intellectual integrity” for teachers of sociology to refrain from bringing politics into the classroom and to recognize “that it is one thing to state facts, to determine mathematical or logical relations or the internal structure of cultural values, while it is another thing to answer questions of the value of culture and its individual contents and the question of how one should act in the cul­ tural community and in political associations.”6 I agree with Weber, but many other sociologists reject the idea of value-free sociology entirely. They dismiss it as impos­ sible, or they hold out the hope of finding sociological answers to moral questions. Some of them even think they’ve already found those answers. In a 2013 issue of the journal Society, for example, the sociologist Philip Gorski7 argued that a distinction between facts and values can’t be maintained, and that sociologists don’t need to limit themselves to describing and explaining the social world. Through the practice of sociology, he said, sociologists can discover and com­ municate moral truths—facts about how we should live. Gorski argued that we should embrace a version of Aristotelian ethics, which sees eudaimonia, or human flourishing, as the highest good, and he went on to say that sociology can play a role in helping us understand how to pursue eudaimonia. Gorski’s article was the lead article in a symposium on “Facts, Values, and Social Science,” and it’s a sign of the state of present-day sociology that nearly all of the other nine contributors accepted whole hog Gorski’s conclusions about the relationship between facts and values.8 And no one at all supported value-free social science. DOI: 10.4324/9781032616278-4

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9

The contributors disagreed about other things. Amanda Maull suggested following Dewey instead of Aristotle; Reha Kadakal10 suggested Hegel. But on facts and values they were in accord: “The fact/value divide is leaky.”11 Value-free sociology is a “chi­ mera.”12 There is “precious little support for the view that facts and moral values belong to mutually exclusive categories.”13 It’s wrong “to say we cannot get an ought from an is.”14 “A rigid distinction between facts and values cannot be maintained.”15 This is the popular view among contemporary sociologists, who commonly dismiss the fact/value distinction out of hand. Curiously, though, many of the symposium contributors seemed to think of themselves as rebels against a status quo in which the fact/value distinction is supposedly accepted uncritically. According to Joseph Davis, the “fact-value dichotomy is firmly ensconced” within American society, and in the social sciences “value freeness is held out as the goal for any science worthy of the name.”16 Reha Kadakal said the fact/value distinction is the “conventional under­ standing” in the social sciences,17 and Christian Smith referred to it as “our received tradition.”18 Yet the opponents of value-free sociology actually dominate the discipline. Their position is the conventional position, and it echoes what opponents of value-free sociology have been saying for many years. Alvin Gouldner, for example, writing in the early 1960s, argued against what he called “the myth of a value-free sociology.” Value-free sociology, he said, was non­ existent, like the Minotaur of Greek mythology, and its lair could be “reached only by a labrynthian logic.”19 But like Gorski and the symposium contributors, Gouldner had this backward. The mythical beast, the thing that’s impossible, isn’t value-free sociol­ ogy. What’s impossible is a sociological morality. Contrary to the claims of the oppo­ nents of value-free sociology, factual statements and value judgments are different kinds of statements, and factual statements can’t lead logically to value judgments. Value-free sociology is possible, while the idea that some kind of sociology other than value-free sociology is possible—the idea that somehow social science can tell us how we should live or how we should organize societies—is simply false. Let’s look more at the logic of value-free sociology, then, and let’s look at the mis­ understandings that lead people like Gorski to reject it. Gorski’s article is a particularly good one to focus on because it’s sober in tone and largely correct on the details, and many of the other contributions to the symposium on his article are similar. Gorski’s argument isn’t a critical theory style rejection of science as oppressive, and I even agree with him that sociology can be useful in helping us to pursue our moral aims, though I’d say this is true whether we get those from neo-Aristotelian ethics or from some­ where else. Where I disagree is in the notion that this means the fact/value distinction or the idea of value-free sociology should be rejected. This only adds more confusion in our thinking about social justice, and what we need is more clarity.

The Nature of Value-Free Sociology “Attempts to derive ought from is,” says the physicist Sean Carroll, “are like attempts to reach an odd number by adding together even numbers. If someone claims they’ve done it, you don’t have to check their math; you know that they’ve made a mistake.”20 This is a good analogy. You’d expect everyone already to know the difference between odd and even numbers and to see why it’s impossible to get an odd number by adding only even numbers. But what if you encountered someone who said they had done it? You’d know that somehow they misunderstood something, and it might be easy to correct them right away. Maybe they’d claim to have reached 21 (an odd number) by adding 8 and 10 (two even numbers) and just one small odd number, 3. Maybe they’d

46 Distinguish Between Facts and Values say that proves the odd-even divide is leaky. You’d then have to explain again that you said they could not add any odd number, not even a 3. Maybe they’d understand, but the longer this went on and the more elaborate their arguments became, the more their mistakes would multiply, and the harder it would become to correct them. All you could do is try to start again at the beginning. First of all, factual statements and value judgments are distinct. They are different kinds of statements. Factual statements—“is” statements, empirical claims—are about observable aspects of reality. Value judgments—“ought” statements, normative claims—offer praise or condemnation.21 So a statement like “Bob got drunk last night” describes Bob’s behavior. It’s a factual statement, and in principle observations of rea­ lity (photographs, witness testimony, etc.) could help us determine whether Bob actu­ ally did get drunk last night. But a statement like “Bob should not have gotten drunk last night” is a value judgment, a statement condemning Bob’s behavior. These state­ ments say different kinds of things, as do these: � � �

“Twenty-three US states have abolished the death penalty” and “The death penalty is immoral.” “Susan is unemployed” and “Susan should look for a job.” “John lied about his age” and “People ought to tell the truth.”

The first sentence of each pair is a factual statement, and the second is a value judg­ ment. Surely you can see the difference. This is all that’s required for value-free social science to be possible—that it’s possible to make statements that aren’t value judg­ ments. As you can see, that is possible. But not only is it possible for sociology to be value free, it can’t really be otherwise and still be science. This is because value judgments can’t be derived logically from facts. Descriptive and explanatory claims (factual statements) don’t in themselves enable us to make claims about what’s good or bad, desirable or undesirable (value judgments). As Sean Carroll says in the quote above, you can’t derive “ought” from “is.” This isn’t an unusual idea, and it’s not new. Writing in the 1700s, the philosopher David Hume showed that claims about what ought or ought not to be the case that appeared to be based on claims about what is or is not the case involved an unjustified logical leap.22 This is known as “Hume’s law,” “Hume’s guillotine,” or the “is-ought problem.” Consider one of the statements discussed above. Not only are “Bob got drunk last night” and “Bob should not have gotten drunk last night” different kinds of statements, but it’s impossible to derive the second statement from the first without reference to another value judgment. If you believe that it’s wrong to get drunk, your response to Bob’s drunkenness (a fact) would be to conclude that he shouldn’t have done so (a value judgment). But this depends on the prior judgment that it’s wrong to get drunk. No set of facts about Bob’s behavior can logically compel a value judgment. You might find out that Bob got drunk last night and missed work this morning, and you might say that Bob shouldn’t have gotten drunk, but again, this rests on some prior value, such as the belief that people shouldn’t miss work due to drunkenness. To give one more example, a factual statement such as “the death penalty does not deter murder,” even if valid, can’t in itself lead to a value judgment such as “the death penalty should be abolished.” A person who draws that conclusion is relying not just on the fact, but also upon some other value judgment, such as that it’s wrong to kill people except to save other lives.23 Again, you can’t deduce a value judgment from facts. This example does illustrate, though, the relevance of facts in making specific value judgments. Many of our broader value claims are contingent upon facts. They

Distinguish Between Facts and Values

47

have exceptions, such as exceptions to a general prohibition against killing specifying when it’s acceptable to kill. Factual information can be important to moral decision making because it helps us determine whether the exceptions apply in particular cases. Someone therefore might come to oppose the death penalty after being persuaded by social science research that it’s not an effective deterrent, but this isn’t a case of deriving values logically from facts. It’s only logical given certain values. People who support the death penalty as an act of vengeance rather than for its purported deterrent effect wouldn’t find this information relevant. Likewise, even people persuaded that the death penalty is an effective deterrent might still oppose it if they oppose all killings of unarmed and unresisting persons. Facts have no moral significance in the absence of values. Anyone should be able to see this. The deniers of Hume’s law are wrong, Certainly, as we’ve discussed in the previous chapters, people who are already committed to certain values should find the discoveries of science relevant to moral decision making, but science can’t generate or adjudicate moral claims on its own. It’s impossible to derive value judgments from social science. Scientific statements aren’t value judgments, and they don’t logically imply value judgments. They’re value-free. It’s always strange, then, to read or hear discussions about whether sociology can be value free. It already is. When sociologists do make value judgments about their subject matter, those aren’t sociological statements. They aren’t facts, and they can’t be tested against the facts to see if they hold up. So, what do value-free sociological statements look like? As we’ve talked about previously, they’re descriptions and explanations of social reality. First, as they report their research findings, sociologists make descriptive statements about stratification, violence, religion, divorce, altruism, and many other things. In a study of homicide cases in Houston, Texas, for example, Henry Lundsgaarde found that the killers of strangers were punished more severely than the killers of relatives, friends, or associates.24 Or, in a survey of rape cases in Seattle, Linda Williams found that 63 percent of the women who were raped by a stranger or acquaintance reported the rape to the police, compared to 44 percent of those raped by a friend or relative.25 These state­ ments are factual statements, not value judgments. They describe how people deal with offenses; they don’t say anything about how anyone ought to deal with them. Second, as we discussed in Chapter 3, sociologists make explanatory statements that order known facts and predict unknown facts. For example, in his book The Behavior of Law, the sociologist Donald Black offers an explanation of law that identifies the conditions that account for the amount of law brought to bear on a conflict. One explanatory statement is “Within a society, law varies directly with relational dis­ tance.”26 This means there is more law—a greater likelihood of legal involvement and a likelihood of more severe punishment—between people who are strangers rather than acquaintances, acquaintances rather than friends, and so on. As an explanatory state­ ment, it can order patterns of facts such as the facts mentioned above—that the killers of strangers are punished most severely and that the victims of stranger rape are more likely to report it. Findings such as these support the statement, while findings in the opposite direction—any finding of more severe punishment for an offense against friends than against strangers, for example—would fail to support it. Clearly the statement that law varies directly with relational distance isn’t a value claim. It doesn’t praise or condemn anything; it doesn’t say what’s right or wrong. Neither does Durkheim’s idea, which we looked at in Chapter 3, that suicide is more likely at the lowest and highest levels of social integration and at the lowest and highest levels of moral regulation.27 This is an explanation of suicide, not a value judgment. It

48 Distinguish Between Facts and Values identifies conditions said to lead to suicide, but it doesn’t say whether suicide is moral or immoral. These are by no means the only value-free sociological explanations, though. Here are a few others: � � �

�

People “are more likely to perform an activity, the more valuable they perceive the reward of that activity to be.”28 Direct-contact predatory crimes are more likely when the target is more valuable, visible, accessible, and movable.29 “To the degree that a religious economy is competitive and pluralistic, overall levels of religious participation will tend to be high. Conversely, to the degree that a religious economy is monopolized by one or two state-supported firms, overall levels of participation will tend to be low.”30 For serious and sustained violence to occur, people must find some pathway around the confrontational tension that normally inhibits violence.31

These statements don’t evaluate or judge anything. They seek to explain social reality. My own work on genocide is likewise value free. To explain when genocide—one-sided, ethnically based mass killing—will occur in response to a conflict, I make statements such as this: Genocide “is more likely when the antagonists are lacking in cultural similarity, interdependence, intimacy, and other forms of closeness, and when the aggressors are wealthier, more numerous, better supported, better organized, and otherwise higher in status than the targets.”32 This doesn’t praise or condemn genocide any more than any of the other statements praise or condemn predatory crime, reli­ gious participation, violence, or anything else. I could certainly make a value judgment about genocide or any of these other phenomena—and I do in other contexts—but this doesn’t at all increase or decrease the explanatory power of any of these statements. Whether the statements hold up scientifically is a separate question from the morality of the things they’re trying to explain.

Confusion about Value-Free Sociology Given, as we’ve seen, that factual statements are different from value judgments, that they can’t lead logically to value judgments, and that numerous sociologists do in fact make statements that aren’t value judgments, why do people keep dismissing the idea of value-free sociology? How can they be so confused? I find it surprising, I admit, and so did Max Weber, who wrote of the “almost inconceivable misunderstanding[s]”33 of opponents of value-free social science. Donald Black34 borrowed Weber’s phrase for the title of an article called “On the Almost Inconceivable Misunderstandings Concerning the Subject of Value-Free Social Science,” which appeared in the British Journal of Sociology around the same time as Gorski’s article appeared in Society. What’s remarkable is how well the claims of Gorski and many of the other symposium con­ tributors match up with the misunderstandings Black discussed. One misunderstanding people have that leads them to say value-free sociology is impossible is that they confuse internal and external value judgments. Sociologists obviously have to make value judgments internal to the discipline, such as judgments about what’s worthwhile to study and what methods to use. Value-free sociology isn’t and in fact can’t be free of these kinds of value judgments. But to the extent that it’s scientific, sociology is free of external value judgments, such as statements about “whether a particular legal decision is just or unjust, whether a particular public policy

Distinguish Between Facts and Values 35

49

is good or bad, or whether a particular social reform is desirable or undesirable.” But Gorski thinks it’s significant that “our values may … influence our choice of research problems,” that “a feminist might be more likely to study gender than a non-feminist” or that “a libertarian might be more interested in studying individual rights than a non-lib­ ertarian.”36 It’s true that our values “influence our choice of research problems,” possibly in the way described in Gorski’s hypotheticals, but this doesn’t have any bearing on the argument about value-free sociology, which has to do with external value judgments. A second misunderstanding about value-free science is to confuse value freeness and objectivity. A statement that isn’t a value judgment is a value-free statement. We can see by looking at a statement whether it’s value-free—it simply contains no value judg­ ments of anything—but we can’t see whether it’s objective, or free of bias. Your values and multiple other factors might lead you to describe reality in a particular way. You might have even misperceived reality, and your factual statement might be invalid. Still, it’s not a value judgment as long as it’s a statement about observable reality. But Gorski imagines that “value-free” means “objective.” He thus thinks it significant that “there is always the possibility … that our assessment of rival theories will be influenced by a values-based form of ‘confirmation bias.’”37 Other symposium participants made the same error. Joseph Davis said that “value­ freeness is a chimera and … objectivity does not require it.”38 But he got this back­ ward; it’s objectivity that’s the chimera, and value freeness doesn’t require it. Christian Smith conflated the two concepts completely in saying that those who oppose norma­ tive sociology “are obliged to answer … [Gorski’s] smart critique of their belief in (allegedly) unbiased objectivity.”39 But who believes in unbiased objectivity? Claiming to be free of even unconscious bias would be like claiming to be God. Certainly we need to strive to be more objective. As we saw in the last chapter, sci­ entific methods are designed to reduce bias. But this doesn’t mean perfect objectivity is possible, and whether or not perfect objectivity is possible has no bearing on the argu­ ment about value-free sociology. A third misunderstanding is to confuse a sociological statement with the reaction to the statement. Facts alone can’t lead to value judgments, but people have values that will lead them to react to facts in various ways. As Black notes, “the findings and the­ ories of social scientists surely elicit more value judgments than the findings and the­ ories of other scientists.”40 This doesn’t transform those findings and theories into value judgments, however. As discussed above, for example, someone might abandon support for the death penalty after being convinced it doesn’t deter murder, but the statement that the death penalty doesn’t deter murder is not a value judgment. The thrust of Gorski’s argument seems to depend on this misunderstanding. At one point he even said that “certain sorts of moral and political questions … cannot be readily answered in naturalistic terms,” that “certain questions concerning human flourishing … cannot be outsourced to the sciences,” and that “the sciences alone cannot easily adjudicate between utilitarian and Aristotelian models of human happi­ ness.”41 This would seem to undermine his belief in a “middle kingdom of moral facts, situated somewhere between the realms of fact and value, an independent territory, containing discoverable truths about the good life and the good society.”42 It sounds instead like these “discoverable truths” are discoverable only in the context of a prior commitment to Aristotelianism or some other ethical system. If all he has in mind is that people who already have certain moral commitments, such as the pursuit of some particular conception of human flourishing, can sometimes employ social science to help them achieve their goals, then he isn’t saying anything that any value-free sociol­ ogist would disagree with. It’s what I’m arguing in this book in fact—that sociology can

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help us in our pursuit of social justice. But if he thinks this blurs the line between facts and value judgments, he’s confusing factual statements with the reaction to them. Gorski and the other opponents of value-free sociology don’t understand the dis­ tinction between facts and values, and they don’t understand that facts can’t lead logi­ cally to value judgments. And since they don’t always understand that those two things are the issues, they tend to mischaracterize the value-free position, imagining that the supporters of value-free sociology claim never to make any value judgments, that they claim to be completely free of any kind of bias, or that they claim sociology has no human significance. Value-free sociologists make those claims, but they do claim to describe and explain the social world. They claim to do sociology.

Is Value-Free Sociology Unethical? Value-free sociology is possible, and value-free sociology exists. But since facts by themselves can’t logically lead us to value claims, these facts can’t tell us whether sociologists or anyone else should do value-free work. Deciding whether to do valuefree sociology requires a value judgment, and some people, including some of the Gorski symposium participants, seem to have moral objections to value-free sociology or value-free sociologists. Christian Smith said that value-free sociologists hide their values “beneath a cloak of alleged scientific detachment,”43 while Andrew Sabl said that a researcher’s claim to be maintaining a distinction between facts and values “often masks, intentionally or unintentionally, an attachment to values that are not openly avowed and defended.”44 Outside the symposium, the condemnation has sometimes been more strident, as when David Gray called value-free sociology a “doctrine of hypocrisy and irresponsibility.”45 The idea is that value-free sociologists aren’t being straightforward about what they’re up to. Some of this is just a mis­ understanding of value-free sociology—the “almost inconceivable misunderstandings” again. The critics of value-free sociologists might not assume dishonesty if they better understood their adversaries’ position. In any case, many sociologists see value-free sociologists as unethical, or at best morally complacent, even as value-free sociologists believe it’s the opponents of valuefree sociology who are doing something wrong. I imagine it’s as dismaying to many other value-free sociologists as it is to me to see such a well-supported and epistemo­ logically modest position so often condemned. The value-free position is epistemologi­ cally modest because value-free sociologists don’t have to hold the same position about every matter of human significance; they might have value disagreements and even disagreements about what values are.46 They might be conservatives or liberals, positi­ vists or interpretivists, religious believers or atheists, moral realists or skeptics.47 All they have to agree on is that some form of social science—the description and expla­ nation of social reality—is possible and worthwhile. To accept Gorski’s position, in contrast, you have to be a moral realist, an ethical naturalist, a virtue ethicist, and an Aristotelian (though you also need to reject some of Aristotle’s inegalitarian ideas about citizenship48). And the critical theorists and others who embrace leftist ideologies would have an even longer list of beliefs you have to hold and causes you have to support. But do we really need to agree on all these philosophical and political matters in order to do sociology? Can’t we go about the business of sociology and then mor­ alize and philosophize separately? Again, the facts can’t answer these questions. What I want to do here, though, is clarify the values of value-free sociologists, to explain why many of us see our own stance as the ethical one. In other words, why should we acknowledge the fact/value distinction, and why should we avoid making value

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judgments about our subject matter in our sociological work? What’s the value of value-free sociology?

Vocational Integrity and Value-Free Sociology Should sociologists try to be good sociologists, or should they try to be the high priests of humanity? You’ll recall from Chapter 1 that as Auguste Comte put his efforts into the latter he did less of the former. If sociology is worthwhile as a field of study, though, it’s worthwhile as a vocation, without having to be subordinated to some other cause. Most sociologists are likely familiar with the idea of vocation—sometimes called the “calling”—from the works of Max Weber. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber argued that the idea of the calling, as developed by the Protestant reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin, helped spur capitalist development.49 This was the idea that one could glorify God through worldly labor—that it had as much value as the priesthood. What this has in common with the non-religious sense of vocation, as in Weber’s “Science as a Vocation,” is the imperative to approach work with moral seriousness. “Nothing is worthy of man as man,” Weber said there, “unless he can pursue it with passionate devotion.”50 Treating one’s work with moral seriousness means first of all doing the work and doing it well. Cynicism is the enemy of vocation, and one way that cynicism might manifest itself is in shoddy work—such as when sociologists produce lots of low-quality articles to increase the length of their publication lists. In that case you’re not treating your work as having value in itself; you’re treating it as if it only serves other ends— freeing up time, perhaps, or receiving a promotion. But another kind of cynicism, which at first seems very different, arises when sociologists subvert their work for what they see as some higher value. Those who use their position as sociologists mainly as a vehicle to pursue social reform and other political causes, just like those using it to pursue selfish interests, aren’t treating their work as having value in itself. I wouldn’t be too rigid about this. Pursuing sociology as a vocation certainly doesn’t mean that’s all you can do. And some sociologists might be clear on the distinction between facts and values but still feel the need to offer a moral assessment of what they study. Ralf Dahrendorf, for example, understood well that “the assertions of social science and value judgments” are “two distinct types of statement,” and that “value judgments cannot be derived from scientific insights.”51 Ultimately, though, he con­ cluded that even though science and value judgments are different things, the sociolo­ gist should be involved in both: “Our responsibility as sociologists does not end when we complete the process of scientific inquiry…. It commits us … to professing our value convictions in our writings and in the lecture hall as well.”52 Dahrendorf ’s posi­ tion wasn’t based on any misunderstanding; he just thought it was ethically imperative that sociologists, in their professional roles, do more than practice sociology.53 I don’t agree with Dahrendorf that professing our value convictions is always imperative, but maybe there’s a place for it. Still, if sociologists end up doing too much professing of value convictions rather than trying to describe and explain the social world, if activism becomes their focus, they aren’t being serious about sociology. Like medieval laymen prior to Luther and Calvin who saw their tasks as inferior to what the priest was doing, many sociologists seem to see their chosen field as inferior to that of the moral philosopher, the political activist, or whoever is the most explicitly involved in promoting their own moral ideals. Dahrendorf offered a way for sociologists to make value judgments in good faith, though. They can be forthright about the fact/value distinction and their own

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limitations and clearly distinguish their scientific statements from their value judg­ ments. This is what sociologists should do, in my view, on occasions when they make value judgments in classrooms, at conferences, or in other sociological forums. But I still think people should at least exercise some restraint so that they’re not constantly making pronouncements about moral and political matters. For one thing, I just don’t see why sociologists should be talking so much about nonsociological matters. And for another, it might confuse our audiences, who probably aren’t going to pick up on every subtle distinction we make. But as Weber says of those who write about factual and evaluative matters “in one and the same book, on one and the same page, indeed in a principle and subordinate clause of one and the same sentence,” all that we can demand of them is that they not deceive their readers, either “unwittingly” or “just to be clever.” Still, Weber’s view was that “nothing is too ‘pedantic’ if it is useful for the avoidance of confusions.”54 And this leads us to another ethical reason for clarity about the fact/value distinction: Simple honesty.

Honesty and Value-Free Sociology A number of ethical frameworks value honesty, though lying certainly isn’t universally condemned.55 Plato allowed for the “noble lie” to facilitate social order,56 and as we saw in the last chapter, lies are routine in political discourse. And though they wouldn’t acknowledge it, perhaps some of the most politicized sociologists would even approve of lying about the fact/value distinction, fearing that acknowledging it would lead to uncer­ tainty about their political claims and harm their efforts to get their students to engage in activism.57 The norms of science, though, have tended to be different than those of politics. Sociologists might question whether, as Deena Weinstein puts it, “the one institution that has the pursuit of truth as its dominant value is science,”58 but most probably do think the pursuit of truth should be highly valued in both the natural and social sciences. It’s dishonest to disguise one’s values as science, and it’s dishonest to claim to have derived value judgments from facts. Sociologists who present themselves to students and colleagues as moral sages with a foolproof plan to change the world are, I think we can say, overconfident about their own giftedness, and if they do so in the name of sociology, they certainly aren’t being truthful. If they persuade anyone, they do so only by first confusing them—confusing them about the basis for their value judgments and about the limitations of social science. I suggest candor instead. As Virginia Seubert says, “It is desirable that the status of science no longer be falsely attached to non­ scientific claims.”59

The False Promise of Evaluative Sociology The alternative to value-free sociology would be evaluative sociology, but in a sense there’s no such thing. Of course there’s critical theory, and there are other forms of ideological sociology, but the rejection of value-free sociology still doesn’t turn value judgments into descriptions or explanations—it doesn’t turn them into sociology. And in practice, despite all the protests against the idea that facts and values are distinct, it’s rare that anyone even tries to show how facts have led to a value judgment or how a value judgment might be tested. Even in the Gorski symposium, where nearly everyone attacked the idea of a fact/ value divide, Tony Lawson was the only contributor who actually tried to show how facts can lead to values. This was his example: “The occupants of a house do not want to get burnt. The house is on fire, and the only way not to be burnt is to leave.

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Therefore the occupants ought to leave.” Though he claimed this was an “oughtstatement following purely from is-statements,” surely you can see that the final state­ ment doesn’t follow from the previous statements. If it seems like it does, this is because Lawson chose a value claim we all agree with, since we would value the man’s safety and since we don’t have any objection to people fleeing burning buildings. But those unstated values are required to reach the conclusion. Consider, for example, another set of statements with the same logic: A man wants his neighbor’s car, and the neighbor won’t give it to him voluntarily. The only way to get the car is to steal it. Therefore the man ought to steal the car. Clearly, this last statement doesn’t follow from the facts given any more than the value judgment in Lawson’s example did. Lawson’s example fails because it’s impossible to logically derive value judgments from facts alone, but activist sociologists don’t even try to show how they arrived at their values. Usually they just assert their values without any attempt to justify them. Thus, when Mary Romero, as president of the American Sociological Association, called for a “sociology engaged in social justice,” she attacked the idea of value-free sociology, but her criticisms of it had to do with what she asserted were its effects, such as that it “functioned to isolate and marginalize groups, particularly scholar-activists, working-class sociologists, sociologists of color, women sociologists, indigenous sociol­ ogists, and LGBTQ sociologists.”61 Her argument was that the lack of support for activism in sociology departments led many activists to go into other fields, such as ethnic studies and gender studies, but she didn’t address the arguments of advocates of value-free sociology. Nor, despite her insistence that “at this crucial time of our history, we need to be social activists,” did she explain how this would advance sociological knowledge. She lamented that future sociologists will judge us harshly if we’re “detached from the climate crisis,” “detached from an empire bankrupting itself in foreign wars,” “detached from growing inequalities,” “detached from K-12 schools and state colleges and universities being systematically defunded,” and so on, but she didn’t try to argue for any of her political positions.62 The assumption is that as sociologists we should all agree with her about what’s wrong with the world and what to do about it. Sociology, as Romero thinks of it, exists to advance left-wing politics, and she doesn’t seem to think this commitment could ever lead anyone astray. Under current conditions, “teaching, research, and service in sociology,” she said, “have become cru­ cial in equipping students, communities, and the general public with critical thinking skills to understand the dog whistles and gaslighting used by right-wing populist movements.”63 Apparently, only one side of the political divide needs any correction. By comparison, Gorski’s version of evaluative sociology is much better—it’s certainly less political. But whether they’re grounded in moral philosophy, like Gorski’s version, or in contemporary political activism, like Romero’s, attempts at evaluative sociology fail as science because their assumptions are wrong. Remember that Alvin Gouldner said that value-free sociology was as mythical as the Minotaur,64 but we should say that about evaluative sociology instead. Trying to develop a sociological morality is like trying to construct the Minotaur, like trying to sew together the parts of a man and a bull. The task is impossible, so the result isn’t a man, a bull, or a Minotaur—it’s just a mess. Facts and values actually are distinct, and value judgments, as important as they are, aren’t going to help us in our sociological efforts. I also think it’s unlikely that blurring the distinction between facts and values is going to help us in our social justice efforts. As we’ve talked about in the previous chapters, we need to think clearly about the world if we’re going to succeed in our efforts to change it. Sociology can help us to think more clearly, but it’s not going to decide moral questions for us. We need good science, but we have to recognize its limits. 60

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Notes 1 Hunter and Nedelisky, Science and the Good, p. 11.

2 Weber, “Science as a Vocation.”

3 Berger, Invitation to Sociology, pp. 5–6; Berger and Kellner, Sociology Reinterpreted, pp. 51–

53, 99. 4 Black, “Boundaries of Legal Sociology”; “On the Almost Inconceivable Misunderstandings.” 5 Turner, “The More Sociology Seeks.” 6 Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” p. 146. 7 Gorski, “Beyond the Fact/Value Distinction.” 8 Stephen Turner (“Sociology Rediscovering Ethics”) was the exception. 9 Maull, “A Deweyan Defense.” 10 Kadakal, “Truth, Fact and Value.” 11 Gorski, “Beyond the Fact/Value Distinction,” p. 548. 12 Davis, “Social Science, Objectivity,” p. 554. 13 Jacobs, “The Fact/Value Distinction,” p. 568. 14 Lawson, “Ethical Naturalism and Forms,” p. 572. 15 Sabl, “Whose Flourishing? Which Aristotelianism?,” p. 587. 16 Davis, “Social Science, Objectivity,” p. 554. 17 Kadakal, “Truth, Fact and Value,” p. 592. 18 Smith, “Comparing Ethical Naturalism” p. 598. 19 Gouldner, “Anti-Minotaur,” p. 199. 20 Carroll, “The Moral Equivalent.” 21 It is useful to think of factual statements as “is” statements and value judgments as “ought” statements, but this should not be taken too literally, since the words “is” and “ought” might be used in different ways. A statement like “It is wrong to get drunk” is a value judgment, an “ought” statement, despite containing the word “is.” Likewise, a statement like “If you want to go to prison, you ought to kill someone” is a factual statement. It is a claim about the likely consequence of killing, not a claim about the morality of killing, despite containing the word “ought.” 22 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 302. 23 Compare Campbell and Manning, Rise of Victimhood Culture, p. 184. 24 Lundsgaarde, Murder in Space City. 25 Williams, “The Classic Rape.” 26 Black, Behavior of Law, p. 40–47; Sociological Justice, pp. 11–13. 27 Durkheim, Suicide. 28 Homans, “Bringing Men Back In,” p. 816. 29 Cohen and Felson, “Social Change and Crime Rate Trends.” 30 Stark, “Rational Choice Theories of Religion.” 31 Collins, Violence. 32 Campbell, Geometry of Genocide, p. 16. 33 Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences, p. 11. 34 Black, “On the Almost Inconceivable Misunderstandings.” 35 Ibid., p. 767. 36 Gorski, “Beyond the Fact/Value Distinction,” p. 546. 37 Ibid., p. 547. 38 Davis, “Social Science, Objectivity,” p. 554 39 Smith, “Comparing Ethical Naturalism” p. 599. 40 Black, “On the Almost Inconceivable Misunderstandings,” p. 769. 41 Gorski, “Beyond the Fact/Value Distinction,” pp. 550–551. 42 Ibid., p. 543. 43 Smith, “Comparing Ethical Naturalism” p. 599. 44 Sabl, “Whose Flourishing? Which Aristotelianism?,” p. 587. 45 Gray, “Value-Free Sociology.” 46 Again, the argument is that factual statements and value judgments are different kinds of statements, and that value judgments cannot be derived from facts alone. Gorski equates moral realism with the anti-value-free position, but moral realists, while believing that value judgments can express truths about reality, do not necessarily think these are the same kinds of truths as those conveyed by valid empirical statements. This may be the case even when they call both kinds of truths “facts,” since they might then distinguish between “ethical facts” and “natural facts,” thus “reproduc[ing] the fact value distinction in all but name”

Distinguish Between Facts and Values

47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56

57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64

55

(Turner, “Sociology Rediscovering Ethics,” p. 604; compare Hunter and Nedelisky, Science and the Good, pp. 221–222). Seubert, “Sociology and Value Neutrality,” p. 212; 218. Gorski, “Beyond the Fact/Value Distinction,” p. 550. Weber, The Protestant Ethic. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” p. 135. Dahrendorf, Essays in the Theory of Society, p. 8. Ibid., p. 18. The critics of value-free sociology would do well to learn from Dahrendorf. If their real objection to value-free sociology involves moral claims about what the role of professional sociologists should be, as Dahrendorf ’s objection does, they might spend their energies articulating and defending this position rather than arguing that value-free sociology is impossible. Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences, p. 20. Black, Moral Time, pp. 52–54. The “noble lie” is probably not one of the ancient Greek ideas Gorski believes sociologists should adopt, but Patrick Nolan worries that many sociologists, such as the writers of sociology textbooks, have in fact adopted something similar: “In their zeal to convince undergraduate students, university administrators, and the general public that sociology is a legitimate and important endeavor, or to effect positive social change, they may focus more on what is ‘good to think’ than what is strongly rooted in fact” (Nolan, “Questioning Textbook Truth,” pp. 108). Rarely do activist-scholars openly advocate lying or distorting the truth to advance a political agenda—this would seem to undermine a lie’s effectiveness—but it’s not unheard of. For example, when Peter Rossi found that there were fewer homeless persons than homeless advocates had been claiming, a Charles Hoch, writing in the Journal of Applied Sociology, criticized him, not because the study was wrong, but because it was unlikely to further the pro-homeless political agenda. Hoch objected to Rossi for his extension of “the scientific notion of objectivity to the contentious realm of the public domain” and for his creation of “damaging practical effects in an ongoing effort to define the homeless as a needy and deserving social group” (quoted in Hollander, “Saving Sociology?,” p. 138). Quoted in Barnes, A Pack of Lies, p. 55. Seubert, “Sociology and Value Neutrality,” p. 218. Lawson, “Ethical Naturalism and Forms,” p. 572. Romero, “Sociology Engaged in Social Justice,” p. 16. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 3. Gouldner, “Anti-Minotaur.”

References Barnes, J. A. 1994. A Pack of Lies: Towards a Sociology of Lying. Melbourne: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press. Berger, Peter L. 1963. Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective. New York: Anchor. Berger, Peter L. and Hansfried Kellner. 1981. Sociology Reinterpreted. Garden City, NJ: Anchor. Black, Donald. 1972. “The Boundaries of Legal Sociology.” Yale Law Journal 81: 1086–1100. Black, Donald. 1989. Sociological Justice. New York: Oxford University Press. Black, Donald. 2010. The Behavior of Law (Special Edition). Bingley: Emerald Books. Black, Donald. 2011. Moral Time. New York: Oxford University Press. Black, Donald. 2013. “On the Almost Inconceivable Misunderstandings Concerning the Subject of Value-Free Sociology.” British Journal of Sociology 64 (4): 763–780. Campbell, Bradley. 2015. The Geometry of Genocide: A Study in Pure Sociology. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Campbell, Bradley and Jason Manning. 2018. The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Carroll, Sean. 2010. “The Moral Equivalent of the Parallel Postulate.” Preposterous Universe Blog. Available at: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/03/24/the-moral-equivalen t-of-the-parallel-postulate/.

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Cohen, Lawrence E. and Marcus Felson. 1979. “Social Change and Crime Rate Trends: A Routine Activity Approach.” American Sociological Review 44: 588–608. Collins, Randall. 2008. Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ versity Press. Dahrendorf, Ralf. 1968. Essays in the Theory of Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Davis, Joseph E. 2013. “Social Science, Objectivity, and Moral Life.” Society 50 (6): 554–559. Durkheim, Émile. 1951. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. New York: The Free Press. Gorski, Philip S. 2013. “Beyond the Fact/Value Distinction: Ethical Naturalism and the Social Sciences.” Society 50 (6): 543–553. Gouldner, Alvin W. 1962. “Anti-Minotaur: The Myth of a Value-Free Sociology.” Social Problems 9 (3): 199–213. Gray, David J. 1968. “Value-Free Sociology: A Doctrine of Hypocrisy and Irresponsibility.” The Sociological Quarterly 9 (2): 176–185. Hollander, Paul. 1999. “Saving Sociology?” Sociological Inquiry 69 (1): 130–147. Homans, George C. 1964. “Bringing Men Back In.” American Sociological Review 29 (6): 809–818. Hume, David. 2000. A Treatise of Human Nature. New York: Oxford University Press. Hunter, James Davison and Paul Nedelisky. 2018. Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jacobs, Jonathan. 2013. “The Fact/Value Distinction and the Social Sciences.” Society 50 (6): 560–569. Kadakal, Reha. 2013. “Truth, Fact and Value: Recovering Normative Foundations for Sociol­ ogy.” Society 50 (6): 592–597. Lawson, Tony. 2013. “Ethical Naturalism and Forms of Relativism.” Society 50 (6): 570–575. Lundsgaarde, Henry. 1977. Murder in Space City: A Cultural Analysis of Houston Homicide Patterns. New York: Oxford University Press. Maull, Amanda. 2013. “A Deweyan Defense of Ethical Naturalism.” Society 50 (6): 576–580. Nolan, Patrick. 2003. “Questioning Textbook Truth: Suicide Rates and the Hawthorne Effect.” The American Sociologist 34 (3): 107–116. Romero, Mary. 2020. “Sociology Engaged in Social Justice.” American Sociological Review 85(1): 1–30. Sabl, Andrew. 2013. “Whose Flourishing? Which Aristotelianism?” Society 50 (6): 587–591. Seubert, Virginia R. 1991. “Sociology and Value Neutrality: Limiting Sociology to the Empirical Level.” The American Sociologist 22: 210–220. Smith, Christian. 2013. “Comparing Ethical Naturalism and ‘Public Sociology.’” Society 50 (6): 598–601. Stark, Rodney. 1994. “Rational Choice Theories of Religion.” The Agora: Newsletter of the Rational Choice Section of the American Sociological Association 2 (1): 1–5. Turner, Jonathan. 2019. “The More American Sociology Seeks to Become a Politically-Relevant, Discipline, the More Irrelevant It Becomes to Solving Social Problems.” American Sociologist 50: 456–487. Turner, Stephen. 2013. “Sociology Rediscovering Ethics.” Society 50 (6): 602–609. Weber, Max. 1949. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Weber, Max. 1958. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Weber, Max. 1958. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, pp. 129–156. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, Linda S. 1984. “The Classic Rape: When Do Victims Report?” Social Problems 31 (4): 459–467.

5

Be Willing to Make Tradeoffs Dealing with Warring Gods

On March 20, 2020, when New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced a shutdown of nonessential businesses, along with other measures intended to stop the spread of Covid, he said, “I want to be able to say to the people of New York—I did everything we could do. And if it saves just one life, I’ll be happy.”1 I think it’s clear he didn’t really mean this. Surely he believed the Covid measures would save many, many lives, and he would have never advocated for them to save only one life. But why did he say this, and why do others use similar rhetoric? In 2013, for example, US president Barack Obama, speaking about gun violence, acknowledged that “no law or set of laws can keep our children completely safe,” but he said “if there’s even one thing we can do, if there’s just one life we can save, we’ve got an obligation to try.”2 Economist Antony Davies and political scientist James Harrigan call this the “if it saves just one life” argument, and they say it’s “usually nonsense.” After all, there are many things we could do that would save at least one life—outlaw cars, say, or ban swimming pools—but we don’t do them because of the negative consequences these policies would have. Policies involve tradeoffs, Davies and Harrigan point out, and when politicians make statements that fail to acknowledge this, they absolve “them­ selves of the responsibility of crafting a rational response to a difficult issue.”3 This doesn’t mean the policies that Cuomo or Obama were talking about were bad policies. Whatever costs there were to them may well have been worth it. But most poli­ cies have costs as well as benefits, and there’s usually some point at which we’d see those costs as too high. Part of what made Covid policy so difficult at the time Cuomo was speaking, in the very early stages of the pandemic, was that there was such uncertainty about the virus, about what its consequences would be, and about how to mitigate it. I wasn’t opposed to most of the Covid measures instituted by Cuomo in New York, or by Governor Gavin Newsom in California, where I live, and at the time they were imple­ mented and for a while afterward, I was as locked down as nearly anyone was. My campus had closed down, so I was teaching from home, and I generally followed the orders of the Los Angeles County Health Department, which required face coverings to be worn out­ side the home, even outdoors, and which prevented even outdoor social gatherings with members of other households. But from the beginning I worried about the negative con­ sequences of these policies.4 The negative consequences didn’t affect me as much as they did a lot of other people. I was able to work from home, but I knew of others whose live­ lihoods were destroyed. As an introvert, I’m happy spending long periods of time alone, reading and writing, but I had friends who very quickly were suffering from the loss of human contact. I’m married, but I knew many single people who lived alone and would have spent months on end by themselves if they’d followed the county orders. And I don’t have children, but others were struggling to care for children who were now home all day and often struggling with online schooling. DOI: 10.4324/9781032616278-5

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It was clear that even if the Covid policies were worth it given the circumstances, they were also causing widespread harm—harm that was unevenly distributed.5 It was also unclear how long the policies would be sustainable. But statements like Cuomo’s, which encouraged people to disregard tradeoffs in the fight against Covid, weren’t helpful in assessing how to move forward. In a May 2020 op-ed in the New York Times, psychologist Pamela Paresky and I expressed our concerns about this. It was clear that many lockdown proponents had embraced an ideology of safetyism—a term used by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in The Coddling of the American Mind to refer to a disregard of tradeoffs that puts safety above all else. It was also clear, though, that many lockdown opponents were embracing a kind of anti-safetyism where they opposed all efforts to fight Covid. As each side demonized the other, they failed to account for views that fell somewhere in between those extremes, and they ignored the insights the other side could have provided. But “solving the complex problems of the pandemic,” Paresky and I said, could not “be accomplished without considering ideo­ logical opponents’ views.” It wasn’t at all clear, we said, how long lockdowns could “serve as a life-saving, medically induced coma, and at what point they [would] become lethal.” Partisans needed “to replace ‘us-versus-them’ thinking,” we said, “with the intellectual humility needed to get the best thinking from political opponents.”6 In a situation where there was so much uncertainty and no good options, why were people willing to believe the worst about those who disagreed with them? Why did a headline in The Atlantic refer to Georgia’s opening of its economy as an “experiment in human sacrifice”?7 Why did conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson call Michigan’s Covid policies “fascism”?8 This was in part because in certain kinds of moral debates, people tend to deny tradeoffs, which makes it hard even to understand the other side’s position.

Clarity About Tradeoffs In the last chapter we talked about the limits of social science. As I noted there, the early-20th-century German sociologist Max Weber was a strong advocate of value-free sociology. As we saw, science cannot provide answers to moral questions, and for Weber this meant that it can’t answer the most important question of all: How should we live? But this doesn’t mean sociology is of no value in moral debates. It can’t answer questions of morality, but it can help us clarify things. As I’ve argued, by helping us understand the social world better, it can help us to predict the likely consequences of certain policies. But as Weber pointed out, sociology can also help us clarify the nature of the debates we’re having. It can help us understand what they’re about, even though it can’t solve them. If we’re confident that we’ve understood how a certain goal might be achieved, Weber says we might say something like this: “If you take such and such a stand, then according to scientific experience, you have to use such and such as a means in order to carry out your conviction practically.” This doesn’t mean science can tell us we must do that, however. We might go on to say, “now these means are perhaps such that you believe you must reject them. Then you simply must choose between the end and the inevitable means.” Sociology can’t tell us what ends we should pursue, and it can’t tell us what means we should pursue. It can’t tell us whether the ends justify the means or not. What it can do, Weber said, is “confront you with the necessity of this choice.”9 The sociology of morality, then, reveals to us the inevitability of tradeoffs. It doesn’t tell us what moral concerns we should have, and it doesn’t tell us how we should bal­ ance them. We may even decide to put one value above all others—whether it’s safety,

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pleasure, equality, freedom, truth, or something else—but this doesn’t spare us from whatever negative consequences result from our actions. And even if we do this, we still have to decide which value to regard as supreme—or as Weber put it, which of the “warring gods” we should serve.10

Denying Tradeoffs Sometimes people have no problem thinking about and acknowledging tradeoffs. When we go to buy a house, a car, or a computer, for example, the decision might weigh on us, but we’re still dealing with what can be thought of as ordinary, or secular, values.11 We’ll consider a house’s location relative to its size, a car’s style relative to its gas mileage, or a computer’s memory relative to its cost. But when we deal with what we consider more serious moral matters—sacred values—things are different. People might still make tra­ deoffs when two sacred values clash, as when a hospital administrator has to decide which of two children to give a kidney to, but they tend to resist any discussion of tra­ deoffs between a sacred and a secular value, such as tradeoffs between lives and money.12 Sacred values are protected values, defined by psychologists Jonathan Baron and Mark Spranca as values that display trade-off resistance. When people have protected values, they may still trade them off for other values, but if they’re aware they’ve done this—aware that they’ve risked lives, for example—“they are not happy with themselves for doing so.” They might feel they’ve been forced to violate a sacred value, “but the value is no less important to them because of this behavioral violation.”13 And since that’s the case, it makes sense that people would try to avoid these feelings by denying they’ve made a trade-off at all. “People tend to deny the existence of tradeoffs,” Baron and Spranca say, “and this tendency may be particularly strong when one of the values involved is not supposed to trade off with anything. People may desire to believe that their values do no harm.”14 Since we tend to hold multiple sacred values, we can’t always protect them from tradeoffs, but we may protect ourselves from acknowledging this. It makes sense, then, that in the Covid debates of 2020 many people on one side, who were focused on the protection of life as a sacred value, refused to acknowledge the harms of lockdowns and other measures, while on the other side, many of those who were focused on free­ dom, community, relationships, education, and other sacred things threatened by the lockdowns refused to acknowledge the harms of Covid.15 Sociology can’t tell us which set of values, if any, we should emphasize, but it does reveal the conditions that prevent clear thinking in moral debates. Here we see one more way that Haidt is right, as we first discussed in Chapter 3, that morality binds us together in communities but also blinds us to the truth.16 When sacred values are a stake and we’ve taken a strong position about some policy, we should take extra care to identify the costs of our pre­ ferred policy and the benefits of our opponent’s. We might not modify our position, but we can at least be honest about what we’re choosing.

The Inevitability of Tradeoffs It should be clear that tradeoffs are inevitable. We might minimize them by choosing one of the warring gods above all others, but even this doesn’t solve the problem. Suppose you decide to reduce morality entirely to matters of care and harm. One issue you’d have to deal with is what constitutes care and harm. As the sociologist Howard Becker pointed out, our values tend to start out as vague and general abstractions. They are often “poor guides to action” because “we find it difficult to relate the

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generalities of a value statement to the complex and specific details of everyday situa­ tions.”17 Even if we take it as axiomatic that we’re supposed to care for others and avoid doing harm to them, how would we decide, for example, how to deal with unhoused people living on the streets of American cities? Should we allow encamp­ ments on public sidewalks? We might say yes if we think of clearing the encampments as doing harm to those who are living there, but we might say no if we think of those who are elderly, or those who have disabilities, who are unable to get around safely because the sidewalks are blocked. Even with one moral principle, you still end up needing to make some kind of trade-off between different kinds of harms against dif­ ferent people. And it’s unlikely in any case that you would actually want to reduce morality to matters of care and harm. Moral philosophers often want to reduce morality to one guiding principle, but as Jonathan Haidt has shown, morality in practice is multi­ dimensional. One of these dimensions, or as Haidt calls them, moral foundations, is care/harm, but there are five others, each with different evolutionary origins and each associated with different virtues. The care/harm foundation has its origins in the care of children, and it’s associated with values such as caring and kindness. The liberty/ oppression foundation has its origins in the tendency of early humans living in small, egalitarian groups to guard against individuals wanting to bully or dominate them, and it’s associated with values such as equality and freedom. The fairness/cheating founda­ tion has its origins in the benefits people derive from exchanges and other two-way partnerships, and it’s associated with values such as justice and trustworthiness. The loyalty/betrayal foundation has its origins in the ability of humans to act together in coalitions, and it’s associated with values such as loyalty and patriotism. The authority/ subversion foundation has its origins in the need for hierarchy in large groups, and it’s associated with values such as obedience and deference. And finally, the sanctity/ degradation foundation has its origins in the need for humans to avoid contaminants, and it’s associated with values such as chastity and piety.18 If you can’t avoid tradeoffs even when limiting your moral thinking to one founda­ tion, it’s certainly impossible to do so when drawing from multiple foundations. The liberty/oppression and authority/subversion foundations are the most obviously at war with one another. Sometimes we’re to resist those who dominate us, but at other times we’re to obey them. We reconcile these conflicting values to some extent by distin­ guishing sharply between domination we view as legitimate versus domination we view as illegitimate. But even when obeying our rightful rulers, we’re on guard to make sure they don’t become oppressors. As Haidt says, we’re “wary of those who claim to be leaders unless they have first earned our trust. We’re vigilant for signs that they’ve crossed the line into self-aggrandizement and tyranny.”19 And when the line between authority and oppression isn’t clear, we end up unable to satisfy demands for obedience and demands for liberty at the same time. We have to make tradeoffs. The same is true whenever any of the other foundations clash with one another. And in these situations, it’s important to realize that moral conflicts aren’t always conflicts over fundamental values, but simply over which of our fundamental values is to rule in a par­ ticular situation. Even when we don’t realize it, our disagreements with others are usually about how to make tradeoffs. Many contemporary conflicts between conservatives and liberals, for example, are rooted in disagreements about the relative weight given to each foundation. Haidt’s work has shown that conservatives tend to have a six-dimensional morality, as they draw nearly equally from all the moral foundations. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to have more of a three-dimensional morality, as they draw from the care/ harm, liberty/oppression, and fairness/cheating foundations much more than from the

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loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation foundations. For liber­ als, any of the first three foundations should win out whenever they come into conflict with any of the last three. And since the more liberal someone is, the less emphasis they put on the last three foundations, someone who is extremely liberal might not even see the last three foundations as having to do with morality at all. When conservatives assign any value at all to loyalty, authority, or sanctity, and especially when those values seem to conflict with concerns about care, liberty, or fairness, this might look to a liberal like an embrace of evil. Likewise, when liberals ignore these foundations, it might look to a con­ servative as if they’re abandoning morality. Understanding morality better won’t resolve the differences between conservatives and liberals. You can accurately describe someone’s thinking without agreeing with them. But in some cases it might help us find some common ground, if only by showing us the similarities in our moral thinking. We’re all making moral tradeoffs, even though we’re prone to deny what we’re doing. In the debates over Covid measures, for example, is it any wonder that liberals and conservatives disagreed so much over Covid policy? At the outset it didn’t seem inevitable that they would take the positions they did. Early in March 2020, liberals like New York mayor Bill de Blasio were telling people to go out to restaurants and to keep doing normal activities.21 It wasn’t crazy at the time to think that conservatives might end up being more Covid-averse than liberals. Con­ servatives emphasize the sanctity/degradation foundation much more than liberals, and Haidt’s theory is that these moral inclinations are rooted in disgust over disease and similar threats. Still, by late March of 2020, and certainly by the time Paresky and I wrote our op-ed in May, the familiar positions had hardened, with conservatives much more critical of anti-Covid measures than liberals.22 And in retrospect it’s easy to see why this was so. The most drastic Covid measures didn’t have to do with avoiding those who appeared diseased. Rather, because people could spread Covid prior to developing symptoms, the measures required people to avoid interaction with everyone outside their households, and it involved the forced closures of businesses, churches, schools, and so on. Even from the standpoint of the care/harm dimension, Covid policies involved tra­ deoffs, as we’ve discussed. But when you take into account the severe disruptions to everyday life caused by the policies—the disruptions to friendships, families, and com­ munities—it’s clear that many of the negative consequences were to aspects of social life valued more by conservatives than liberals. The three moral foundations that con­ servatives emphasize more than liberals, remember, are loyalty/betrayal, authority/sub­ version, and sanctity/degradation, and these are the foundations that are much more concerned with the protection of family, community, and religious life than they are with the protection of individuals. Liberal Covid hawks were concerned primarily with the individual harms of Covid, but as Haidt says, “conservatives are more willing than liberals to … let some people get hurt in order to achieve their many other moral objectives.”23 Conservatives and liberals made different tradeoffs in part because they emphasize different moral foundations, but also because of differences in how they conceive of liberty and oppression. The liberty/oppression foundation is emphasized by both liber­ als and conservatives, but liberals, in keeping with their heightened concern for care and harm, worry most about the oppression of the powerless. This leads them, Haidt says, “to sacralize equality, which is then pursued by fighting for civil rights and human rights.”24 Conservatives, though, in keeping with their heightened concern for protect­ ing the groups they belong to, tend to sacralize liberty. As Haidt says, the idea is “don’t tread on me (with your liberal nanny state and its high taxes), don’t tread on my

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business (with your oppressive regulations), and don’t tread on my nation (with your United Nations and your sovereignty-reducing international treaties).”25 Given these differences, conservatives pushed back against Covid regulations. Liberals were willing to accept more regulation to reduce harms from Covid, but as we might expect, when Covid policy did conflict with their own sacred values, liberals sometimes made the same kinds of tradeoffs that conservatives had. In May 2020, the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer led to mass protests around the country, but many of the same health officials who had strongly supported the closures of schools, churches, and beaches, and the bans on weddings, funerals, and even on small interhousehold gatherings, signed a letter of support for the protests. And since many of them had also condemned earlier protests by those who were against the lockdowns, it seemed to many people at the time, journalist Michael Powell reported, that these officials’ advice to the public depended on whether they “approved of the mass gath­ ering in question.”26 Many of the health officials insisted that the Floyd protests, unlike the others, were worth it. Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo, for instance, said, “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”27 In other words, she was making a moral trade-off. It’s clear, though, that her trade-off wasn’t determined by any epidemiological formula; it was just that the politics of the situation had changed. The new protests concerned matters of liberty/oppression, but this time restricting protests would have threatened the liberal value of equality and not just the con­ servative value of liberty. The sacred values of liberals would have been threatened by an application of the Covid advice they’d given previously.

Tradeoffs and Moral Cultures Moral disputes are often about tradeoffs, about which virtues to emphasize. And just as some individuals prioritize some values over others, so do groups and societies. Moral cultures clash with one another for this reason, but they aren’t always so different as they might appear at first. It’s not as if one culture values honesty, courage, and justice, and the other values dishonesty, cowardice, and injustice. As with individuals, they emphasize different virtues. This aspect of moral cultures is illustrated nicely in the science fiction novel Divergent and in its two sequels, as well as in the films based on the books. In the novels, author Veronica Roth imagines a dystopian future with a community divided into five factions, each of them emphasizing a different virtue. These groups formed, we eventually find out, because people had different ideas about what was to blame for the world’s pro­ blems. Those who blamed aggression formed Amity, and they emphasized the virtue of kindness. Those who blamed ignorance formed Erudite, and they emphasized knowledge. Those who blamed duplicity formed Candor, and they emphasized honesty. Those who blamed selfishness formed Abnegation, and they emphasized selflessness. And those who blamed cowardice formed Dauntless, and they emphasized courage. Emphasizing a particular virtue suits the members of the different factions for dif­ ferent tasks. The Dauntless are the police, for example, and the Abnegation, who aren’t prone to corruption, are the political rulers. But it also leads them into conflict with one another, and it leads to problems within the group. Emphasizing courage often leads the Dauntless to cruelty, for example, and emphasizing intelligence and the pur­ suit of knowledge often leads the Erudite to arrogance.28 Obviously this isn’t a realistic portrayal of how a society might be organized, but it does something a lot of science fiction also does; it presents things in an unfamiliar and

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even unrealistic setting in order to point to features of our own world. And in reality we do see different moral cultures emphasizing different virtues to different degrees and deemphasizing others. We might think of the Amish as much like Abnegation, for example, with lives centered around selflessness. Or we might think of the many honor cultures of the past and present as similar to the Dauntless, centered around courage. Honor is a kind of moral status that’s associated with a reputation for physical bravery.29 In many traditional societies, losing honor will affect your social standing, so you have to be vigilant in protecting it. Once we understand this, certain things about honor cultures that might baffle us are much easier to understand. Duels, for example, make little sense outside of honor cultures. Why should two men shoot guns at each other because one of them has insulted the other? If someone calls me a scoundrel or a liar, I challenge him to a duel, and then he accepts and we take turns firing shots at each other, how does that prove I’m not a scoundrel or liar? It doesn’t, of course, but it proves I have courage—I’m willing to face death, and therefore I’m worthy of respect. Honor cultures were replaced with what some historians and sociologists have called dignity cultures.30 Dignity refers to the inherent worth that everyone has, regardless of the opinions of others. If you have dignity, you don’t have to be as vigilant about defending your reputation, so in a dignity culture, if someone slights you or insults you, normally the idea is that you should let it go. And if they injure you more severely you can call the police or take them to court. The distinction between honor and dignity cultures is a useful way of describing dif­ ferent ideas about morality, but as culture keeps changing, other moral cultures have emerged. In 2013, for example, Jason Manning and I were talking about some of the moral claims of campus activists, and we began to realize that what they were advocating seemed to diverge from the ideals of both honor and dignity cultures. These activists were often inspired by critical theory in using oppression and victimhood as a master frame­ work for examining all or most aspects of society. From this standpoint ordinary inter­ actions between members of an oppressor group and members of a victim group were a cause for concern, as they might further oppression. What you end up seeing, then, is a concern over small slights like you’d see in an honor culture, but rather than handle them through aggression, people were to handle them by appealing to authorities. In this environment, morality is about protecting the victims of oppression, so victimhood comes to act as a kind of moral status that determines how you treat people. We called this new moral framework victimhood culture, and we ended up describing and explain­ ing it more thoroughly in our 2018 book The Rise of Victimhood Culture. The new culture is different from both honor and dignity cultures, then, and if we ima­ gine that it formed around an answer to the question, “What’s wrong with the world?,” like the factions in Roth’s Divergent novels, the answer would be that what’s wrong with the world is oppression. And if we think about this culture in terms of Haidt’s moral founda­ tions, it emphasizes the liberty/oppression foundation, and it’s the liberal “equality” con­ ception of this foundation that’s emphasized—and amplified—rather than the conservative “liberty” conception. Those who have adopted this new moral culture would say society is set up so that whites, men, straight people, cisgendered people, able-bodied people, and so on benefit, while people of color, women, LGBT people, the disabled, and so on, suffer, and they would see it as morally imperative, above all else, to help the victims of oppression. They would see this as social justice, and because the idea of social justice plays such a central role in this moral framework, Manning and I have said that it could also be called social justice culture instead of victimhood culture.31 Keep in mind, though, that this is social justice in a narrow sense—what we’ve called critical social justice because of its roots in critical theory.

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Social Justice and Confusion About Tradeoffs When a moral culture emphasizes one virtue at the expense of others, there’s often a kind of moral emaciation, where other moral concerns are given no attention, or if they are dealt with at all, are dealt with in other terms.32 Using critical theory as a master framework to understand the world, those who embrace victimhood culture, for example, might come to see concerns about oppression as the whole of morality. And as in other contexts where one value is sacralized above all others, they end up failing to acknowledge the necessity of making tradeoffs. We see this in the work of Ibram X. Kendi, who is one of the most prominent pop­ ular expositors of critical theory, and whose 2019 book How to Be an Antiracist reached the number one spot on the New York Times’s hardcover nonfiction list after the killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed.33 Kendi’s argument in that book is that everyone is either acting in a way that is racist or antiracist at all times— there is no nonracist option. Someone who supports racist policies, for example, is racist, and “every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.”34 As an illustration, Kendi points to racial discrimination. What’s relevant isn’t whether a policy is discriminatory, but whether the discrimination increases racial equity. “If dis­ crimination is creating equity,” he says, “then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creat­ ing inequity, then it is racist.” Kendi also makes clear that antiracist discrimination is needed: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”35 Kendi encourages people to choose antiracism, and he explains what this means in a variety of contexts, but he doesn’t seem to think this ever involves tradeoffs. Remember, in Kendi’s view every policy is either racist or antiracist in the sense that it either fails to increase racial equity (racist) or it does increase racial equity (antiracist), and you should always reject racism and choose antiracism. Kendi never considers whether any antiracist policy in this sense might also have negative effects or whether there’s any other way of evaluating policy. As the philosopher Matt Lutz points out, this is a pro­ blem with Kendi’s racial egalitarianism, and it’s also the same basic problem with all forms of egalitarianism—that is, “equality can conflict with other political goals or values.”36 A strict egalitarian might just say that whenever any other value conflicts with equality we should choose equality, but we should at least think through the consequences of this. As Lutz points out, one problem is that even in a state of perfect economic equality between individuals, the free actions of any of the individual can at any moment make things unequal. If one person agreed to perform a service for others in exchange for a payment, for example, that person would now be wealthier. Should we prevent this kind of exchange? Maybe so, but we’d at least need to acknowledge the harms and the restriction of freedom that would go along with our efforts to enforce equality.37 Another potential problem with always choosing equality over other values is that equality is achieved as easily—and in practical terms, usually more easily—by leveling everyone down rather than raising everyone up. Lutz mentions Kurt Vonnegut’s story “Harrison Bergeron,” about an egalitarian future in which those who are beautiful have to wear masks to hide their beauty, those who are intelligent have to wear radio headsets that interrupt their thoughts, and so on. That’s fiction, but it’s an exaggerated depiction of the real tendency in some settings to value equality over everything else. Consider, for example, how two men who belonged to a New Guinea tribe resolved a

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dispute about ownership of a valuable pandanus tree. As their argument when on, a missionary jokingly suggested they cut the tree down so that neither one of them could have it, and to the missionary’s surprise, the two men agreed enthusiastically.38 Of course, nothing prevents Kendi from privileging racial equality over all other values. Maybe it’s a sacred and protected value that should take precedence over others. But this doesn’t mean we can avoid tradeoffs, even if we decide they’re worth it. When Kendi refers to racial discrimination, for example, in one sense he’s unusually clear in that he doesn’t shy away from saying he endorses discrimination if it leads to racial equity. Kendi critic Coleman Hughes even praises Kendi for his candor here, noting that he says what others “probably believe but are too afraid to say.”39 Given that dis­ crimination has a negative connotation, it’s more common for people to deny that any affirmative action policies they support are discriminatory, but while Kendi is forthright about this, he doesn’t admit of any problems arising from discrimination, as long as it’s antiracist. Again, Kendi isn’t using the language of tradeoffs. He’s not saying that dis­ crimination has problems but is often better than the alternatives. As long as it increases racial equity, he seems to argue, it should be pursued without limit. Kendi’s singular focus on racial equity is evident in his proposal for an amendment to the US Constitution. In 2019 Politico asked a number of thinkers to give ideas for solutions to America’s problems, and this was Kendi’s contribution: To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the US Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals. The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials (with “racist ideas” and “public official” clearly defined). It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Antiracism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and fed­ eral public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those poli­ cies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.40 This is consistent with Kendi’s view of policy, but note again the lack of any acknowl­ edgment of tradeoffs. If giving this new Department of Anti-racism power over all private businesses and even over all elected officials could have any negative con­ sequences, Kendi doesn’t say what they are, but Hughes says it would “enable actual authoritarianism,”41 and he says Kendi’s goals are “openly totalitarian.”42 And if there aren’t supposed to be any limits at all to what can be sacrificed in the pursuit of equity, if there aren’t any other values to consider, then it seems clear that Hughes is right. It’s not just Kendi, though. In discussions of morality and public policy, other cri­ tical social justice scholars and activists also tend to ignore or deny the need for tra­ deoffs. Often, they seem to believe that whatever evil they’re focused on should be addressed by any means necessary. After the killing of George Floyd, for instance, many activists began calling for the defunding of the police, and even mainstream lib­ eral politicians began to sign on. Many of these people, if pressed, would say that “defund the police” wasn’t as radical as it sounded, that it only referred to the idea of reorganizing police departments in some fashion. Others, though, like activist Mariame Kaba, were clear that they meant much more than this. In a New York Times op-ed

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called “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” Kaba argued for police abolition as a way of eliminating police violence, and she hoped that even those who didn’t agree with her—those who didn’t want to abolish the police but still wanted to reduce police violence—would join abolitionists in demanding that the number of police and the budgets of police departments be cut in half immediately. “Fewer police officers,” she said, “equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people.”43 In one sense police abolition is a policy that would be highly effective in achieving its goal. Eliminating police would unquestionably eliminate police violence. We can even see this as an example of what the sociologist of law Donald Black, in his book Sociological Justice, calls sociological anarchism. Since anarchy is the inverse of law in Black’s conception, it’s a matter of degree, not an all or nothing thing, so sociological anarchism doesn’t require abolishing law altogether. But activists concerned with the injustices of the legal system might reduce them, Black says, by restricting law to var­ ious degrees, whether by decriminalizing certain offenses, reducing the penalties of other offenses, or putting more limits on the behavior of legal officials. Reducing the number of police or eliminating them entirely is an example of this, but Black sees sociological anarchism as one strategy that could be used to reduce certain kinds of behavior—a kind of sociological technology—not something that’s certain to be costfree. In fact, he says people could carefully consider the costs and adjust their policies accordingly. To avoid a spike in violence likely to come from reducing law enforcement, for example, they could continue enforcing laws against violence. The point, Black says, “would be to improve the quality of life, not worsen it, and violence could receive the highest legal priority and the utmost severity.”44 The careful analysis of tradeoffs Black envisions is absent from much of the social justice discourse, though. In her op-ed, Kaba doesn’t indicate that police provide any­ thing of value at all, and the closest she comes to explaining how we could eliminate police while avoiding a spike in violent crime is to argue for spending the money pre­ viously spent on police to provide “health care, housing, education, and good jobs.” Then “there would be less need for police in the first place,” she says.45 Kaba doesn’t really address the issue, but police violence is a small fraction of all violence, and we have good reason to think that the rates of criminal violence would be higher still with less policing, and particularly with no policing. The expansion of the modern state, and the state’s increasing claims of a monopoly on violence, led to a long-term decline in violence over the last five centuries.46 And even today whenever the state’s monopoly on violence is weak—such as when the police fail to solve homi­ cides—the rates of violence soar.47 If we want to reduce crime and violence, in fact, there’s reason to think that more policing would help, though certain kinds of policing are more effective than others. Those who are concerned with reducing police violence but also reducing violence generally would want to carefully examine the effects of different policies and possibly even reevaluate them as more evidence comes in. And where the two goals are at odds, they would need to decide how to make tradeoffs. Like other policymakers, they’re likely to encounter warring gods, conflicting values. And as difficult as it might be to decide what to do when values conflict, simply denying the conflict won’t help.

Notes 1 Quoted in Hogan, Marsh, and Hicks, “Coronavirus in NY.”

2 Obama, “Remarks.”

3 Davies and Harrigan, “‘If It Saves Just’.”

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4 In an article in Areo published in late March of 2020, for example, I wrote that we needed to find “ways of helping not just those suffering from COVID-19, but those suffering from our attempts to stop its spread—the people who’ve lost their jobs and incomes, those who have had their social connections severed, those who are lonely or depressed, and those in chaotic or dangerous living situations” (Campbell, “Human Responses to Contagion”). 5 Any benefits were also unevenly distributed. As sociologist Musa al-Gharbi said in April 2020, “the relative ease and comfort that many in the professional-managerial class are experiencing during the pandemic … is actually the product of thousands of low-paid ‘invi­ sible’ workers who are paying the costs, and exposing themselves to considerable risk.” He pointed out that those who were preparing food in restaurants, delivering groceries, and loading trucks might also have wanted to avoid exposure to Covid, and they might have also wanted to spend time with their families or binge-watch Netflix, but that for most of them, staying home was not an option (al-Gharbi, “Disposable People”). 6 Paresky and Campbell, “Safetyism Isn’t the Problem.”

7 Mull, “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice.”

8 Cole, “Tucker Carlson Calls.”

9 Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” p. 151.

10 Ibid., p. 153. 11 Bartels et al., “Moral Judgment and Decision Making.” 12 Tetlock et al., “Psychology of the Unthinkable”; Bartels et al., “Moral Judgment and Deci­ sion Making.” 13 Baron and Spranca, “Protected Values,” p. 1. 14 Ibid., p. 5. 15 This was true later on as well. In February 2022, more than a year and a half after our initial op-ed, Paresky and I pointed out that while a lot had changed in the debates over Covid policy since May 2020, the debates “were still marked by positions that fail[ed] to acknowl­ edge tradeoffs, and by a tendency for each side to label and demean the other” (Paresky and Campbell, “The Other Side Isn’t the Problem”). 16 Haidt, Righteous Mind, p. 191. 17 Becker, Outsiders, p. 130. 18 Haidt, Righteous Mind, pp. 123–127, 172–176. 19 Ibid., p. 173. 20 Ibid., Chapters 7 and 8. 21 Dai, “Mayor Says that Healthy People.” 22 Daniller, “Americans Remain Concerned.” 23 Haidt, Righteous Mind, p. 184. 24 Ibid., p. 175. 25 Ibid. 26 Powell, “Are Protests Dangerous?” 27 Quoted in Diamond, “Suddenly Public Health Officials Say.” 28 Roth, Divergent. 29 Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers, Chapter 5. 30 Berger, “On the Obsolescence”; Ayers, “Vengeance and Justice,” Chapter 1. 31 Campbell and Manning, Rise of Victimhood Culture, p. 191. See also Campbell, “What the Right Gets Wrong.” 32 Campbell and Manning, “Understanding Victimhood Culture.” 33 Egan, “These Authors Are Glad.” 34 Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist, p. 18. 35 Ibid., p. 19. 36 Lutz, “What’s Racist?” 37 We would also need to acknowledge that different kinds of equality are in tension with one another. The sociologist Carl Bankston, for example, points out that the equality of oppor­ tunity and the equality of condition are opposites in a sense, since equality of opportunity assumes that competition will lead to different outcomes. Even choosing one over the other doesn’t resolve the tension, though, since it’s not always easy to clearly separate them or to achieve either in a pure form. For example, Americans have tended to value equal opportu­ nities over equal conditions, but opportunities are never equal when conditions are unequal (Bankston, American Ideas of Equality). 38 Black, Moral Time, p. 65. 39 Hughes, “How to Be an Anti-Intellectual.”

68 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Be Willing to Make Tradeoffs Kendi, “Pass an Anti-Racist.”

Hughes, “A Better Anti-Racism.”

Hughes, “How to Be an Anti-Intellectual.”

Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally.”

Black, Sociological Justice, p. 86.

Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally.”

Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers, Chapter 3; Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature.

Leovy, Ghettoside.

References al-Gharbi, Musa. 2020. “Disposable People: Coronavirus and the Lifestyles of the ProfessionalManagerial Class.” The Baffler, April 1. Available at: https://thebaffler.com/latest/disposable-p eople-algharbi. Ayers, Edward L. 1984. Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South. New York: Oxford University Press. Bankston, III Carl L. 2021. American Ideas of Equality: A Social History, 1750–2020. New York: Cambria Press. Baron, Jonathan and Mark Spranca. 1997. “Protected Values.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 70 (1): 1–16. Bartels, Daniel M., Christopher W. Bauman, Fiery A. Cushman, David A. Pizarro, and A. Peter McGraw. 2015. “Moral Judgment and Decision Making.” In The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making, edited by G. Keren and G. Wu. Chichester: Wiley. Becker, Howard. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press. Berger, Peter L. 1970. “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor.” European Journal of Sociology 11: 339–347. Black, Donald. 1989. Sociological Justice. New York: Oxford University Press. Black, Donald. 2011. Moral Time. New York: Oxford University Press. Campbell, Bradley. 2020. “Human Responses to Contagion: Persecution, Blame, Compassion.” Areo, March 31. Available at: https://areomagazine.com/2020/03/31/human-responses-to-conta gion-persecution-blame-compassion/. Campbell, Bradley. 2020. “What the Right Gets Wrong about Social Justice Culture.” Quillette, July 20. Available at: https://quillette.com/2020/07/20/what-the-right-gets-wrong-about-socia l-justice-culture/. Campbell, Bradley and Jason Manning. 2018. The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Campbell, Bradley and Jason Manning. 2018. “Understanding Victimhood Culture: An Interview with Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning.” Interview by Claire Lehmann. Quillette, May 17. Available at: https://quillette.com/2018/05/17/understanding-victimhood-culture-interview-bra dley-campbell-jason-manning/. Cole, Brendan, 2020. “Tucker Carlson Calls Anti-Covid Measures ‘Fascism,’” Says Michigan Gov. Whitmer ‘Wants this Moment to Last Forever’.” Newsweek, May 15. Available at: http s://www.newsweek.com/gretchen-whitmer-tucker-carlson-fox-coronavirus-1504310. Cooney, Mark. 1998. Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence: New York: New York University Press. Dai, Serena. 2020. “Mayor Says that Healthy People Should Still Be Dining Out.” Eater, March 11. Available at: https://ny.eater.com/2020/3/11/21175497/coronavirus-nyc-restaurants-safe-dine-out. Daniller, Andrew. 2020. “Americans Remain Concerned that States Will Lift Restrictions Too Quickly, but Partisan Differences Widen.” Pew Research Center, May 7. Available at: https:// www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/07/americans-remain-concerned-that-states-will-lif t-restrictions-too-quickly-but-partisan-differences-widen/. Davies, Antony and James R. Harrigan. 2020. “The ‘If It Saves Just One Life’ Fallacy.” Inter­ collegiate Studies Institute, April 29. Available at: https://isi.org/intercollegiate-review/if-it-sa ves-just-one-life-fallacy/.

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Diamond, Dan. 2020. “Suddenly Public Health Officials Say Social Justice Matters More than Social Distance.” Politico, June 4. Available at: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/ 06/04/public-health-protests-301534. Egan, Elisabeth. 2020. “These Authors Are Glad You’re Buying Their Books: Now Do the Work.” New York Times, June 11. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/books/ review/me-and-white-supremacy-layla-saad.html. Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books. Hogan, Bernadette, Julia Marsh, and Nolan Hicks. 2020. “Coronavirus in NY: Cuomo Orders Lockdown, Shuts Down Nonessential Businesses.” New York Post, March 20. Available at: https://nypost.com/2020/03/20/coronavirus-in-ny-cuomo-orders-lockdown-shuts-down-non-es sential-businesses/. Hughes, Coleman. 2019. “How to Be an Anti-Intellectual.” City Journal, October 27. Available at: https://www.city-journal.org/how-to-be-an-antiracist. Hughes, Coleman. 2020. “A Better Anti-Racism.” Persuasion, August 19. Available at: https:// www.persuasion.community/p/a-better-anti-racism. Kaba, Mariame. 2020. “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” New York Times, June 12. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html. Kendi, Ibram X. 2019. How to Be an Antiracist. New York: One World. Kendi, Ibram X. 2019. “Pass an Anti-Racist Constitutional Amendment.” Politico. Available at: https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politics-in-america/inequality/pass-an-anti­ racist-constitutional-amendment/. Leovy, Jill. 2015. Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America. New York: Spiegel and Grau. Lutz, Matt. 2021. “What’s Racist?” Persuasion, November 19. Available at: https://www.persua sion.community/p/whats-racist. Mull, Amanda. 2020. “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice.” The Atlantic, April 29. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/why-georgia-reopening-coronavirus-pandem ic/610882/. Obama, Barack. 2013. “Remarks at the Minneapolis Police Department’s Special Operations Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.” February 13. Available at: https://www.govinfo.gov/con tent/pkg/DCPD-201300071/pdf/DCPD-201300071.pdf. Paresky, Pamela and Bradley Campbell. 2020. “Safetyism Isn’t the Problem.” New York Times, June 1. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/opinion/safetyism-coronavirus-reop ening.html. Paresky, Pamela and Bradley Campbell. 2022. “The Other Side Isn’t the Problem.” Real Clear Politics, February 12. Available at: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/02/12/the_ other_side_isnt_the_problem_147184.html. Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking. Powell, Michael. 2020. “Are Protests Dangerous? What Experts Say May Depend on Who’s Protesting What.” New York Times, July 6. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/ us/Epidemiologists-coronavirus-protests-quarantine.html. Roth, Veronica. 2012. Divergent. New York: Katherine Tegen Books. Tetlock, Philip E., Orie V. Kristel, S. Beth Elson, Melanie C. Green, and Jennifer S. Lerner. 2000. “The Psychology of the Unthinkable: Taboo Trade-offs, Forbidden Base Rates, and Heretical Counterfactuals.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78 (5): 853–870. Weber, Max. 1958. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, pp. 129–156. New York: Oxford University Press.

6

Make Room for Opposition The Reality of Pluralism

By now we know that whenever we set out to make the world a better place, we’re going to face obstacles. Sometimes we just don’t have enough knowledge about the world to know the consequences of various policies. And even when we do, we might not know the right course of action, in part because most policies have both good and bad consequences. In this chapter we’ll consider another common obstacle to our plans for social justice: Other people. In any pluralistic society, people are bound to have different visions of social justice. The opinions of others affect our efforts to bring about social change, so we can’t simply ignore them when we’re crafting public policy. We can try to persuade people, but there are limits to how persuadable they are. If there’s enough opposition, we’re likely to find it impossible to enact our preferred policies, and even if we’re able to enact them, they might not have the effects we’d hoped for. In the last chapter, we saw that in the spring of 2020, both extremes in the debate over Covid policy tended to ignore the downsides of the policies they supported. Psy­ chologist Pamela Paresky and I pointed out at the time that one side used the language of safetyism and ignored the costs of business closures and other social distancing measures, while the other side embraced a kind of anti-safetyism and dismissed con­ cerns over Covid.1 Paresky and I pointed out that each side ignored the legitimate concerns of the other side, but we can add that they also seemed to ignore the sig­ nificance of the fact that large numbers of people had very different ideas about how to deal with Covid. In other words, even if one side’s concerns had been baseless, those concerns would still have political consequences. Those who wanted to keep businesses and schools closed might have thought this was the right policy and that their oppo­ nents were completely wrong, but they should have realized there were limits to how long they could maintain lockdowns in the face of so much opposition. Likewise, those who wanted to end all Covid-related restrictions in the spring of 2020 should have realized this was unlikely to happen given the widespread concerns about the new virus. Libertarian columnist Megan McArdle has made a similar argument about gun control. In the aftermath of the mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, McArdle argued that while an actual ban on all guns would theoretically work to reduce mass killings, it would be impossible in the United States in part because most of the 40 to 60 percent of adults in the United States who own guns, along with many others who don’t, “will not vote for your gun ban.” And even if you could get the support—and get it past the Supreme Court—“you also can’t ban them because there are hundreds of millions of guns in circulation in the United States” and “we don’t know where any of those guns are.” “So how would we get them?” she asked, “House to house searches?”2 DOI: 10.4324/9781032616278-6

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As with Covid policy, you can make this argument about either extreme, and McArdle has also said that the right’s opposition to gun control isn’t going to prevail in the long term if something isn’t done about mass shootings.3 The point isn’t about a particular policy; it’s just that the pursuit of social justice has to take the opinions of other people into account. If we ignore them, we’re likely to fail. Disagreement obstructs our efforts to pursue our own vision of social justice, so if we don’t just ignore disagreement, we’re likely to look for some way to neutralize it. One way to try to neutralize disagreement is to treat your opponents as enemies and try to eliminate them through expulsion, killing, or some other ruthless means of enforcing conformity. Short of that, you can try to marginalize your enemies with social exclusion and expressions of contempt. You can also try to obtain conformity through indoc­ trination. Some of these options are more extreme than others, but any of them might just end up making things worse. In this chapter we’ll look at the different ways of neutralizing disagreement. As we’ll see, there are limits to the effectiveness of these neutralization strategies as well as moral rea­ sons we might reject them as ways of pursuing social justice. Instead of trying to eliminate disagreement, we can accept it as a reality and try to make room in society for opposition. The opinions of others and their reactions to any policy are sociological realities just like every other reality that you need to account for in your social justice pursuits.

Neutralizing Disagreement Through Ruthlessness It’s important to realize that disagreement is inevitable. If we value pluralism, we might see disagreement as a social good that we need to protect rather than as an obstacle we need to overcome. What seems to happen more often, though, is that those who believe they’ve discovered a new morality or a new way of organizing society end up con­ temptuous of those who reject their ideas. The conservative writer Whittaker Chambers, in his 1957 review of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, said that the most striking feature of the book was its “dictatorial tone,” and he said the mind that finds that tone natural “supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation.” This is a mindset in which resistance “cannot be tolerated because dis­ agreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible.” Then in what became a famous line from the review, Chambers wrote, “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’”4 Perhaps this wasn’t fair to Rand, but it does capture her contempt— or at least indifference—toward those she considered to be looters and moochers. As she had the novel’s hero John Galt say, “We have no demands to present to you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach…. We do not need you.”5 Chambers was arguing that Rand’s kind of individualism could end up dehuma­ nizing people as much as the collectivism that both Chambers and Rand opposed. And whether or not he was right about Rand, his reference to gas chambers reminds us of the mass killings and other crimes of the totalitarian governments of the 20th century. Fascist and communist regimes came to see groups of people as impediments to the new world they were creating, and one way of dealing with those people was simply to eliminate them. And while this mindset isn’t always articulated clearly by those who embrace it, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm was very forthright about it. In 1994 when the journalist Michael Ignatieff asked Hobsbawm whether the mass killings by the Soviet Union were justified, he answered, “Probably not … because it turns out the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution.” Ignatieff then asked for clarification: “Had the

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radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?” Hobsbawm replied, “Yes.”6 Whenever people come to think of those who disagree with them simply as obstacles blocking the path to a better future, they’re unlikely to embrace tolerance and plural­ ism. For Hobsbawm, this meant mass killing was theoretically a moral option, even if in retrospect he believed the Soviet killings weren’t worth it. Mass killing is the most ruthless expression of contempt for one’s opponents, but the same kind of contempt more often leads people to disparage and try to marginalize their opponents. This tends to go along with a rejection of the norms of civility that ordinarily guide people in pluralistic settings.

Neutralizing Disagreement Through Incivility Conceptualizations of civility vary, but the idea is usually that you have to treat people with respect even when you disagree with them. As the political scientist Charles Kesler put it, “When citizens are civil to one another, despite their political disagreement, they reveal that these disagreements are less important than their resolution to remain fellow citizens.”7 The idea of civility assumes that disputants have things in common that are more important than their disagreement—such as common interests, a common cul­ ture, common citizenship, or a common humanity. Civility thrives in a depolarized social environment where people have reciprocal moral obligations to one another.8 Moralism—the “tendency to treat people as ene­ mies”9—undermines pluralism and civility. Morality encourages civility only when it discourages moralism. Civility is about treating people as fellow human beings rather than as enemies, but when people no longer recognize others as sharing with them a common universe of moral obligation, a different kind of morality emerges, where in the pursuit of justice people are willing to do to others what they would never want done to themselves.10 In the past 20 years, as Republicans and Democrats have grown further apart in their political beliefs, they have developed more negative attitudes toward one another. Increasingly they’re motivated to vote more out of hatred of the other party than out of love for their own.11 Along with this has come increasing incivility, and politicians and their opponents routinely say things now that would have been unthinkable in the recent past. This is most obviously true of former US President Donald Trump, whose departure from the norms of political debate was part of what led many people to think first that he could never win the Republican primary and then that he could never win the presidency. Even many of those who thought better of his chances assumed first of all that he would become a more conventional presidential candidate after winning the primary, and later that he would become a more conventional president after win­ ning the presidency. That didn’t happen, and even after he became president, Trump tweeted that former White House staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman was a “crazed, crying lowlife” and a “dog,”12 that his former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was “dumb as a rock,”13 that former Vice President Joe Biden was “a low I.Q. indivi­ dual,”14 that London Mayor Sadiq Khan was a “stone cold loser,”15 and that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio was “dumb and incompetent.”16 Many of Trump’s supporters distanced themselves from these kinds of remarks, but others seemed to ape the style. For example, when the Southern Baptist official and Trump critic Russell Moore tweeted that the treatment of children at the border should “shock our consciences” and called for “those created in the image of God” to “be treated with dignity and compassion,”17 Liberty University president and Trump

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supporter Jerry Falwell Jr. replied to Moore with “Have you ever made a payroll? Have you ever built an organization of any type from scratch? … You’re nothing but an employee—a bureaucrat.”18 Trump’s and Falwell’s insulting words are extreme examples, but it would be a mis­ take to think that it’s only Trump and his close supporters, or only Republicans, who violate norms of political civility. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, for example, a fierce Trump critic aligned with the progressive wing of the Democratic party, in a speech given the day she was sworn into office said, referring to Trump, “We’re gonna go in there and we’re gonna impeach the motherfucker!”19 Opponents of Trump and his supporters have also confronted Trump supporters when they’ve spotted them on out­ ings with their families, as when UN Ambassador Nikki Haley was booed while leaving a restaurant with her family,20 or when the Republican Attorney General of Florida, Pam Bondi, had to be escorted out of a showing of a film about children’s television host Fred Rogers (“Mister Rogers”) after activists confronted her and shouted things like “Shame on you!” and “You’re a horrible person!”21 Outside of ordinary politics, we also see incivility among political activists at uni­ versities. Here it’s often inspired by the critical social justice perspective and, in these cases, it takes the form of accusations of oppression and harm, often over what might seem to outsiders like mild disagreements with the activists, and then insults and hos­ tility toward the oppressors and perhaps demands they be fired. For example, Nicholas and Erika Christakis were Yale professors and the heads of one of Yale’s residential colleges. When the dean’s office sent out an email warning students not to wear Halloween costumes that might be considered offensive, Erika sent out an email to the college residents in which she raised the question of whether administrators needed to be involved in such matters or whether it was instead better to leave them to the judgment of students. A number of the students responded by demanding that Erika and her husband Nicholas be fired. At one point students sur­ rounded Nicholas on campus, cursed at him, and accused the Christakises of racism. One student yelled at him, “You should not sleep at night! You are disgusting!”22 In another case, Professor Samuel Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College came under attack after he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in which he presented data showing that student-facing administrators—those whose work in residence halls and other areas deals with students’ campus experiences—are ideologically lopsided, with only one conservative for every 12 liberals. They’re more ideologically lopsided, in fact, than the faculty, and much more than the students, and Abrams argued that their power in setting the agenda on campus threatened the free exchange of ideas.23 For this, students attempted to break into his office, and they left messages cursing at him and demanding he “go teach somewhere else.”24 Six months later Abrams was still the target of a leftist campus group, which demanded his tenure be reviewed.25 It’s not just student activists, though. Faculty and administrators may engage in incivility themselves or offer support for students who do so. Two of the students who accosted Nicholas Christakis at Yale later received the university’s Nakanishi Prize for “high academic achievement and exemplary leadership in enhancing race and / or ethnic relations.”26 And Sarah Lawrence College president Cristle Collins Judd told Samuel Abrams that he had created a hostile work environment by writing his New York Times op-ed and suggested he should find a new job.27 Others go further by insulting people themselves instead of just defending those who do. Otto Warmbier was a University of Virginia student who, while on a trip to North Korea, was accused of stealing a poster and was arrested and held in prison for 17 months before being sent home in such a terrible condition that he died right

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afterward. Apparently because Warmbier was a white male and a student at an elite university, Kathryn Dettwyler, a University of Delaware lecturer, saw him as an oppressor rather than as a victim of injustice. In a Facebook post, she wrote, “Is it wrong of me to think Otto Warmbier got exactly what he deserved? … I’ve spent my life teaching folks just like Otto…. and Otto is typical of the mindset of a lot of the young, white, rich, clueless males who come into my classes.”28 These are examples from the left, but incivility on campuses comes from both right and left just as it does in mainstream politics. Sociologists Amy Binder and Kate Wood, in their study of conservative campus groups, found that some of the groups— though certainly not all—adopted an uncivilized style of discourse and activism. One of the universities they studied was an elite campus on the east coast, and the con­ servative students there adopted a style that Binder and Wood call civilized discourse. They preferred inviting speakers such as mainstream former Republican administration officials and elected politicians, and they avoided and looked down on efforts to pro­ voke the left. The researchers also studied a western public university, however, and there the conservatives tended to adopt a provocative style. They tended to invite speakers who were known for their strident attacks on the left, and they put on events like an “affirmative action bake sale,” which involved selling baked goods and charging whites more than African Americans or Latinos. As Binder and Wood put it, the con­ servative group there “generally strives to be a visible, vocal, mediaworthy presence on campus both during and outside of planned events.”29 Conservatives at other universities have held events such as the “Catch an Illegal Alien Day (when students marked as illegal immigrants are chased down and mockimprisoned), the Global Warming Beach Party (during which environmental concerns are ridiculed with suntan oil and beer), and the Conservative Coming Out Day (a twist on LGBT coming-out celebrations, when conservatives proudly announce their pre­ sence to the campus).”30 Since Binder and Wood did their research, the larger political environment has become even more polarized, and it’s likely that the provocative style has become even more popular with campus conservatives. Former Breitbart reporter Milo Yiannopou­ los is less in demand now, but for a while campus conservative groups kept inviting him to give talks. Yiannopoulos would sometimes wear costumes—he dressed in drag at one event and wore a bathrobe at another—and he seemed to intentionally provoke administrators and student activists with his support for Donald Trump along with insults and mockery directed at the activists and those the activists see as victimized groups on campus. One planned talk at the University of California, Los Angeles (which ended up being canceled) was called “10 Things I Hate about Mexico.”31 Incivility comes from the left and the right, and it’s not new. Norms of civility may have restrained public behavior more in the recent past, but not completely. What’s remarkable, though, is that from the left and the right, we now see elaborate arguments for dispensing with what are still widely shared norms. Increasingly even mainstream columnists and politicians argue that it’s morally acceptable to use demeaning and even racist language about those they see as enemies. To anyone who places a high value on civility, for example, the answer to the ques­ tion “Why can’t we hate men?” is obvious, but “Why Can’t We Hate Men?” was the title of a 2018 Washington Post op-ed by sociology professor Suzanna Danuta Walters. Walters asked whether it’s really illogical to hate men, and she scoffed at the idea that “we’re not supposed to hate them because… #NotAllMen.” To men she said, “And please know that your crocodile tears won’t be wiped away by us anymore. We have every right to hate you.”32 Later, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, she said it

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would also be appropriate to ask, “Why can’t we hate white people?” The Washing­ ton Post isn’t a fringe publication, of course, and neither is the New York Times, which hired journalist Sarah Jeong as part of its editorial board in 2018 despite her prior statements denigrating whites and men. These included tweets such as “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men,” “#Cancel­ WhitePeople,” “White men are bullshit,” and “Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”34 The New York Times expressed regret over the tweets but support for Jeong herself. Jeong likewise expressed some regret, but others defended her and her tweets more forthrightly. According to two writers at Vox, Ezra Klein and Zack Beauchamp, Jeong’s tweets weren’t racist, sexist, or even uncivil. According to them, the tweets didn’t mean what they appeared to mean, but instead were innocuous criticisms of injustice—if only you know how to read them. Klein talked about how it had become popular in some of his circles to tweet the hashtag #KillAllMen. But of course, he said, those people didn’t really want to kill all men. “Kill all men” was their way of saying “it would be nice if the world sucked less for women.” He argued the same was true of Jeong. When she talked about white people, he said, it was a shorthand for talking about the power structure. So, to say “cancel white people” was just a way of “chal­ lenging the dominant power structure.”35 Similarly, Zack Beauchamp argued that Jeong’s tweet that “White men are bullshit” satirically “emphasize[s] how white people continue to benefit (even unknowingly) from their skin color” and points to “the ways in which a power structure that favors white people continues to exist.” And he said that the tweet “Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants” was Jeong’s way of “commenting on the ubiquity of (often uninformed) white opinion on social media—a way of pointing out how nonwhite voices often don’t appear or get drowned out in social media discourse.”36 The Vox defense of Sarah Jeong was rooted in ideas of critical social justice, but the right has its own equivalent. The best example might be Sohrab Ahmari’s First Things article called “Against David French-ism.” Ahmari condemns certain kinds of civility, and he points to anti-Trump conservative writer David French as an example of what he opposes. “It isn’t easy to critique the persona of someone as nice as French,” he says. “Then again, it is in part that earnest and insistently polite quality of his that I find unsuitable to the depth of the present crisis facing religious conservatives. Which is why I recently quipped on Twitter that there is no ‘polite, David French-ian third way around the cultural civil war.’” Ahmari’s substantive point is that David French, though culturally conservative, is politically liberal. French believes in American insti­ tutions, in free speech, in freedom of religion, and he still sees these as the best path for getting along, and even for protecting religious conservatives. But Ahmari says the left won’t live with this, and the culture war can’t be solved this way. French, he says, dis­ plays “a kind of airy, above-it-all mentality…. But conservative Christians can’t afford these luxuries. Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their oppo­ nents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism. Civility and decency are secondary values.”37 We see the left and right both defending their own side’s incivility, then, and for similar reasons. For leftwing social justice activists, whether something is offensive depends on who makes the statement and to whom it’s directed. Critical social justice divides people into victims and oppressors rather than appealing to their common humanity, so a heightened sensitivity about offenses against those who are considered victims is compatible with hostility toward those who are considered oppressors. The 33

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combination of the two is what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have called vin­ dictive protectiveness.38 Efforts to protect some people are combined with extreme vin­ dictiveness toward those believed to be oppressing them. If you see the world the way some social justice activists see it, people like Nicholas and Erika Christakis and Samuel Abrams aren’t just people with different ideas; they’re people who are harming the oppressed by refusing to join in their struggle. They’re worthy of contempt. On the other hand, the racial invective coming from someone like Sarah Jeong isn’t the same thing at all. It’s a way of fighting oppression, or at least an understandable response to oppression. Meanwhile, on the right those who defend incivility often draw from their own notions of victimhood and oppression. As we saw to some extent with Sohrab Ahmari, many conservatives believe they’re oppressed, or at least that they’re in a fight against those who will oppress them if they get enough power. Others on the right, like Milo Yiannopoulos, seem to embrace offensiveness for its own sake, or perhaps just to antagonize those they see as easily offended. As left and right come to view one another as enemies, they end up resembling one another in their incivility. What Pamela Par­ esky and I said about the Covid debate applies here as well: “The more each side reacts to the most extreme version of the other side, the more each side becomes like the extreme version the other side rails against.”39

Neutralizing Disagreement Through Indoctrination Attempts to neutralize disagreement, either with ruthless policies that attempt to elim­ inate our opponents or with incivility that attempts to marginalize them, are ways of rejecting pluralism. These attempts might be effective in some circumstances, but many of us would see them as incompatible with true social justice. If we believe all people should be treated with dignity, we’ll want to try to find ways to reduce conflict while also fostering diversity. And in doing so, we’ll recognize the limits on what we can do as well as the challenge that arises in pluralistic social settings. The challenge is to figure out how to enable diverse people—people with different ethnicities, religions, political beliefs, and socioeconomic backgrounds—to interact with one another while getting along better, respecting one another more, and treating one another more fairly. Once you recognize the difficulty in that, it’s easy to sympathize with the universities and corporations that increasingly encourage or require students or employees to undergo “diversity training,” “sensitivity training,” or similar pro­ grams intended to minimize discrimination, offensive comments, and other problems likely to arise in diverse environments. But if we look closely at what goes on in those programs, we find that many of them aren’t really attempts to help people get along while respecting each other’s differences. Instead, they’re efforts to get people to accept the ideas of critical social justice. When people are pressured or forced into these pro­ grams, these efforts go beyond attempts to persuade and become attempts to indoc­ trinate. It’s unsurprising, then, as the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi found in reviewing the evidence on diversity training, that these programs “tend to work better (or at least, be less harmful) when they are opt-in.” Mandatory diversity training for employees, on the other hand, “often leads to more negative feelings and behaviors, both towards the company and minority co-workers.”40 Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility: Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, which details the pushback DiAngelo has received as she’s led diversity trainings over many years, unintentionally provides us with a close-up account of diversity training as indoctrination. It’s clear that in DiAngelo’s mind that she’s

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confronting racism by drawing from a theoretical approach that’s uncontestably true and using techniques that are uncontestably fair and effective. Those who argue with her, get angry, cry, withdraw, or in other ways fail to embrace wholeheartedly what DiAngelo says are therefore displaying what she calls white fragility. DiAngelo seems sincere in her frustrations, but surely many of the people who’ve argued with her over the years, and even many of those who’ve become angry or emotional, have been sin­ cere too. The problem with DiAngelo’s white fragility concept is that it seems to apply to any kind of resistance to DiAngelo’s teaching. But should she and other diversity trainers really be protected from disagreement and criticism? One problem with delegitimizing criticism of diversity training is that any kind of serious moral education—regardless of whether it has to do with race and diversity— provokes disagreement in a pluralistic society. In The Death of Character: Moral Edu­ cation in an Age without Good or Evil, the sociologist James Hunter points to the dif­ ficulties of providing moral education in schools. The major challenge is that morality is particularistic. Moral cultures develop in moral communities—often religious com­ munities. In diverse settings where people of different moral communities interact, they have different sources of morality, they have different moral vocabularies, and they often come to very different moral conclusions. This means moral education can be noncontroversial only by being very thin. Any attempt to teach a thicker morality— and therefore a particularistic morality—would be resisted by those who aren’t part of the same moral community. DiAngelo makes it clear that she isn’t just teaching platitudes about race and diver­ sity that almost everyone agrees with. She’s drawing from critical theory, but as we’ve seen in previous chapters, critical theory is in fact highly contested, both as a socio­ logical theory and as a moral perspective. DiAngelo fully embraces it, though, and since from the standpoint of critical theory, racial oppression is inherent in interactions between whites and people of color, she bristles when white people tell her they per­ sonally aren’t racist, just as a doctrinaire Marxist would bristle if told by capitalists that they weren’t personally exploiting the proletariat. Apparently, some of these people bristle back when DiAngelo then explains that she’s using racism in a different sense, that it doesn’t just refer to individual and malicious acts, or when she says that “anti­ blackness is foundational to our very identities as white people.”41 All of this is what we’d expect from any kind of diversity training or other moral education drawing from a thick, particularistic morality in a diverse setting. We’d expect people to be defensive, argumentative, or even angry when confronted with alternative worldviews and alternative moral ideas. This doesn’t make DiAngelo’s approach wrong, but it does raise the question of why one particularistic set of ideas about race and diversity should guide diversity training in public settings. DiAngelo might say these ideas are so well supported that any objection to them displays ignorance or bad motives, and certainly many sociologists and other social scientists use critical theory in their own work or view it favorably. But as we saw in Chapter 2, critical theory isn’t settled science—like heliocentrism or Darwinism—that’s only disputed by cranks. Critical theorists, moreover, have tended to be outside the sociological mainstream, and as we saw in Chapter 3, many sociologists see critical theory as more of a political ideology than a sociological theory. In practice it’s often both, but DiAngelo’s thinking is especially unsociological. Her one intellectual con­ tribution is the idea of white fragility, but her discussion of the concept is heavy on moral condemnation and light on evidence or comparative analysis. DiAngelo says that even the title of her book, White Fragility, “will cause resistance because I am breaking a cardinal rule of individualism—I am generalizing. I am

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proceeding as if I could know anything about someone just because the person is white.”42 A few paragraphs later she explains, “As a sociologist, I am quite comfortable generalizing; social life is patterned in measurable ways.”43 As we saw in Chapter 3, generality is in fact key to a good sociological theory. And social life is patterned, as DiAngelo says, and therefore it’s to some degree predictable. But our predictions of the social world are at best probabilistic, and when we generalize we need to be careful not to make claims we can’t support. DiAngelo’s claims almost never come with numbers, and they’re almost never discussed probabilistically. When she talks about what white people believe or about the things white people say in her training sessions, she doesn’t say how many white people believe it or how many white people said it, and she doesn’t say how that compares to the number of people of color who believe or say the same things. She also makes little effort to think about her subject in any broader context—to think about what kind of social phenomenon she’s observing, how it relates to other phenomena, what kind of variation it displays, or how that variation can be explained. Is white fragility defensiveness about accusations of wrongdoing? Is it a kind of ingroup loyalty? Is it a kind of resistance to challenges to one’s worldview? If it’s one or all of these, wouldn’t it be worth exploring other instances? Wouldn’t it be worth exploring variation in white fragility and related phenomena? Not only does DiAngelo fail to do any of that, but she seems to reject the very idea of that kind of comparison, at one point saying “the term ‘white fragility’ is intended to describe a very specific white phenomenon.” She goes on to say that “the term is not applicable to other groups who may register complaints or otherwise be deemed difficult.”44 While she says she’s comfortable generalizing, then, she resists the kind of generality that might be useful in developing a sociological theory. The social world is patterned, but for DiAngelo it’s not patterned in a way that anything else other than oppressive behaviors by whites could be similar or comparable in any way to what she calls white fragility. The obvious irony is that if we’re going to consider defensiveness about one’s mor­ ality and one’s worldview a sign of fragility, we could consider DiAngelo’s accusations of white fragility a sign of her own fragility. Throughout her book she gives example after example of criticisms she says her fellow white people have made of her and her training classes, but nowhere does she indicate that any of those criticisms might be valid. Nowhere does she provide any way to distinguish legitimate criticism from white fragility. Her theory of white fragility allows her to dismiss any objection to her theory, her training methods, or her character. DiAngelo’s book serves as an illustration of one reason diversity training might be failing in its objectives.45 Teaching people to get along in diverse environments involves moral instruction, but only the thinnest moral injunctions get widespread agreement in diverse settings. Any attempt to impose a more substantive and therefore particularistic moral culture sets one at odds with those who draw from other moral cultures, and it produces more conflict rather than less, as we see from DiAngelo’s experiences. This doesn’t necessarily mean diversity training is futile, but it does mean that diversity training based on critical theory probably is. Diversity training has the same challenges that any other kind of moral education in a diverse setting has, and simply imposing one set of moral ideas on everyone else isn’t really an option—at least not in a pluralistic society. Serious and effective moral education might still be possible. Hunter holds out the hope that we can find ways to allow for discussions of morality in which we recognize the diversity of moral communities. The idea is that we could then find areas of agreement, but that we would do this by finding “commonality through particularity” rather than trying to force commonality “at the expense of particularity.”46 It’s unclear exactly what that

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would look like for moral education generally or for diversity training in particular, but if we want to better pursue social justice in a pluralistic and free society, figuring this out might be a good place to start.

Accommodating Disagreement Pluralism is a reality that can’t be wished away,47 but it’s also a variable that can be altered within certain bounds. Pluralism constrains our pursuit of social justice, but unless we see it as an absolute value, we’ll still need to decide just how much we value pluralism and to what extent we’re willing to tolerate dissent. Are we willing to allow people to pursue drastically different visions of social justice within the same society, or will we try to get to a point of conformity on our most sacred values? Either way, we’ll have to make compromises. Everyone isn’t going to just agree. In the last chapter, we saw that tradeoffs are inevitable as we pursue social justice, and this is another tradeoff we can’t avoid. To pursue social justice is often to impose our values on others, but there are limits to how much that’s possible, and if we accept the idea of a pluralistic society, there are limits to how much that’s desirable.48 At some point we have to make room for opposition. No doubt there will still be some things embraced by large num­ bers of our fellow citizens that we’re unwilling to tolerate, but if we want to avoid the problems that come from trying to neutralize disagreement, we’ll want to keep those to a minimum. Not every social justice aim can be pursued with equal fervor.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Paresky and Campbell, “Safetyism Isn’t the Problem.”

McArdle, “There’s Little We Can.”

McArdle, “If Conservatives Want to Keep.”

Chambers, “Big Sister Is Watching.”

Rand, Atlas Shrugged, p. 937.

Quoted in Bell, “Bourgeoise Eric Hobsbawm.”

Kesler, “Civility and Citizenship,” p. 57.

This includes an obligation to avoid causing offense and to avoid taking offense. These two

injunctions might seem incompatible if you assume a world where there aren’t any moral tradeoffs. If you avoid taking offense, after all, you might allow offensive behavior to flourish. But if you assume people will always have conflicts but that they should still respect each other’s dignity, these aren’t incompatible at all. Both injunctions are about treating people charitably, something that requires tolerating error. Norms of civility put constraints on conflict, but they don’t try to eliminate it. Black, Social Structure of Right and Wrong, p. 144. Campbell, Geometry of Genocide, pp. 47–48; Fein, Accounting for Genocide. See also Shitka and Mullen, “Dark Side of Moral Conviction.” Lukianoff and Haidt, Coddling of the American Mind, pp. 128–132. Donald Trump’s Twitter Account, accessed August 30, 2020, https://twitter.com/realDona ldTrump/status/1029329583672307712. Ibid., accessed August 30, 2020, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/10711328803681 32096. Ibid., accessed August 30, 2020, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/11076312970763 05920. Ibid., accessed August 30, 2020, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/11354538913262 38721. Ibid., accessed August 30, 2020, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/11354538952772 03458. Russell Moore’s Twitter Account, accessed August 30, 2020, https://twitter.com/drmoore/sta tus/1143418475723055106.

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18 Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Twitter Account, accessed August 30, 2020, https://twitter.com/JerryFa lwellJr/status/1143613031450103813. 19 Rupar, “New Congress Member Creates.” 20 Sinclair, “New York Pride.” 21 Panetta, “Florida GOP Politician Heckled.” 22 Friedersdorf, “Perils of Writing.” 23 Abrams, “Think Professors Are Liberal?” 24 Soave, “Sarah Lawrence Professor’s Office.” 25 Soave, “Activist Students Demand.” 26 Lips, “Yale Honors Students.” 27 Soave, “Sarah Lawrence Professor’s Office.” 28 Miller, “University of Delaware Professor Slammed.” 29 Binder and Wood, Becoming Right, p. 164. 30 Ibid., p. 2. 31 Richardson, “UCLA Republicans Cancel Milo.” 32 Walters, “Why Can’t We Hate.” 33 Kafka, “A Scholar Asks.” 34 Sullivan, “When Racism Is Fit.” 35 Klein, “The Problem with Twitter.” 36 Beauchamp, “In Defense of Sarah Jeong.” 37 Ahmari, “Against David French-ism.” 38 Lukianoff and Haidt, “Coddling of the American Mind.” 39 Paresky and Campbell, “Safetyism Isn’t the Problem.” 40 al-Gharbi, “Diversity-Related Training.” 41 DiAngelo, White Fragility, p. 91. 42 Ibid., p. 11. 43 Ibid., p. 12. 44 Ibid., pp. 112–113. 45 For evidence that it is failing, see al-Gharbi, “Diversity-Related Training.” 46 Hunter, Death of Character, p. 230. 47 According to Hunter, pluralism is “one of the defining features of the contemporary world order” (To Change the World, p. 200). 48 It’s not always possible or desirable to impose our values on others, but fortunately, as al-Gharbi points out, there are many actions people can take in pursuit of social justice that require no coercion at all. Those who want to increase racial equality, for example, could embrace an ascetic antiracism in their own lives by abstaining from itemizing charitable deductions, by taking taxis or public transportation instead of using rideshare apps, by avoiding delivery services, and by sending their children to public schools (al-Gharbi, “Resistance as Sacrifice”).

References Abrams, Samuel J. 2018. “Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators.” New York Times, October 16. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/opinion/liberal-college-a dministrators.html. Ahmari, Sohrab. 2019. “Against David French-ism.” First Things, May 29. Available at: https:// www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/05/against-david-french-ism. al-Gharbi, Musa. 2019. “Resistance as Sacrifice: Toward an Ascetic Antiracism.” Sociological Forum 34(S1): 1197–1216. al-Gharbi, Musa. 2020. “Diversity-Related Training: What Is It Good For?” Heterodox Acad­ emy, September 16. Available at: https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/diversity-related-training­ what-is-it-good-for/. Beauchamp, Zack. 2018. “In Defense of Sarah Jeong.” Vox, August 3. Available at: https://www.vox. com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/3/17648566/sarah-jeong-new-york-times-twitter-andrew-sullivan. Bell, David A. “The Bourgeoise Eric Hobsbawm.” The National Interest, August 26. Available at: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-bourgeois-eric-hobsbawm-11133. Binder, Amy J. and Kate Wood. 2013. Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Con­ servatives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Black, Donald. 1998. The Social Structure of Right and Wrong (Revised Edition). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Campbell, Bradley. 2015. The Geometry of Genocide: A Study in Pure Sociology. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Chambers, Whittaker, 2005 [1957]. “Big Sister Is Watching You.” National Review, January 5. Avail­ able at: https://www.nationalreview.com/2005/01/big-sister-watching-you-whittaker-chambers/. DiAngelo, Robin. 2018. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Fein, Helen. 1984. Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Friedersdorf, Conor, 2016. “The Perils of Writing a Provocative Email at Yale.” The Atlantic, May 26. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-peril-of-writing-a-pro vocative-email-at-yale/484418/. Hunter, James Davison. 2001. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age without Good and Evil. New York: Basic Books. Hunter, James Davison. 2010. To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. New York: Oxford University Press. Kafka, Alexander C. 2018. “A Scholar Asks, ‘Why Can’t We Hate Men.’ Now She Responds to the Deluge of Criticism.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 9. Available at: https://www.chronicle. com/article/a-scholar-asked-why-cant-we-hate-men-now-she-responds-to-the-deluge-of-criticism/. Kesler, Charles R. 1992. “Civility and Citizenship in the American Founding.” In Civility and Citizenship in Liberal Democratic Societies, edited by Edward C. Banfield, pp. 57–74. New York: Paragon Press. Klein, Ezra. 2018. “The Problem with Twitter, as Shown by the Sarah Jeong Fracas.” Vox, August 8. Available at: https://www.vox.com/technology/2018/8/8/17661368/sarah-jeong-twit ter-new-york-times-andrew-sullivan. Lips, Evan. 2017. “Yale Honors Students Who Berated, Threatened Professor.” New Boston Post, June 2. Available at: https://newbostonpost.com/2017/06/02/yale-honors-students-who-a ccused-professor-of-racism/. Lukianoff, Greg and Jonathan Haidt. 2015. “The Coddling of the American Mind.” The Atlan­ tic, September. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod dling-of-the-american-mind/399356/. Lukianoff, Greg and Jonathan Haidt. 2018. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. New York: Penguin Press. McArdle, Megan. 2012. “There’s Little We Can Do to Prevent another Massacre.” Daily Beast, December 17. Available at: https://www.thedailybeast.com/theres-little-we-can-do-to-prevent-a nother-massacre. McArdle, Megan. 2019. “If Conservatives Want to Keep Their Guns, They’re Going to Have to Find a Way to Stop Mass Shootings.” Washington Post, August 6. Available at: https://www.washing tonpost.com/opinions/if-conservatives-want-to-keep-their-guns-theyre-going-to-have-to-find-a-wa y-to-stop-mass-shootings/2019/08/06/351bb9a4-b88a-11e9-bad6-609f75bfd97f_story.html. Miller, Abigail. 2017. “University of Delaware Professor Slammed for Saying North Korea Pris­ oner Otto Warmbier Was a ‘Privileged, Rich, Clueless White Male’ Who ‘Got Exactly What He Deserved’.” Daily Mail, June 24. Available at: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/a rticle-4636010/Professor-says-Otto-Warmbier-got-deserved.html. Panetta, Grace. 2018. “Florida GOP Politician Heckled at a Showing of Mister Rogers Movie over Her Stances on Healthcare and Immigration.” Business Insider, June 25. Available at: https://www.busi nessinsider.com/pam-bondi-heckled-at-mister-rogers-movie-over-healthcare-immigration-2018-6. Paresky, Pamela and Bradley Campbell. 2020. “Safetyism Isn’t the Problem.” New York Times, June 1. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/opinion/safetyism-coronavirus-reop ening.html. Rand, Ayn. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. New York: The New American Library.

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Richardson, Valerie. 2018. “UCLA Republicans Cancel Milo Yiannopoulos ’10 Things I Hate about Mexico’ Speech.” Washington Times, February 15. Available at: https://www.washing tontimes.com/news/2018/feb/15/milo-yiannopoulos-10-things-i-hate-about-mexico-sp/. Rupar, Aaron. 2019. “New Congress Member Creates Stir by Saying of Trump: We’re Going to Impeach this Motherfucker!” Vox, January 4. Available at: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-p olitics/2019/1/4/18168157/rashida-tlaib-trump-impeachment-motherfucker. Shitka, Linda J. and Elizabeth Mullen. 2002. “The Dark Side of Moral Conviction.” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 2 (1): 35–41. Sinclair, Harriet. 2017. “New York Pride: Twitter Reacts to UN Ambassador Claims She and Family Booed at Restaurant during Festival.” Newsweek, June 26. Available at: https://www. newsweek.com/new-york-pride-nikki-haley-booed-family-restaurant-gay-rights-629164. Soave, Robby. 2018. “Sarah Lawrence Professor’s Office Door Vandalized after He Criticized Leftist Bias.” Reason, November 2. Available at: https://reason.com/2018/11/02/sarah-lawren ce-professor-samuel-abrams/. Soave, Robby. 2019. “Activist Students Demand Sarah Lawrence College Punish a Conservative Professor for Expressing His Views.” Reason, March 12. Available at: https://reason.com/2019/ 03/12/sarah-lawrence-college-abrams-demands/. Sullivan, Andrew. 2018. “When Racism Is Fit to Print.” New York Magazine, August 3. Avail­ able at: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/08/sarah-jeong-new-york-times-anti-white-racism. html. Walters, Suzanna Danuta. 2018. “Why Can’t We Hate Men?” Washington Post, June 8. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-cant-we-hate-men/2018/06/08/f1a3a8e0-6451-11e 8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html.

7

Accept Imperfection The False Promise of Utopia

What we’ve learned so far can help us in our pursuit of social justice, but it might seem instead like we’ve just been encountering obstacles. We have to learn about the world before changing it, but there’s so much we don’t know. A lot of the sociological knowledge we have is provisional and contested, so we have to make sure we’re paying attention to different theoretical perspectives. If we try to join with other social justice activists, we often find that they’re confusing political ideologies with science, and they often know much less about the world than they think. And even when we manage to disregard ideology and to get enough sociological knowledge to be fairly certain about the effects of various policies, sociology still can’t tell us whether those policies are good. We still have to do the work of clarifying our values and making judgments about right and wrong. Even then, the right course of action isn’t always clear, given that most policy decisions involve moral tradeoffs. And if after all this we’ve still managed to decide how we can make the world a better place, we might find that large numbers of our fellow citizens disagree with us. Maybe this sounds bleak, but if the point of social justice is to do good in the world, we should be grateful to learn about our limits. We’re trying to make things better, not just feel good about ourselves, and to make things better, we need to know what’s possible and what’s not. At this point, it should be clear that social justice is difficult. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it does mean perfection is impossible. The pur­ suit of social justice can’t be the pursuit of utopia—the perfect society. We can’t design a perfect society or anything close to it. We know this because of what we’ve learned in the previous chapters—that our knowledge is imperfect, that we can’t avoid tradeoffs, and that we can’t all agree on what’s desirable. But we also know perfection is impos­ sible because, as we’ll see in this chapter, social life without conflict is impossible. And if this is true, the very idea of utopia is unsociological. But does that mean we should abandon it as an ideal? Maybe the promise of utopia will encourage us to have hope. Maybe even if perfection is impossible, we’ll keep moving closer toward perfection if that’s what we’re aiming for. Maybe. But keep in mind that the promise of utopia has often led to disaster. It’s a false promise that can lead us to make society a lot worse than it already is.

A Society of Saints When we think of achieving perfection, we might think of doing so by one of two paths. Either we change imperfect institutions so that they no longer produce injustice, or we change imperfect people so that our societies are no longer filled with morally flawed individuals. Which path we’re thinking of depends on whether we think the world’s problems are due to the failings of societies or to the failings of the people who DOI: 10.4324/9781032616278-7

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create them. Either way, we’re thinking of achieving moral perfection by finding a way to eliminate the behaviors and conditions we see as immoral. But what if people will always collectively define and punish immorality regardless of these behaviors and conditions? That’s what the French sociologist Émile Durkheim thought, and for this reason he thought that any possible society—any group of people, in fact—would have its own forms of crime and punishment. A crime, for Durkheim, was just anything that offends a group’s collective conscience—their shared values—whether it’s an inter­ personal offense like an assault or a homicide or the violation of a religious taboo like eating a forbidden food. And whenever something offends the collective conscience, the group comes together to punish it. Crime and punishment go hand in hand, and they’re inevitable features of every society. The reason crime is inevitable, Durkheim said, is that if we eliminate a particular behavior, it will just mean other behaviors will now become crimes. In any society, we can think of behaviors that are considered much worse than other behaviors that are otherwise closely related. In our own society a murder is worse than an assault, and an assault is worse than an insult, though all three may result from anger toward someone. At the same time, some individuals within any society are less committed to the group and to its norms than others are. The group’s collective conscience isn’t their own conscience, and they’re more likely to commit crime—more likely to commit an assault or murder, perhaps. But let’s say we intensify the group’s collective conscience so that even those on the moral periphery now eschew murder. You would have eliminated a particular behavior, but now the entire group’s collective conscience is stronger—it’s not just stronger for the peripheral members—so those at the group’s core see assaults and insults as much worse than they did before. Durkheim illustrated this by asking us to imagine a “society of saints,” a “cloister of exemplary individuals.” In this society, “faults which appear venial to the laymen will create … the same scandal that ordinary offense does in ordinary consciousness.” The group will then “define these acts as criminal and will treat them as such.”1 Even in a society of saints, some saints will be less saintly than others, and they’ll be treated as sinners. Durkheim went further than this, though. Not only were crime and punishment inevitable, he said, but they were also functional—important parts of any healthy society. You’ll recall that in Chapter 2 we talked about functionalism along with several other sociological perspectives. Functionalist theory, remember, is a way of explaining human behavior with its contributions to the needs of the group. Durkheim’s func­ tionalist theory of crime is counterintuitive since even if you’re thinking in functionalist terms you might initially think of crime as dysfunctional for society and of law as the institution whose function it is to prevent it. But Durkheim said that crime and law are both functional and that law regulates crime but doesn’t attempt to eliminate it. Crime is functional, Durkheim said, first of all in that some degree of crime is necessary if a society is to remain flexible enough to adapt to new circumstances. Nonconformists at the moral periphery of society are those who commit crime, but the willingness of nonconformists to reject social norms can also lead to positive social change. Second, crime is functional because it gives the group an opportunity to define its moral boundaries. The existence of some crime and the punishment it elicits keep group members informed about what kinds of behaviors actually lead to censure. And third, crime and punishment help to increase social solidarity. Crime gives the group the opportunity to come together and to strengthen their bonds to one another as they express their shared outrage toward the criminal. Durkheim’s functionalist analysis has its problems,2 but if there’s anything at all to the idea that crime is inevitable because moral variation is inevitable—that is, people

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aren’t all going to accept the group’s morality to the same degree—this has implica­ tions beyond what Durkheim said about crime and law. If this is true then all kinds of conflicts are inevitable, and it would be impossible for people to ever agree on a utopia. As Chris Jennings puts it in his book about utopian communities, “My Best Possible Society is not the same as your Best Possible Society.”3 Durkheim represents a non-utopian strain of sociology that recognizes that social improvement doesn’t mean perfection. Durkheim was in some ways as optimistic as Comte in believing that sociology could help us discover how to design a society, but Durkheim recognized that even the best of societies would have to balance opposing forces like individuality and collectivism.

The Inevitability of Conflict A newer theory of conflict makes it even clearer than Durkheim did that conflict is endemic to social life. In his book Moral Time, the sociologist Donald Black posits that all human conflict results from what he calls movements of social time. Black’s theory is masterful in its simplicity, but its use of unfamiliar concepts can make it confusing at first. The unfamiliar term social time, though, just refers to a kind of social change. Social time is the dynamic aspect of social life, and movements of social time involve changes in intimacy, equality, and diversity. A change in intimacy can involve an increase or a decrease in intimacy. It’s an increase in intimacy when a stranger touches your body, trespasses your property, or taps your phone, and it’s a decrease in intimacy when a boss fires you, when a spouse abandons you, or when a friend stops talking to you. It’s an increase in equality when a subordinate disrespects a superior, and it’s a decrease in equality when someone who was your equal begins bossing you around. It’s an increase in diversity when someone comes up with a new religious idea, and it’s a decrease in diversity when someone kills or expels a heretic. All of these movements of social time are potential offenses— potential sources of conflict. And in fact, according to Black, every offense—every behavior defined as deviant—involves some kind of movement of social time. Even movements of social time that don’t get defined as offenses can still cause conflict, since they can cause people to make false accusations of wrongdoing. In some societies, for example, when a poor person suddenly becomes wealthy, that person might be accused of using witchcraft to grow richer, and when a wealthy person falls on hard times, an innocent person might be accused of using witchcraft to cause this person’s misfortune. Black says that the greater and faster the movement of social time, the more conflict it causes. So you’re probably going to find it more inappropriate when a casual acquaintance starts asking you very personal questions than when a close friend does. Likewise, a new religious idea introduced into a setting where there’s already a lot of religious diversity isn’t going to cause as much trouble as it will in a less diverse setting. Since Black’s theory helps to explain differences in the amount of conflict in social settings, we can use it to guide us in our social justice efforts. If we can find ways to reduce the volatility of social life, we can reduce conflict. But we still can’t eliminate conflict, because it’s not possible to have social life without change. Social time never stands still. We might reduce the frequency or the speed with which people start new relationships or end old ones, or by which they become closer or more distant to someone they know, but we can’t eliminate the ordinary human interactions that lead to relationship changes. Similarly, we might have a more equal society on the one hand, or a more stable system of inequality on the other, but we can’t eliminate the acts of respect and disrespect, the wins and losses, or all the other human behaviors that cause

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people to rise above others or fall below them. We can aim for cultural homogeneity, hoping to prevent the kind of diversity that renders people unable to agree on morality, but then when the inevitable disagreement occurs, it causes more conflict. Or we might aim for diversity and for the tolerance it fosters, but then cultural clashes, while less severe, are all the more common. As Black puts it, “conflict is ubiquitous because the movement of social time is ubiquitous, and it is inevitable because the movement of social time is inevitable.”4 It’s also inevitable, then, that attempts at social perfection fail. This is true of smallscale attempts to form utopian communities, and it’s true of attempts to transform societies through social revolution. Typically, utopian thinking is flawed enough that its failures have many causes. It might be bad economics that leads people into poverty because they’ve misidentified the sources of wealth. Or it might be bad biology that leads them into famine because they’ve overestimated their ability to produce food.5 But even if they manage to avoid disasters like these, it’s bad sociological thinking that leads them to believe they can avoid the kinds of conflicts that divide all human groups.

Conflict in Utopian Communities Utopians have pursued perfection through various means, but we might think of the two main strategies as occupying opposite ends of a continuum of violent and peaceful change. Some utopians have been violent revolutionaries, attempting to overthrow governments and establish by force new institutions and new ways of living. We might call this the Armageddon strategy, after the gathering place for the apocalyptic battle described in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation. The idea is that before the new millennium—or whatever version of a future utopia the revolutionaries are pursuing—there must be bloodshed. There must be some kind of final conflict between the forces of good and evil. At the other end of the continuum are peaceful utopians who establish small-scale communities organized to avoid the problems of the larger society. They often believe the success of the new communities will lead others to set up similar communities until the larger society is transformed. Here the idea is that things will improve gradually and voluntarily, as technology improves and as people find better ways of organizing societies, so an apocalyptic battle isn’t necessary. We might call this the Field of Dreams strategy, after the 1989 baseball film and its famous line, “If you build it, he will come.” This was the thinking behind a number of utopian communities established in 19th­ century America. Some of these were religious communities. There were the Shakers, for example, who believed the second coming of Christ had occurred—that Christ had come again as the Shaker prophetess Ann Lee—and that she and the community of Shakers would usher in the kingdom of God. The Shakers believed sexual intercourse was the sin that had led to the fall of humanity, and they forbade both marriage and sex among their members. Another group of religious utopians were the perfectionists of the Oneida commu­ nity, founded by John Humphrey Noyes, who believed that followers of Christ could live lives completely free of sin. Like the Shakers, they also forbade marriage, but they practiced free love instead of celibacy. There were also secular utopian communities, such as those established by the fol­ lowers of the French philosopher Charles Fourier. Fourier believed that the creation of intentional communities called phalanxes, each to be composed of 1,620 people, would lead to a new era of universal harmony. The phalanxes would be designed so that every personality type would be present and so that every person could pursue their passions while also contributing to the public good. Albert Brisbane, an American who was

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inspired by Fourier, led a movement that was successful in establishing more than two dozen phalanxes in the United States, though in practice they always deviated quite a bit from Fourier’s plans. And there were also the Icarians, followers of another Frenchman, Étienne Cabet, who established a community modeled after the fictional socialist land described in Cabet’s novel Voyage to Icaria. In the novel, Icaria was a technologically advanced society without private property, without money, and without crime. It was also a place where almost every aspect of people’s lives—including the food they ate and the clothing they wore—was planned by committees of specialists. The elected authorities regulated art and literature, and this regulation included destroying or rewriting old books that might cause harm. Everyone in Icaria worked, and they had time for study in the afternoon and entertainment in the evening. The voluntary utopian communities of the 19th century failed eventually,6 sometimes spectacularly. And it must have been a shock for the utopians when things fell apart. After all, they believed their communities would be so successful that others would copy their way of living. They believed they were providing a model of the society of the future. But if it’s a shock for utopians when there’s conflict in their new commu­ nities, it shouldn’t be a shock to sociologists familiar with Durkheim’s thought experi­ ment about the society of saints. And it certainly shouldn’t be a shock to anyone familiar with Black’s theory of conflict. Remember, Black’s theory explains why conflict is inevitable, and it can help us understand the underlying causes of all conflicts, including those we see in utopian communities. Consider the Icarians, whose conflicts led to factionalism and schism. Cabet had attracted a following who wanted to see his utopia implemented, and eventually he led a group from France to establish a community in Texas. When that didn’t work out, he moved them to Nauvoo, Illinois, to land that had been the site of a Mormon commu­ nity before the Mormons were driven out. There Cabet and the other settlers set out, as one of Cabet’s followers put it, to prove “man’s innate goodness.”7 In the new socialist community, people ate together, they put on plays and concerts, and they started a large library, but soon they began dividing into factions. Worried the community wasn’t living up to its ideals, Cabet started exerting more power. He required people to be silent in the workshops, he banned drinking and smoking, he established a network of spies, and he even got the assembly to prohibit complaining. Cabet’s move to increase his control over the community was what Black calls a movement of social time—specifically, it was an instance of overstratification, an increase in inequality. Movements of social time cause conflict, remember, and those who objected to Cabet’s actions responded by organizing against him to reduce his power—an act of understratification that led to further conflict. When Cabet tried to have the community’s constitution amended to give himself even more power, the majority of the community voted against him. The group of dis­ senters to Cabet’s rule began calling themselves the Majority, while those who were still loyal to their founder called themselves Cabetists. This split led to other movements of social time, such as underintimacy—a decrease in intimacy—as the two groups began eating separately and otherwise avoiding one another. Jennings says “it was as if two separate communities were living side by side.”8 During this time the conflict intensi­ fied. There were scuffles, strikes, and burnings of people in effigy. As one Icarian put it, “We had come to Nauvoo to make a paradise on earth and we had made a Sheol.”9 Eventually the conflict led to permanent separation. The Majority faction expelled Cabet from the community, and he and the Cabetist faction moved to Missouri, though Cabet died only days after moving.

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Those who stayed in Nauvoo eventually left for Iowa. In principle they still adhered to the ideals of their founder, even though they had expelled him, but in the new community they worked in agriculture and lived in single-family homes instead of in apartments in communal dwellings. Jennings says they “had effectively abandoned the vision of urban industrial paradise described in Voyage.”10 This tends to be the pattern with utopian communities. If they survive as communities they don’t survive as utopias, and they tend to revert to the norms of the larger society.11 Just as the followers of Cabet gave up on the technological utopianism that was supposed to define the com­ munity, for example, the Oneida community ended up abandoning free love and started practicing monogamous marriage. The Iowa community of Icarians was stable for a while, but eventually there was another split. This time movements of cultural time—cultural changes—led to the conflict. The faction calling themselves Conservatives were content with things as they were, while those calling themselves Progressives embraced more radical ideas. They wanted the community to officially embrace atheism, for example, and they wanted women to have the right to vote. The Progressives were mostly younger members of the community, along with some new recruits, political radicals who had come recently from France. Eventually the groups split, and the Progressives founded Young Icaria, while the Conservatives moved a mile away and founded New Icaria.12

Conflict after Revolution If the peaceful Field of Dreams strategy leads to failure, one possibility is that it just takes a lot more than that to transform society. If it was wishful thinking that a new world could come about peacefully, perhaps the Armageddon strategy—a battle between good and evil—is what’s needed to bring about utopia. But remember Black’s theory. Movements of social time cause conflict, and the greater they are and the faster they occur, the more conflict they cause. Attempting to achieve utopia through war, revolution, and drastic societal transformation, then, leads to much greater disasters than the failures of voluntary utopias. As the historian of science and skeptic Michael Shermer points out, the 19th-century utopian communities were “relatively harmless,” given that “they did not employ force and violence upon dissenters, but instead tried to sell everyone on the benefits to come.”13 Much more catastrophic, he says, “were the grand twentieth-century experiments in utopian socialist ideologies as manifested in Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist Russia (1917–1989), Fascist Italy (1922–1943), and Nazi Germany (1933–1945).”14 Unlike fascism, Marxism still has many defenders and adherents among mainstream academics—about 25 percent of sociologists identify as Marxists, for example.15 But wherever they’ve been implemented, Marxist ideas have failed, and as Shermer points out, in large societies like the Soviet Union and Communist China, they led to the deaths of tens of millions of people. Marxism hasn’t brought about utopia, but its promise of utopia seems to have fueled its brutality. In the last chapter we saw that historian Eric Hobsbawm said that Soviet mass killing would have been justified if the “radiant tomorrow” had come, and it makes sense that all kinds of horrible things might be thought of as reasonable costs of achieving perfection if you believe perfection is actually achievable. Marx’s perfectionism—his utopian vision of the future—arguably makes little sense even under the terms of the rest of his own theory. Marx argued that class conflicts produce changes in a society that eventually lead to a new system of class relations with its own conflict. Throughout history, then, the result of conflict and change hasn’t been

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utopia, but rather more conflict and more change, with one system of exploitation replacing another. But Marx believed the future would be different. The cycle of con­ flict and change would finally end—and exploitation would end—because a classless society would emerge after the downfall of capitalism. Revolutionary workers would put the means of production in the hands of the state—a dictatorship of the proletar­ iat—and this time no new form of inequality would emerge. Even the state would wither away. But the sociologist Jonathan Turner says Marx had no basis for thinking this would happen, that it was “just a wish on his part.” Turner says that state owner­ ship of the means of production means “an entirely new basis for inequality is set into motion: control by the state of the means of economic and cultural production.”16 The historian R.J. Rummel coined the term democide to refer to the murder17 of people by governments, and totalitarian regimes like the communist regimes in China and the Soviet Union have been among the most murderous regimes in history. These regimes engaged in genocides and similar mass killings, political purges, and other more familiar atrocities,18 but as Rummel points out, some kinds of democide aren’t captured by any more familiar terms: There is, for example, murder by quota carried out by the Soviets, Chinese com­ munists, and North Vietnamese. For the Soviet and Vietnamese communists, gov­ ernment (or party) agencies would order subordinate units to kill a certain number of “enemies of the people,” “rightists,” or “tyrants,” and the precise application of the order was left to the units involved. Moreover, millions of people wasted away in labor or concentration camps not because of their social identity, their political beliefs, or who they were, but simply because they got in the way, violated some Draconian rule, did not express sufficient exuberance over the regime, innocently insulted the Leader (as by sitting on a newspaper with the picture of Stalin show­ ing), or simply because they were a body that was needed for labor…. And there are the hundreds of thousands of peasants that slowly died of disease, malnutrition, overwork, and hunger in Cambodia as the Khmer Rouge forced them under pen­ alty of death to labor in the collectivized fields, expropriating virtually their whole harvest and refusing them adequate medical care.19 Rummel’s explanation was that democide increases with government power. Power here refers to the government’s power over its own citizens, and it has two dimensions: the concentration of political decision making and the state’s control over other institu­ tions. Liberal democracies engage in less democide than other regimes because they have the least power in this sense, as decision making is spread out and institutions such as the media, the economy, and religion are largely independent. Autocracies engage in more democide, since decision making is more concentrated. And totalitarian regimes, where political decision making is concentrated and where the government has control over other institutions, engage in the most democide. Rummel’s theory is consistent with Turner’s argument that communist revolutions simply gave rise to a new kind of inequality. Putting private property into the hands of the government didn’t reduce inequality; it increased it by making power more con­ centrated. In Black’s terminology, communist revolutions involved overstratification, as communist party elites gained control over the government and over the means of production. This was a large and fast movement of social time, an act of leapfrogging given that the former elites simultaneously lost their power. Leapfrogging—where those who were formerly subordinate gain power over their former superiors—is an especially dangerous movement of social time.20

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This is all as Black’s theory predicts. No community can stop social time, so they can’t stop conflict. That doesn’t mean the specifics of the conflict are inevitable. Not every smallscale utopian community splits, for example, and those that do don’t all do so for the same reasons. Many of the would-be utopian communities seem to have been fairly pleasant places to live, at least for a while. And while attempts to create large-scale utopias have always led to political violence, some utopian-minded regimes have been more murderous than others. Any kind of conflict, though, is enough to preclude utopia.

Utopian Social Justice The main problem with utopian social justice is that instead of making the kinds of comparisons that help social scientists better understand the world—such as compar­ isons of societies in different times and places—utopian-minded activists compare the present society to a world that doesn’t exist, to a world that can’t exist. Sometimes this is explicit, as with Cabet’s efforts to create a society modeled after the imaginary land of Icaria. But of course, the big difference between a fictional society and a real one is that the author of fiction has control over what happens. When Cabet wanted to ima­ gine a society where everyone was happy, and where there was no property, no police, and no crime, there was nothing to stop him. He was able to avoid any problems in his imaginary Icaria simply by not writing them into existence. But when he tried to create Icaria in reality, he was no longer the author of what happened; he was no longer in control. To make the move from author of a utopian novel to leader of a utopian community is like becoming a character in a different novel—an influential character, to be sure, but now you only get to write your part, not everyone else’s, and you don’t know how the story will end. In your novel you can decide the outcomes of social policies, you can decide whether your policies have tradeoffs, and you can decide whe­ ther people accept them, but if you actually try to change the world, as Cabet found out, you can’t do any of that. Utopians often focus on the problems associated with an aspect of human society, and their solution is just to get rid of it. They might look at conflicts over sex and propose celibacy, like the Shakers did, or they might propose nonmonogamy, like the Oneida perfectionists did. Or like Marx, they might propose eliminating the vast inequalities in capitalist societies by having the government seize control of the means of production. But sometimes utopian thinking is less explicit than trying to create a new commu­ nity based on the perfect society you wrote about in a novel or on the perfect society you believe has been foretold by prophecy. And sometimes it’s less explicit than blindly following an ideology like Marxism that promises a new world. We often have more subtle ways of abandoning the hard work of thinking sociologically about social justice. If we see a problem like inequality, violence, or anything else, and we talk about it simply as a problem to be eliminated—as if there’s a possible society where it doesn’t exist—we’re often invoking a kind of implicit utopianism. We might see that speech can cause offense, and decide to try to eliminate offensive speech. Or in response to police violence and other misbehaviors, as we saw in Chapter 5, we might argue for abolishing the police. Or if we think the misbehavior of governments is much more extensive than just what the police do, we might argue for abolishing the whole government. The problem is that we can’t know whether any of these are good policies without sociological evidence about their likely effects, without clarity about our values, and without an analysis of the tradeoffs, as we’ve learned in previous chapters. Whether our utopianism is explicit or implicit, we err if we assume that every problem we can

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identify has a solution. It might be that there’s no possible society where there isn’t conflict about sex, for example, and maybe the norm of monogamy keeps those conflicts to a minimum.21 Or perhaps capitalism, despite its problems, leads to more freedom and to a higher standard of living than any other economic system.22 Perhaps it’s not possible to ensure that speech is never offensive.23 Perhaps it’s not possible to get rid of police without increasing crime.24 Perhaps it’s not possible to get rid of government under modern conditions without causing suffering and chaos.25 Comparing societies and other social settings often reveals that our goals might be unattainable, but not always. We don’t need to invoke a nonexistent society to imagine abolishing capital punishment, since capital punishment has been declining for several centuries and has already been abolished in many countries.26 Likewise, we don’t need to invoke a nonexistent society to imagine reducing homicides by police, since the rate of police homicide varies widely among police departments in the United States, pos­ sibly due in part to differences in training.27 And we don’t need to invoke a nonexistent legal system to imagine reducing the extent to which people’s social characteristics affect the outcomes of cases. We know that it’s possible to exclude certain kinds of social information from trials and other legal proceedings because some social information is already excluded.28 These are just a few of many possible social justice ideas that don’t depend on uto­ pian assumptions. But the kinds of real-world comparisons they depend on also point to limits on how much we can change things without causing greater harms. We know we can eliminate capital punishment without causing massive spikes in crime, but we don’t claim we can eliminate all criminal punishment. Perhaps if we can better under­ stand the variation in homicides by police among police departments, we can reduce these kinds of homicides, but we don’t claim we can eliminate them. And even if we can reduce the extent to which social characteristics determine whether someone wins or loses a legal case, how much they’re punished for a crime, and so on, we can’t eliminate the effect entirely. When pursuing social justice, we need to try to identify the limits of what’s possible. Comparative sociology can give us an idea about what’s possible and what isn’t, but we need real comparisons, not imaginary ones. And although this might seem odd to say given their failures, this is one reason we can be grateful to the 19th-century uto­ pians and to others who have tried creating new kinds of communities. Though they fail as utopias, new communities like these give us a greater variety of real-world comparisons, so they can give us insights into what can work and what can’t.29 And since, as Shermer points out, they’re relatively harmless given their small scale, maybe we’d benefit from having more of them—or at least more experimental communities, not necessarily more utopian communities as such. They wouldn’t have to involve radical new ways of living—though they might—but they could at least try to demon­ strate what it looks like to live according to various visions of social justice. We’ve seen that our social justice pursuits are hobbled by the limitations of our knowledge, and our large-scale attempts at radical change can lead to catastrophe. We have to be cautious in pursuing social justice in order to avoid doing harm. But smallscale experimentation in voluntary communities is less dangerous, and it might give us a better idea about the effects of various social justice ideas. It would be both naïve and hubristic for anyone to think, as the 19th-century utopians often did, that they could create communities characterized by such human flourishing that everyone would end up adopting their way of life. But the good thing about the hubris of the 19th-century utopians is that it left them so confident in their ideas that they didn’t think they needed to impose them on others. They were sure their success would be obvious.

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Current social justice activists could try adopting the small-scale and noncoercive approach of the 19th-century utopians, but out of humility rather than hubris, out of a recognition that their efforts might fail. By trying out their ideas in voluntary commu­ nities, they would be the ones to bear the costs of failure. And whether they were to fail or succeed, they would provide us with new evidence about human society. Either way, they would be helping future social justice efforts.

Social Justice and Imperfection The economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell, in his book A Conflict of Visions, identified two visions of politics—what he called the unconstrained and constrained visions—which he said are at the root of many of the political controversies of the day.30 The unconstrained vision is the idea that human nature and human societies are infinitely malleable and perfectible. No evil need ever be tolerated, not in the long run. The constrained vision is the idea that not everything is possible, that there are limits to what can be achieved through politics, and that there are almost always tradeoffs to be made. This naturally limits some of our plans, and it should temper our passions, but it doesn’t need to prevent us from pursuing social justice. As we’ve seen, the unconstrained vision—the pursuit of utopia—is sociologically unrealistic. It’s a fantasy, and often a dangerous one. If we’re going to think better about social justice then, we need to reject the unconstrained vision in whatever form it takes. This doesn’t mean any particular constrained vision is correct. We can reject utopian thinking and still be wrong about what’s possible and what isn’t. And just as those who are pursuing change can be wrong about the effects of their proposed policies, so can those who are trying to stop change. We don’t need to give up on improving things, but as we try to determine the best way of doing so, we need to be clear that we’re never going to be able to eliminate all problems. Again, pursuing social justice isn’t like writing a novel. We don’t get to choose the effects of our policies. We don’t get to wish away all the things we don’t like. We don’t get to choose our constraints. We are a part of social reality, not its author.

Notes 1 Durkheim, Rules of the Sociological Method, p. 100. 2 One problem with functionalism is that it tends to point to a phenomenon’s effects rather than its cause. The idea that crime and punishment produce solidarity, for example, points to an effect of crime and punishment, but this doesn’t actually explain why they occur. 3 Jennings, Paradise Now, p. 259.

4 Black, Moral Time, p. 4.

5 For example, we saw in Chapter 3 that this happened when the Soviet Union rejected Dar­ winism and Mendelian genetics in favor of Lysenkoism. 6 They failed as utopias, that is. Most also failed as communities, but the Shakers, while dwindling in numbers, have survived until the present. As of 2022, though, there were only two remaining Shakers (Harris, “Last Shakers”). 7 Quoted in Jennings, Paradise Now, p. 276.

8 Jennings, Paradise Now, p. 283.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid., p. 291.

11 Compare Christakis, Blueprint, p. 77.

12 For a more detailed summary of the Icarian communities and their history, see Jennings,

Paradise Now, pp. 242–292. 13 Shermer, Heavens on Earth, p. 185. 14 Ibid., p. 193.

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15 Shields and Dunn, Passing on the Right, p. 69. 16 Turner, Theoretical Sociology, p. 103. 17 By murder, Rummel meant the killing of unarmed, unresisting people. Ordinary war deaths— deaths on the battlefield—aren’t democide, then, but the bombing of civilians, the killing of prisoners of war, and other such killings during wartime are included. 18 Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides; Genocide, Chapter 6. 19 Rummel, Death by Government, pp. 35–36. 20 Black, Moral Time, p. 89. 21 For example, consider Daly and Wilson, “An Evolutionary Perspective,” p. 68. 22 For example, consider Berger, Capitalist Revolution. 23 For example, consider Paresky and Campbell, “Psychology’s Language and Free Speech Problem.” 24 For example, consider Leovy, Ghettoside. 25 For example, consider Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers, Chapter 3. 26 Phillips and Cooney, Geometrical Justice, pp. 136–137. 27 Campbell and Manning, Rise of Victimhood Culture, pp. 189–190. 28 Black, Sociological Justice, p. 64; see also Phillips and Cooney, Geometrical Justice, pp. 133–136. 29 See, for example, Christakis, Blueprint, Chapter 3. 30 Sowell, Conflict of Visions. According to Stephen Messenger (“The Water We Swim In”), the division Sowell describes reflects opposing cognitive styles. These opposing cognitive styles, he says, also account for the division between the six-dimensional morality of conservatives and three-dimensional morality of liberals (Haidt, Righteous Mind), which we discussed in Chapter 5, as well as similar divisions between Aristotelianism and Platonism (Herman, The Cave and the Light) and between the practical and technical knowledge identified by Michael Oakeshott (Rationalism in Politics). Messenger says that opposing cognitive styles rooted in personality differences are the common source of all of them and the root cause of political and moral conflicts.

References Berger, Peter L. 1986. The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty Propositions about Prosperity, Equality, and Liberty. New York: Basic Books. Black, Donald. 1989. Sociological Justice. New York: Oxford University Press. Black, Donald. 2011. Moral Time. New York: Oxford University Press. Campbell, Bradley and Jason Manning. 2018. The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Christakis, Nicholas A. 2019. Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. New York: Little, Brown Spark. Cooney, Mark. 1998. Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence: New York: New York University Press. Daly, Martin and Margo Wilson. 1999. “An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective on Homicide.” In Homicide: A Sourcebook of Social Research, edited by M. Dwayne Smith and Margaret Zahn, pp. 58–71. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Durkheim, Émile. 1981. The Rules of the Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method. New York: Free Press. Harris, Séan Alonzo. 2022. “The Last Shakers.” Deseret News, March 24. Available at: https://www. deseret.com/faith/2022/3/24/22989812/the-last-shakers-sabbathday-lake-maine-shaker-village. Herman, Arthur. 2014. The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization. New York: Random House. Jennings, Chris. 2016. Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism. New York: Random House. Leovy, Jill. 2015. Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America. New York: Spiegel and Grau. Messenger, Stephen. 2018. “The Water We Swim In: A Need to Look at Causes as Well as Effects.” Areo, October 8. Available at: https://areomagazine.com/2018/08/10/the-water-we-s wim-in-a-need-to-look-at-causes-as-well-as-effects/. Naimark, Norman M. 2010. Stalin’s Genocides. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Naimark, Norman M. 2017. Genocide: A World History. New York: Oxford University Press. Oakeshott, Michael. 1991. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Expanded Edition). India­ napolis: Liberty Fund. Paresky, Pamela and Bradley Campbell. 2023. “Psychology’s Language and Free Speech Problem.” In Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology: Nature, Scope, and Solutions, edited by Craig L. Frisby, Richard E. Redding, William T. O’Donohue, and Scott O. Lilienfeld, pp. 149–172. New York: Springer. Phillips, Scott and Mark Cooney. 2022. Geometrical Justice: The Death Penalty in America. New York: Routledge. Rummel, R. J. 1994. Death by Government. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Shermer, Michael. 2018. Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia. New York: Henry Holt. Shields, Jon A. and Joshua M. Dunn Sr. 2016. Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University. New York: Oxford University Press. Sowell, Thomas. 2007. A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggle (Revised Edition). New York: Basic Books. Turner, Jonathan. 2013. Theoretical Sociology: 1830 to the Present. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

8

Embrace Humility A Case for Classical Liberalism

Can we change the world? Can we make things better? We can, but we need to make sure that when we change the world, we really do make things better. If we have a proper sociological understanding of the world, we can be optimistic about social jus­ tice but also cautious. Remember what we’ve learned so far. First, we should learn about the world before changing it. We need sociology if we’re going to understand how society works enough to transform it to our liking. Second, we should acknowledge uncertainty. Sociological knowledge is often provisional, so we don’t want to just pick one approach that comports with our prior thinking. We need to learn from multiple theories. Third, we need to make sure we don’t treat ideology as science. Many sociol­ ogists think of themselves as activists more than scientists, so a lot of what gets counted as sociological theory isn’t really scientific at all. Fourth, we need to distinguish between facts and values. We need to recognize the limits of what sociology can tell us about social justice. As much as it can inform our pursuits, sociology can’t tell us what we should be pursuing; it can’t tell us what we should value. Fifth, we need to be willing to make tradeoffs. Our values often clash as if they’re warring gods, and we have to decide how much to honor each one. It’s rarely the case that anything we do to change the world has entirely positive or entirely negative consequences. Sixth, we need to make room for opposition. We have to accept the reality of pluralism. Not everyone will agree with us on how to improve society or even about what an improved society would look like. Part of the art of social justice is figuring out how to help people live with one another despite disagreement. And seventh, we need to accept imperfection. It’s impossible to have a perfect society, and the false promise of utopia commonly just leads to more bloodshed and oppression. We can sum all this up with an eighth and final tip for thinking better about social justice: Embrace humility. Embracing humility first of all means embracing intellectual humility by recognizing that we don’t always know what’s true or false. There’s a lot we don’t know, and a lot we’ll never know. Embracing humility also means embracing moral humility by recognizing that we don’t always know what’s right or wrong. Morality isn’t something we can get from science, and there’s usually no reason to think we have any special moral insights. Many of our fellow human beings disagree with us, and they’re often just as serious as we are about morality—and just as convinced they’re right. Embracing humility means being humble enough to question things and humble enough to learn, and it means being humble enough to keep questioning and keep learning. We can be optimistic about changing the world because we know that it’s possible to increase our knowledge and because we’re willing to do the work it takes to do so. But we know we still need to be cautious about changing the world because we’re aware of the challenges in applying any knowledge we acquire and because we know that any knowledge we acquire isn’t the final word. DOI: 10.4324/9781032616278-8

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If we embrace humility, we won’t pretend to have all the answers. And we won’t dismiss all of our antagonists as stupid or evil. We haven’t discovered a social elixir. We haven’t found a way to free ourselves from suffering, struggle, or conflict. We haven’t found a way to avoid all the hard choices our ancestors had to make. We know that we’ll never find a perfect way to organize society, but can we find the best way to organize a society given our other options? In one sense we can’t even do that—not with certainty. We’re not going to resolve all moral debates, and since any system we embrace is going to be imperfect, we can’t be sure that some better system won’t come along. Still, given what we’ve learned about sociology and social justice, I think we should at least consider the possibility that classical liberalism is the best system we know of for allowing us to pursue social justice with humility. I’m using the term classical liberalism here as the political scientist Francis Fukuyama uses it, to refer “a range of political views that nonetheless agree on the foundational importance of equal individual rights, law, and freedom.” Classical liberalism is a “doc­ trine that first emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century that argued for the limitation of the powers of governments through law and ultimately constitutions, creating institutions protecting the rights of individuals under their jurisdiction.”1 People sometimes use classical liberalism to refer to libertarianism, but I’m not using it here in that narrow sense. And people sometimes just call classical liberalism liber­ alism, and though I’ll also use liberalism in that sense here, keep in mind that I’m not referring narrowly to one side of the political divide in the United States—as when Americans talk about conservatives and liberals. In the broader sense in which I’m using the term in this chapter, both conservatives and liberals in the US are usually liberal. Classical liberalism, or just liberalism, then, is associated with liberal democ­ racies such as the United States, Canada, Japan, and most European countries, and it’s distinct from political philosophies such as monarchy, fascism, and communism. Liberalism is increasingly under suspicion—sometimes even under attack—in the societies where it’s long flourished. From segments of both the left and the right, we hear the argument that liberalism has failed—that its norms and institutions are no longer helping to secure justice or liberty, if they ever were. A lot of what the critics of liberalism say is correct, but I don’t think that means we should abandon liberalism. As we saw in the previous chapter, it’s very easy for us to start making the same error as utopians do when we compare the failures of real societies with the successes of imagin­ ary societies, and I think that’s largely what the critics of liberalism are doing. Liberal societies have many failures, but if we’re unable to find something better, why should we attribute those failures to liberalism? It’s at least possible that some form of liberalism is our best option.

Liberalism and the Left Much of the left is still liberal. They might favor more government intervention in the economy than the right does, more redistribution of wealth, and so on, but they tend to support liberal ideals such as individualism, free speech, universalism, and due process. The critique from the liberal left is often that we’ve failed to live up to the ideals of liberalism. But there’s also an illiberal left. First there were the Marxists, who rejected liberalism as part of the superstructure of capitalist societies, to be done away with after the communist revolution. And now there are the critical theorists and those inspired by them, who are like Marxists in the sense that they believe liberalism enables oppression. As Fukuyama puts it, certain versions of critical theory have “shifted from a critique of liberal practice to a critique of liberalism’s underlying essence.”2 Or as the

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social justice scholars Loretta Capeheart and Dragan Milovanovic said, “The CRTs [critical race theorists] challenged the very foundations of the liberal order. Notions of formal equality, neutral principles in law, and forms of legal reasoning were all seen as supportive of an order devoid of voices of people of color.”3 As we saw in Chapter 1, critical social justice scholars Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo say that social justice movements started to reject liberalism when they began to see it as a means of oppression. They say the liberal idea of individual autonomy, for example, “fooled people into believing that they had more freedom and choice than societal structures actually allow.”4 Sensoy and DiAngelo view individualism as an ideology that allows whites to obscure the importance of race, and they say that “being viewed as an individual is a privilege only available to the dominant group.”5 We see a similar argument—that liberal ideals protect the privilege of dominant groups—from a group of student activists at Berkeley who argue that when white people “believe in free speech, we do so because it works in our favor.” Free speech isn’t a reality for everyone, though, and support for it “assumes a level playing field among speakers that does not exist.”6 The feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon makes a similar argument about the rule of law, the liberal ideal of due process. “In the liberal state,” she says, “the rule of law—neutral, abstract, elevated, pervasive—both institutionalizes the power of men over women and institutionalizes power in its male form.”7

Liberalism and the Right The political right, like the left, still tends to support liberal ideals and institutions. In the United States, the right has had a libertarian bent, and support for free markets has been especially strong. Whereas the liberal left might support more government invol­ vement in regulating markets and redistributing wealth, though, the right has tended to support more government involvement in promoting traditional values and in enforcing criminal laws. The conflict between left and right has mostly been rooted in the ten­ dency of the left to sacrifice some freedom for the sake of equality and of the right to sacrifice some freedom for the sake of social order. For the most part, neither the mainstream left nor the mainstream right has advocated a radical overhaul of our institutions. But that has begun to change on the right just as it has on the left. One difference is that the illiberal right has fewer recent intellectual sources to draw from given the scarcity of conservatives in academia. So, there’s no right-wing equivalent of critical theory driving things like the Capitol riots of January 6, 2021. Right-wing populism is often illiberal, but there’s not always a clear ideology connected to what’s happening. Certainly, most of the people who came to the US Capitol to prevent the certification of Joseph Biden’s election to the presidency didn’t have an ideological opposition to democratic elections. They came out of loyalty to President Trump or because they believed his claim that the election had been stolen.8 Illiberalism on the right is often more personality based than ideological, but in recent years some conservative intellectuals have come to the same conclusion about liberalism as critical theorists—that liberalism itself is flawed and unsalvageable. Per­ haps the most well-known recent intellectual critique of liberalism from the right is political theorist Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed.9 According to Deneen, “Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself.” Though early liberals hoped that liberalism would “foster greater equity, defend a pluralistic tapestry of different cultures and beliefs, protect human dignity, and, of course, expand liberty,” it instead “generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation, and undermines freedom.”10

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For Deneen, the original sin of liberalism was a redefining of liberty. For the ancients, liberty, for both individuals and communities, had to do with self-governance, and it required discipline and the cultivation of virtue. But now liberty has come to mean freedom from constraint—from all kinds of natural, moral, and communal constraints. Liberalism leaves us free to pursue our desires, and we’ve wrecked and polluted the natural world, we’ve created vast inequalities between people, and we’ve broken up communities and cultures and left individuals reliant on the state. Note that while Deneen’s critique comes from the right, he’s as harsh on free-market conservatism as he is on sexual liberationist liberalism. He sees the right and left as “two ‘sides’ of liber­ alism,” which are “apparently locked in intense contestation,” but “together advance the main objects of the liberal project.”11 Deneen’s rejection of liberalism from the right is as thoroughgoing as the critical theorists’ rejection from the left. For the most part his concerns are different from theirs, but what they have in common is a break from the usual stance of those who tend to be on their side politically. On the right, people usually praise America’s foun­ ders, and they argue the founders’ intentions have been corrupted in various ways. On the left, people often praise America’s liberal ideals—such as the Declaration of Inde­ pendence’s claim that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights— and they argue that we still fall short of those ideals. Arguments between right and left are often arguments about who is being most true to America’s founding, but the illiberal movements on the right and left, despite their fundamental disagreements, consciously reject both the founders and their ideals. As the political philosopher Jim Belcher points out, this means they agree on at least one thing: “America is bad.”12

Liberalism and Sociology The illiberal left and right might agree that liberalism is flawed and that America and its ideals are bad, but are they right? Ultimately liberalism is an ideology, and argu­ ments for and against it are moral rather than scientific arguments. As I’ll explain, I don’t accept the moral argument for rejecting liberalism, but first let’s try to assess some of the more empirical claims of liberalism’s opponents. As we discussed in Chapter 3, ideologies are always a mix of ideas about right and wrong along with ideas about how the observable world actually operates. Sociology can’t tell us which moral claims are correct, but it can help us think more clearly about other aspects of an ideology. And if we subject liberalism to sociological scrutiny, we find out first of all that liberalism’s critics are actually right about some of its flaws. Sociology has sometimes had an uneasy relationship with liberalism, and this isn’t just because of Marxism and critical theory. Scientific sociologists have also tended to question liberal assumptions about human nature and society. Early sociological thin­ kers like Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim, who were eager to distinguish sociology from psychology, argued that the social realm was a reality that couldn’t be understood as resulting just from the choices of individuals. To some extent they were influenced by conservative critics of Enlightenment liberalism, who emphasized the importance of the community over the individual and who believed that in any healthy community reli­ gion, tradition, and authority would work to restrain individual desires.13 Sociologists weren’t necessarily ready to embrace conservative politics, but many were convinced that conservative thinkers had identified important aspects of society that were dis­ missed by liberal individualists.14 Durkheim rejected liberal individualism because he saw individuals as fundamentally social creatures, so he also rejected the liberal idea of society as a social contract. The

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contract view sees individuals and their interests as the drivers of human behavior, so in this view individuals create groups and societies because it’s in their interest to do so. If everyone were simply acting on their own behalf without the restraining forces of society, there would be a war of “every man, against every man,”15 as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it, and life in these circumstances would be “nasty, brutish, and short.”16 Individuals thus benefit by sacrificing some of their freedom in order to form societies. Societies then restrain individuals in ways that benefit everyone—such as by punishing violence and theft. Society ends up being a good deal for individuals, then, as it allows them to be at peace with one another. Liberal theorists don’t necessarily mean that society got started this way in any his­ torical sense. They don’t think individuals were in a war of all against all before they got together one day and made a contract. But they do believe a society’s legitimacy rests on its contractual nature—that it’s rational to form societies because, like con­ tracts, they benefit the individuals involved. It’s individuals who form contracts, and they each pursue their own interests and benefit from the agreement. In capitalist societies, contracts allow for wage labor and for trans­ actions in the marketplace, so it’s fitting that liberals even see society as a kind of contract. Marxists have challenged the liberal ideology of contracts by arguing that contracts assume an equality between both parties that doesn’t exist when capitalists and workers negotiate, but the Durkheimian critique is that sociality precedes individualism and that individualism actually depends on certain kinds of social relationships. According to Durkheim every contract depends on an implicit contract that the two parties will actually obey the contract. Without some kind of preexisting trust, agreements between indivi­ duals would be impossible. And this trust comes not from the rational calculations of free individuals, but rather from their social relationships and shared norms.17 This kind of sociological critique of liberalism can be extended much further. As with social contract theory, many of the basic ideas of liberalism just don’t really hold up well as accounts of how people behave or how social institutions work. For about 20 years now, I’ve been teaching a class in the sociology of law, and I’ve always pointed out how the insights of sociology conflict with the ideas of liberal jurisprudence. One aspect of liberal jurisprudence, for example, is formalism—the idea that the rules and facts are supposed to decide cases. In the early 20th century, though, the legal realist movement in American law schools showed that legal rules can’t explain the outcomes of judicial decisions. The legal realists often referred back to US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr., who defined law as “what the courts will do in fact.”18 Holmes believed that if you want to understand the law, it’s not enough just to read the relevant statutes. Though judges will appeal to the statutes and explain the logic of their decisions, Holmes said that behind the logic “lies a judgment as to the relative worth and importance of competing legislative grounds, often an inarticulate and unconscious judgment, it is true, and yet the very root and nerve of the whole proceeding.” Judges make decisions based on other factors, and then create the legal justification afterward. “You can give any conclusion a logical form,” Holmes said.19 Holmes and the legal realists were focused on appellate and constitutional law, but later on in the 20th century labeling theorists in criminology showed that legal rules don’t determine the behavior of the police or the outcomes of criminal cases either.20 Whether someone gets labeled a criminal isn’t just a matter of whether they engage in a behavior that’s defined by a legal statute as criminal, since there’s a great deal of variation in how the police treat different people who’ve committed the same crime. This variation in treatment might be a matter of chance, or it might be shaped by social factors, but since labels tend to stick, it has consequences even for the handling of future cases.

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Another aspect of liberal jurisprudence is universalism—equality before the law. In liberal legal systems, the rules tend to be universalistic—they apply to people equally regardless of their status and other social characteristics—so if the rules aren’t actually what decides cases, we might also ask whether there’s really equality before the law. Labeling theorists suggested there wasn’t, given that, say, a middle-class teenager might be treated more leniently than a working-class teenager when caught shoplifting. The sociologist Donald Black’s theory of law goes much further than the labeling theorists, though, in that it identifies cross-cultural sociological patterns in the handling of cases.21 In Chapters 4 and 5 we discussed aspects of Black’s theory of law, such as his idea that within a society, law varies directly with relational distance. This means, remember, that an offense between strangers tends to be treated more severely than an offense between intimates. Another of Black’s ideas is that downward law is greater than upward law. This means that an offense by a low status person against a high-status person tends to be treated more severely than an offense by a high-status person against a low-status person. Nothing in the rules says that cases should be handled this way. Nothing says that a man who kills a stranger should be punished more than a man who kills his wife. Nothing says a poor person who kills a wealthy person should be punished more than a wealthy person who kills a poor person. But Black says that these are the patterns we see, and there’s a great deal of evidence to support his claims.22 Black’s theory isn’t just about modern America, though. The patterns Black identi­ fies are supposed to hold true in all societies, and indeed we see that one of the main differences between modern liberal societies and the societies of the past is that the legal systems of many past societies didn’t even claim to be universalistic. The ancient Babylonians, the Vikings, and many others, for example, prescribed different penalties for murder and other offenses based on the status of the person killed. Whether uni­ versalism is good or not is a moral question, but Black’s work questions whether it exists and whether it could ever exist.23 If the rules don’t decide the case, and if there’s no equality before the law, is liberalism just a fiction? Should we abandon it? I don’t think so, and that’s partly because we should keep in mind, again, the dangers of utopianism. We don’t need to abandon an idea like universalism based on whether perfect equality before the law is possible, or even whether it’s always desirable. We can instead ask whether liberal legal systems provide any degree of equality compared to other systems and whether we think this is an improvement. Black’s theory of law explains variation in law, and it’s probabilistic in that it identifies patterns in the handling of cases rather than predicting exactly how a case will be handled. So, Black’s claim that law conforms to the same basic patterns in modern America as it does, say, in ancient Babylon, while correct, doesn’t mean there aren’t any differences in the two legal systems. Black’s theory can even explain some of those differences. To say that the rules aren’t dispositive, for example, doesn’t mean that the rules don’t matter at all, and Black’s theory can explain variation in the degree of formalism.24 Likewise, to say that social factors help determine the outcome of cases doesn’t mean they always do so to the same extent. Universalism, like formalism, is variable—a matter of degree. Liberalism, like any ideology, is partly false. Its critics are right about this. The rhetoric of liberalism sometimes rests on individualistic assumptions about human nature that don’t accord with our best understandings of social life. And liberal governments never fully realize many liberal ideals—and they probably can’t. But I’m not sure it’s possible to have a political philosophy that avoids any kind of exaggeration or overemphasis on one aspect of social life over another. The important thing is what kinds of outcomes liberalism leads to in comparison with the alternatives. And I think we should hesitate to reject liberalism unless we have reason to think there’s something better.

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Liberalism and Humility If we look at individualism and other aspects of liberalism as scientific claims, they don’t really hold up. If we look at them as moral claims, we can’t assess them scienti­ fically, but we might ask what the nature of the claim is. The individualist claims of liberalism might be taken as claims about human nature, in which case they’re not correct without a great deal of qualification, but if they’re moral claims about how governments and many other public entities should generally treat people, that’s a dif­ ferent matter. Deneen makes much of the fact that liberalism is based on a lie. And it’s easy to sympathize with this if the goal of liberalism really has to be maximizing individual autonomy. This is how Deneen seems to view it—that the hyperindividualism and the destruction of communities he decries are just the results of liberalism in full bloom and that any less destructive version of liberalism is just a nascent form of liberalism destined to become worse. Deneen tells a story about teaching a course at Princeton where he discussed the Amish practice of rumspringa. Rumspringa is a time when young people from Amish families can go out and experience life in the larger world before choosing whether they want to get baptized and become full members of the Amish community. The overwhelming majority of them end up choosing baptism, but Deneen points out that some of his colleagues thought this was evidence that the Amish weren’t really autonomous. “We will have to consider ways of freeing them,” one colleague said. For Deneen, this colleague’s reaction indicates that liberalism requires “perfectly liberated individuals,” since “the evi­ dence that Amish youth were responding to the pull of family, community, and tradition marked them as unfree.”25 I’d be more receptive to Deneen’s argument if I thought liberalism somehow required people to think like that colleague of his. But liberal ideals of individual autonomy haven’t led everyone to dispense with toleration and pluralism. Various liberal ideals are sometimes in tension with one another—again, there are always warring gods—but it’s not clear that autonomy always triumphs. That the Amish have been protected in the United States and allowed to have their own practices—they’re even exempt from required schooling beyond the eighth grade—is surely at least partly because of liber­ alism and not just in spite of it. The real question is what kind of society and what kind of government we’re to have, and even Deneen admits he doesn’t have a good alternative. As he puts it, “A rejection of the world’s first and last remaining ideology does not entail its replacement with a new and doubtless not very different ideology.”26 He doesn’t suggest overturning the liberal order; instead, he wants “smaller, local forms of resistance: practices more than theories, the building of resilient new cultures against the anticulture of liberalism.”27 There’s nothing illiberal about building new kinds of communities and cultures, and some forms of liberalism would welcome it. But can these other forms of liberalism prevail? Deneen dismisses the possibility, because he thinks the problems he identifies result from the full realization of liberalism. But even if this is partly true, and if the logical extension of liberalism is as Deneen describes it, I don’t see any reason why anyone who supports some form of liberalism would be required to take it to its logical extreme. Liberalism doesn’t need to be an all-encompassing ideology, and embracing liberalism shouldn’t mean one can’t avoid utopian thinking, acknowledge tradeoffs, or allow for pluralism. In fact, many liberal thinkers have thought of liberalism as an antiutopian ideology, and they’ve seen its ability to manage tradeoffs and protect pluralism as among its strengths.

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In the last chapter, we discussed Sowell’s idea of constrained and unconstrained visions of politics. What Deneen describes is a kind of unconstrained liberalism, but there are also versions of liberalism that acknowledge limits to what we can achieve through politics. Fukuyama, for example, says that classical liberalism isn’t a “means of seeking the good life,” but rather that it lowers “the aspirations of politics.”28 It’s a means of “peacefully managing diversity in pluralistic societies.”29 Or as political the­ orist Joshua Cherniss says, “Liberal politics is limited politics.”30 Fukuyama, Cherniss, and many others advocate a constrained form of liberalism. This means even the ideals of liberalism sometimes need to have limits. Fukuyama actually recognizes some of the same problems with contemporary liberalism that Deneen does, such as the problems created by free market absolutism on the right31 and by identity politics and critical social justice on the left.32 Fukuyama thinks these are excesses that need to be curbed, though, rather than reasons to abandon liberalism. Accepting a constrained form of liberalism also means recognizing that liberalism doesn’t have answers to all of life’s problems. It can’t guarantee happiness or virtue. It can’t provide deep social connections. It can’t provide anyone with the kind of thick morality that comes from being part of a moral community. It can’t guarantee that your side will win political conflicts. A constrained liberalism recognizes that liberal individualism is only a guide for managing certain kinds of relationships, and it allows various kinds of communities to flourish partly because the liberal state can’t provide all the things those communities can. Liberalism won’t stop us from bad sociological thinking, and it won’t necessarily stop us from making a mess of things when we try to make things better. But classical liberalism is at least distinct from many other ideologies in embracing humility. Cherniss says the lib­ eral thinker Reinhold Niebuhr “closely linked the ‘spirit of humility’ to democratic politics, which … required dispositions, or practices, of fallibilism—the recognition of the need ‘to question the validity of any claim, including our own—and toleration.”33 For Niebuhr, the spirit of humility should lead to “active self-criticism.”34 Liberalism, then, shouldn’t lock us into failed policies and bad ways of thinking, and we should feel free to use the logic and tools of science to examine the effectiveness of our social justice pursuits.

Liberalism and Social Justice Sociology can’t settle the debate over liberalism, but it should at least help us recognize bad thinking about social justice. The success of critical social justice on the left and the rise of illiberal thinking on the right might lead us to assume that liberal institu­ tions and ideals are responsible for any problems we can identify in liberal societies. Before we give up on liberalism, though, we might consider whether alternative ways of pursuing social justice actually do better in comparison. We’ve seen that the critics of liberalism don’t really have compelling alternatives, and there are good arguments that we can best advance social justice by protecting due process,35 free speech,36 academic freedom,37 free markets,38 and other ideals associated with liberalism. As we evaluate liberalism, the question shouldn’t be whether liberalism ever fails to prevent bad outcomes or whether it ever causes bad outcomes. Surely any kind of system does both. The question should be how liberalism compares to other actually existing systems. And if we’re trying to pursue social justice, we should ask whether liberalism does better than the alternatives in giving us the freedom to learn more about the world we’re trying to change, to draw from multiple sociological perspectives, to scrutinize ideological claims, to distinguish carefully between facts and values, to allow for tradeoffs, to protect pluralism, to accept imperfection, and to embrace humility. I think it does, and I think that’s the best path toward social justice.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents, p. vii.

Ibid., p. 68.

Capeheart and Milovanovic, Social Justice, p. 250.

Sensoy and DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal?, p. 26.

Ibid., p. 126.

Dean-Johnson et al., “On Whiteness, Free Speech.”

MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory, p. 237.

Collins, Reilly, and Ward, “In Harvard Study of Jan. 6.”

Deneen isn’t the only prominent right-wing critic of liberalism, though. The conservative

Christian writer Rod Dreher, for example, also argues that the individualism of the Enlight­ enment is flawed, and he says it eventually leads to the decline of Christianity and to a new kind of totalitarianism in which orthodox Christians are persecuted. Dreher thinks there’s no real alternative to liberalism, at least for now, and he wants Christians to find ways to protect themselves and their communities until something else comes along (Dreher, Benedict Option; Live Not by Lies). Catholic integralists offer yet another critique of liberalism from the right. The legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, for example, rejects the liberal idea of the separation of church and state, and in the post-liberal government he imagines, government policy would be guided by the precepts of Catholicism and the state would be subject to the authority of the Catholic church (Vermeule, “Ralliement”; “Beyond Originalism”; Barnett, “Common-Good Constitutionalism Reveals”). Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, p. 3. Ibid., p. 47. Belcher, Cold Civil War, p. 177. Hadden, Sociological Theory, p. 23. Ibid., p. 24. Quoted in Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers, p. 47. Quoted in Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers, p. 48. Collins, Sociological Insight, pp. 9–10. Holmes, “Path of Law,” p. 77. Ibid., p. 78. For example, see Becker, Outsiders. Black, Behavior of Law; Social Structure of Right and Wrong; Sociological Justice. For example, see Cooney, Is Killing Wrong?; Phillips and Cooney, Geometrical Justice. See Black, Sociological Justice, Chapter 6. Black, Social Structure of Right and Wrong, p. 145. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, p. 190. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., pp. 19–20. Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents, p. 6. Ibid., p. 7. Cherniss, Liberalism in Dark Times, p. 3. Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents, Chapter 2. Ibid., Chapter 5. Cherniss, Liberalism in Dark Times, pp. 158–159. Ibid., p. 159. Krishnan, “How Social Justice.” Esparza, “Contemporary First Amendment Politics.” Hooven, “Academic Freedom Is Social Justice.” Tomasi, Free Market Fairness.

References Barnett, Randy E. 2020. “Common-Good Constitutionalism Reveals the Dangers of any Non-Origin­ alist Approach to the Constitution.” The Atlantic, April 3. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/ ideas/archive/2020/04/dangers-any-non-originalist-approach-constitution/609382/. Becker, Howard. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press.

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Belcher, Jim. 2022. Cold Civil War: Overcoming Polarization, Discovering Unity, and Healing the Nation. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Black, Donald. 1989. Sociological Justice. New York: Oxford University Press. Black, Donald. 1998. The Social Structure of Right and Wrong (Revised Edition). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Black, Donald. 2010. The Behavior of Law (Special Edition). Bingley: Emerald Books. Capeheart, Loretta and Dragan Milovanovic. 2020. Social Justice: Theories, Issues, and Movements (Revised and Expanded Edition). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Cherniss, Joshua L. 2021. Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Collins, Ben, Ryan J. Reilly, and Jacob Ward. 2022. “In Harvard Study of Jan. 6 Rioters, Top Motivation Is Clear: Trump.” NBC News, July 20. Available at: https://www.nbcnews.com/p olitics/politics-news/harvard-study-jan-6-rioters-top-motivation-clear-trump-rcna38794. Collins, Randall. 1992. Sociological Insight: An Introduction to Non-Obvious Sociology (Second Edition). New York: Oxford University Press. Cooney, Mark. 1998. Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence: New York: New York University Press. Cooney, Mark. 2009. Is Killing Wrong? A Study in Pure Sociology. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Dean-Johnson, Liam, Aidan Dunbar, Anastasiya Gorodilova, Nico Sedivy, and Madison Shiver. 2015. “On Whiteness, Free Speech and Missing the Point.” The Brown Daily Herald, October 19. Available at: http://www.browndailyherald.com/2015/10/19/dean-johnson-16-dunbar-16-gorodilo va-16-sedivy-17-shiver-17-on-whiteness-free-speech-and-missing-the-point/. Deneen, Patrick J. 2018. Why Liberalism Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Dreher, Rod. 2017. The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.

New York: Sentinel. Dreher, Rod. 2020. Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. New York: Sentinel. Esparza, Louis Edgar. 2022. “Contemporary First Amendment Politics.” Contexts 21 (3): 22–27. Fukuyama, Francis. 2022. Liberalism and Its Discontents. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hadden, Richard W. 1997. Sociological Theory: An Introduction to the Classical Tradition. Tor­ onto: University of Toronto Press. Holmes, Oliver Wendell Jr. 1996. “The Path of Law.” In The Sociology of Law: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives, by A. Javier Trevino, pp. 76–79. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hooven, Carole. 2023. “Academic Freedom Is Social Justice: Sex, Gender, and Cancel Culture on Campus.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 52: 35–41. Krishnan, Rohan. 2021. “How Social Justice and Due Process Are Inextricably Linked.” FIRE, June 22. https://www.thefire.org/news/how-social-justice-and-due-process-are-inextricably-linked. MacKinnon, Catherine. 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Phillips, Scott and Mark Cooney. 2022. Geometrical Justice: The Death Penalty in America. New York: Routledge. Sensoy, Özlem and Robin DiAngelo. 2017. Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education (Second Edition). New York: Teachers College Press. Tomasi, John. 2013. Free Market Fairness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vermeule, Adrian. 2018. “Ralliement: Two Distinctions.” The Josias, March 16. Available at: https://thejosias.com/2018/03/16/ralliement-two-distinctions/. Vermeule, Adrian. 2020. “Beyond Originalism.” The Atlantic, March 31. Available at: https:// www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/common-good-constitutionalism/609037/.

Index

Abrams, Samuel 73, 76 activism 5, 9, 11–12, 18, 19, 26, 51, 52, 53, 74 Ahmari, Sohrab 75, 76 al-Gharbi, Musa 67n5, 76, 80n48 American Sociological Association 11–12, 53 Amish 63, 101 Amos 3 antiracism 7, 64–65, 80n48 anti-safetyism see safetyism Aristotelianism 44, 45, 49, 50, 93n30; see also Aristotle Aristotle 45, 50; see also Aristotelianism Armageddon strategy 86, 88 Atlas Shrugged (Rand) 71 Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity (Wernick) 10 authority 22, 32, 60–61, 98 Bankston, Carl 67n37 Barnes, J. A. 31 Baron, Jonathan 59 Beauchamp, Zack 75 Beck, Glenn 4 Becker, Howard 59 Before the Shooting Begins (Hunter) 22 Behavior of Law, The (Black) 47 Belcher, Jim 98 Bellet, Benjamin 39 Berger, Peter 44 Beyond Racial Gridlock (Yancey) 13n25 Biden, Joseph 72, 97 Binder, Amy 74 Black, Donald 18, 22, 28n45, 32, 44, 47, 48–49, 66, 85–86, 87, 88, 89, 100; see also Behavior of Law, The; Moral Time; Sociological Justice Blau, Peter 25 blood feuds 31 Bondi, Pam 73 Breault, Kevin 41n31 Brisbane, Albert 86 Buchanan, James 24; see also Politics and Public Choice Burawoy, Michael 12

Cabet, Étienne 87–88, 90; see also Voyage to Icaria Calvin, John 51 Cambodia 3, 19–20, 89 Campbell, Bradley 7, 8, 36–37, 48, 58, 61, 63, 67n4, 67n15, 70; see also Rise of Victimhood Culture, The Capeheart, Loretta 97 capitalism 19–20, 35, 51, 77, 89, 90, 91, 96, 99 capital punishment 35, 46, 47, 49, 91 Carlson, Tucker 58 Carroll, Sean 45, 46 Case Western Reserve University 8 Chambers, Whittaker 71 Cherniss, Joshua 102 China 19, 20, 88, 89 Christakis, Erika 73, 76 Christakis, Nicholas 73, 76 Christianity 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 13n25, 86, 103n9 civility 72–76 classical liberalism see liberalism Coddling of the American Mind, The (Lukianoff and Haidt) 6, 58 cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) 6–7 Collins, Randall 18, 41n1; see also Conflict Sociology Comte, Auguste 9–12, 14n49, 17, 51, 85, 98 communism 3, 19–20, 71, 88–89, 96 Conflict of Visions (Sowell) 92 Conflict Sociology (Collins) 41n1 conflict theory 18, 19–21, 25, 26, 30, 32, 39, 41n1 Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth (Williams) 6 conservatives 4, 22, 24, 25–26, 58, 60–62, 73, 74, 75, 76, 93n30, 96–98 constrained vision, the 92, 102; see also unconstrained vision, the Cooney, Mark 37–38; see also Execution by Family Covid 57–58, 59, 61–62, 67n4, 67n5, 67n15, 70–71 crime 21, 23–25, 31, 48, 66, 84–85, 87, 90, 91, 92n2, 99

106

Index

Crime and the American Dream (Messner and Rosenfeld) 23 critical race theory 13n25, 97; see also critical social justice; critical theory; intersectional theory critical social justice 6–7, 17, 19, 26, 27n2, 63, 73, 75, 76, 102; see also critical race theory; critical theory; intersectional theory; social justice critical theory 2, 5–7, 13n25, 17, 18–21, 26, 27n2, 30–40, 50, 52, 63, 64, 77–78, 96–97, 98; see also critical race theory; critical social justice; intersectional theory cultural appropriation 20–21 Culture Wars (Hunter) 22 Cuomo, Andrew 57–58

Falwell, Jerry Jr. 73 family honor violence 37–38, 40 fascism 41n7, 58, 71, 88, 96 Feagin, Joe 12; see also Liberation Sociology Field of Dreams strategy 86, 88 Floyd, George 36, 37, 62, 64, 65 formalism 99–100 Fourier, Charles 86–87 France 7, 87, 88 free-rider problem, the 24 free speech 2, 7, 75, 96, 97, 102 French, David 75 Fukuyama, Francis 7, 96, 102 functionalist theory 18, 25–26, 28n45, 32, 84, 92n2

Dahrendorf, Ralf 41n1, 51 Darwinism 31, 37; see also neo-Darwinian theory Davies, Antony 57 Davis, Joseph 45, 49, Davis, Kingsley 25 Death of Character, The (Hunter) 77 death penalty, the; see capital punishment de Blasio, Bill 61, 72 Deflem, Mathieu 12 democide 89, 93n17 Deneen, Patrick 97–98, 101–102, 103n9; see also Why Liberalism Failed deterrence theory 23–24 dignity 3, 21, 63, 72, 76, 79n8, 97 dignity culture see moral cultures Dettwyler, Kathryn, 74 Dewey, Thomas 45 DiAngelo, Robin 5–6, 7, 17, 32, 76–78, 97; see also Is Everyone Really Equal?; White Fragility Divergent (Roth) 62–63 diversity 2, 4–5, 12, 13n38, 26, 31, 40, 76–79, 85–86, 102 diversity statements 4–5 diversity training 40, 76–79, 80n45 domestic violence 35–36, 40 Dreher, Rod 103n9 due process 96, 97, 102 Durkheim, Emile 12, 18, 25, 32–34, 35, 47, 84–85, 87, 98–99

Geertz, Clifford 22 genocide 31, 37, 48, 89 Georgetown University 8 God 3, 4, 6, 10, 49, 51, 72, 86 Gorski, Philip 45, 48, 49–50, 52, 53, 55n56 Gouldner, Alvin 45, 53 Gray, David 50 Great Society, the 3 gun control 70–71

economics 23, 86 Engels, Friedrich 19; see also Manifesto of the Communist Party, The epistemic egocentrism 22 equality 5–6, 8, 9, 12, 19, 26, 38, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64–65, 67n37, 80n48, 85, 87, 89, 90, 97, 99–100 Execution by Family (Cooney) 37–38 explanation 37–38, 39, 40, 47–48, 52 facts 1, 2, 35–36, 37, 38, 44–53, 54n21, 95, 102 false accusations 31, 85

Haidt, Jonathan 5, 6–7, 20, 26, 31, 40, 58, 59, 60–61, 63, 76; see also Coddling of the American Mind, The; Righteous Mind, The Haley, Nikki 73 Harrigan, James 57 Hayek, Friedrich 7–8, 13n38 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 45 heteronormativity 20 Hobbes, Thomas 99 Hobsbawm, Eric 71–72, 88 Hoch, Charles 55n57 Holmes, Oliver Wendall Jr. 99 homicide 21, 47, 84, 91 honesty 31, 52, 62; see also lying honor 37–38, 40, 63; see also family honor violence honor cultures see moral cultures How to Be an Antiracist (Kendi) 64 Hughes, Coleman 65 Hume, David 46; see also Hume’s law Hume’s law 46, 47 humility 2, 11, 58, 92, 95–96, 101–102 Hunter, James Davison 22, 44, 77, 78, 80n47; see also Before the Shooting Begins, Culture Wars; Death of Character, The Icarians, the 87–88, 90, 92n12 ideology 1, 22, 30–40, 41n7, 44, 50, 52, 77, 83, 88, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102 Ignatieff, Michael 71 illiberalism 96–98, 101, 102; see also liberalism inaccurate observation 34 incivility see civility

Index individualism 6, 22, 32, 33, 71, 77, 85, 96, 97, 98–99, 100, 101, 102, 103n9 indoctrination 71, 76–79 inequality see equality intersectional theory 20; see also critical race theory; critical social justice; critical theory Is Everyone Really Equal? (Sensoy and DiAngelo) 5 Jennings, Chris 85, 87, 88 Jeong, Sarah 75, 76 Johnson, Barclay 41n30 Johnson, Lyndon 3 Johnston, David 8 Jones, Payton 39 Judd, Cristle Collins 73 Kaba, Mariame 65–66 Kadakal, Reha 45 Katz, Jack 21; see also Seductions of Crime Kendi, Ibram X. 64–65; see also How to Be an Antiracist Kesler, Charles 72 Khalid, Amna 39 Khan, Sadiq 72 King, Daniel 36 King, Martin Luther Jr. 3 Klein, Ezra 75 Krietemeyer Ron, 8 Kuehl, Sheila 36 Kuhn, Thomas 17–18, 26; see also Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Latzer, Barry 36 law 7, 19, 20, 25, 47, 57, 66, 84–85, 96, 97, 99–100 Lawson, Tony 52–53 leapfrogging 89 Lee, Ann 86 legal realism 99 liberalism 1, 2, 95–102, 103n9 liberals 22, 24, 25, 26, 40, 60–62, 73, 93n30 Liberation Sociology (Feagin) 12 libertarianism 96, 97 Lilienfeld, Scott 39 Lundsgaarde, Henry 47 Luther, Martin 51 Lutz, Matt 64 lying 31, 52, 55n57; see also honesty Lysenko, Trofim 31; see also Lysenkoism Lysenkoism 40, 92n5; see also Lysenko, Trofim Logic of Collective Action, The (Olson) 24

Lukianoff, Greg 6–7, 20, 58, 76; see also

Coddling of the American Mind, The

MacKinnon, Catherine 97 Manifesto of the Communist Party, The (Marx and Engels) 19 Manning, Jason 7, 8, 32, 34, 36–37, 63; see also Rise of Victimhood Culture, The; Suicide

107

Marks, Jonathan 31, 40 marriage 86, 88, 90, 91 Martin, Chris 22, 39, 41n7 Marx, Karl 6, 24, 30, 88–89, 90; see also Manifesto of the Communist Party, The; Marxism Marxism 1, 2, 12, 19–20, 30, 71, 77, 88, 90, 96, 98, 99; see also Marx, Karl Maull Amanda, 45 McArdle, Megan 70–71 McNalley, Richard 39 McWhorter, John 7 Messenger, Stephen 93n30 Messner, Steven 23; see also Crime and the American Dream methods 6, 32, 34–35, 48, 49 microaggressions 7, 20–21, 39, 40 Milovanovic, Dragan 97 Minotaur, the 45, 53 Mohler, Albert 4, 5 Moore, Russell 72–73 moral cultures 62–63, 77, 78, moral education 77–79 moral emaciation 64 moral foundations theory 60–61 moral grandstanding 31 moralism 21, 72 morality 5, 22, 31, 38, 40, 45, 48, 53, 58–59, 60–65, 72, 77–78, 84–86, 92n30, 95, 102 Moral Time (Black) 85 motivational theory 18, 22–23, 25, 32 Nedelisky, Paul 44 neo-Darwinian theory 18, 28n45; see also Darwinism Newman, Omarosa Manigault 72 Niebuhr, Reinhold 102 Nietzsche, Friedrich 10 Nolan, Patrick 55n56 North Korea 73 Novak, Michael 8 Noyes, John Humphrey 86 Nuzzo, Jennifer 62 Oakeshott, Michael 93n30 Obama, Barack 57 objectivity 6, 32, 49, 55n57 Occidental College 5 Olson, Mancur 24; see also Logic of Collective Action, The Oneida community, the 86, 88, 90 opportunity theory 18, 24–25 overgeneralization 34–35 paradigms 17–27, 30, 32, 33, 39; see also theory Paresky, Pamela 7, 58, 61, 67n15, 70 Parsons, Talcott 25 patriarchy theory 37–38 phenomenological theory 18, 21–22

108

Index

Pierce, Gregory F. Augustine 8 Plato 52; see also Platonism Platonism 93n20; see also Plato pluralism 12, 48, 70–79, 80n57, 95, 97, 101, 102 polarization 22, 72, 74 police 36, 37, 47, 62, 63, 65–66, 90–91, 99 Politics and Public Choice (Buchanan) 24 Pol Pot 3 Powell, Michael 62 Princeton University 101 protected values 59, 65; see also sacred values secular values public sociology 12 public goods 24 pure sociology 18; see also Black, Donald Rand, Ayn 71; see also Atlas Shrugged rape 47 rational choice theory 18, 23–24, 32 Redstone, Ilana 4–5; see also Unassailable Ideas religion 7, 10–12, 14n49, 23, 25, 41n5, 89; see also Christianity Righteous Mind, The (Haidt) 26 Rigney, Daniel 18 Ringle, Ken 36 riots 36–37, 40, 97 Rise of Victimhood Culture, The (Campbell and Manning) 63 Robb, Alice 36 Rogers, Fred 73 Romero, Mary 12, 53 Rosenfeld, Richard 23; see also Crime and the American Dream Rossi, Peter 55n57 Roth, Veronica 62–63; see also Divergent Rummel, R. J. 89, 93n17 ruthlessness 71–72, 76 Sabl, Andrew 50 Sacred Project of American Sociology, The (Smith) 12 sacred values 59, 62, 65, 79; see also protected values; secular values safetyism 58, 70 Sarah Lawrence College 73 science see explanation; methods; paradigms; theory; typologies; value-free sociology Seductions of Crime (Katz) 21 secular values 59; see also protected values; sacred values selective observation 34–35 Senechal de la Roche, Roberta 37 Sensoy, Özlem 5–6, 7, 17, 32, 97; see also Is Everyone Really Equal? Seubert, Virginia 52 Shakers, the 86, 90, 92n6 Shermer, Michael 88, 91 Smith, Christian 12, 45, 49, 50; see also Sacred Project of American Sociology, The

Snyder, Jeffrey Aaron 39 social contract theory 98–99 social justice: attitudes toward 3–4; Christianity and 4, 6, 7, 8, 13n25; critics of 4–7, 27n2; imperfection and 92; liberalism and 102; meaning of 7–9; pluralism and; 79 sociology and 9; tradeoffs and 64–66; uncertainty and 26–27; utopia and 90–92; see also critical social justice social solidarity 18, 25–26, 31, 41n9, 84, 92n2 social time 85–88, 90 sociological anarchism 66 Sociological Justice (Black) 66 Sowell, Thomas 92, 93n30, 102; see also Conflict of Visions Spranca, Mark 59 Stalin, Joseph 31, 88, 89 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn) 17 suicide 32–34, 35, 41n30, 41n31, 47–48 Suicide (Manning) 34 Taparelli, Luigi 8 terrorism 31, 37 Theoretical Sociology (Turner) 30 theory: of conflict, 85, 87, 88; of democide, 89; of family honor killings, 37–38; evaluation of, 33–40, 78; of genocide, 48; of law, 47, 100; meaning of, 32; of suicide, 32–34, 41n30, 45, 47–48; types of, 18; see also conflict theory; critical race theory; critical theory; deterrence theory; explanation; functionalist theory; intersectional theory; moral foundations theory; motivational theory; neo-Darwinian theory; opportunity theory; patriarchy theory; phenomen­ ological theory; pure sociology; rational choice theory; social contract theory; typologies Tillerson, Rex 72 Tlaib, Rashida 73 torture 3, 31 tradeoffs 2, 11, 26, 33, 57–66, 67n15, 79, 83, 90, 92, 95, 101, 102 trigger warnings 39, 40 Trump, Donald 72–73, 74, 75, 97 Turner, Jonathan 9, 11, 12, 18, 30, 31, 41n5, 44, 89, see also Theoretical Sociology typologies 32, 33, 37, 39, 40 Unassailable Ideas (Redstone and Villasenor) 4 unconstrained vision, the 92, 102, see also constrained vision, the understratification 87 universalism 96, 100 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) 5 University of Delaware 74 University of Oklahoma 8 University of Tennessee 8

Index University of Virginia 73 University of Wyoming 13n38 utopianism 2, 11, 83–92, 95, 96, 100, 101 value-free sociology 44–53, 54n46, 55n53, 58 value judgments 1–2, 11, 44–53, 54n21, 59–62, 83, 95, 102 Van den Berg, Axel 9 Vermeule, Adrian 103n9 victimhood culture see moral cultures Villasenor, John 4–5; see also Unassailable Ideas violence 3, 9, 19, 21, 22, 23, 31, 33, 35–38, 39, 40, 47, 48, 57, 66, 86, 88, 90, 99; see also blood feuds; capital punishment; democide; domestic violence; family honor violence; genocide; homicide; rape; riots; suicide; terrorism; torture vocation 51 Vonnegut, Kurt 64 Voyage to Icaria (Cabet) 87 Walters, Suzanna Danuta 74

109

Warmbier, Otto 73–74 warring gods 59, 66, 95, 101; see also tradeoffs Weber, Max 6, 32, 44, 48,51, 52, 58–59 Weinstein, Deena 52 Wernick, Andrew 10, 14n49; see also Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity white fragility 20, 77–78 White Fragility (DiAngelo) 76–79 white privilege 39 white supremacy 20, 21 Why Liberalism Failed (Deneen) 97–98 Williams, Linda 47 Williams, Thaddeus 6, 13n25; see also Confront­ ing Injustice without Compromising Truth Wood, Kate 74 Yale University 73 Yancey, George 13n25; see also Beyond Racial Gridlock Yiannopoulos, Milo 74, 76 Zielinski, Sarah 31