Invitation to Sociology

Let us return once more to the image of the puppet theater that our argument conjured up before. We see the puppets dancing on their miniature stage, moving up and down as the strings pull them around, following the prescribed course of their various little parts. We learn to understand the logic of this theater and we find ourselves in its motions. We locate ourselves in society and thus recognize our own position as we hang from its subtle strings. For a moment we see ourselves as puppets indeed. But then we grasp a decisive difference between the puppet theater and our own drama. Unlike the puppets, we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first step towards freedom.

Another such peculiar value is inherent in the sociologist’s necessity to listen to others without volunteering his own views. The art of listening, quietly and with full attention, is something that any sociologist must acquire if he is to engage in empirical studies. While one should not exaggerate the importance of what is often nothing more than a research technique, there is a human significance at least potentially present in such conduct, especially in our nervous and garrulous age in which almost nobody finds the time to listen with concentration.

Take a settlement house in a lower-class slum district trying to wean away teen-agers from the publicly disapproved activities of a juvenile gang. The frame of reference within which social workers and police officers define the “problems” of this situation is constituted by the world of middle-class, respectable, publicly approved values. It is a “problem” if teen-agers drive around in stolen automobiles, and it is a “solution” if instead they will play group games in the settlement house. But if one changes the frame of reference and looks at the situation from the viewpoint of the leaders of the juvenile gang, the “problems” are defined in reverse order. It is a “problem” for the solidarity of the gang if its members are seduced away from those activities that lend prestige to the gang within its own social world, and it would be a “solution” if the social workers went way the hell back uptown where they came from. What is a “problem” to one social system is the normal routine of things to the other system, and vice versa. Loyalty and disloyalty, solidarity and deviance, are defined in contradictory terms by the representatives of the two systems.

In the second Middletown study the Lynds have given a classic analysis of the mind of middle-class America in their series of “of course statements”—that is, statements that represent a consensus so strong that the answer to any question concerning them will habitually be prefaced with the words “of course.” “Is our economy one of free enterprise?” “Of course!” “Are all our important decisions arrived at through the democratic process?” “Of course!” “Is monogamy the natural form of marriage?” “Of course!” The sociologist, however conservative and conformist he may be in his private life, knows that there are serious questions to be raised about every one of these “of course statements.”

There is a broadly based popular mythology about the character of love as a violent, irresistible emotion that strikes where it will, a mystery that is the goal of most young people and often of the not-so-young as well. As soon as one investigates, however, which people actually marry each other, one finds that the lightning-shaft of Cupid seems to be guided rather strongly within very definite channels of class, income, education, racial and religious background.

People who like to avoid shocking discoveries, who prefer to believe that society is just what they were taught in Sunday School, who like the safety of the rules and the maxims of what Alfred Schuetz has called the “world-taken-for-granted,” should stay away from sociology.

But sociology consists of statistics as little as philology consists of conjugating irregular verbs or chemistry of making nasty smells in test tubes

The fact that more criminologists have been employed by the police than by gangsters can be ascribed to the ethical bias of the criminologists themselves, the public relations of the police and perhaps the lack of scientific sophistication of the gangsters. It has nothing to do with the character of the information itself.