Browsing in a Cambridge bookshop I have come across the first published volume of Camus’ notebooks or journals (1942-1951). It comprises a collection of ‘thoughts’ as and when they occurred to him. I have since retirement taken to blogging, a form of ‘thinking aloud’, but I wonder now if I might help myself also by jotting thoughts as I go. Moreover lonesome fragments of thought have long suited my style and temperament.
There’s maybe a tension in my published writings as well as my blogs. It is between this sense that: (a) fragments are somehow ‘fit for purpose’ in tackling the complex and dynamic nature of social phenomena in an ineluctably open society, and (b) an urge to be systematic, as well as scientific.
Blogs are more suited to fragmentation, published offerings to systemness. So the tension between the two is most apparent in the latter. I sense it in my books in particular. I suspect it means that my books appeal only to the academically like-minded (certainly not to the public-at-large). Is this a fault? Maybe it defines the limits of my opportunity to share ideas.
May’s decisions on Brexit, if the word ‘decisions’ truly captures a PM adrift, will filter through the biological, psychological and social structures as well as the cultures and agencies that constitute our being – or, better, courtesy of the existentialists, our ‘becoming’ – to stamp their authority on our body systems. It is down to science to trace and account for this filtering. One of my mantras: sociologists never wrap things up, and no more do biologists or psychologists. Scientific fragments ever reaching towards an unobtainable systemness? Brings to mind Popper’s notion of verisimilitude (you can get closer to the truth whilst recognising that you can never reach the station you purchased a ticket to travel to)
Critical realism’s trinity: ontological realism + epistemological relativism (‘relativism’ the wrong word here) + judgemental rationality. Translated: there exists a world that is independent of humankind (let alone ‘we/us’), which we can only access via the conceptual frames of the day, but this needn’t/shouldn’t stop us decisively assessing one theory against another.
Fallibilism – indisputably the most sensible epistemological stance – might extend further than we suspect. Are we humans so special? Maybe the ants are just waiting, it’s tempting to add ‘smugly’, for us to self-destruct. Are we right in thinking they don’t/can’t think? Maybe we are being played for fools.
Is what counts for humans at the end of the day what we leave behind (too pompously described as a legacy)? I suspect not. But even if so, what are the relevant criteria? For us academics, is there any correlation at all between increasingly metric evaluations of productivity and what we bequeath? Obviously not! So?
Underlying problematic: what enduring salience do the narratives we construct for ourselves have? And why are they oriented to the capitalist ‘imperative to work’? Or is this (still) more or less exclusive to white, male (stereo)types?
Patriarchy. I was once asked by BBC prog to affirm that the increasing numbers of women visiting sex workers was a sign of progress. I said that increasing numbers of women doing what men have long done didn’t necessarily indicate ‘progress’. I wasn’t cited or called on again.