I'm not very educated; I could feel the consequence of that when I tried to make sense of this article. But I read it anyways—rather slowly I'll admit—and was able to understand some of it using whatever context clues I could. I think (please correct me if I am wrong) that you think that there may be one political bias that dominates the study of societies, and that it's effecting the accuracy of the conclusions because of their preconceived notions.
If I'm totally wrong, I apologize.
If I managed to do ok—with my limited ability capabilities—I want express my concern as well. Through my eyes, I find it very challenging to engage with most people because, for the most part, they seem to have equipped a lens that prescribes a certain set of explanations for matters that pertain to society. There can be lenses stacked on lenses, but almost every person is either wearing a set of blue lenses or red lenses. In essence, almost every person sees the world with a strong red or blue cast over everything. But unlike clear prescription bifocals that sharpen the objectivity of reality, these lenses saturate the wearer's worldview. The only thing that they both agree on—red and blue—is that the other is wrong. People drive down the highway and pass a black man that has been pulled over by a police officer—perhaps he was speeding or perhaps he wasn't. Further down the highway, drivers see a family climbing over the US/Mexico boarder—perhaps they have the right to be here or perhaps they don't. My concern is that almost everyone is wearing a set of preconceived red or blue lenses.
Regardless of what is being researched in universities, these metaphorical lenses cannot be on. Every aspect, from observation to conclusion, is highly susceptible to preconceived notions; every aspect will confirm the bias.
As a PhD in music education, which is deeply rooted in sociology and the humanities, I can't agree more. There were some parts in my thesis that the external reviewer commented on a paragraph reminding me that I must consider “socially constructed biases in western music education that have led to the dominance of classical music in the world” … although I understand some part of their argument, I still wonder how a phenomenon like western classical music education system can travel the world and lead to train best of best musicians, and yet, leftists say this trend must be dismantled and this is pure whiteness in education. Partially true, but the nature of this education system was so insanely valuable that it could travel the world! Yeah… I can not agree more.
The problem of the humanities is not the lopsidedness of political association. It's not surprising that anthropologists, who study ethnicities around the world, don't fall for the racism of the republicans. It's not surprising the sociologists don't support the scrapping of social programs to lower the tax of the ultrarich.
The problem of todays humanities is their philosophical underpinning by the worst of the postmodern ideas: The tabula rasa idea of humans, the antirealism through Foucault and a false reading of Kuhn, the logocentrism(words reign over reality).
The groupthink You based Your article on (dems vs reps) is one of those postmodern artifacts I hope You can rid Yourself of.
I think you should re-read because my argument is that political bias is not what matters, but instead core assumptions are. So, not much different than what you wrote.
But, I’d also argue that your characterization of Republicans is exactly why political bias does matter (and maybe I should give more weight to it). The government doesn’t own our money and tax cuts are a gift. That’s an utterly biased way to view it. Given that freedom demands we own the product of our own labor and exchange, taxes for social programs must be justified by those programs 1) working to solve an issue, 2) the issue is necessary for the greater good to solve, and 3) there’s no other way to solve it. Republicans thinking that there are better ways (market based solutions) to solve issues of poverty than taxes and government programs does not make them racist or only working for ultra rich interests. No more than Democrats desire for some form of social health care makes them Stalinists. Culture matters. A Republican who would prefer immigrants from Trinidad (English speaking, Catholic nation) rather than Syria or Haiti is not racist, any more than a Democrat who wants open borders doesn’t have to be anti-white or anti-western. These are policy disagreements based on different views of human nature and it behooves us all to honestly consider others assumptions and ideas rather than characterize them as foolish, evil, or dishonest. What you did absolutely IS one of the problems with humanities, social science, and current politics in general.
It’s strange that mental health professions get a pass when they are important enforcers of behavioral norms with legal authority. Surveys show that at least 80 percent of practicing psychologists vote Democratic, and they almost entirely identify as feminists.
So you're saying the problems are socially constructed by the educators supposed to be teaching the students how to interperate reality they are supposed to study.
Chuck in some classical diabolical dialectical rhetoric to make everyone confused.
All this just to protect pedophiles. The right is sick. You're just mad at researchers because they supported Metoo and it embarrassed your elite pedo backers.
Isn't this because a sociology based on biological differences was strongly associated with colonialism and fascism, and was discredited by their collapse?
Yes. An approach that assigns 100% of the explanation for social inequality to biology is associated with Nazism, eugenics, colonialism, etc.
But an approach that assigns 100% of the explanation for social inequality to social construction should be associated with communism and Maoism and the Khmer Rouge and equally be discredited.
And then we can all be ok living in the space where the truth is- that social differences are a combination of biology, culture, history, geography, psychology, etc.
And once we all agree it’s a combination, we can do the important work of figuring how much of specific social outcomes are explained by different forces. It’s totally plausible that for one type of outcome it’s 75% construction and culture and 5% biology, but for a different type of outcome it’s 60% biology and 30% geography. Rather than be ideologically extreme, or be reactionary to ideological extremism, Sociology should just seek to find the truth and trust the scientific method and the market place of ideas.
Agreed, I'd just note that the scientific work on the marketplace of ideas indicates it doesn't really work in practice. People dig in when faced with contrary evidence, rather than moving towards the evidence.
This post got me to borrow Pinker's Blank Slate from the library and so far, so good.
As far as the evolution of disciplines goes, my limited understanding is that the statisticians (root "state") were funded by government to count the subjects. The original economists (e.g., Smith, Bastiat) were focused on pointing out the limits to state action ("peace, easy taxes, and tolerable justice" was Smith's recipe for development). But then economics got co-opted with Samuelson's quantification of economics in aspiring to do "science." The sociologists were a reaction against the economists. This story may be completely wrong.
Another thought, having just read Glaser & Strauss (1967) on grounded theory, is that qualitative analysis will tend to lead to frameworks based on data observable to the naked eye and ear, whereas a lot of hard science depends on instruments that extend our ability to observe. In other words, other than twin studies, sociology will never observe the effect of genes based on its methods.
Finally, if government pays your bills, then you work for government, and government is interested in expanding its scope and not in being told that its programs don't work. Throwaway policy prescriptions are required in the social sciences, and pure description doesn't satisfy the individual's will to power. Publish or perish!
Very true. I studied Sociology in the UK in the 80s and was struck by the dominance of Marxists in the department, although we have others who advocated Durkheim or Weber more, took a more phenomenological approach and so on. It is amazing to think that not a lot has changed, or at least if it had for while has now reverted back to this seemingly default position. It's actually quite oppressive and limiting to think through this lens of social dysfunction and inequity all the time, rather than follow a more authentic form of academic enquiry, open to a variety of perspectives and evidence.
Albert Murray in his 1970 book 'The Omni-Americans' gave a fascinating critique of sociology and how it supported some of the most destructive ideas arising from the post-1967 cultural revolution.
Sociologists aren’t supposed to “do” anything about anything. The idea that we are is a major problem of the discipline. We aren’t activists and we aren’t policy makers and we aren’t a ruling elite. We are social scientists. We are supposed to use the scientific method to discover truth about how society works and explain social outcomes and processes. If biology and hereditary constraints are part of that, we need to include them in our explanations.
One thing I find interesting is how normatively loaded so much sociology and anthropology is when it comes to studying western societies whole at the same time trying uphold the disciplinary norm that one should be nonjudgmental when it comes to non Western society. I would much prefer if they upheld the nonjudgmentalness norm across all their studies.
Everyone judges. Not just themselves, but everyone else. The paradox is that those who claim don’t are, in that very moment, judging those who do.
Whether someone admits it or not, everyone holds beliefs on what is right or wrong, good or bad, as well as beliefs on the things that we should or shouldn’t do. Many people think that forming an opinion on another’s beliefs is judgmental (it is), and that it’s bad (it’s wasn’t). In 1952, the definition of the word “judgmental” was changed from a neutral meaning—“involving the exercise of judgment”—to one that had a negative connotation when they added the adjective “harsh” or “excessive” before “judgement”.
A couple of questions before I dive in the pool. You speak of the dearth of conservative faculty members in sociology university sociology departments. The chart you display shows zero faculty members in Anthropology and Communications departments in the universities surveyed. Are we to conclude that Anthropology is a sociology? AI may agree with you but Anthropology professors don’t: they insist in having their own department, separate from the Sociology department. And Communications profesors as well consider themselves a department separate from Sociology. And the top of this chart is not unlike the top of a fruit tree: you seem not to have been able grasp the fruit at the top, i.e., the dearth of Democrats is some university departments. But the cherries at the bottom of the chart, the stats about Anthropology and Communications, were easily gathered to bake into this pie. I have a simple solution. Given that the number of Democratic-affiliated professors in Engineering departments is acceptable let’s just call on Anthropology and Communications departments to hire two Republicans each. End of story. God willing.
The top of the chart says that the most conservative discipline is engineering, where Democrats outnumber republicans 1.6:1! Nearly twice as many Democrats as Republicans in the most conservative discipline.
On Anthropology, Communications, and Sociology:
All of Academia is skewed left, that doesn’t make all of academia Sociology.
It may be that Anthropology has the same problems of narrow assumptions Sociology does, but I don’t know. I’m a Sociologist. I know what ails my discipline.
"If differences are socially constructed, then unequal outcomes are taken to be inherently unjust."
Differences are also unjust if they're innate. But I agree that sociology would look much different if we paid more attention to genetic differences and then asked how society processes those. One reason we're slow to do that (though of course some people are) is that genomic data is hard to get using our traditional methods. It's a looking-for-the-keys-under-the-lamppost problem.
Differences may be unfortunate if they're innate, but how can they be unjust? It's not clear that justice as a concept applies to nature, as opposed to things that humans have played a causal role in.
It's an interesting claim, that the perception of injustice depends on some other person being responsible for your disadvantage. Because injustice is in the eye of the beholder, I'll defer to any empirical evidence (though I'd want to control for religiosity, if more religious people are apt to take genetic differences as just because God made it so). My thought in writing that was simply that if sociology was more attuned to genetic effects, it wouldn't necessarily make it less activist, at least if the consequences of a genetic disadvantage were steep so that people a little less lucky in the genetic lottery were vastly worse off in their standard of living (income, job security, vulnerability to violence).
Holy strawman, Batman.
I'm not very educated; I could feel the consequence of that when I tried to make sense of this article. But I read it anyways—rather slowly I'll admit—and was able to understand some of it using whatever context clues I could. I think (please correct me if I am wrong) that you think that there may be one political bias that dominates the study of societies, and that it's effecting the accuracy of the conclusions because of their preconceived notions.
If I'm totally wrong, I apologize.
If I managed to do ok—with my limited ability capabilities—I want express my concern as well. Through my eyes, I find it very challenging to engage with most people because, for the most part, they seem to have equipped a lens that prescribes a certain set of explanations for matters that pertain to society. There can be lenses stacked on lenses, but almost every person is either wearing a set of blue lenses or red lenses. In essence, almost every person sees the world with a strong red or blue cast over everything. But unlike clear prescription bifocals that sharpen the objectivity of reality, these lenses saturate the wearer's worldview. The only thing that they both agree on—red and blue—is that the other is wrong. People drive down the highway and pass a black man that has been pulled over by a police officer—perhaps he was speeding or perhaps he wasn't. Further down the highway, drivers see a family climbing over the US/Mexico boarder—perhaps they have the right to be here or perhaps they don't. My concern is that almost everyone is wearing a set of preconceived red or blue lenses.
Regardless of what is being researched in universities, these metaphorical lenses cannot be on. Every aspect, from observation to conclusion, is highly susceptible to preconceived notions; every aspect will confirm the bias.
As a PhD in music education, which is deeply rooted in sociology and the humanities, I can't agree more. There were some parts in my thesis that the external reviewer commented on a paragraph reminding me that I must consider “socially constructed biases in western music education that have led to the dominance of classical music in the world” … although I understand some part of their argument, I still wonder how a phenomenon like western classical music education system can travel the world and lead to train best of best musicians, and yet, leftists say this trend must be dismantled and this is pure whiteness in education. Partially true, but the nature of this education system was so insanely valuable that it could travel the world! Yeah… I can not agree more.
The problem of the humanities is not the lopsidedness of political association. It's not surprising that anthropologists, who study ethnicities around the world, don't fall for the racism of the republicans. It's not surprising the sociologists don't support the scrapping of social programs to lower the tax of the ultrarich.
The problem of todays humanities is their philosophical underpinning by the worst of the postmodern ideas: The tabula rasa idea of humans, the antirealism through Foucault and a false reading of Kuhn, the logocentrism(words reign over reality).
The groupthink You based Your article on (dems vs reps) is one of those postmodern artifacts I hope You can rid Yourself of.
I think you should re-read because my argument is that political bias is not what matters, but instead core assumptions are. So, not much different than what you wrote.
But, I’d also argue that your characterization of Republicans is exactly why political bias does matter (and maybe I should give more weight to it). The government doesn’t own our money and tax cuts are a gift. That’s an utterly biased way to view it. Given that freedom demands we own the product of our own labor and exchange, taxes for social programs must be justified by those programs 1) working to solve an issue, 2) the issue is necessary for the greater good to solve, and 3) there’s no other way to solve it. Republicans thinking that there are better ways (market based solutions) to solve issues of poverty than taxes and government programs does not make them racist or only working for ultra rich interests. No more than Democrats desire for some form of social health care makes them Stalinists. Culture matters. A Republican who would prefer immigrants from Trinidad (English speaking, Catholic nation) rather than Syria or Haiti is not racist, any more than a Democrat who wants open borders doesn’t have to be anti-white or anti-western. These are policy disagreements based on different views of human nature and it behooves us all to honestly consider others assumptions and ideas rather than characterize them as foolish, evil, or dishonest. What you did absolutely IS one of the problems with humanities, social science, and current politics in general.
It’s strange that mental health professions get a pass when they are important enforcers of behavioral norms with legal authority. Surveys show that at least 80 percent of practicing psychologists vote Democratic, and they almost entirely identify as feminists.
So you're saying the problems are socially constructed by the educators supposed to be teaching the students how to interperate reality they are supposed to study.
Chuck in some classical diabolical dialectical rhetoric to make everyone confused.
All this just to protect pedophiles. The right is sick. You're just mad at researchers because they supported Metoo and it embarrassed your elite pedo backers.
Preaching to the converted with me but saying it better too!
Isn't this because a sociology based on biological differences was strongly associated with colonialism and fascism, and was discredited by their collapse?
Yes. An approach that assigns 100% of the explanation for social inequality to biology is associated with Nazism, eugenics, colonialism, etc.
But an approach that assigns 100% of the explanation for social inequality to social construction should be associated with communism and Maoism and the Khmer Rouge and equally be discredited.
And then we can all be ok living in the space where the truth is- that social differences are a combination of biology, culture, history, geography, psychology, etc.
And once we all agree it’s a combination, we can do the important work of figuring how much of specific social outcomes are explained by different forces. It’s totally plausible that for one type of outcome it’s 75% construction and culture and 5% biology, but for a different type of outcome it’s 60% biology and 30% geography. Rather than be ideologically extreme, or be reactionary to ideological extremism, Sociology should just seek to find the truth and trust the scientific method and the market place of ideas.
Agreed, I'd just note that the scientific work on the marketplace of ideas indicates it doesn't really work in practice. People dig in when faced with contrary evidence, rather than moving towards the evidence.
This post got me to borrow Pinker's Blank Slate from the library and so far, so good.
As far as the evolution of disciplines goes, my limited understanding is that the statisticians (root "state") were funded by government to count the subjects. The original economists (e.g., Smith, Bastiat) were focused on pointing out the limits to state action ("peace, easy taxes, and tolerable justice" was Smith's recipe for development). But then economics got co-opted with Samuelson's quantification of economics in aspiring to do "science." The sociologists were a reaction against the economists. This story may be completely wrong.
Another thought, having just read Glaser & Strauss (1967) on grounded theory, is that qualitative analysis will tend to lead to frameworks based on data observable to the naked eye and ear, whereas a lot of hard science depends on instruments that extend our ability to observe. In other words, other than twin studies, sociology will never observe the effect of genes based on its methods.
Finally, if government pays your bills, then you work for government, and government is interested in expanding its scope and not in being told that its programs don't work. Throwaway policy prescriptions are required in the social sciences, and pure description doesn't satisfy the individual's will to power. Publish or perish!
Very true. I studied Sociology in the UK in the 80s and was struck by the dominance of Marxists in the department, although we have others who advocated Durkheim or Weber more, took a more phenomenological approach and so on. It is amazing to think that not a lot has changed, or at least if it had for while has now reverted back to this seemingly default position. It's actually quite oppressive and limiting to think through this lens of social dysfunction and inequity all the time, rather than follow a more authentic form of academic enquiry, open to a variety of perspectives and evidence.
Albert Murray in his 1970 book 'The Omni-Americans' gave a fascinating critique of sociology and how it supported some of the most destructive ideas arising from the post-1967 cultural revolution.
The thing is sociologist can't do much about about biology or hereditary constraints, so they must focus on made up sociological stuff.
Sociologists aren’t supposed to “do” anything about anything. The idea that we are is a major problem of the discipline. We aren’t activists and we aren’t policy makers and we aren’t a ruling elite. We are social scientists. We are supposed to use the scientific method to discover truth about how society works and explain social outcomes and processes. If biology and hereditary constraints are part of that, we need to include them in our explanations.
" change the world for better " syndrome is quite prevalent among sociologist. Rigour has gone out of the window .
Agreed
One thing I find interesting is how normatively loaded so much sociology and anthropology is when it comes to studying western societies whole at the same time trying uphold the disciplinary norm that one should be nonjudgmental when it comes to non Western society. I would much prefer if they upheld the nonjudgmentalness norm across all their studies.
Everyone judges. Not just themselves, but everyone else. The paradox is that those who claim don’t are, in that very moment, judging those who do.
Whether someone admits it or not, everyone holds beliefs on what is right or wrong, good or bad, as well as beliefs on the things that we should or shouldn’t do. Many people think that forming an opinion on another’s beliefs is judgmental (it is), and that it’s bad (it’s wasn’t). In 1952, the definition of the word “judgmental” was changed from a neutral meaning—“involving the exercise of judgment”—to one that had a negative connotation when they added the adjective “harsh” or “excessive” before “judgement”.
A couple of questions before I dive in the pool. You speak of the dearth of conservative faculty members in sociology university sociology departments. The chart you display shows zero faculty members in Anthropology and Communications departments in the universities surveyed. Are we to conclude that Anthropology is a sociology? AI may agree with you but Anthropology professors don’t: they insist in having their own department, separate from the Sociology department. And Communications profesors as well consider themselves a department separate from Sociology. And the top of this chart is not unlike the top of a fruit tree: you seem not to have been able grasp the fruit at the top, i.e., the dearth of Democrats is some university departments. But the cherries at the bottom of the chart, the stats about Anthropology and Communications, were easily gathered to bake into this pie. I have a simple solution. Given that the number of Democratic-affiliated professors in Engineering departments is acceptable let’s just call on Anthropology and Communications departments to hire two Republicans each. End of story. God willing.
The top of the chart says that the most conservative discipline is engineering, where Democrats outnumber republicans 1.6:1! Nearly twice as many Democrats as Republicans in the most conservative discipline.
On Anthropology, Communications, and Sociology:
All of Academia is skewed left, that doesn’t make all of academia Sociology.
It may be that Anthropology has the same problems of narrow assumptions Sociology does, but I don’t know. I’m a Sociologist. I know what ails my discipline.
I appreciate being straightened out! Thank you, Josh. I stand corrected.
"If differences are socially constructed, then unequal outcomes are taken to be inherently unjust."
Differences are also unjust if they're innate. But I agree that sociology would look much different if we paid more attention to genetic differences and then asked how society processes those. One reason we're slow to do that (though of course some people are) is that genomic data is hard to get using our traditional methods. It's a looking-for-the-keys-under-the-lamppost problem.
Differences may be unfortunate if they're innate, but how can they be unjust? It's not clear that justice as a concept applies to nature, as opposed to things that humans have played a causal role in.
It's an interesting claim, that the perception of injustice depends on some other person being responsible for your disadvantage. Because injustice is in the eye of the beholder, I'll defer to any empirical evidence (though I'd want to control for religiosity, if more religious people are apt to take genetic differences as just because God made it so). My thought in writing that was simply that if sociology was more attuned to genetic effects, it wouldn't necessarily make it less activist, at least if the consequences of a genetic disadvantage were steep so that people a little less lucky in the genetic lottery were vastly worse off in their standard of living (income, job security, vulnerability to violence).