The road south from Kinshasa, Zaire, leads a quick two hundred miles to Kikwit and the welcome sight of the Kwilu Hotel. Broad steps sweep into the stone building. A restaurant, bar, and glassed-in atrium with lush plants beckon. The rooms are large, clean, air-conditioned, fitted with telephones, reading lamps, soft carpets, and private baths. It promises all the amenities of a Hilton or Marriott. The bath, already filled with cold water, and the candles by the bedside are the only clues that promise and reality may not correspond.
When a guest checks in, the receptionist asks for payment in advance in order to purchase diesel fuel for the electric generator. Even so, the electricity is turned off at 8 P.M. in order to save fuel. The large restaurant menu is filled with succulent choices. But guests get what they want only if they happen to want the one dish that is available the night they are there. And when they return to their rooms, the candlelight illumines unworkable taps, an unflushable toilet, a disconnected telephone, and an air conditioner that does not run.
Nonetheless, with a little flexibility, a stay at the Kwilu Hotel can be most refreshing. Mary Douglas notes:
Considering that it depends on its own generators, and that it has not enough credit with the Bank, and considering everything else that makes it difficult to use its medium technology appurtenances, it does remarkably well. Its management is to be congratulated on providing a comfortable, self-contained place for privileged travelers to rest.1
Sociology is a recently constructed building on the intellectual map. Along with other parts of modern science, it beckons with its broad steps, and it is full of promise and pretensions. Like the Kwilu Hotel, all does not work as advertised. This book is a guide, taking a look at the building that sociology is constructing and the amenities it offers.
Christians are interested in the reception that sociology gives the historic Christian tradition to which they are committed. What is it like to be a Christian while living and working as a sociologist? What possibilities exist for a distinctly Christian sociology? Does sociology provide for all the matters that Christian faith provided for in the past? Does it sharpen old questions and offer better answers or simply ask questions very different from those asked by Christianity? What language is spoken by sociology? Does the grammar of Christian faith translate into sociological discourse, or are they two mutually exclusive languages?
Approaching sociology for the first time can be somewhat intimidating. There are many floors, twisting hallways, suites of various vintages. The newcomer cannot be expected to know which of the promised amenities will work. Then there are the occupants—interesting characters who are long-term residents, others of more recent vintage, and new ones checking in all the time. Old portraits hang on the walls, some prominently displayed, others encountered only in small rooms off winding hallways, each with a story. Some are of prominent architects and builders of sociology, now forgotten or neglected. Many of them were Christians. Current residents often attempt to move the portraits about so that their favorites are more prominently displayed.
Part of the romance of sociology is the undisciplined nature of the relationships and conversations that happen among those who profess it. At times the jokes and arguments between sociologists can be as interesting as sociology itself. They even give clues as to what’s wrong with the more imperialistic versions of sociology that pretend, in deluded moments, to have all the truth about human beings and their communities.
A guidebook such as this is no substitute for actually talking to these figures or reading some of their wonderful books. It is a rewarding experience to curl up with a well-written work of sociology, to follow the cadence of the words as they reveal whole new worlds of experience and insight into the wiles and ways of human beings living in their unsociably social manner.2
Sociology helps one realize how narrow and limited his or her own social experience is. It takes readers to other worlds of culture and customs, social habits and arrangements that lie beyond the horizon of their own experience and imagination. It poses large questions that demand the clear, coherent, careful answers on which the very future of modern civilization depends. It also points out how difficult it is to construct such answers.
Philosophers of science often divide these difficulties into matters that have to do with the knower (the subject) and those having to do with what is to be known (the object).
One difficulty in getting good answers arises from the sort of creatures human beings are. At the very origins of the tradition of modern science, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) wrote about the “idols” that obscure a person’s ability to see things clearly. His idols refer to factors that bias the process of trying to discover truth. He listed four classes of such distorting tendencies.
The idols of the tribe are those tendencies of thought ingrown in human beings as a species. People are prone to believe what pleases them and to discount what doesn’t. They look for evidence that agrees with their own hypotheses and overlook contrary evidence. These are general or universal biases.
The idols of the cave result from the fact that each person is a member of a particular human group. An individual may be Caucasian, Asian, African American, male or female, liberal or conservative, religious or irreligious. Group loyalties give people specific biases. When they peer out at the world from their particular cave, they see things from the vantage point of that cave. Group affiliations affect how individuals feel about the larger social world. Sociologists spend a lot of time looking at these sorts of bias. A specialty called the sociology of knowledge traces the ways in which membership in and identification with specific groups shape the knowledge that people consider genuine and important.
The idols of the marketplace are problems created by the words, often the only words, that people have to talk to each other about reality. Language is the tool through which humans handle the world, labeling it, calling attention to certain features and not others. No one can think without words, and yet sometimes he or she can’t think straight with them. Words have a range of meanings, and people keep changing the ways they use words.
This is a serious problem in sociology. Most of the words that sociologists use are everyday, common words. To be scientifically useful, they must be given more precise and unusual meanings. Yet even when that is done, there is disagreement on those meanings within the sociological community. Many of sociology’s central concepts have multiple meanings—a point that can be proved simply by asking three or four sociologists to give clear definitions of “social class” or “culture.”
The idols of the theater represent the human tendency to prefer older, more widely accepted ideas over novel, minority opinions. Familiarity breeds respect. Common sense makes the uncommon look nonsensical. Humans (even scientists) prefer the security of the respectable and socially confirmed to the insecurity of the different and novel. Two hundred million Americans can’t be wrong. Or twenty thousand sociologists can’t be wrong. When something is considered self-evident and is widely received as the truth, it becomes nearly impossible to question it or to give new answers to those questions, even with substantial evidence as support.
Christians see these subjective tendencies toward confusion and bias as rooted in human nature. As fallen creatures made in the image of God, people have magnificent capabilities to probe the marvels of creation and human life. They have a hunger for truth, beauty, and goodness. Yet as creatures they are finite, limited in their ability to see the full picture. Still, humans have a God-given ability to apprehend truth and live in harmony with it.
As fallen creatures, people are afflicted by sin. Sin brings about alienating quests that take people away from the larger reality that this world belongs to God and is designed to serve God’s purposes. Because they are fallen, humans may repress the truth, create ugliness, and call the evil they do goodness. They confuse the limited for the unlimited, the imperfect for the perfect. They may even come to see the body as the soul, to confuse earthly time with eternity, and to put the human in the place of God. One of the effects of sin is to magnify the idols of the tribe, cave, marketplace, and theater. These idols become powerful forces within all communities (including those of sociologists and Christians) that seek to make sense of the world.
One cannot banish human sinfulness or Bacon’s idols from the rooms of sociology simply by putting the adjective Christian alongside the word sociology. Being fallen is not something that ceases when a person becomes a Christian or a sociologist. Anselm’s famous words apply to both Christian and secular thought: Nondum considerasti quanti ponderis sit peccatum (“You have not yet taken full account of sin”).
The aim of this book is to further the conversation between sociology and Christians about their commonly shared social worlds so that more sociological truth can be discovered. We authors believe that this will lead to more fair play in societal affairs and to more people securing a fair share of the goods of this life and of the age to come. But this conversation requires more than simply an understanding of the weaknesses of humans as the subjects or knowers of truth. It also requires an understanding of the difficulties posed by what it is that sociologists want to know about—the object of sociological knowing.
A second major source of difficulty in figuring out social worlds resides in the particular nature of those worlds. Social reality is extraordinarily rich and complex. What is more, it continues to change in ways and at a rate that exceed even the imagination of the most acute futurists. The Indian story of the elephant and the six blind people suggests the difficulties here.
The question in the story is simple: The king asks six blind men to say what sort of beast an elephant is. Feeling a tusk, the first says an elephant is like a mighty spear. Feeling the side, the second claims it is like a wall. The others in turn contribute their best knowledge: feeling the ear, one says it is like a fan; feeling the leg, a tree; feeling the tail, a rope; feeling the trunk, a boa constrictor.
Of course, there are several problems with this story as an analogy for sociology. The story relies on the fact that someone has the sight to know that all the blind investigators are incorrect, that the beast is actually an elephant and like none of the descriptions given by the blind. The story’s point is that the reality is larger than the partial truths contained in any of the single descriptions or in all of them put together. Yet the only way one can know that the reality is larger and different is because someone is able to see the elephant. Still, there are aspects of the story that make it a helpful parable.
Sociology offers more than six accounts of what its beast is like. That’s often a bit surprising and disturbing to the person who comes to sociology hoping to get a fix on society. If sociology is scientific, then why all the disagreements among sociologists about what society is, how it works, and what one can do about it?
One reply is simply that the very nature of science lies in the conflict of interpretations, the rough-and-tumble challenge of hypotheses confronting data that will falsify one or another notion. Another reply is that sociology is still a youthful science and has not yet settled some of its fundamental disputes in the way that physics and physiology have settled some of theirs. But there is an entirely different reply that can be illustrated by changing the story of the elephant in a rather dramatic way.
Imagine the problem for the six blind persons if the elephant were encouraged to take up the bad habit of running at top speed. Now the king would get very complicated reports. The person clinging to the leg would experience it as a jolting, dusty elliptical motion. The one on the tusk would be convinced he is on some amusement park ride. The one clutching the tail would be whipped about (and, if fortunate, not wind up too wet or smelly) and would conclude that no rope could do such things.
Setting the beast in motion would destroy some of the previous accounts and would make the task of coming to consensus about its nature even more complicated. Yet even this is not quite the picture of how societies work. Fortunately for biologists (and blind investigators), elephants, whether stationary or running, have the habit of remaining elephants for long periods of time. They don’t suddenly begin shedding their elephant skins and turn into lizards, leopards, or loons.
Societies, unfortunately, have the habit of changing in ways that are disconcertingly rapid and dramatic, of splitting up into new social groups, of taking on new forms of organization—that is, new economic, political, and religious arrangements. Moreover, “single societies” often include many language, ethnic, and racial groups with very different religions, worldviews, and life-styles. What would the blind investigators say if, as they clung to the running elephant, the tusk transformed into a paw with claws, the trunklike leg into an arm and hands, and the tail simply disappeared? How then would they imagine and agree on the nature of the beast?
This new image of the changing beast on the move more adequately portrays the problem faced by sociology. Sociology came into being at a very particular time and place. It got into business when the Western world was in the midst of an extraordinary societal transformation. Its first and continuing question, more than any other, concerns this transformation called modernization and modernity. Sociology, conceived in the eighteenth century and born in the nineteenth, responded to the emergence of modern society.
When sociology began, people had the sinking feeling that the world was changing more rapidly than ever before. In addition, it was generating social arrangements that were bad for large segments of the population. The horrible problems of the old order vanished, to be sure, but new ones were appearing that seemed even worse. Hope of returning to the old order or of moving quickly through the new to something better was scarce. So sociologists got to work, believing they could discover what was going on and gain control over the process of change. They thought they might be able to steer change in new directions, leading to social arrangements where all members of the human community could flourish in societies of peace, prosperity, and justice.
Sociology’s beast, thus, was a very large, very complex “elephant” of old and revered ancestry. It had started to lumber along at top speed and in the process had shed its elephant skin, turning into some new beast whose shape, form, and capabilities were so new that no one had ever seen one before. Even in the present it continues to move and change dramatically. It is no wonder that there are disagreements among sociologists and very different accounts of what the modern world is like. Because societies are the sorts of things they are (and not atoms, aardvarks, or angels), discovering truth about them is a very different and more difficult endeavor than discovering truth in physics, biology, or even theology.
Two last notes before the tour begins: First, the building that sociologists have erected for themselves sits in its own intellectual neighborhood, butting up against several other buildings constructed by other social scientists (economists, anthropologists, political scientists, historians, psychologists). There is a lot of convivial exchange among them (as well as shouted epithets). All of them front the same courtyard where the beast called the “social world” is found. All of them study parts of it.
Sociology has no monopoly on human society or on truth about it. It learns from the other social sciences. Every human being inhabits a social world and has ideas of how social arrangements work. Sociology challenges people to test their ideas against a much wider range of social experience than they normally do, to clarify the ideas that they already have about society and its processes, and to listen to the ideas of other people who have tried to do just that.
Second, Christians have been a part of sociology from its beginnings.3 They bring their own tradition of rational discourse to sociology. In the story of the elephant, they are not the sighted king who can settle the issue of the real truth behind the various theories of various blind investigators. In this regard, they are on the same footing as all other social investigators.
What Christians do believe is that there is a sighted King who has spoken and given certain clues as to the meaning and purpose of the universe and its human inhabitants. They believe that the King of the universe, who sees the whole picture, is revealed in history in the person, life, and death of Jesus Christ. By attending to Christ and understanding the Bible’s message, Christians bring to the debate about society certain distinctive meanings and assumptions. These shape the issues they consider crucial and the theories they find compatible with what the King has said. But none of this gets them out of the messy job of hanging onto the lumbering beast as it continues to change nor does it relieve them of the difficult work of developing the widest consensus possible with others who are engaged in the same task.
So check in to Hotel Sociology—and come with us to grab hold of whatever wondrous beast it is that inhabits the courtyards of social science.
1. Mary Douglas, “Distinguished Lecture: The Hotel Kwilu—A Model of Models,” American Anthropologist 91, no. 4 (December 1989): 864.
2. This is from Augustine: “There is nothing so social by nature, so unsocial by its corruption, as this [human] race.” City of God (Book 12, Chapter 27).
3. For example, Giambattista Vico, Frédéric Le Play, Paul Göhre, Albion Small.