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Science folks often steer away from the social sciences, and particularly sociology, because social science, and related current events and public policy are, typically presented at a low level, both in the mass media, and often even in better-than-mass media.
This is, of course, well-recognized, and is due to:
and
Fortunately, with practice, we find places to avoid the problems above. We figure out that there are millions of quality minds around the world who are aware of the problems above, and are beyond that level. Many of those folks do some writing about social issues, and even show up on TV.
Let me toss in a particular plug for the field sociology. The field is correctly attacked for abundant pretentiousness and false scientism. Further, hard-science people will note a general use of therefore and shows that is kind of laughable. However, the sociological literature is the place where the question of power and manipulation within society is confronted most directly. There are issues of power, confrontation, and especially of manipulation to avoid the confrontation, that exist in any society. To have a full comprehension of the world around us requires that we see those issues. (To wit, within many corporations, the corporation or its managers, by virtue of their power, define their own right and wrong. Often this right and wrong has no, or negative, relation to morality, and has a positive relation to profits, or to the success and/or emotional gratification of the more powerful corporate figures. And often, this corporate assessment of right and wrong is accepted blindly, by many unaware of the deception, as a true morality and appropriate behavioral course.)
To share the pleasure of good reading, let me (Norm Spier) toss out some books in the social studies/issues area, by minds good enough for hard science.
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The Sociological Imagination, by C. Wright Mills. This book was written in the late 1950s by a distinguished sociologist. The author firstly does some summing up of some of the predominating sociological writing going on in his day, and finds them pretentious, pretty useless, and pseudo-scientific -- a scientism in the false sense. He makes the assertion that many in his field are taking on the posture of being "scientists" not for any intellectually valid reason, quite simply because it gives them rank, in their own minds and that of others. (Before reading the book, I had seen the assertion of this almost-too-silly-about-people-to-believe motive by several science-people, notably Noam Chomsky, but never by a sociologist attacking his own field).
After the scathing attack on his own field, the author comes forth with his own idea of how Social Science should be done. His idea is to gather a broad, complete-as-possible, holistic understanding of each issue (say policy issue), we get all the knowledge the historian has to provide, and all the comparative knowledge from other societies available, and then to act intellectually in an open-minded, non-bombastic fashion to put it all together. The result will be non-obscure. It will not be in a dense symbolic language like that of the hard scientist or mathematician, because the material is much more complex, and not amenable to it.
Finally, Mills speaks of, in a beautiful section, of his own values of truth, freedom, and reason, and the use of Social Science knowledge to improve life by furtherance of those values. Though one may think Mills was too optimistic, the reader may be driven to applause.
The Epic of Latin America, by John A. Crow This book, by a scholar of the Spanish language, runs from pre-Columbian times until about 1992. The book takes us through the history providing a wonderful and sharp understanding of the cultural, economic, and social/governmental issues governing the history of the area. Indeed, the issues and problems covered, such as how to get prosperity, security, and perhaps democracy among uneducated, and in the author's terminology, even "ignorant" populations clearly extend of human history much more broadly, and to current world events.
The praise for this book is not just my own -- it is considered a classic in the field.
Fashionable Nonsense, by Alan Sokol and Jean Bricmont
The false scientism that C. Wright Mills critiqued in the 1950s did not go away. Rather, it actually got worse. Hoping to make an appropriate point, NYU physicist Alan Sokal in the 1990s got them with a good zinger, getting his own meaningless-nonsense pseudoscientific article published in a major sociological journal. This book is the story of that, as well as a counter to an excessive cultural relativism point of view that some sociologists have claimed for the knowledge of the hard sciences.
The hoax is famous in sociological circles, and Sokal's point seems to have been effectively made to some: I have seen the need to avoid a false scientism, "as demonstated by Sokal's hoax", stated in recent sociological writings.
Manufacturing Consent, by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman
At a certain point in the life of an educated, thoughtful person, if a free democracy, one realizes that mainstream journalism, even at the better New York Times level, is within a narrow range, within both cultural norms and a certain amount of the interests of the elite. This may not be totally bad thing, as there is a certain amount of stability that this brings, and further, that some elite guidance may be needed by the people.
The authors, in early chapters, lucidly describe the fact and mechansim (non-conspiratorial) in this now-classic work. The authors, in the book, are distinctly of the mind that the limited range in the mainstream media is a uniformly bad thing. My own explanation for the one-sidedness of view, in the case of Chomsky, is that he is an excessive democrat--that is, believing fully in the decisions of the people, if they just work at it a little. In fact, I have seen, in at least 2 different places, Chomsky make this assertion of his fundamental error: he has stated quite directly that matters of policy and government are simply not too complex for the average person. I am also not the first to make the point that this is his error.
At any rate, Chomsky is still a good mind (despite the big flaw), Herman as well, and they both still write regularly for Z magazine (along with some good and lesser minds). Z will help fill in the information outside NY Times range, though sometimes a bit speculatively, and often with the same naive flavor of excessive faith in the result if full control is returned to the people.
The Phantom Public, by Walter Lippmann
In this book, rather bleak about the public's prospects for understanding, we have the wonderful quote:
We must assume that the members of a public will not anticipate a problem much before its crisis has become obvious, nor stay with the problem long after its crisis has past. They will not know the antecedent events, will not have seen the issue as it developed, will not have thought out or willed a program, and will not be able to predict the consequences of acting on that program. We must assume as a theoretically fixed premise of popular government that normally men as members of a public will not be well informed, continuously interested, nonpartisan, creative, or executive. We must assume that a public is inexpert in its curiosity, intermittent, and that it discerns only gross distinctions, is slow to be aroused, and quickly diverted; that, since it acts by aligning itself, it personalizes whatever it considers, and is interested only when events have been melodramatized as a conflict.
The public will arrive in the middle of the third act, and will leave before the last curtain, having stayed just long enough to decide who is the hero and who the villain of the piece. Yet usually that judgement will necessarily be made apart from the intrinsic merits, on the basis of some sample of behavior, an aspect of a situation, by very rough external evidence.
Lippmann is thus an intellectual elitist, and wants the "best and the brightest" to be guiding things. I rather agree with him, as long as the guidance is to the general benefit, and not the benefit of the the better off or financial elite. Thus, the outlooks of Chomsky vs. Lippmann are a classic and fundamental starting points at conflict. The title "Manufacturing Consent" of the Chomsky/Herman book is taken from Lippmann. To this day (4/08 Z magazine), Chomsky has faith in the people, if only the government would listen. Issues recede as candidates, party managers, and their PR agencies focus on character (qualities, etc.) As usual. And for sound reasons. Apart from the relevance of the population to them, they can be dangerous. In the same issue, Chomsky laments: the [other] quoted admonitions, taken from highly regards essays by the the leading public intellectual of the 20th century, Walter Lippmann, capture well the perceptions of progressive intellectual opiniion, share across the narrow elite spectrum. The common understanding is revealed more in practice then in words, though some, like Lippman, do articulate it. Again, I incline much more towards Lippmann than Chomsky myself. And especially, with the Grover Norquist types merely interested in manipulating the people for the benefit of themselves ("socialism", "death tax", etc., etc.), I think the Democrats may be making the best choice under the circumstances, by countermanipulating, but much more for the common good than the current batch of Republicans are manipulating.
Though Herman wrote the classic "Manufacturing Consent" with Chomsky, in his writings for Z magazine, my take is he doesn't have such a naive faith in the people. Thus, he writes We are in the midst of both a farce and a tragedy in the United States today: the farce, a government of great incompetence and hostile to the interest of the general citizenry, a leadership headed by a wild jackass, an elite including the corporate media and Democtratic leadership unable or unwilling to constrain the jackass, and corruption now competitive with that of the Gilded Age. (Z: 3/08), which I find unobjectionable, perhaps dead on.
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, by Edward O. Wilson
To science people like myself, the assertion that pops up often in discussions is "From the point of view of discipline X, yes, but from the point of view of discipline Y, no", and it always strikes me as lame, that is, simply incorrect. Wilson has written this popular book around that
topic, has the same conclusion as myself, and I think most science minds will share the same belief.
The book is a light, easy read for most science people, but will still be worth while for such people for the pleasure of many examples and ideas. I also point out that Wilson points out that he has faith that a blending of biological, chemical, and psychevolutionary thinking in to the social sciences would cause those social sciences to make great progress in prediction. Personally, I'm skeptical on that one point--as the laws involved act in too complicated a way. But the author admits that this particular view is a matter of his faith, many scientists disagree, and he readily confesses that he may be wrong.
The Israel Lobby, by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
In this scholarly, clear, and cogent book, the authors, Harvard foreign policy folks, make the case that one of the most powerful lobbies, distorting information relevant to both goodness and the U.S. interest, is the pro-Israel-hardline lobby. Such lobby makes it forbidden to even challenge Israeli policies in the U.S. mainstream press, particularly the Israeli policy of building settlements on the West Bank, which is both morally horrible and against U.S. interest. Indeed, U.S. support for such, and always being biased towards the Israeli side, may have played a substantial role in causing 9/11.
Regrettably, the Obama administration and Secretary of State Clinton have stated they are against the West Bank settlements, but the lobby seems to still be powerful at keeping away actions with teeth, such as the threat of withdrawal of all U.S. aid if the settlements are not abandoned. Indeed, note the withdrawal of Obama appointee Charles Freeman as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council for reasonable statements on the matter (article on widthdrawal here) and Freeman statement on withdrawal here.
Incidentally, some commentators have called the book anti-semitic. These commentators represent the Israel Lobby, and such comment is intentionally disinformational. As a person of Jewish extraction myself, let me confirm that the antisemitism charge is rubbish.
The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life, by Erving Goffman
Another classic sociological work from the 1950s. It presents thw world from a team social interactions / presentation / theatrics point of view. I don't know if I'd call it social science in any sense. I'd call it literature. Perceptive, poignant, often hilarious literature.
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