THE DRAMA OF SOCIAL ENQUIRY: POLITICALLY CORRECT KNOWLEDGE T. R. Young The Red Feather Institute August 25, 1993 No.161 Prepared for the Wisconsin Sociologist. Distributed as part of the Red Feather Institute Transforming Sociology Series. The Red Feather Institute, 8085 Essex, Weidman, Michigan, 48893. For the matter at hand is no mere felicity of speculation, but the real business and fortunes of the Human race. ...Francis Bacon in Novum Organon c.1620 THE DRAMA OF SOCIAL ENQUIRY: POLITICALLY CORRECT KNOWLEDGE ABSTRACT Current conflicts over politically correct knowledge are set inside the larger dramas of human knowledge as they sweep across human history. Missions and methods of knowing are limned in three major approaches to human understanding; pre-modern, modern and, now, postmodern sensibility. Issues of political correctness in sociology today are viewed against changing missions and methods since the 1930s. The new science of complexity, often called Chaos theory offers an elegant theoretical envelope with which to understand some of the issues. From this historical survey, a case is made that all social science is a poetics and a politics. Given postmodern critique, agency in social research, as in other sciences, shifts from Gods and/or Nature and resides, increasingly, in human hands. Against the nihilism of french postmodern thought, some ideas of what an affirmative postmodern sociology might look like are offered. THE DRAMA OF SOCIAL ENQUIRY In human history, the most profound dramas, farces, comedies and tragedies are found in the knowledge process as it threads and weaves its way through class, ethnic, gender, religious and national conflicts. It was in support of sure and certain knowledge that inquisitions were held, witches burnt, heretics flogged and scientists forced to recant. It was in the quest for knowledge to control whole nations and to bend human desire to given patterns that both physical and behavioral sciences were founded and funded. It is in the quest for sure and certain facts that contemporary science holds hostage other pathways in the knowledge process. Modern scientists see themselves as key to all there is to know and are positive that all there is to know can be measured, correlated, validated and, then, tightly connected to every domain of human knowledge. The wisdom of the past is held in light esteem while much which that is valuable to the human project is dismissed as myth and ideology. Today, In every campus in the Americas and Europe there are, to coin a phrase, a thousand points of conflict. These points of conflict are part of the larger transformation of the knowledge process from the premodern [c. 40,000 b.c] to the modern [c. 1650 a.d.] now to the postmodern [c. 1950 a.d.]. The pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education are filled with these dramas; at Catholic University, Duke, University of Arizona, The National Endowment for the Arts, in ROTC and at Boston University, bitter accusations are hurled back and forth about who is and who is not enforcing their partisan standards of knowledge on whom else. At issue in all of this are wide ranging differences in what the mission and how the methods of knowledge should be set in the university and, indeed, in all of social life. These struggles over missions and methods in the knowledge process in this epoch pit women, third world peoples, cultural marxists and deconstructionists as well as post-structuralists in the university against those who are male, anglo, Euro-centered and who dwell in the well ordered house of proposition, theory and principle. Against the possibility of theory, universal standards and uniform application of abstract principles in science, literature, history and sociology stand those who assert that such claims are founded on hierarchy, ethnicity and patriarchy. That there is much truth in both camps and that there is much merit in both camps is often lost as the struggle becomes focussed upon real persons and in real courses. Power to validate knowledge and truth claims now resides in those who hold the modernistic world view. Today, men and women are passed over in job searches, are excluded, fired, demoted, denigrated and degraded in that they do not accept that which modernist scholars set as politically correct in terms of the scholarship, teaching style and pathways to knowledge now dominant. Rebels, in turn, hold modernist scholars to ridicule as guardians of a truth system which privileges order above the struggle for justice; which privileges European pathways to knowledge above more Eastern pathways; which validates technical reason and hierarchal command; which supplants mercy, kindness and empathy with a ruthless, rational application of formal principle, rule, rule or policy and, in passing, institutes a terrible uniformity upon social life in bureau, hospital, church, and school. Yet the missions and methods of the knowledge process have changed over history and are now changing at an ever increasing pace. Even the most casual historical overview instructs us that the content of the knowledge process is itself a poetics and a politics in which each age sits itself as the last word in truth, ethics and esthetics. It is the social history of the knowledge process which, as it improves, places ever increasing accountability upon scholars and scientists for the knowledge they produce, celebrate and, too often, turn back upon society to judge who is politically correct and what is proper to the human condition. They do this in the name of Nature or Functional Necessity thus exculpating themselves from the harm done to the human project in the social order which they help bring to birth. DRAMAS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE: Premodern Knowledge Processes For most of human history and for most human beings today, the mission and the methods of the knowledge process are oriented to the dramas of the Holy. Premodern Dramas of the Holy, informed by belief, faith, hope, trust and caritas, help construct the very fabric of social life without which sociology is nothing. For most of human history, troupes of actors used their great talent to put on morality plays at fairs, markets, festivals and at the holy days of the year. Costumes, scripts, rehearsals and performances are assembled and carefully staged that one might know the will of the gods. Across history, books, poetry, plays, movies, operas and ballets best received are those which publicly celebrate and sanctify a given way of life; a given resolution to the many private dramas of love, death, war and catastrophe. Since earliest times, the accouterments of drama have been assembled by kinship groups gathered to discover the will of their gods in times of war or famine. Across the long history of humankind, desperate parents have consulted shaman and healer in order to know the cause and cure of a child's affliction. Young men, proud in their strength, have petitioned their gods to give them courage and understanding. Young women, beautiful in their youth have secluded themselves in order to know their name and fate. All societies, everywhere, have turned to their elders for the wisdom and prudence their years have earned. Since earliest times, costumes, make-up and lighting have been used to frame out a stage and a scene within which to enact such drama. Around fires inside secret caves, deep in the heart of a forest, alone on the cold mountain top, men and women have assembled the equipment with which to purify themselves, to quiet themselves, to sensitize and to ready themselves to receive the messages, inspirations and revelations their gods have to give. In some societies, men and women starve themselves in order to get ready to understand the deeper rhythms of nature and society. In some, alcohol or peyote is used as a means to enter the dream-world. Some peoples chant, sing, dance, flagellate or undergo ordeals of water, fire or pain in order to know the way of the ship at sea or the way of the eagle in the air. Music and musical instruments once called forth the gods and paid tribute to them that they might share with mortals the secrets and purposes of still other gods. Throughout the earliest times, the drama of the Holy has been enacted in a continuing quest for knowledge and the meaning of a thing. Each society has set aside special days and weeks in which to enact these dramas of enquiry. Such days often match and mark the deeper rhythms of the seasons or stages of human growth. The coming of age, the advent of Spring, the beginning of harvest and the coming of frost all signal a time to embody the drama of the Holy; to make decisions that require the best information available. And, since earliest times, women and men have been broken, burnt, exiled and reviled for their disagreements with the knowledge process as constituted since so very much human depends upon knowledge. The time to sow and a time to harvest, the time to build and the time to tear down, that time to make war and that time for peace, a time to marry and a time to depart to new lands all are known from such pathways to knowledge. Questions of life and death; of salvation and damnation; of love and hate hinge upon what we learn from the fall of sticks or the toss of stones. When one challenges either folk methods of the knowledge process or the results of the knowledge process, they challenge both God and Nature; more than that, they put a whole society in jeopardy since these questions must have answers. In the arrogance and vanity of doubt and disbelief, those who scoff risk the future of whole families and tribes. Such blasphemy is not to be treated lightly in adults. Modern Knowledge Processes For some 400,000 years or more, production and enactment of the knowledge process has been kept by priest, scribe, shaman, rabbi, prophet and guru. At some point in the pre-history of human beings, a particularly astute priestly shaman noted the regularity and periodicity of nature. In the Mesopotamia, in Central America, in ancient China as in the caves of Greece and temples of Egypt, the keepers of divine truth noticed the regularity with which floods came or frost departed. Ever more precise calculations revealed the cycles of the sun and passage of the stars fit precise mathematical formulae. The birth of a calf or the beginning of puberty had their own time-bound periods waiting discovery. Out of these observations, a new era in the knowledge process lay waiting to be born. Some 4000 years ago, mathematics which began as homage to the gods, replaced prayer as a pathway to knowledge while the scientist replaced the priestly functionary as the keeper of knowledge. At first, such transformations were disguised by conceding mathematical genius to the gods or by substituting equations for the Will of God. But, as pre-modern teachings about the earth and all its creatures came into conflict with direct observation, the conflict sharpened. As ideas about the earth as the center of the cosmos came into conflict with findings from astronomers, the gods receded into the far reaches of the universe. Neither the earth, nor the sun or even our galaxy were the center of anything. In modern times, we come to see ourselves as a bio-chemical accident on a lonely speck of dust swirling without direction in a vast and endless cosmos rather than the special creation and special concern of the gods. For the last 400 years, titanic struggles between science and theology, church and state, priest and scholar have wrested the knowledge process out of the churches, out of the temples, out of the holy places of the world and into university laboratories, observatories and research institutes of Europe and the Americas. Without an army, without weapons, without favor of kings or benefice from princes, modern scientists stood their ground and slowly expanded their hegemony over the drama of social enquiry. The stories of such battles still echo through the pages of medical history, of military history, in astrophysics and in the biological sciences not to mention theories about the origin of species. The central actors in these dramas are well known: Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, Newton, Pasteur, Koch, Darwin, the monk Mendel, Einstein, and Salk have astounded the world with their insights. Their works have undone princes, priests and Popes whose authority rested upon earlier understandings of law and authority. A. D. White, first President of Cornell, wrote a treatise on the history of warfare between science and theology in Christendom; he agonized over the defeats of science in academia and gloried in its final triumph. The drama of the Holy was thus displaced by the many dramas of scientific enquiry. In agriculture, controlled experiments replaced appeal to the gods for good harvest and crops improved and the demographics of whole nations changed. In hospitals, priests and healers were excluded in preference for surgeons and pharmacists and people lived where before they died. In factories, metallurgists displaced alchemists to weave crystalline structures into ever harder, tougher, lighter and stronger metals. Out of the furnaces and factories of modern industry came floods of steam engines, trains, pumps, dynamos, automobiles, radios, airplanes, television sets and now, ever better computers. The dramas of suspense and discovery in the knowledge process is nowhere more clearly delineated than in the process of prediction, observation and verification. When a scientific theory makes a prediction to an accuracy that defies human imagination; when that prediction is found to conform to the most careful observation; when such predictions determine billions of dollars of investment together with thousands of new posts, the whole world holds its breath. When predications offer an understanding of cosmogony or ontogeny which differ from received truths upon which great empires and great wealth are built, then the drama is heightened. When they are verified by direct observation, whole philosophies crumble. Armed with algebra, trigonometry, calculus, analytic geometry and aristotlean logic, continents were mapped, oceans surveyed, rivers followed, languages collated, mountains analyzed, genomes described and space explored. British surveyors went everywhere, nestled everywhere, measured every thing and laid straight roads and elegant trestles across the Indian continent. German scientists explored the deepest secrets of chemistry and the atom while Swedish scientists brought order into the families and phyla of plant life. Russian scientists replaced Russian priests as the givers of law and the sayers of truth and churches were closed. Dramas of the Holy grew dim in the face of such new productions; all of nature was desanctified and enclosed in impersonal equations or indifferent algorithms. Science desanctified society even as it sanctified truth. Francis Bacon wrote the words on the first page above in early 1600th century to celebrate the new body [novum organum] of knowledge which now we call modern science. Bacon, an English philosopher, Lord Keeper and Chancellor was born in 1561, just as the successes of mathematics worked to reveal the wonderful patterns hidden within the dynamics of nature. Bacon argued well that such a science contained all the truth, utility and beauty that one needed or could have. Bacon held that, by using his tables of a) essence and presence, b) absent in proximity, c) degrees of presence (or absence), one could determine the cause of every natural phenomenon. We recognize such tables as the modern protocol of research design within which one tries to scale attributes of a phenomenon and, carefully controlling the conditions in which these attributes vary, ascertain the laws of physical and social reality through a series of research endeavors which zero in on a set of stable and coherent laws through validations and refutations of working hypotheses. The political point of Bacon's work was to contribute to a 'Great Instauration." This great endeavor was meant to give human beings control over the raw forces of nature; to take them from a point where they were the helpless victims of the natural forces to a time when people, guided by experts, would live in a New Atlantis. In this, the first utopian novel, Bacon thought that science and scientists could, usefully, control and guide the masses to happiness--an immodest and epochal challenge to the hegemony and will of the gods who gave humans only hunger, disease, warfare, suffering and death at an early age. The repository of the new body of knowledge, and the momentous purpose it implied, was to be the House of Solomon, a precursor to the Royal Society; members of which were to be those scientists who contributed most to the new body of knowledge and to the progressive control of nature and society such knowledge foretold. Chaos Theory For the past 200 years, as the promise of systematic enquiry was realized, formal science successfully instituted itself as the core of the knowledge process. Going from success to success in the laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics, the laws of genetics and the laws of evolution, modern predictive science has proven its worth. It has fueled an technological explosive which, turned back upon itself, now provides the technology with which to end the hegemony of order and certainty. Computers make it possible to trace and retain the non-linear patterns hidden deep in data from sea, storm, and society. Chaos theory now informs and grounds a view of nature and society in which order and disorder share in changing ratio, the governance of natural and human events. Indeed, as it turns out, it is disorder within a larger ordered environment which drives social change and, thus, human survival. Rather than disprized in this new science of complexity, change, variety, surprise and uncertainty make survival possible. It also offers an intellectual tool by which human agency, still subject to impersonal structural limits episodically, can alter the future in ways not possible in the clock-like laws attributed to God and Nature (Young, 1992). In the continuing drama of social enquiry, August Comte, Pierre Simon LaPlace, Stuart Dodd, George Lundberg, George Homans, Fred Taylor, and Hubert Blalock sought after the holy grail of deterministic causality and mathematical formulae with which to bring order out of the seamy, steamy, restless twists and swirls of social life. Postmodern sensibility has no such agenda. Postmodern Sensibility Postmodern critique decenters everything, strips every natural and social form of its formerly privileged position and legitimates change, variety and discontinuity. Postmodern critique in art, music, literature, architecture, poetry, sculpting and life style decenter and delegitimate all claims of privilege and preference for Gods, Kings, Popes, as well as scientists themselves. Just so, Chaos theory decenters grand unified theory, linear causality and the possibility of universal truth claims said to be certain, eternal and inviolable. The postmodern thus presents us with another great drama of conflict in which modern science must, perforce, be content with more modest truth-claims and even less seamless authority. Architects of Postmodern Sensibility The central actors in the transformation of the knowledge process from modern to postmodern are many. Modern science had barely began before it was challenged by what is now called Romanticism. Mary Wollenscraft Shelley, William Blake, Mary Daly, Carol Gilligan, and James Joyce join with Benoit Mandelbrot, Edward Lorenz, Mitchell Feigenbaum, Robert May, David Ruelle, Florian Takens, Steven Smale, and a thousand others to play their parts in this most engrossing of dramas. The French deconstructionists and post-structuralists have their part to play: Derrida, Foucault, Bourdieu and Baudrillard have starring roles. Cultural marxists in England; E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Nicholas Garnham, Richard Johnson and Stuart Hall have contributed greatly to postmodern critique of science and the media. Tragic parts are played by Newton, LaPlace, Einstein, Steven Hawking and all those who seek to discover the one single, summary equation which orders and connects all natural events into one coherent, linear equation. Postmodern Philosophy of Science Postmodern philosophy questions the centerpiece of modern science; the assumption that there is a set of stable and coherent processes at work in nature and in society which can be summed up in words, numbers, theories and equations (Young, 1993; 1994). Modern science made its living by recourse to prediction, observation, and verification of such laws. Modern scientists made their name by specification of the 'exact laws' of nature and society. Modern nations made their cause that of rationalization of commerce, health care, agriculture, warfare, education, politics and transportation. Those who resisted modernization were labelled reactionary, simple, primitive or undeveloped peoples. Political Correctness At the moment, the conflict between modern and postmodern sensibilities registered as 'political correctness' is part of a larger conflict between those who privilege order, stability, coherence and control in their philosophy of science and, on the other side, a postmodern scholarship which refuses to honor current 'standards' of knowing and being. Just as modern science decentered the earth and challenged the rule of the gods, this same desanctifying impulse of was turned back upon modern science to yield a more profound insight; there are no absolute standards for social or economic life, there are no modern forms of social organization which are everywhere superior and against which modernization and development can be gauged. There are no universal laws of society with which deviance can be divined and pathology held thrall to therapy. There is no one necessary end-state toward which all successful societies are evolving. Thus there is no end of history nor can there be an end to ideology as long as human imagination and human genius are alive to bring surprize, invention and variety into nature and society. There are, in the universe observed in nonlinear science only infinite centers with infinite detail and infinite length. It is, of course, possible to center a set of mor‚s; a cluster of institutions or a given political economy; indeed, it is essential to the human project that this be done. What is not possible is a centering which is said to be natural or ordained; a centering apart from human belief, trust, hope, desire, persuasion, coercion or conflict. This insight we call postmodern. POLITICALLY CORRECT SOCIOLOGY In American sociology, since its beginnings in Europe in the 1700s, this conflict between differing world views has been registered in the treatment of race relations, in arguments about the necessity and utility of inequality, over the sources of social unrest and over the causes of crime. Yet, wherever there is sociology, there is critique and opposition to social norms. By the very fact of giving a society feedback about its rates of crime, suicide, bankruptcy, divorce and drop-out rates in school, the discipline provides food for thought and energy for action. In such value-free work resides an inescapable politics. But there is no science which is able to rise above and detach itself completely from its culture. In this resides another, more direct political bent. In their 1986 work, American Sociology, Vidich and Lyman reveal the deep allegiance to Protestant values which inform both topic and treatment of social realities in American sociology. In 1970, Alvin Gouldner, with profound contempt, castigated the domination of structural functionalism in American Sociology. In their book, Sociologists of the Chair, Julia and Hy Schwendinger traced the deep class connections of American sociology. Today, as legacy of these works and of the radical scholarship which blazed in the 60s, American sociology is deconstructed in the effort to put it back together in more human form. Steven Seidman put it nicely when, in a recent Newsletter of the Theory Section of the American Sociological Society, he summarized postmodern critique: As this relentless epistemological suspicion is turned against disciplinary discourses by, say, feminists, and as this same trope is rehearsed among African-Americans, gays, lesbians, Hispanics, Asians, the differently-abled and so on, no social discourse can escape the doubt that its claims to truth are tied to and yet mask an on-going social interest to shape the course of history. Once the veil of epistemic privilege is torn away, science appears as a social force enmeshed in particular cultures and power struggles. The claim to truth, as Foucault has proposed, is inextricably an act of power--a will to form humanity (1990:2). There are two important notes to make about political correctness in American sociology. The first is that every science is a politics and a poetics; it is not sociology alone that is on the agenda for deconstruction and, perchance, reconstruction. Even physics is beset with hard questions which greatly soften its claims of truth, claims of certainty, claims of object and objectivity (Ekeland, 1988; Penrose, 1989; Casti, 1990; Barrow, 1991). The second is more germane to this essay; each new contribution to the knowledge process in sociology was, at one time, victim to charges of political correctness. Indeed, the determined effort to dislodge sociology from academia today testifies to the political character of even the more acceptable sociologies. In their time, Weber, Marx, Durkheim, Lundberg, Parsons, and even the gentle Blalock were subjected to charges of political bias; today, their heirs make the same charge against feminist sociologists, Black sociologists, qualitative methodologists, and postmodern scholars. Both pre-modern and modern science project their politics upon God and/or Nature; postmodern sensibility admits its own political character while pointing out that of those who claim to stand aside from the happiness and despair they observe. Sociology as Politics and Poetics. The great drama unfolding in both social and natural enquiry in these days is a drama in which predictive science is decentered. In such a drama, space is made for variation, discontinuity, disorder and innovation in ways not possible in a tightly ordered universe. There is much at stake in this latest drama of social enquiry. In sociology, all syllabi have to be rewritten; all journals re-dedicated; all editors re-oriented; all graduate programs reviewed and all missions of the knowledge process rethought. This re-orientation of the discipline will continue to occasion much bitter strife in faculties and in editorial staffs. Even as I write, the sociology faculty at the University of Illinois have cast out of the department those who do a qualitative analysis informed more by imagination than mathematics. Central to the transition from modern to postmodern sociology is an understanding, as I have asserted before, that all theory is a politics and a poetics. In the choice of terms to label its major concepts it is a poetics. Some terms come from agriculture, some from warfare, some from hunting and some from commerce but all scientific terms begin as folk concepts with which to create a given social life world. Whether to use four concepts to analyze snow or the forty used by the Innuit is a political act; to use two concepts with which to grasp the gendering process or twenty is, equally, a politics. The poetics of sociology is seen clearly in Lundberg's use of terms from physics and biology to serve as metaphor for human behavior. He says, "The social sciences are concerned, then, with the behaviors of those electron-proton configurations called societal groups, principally human groups" (1939:204). Other metaphors from physics are used to explain social dynamics, 'energy is...the amount of change in a [human relationship' while force is the rate of social change (p.205). Lundberg uses terms from biology as analogy to explain uniformities of human behavior: heliotropism, galvanotropism and chemotropism (p.175). Judgment, wisdom, outrage, desire and false needs play no part in the sociology of George Lundberg. Poetry stops and politics start when Lundberg uses equilibrium as the 'basic postulate' that the most probable state of social dynamics is that of equilibrium while unpredictable events 'must be regarded as chaotic and, for the time being, completely outside the pale of science' (p.208). We now know that nonlinear dynamics are the most probable state of any complex system and that whoever says science says uncertainty. Central to Lundberg's political agenda was an effort to institute rational numbering systems into the study of human behavior. Lundberg devoted his second chapter to an apology for quantification; not mind you, a discussion of research methods and inferential techniques but a defense of the use of numbers to grasp social reality and validate theory (p.45 ff). Rational numbering systems exclude discontinuity and qualitative change. Social realities do not pop into existence by belief, faith and self-fulfilling prophecy; they emerge linearly as do crystals in a controlled experiment. Gone is mystery, surprize, the magic of love and the power of spiritual inspiration in the accounting of warfare, marriage, friendship or migration. By 1950, such political tactics of quantification were unnecessary. Those who governed graduate departments set quantification and statistical inference as the only legitimate pathway to knowledge. Those who used acumen, genius, wit, and wisdom to speak to social realities were set aside as poor students who used bad science in place of objective methods and mathematical tools. Today however not just Social theory but all theory is at risk. That is to say, the kind of theory specified by, among most other modern scientists, George Lundberg: In its maturest form the content of science consists of a body of verified propositions so related that under given rules (logic) the system is self-consistent and compatible with empirical observation. (1939:6). What a Lundberg would make of nonlinear dynamics which are so topical today is a matter to ponder. If propositions are compatible with empiric observation, they are not self consistent since co-relations which are strong in one part of an outcome basin are weak in another part. The use of rational numbering systems, praised fulsomely as entirely necessary to the kind of science Lundberg imposed on his subject matter, are useless to follow the dynamics of most of actually existing systems. There is a mathematics called, quaintly enough, rubber math with which to map, to model nonlinear structures and to follow nonlinear processes (Briggs and Peat, 1989: Chapter 0), however it does not honor linearity as its essence. In its choice of concepts to study, all sociology becomes a politics. In 1905, students of E.A. Ross had to memorize some 30 'basic' social processes. In 1915, students of Blackmar and Gillan had the list down to 10 basic social processes. Park and Burgess (1924) told their students that there were four fundamental types of social action while von Wiese and Becker, in 1932, assured them that there 24 such processes. Dodd (1940) listed two basic types but found different social processes for persons, nations and businesses. Why he omitted religions, sports, and warfare is open to question. Joan Ferrante, writing in 1992, did not bother to list 'basic' social processes; she simply discussed those which were important to her and to the social life world she would like to see emerge. She included terms not mentioned by those above; discrimination, segregation, secularization, professionalization and sanction (as both verb and process). She, in her turn, left out social processes which others might want to include in a critique and reconstruction of society: communication, exploitation and oppression. If society had but 30 or 50 or 500 basic concepts which matched precisely that which really exists, ontologically, there would be no politics. But in fact there are an infinite number of ways to slice up social reality...in baseball alone, one could create a variable with ontological grounding by counting the number of times that a left-handed pitcher struck out a right- handed catcher in the third inning with two men on base; and correlate that variable with the number of times a third place team gained a spot in the playoffs before the seventh of October. The politics of sociology is easily visible in theories of crime. Seeing the disproportionate number of young people in prison, age is considered a correlate of crime; this correlation fades when one considers white collar crime, corporate crime and state crime. Organized crime recruits heavily among disemployed young people but it is the older men who run it. Race is considered a factor in crime but again that correlate reverses when one examines these other forms of crime. It is simply not politically expedient to look too closely at state crime or corporate crime in a society in which the large corporation and the state have control over the funding of grants and the hiring of criminologists. Donald Taft made that connection clear in his last chapter on crime (1942:685) in the midst of a popular war... even today most criminologists however pass by state crime and corporate crime lumping the latter with white collar crime. In his otherwise excellent treatment of race and crime, Donald Taft (1942) uses the social disorganization of Afro- American culture as an alternative to race as a way to explain the disproportion. Anomie may be a factor in some forms of crime but most corporate crime and political crime is well organized. Social disorganization itself is a pejorative term when things we don't like happen; when things we do like occur, then we call the ensuing disorder by more favorable terms: progress, development, change or social evolution. Spencer (1920:367) asserted that specialization and the sub-division of labor was a positive, progressive process; marxists talk about the same process in terms of fragmentation, alienation, massification, depersonalization, and bifurcations of class, status and power leading to conflict and crime. Indeed the shabby treatment of Marx in most texts continues today; Broom and Selznick (1955:578) give him short and belated treatment in their collection of writings on social movements, collective behavior, crime and social organization. Ogburn and Nimkoff say that class overshadows all other statuses (1942:307) but when they define class, they say it is the aggregate of persons having the same social status in a given society (309). The means by which persons get into the 'same status' is not considered. Marx would look at racism, sexism and class advantage to explain why some have more wealth, power and social honor than others. Marx is cited (342) but not mentioned by Ogburn and Nimkoff. Ogburn and Nimkoff accept that inequalities 'attend' status differences but it is age, sex, and intelligence which 'affects' status (340). The use of sexist language in sociology texts abounds. Green (1952:ix), wrote about 'Man and His World.' It is 'girls' who are exploited sexually instead of women (1952:41). Infants are a 'he' rather than an it (1952:116). The American Indian is genderized as well: He can contract debts but he is not under the same compulsion as his white neighbor pay his debts. He receives free medical care, often land and buildings, and even seed and farm machinery--all from the Great White Father (238). Green is particularly sensitive to the pejorative use of labels to degrade American Indians but does not give a second thought to his use of labels to degrade women. Lundberg, Ogburn and Nimkoff, Broom and Selznick as well as Green benefit indirectly from discrimination against Afro-Americans or Indians but benefit daily from gender privilege.Today, demands that authors use non-sexist language is scorned as politically inspired by those who benefit politically, economically, and socially by such degradations. Harold Phelps and David Henderson, writing in the early 30s, were far in front of their time with their text on Social Problems. They looked and saw older white males committing some of the most serious kinds of crime (1932:471 [rev. 1952]). They looked at unemployment and saw an economic system in which serious dislocations between production, distribution and consumption disemployed millions, increased crime, stimulated racism, detracted from health and generated warfare (Chart, p. 299). Today, social problems journals are filled with essays on the 'construction of social problems.' Confusing between a social issue and a social problem Kitsuse and Spector (1977) treat social problems as a matter of advertizing and public relations rather than as deep flaws in the organization of a political economy. In the midst of a depression, Phelps and Henderson were politically acceptable in a populist sort of way; today, social problems theorists living an abundant life, see Phelps and Henderson as irrelevant to the sources and solutions to social problems. POSTMODERN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE The postmodern philosophy of science now developing before us, again informed by findings from Chaos research suggests that the sort of dynamics in which the canons of science mentioned by Lundberg are appropriate, these canons hold for one small set of very, very simple systems. If one studies really existing systems with more than three variables interacting, nonlinear methods and measures are appropriate. Social systems are a result of dozens if not hundred of variables interacting and thus outside the reach of linear logic. There is a mathematics and a set of methods appropriate to such complex dynamics but these do not preclude the use of human genius to reach deep into a data set and pull out just those fractal structures which are of prime importance to the practical task at hand. Indeed, it may be the case that the poetic genius of concerned human beings is better at locating such fragile and changing structures than the mechanical rationality of linear mathematics. But more than theory is at risk in this new science of complexity. Verification depends upon replication and, in this new science of complexity, one never finds sameness only similarity. Verification depends upon falsification; in this new science, falsification is impossible since no one outcome basin can be held up at the standard against which all other regions in an outcome field may be falsified (Young, 1994). Deterministic causality, theoretical coherence, interval and rational scaling, inferential validity and reliability, falsifiability, replication, stability of theorems, theory building and general theory itself are casualty to the cosmos revealed by Chaos researchers (Young, 1991b; 1994). This new body of knowledge sets forth a very different ontology; one that is much richer in detail and much more variable in dynamics than that presupposed by the old organum of knowledge. Postmodern scientists, acutely aware of the human hand guiding the knowledge process and increasingly the social process, will have to acknowledge the political agendas they serve and thus, open themselves to critique and to challenge in ways not now known. Instead of an elite body of scientific advisors to a President or a Premier, there will be an interactively rich public academy of lucid and readable public scientists in the manner of Loren Eiseley, Lewis Thomas, Jeremy Campbell, Paul Davis, A. K. Dewdney, Steven Jay Gould as well as a cadre of scientific reporters in the manner of James Gleick or Jonathan Weiner who will serve as catalysts to a widely spread, differentiated and culturally relevant knowledge process. Such scientists with a rare grasp of the mother tongue, an abiding desire to communicate and a firm trust in the intellectual competency of their fellow citizens will help broadcast, cast broadly, the meaning and the meat of the scientific endeavor. Instead of two cultures forever separated, as conceived by C.P. Snow, postmodern science will respond and defer to the same protocols of critique: deconstruction, sub-text reading, semiotic synthesis, class, gender or ethnic agendas now pointed more at such literary works as poems, novels and television programs. The work of Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and all past and future Nobel prize winners in all the physical and biological sciences will be deconstructed for the human hand and the cultural theme that organizes and mobilizes them. Indeed, the boundaries of every discipline will be greatly expanded as more and more lay persons spend time in associate research posts; as more and more people participate, directly through interactively rich and informationally rich electronic policy processes in great public debates about which research projects to fund, and which set of experiments, affecting their own work, community or nation should be instituted. POSTMODERN SOCIOLOGY The postmodern sociologist is very different from her modern counterpart; not better, just different. There will always be a place for studies of what is, however the postmodern scientist will be just as interested in 'What might be,' 'What could be,' 'What should be,' and 'What Might Have Been Had We Not Acted.' The postmodern sociologist will accept the role of poetics as a metaphor and as an ideology that informs the knowledge process; indeed, poetics and operatics are synonymous at the most fundamental levels of knowing with truth and validity. Poetics takes its capacity to speak truth from the capacity of the imagination to leap across domains of life and to see the self-similarity within one or more separate domains. Operatics gets its capacity to grasp truth from the fact that one participated in the design, building, and living of the social event of which one speaks. It is no longer possible to center the mission and method of sociology around grand unified propositional theory. It is no longer possible to assert the separation of object and subject of empirical research. It is, of course, possible to recenter sociology and social science. The only interesting question becomes, Whose and What politics are to inform its practice? In other work, I want to help reorient American sociology to the new body, the Novum Organum, of knowledge that comes out of Chaos theory. The implications of chaos research for the knowledge process in sociology itself are, thus, monumental as chaos theory decenters the assumptions of social research. In a word, all these assumptions has to be confined to a tiny part of the entire realm of social phenomena; they have great value in a limited set of cases and limited value in the great majority of social forms and dynamics observed. We need to rethink theory and method as we enter the third millennium. It is a great challenge and will take all the genius of the next several generations of social scientists; The Marxes, Spencers, Comtes, Wards, Smalls, Znanieckies, Dodds, Lundbergs, Blalocks and Parsons of the future will have to leave the tidy world of linear mathematics and formal theory and work in the messy, changing, unpredictable world as it is. Yet every social event is larger, more complex, more deeply connected to the larger world than words or theories or poems can say. Every unit act has levels and domains not plumbed by the paucities of speech; still less by informationally deficient quantification techniques. Every social role requires an infinitely expanding and changing set of unit acts that is but briefly noted in even the most elaborate explanation. All social occasions are interactively rich beyond the capacity of the fastest computer, the largest data base, the most extensive library to record and retrieve. Postmodern science appreciates the richness and variety of the world and accepts that scientific statements have a fractal truth value that last but for the moment while the moment depends, in turn, upon scale of observation. Recentering Postmodern Sociology In its worst, most pessimistic moments, postmodern scholarship despairs of the possibility of authentic self knowledge or of reliable knowledge of social facts; it decries the possibility of going beyond the moment, below the surface of any society. In such a mood, postmodern scholarship sees all social research as contaminated by power, privilege and parochial political goals. At best for such scholars, one can only read the social text; one can only identify its authors; one can only offer parallel and conflicting interpretations of research reports, scholarly monographs or sociology textbooks used by hundreds of thousands of students. In its bleak, unyielding moments, postmodern sociologists, artists, dancers, poets, architects and dramatists tend toward nihilism, self expression and retreat to a very private forms of freedom. In such negative moments, postmodern social analysts become disenchanted and withdraw from class, gender, and ethnic struggles. As does Pierre Bourdieu, (1989) they stand aloof from '...everything that marches under the self-proclaimed banner of "radical" sociology or 'critical theory." One becomes cynical, solipsic, and arrogant, dismissing of all who make some effort to set and keep standards in a decentered world. In its more optimistic, value-full and progressive moments, postmodern sociology transforms into critical sociology. It accepts as its mission the production and reproduction of a good and decent society. It respects and honors a wide variety of ethnicities, religiousities and economies that teach and practice compassion, human dignity and equality of opportunity. It joins social research with politics, economics, and religion to enhance liberation theology, democratic socialism, and infinite variety in prosocial forms of desire and love. As have so many others before, I take the position that some set of Human Rights and Human Obligations to one's own society, to other cultures, to the future, to the environment and to research subjects should mediate the knowledge process and the social life upon which it now depends so intimately. This centering of human rights and human obligations is but one of many such centerings; as such it does not appeal to that which is natural nor that which is divine. Rather it appeals to that which is promotive of praxis and a praxis society. Markovic (1974) identifies five moments of praxis, which together produce the same infinite variety and harmony that one can see in a mandelbrot set: intentionality (rather than reaction), creativity (rather than sameness), rationality (rather than pretheoretical struggle), self-determination (rather than oppression), and sociality (rather than privatization). Conflict sociologists, researching in an intersubjective format, can help those who are oppressed come to know the sources of their oppression as well as the political tools available to them with which to become architect of their own lives and institutions (Young and Yarbrough, 1993). Critical sociologists, working in the loose and multi-centered format of postmodernity, can join with those in Liberation theology to help find answers to ancient questions of value, purpose and compassion. Along with progressive Catholic, Buddhist, Protestant and Muslim theologians, critical sociology helps answer the four fundamental questions of life: what are our origins; what are the social sources of human tragedy and oppression; how shall we live together and, finally, how shall we prepare for the future?? Critical sociologists join with Greenpeace, Jacques Cousteau, George Page, animal rights organizations and other naturalists to protect and preserve the good earth and all its creatures great and small. Each animal, each plant is a text and a journal within which are written the findings of thousands of natural experiments in adapting to the dangers, diseases and of potentiality of life. Each egg, each seed is a precious promise of new life with old and secret solutions buried deep within its billions of bytes of genetic information just as each culture is a treasure trove of information of how to produce, to eat, to live, to build, to heal, to share and to change as nature and society changes. References Barrow, John D. 1991 Theories of Everything. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blackmar, J.W. and J.L. Gillan 1915 Outlines of Sociology. New York: Macmillan. Briggs, John and F. David Peat. 1989 Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness. New York: Harper and Row. Broom, Leonard and Philip Selznick. 1955 Sociology: A Text with Adapted Readings. Evanston, Ill: Row, Peterson, and Co. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1989. "Interview," conducted by Loic Wacquant. The Berkeley Journal of Sociology, V. XXXIV. p. 18. Casti, John L. 1990 Searching for Certainty. New York: William Morrow and Company. Dodd, S.C. 1940 Dimensions of Society. 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