‘Does It Have To Be Like This?’ A Book Abandoned

By | April 6, 2018
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 DOES IT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY?

 Graham Scambler

Introducing: Behind the Scenes

This is a book of sociology that differs from many another. Most obviously it is not written with students of the discipline in mind. There already exists a plethora of textbooks within students’ reach and compass, many of which are excellent guides to apprentices and novitiates alike. Nor is it punctuated by quotations, references or footnotes, the routine accoutrements of institutionalised scholarship. The absence of these is not to decry them elsewhere – in many ways they are markers of hard-won expertise and authority – but is rather a function of the alternate, non-student readership in my sights. This volume is directed at all those who now and again, when the mood takes them, or maybe when their lives grow suddenly more awkward or complex, contemplate how or even why they have become the persons they are in the situations in which they find themselves. Anybody who thinks in other words (to play with Descartes’ famous dictum, ‘I am, therefore I think’). So this is intended as a thinking person’s invitation to look into the shadows and drag whatever is found lurking there into the sunlight for inspection and, ultimately, analysis.

Why bother? There is a mix of motivations, the most obvious of which is a commitment to the salience of sociology for clarity and for countering ideology, that is, carefully packaged views of the world informed by and conducive to particular interests. Trust can be engineered and misplaced. Trust for politicians, for example, is at a record low. Might this be because there is growing resistance to the view of the world or ideology that predominates within and exudes like pollution from a car exhaust from the ‘Westminster bubble’? But what, and who, comprises the Westminster bubble? And how are we to account for its existence and influence?

But this is to get ahead of ourselves. The strategy adopted here will be to adopt as starting points a series of processes with which we can all identify. Some of them are universal or common to all humans, while others arise out of my own lifecourse. All, I hope, allow for a deepening of people’s grasp of who and where they are and what might have been and might yet be. That’s the point. As one of my favourite philosophers put it: being, or what is, is a mere ripple on the surface of the ocean of non-being, or what might have been or might yet be.

So what are these processes that provide promising take-off points? And insofar as I intend the text as a whole to be cumulative – that is, to build slowly towards a framework for grasping the salience of ‘the social’ for our so very personal and individual biographies – and I do, how is this to be accomplished? Let’s consider the processes first, and there are ten of them.

  • The first is reflecting. This is something we all do and from an early age. Psychologists tell us that through our infant and junior years our egos sit at the very core of our worlds. We may know an adult or two to whom this also applies. But even during this learning, socialising phase of the lifecourse we talk to ourselves, assess and appraise, hold what have been called internal conversations. As adolescence and adulthood impinge these inner dialogues (normally) become less ego-centred. Among their multiple foci are queries about who we are, how others see us, and where we go ‘from here’, that is, how we might impact on what might otherwise be in store for us. We cling to a capacity to influence the events that somehow or other constitute our futures, though it frequently seems a nebulous and unpredictable business.
  • The second process is connecting. Again, psychopathology aside, this is ubiquitous. Like it or not, we are social beings from the moment of our birth and placement in a particular society. Family, kin, friends and acquaintances, our peers, comprise our reference groups, and it is via our relations with them that we come to define who we are. But connectivity shifts into adulthood and, in the second decade of the 21st century virtual must be added to actual relations; and here pre-adolescents trump babyboomers of course. I was wielding a fountain pen through the 1950s whereas they are comfortable with tablets.
  • Belonging, my third process, is not synonymous with connecting; it supercedes it. Much discussed by sociologists, it refers to feeling – with a degree of intimacy and commitment – part of a community. But there are communities and communities. On the one hand being a regular church attender or a member of a village choral society or cricket club can produce a sense of belonging, but on the other hand so too can being conscripted to a urban street gang or a platoon of mercenaries. Belonging, as these examples imply, is a double-edged sword, and can moreover be open to manipulation.
  • The fourth process is loving. Notoriously elusive, it is nevertheless a process that permeates most – though sadly not all – human lives, whether expressed in a parent’s arms, a friendship won by trust over time or in a lover’s clinch. But it challenges the cultural norms and boundaries of the UK and ‘the West’: its romantic accommodation in the institution of marriage and the nuclear family is far from ubiquitous. And what about sex? Love and sex are a moveable feast. Orgasms are not so easily constrained. Sex without the ‘threat’ of pregnancy has redefined intimacy and recharged batteries since the 1960s.
  • Number five is the process of parenting. Plato’s philosophical counsel in ancient Greece to remove parents from the equation of childrearing in order to release children’s potentials is not always seen as dystopian. The ‘11+’ examination we babyboomers had to sit is not such a distant relation to Plato’s Republic as might be imagined. Viewed as progressive at the time, it saw in the IQ-based 11+ a tolerable measure of innate intelligence, and therefore of potential. The one in four who passed may not all have been destined to become Plato’s ‘philosopher kings’ (that is, an elect with a honed talent to rule), but the four out of five who failed were almost without exception heading for manual employment. The wheat had been separated from the chaff. So whither now parenting? It is a rubric of parental ‘choice’ that predominates. But how should we understand this in relation to teaching and learning, schooling and education?
  • The sixth process is indeed teaching. Just as all humans learn, if differently and by orientation and degree, so all are taught. Not all teachers are trained formally or otherwise to be occupants of this specific role. It is a role I occupied – without formal training I should add – for more than forty years, hence the reference to it here. I have things to say, a number of them about social change. The system from 11+ to higher education that I grew up with has been reformed beyond recognition.
  • Earning, the seventh process, has a more ambiguous referent than is commonly assumed. Livings might once have been earned by hunting and gathering or substistence farming (and occasionally still are). In the modern world we are more familiar with wages and salaries, recompense for goods produced or services delivered. But wealth is not so obviously earned as income is, though people with more of it are fond of claiming that the investment of capital ‘earns’ additional income. Marx was not the only historical personage to have problems with glossing over the ‘contradictions’ between wage-labour and capital ownership. But do his theories, formulated in the industrial heyday of English liberal capitalism apply now?
  • Consuming comes in at number eight. While there is a sense in which premodern systems of bartering or exchanging tokens for goods or services might be regarded as proto-types of consuming, the notion has recently gained new and powerful connotations. Society in the twenty-first century, it is said, is characterized by consumption, not production. We now inhabit a post-industrial world. Another personal note: my parents were not poor – my father taught in a secondary modern school while my mother worked unpaid in the home (as was then expected/required of women) – but I left home never having flown or stayed in a hotel, my mother made her own clothes, and my main Christmas and birthday presents were clandestinely hammer-and-nailed together by my father in our council house garage. Contemporary consuming, it is claimed, confers identity, and is far more a function of ‘choice’ than it was sixty years ago.
  • I shall contend that the ninth process, voting, generally promises more than it delivers. What price parliamentary democracy? What alternative is it better or worse than? Voting has seeped slowly over time through barriers of class, gender, ethnicity and age to draw more people in. But does the old tag line – ‘if voting changed anything they’d abolish it’ – capture a downside. Slightly more provocatively, is democracy an absolute principle? If so, why not hold regular referenda, on capital punishment for example. And if it is one principle, independent but not absolute, then how are compromises to be struck with those of freedom, equality, fraternity, justice and so on? Democratically?
  • Acting is my tenth process. In one sense we act on the world all the time, like it or not. We do so when we pack the kids’ lunches and off to school, go to work, adjourn to the pub and go on a protest march. But a portion of our everyday acts is habitual: we don’t deliberate, we just act. So how to distinguish between habitual and purposeful behaviour? And is this distinction significant for voting behaviour for example? Are there degrees of deliberative-cum-purposeful action?
  • Engagement comes eleventh in my severely edited list of processes. Engagement as I define it here is acting with a view to ‘making a difference’. The difference might be located in the micro-worlds of everyday interaction, like proposing a motion at a local political meeting, or, more pertinently, threatening the status quo via a credible bid for power to accomplish shifts in policy or practice at the macro-level of institutions. How and in what circumstances can which of us act with consequence? Whence the Gandhi’s and Mandela’s?
  • Finally, I allow myself a technical term for a process, namely, absenting. It is a process deriving from philosophers more enamoured of dialectical than formal logic. Bhaskar gives it a double meaning, firstly to indicate the possibility of removing unwanted existing practices, and secondly to allow for the possibility of anticipating and introducing more positive alternative practices. Absenting here is about moving on via acting that takes the form of engagement. After all, what is sociology about if it is not oriented to improving our collective wellbeing?

In introducing this contribution I have so far outlined my principal goals and the means I have chosen – discussing a dozen processes – to attain them. It remains to stress its cumulative thrust and to append a few themes that I have in mind. My hope is that readers hitherto unacquainted with sociology as an academic discipline will pick up on its potential to inform and inspire, and will as a consequence ask questions of themselves and others that had not occurred to them before. If not, the project will have failed. As for the major themes, it may be sensible to state a number of these at the outset:

  1. what we think and do, how we act, even engage, does not always accord with how we perceive our intent or hopes and ambitions;
  2. there’s a lot of – mostly structural, but also cultural – baggage that we carry unawares and that eases us onto unchosen paths;
  3. in relation to our social worlds, a workable distinction can be drawn between knowledge, or truth-minded descriptions and explanations, and ideology, or falsified descriptions and explanations;
  4. if we are what we do day by day (‘becoming’), only, as Sartre argued, wrapping up our ‘essence’ (‘being’) on our deaths, then we have the opportunity to confront and engage with this;
  5. we have free will though we exercise it only rarely;
  6. our free will, or agency, is structured but never structurally determined;
  7. all humans have agency, however residual and circumscribed by situations and by events;
  8. sociology is practiced on the borders and hinterland of agency and structure;
  9. sociology is not reducible to the likes of psychology or biology, though it can only provide some of the pieces of the jigsaw that is human life on Earth;
  10. a core task of sociology is contributing to our grasp of how we might accomplish change towards personal and social ‘flourishing’.

These themes will be present from the beginning but will be expanded and become clearer as the text unfolds. In the final paragraphs, on concluding, I will suggest a framework suitable for asking and answering questions about who we are, might have been and might yet be; and about ways of accomplishing personal and social change. If not exactly a manual for evidential and creative social thinking, I will have failed if readers unversed in the discipline of sociology park my book on their shelves, or in the nearest Oxfam bookshop, without having acquired a mindset, Bourdieu would say a habitus, predisposing them to reflect and act with sharper social acuity. In short, it is an educative offering.

Chapter 1: Reflecting

Leaving aside intriguing biological and psychological questions about precisely when and how as babies or infants we first open our reflexive accounts, nobody will deny that from as far back as they can recall they have held secret conversations with themselves. The nature of these conversations clearly changes with age, although not at the same rate for everybody. The individual ego, for example, tends to shift from centre-stage towards the wings as infancy, childhood and adolescence pass by. Gradually others are attributed with the degree of independence, even rights, which we long assumed for ourselves. But none of this occurs in a social vacuum. Analytic philosophers, a fairly austere bunch much favoured in our leading universities in the postwar era, used to distinguish between ‘sensation’ and ‘perception’. Sensation accompanies us from our earliest days and weeks: we see, hear, feel and so on. But it takes perception to inform us what we see, hear, feel etc. In other words, we require a framework, however rudimentary, before we can construct stories or narratives of order for ourselves or others. And this is a roundabout way of saying that we are born and socialised into a pre-existing social world. The framework we are taught by parents, carers, teachers, peers and others stands for a first or neophyte narrative of a reality of which we are ineluctably a part.

There are those overly prone to the abstruse who contend that this narrative of reality to which we are initiated, and which we extend, revise and deepen into adulthood, is all the reality we can know: we can live only in the social world afforded us by the concepts bequeathed by our predecessors. Such thinking is seductive but seriously misleading. What exists cannot be so constrained as to reduce to what we currently know of what exists. We wriggle, toddle and eventually walk in natural and social worlds that do not come to a halt at the edge of our knowledge of them. Newtonian physics yielded a theory of gravity that reflects even more than it comprises a natural world that will outlast the human species on Earth. For all that Einstein succeeded Newton, more of the latter’s theories survive than is commonly assumed. And I shall argue step by step that sociology too has its theories that identify mechanisms roughly akin to gravity.

But now is the time for more concrete considerations. Assuming this will be read, if at all, by adolescents (who are typically under-estimated), as well as by adults (as typically over-estimated), how might the reflective process be best understood? We incessantly ask questions of ourselves but the nature of the interrogation varies, and in patterned ways. It is an obvious mistake to equate reflexive maturity with chronological age. How then might reflexivity work?

A shy, defensive and largely undemanding child I enjoyed a contented infancy and childhood, the sole offspring of a father whose promising career in shipping was interrupted by the 2nd WW and who of necessity reinvented himself as a secondary-school teacher, and a mother who conformed to the cultural norms of the time by working unpaid in the home (it was still considered stigmatising in the 1950s if a man couldn’t support his family). It was a protected and environment, though The Daily Telegraph plopped through the letter box of our council house and, for my mother’s entertainment, at weekends The Sunday Express. (I welcomed the Swift on Tuesday mornings). In point of fact there was no political party that my parents didn’t vote for at one general election or other. But I am a different person now, so how come? Wishing me a well-paid and secure career my dad commended solicitor or bank manager. In the event, messing up and having to re-take my A levels – ‘your mother and I have discussed it and decided that we can support you to re-take your exams’, a statement the poignancy of which I only grasped many years later – set me on a path. It was still possible in 1968 to study what you chose, education then trumping the imperative to work and transferrable job skills. Geography was part of it, Surrey University being relatively close to the south coast, but it was philosophy and psychology that attracted me. I dropped psychology in favour of sociology in the second year. My first love was philosophy and I did a year’s worth of an M.Phil./Ph.D at Birkbeck College before switching to sociology in pursuit of a steadier income to support a growing family.

If pushed now for a transitional moment, I’d plump for my late-adolescent reading of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, a graphic US portrayal of poverty and blunt and brutal hopelessness. Forty years on, somehow or other and with a nod or two to serendipity, my parents gone, I’m a socialist. What are you, and how come?

Gadamer presciently writes of a ‘fusion of horizons’. He notes that every time we watch a TV programme, read a book, newspaper or tweet, hold a conversation, even reflect, we are re-cast, re-moulded. In retrospect Steinbeck’s novel unbalanced me. But reading this rather than that text is a happenstance, unlikely on its own to deliver a change in perspective in the absence of preconditions. So maybe my exposure to sociology at Surrey lit the fuse of Steinbeck’s fictional masterpiece.

What lit the fuse for you, or has it yet to be lit? The lighting of such fuses can occasion a diversion from paths that appear predestined. It is the infusion of an agency of sorts into journeys that are otherwise decisively structured. Did you choose to be who, what and where you are? Are you copies of your parents, or simulacra? If you are, or are not, to what extent is this a product of deliberation? It is one thing to opt for law as a career if a parent is a barrister, or at least attended university (only 7% went to university in my day), quite another if your dad was an intermittently employed semi-skilled manual worker, or a smart but constrained refugee. How many of which of our citizenry reflect on: (a) what constrains/enables their options, and (b) what might be done to ameliorate disadvantage?

On the whole, and increasingly, material advantage takes the form of inherited capital. For millennials it has become much tougher to earn income enough to secure a stable future. If you are not the lucky – dwell on that word, because you obviously can’t ‘earn’ anything in the womb or as the proverbial twinkle – recipient of inherited capital you are playing catch-up. What has this to do with reflection? Well, think about it! It’s in the pecuniary interests of the advantaged, or privileged, that the disadvantaged don’t ‘get it’, even when they think about it. This is where ideology comes in. An ideology is a false, distorted and manipulative view of the world that serves to rationalize and legitimize advantage and privilege. Examples are easy to come by. Consider the specious myth of the ‘American Dream’ (‘if they’ve got the talent and work hard enough, anyone can make it in the US of A’), or the equally fatuous myth of ‘trickle down economics’ (‘if the wealthy are rewarded we all benefit in the longer run). What these myths do is help reconcile the disadvantaged, that is, those who don’t inherit capital, to their lot. Those individuals, like Americans who come from humble beginnings to accumulate vast hoards of capital, simply fuel the American Dream-cum-Nightmare; there is incontrovertible evidence that they are statistical exceptions.

If you have any doubts, ask why it is ok for the Duke of Westminster’s 25 year old son to inherit the bulk of his father’s £8.3 million, in the process becoming the 3rd richest person in the UK and the 68th richest in the world, while the majority of the population inherit next to nothing. ‘How’, one wit enquired of a landowner who accused him of trespassing, ‘did you come by your property?’ ‘My ancestors fought for the King and were rewarded with it.’ ‘Ok, I’ll fight you for it.’ There would be no Dukes without a monarchy that appears harmless even as it symbolizes, represents and affords ideological cover for the heritability of hierarchical rewards.

All this raises subsidiary questions. Where do you sit? Do you happen to be amongst the few born winners or the many born losers? If the former, are you reflective about it, or do you – as it were – reflexively opt to be non-reflexive? We know how formerly aristocratic landowners vote (they have to vote now they can no longer presume to represent their serfs-cum-labourers-cum-employees). And how do you vote in general elections? If the latter, have you fallen into ideological traps like the American Dream or trickle-down economics? And if not, how might the ideology that reproduces your disadvantage be effectively challenged? Or are you comfortable with or reconciled to Hugh Richard Louis Grosvenor’s stroke of good fortune?

The prospect of challenging ideologies or the myths they project at this level of generality and significance is daunting indeed. Consider a more modest and less loaded scenario. You are sitting in a café perusing a copy of the Daily Mail, and reflecting. At an adjacent table is an iPhone accompanied by a man in his mid-30s in smart t-shirt and jeans who’s eyes seem disapprovingly to latch onto your tabloid’s headlines. His companion meanwhile is trying to get him to focus on an imminent appointment with a solicitor, as far as you can ascertain to discuss how best to stop a build of affordable houses in their village. When a barista delivers their sandwiches neither as much as looks up. You find yourself irritated on three counts: first, as a UNITE official you detest Dacre’s crass propaganda but need to know what’s being said about an ongoing local dispute; second, you’re torn between correcting your neighbour’s smug misunderstanding and rising above it; and third, you are struck by the hypocrisy of an apparently prissy left-liberal couple who share your disgust with the Daily Mail while signing up to a NIMBY cop-out on housing and, almost worse, treat a barista, probably on a zero hours contract, with dismissive contempt.

Hmm, maybe. But what if … And that’s my point, ‘what if’. What if we’ve got it all wrong? When we routinely interpret, appraise and judge, we demonstrate a reliance on reflection that as often as not betrays even as it evidences our presumptions; and a betrayal makes prejudices of our presumptions (prejudice here announcing a view resistant to evidential correction). Given that our knee-jerk impressions of others are buttressed by frames and convictions garnered throughout the lifecourse (to that point), and recognising too that they rarely humble us in our own eyes, to what extent are they susceptible to distortion? The distortion might be ideological, or it might simply echo our idealised notion of who we are. At issue is not only whether or not we have ‘read’ things correctly, but whether or not it is within our capacity to do so, or indeed whether or not it is possible even in principle to do so. Does it come within the capability of a fully trained and funded sociologist to get to the bottom of such routine exchanges and interactions in a café? Does the reflection of a sociologist trump yours?

Another scenario: you are sitting in the corner of your local pub in the company of your husband, two other couples and a divorced friend, all fairly normal for a Saturday evening. It is an unwritten if ubiquitous rule that certain topics are avoided, circumvented or appropriately sanitized. This rule, you feel, sanctions the local status quo. In other words, the local – and pub – status quo comprises what is normal, uncontroversial and almost certainly apt. To infringe, you realise but are reluctant to accept, is to put friendships and companionable acquaintanships (as well as convivial Saturday evenings) at risk. A Sun headline is quoted, linking EU immigration, causally, with native unemployment, low pay and zero hours contracts. ‘We’ve got to do something about controlling the numbers coming into the country and taking British jobs and houses and sponging off our welfare, our NHS. We’ve got to take back control.’

You know better: you teach the social sciences and are aware that the evidence contradicts carefully manufactured ‘fake news’ in the guise of tabloid-packaged entertainment. Not only are immigrants more likely to be in paid work and paying taxes and less likely to be claiming benefits than those from the indigenous population; but their skill-sets are required now and will be for the foreseeable future, not least in providing welfare services and health care. What to say? To remain silent or change the topic seems an easy but unacceptable expedient. But if you challenge the veracity of the consensual view you risk ‘spoiling’ a pleasant social ritual. Moreover you are aware that sociology typically commands less authority than, say, chemistry. At least non-chemists quickly appreciate how much they don’t understand, while sociology can strike non-sociologists as common sense double-wrapped in impenetrable jargon. And then there’s the old cliché that ‘you can use statistics to prove anything, can’t you?’ Of course you can counter these prejudices, but how, and is now the moment? Surely not on a Saturday evening in the pub.

The likely resolution is token or symbolic dissent, a practice you have refined for these occasions. But your academic training kicks in, uninvited. The rules, or norms, that govern social interaction are context dependent. However familiar you may be with the evidence in relation to the Brexit hinterland, this context threatens you with the status of norm-breaker or ‘deviant’. And on multiple fronts: tread wrongly, for example, and you can render yourself both a political and a social deviant. What about next Saturday? You trade glances with your husband and he offers fleeting support prior to ‘changing the subject’. All is not lost. However, you have both afforded tacit consent to a view of the social world, an ideology that you know to be purposefully erroneous. Politeness, or friendship, or maybe self-interest, have outbid evidence-based knowledge. If you have not actually tried to ‘pass as normal’, you have ‘covered’ by prioritising fitting in over truth-telling, in the process neutralizing potential charges of deviance. Your reflexivity has been attenuated, shunted into a siding. An unintended consequence of tens of thousands of understandable, even prudent, deviance-avoiding cop-outs like this is the reproduction of that which is, namely, a status quo favouring the most powerful and ubiquitous voices. Other pubs might provide alternate contexts of course, but they may be a distance away.

What lessons might be learned from these fictional incidents of reflection? The first is undoubtedly that we are all endowed with a capacity for reflection, for reflexivity, that carries the potential to affect change for self or others, and even at a pinch for social institutions. We can behave and act differently, and be different persons, even if the constraints pressuring us to conform are normally experienced as overwhelming.

Another lesson results from the fact that our ponderings can mislead us. If the protagonists across my scenarios supply their own contexts for interpreting transitory everyday encounters, as they must, then this suggests that what is required for more comprehensive accounts is a context of contexts. Nor is this just a matter of collating more data. Individual lives are complex affairs and cannot be so easily subdued. Biologists and psychologists, among others, would want their inputs recognised; but let’s stick with sociology. What would a context of contexts look like to a sociologist? How, in short, is sociological reflection distinctive?

My response comes in four parts. First, there seems little doubt that further investigation will show a return. The précis of my own halting steps towards the light indicated as much. But consider the café and pub encounters featuring you not me. If all those who found themselves in close proximity were interviewed, this would give us insight into their definitions of self, philosophies, projects and opinions. You might have got it wrong. The dismissive treatment of the barrister, for example, might have been water off the back of a can’t-be-bothered student the clients had encountered before; your associates in the pub might be struggling to shake off the extreme right-wing prejudices of their parents. But it seems unlikely that even exhaustive research via interviews will reveal the whole picture. Why is this?

Well, in part it’s because people’s definitions of their own circumstances do not – cannot – add up to a final all-inclusive statement. We are not always able to put our fingers on why we believe what we do or behave the way we do. Parental influence for example is typically both part of who we are and how we define our lot and circumstances and an effort to distinguish as such. So a second response is that not only parental and familial but also cultural and, even less conspicuously, structural conditions, help determine our identities and predilections. A way of saying as much in sociological terms is to insist that far-off macro-social as well as less distant meso-social factors are always at play.

A little reflection makes this undeniable. Time and place matter and hold us in thrall. This is blindingly obvious if we consider the worldviews and predispositions of mediaeval monks in Prussia or black slaves in the confederate American south with our own. It is less obvious if we travel across the borders of class, gender, ethnicity or ageing in our present, all of which incline to discernible orientations and actions. A simple breakdown of the class, gender, ethnic and age characteristics of the participants in the scenarios would yield predictable results. It is not that such characteristics determine the unfolding of any particular micro-encounter, more that they lend it a likely shape. Another way of articulating this is to suggest that people and situations are in part the issue of tendencies, that is, of class, gender, ethnicity and age ‘in action’. Tendencies can be trumped by agency or individual decision-making, or by contingent events; but they never just go away, living to fight their corner another day.

A third response is that sociologists frequently refer to types of person or situation. Thus a professional woman, a doctor say, who was educated privately and at an Oxbridge or Russell Group Medical School will more often than not possess a predictable and integrated set of beliefs and attitudes suggestive of adaptation to a comfortable ‘bourgeois’ status quo. There will be exceptions of course; but types give sociologists an entrée into explanatory accounts of what’s going on and why. There were for example types of Brexit voter, possibly impacting on our socially awkward and embarrassing pub scenario. The ‘fact’ that they were disproportionately older, had accrued less formal education, were white and working-class, and felt (and frequently were) politically overlooked and therefore prone to despondency is more than suggestive. Here indeed is the germ of compelling narrative.

Finally, a point or two made in the opening paragraphs of this volume bear reiteration. Patterns of behaviour, circumstance and events revealed by studies, often those of a quantitative or statistical bent, however fruitful sociologically, do not allow us to extrapolate to individuals. Our posh GP might be the exception that proves the rule, sacrificing personal comfort and prosperity by eschewing private practice and committing to the NHS. Then there is the ‘problem’ that all scientists, natural or social, face, that of ‘fallibilism’. It might always turn out that the patterns discerned that have fuelled our theory are misleading us: for example, we may have found them because we ruled out too many other possibilities. Fallibilism is something we live with. Anyway, why would we presume that we, constrained by time and place, and piddling members of one of multiple species on Earth, have the capacity to get to the bottom of things, to wrap complex stuff up? But aspiring with a requisite daily dose of humility is okay.

Accepting that reflecting, that is, cashing in our powers of reflexivity with a view to making as many of our own views ‘reasoned’ – dare I say, evidence-based – as possible, opens doors. Sociology is pertinent here. We are after all social beings. To deploy the earlier shorthand, this does not mean that biologists and psychologists should keep their own counsel. Humans cannot buy coffees or beers in the absence of genes, cells and personalities. But it does mean that what sociologists contribute does not reduce to the properties of genes, cells or personalities. The social does not reduce down any more than genes, cells and personalities reduce up. Comte, who first coined the term ‘sociology’ in the 1820s, was wrong to judge it the all-encompassing priesthood super-science.

 

 

 

 

 

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