Must We Blame Sociology?

Sociology is an honourable discipline founded over a century ago by Emile Durkheim, Vilfredo Pareto, Herbert Spencer and Max Weber and with roots that go back much further, perhaps even to Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century. Sociology does not deserve to be maligned because of the distortions of its left wing and the fantasies imposed on it by “critical” thinkers unable to question propositions impartially. To be sceptical is a virtue in sociology; to be critical is a vice.

The roots of their “infantile disorder” (Lenin’s phrase, not mine) lie in their obsession with ineq­uality and hence their ideology of “underdoggery”, which asserts that particular, selected groups of losers are the blameless victims of social injustice and that all analyses must be governed by the drive to redress this, even if it leads to falsehoods. At first it was the heroic working class whose cause they took up with a fervour that was often, though by no means necessarily, Marxist. The proletariat later fell out of favour with the radicals. The workers had not only refused to be revolutionary but proved to be socially conservative and stubbornly patriotic and so the radicals dumped them in favour of the “excluded”—racial minorities, criminals and those with unorthodox sexual preferences. Capitalism remained the villain but for different reasons.

The rise of the class-obsessed leftists within sociology meant that class differences and the supposed lack of upward social mobility between classes through the education system were made the very core of sociology. The leftists rarely studied downward mobility, which is the true mark of how open a society is, nor the personal suffering experienced by those moving down and their families; they concentrated only on the discontents of those trying to rise or who have moved up. Likewise they failed to study those without education who rose through business entrepreneurship, for that would have made capitalism look legitimate. Work on class, education and mobility was the high road to citations and promotions, to prestige and to funding from the awarders of research grants, who were also ideologically (indeed to use their own cant phrase “hegemonically”) of the Left. Religious and military institutions were seriously neglected because they were seen as unimportant in relation to the workings of capitalism. The “bourgeois family” was important but only because it was the transmission belt for property and privilege and thus one of the props of capitalism. Otherwise families were just the way the labour force got reproduced.

For the Marxists in particular economic forces drove everything, and the other leftists were always willing to meet them halfway. The manual workers were bound to come to power either through revolution or through inevitable and inexorable social forces such as the squeezing out of small business and of course the peasants, the greater radicalism of workers in ever larger enterprise, who were alienated from a distant management and formed militant labour unions, the expansion of state employment, even the higher birth-rate of socialist voters, whose children would vote the same way. Such was the message of Left-optimistic sociology. Anyone who at that time mentioned the growth of the service sector or the importance of knowledge in the creation of wealth was dismissed as a reactionary.

The sociologists of the Left had a nasty shock in 1979 when the Shah of Iran was overthrown not by those radicalised by economic deprivation but by reactionary Muslim fundamentalists. They had also tried to explain away or minimise the profound but slow and peaceful social changes brought about by the conversion of the dispossessed to Pentecostalism in South America instead of the revolution they had predicted and the role of Catholicism in the destruction of the Australian Labor Party by B.A. Santamaria and the Groupers. Now they were faced with the first violent revolutionary change in peacetime in decades, not a mere political coup but a revolution that utterly transformed an entire society, and it was rooted in religion, not in clashes between economic classes. The leftists had failed to predict it and now could not explain it. It “ought not to have happened”.

They are still trapped in their old prejudices in the twenty-first century when many societies are plagued by Islamic terrorism and when Muslim gangs in Australia, Britain and Scandinavia alike have committed a disproportionate proportion of sex crimes against women and girls. The mantra of the sociologists of the Left in either case is that the perpetrators are “marginalised” and “deprived” individuals. Religion does not come into it. Never mind that many Muslim terrorists from the West have university degrees. For the Left-sociologists it is still all about inequality under capitalism, an explanation that conveniently meshes with the politically correct view that a group defined as a “minority” and even its leaders must not be blamed for the wickedness of their members.

The leftists’ dismissal of religion and the military as important forces was brought home to me in a strange way. In the 1980s I published several articles and later book chapters to try and explain why homosexual men were or had been so viciously hated and their activities rendered criminal. I could see no sense or justice in this. It was a puzzle that had to be explained. I concluded on the basis of an extensive comparative study of different societies and institutions that it was a product of religious beliefs in the maintenance of strong boundaries and of the organisational demands of all-male, celibate hierarchical organisations such as churches and armies. Since for once I was being a good liberal, my work was published in the leading journals and I got promoted to full professor. But the Left-sociologists continued to assert without any evidence whatsoever that the phenomenon was the product of a “crisis in the bourgeois family”. Such a view neither meshes with history nor with differences between societies. But never mind the facts, our special insight tells us that the persecution of the gays is a product of the need to preserve the inheritance of property within the bourgeoisie. Yes, capitalism is to blame as usual. More tauromerdine sociology of the Left.

Many of the sociologists of the Left were particularly obsessed with equality of opportunity and wasted enormous sums of taxpayers’ money building detailed input-output tables of social mobility to show that the educational system had failed the working class. Any sociologist who suggested that intellectual ability was innate and inherited risked being drummed out of the profession. The psychologists whose work proved conclusively that intelligence is inherited remained unread by the Left-sociologists or were subjected to ad hominem attacks. When an East German psychologist showed how very strongly intelligence is inherited, the English leftists asked the Stasi to suppress his work lest it embarrass their ideological claims. Psychologists, like economists, were always suspect because they challenged left-wing fantasies of creating a totally equal society by bringing up harsh facts about the constraints imposed by scarcity and biology. Ironically the inheritance of intelligence is the great driver of social mobility because of the regression effect. The offspring of intelligent parents tend to be more able than average but less intelligent than their parents, and the converse is true of the stupid, some of whose descendants will be bright and will move to a higher class. When the libertarian Australian sociologist Peter Saunders pointed this out in his masterly book Unequal but Fair? the Left-sociologists reacted with a characteristic mixture of rage and wilful incomprehension.

In fairness to the sociologists of the Left, most of them did not hold the Soviet Union in high regard, but nonetheless they were far less willing systematically to criticise this socialist “civilisation” than the free and democratic societies in which they lived. This is one more illustration of how the “critical thinking” of the Left is a complete sham. In particular they laid stress on the supposedly more equal distribution of incomes and higher rates of social mobility in socialist societies, where there was affirmative action for the children of the proles and central control over wage levels. They failed to understand that even if the Soviet statistics were truthful—which the Left-sociologists always assumed they were—they did not reveal how privilege worked in a socialist society.

If I know how much an Australian earns and what assets he or she owns, I will have a good idea of what they are able to purchase and where they can afford to live. In the Soviet Union what you could afford depended equally on access to the power of the state, selective access to the special shops where high-quality, often imported, goods were cheaply available, goods available nowhere else. Ordinary people could not shop there; they were not allowed in. Those who lived in Moscow or Leningrad had a much better life, better education, better health care, better facilities than those stuck in some down-at-heel provincial town because these cities were showpieces and the places where the elite lived. But you needed a residence permit and work permit to live there and getting them required political influence. Crime rates in these cities were low and life was safer because the penalty for being convicted of a crime within the city limits was to lose your residence permit. Criminals were exiled to ghastly provincial towns with poor housing and facilities, which in consequence had a very high incidence of crime. But the top people did not live there and foreigners including Left-sociologists did not visit, so it did not matter, did it?

The sociologists of the Left, so keen to uncover the seamier side of capitalist societies, showed no interest in the widespread bribery, corruption, black-marketing and money-laundering of a socialist society and no understanding of why these deviant activities were utterly necessary to the functioning of a planned economy without prices determined by supply and demand. Nonetheless the Left-sociologists were shocked and surprised when the communist societies of Europe all collapsed, a peaceful but complete revolutionary destruction not just of a government but of an entire type of society. They had no idea that such a thing could happen, no idea that communist societies were an unreformable mass of internal contradictions, based entirely on the arbitrary and repressive use of force. What they had asserted was solid melted into air. Shortly before, they had denounced the exiled Lithuanian sociologist Alexander Shtromas for so accurately predicting the collapse.

It is in relation to crime that we can best see how the Left-sociologists began to split, with many abandoning the old emphasis on material production and social classes. The old-style Marxist sociologists had been a disciplined lot who admired the working class, the proletariat, for its capacity for organising itself, leading in time to revolution or at the very least to the capture of the power of the state. They had nothing but contempt for the lumpenproletariat, those below the working class, that disorganised rabble of criminals, drifters and dealers in dubious commodities who had chosen idleness rather than work. Bandits and bushrangers might be turned into class heroes, but not the urban flotsam. But in the 1960s even muggers, burglars and car thieves, vandals, drug dealers and brawlers became heroes and victims for some sociologists of the Left. They were victims not just because they had been pushed into crime by deprivation, the older view, but because they were unfairly vilified by the popular press.

Between the mid-1950s and the mid-1990s there was an inexorable rise in both violent and property crimes in nearly all the wealthier industrial countries, in marked contrast to the Victorian era when crime fell, or the inter-war period when despite high unemployment and a much less well-developed welfare state, crime rates had stayed low. Not surprisingly there was considerable public concern among the ordinary folk who were experiencing the new waves of theft and assault, burglary and robbery. The nice pink liberals were horrified. The welfare state was producing unwelcome, unexpected consequences. It should not be happening. It could not be happening. Among the even lefter sociologists, there were two responses. One was to deny that crime was rising and to explain it away by “improved reporting and recording”. This could not be matched with the falling or static crime rates of the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries when reporting and recording were also improving, but why let facts get in the way? I sometimes wonder how the adherents of the reporting and recording thesis have coped with the general fall in crime since the mid-1990s. When victim surveys of the general public were done (which leaves out crimes against stores, warehouses, banks and so on) they showed what any sensible person knew. Crime had risen substantially but not as fast as the police figures.

The Left-sociologists’ motives in denying the obvious were partly that the justifiable high coverage of crime in the press was distracting attention from what they saw as the “real” problem of class injustice, and partly that the alarm over crime might lead governments to be more punitive towards a group with whom they increasingly identified—the young, male, lower-class criminal. He, like themselves, was an opponent of bourgeois society and under attack.

Perhaps the silliest essay on the subject, one still adored and reverently cited by Left-sociologists, was Stuart Hall’s “Mugging as a Moral Panic” (1978). There had been a spate of robberies against the person in streets and parks and other public places and the worst cases involving serious injuries were extensively reported in the press in vivid detail. Hall argued, by an incompetent use of statistics and with a complete ignorance of calculus, that the incidence of mugging was no longer rising, and more to the point he suggested that many of the robberies were mere bag-snatching, frightening but without much violence. Thus the heavy press coverage and the outrage expressed by those in high places were not justified and constituted a “moral panic”, meaning an exaggerated alarmed response in the face of deviant behaviour. But who is to say what is a disproportionate and what is a reasonable response? Hall’s supporters were absolutely horrified when those not on the Left applied the concept and the method behind it to “racial attacks”, most of which are merely verbal abuse or a bit of scuffling, and to domestic violence, which in general does not result in serious injury.

Later what was equally shocking to the “watermelons”—a red Left turning green—in what they called “the new risk society” was an extension of the concept, the “techno-moral panic”. This was used to analyse the absurd and alarmist fears drummed up by the greenists who have mendaciously demonised food irradiation and GM crops and stirred up the press, which far from being controlled by the big capitalists simply wants to sell exciting copy. The Left-sociologists invent concepts that are not analytical but tendentious and then get indignant when someone uses them in a perfectly honest way to make a point that goes against their ideology.

What seriously split the Left-sociologists was when one of their own number showed on the basis of an accurate area survey that poor people were the ones who suffered most at the hands of young male criminals. The poor tended to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and got attacked, were unable to defend themselves and their homes and could not afford insurance. There was now a split between the oddly named “Left-realists” who acknowledged honestly the havoc wrought by criminals in poor areas, and the remnant of the macho-Left, many of them criminals-manqué, who went on championing the muggers. The macho-Left sociologists’ position was further undermined by the rise of the feminists, angry that domestic violence and sex crimes against women were being under-rated by the tough-minded men of the Left. They succeeded to such an extent that today the incidence of crimes against women is being talked up as vigorously and dishonestly as violent crime in general had been talked down thirty years before. The working class is now often stereotyped on the Left as a horde of wife-beaters, xenophobic brawlers who harass immigrants, and vicious “poofter bashers”. They are now only one person in the holy trinity of race, gender and class, the three holies of sociology, the three sets of inequalities that must be exposed and denounced by all true-red and even true-pink sociologists.

The left-wing sociologists of an earlier generation often deceived themselves into thinking their work was scientific. Russia had “scientific Marxism” and Britain a Social Science Research Council. They believed in cause and effect in a deterministic way. They measured the easily measurable with great precision to the neglect of variables that were difficult to measure and then they drew lines on a graph and projected them into the future, ignoring such imponderables as the impossible-to-predict inventions of the future and they used their findings to agitate for social planning. Accurately measured nonsense.

Nonetheless as quantitative techniques improved, censuses and surveys have produced a lot of good data, some of it embarrassing to the leftists. How else would we have known that gay men are less than 2 per cent of the male population, or that other things being equal the short-sighted are more likely to succeed in life?

In consequence many of the leftists have gone off science. It was not producing the answers they wanted. Now many sociologists of the Left study not social “reality” but the way people talk about that reality, not crime but press reports of crime, not conflicts but images of the conflicting parties, not documents in the files of institutions but chat on the internet. They have taken up “discourse analysis” which consists of recording long “depth” interviews with ordinary people about tendentious matters, arbitrarily editing the record, and then producing shock-horror claims about how bigoted and reactionary the populace are. Discourse analysis is the long-winded descendant of the dishonest F-scale questionnaires produced by Adorno in the 1940s and 1950s. “F” in this case does not mean what most people would expect but refers to Fascism. It was a slick trick to prove that all “authoritarian personalities” were on the Right. Today’s discourse analysis reduces sociology to a sort of third-rate radio documentary that is all talk and no reality. The flesh has become word.

Now instead of mimicking the scientists, the Left-sociologists, like many teachers of literature, have embraced the wilder and foggier branches of Continental philosophy, the “higher Froggy nonsense”—structuralism, post-structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalytic thought, postmodernism and so on. The nonsense called literary theory, much of which has built-in biases from the start—post-colonial theory, feminist theory, queer theory—owes as much to Left-sociology as it does to the students of literature and they merge in that vague aggregate called cultural studies which means you do not need to do any hard thinking about social or economic structures. Yet more of that “cultural Marxism” which Lenin would have denounced as bourgeois idealism. Poor Lenin, the man who even got upset when physicists began undermining his crude view of what was “material”, must be turning in his mausoleum. In the twenty-first century the Left-sociologists waffle about “liquid capitalism” or even “weightless capitalism” in a vain attempt to come belatedly to terms with a society in which the key commodities are services and information, while still not understanding the spontaneous order produced by markets or the role of the entrepreneur as innovator.

Some of the more obscurantist Left-sociologists seem to regard society as a kind of text to be subjected to exegesis. The new theories have the great advantage of being untestable, unfalsifiable and often incomprehensible. Some lengthy works of sociological theory are entirely self-referential and contain hardly any factual data. Those, like myself, who know that a scientific sociology is a mirage but argue that there are advantages to the scientific approach and that even though we cannot attain truth we ought to try to approach it and that it is possible to show that certain propositions are almost certainly false, are denounced as “privileging science”.

Those on the Left who once claimed that they had access to the truth because of where they were placed in the social order now assert that there is no way of showing that one statement is more accurate than another. They do not ask of data “Is it reasonably correct?” but only “Who produced the data?” and “Who would benefit if we decide to accept it?” Their favourite author is Thomas Kuhn because they falsely believe that he has shown science in all its neutrality to be as fallible as the value-laden and untestable theses about the nature of society that they peddle. The proposition that there is progress in the natural sciences, whereas changes in Left-sociology are mere shifts of fashion driven by political factions, is anathema to them. They once believed that they had progress on their side. Now they are determined that no one shall, not even the scientists. Their mantra is “You can’t be certain”, but no one claims that our ever-changing physical sciences provide complete certainty. It is enough to say that for all practical purposes we can be sure that, say, the chemistry of today is vastly superior to that of 1900 or 1950 or even 2000. No such claim can be made about social theory.

Despite the way sociology was disfigured by the Left, who also monopolise the textbook market, the last half of the twentieth century was a time of great achievement in sociology by those who, whatever their politics, retained free minds. The great comparative sociologists such as Stanislav Andreski, Ernest Gellner, Seymour Martin Lipset, David Martin and Edward Shils flourished and there were the wonderful insights too of Raymond Aron, Mary Douglas, Norbert Elias, Erving Goffman, Louise Shelley and Helmut Schoeck. To read them or to listen to them was to realise with pleasure that you now had a better understanding of the social order than you had before. What a pity the leftists had to stain a great discipline.

The Left-sociologists tried to change the world, but the calling of the sociologist is to interpret it in various ways. The sociologists of the Left betrayed that calling. It is time to restore and insist on it.