The Audience Problem

throwing tomes in a widening ocean?

For various reasons, I’ve been doing some (hopefully) deep rethinking.

I think I started studying sociology, back in the 1980s, for three reasons:

1. I was unhappy with prevailing explanations of where Thatcher and Reagan had come from;

2. I sensed the onset of a phenomenon that sociologist Anthony Giddens would end up describing as “runaway world”; and

3. I held perhaps naively optimistic views about the power and prospects of human rationality/slow thinking.

The premise for damning the torpedoes and choosing sociology as a vocation was (and still is) the hypothesis that helping clarify and publicize the ways in which inherited circumstances push us humans around could and would inspire us talking monkeys to make smarter interventions into the most troublesome aspects of that crucial but hard-to-perceive process.

This assumption invites its enthusiasts (of which I was, and still am, one) to make the further Vicoian assumption that because we humans have made our own history, we can also rather easily understand how we have done so and might possibly do so in the future.

Okay, nice, but here we stand, in a world that has learned little from a global pandemic; that is jettisoning rather than extending decent single standards of conduct; that drives large masses of its residents into the arms of obviously oblivious clowns; and that can’t tear itself away from addictive mental baubles and narrow squabbles.

What, in such circumstances, is the point of building long-form analytical arguments about the complex motions of social structure? Is this now a fool’s errand?