Amateur Sociology Considered Harmful | Thing of Things
Excellent essay about the difficulties of reasoning about things you encounter everyday, the epistemic difficulties of doing knowledge-seeking when everything is plausible and nothing is verifiable, and the temptation to prematurely pin down the big stuff. From where I'm currently standing, it doesn't draw the boundaries of negative space precisely, but errs in favor of caution.
Some truly excellent plausible alternatives to Meditations on Moloch and Toxoplasma of Rage and Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs.
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, the young sociology student takes her first theory class. The first week, she reads Smith, who presents a plausible and insightful argument that the invisible hand of the market causes goods to be distributed in the way that best benefits everyone. The second week, she reads Marx, who presents a plausible and insightful argument that capitalism is a product of bourgeoisie ownership of the means of production which alienates the proletariat from their labor. The third week, she reads Durkheim, who presents a plausible and insightful argument that industrialization leads to anomie, a condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals. The fourth week, she reads Weber, who presents a plausible and insightful argument that the capitalist spirit originates in a Calvinist urge to find signs whether or not one is a member of the elect. The fifth week, she reads Mills, who presents a plausible and insightful argument that the ordinary citizen is a powerless tool in the hands of corporate, military, and political leaders who control society for their own ends.
Imagine if instead of Meditations on Moloch, there was this essay:
Human beings evolved to know less than two hundred people. We have scope insensitvity: we didn’t evolve to understand the difference between two hundred humans and two hundred thousand. We don’t help the global poor, because in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness we would have no way of helping people whose faces we couldn’t see. We feel scared and threatened by ultimately harmless online dogpiling, because we evolved to know that if you were hated by two hundred people you would die. Humans, empirically, are quite good at sorting out tragedies of the commons within small groups, via compassion, guilt, social isolation, violence, etc. It’s only when we need to coordinate millions of people that we have coordination failures. Hell, even the famous nervousness of shy male nerds is an instance of this problem: their emotions haven’t caught up to the fact that if they fuck up with one girl, she’s not going to tell Literally Every Girl In The Whole Entire World.
Conversely, everyone lives in a society [citation needed], and thus everyone feels qualified to have an opinion on sociology. Things like “marginalization”, “signalling”, “cults”, “social class”, and so on are the stuff of everyday life. On the other hand, sociology is really hard. You can’t do controlled experiments where you give five hundred societies public funding of elections and five hundred societies private funding of elections and see which one has the higher rate of corporate welfare: all your data is observational. Your sample sizes are tiny: there simply aren’t enough different countries, religions, wars, or what have you. And as soon as you get a conclusion that you think really holds, someone comes along and invents the birth control pill and fucks everything up for you.