The Trouble with the Soft Sciences

I n the middle of one of those broad-spectrum, wide-ranging arguments with a liberal recently, I was hit with this: “You know, conservatives don’t believe in sociology.” I had two immediate thoughts:

1. I don’t know that one believes in a social science; you can accept or not accept its theories and conclusions. Hard sciences are different. I believe in rocket science inasmuch as the ships belch fire and takeoff and come back to Earth. Even if they blow up, I believe in rocket science, because there were facts, processes, and unarguable results. The tower is a smoking ruin: I believe they screwed up.

2. If you look at the replication crisis, a term for the inconvenient inability to reproduce the results and conclusions of sociological studies, it would seem that not even sociologists believe in sociology. Or at least all of it.

The unmasking of Jason Arday, Cambridge professor of sociology of education, was portrayed by some as a skirmish in this culture war — as if it wasn’t the academic culture that’s to blame, but the war against the academic culture. This is intended to discredit the criticism: calumny from bad-faith culture warriors. But again and again, dogged believers in academic integrity run the disputed work through Mr. Peabody’s Plagiarism Machine, and it turns out that respected academics lifted great chunks of their impenetrable texts from another academic whose work no one ever read. It always sounds like this:

Structural biases, discerned most readily in interstitial interstices, can play into preconceived narratives aligned with colonialist readings of white-enforced hierarchical variances, questioning the ontological experiences of dispossessed bodies experiencing marginalizing forces that historically align with queerphobic and capitalistic narratives, derived in part from systemically enforced settler-colonial suppression of non-quiescent voices.

The plagiarized version is the same, except a few boilerplate buzzwords are swapped out. Next, the tepid defense: “Well, the original piece said ‘Capitalistic narratives,’ but our valiant beleaguered academic referred to ‘Narrative capitalism,’ which is completely different.” And I suppose it is, if you’re a regular consumer of thin broth bobbing with wads of gristly twaddle. A teacher who specializes in Capitalistic Narratives is probably having a bitter war in the department with the fellow who teaches Narrative Capitalism. (But both hate they who teaches Anti-Capitalist Approaches to Deconstructing Narrative; total fraud, that one.)

In the end, though, it’s all vacuous nonsense. The words do not signify facts, or even an idea — they’re code for “This must be correct, because it has the proper words reinforcing our disciplines underlying assumption that the West is a vast pit of infinite sin.” If you don’t accept the holy text, you’re calling the whole enterprise into question, and this is literal violence. You are literally erasing people’s lived experiences, and they fade out like the picture of Marty McFly’s family in Back to the Future.

Of course, the subject of social arrangements is worth studying. You’d have to be a misanthropic hermit not to be interested in human society, its complexities, its recurring themes, its diverse arrangements. But the Wikipedia definition reveals the problem:

As a social science, sociology uses various methods of empirical investigation

Good, good, that should be enough —

and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge

Ah, well, there’s the problem. Not that they’re analyzing, critically, but that it’s done in the crucible of the modern university, a dreary grey bowl in which everything is ground into a bitter powder. The only constancy in the discipline seems to be certainty: They have always trusted the science. But if you read sociology threads on Reddit, you learn that many old certainties are now regarded as dangerous and vile. Down with Structural Functionalism! Up against the wall, Unilineal Evolutionists!

But now they have it all figured out. Of course, science is always evolving and making new discoveries that require reassessment of fundamental beliefs, but the soft sciences — from an outsider’s ignorant perspective, I admit — seem like “Lysenko was wrong, but in its essence and intention, Lysenkoism is correct.”

It’s a fascinating topic, because mankind is endlessly fascinating, but science? Conservatives might not “believe” in it, despite the novel and interesting ideas it might produce, but who cares? Worry more about the people who believe in something because the person at the head of the classroom has a glistening resume, like the late Arday. A PhD in the spongy-soft sciences doesn’t mean you know more than everyone else. It means you designed an interesting basket for a hot-air balloon and got it six feet off the ground in front of a thesis committee, half of whom believe helium is a social construct.