Social Sciences as Sorcery

...Claude Levi-Strauss, Talcott Parsons, and R. D. Laing are among his targets...

...Laqueur was no friend to rioting students in the sixties...

...Andreski cites this example of "manipulation by description": "By interpreting every manifestation of warm feelings between persons of the same sex as latent homosexuality, the psychoanalysts . . . have debased and well-nigh destroyed the concept of friendship, and have greatly contributed to the painful isolation of modern man...

...If faith was a virtue," observes Wills, "and doubt was opposed to it, then doubt was a sin...

...Often reality is camouflaged by jargon, Andreski notes...

...Although critical of the hucksterism in the book business, he understands the market "often constitutes the chief (or even only) bulwark against an orthodoxy imposed by a bureaucratic machine . . . . " It is his opinion that money is corrupting the social sciences and that governments should give less rather than more support...

...so the truer liberal--i.e., Adlai Stevenson~had, at the outset, a stronger claim on him than a fellow Catholic with Jack Kennedy's dubiously liberal past...

...Andreski gives examples of obfuscation or emptiness from a number of well-known men...

...The better to fool you with, my dear...

...If academic sanction is not guarantee of moral purity, neither is it proof of theoretical insight...

...Andreski writes clearly, cleverly, and convincingly...

...Great harm has been done: " . . . the moral disorientation and fanatic nihilism which afflict modern youth have been stimulated by the popular brands of sociology and psychology with their bias for overlooking the more inspiring achievements and focusing on the dismal average or even the subnormal...

...They have reacted by ignoring this book, but he's not likely to care much: " . . . social and political studies have opened the gates of academic pastures to a large number of aspirants to the status of scientist who might have been perfectly useful citizens as post-office managers or hospital almoners, but who have been tempted into charlatanry by being faced with a subject utterly beyond their mental powers...

...A country with plenty of capable engineers will tend to have more and better products of engineering than a country less blessed...

...The mechanistic, cybernetic view of society as a goal-seeking machine ignores the competition within society over what goals are to be achieved...

...But the main point about the Council can be put quite simply: it let out the dirty little secret...

...Not that I would have you read Andreski's book uncritically...

...It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest...

...He finds much of value in Marxism, but repudiates its dogmatism...

...social Work" merits Honorable Mention...

...Yet, as Wills claims, despite their initim doubts, Catholic liberals came to see that Kennedy better served their purposes, for "his defense of the secular realm's autonomy had more impact becausehe was a Catholic...

...But the gates of hell would not prevail against the church . . . . We have yet to learn all the good wrought by 'Vatican Two', and all the damage...

...Sociologist Stanislav Andreski doesn't mince his words when it comes to criticizing his fellows in the social sciences...

...Mathematics may have replaced patriotism as a last refuge for scoundrels, at least in the social sciences...

...But sin is in the will--so intellectual objection to the faith must be willed away by virtue, by one's faith . . . . Letting the intellect dwell on any doubt was like entertaining impure thoughts . . . . So at times one had to ignore one's faith in order to retain it . . . . " This ghetto mentality was largely responsible for the attitude of many Catholics regarding the change that came about because of Pope John and the Second Vatican Council...

...Laski described Andrei Vyshinksy, the lackey who presided over Stalin's show trials, as "a man whose passion was law reform . . . . He was doing what an ideal Minister of Justice would do if we had such a person in Great Britain...

...The willingness to gore the oxen (or sacred cows) of liberals and conservatives alike is a persuasive token of his honesty...

...Purging themselves will not be easy, he states, because those social scientists who have not deceived themselves about much of what fills their professional journals are under pressures not to be too critical of the vacuity of some of their colleagues' "contributions...

...Shades of "alleged...

...Douglas W. Cooper Bare Ruined Choirs by Garry Wills Doubleday $7.95 "The Catholic Church," I~nny Bruce once observed, "was the only the Church...

...The study of human beings, complex enough in subject matter, is made even more difficult because the objects of study react to what is said about them, making some statements self-fulfilling prophecies, and often making flattery profitable and criticism costly...

...rather, he is talking about a ghetto mentality, "an isolation from the intellectual currents of this country...

...Catholics, Wills contends, were forced to accept on faith answers that failed to satisfy them intellectually...

...It was, Garry Wills points out, "the extreme taken as a type, the most fixed part of religion's stable landscape...

...Science may be distinguished from witchcraft, Andreski suggests, by noting whether or not the stated goals are achieved by the means recommended...

...The Soviet regime becomes a "goal-oriented mechanism" one of whose "inputs" was the lives of a million or so Kulaks...

...And if one were to have a Catholic president, it was better to have Kennedy than Gene Mc20 The Alternative November 1973...

...But there is no need to become alarmed--aren't all governments "goaloriented mechanisms...

...There is a part in which the astute professor seems to lose his usual clear-sightedness: in discussing the dearth of meaty books in the social sciences, he casts aspersions on the level of book reviewing in general...

...The rest of the book is excellent...

...Not only does he suggest that friends are rewarded with good reviews and boat-rockers dismissed with unfavorable ones (or worse, silence), but he comes close to misleading our youth when he warns, "one must never assume without good evidence that the reviewer knows better than the author...

...In a parody, Andreski offers "a mathematical model of jargon-mongering: (A/K) - 1 = V; the verbiage produced (V) equals the ratio of the author's ambition (A) to his knowledge (K) minus one...

...The program of modern ratiolmlism is to speak only with certainty and primarily about that which can be quantified...

...Wills takes the disarray of the Catholic Church as a model of institutional breakdown, tracing parallel agonies in church and state...

...Politics was, for him, a world separate and quite different from religion...

...Some of the changes ushered in by Vatican II were transformations in lit u r g y - t h e introduction of the vernacular into the mass and the simplification and shortening of the mass--the introduction of a "questioning spirit" and a "spirit of democracy" into the Church, more autonomy on all levels of the Church, and more power and responsibility for lay persons...

...Recently, the ForresterMeadows doom scenario has undergone withering attack on its assumptions...

...Corruption is hard to quantify, the participants being less than candid in their replies to questionaires, so it is not much studied, for example...

...Whole sections of the universities could be closed down for a year or two, and the result, far from being the disaster to civilization which some appear to anticipate, would probably be beneficial/' If there is an unfortunate side to Laqueur's healthy skepticism about academic "non-subjects," it is that his animus against modern social science is such that he tends to identify bad theory with theory altogether...

...I~t the "soc sci" students beware...

...But apparently the Church, too, had its own "dirty little secret": change...

...as Michael Oakshott stressed in his critiques of rationalism, this means saying very little with regard to values and ethics, crucial areas in the study of men...

...Laqueur is so insistent that his work has nothing in common with bad social science that he forgets how much it has in common with good social science...

...Last year, computer simulations of population growth and resource depletion were the rage, typified by the work of Forrester and Meadows reported in Limits to Growth, which predicted catastrophic collapse of the world economy in a few decades...

...As Wills points out, for the mass of Catholics Vatican II and its aftermath "threatened psychic ruin for them personally, as well as institutional jeopardy for the church...

...He emerges as a spokesman for the the study of history rather than political theory...

...D. H. Lawrence once remarked that our civilization's "dirty little secret" was sex...

...I mean...

...Professor Andreski is critical of such simulations, whether growth games or war games, because they focus on outcomes at the expense of analyzing the assumptions on which the model is built...

...The assumption that organizations pursue exclusively the goals for which they were first organized naively ignores the variety of motivations of organization members...

...By the "Catholic ghetto," Wills is not referring to a ghetto of a racial or economic kind...

...Mr...

...Wills tells us that "the church's secret, hidden away in official teaching, minimized when it could not be ignored, was change...

...Deviance" is so broadly used as to apply to the sadist and the saint, the nonconformist and the nincompoop...

...The study of human minds and societies deals with extraordinarily complex phenomena, further complicated bythe rapidity with which certain aspects change and the response of the subjects to what is said about them...

...say there has arisen a new permissiveness, and the "bandwagon" effect will encourage the suggestible into promiscuity...

...The difficulty of proving or disproving assertions in the social sciences is so great that it "gives a wide scope to ulterior motives, and provides immunity for the purveyors of false information...

...Money (government grants, book royalties) go to those esteemed by their peers . . . a Zulu proverb is offered us, "a dog with a bone in his mouth cannot bark," and it is considered unseemly to jeopardize the playing of the game, though one's co-professionals allow one to play it in a variety of ways...

...yet he offers a strikingly sympathetic explanation of at least one part of their problem: "There is nothing more discouraging than to behold the proliferation of social science non-subjects in which the body of solid knowledge proffered stands usually in inverse ratio to the scientific pretensions upheld...

...Thus, much was written about how to avoid the coming "catastrophe...

...If the forces of change can make it crumble, then what social institution can hope to stand...

...Goal-questioners become merely malfunctioning parts...

...At least we've got the Kulak count right...

...The Alternative November 1973 19 Why, Grandma, what big words you have...

...Martin's $7.95 "Even a popular weekly like Time supplies a much better insight into American society than all the journals of sociology combined...

...Socialization" is widely used as a euphemism for "shaping the individual to conform to the group's desires ; ascribed is used Instead of inherited" and obscures the meaning of such phrases as '~ascribed wealth" and "ascribed intelligence...

...Even the chapter headings reflect his iconoclastic humor: "Why Foul One's Nest?," "Manipulation Through Description," "Censorship Through Mass Production," "Evasion in the Guise of Objectivity," "Quantification as Camouflage," and my own favorite, "The Law of the Lighter Weights Rising to the Top...

...As Duncan Williams argued in his excellent critique of modern literature and art, Trousered Apes, the emphasis on the base distracts and discourages those who might pursue the noble if their attention were so directed...

...With what ddja vu must Laqueur view the current ecstasy over the "discovery" of China...

...For those Catholic intellectuals who supported Pope John and Vatican II, John Kennedy represented the kind of Catholic liberalism that would revamp the political and social orders according to their blueprints...

...to the mass of Catholics, however, this experience of change engendered not rejoicing, only shock and disillusionment...

...His writings provide not only illuminating historical generalizations but explanations that draw on a broader understanding of politics...

...Quantification as camouflage" is Andreski's label for a device popular among those who wish to be all things to all men...

...Fouling one's nest" is more taboo than incest and puncturing the pomposities of one's fellow practitioners is a no-no...

...To many Catholic intellectuals, these changes were not only in the right direction but also long overdue...

...George Washington captive to history...

...A professor of sociology at Reading University in England, he is writing, in part, to stir the consciences of his colleagues to sift the wheat from the chaff in the profession...

...Itis vain opponent ga,~ in, not wishing to reveal his befuddlement by the mathematics, although we now understand that this does not prove the existence of God unless the process of exponentiation is commutative...

...Has the world'srecord concentration of psychologists and psychiatrists and sociologists produced in twentieth-century America a happier, better-adjusted, more selfaware populace than that of other countries at other times...

...He believes that the Church has for much too long contributed to a "Catholic ghetto...

...Self-fulfilling prophecies abound: tell someone he is likely to fail and he will likely fail...

...Andreski tells how, long ago, the great Swiss mathematician Euler silenced an argumentative Voltairian by writing on the blackboard in the debating hall: "(x+y) 2 == x~' +2xy+y 2, therefore God exists...

...they were required to conform blindly to Church teachings, for there was never any room for doubt...

...The ramifications of this relationship are left as an exercise for the reader...

...A major problem in sociology is the preoccupation with details of method at the cost of content, partly because it is safer to be mathematically elegant than to step on anybody's toes...

...Those readers who answer, "Education," move to the heads of their classes...

...It forced upon Catholics, in the most startling symbolic way, the fact that the church changes...

...for instance, the market response by increasing prices for scarce goods was ignored...

...The distinction is important, but Laqueur underestimates the extent to which the quality of his own work reflects his considerable ability to theorize about politics...

...Victor Baras Social Sciences as Sorcery by Stanislav Andreski St...

...Other things came and went, Great American Series The Nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave...

...Andreski is more effective than most polemicists because he is hard to pigeonhole...

...What 50 billion dollar per year American enterprise turns out the shoddiest product per dollar invested compared with similar enterprises abroad...

...It is true, of course, that they had not at first been ardent for Kennedy's election, for as Wills explains, "the Catholic liberal wanted liberalism in politics, not Catholicism-that was the very point he strove to make...

...He points out that disillusionment and a crisis of authority have followed on the shallow optimism of the Second Vatican Council, just as it did on the empty hopes of President John Kennedy's "Camelot" and Harvey Cox's "Secular City...

...Someone wisely said that the problem with teaching sociology to collegians is that it seduces them into believing they understand a human phenomenon just because they have learned its name...