Against the determinism of the sociologists

"Everything's beyond my control" or "I will take fate by the throat"?

In Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir published a long discussion she had with her companion Sartre in the last years of his life. In the many pages of that discussion, I found the following bit that I have used intermittently over the years as an email signature:

Simone de Beauvoir:  Broadly speaking, how would you define...what you call Evil?

Jean-Paul Sartre:  Evil is that which is harmful to human freedom, that which holds men out as not being free and which, for example, creates the determinism of the sociologists...

---

Sartre and Beauvoir believed many things I find unpalatable (I’ve something in the works along that line at present on SB’s book about her mother’s death), but I am 100% on board here.

I was the other day rereading an old journal, from nearly 30 years ago, and I was pleased to find there some rather intense if not fully considered pages I had completely forgotten on this question with respect to which Sartre was positioning himself in the quote, one of the biggest of the big questions: are we free to act, or do things beyond our wills prevent us from doing anything they do not determine?

A trivial view of the question can be found in much of my own discipline of sociology today, and elsewhere too. There, the answer given is, in its essence, that people at the top of social hierarchies are free, and those below them in those hierarchies are mercilessly compelled and unfree—and of course this situation is viewed as morally distasteful. “Structures” put in place by the powerful keep the powerless powerless, and they are so impervious to struggle and individual effort that no member of the powerless class can ever escape his bondage (well, until the magical moment of the revolution, in any event).

You know the riff, I’m sure, since it’s spread far and wide throughout our culture at this point. The people who adhere to such Manichaean beliefs seldom spend enough time with the particulars of the system to realize that the people they think are free in a given setting (whites in America, for example) in many, many cases came from what they would have to consider positions of unfreedom to get there (religious and ethnic subordination in Europe). How did that happen? Silence usually follows the question.

These simplistic non-ideas safely tucked away in the dustbin where they belong, we can nonetheless find sophisticated efforts in sociological theory circles to capture with some nuance the way in which social forces (which can be structures such as the existing division of labor in a society, or more contingent social pushes and pulls on individual action such as cultural attitudes about gender difference) act to mold the acts of individuals.

It is of course untenable to imagine that human individuals are never driven down certain behavioral pathways, or at least greatly encouraged to go down them, by things that are external to them. Physical environments set conditions on the freedom of all animals, including us, and social environments can have similar if not identical consequences in the action of social animals, of which we are one clear example.

As a sociological theorist, I have training in how to talk in that complicated language of the delicate dance of individual agency (which is always already informed by the social in many ways, since identity, which drives a good deal of what we perceive as our free action, is inconceivable outside of a social group) and social forces (which are never anything like as deterministic as physical forces are and always permit at least some degree of individual negotiation of action patterns). I realize as a purely scientific matter the question is incredibly complex and no position that stands too completely at one end or the other of the binary agency←→structure is theoretically sustainable.

But it is not the scientific question of “how does it work, in the most painstakingly rigorous theoretical formulation” that guides how I behave in the world on this question. It is the moral concern for the dignity of human beings and the profound importance of the value of hope that drive my life with other people and my way of talking about freedom and determinism in that life.

I have posed the following question to myself on this matter: what if I genuinely believed there were real evidence that structures in American society were so deterministic of people’s lives based on their position in existing hierarchies at birth that we could feasibly defend the notion that determinism was reality? Or, more imperfectly, what if the determinism we discovered to be the case was not quite complete, but close enough to it to make it in broadly statistical terms inaccurate to tell people they had a reasonable chance to escape the position predetermined for them by their own willed action? What if that were demonstrably true? (It is statistically true that the majority of people wind up in positions in the social hierarchy quite close to the position in which they began, which is not quite what I said previously, but close). What would I do with that in my everyday life? In my interactions with others, in my professional life, in my own understanding of my own life outcomes and possibilities?

What would I tell young people, especially, in my various roles as an authority figure with respect to them? What would I tell my students? My children?

To tell them the truth—that what they do really matters very little, or even not at all, and that their life trajectories are essentially out of their control—would be to deflate their spirits. It would be teaching them to accustom themselves to being at the whim of forces over which they exercise no control. It would require participating in the diminution in the world of the aspect of human beings that makes us unique on the planet: our deep belief in and love of the notion of our own freedom.

But, in this scenario at least, it would be telling them the truth.

Here is what I would do. In such a case, I would not tell them the truth.

I would continue to do what I do now: tell them everything I could to convince them to try, to convince them to have hope, even if I believed based on the evidence that their efforts were fruitless and their hope groundless. I would tell them to fill their hearts and their souls with happiness and the spirit of work and endeavor and effort, and I would tell them they should never give up and never give in and always strive upward, upward, upward, no matter what faced them.

No matter what.

That’s what I would tell them. And it’s what I tell them now.

For more than a quarter century now, I have kept two printed quotations mounted near my desk to remind me of these sentiments.

One is from Kierkegaard: “The crowd is untruth.” (More extensively from him: “[A] crowd in its very concept is the untruth, by reason of the fact that it renders the individual completely impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his sense of responsibility by reducing it to a fraction.”)

The other, from Beethoven, you can see at the header.

I look over at them from time to time and I imagine those two individuals, heroes of mine, silently mouthing the words and grinning at me and then turning with me to sneer at the sociologists.