Status-Ticians in Limbo

The Sociologists, in the argot of their craft, are upward mobile. They are getting ahead. The membership of the American Sociological Society is eighty percent higher than it was eleven years ago. In 1950, there were only fifty persons who had working cards in the study of social stratification; now there are five times as many. The increase has been almost as substantial in the sociology of art and literature, not to mention the sociology of "disorganization, deviance."

What is more to the point is that sociology has now been accepted as stuff of commercial consequence. As the president of the Eastern Sociological Society reported recently – thinking very likely of all the help-wanted ads from advertising agencies in the American Sociological Review – "We have moved from the cloister to the market." Ford would not have dared launch the Edsel without having first made sure of its ground by hiring Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research to study the elusive impulses that customers bring to an auto showroom. Similarly, when guilt assails it, the Columbia Broadcasting System hires a sociologist to study the possible damage done to the minds and souls of children by its programs; he surveys the literature, finds nothing tangible and extends his absolution, and CBS arises comforted from this, our new and scientific confessional.

The sociologist both serves what he calls mass culture and infects it. We hear an echo of his pervasive voice, for example, in Redbook magazine – almost three and a half million circulation – which some months ago offered A Major New Report on Love and Marriage: How American Wives Really Feel About Their Husbands. This was the fruit of a five-year study by a University of Michigan team of sociologists and social psychologists headed by Dr. Robert O. Blood and Dr. Donald L. Wolfe. Their platoon questioned 909 families – that is, 182 a year or a shade over three a week. The most impressive guide for the perplexed to come out of this Major New Report was: "What proved wisest for one family apparently would not work for another."

Cosmopolitan, for its part, devoted six pages not long ago to Crack-Ups in the Suburbs, with a heading that certified the new oracle: "Sociologists say there is a solution – for those courageous enough to try." The solution – courage, men! – turns out to be: (1) The suburban father must say to his child, "No, you can't have a new bike!" and (2) Families kept awake by neighbors' beer parties should move.

We can measure the awful new authority of the profession when we observe that its victims have begun to imitate their inquisitors. The language of sociology has become part of the common speech. A young mother in Redbook's Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped wails in sociologese: "I want status." It is as though Emma Bovary had wept: "I'm in a box; I must talk to Flaubert."

But such popular acceptance brings problems. It is a bitter thought to sociologists that Vance Packard's The Status Seekers was the most quoted best-seller of 1959. Packard's work, a wholesale looting from what are alleged to be the discoveries of the sociologists, carried the endorsement of Dr. Bevode C. McCall, who in turn, carries a title by itself an index of the elevated new station of his calling, sociologist-in-chief to the Chicago Tribune – there being no islands any more. Packard's own aspirations for status were defined in his description of himself on the jacket of The Status Seekers as an associate member of the American Sociological Society. This high distinction is available, as one offended sociologist pointed out, to anyone who puts up eighteen dollars and subscribes to the Society's magazine.

Packard had therefore committed the double crime of working above scale, a source of envy, and without a union card, a source of anarchy. His offense was compounded because he managed to produce a quite respectable facsimile of the acquired wisdom of sociology, a rag bag of course, but with the rags bearing the label of the right tailor. And what is a craft if it can thus be imitated, to the general satisfaction of society, by an outsider without training or license?

Man's struggle to feel superior to his equals is a major concern of the sociologists, and their researches into the status urge form the body of Packard's exposition. If the disease truly exists, the sociologists themselves could no more be expected to escape it than could the Fourteenth Century doctors who ministered to plague victims. We cannot then blame them if, after so long an exposure, they have become abnormally sensitive to their own position in society.

The sociologists made their last survey of the comparative prestige of various jobs in our society fourteen years ago. The National Opinion Research Corporation asked 2000-odd interviewees to rate ninety occupations, and found that a Supreme Court justice has the job with the highest status and a shoe-shine boy, the job with the lowest. In 1947, the sociologist ranked twenty-seventh on the scale – well in the upper third – just behind the small-factory owner and safely ahead of the author (31), the building contractor (33), the newspaper columnist (42) and the nightclub singer (75). The pollers reported that many of those interviewed did not know what a nuclear physicist was, but they all seem to have known even in that benighted year what a sociologist was. It was quite something to work at a job which could claim higher social prestige than William Faulkner's, Walter Lippmann's or Hildegarde's. And in the past fourteen years, the rise on the status scale must surely have been dazzling as the sociologist has become the Supreme Court justice of our folkways.

Or, let us say, rather, that the sociologist is the whaling captain of this century, loading his bark with wife, children and, in the more fortunate cases, PX privilege certificates, sailing forth, and returning home with a hold full of reports on Genitality Among Adult Groups of Swazi in Johannesburg; Political Cynicism in Jamaica; Murder, Suicide and Economic Crime in Ceylon; The Australian Aborigines – a Powerless Minority. Even when he stays home, he gives the impression of being ever at the vigil; David Riesman, for example, with collaboration, has produced an analysis of "participant-observer reports of verbal interact" at twenty-seven cocktail parties.

The sociologists have placed uÈon our society the burden of supporting a host of committees and foundations whose dimensions can be imagined from the source comment accompanying a fourteen-page paper which one inquiring spirit contributed to his union journal: "This paper was planned during the summer of 1958 while I was attending a conference in Behavioral Science at the University of New Mexico under the sponsorship of the United States Air Force, Behavioral Science Division. My participation was made possible by the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. I wish to thank James L. Monroe of the Society and Ralph D. Norman, principal investigator of the Behavioral Science Conference, for their interest in this work. I also thank the Council of Research and Creative Work of the University of Colorado for its support of research leading up to this study."

And what was the consequence of this united endeavor by three collectives of higher learning? A sampling of 155 pages of the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary – one percent of the whole – for the appearance of sociological terms. Majesty of means and poverty of results would seem to constitute the general sociological experience. For example:

The long voyage to study murder in Ceylon brought home this cargo: "Homicide is more frequent among persons alienated and demoralized." To the sum of human knowledge has thus been added the discovery that murder is not very often committed by the well adjusted.

A commune of sociologists and their students spent two years studying crime rates in a northwestern city. They found out that most women arrested for public drunkenness are picked up in the neighborhood of saloons and that most bank frauds are committed in the business district. A résumé of all the available surveys of the attitudes of active labor union members reported: "Those workers related to or friendly with supervisors or owners are unlikely to be union activists."

Three Kansas City sociologists studied the effects of the grade system on college students, and revealed: "Most students believe that getting good grades is a necessity they must take into account."

A husband-wife team from Stanford surveyed the family backgrounds of twelve Massachusetts boys committed to mental hospitals, compared them carefully with the homes of twelve nonpsychotic boys, and more generally with one hundred and twenty-nine others and came out with the finding: "As children, prepsychotics tend to be withdrawn from their peers, escapist in reaction to crises and plagued by feelings of inferiority."

This garland plucked from papers presented at the various conventions of the American Sociological Society is, of course, the product of minor artisans in the field, but it is a fair sampling of the rewards of that practical research which is sociology's present passion. The results seem no more impressive when we move to larger, more expansive works cited as classics of sociology.

One such classic is The American Soldier, upon which Dr. Samuel Stouffer deployed an entire battalion at the expense of the War Department throughout the Second World War. "Broadly speaking," Dr. Stouffer concluded, "we can say that the evidence seems [the italics are Dr. Stouffer's] to show that a stable home background, a healthy childhood, good work habits in school, and association with other boys and girls, including participation in sports, were assets for the young civilian who put on the uniform and tried to adjust to military life."

The social aspirations of sociologists may be pretentious, but their intellectual aspirations appear to be all too humble. They aim low and what ducks they hit are sitting. There are renderings of experience which can teach us about the ground upon which we stand. The novels of William Faulkner tell us in great depth something of what it is like to live in Mississippi, just as the lyrics of W. C. Handy help us understand what it was like to be a Negro in the deep South in the Twenties. But no poll of the opinions of a cross section of the citizens of Oxford, Mississippi, could tell us what Faulkner does, for part of Faulkner's essence is his recognition that, as a mass, the citizens of Oxford do not know what they think.

The grand purpose of sociology, according to its better-educated practitioners, is to make us more sophisticated about the world. But sophistication is the one quality in which sociologists as a class seem peculiarly deficient. Their rules of measurement are uniformly crude; subtler calibrations are apparently beyond them. Yet surely, it is the subtleties of life which define its complexity, and it is our feeling for the subtleties which refines our knowledge.

A particular instance of the sociologists' deafness to tone is the afore-cited survey of the prestige of American occupations, that cornerstone of American sociological theory, which tells us that Supreme Court justices have more elevated social positions than shoeshine boys. But what does it tell us about real life? To what extent is it usable by the headwaiter at Romanoff's when he must choose between giving a table to the head of the Abilene Medical Society (prestige rating 2) or to Frank Sinatra (prestige rating 75)? Or where would it serve the Washington hostess who must delegate seats at the dinner table to a banker friend (prestige rating 10) and Joseph A. Alsop (prestige rating 42)?

Most of sociology's techniques are useless in problem-solving – so much so that sociologists have shown a general tendency in recent years to flee from the confrontation of practical problems. And the reason the techniques are useless is that they are so often defeated by the individual. Last year, as an instance, the New York City Youth Board, an agency struggling with disturbed children, announced that henceforth it would use a scale for predicting juvenile delinquency developed by Doctors Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, the Harvard criminologists. The Youth Board had tested the Glueck scale on 224 children in a Bronx slum for eight years. By applying it to children when they were very young, the youth workers no doubt reasoned that they would be able to treat the pre-delinquents before they went hopelessly sour.

Last summer, Keith Kenniston, a young Harvard sociologist, examined the results of the lengthy test which had so encouraged the Youth Board. He found that the Glueck scale had been only twenty-five percent correct in predicting that a child would become a delinquent. Kenniston reported: "Only seventeen out of sixty-seven boys originally given a high probability of delinquency have so far developed mental illness, or unofficial or official delinquency; while four more currently 'delinquent' boys were originally assigned a low probability of delinquence."

So much for the exactitude of a scientific scale developed and refined over twenty-one years. It might be argued that even this clumsy tool has its uses if it serves to discover and help treat troubled children. But what can be said about its effects on the fifty first-graders judged incorrectly to be potential delinquents by the Glueck scale?

Still, the Gluecks, for all their failures, have at least the excuse of having been engaged with a real problem, when most of their colleagues were raking leaves.

For four years, the Russell Sage Foundation has been publishing a series of monographs on the uses of sociology in various fields of public interest. These studies, each the work of a license-holder, are largely confessional in character. For instance, the Army spends more money on sociologists than any other American institution (the foundations are writing them off because their discoveries have been judged largely useless), but, says a Russell Sage study, the Army still can't discover "satisfactory or reliable methods" for pretesting a soldier's potential for combat or combat leadership. The libraries groan with sociological studies of the family, but, in sum, "Our knowledge of family routines and the actual social world of the child iÈ extremely meager." And to add it all up, in the words of one of the monographs: "It is an extremely sad commentary on current social science that we know almost nothing of the aspirations of man for the kind of person he wants to become." With that record of achievement we may better understand why the Department of Defense and the advertising agencies are the largest institutional patrons of the sociologist. He is not a man likely to discover anything fundamental or disturbing.

It is rather refreshing to read these candid samples of self-appraisal; their authors, perhaps because they are being honest with themselves, compose their thoughts in something approximating English – a language not widely employed among the mandarins of sociology. In moments of self-satisfaction – their more common mood – they reflect on their glories in sentences which sound as though they have been ripped bloody from the Serbo-Croatian. As an unusually literate Columbia University sociologist has commented sarcastically, the prose of his colleagues reveals their field to be "technical and quantitative, atheoretical, segmentalized and particularized, specialized and institutionalized, modernized and groupized."

This occupational liturgy has been a perennial subject of derision; but sociologists cling to it so manfully that anyone swallowing their notions of human motivation whole might think it a status symbol. Here, for example, is the fashion in which Professor Talcott Parsons attempts what he calls an "overdue clarification" of his work on systems of action: "The action system is presented in Figure 1 below so as to establish the analytical independence of the four subsystems: orientations (pattern measurement); modalities (goal attainment); their combination establishing the conditions of internal stability of a relational system shared by both actor and object (integration); their combination characterizing the ways in which that system is stably related to the environment (adaptation)."

Now Professor Parsons might answer any complaint about standards of expression by saying that his is a work of considerable complexity and that a layman could as well demand comprehensibility from a nuclear physicist. That answer would be easier to accept if the sentence cited represented a truly complex idea – but let us accept it anyway. What, then, are we to say about this sentence, offered by workers in humbler stretches of the field: "The higher the acceptance of the organizational authorities as sources of criteria relative to other sources, the less, by definition, the probability of role deviation, defined as role behaviour differing from the expectations of the organizational authorities." Is this not inelegantly reducible to a simple proposition? "If a man works for an organization and respects his superior he will probably follow the superior's suggestions and orders." Of course, in so reducing it, we have stripped this stuff of its mystic presence and its impression of significance. To a student of the struggle upward, the original sentence set beside Parsons' is merely a Chrysler imitating a Cadillac, with words for tail fins and an egg beater for an engine.

A year or so ago, Daniel Bell, a sociologist who is an ornament to a class possessing few, was working at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Santa Barbara, California – an institution he calls "the leisure of the theory class." In an idle moment, he worked out an elaborate parody of the Parsons style which he called "The Parameters of Social Movement – a Formal Paradigm." This private joke, now enshrined entire in Dwight MacDonald's recent anthology Parodies, begins: "The purpose of this scheme is to present a taxonomic dichotomization which would allow for unilinear comparisons. In this fashion we could hope to distinguish the relevant variables which determine the functional specifities of social movements. Any classificatory scheme is, essentially, an answer tÈ some implicit other scheme. In this instance, it is an attempt to answer the various hylozoic theories which deny that social categories can be separable."

This was all, of course, deliberate nonsense, although the lay eye might have trouble telling it from the real thing, just as the lay ear may miss the humor in Mozart's Musical Joke. But it was composed as a private sport, and Bell sent it only to persons he thought would appreciate its comic intent – that is, other sociologists. But none of them, to his dismay, seem to have gotten it at all. "I sent it off to two sociologist friends who I thought would appreciate it," he reports, "and one sent me back a serious letter about one of the categories, while the other, not knowing whether it was a spoof or not, wrote: 'You are too good a sociologist not to have created something which is quite good in itself.'"

The language of sociology must then be judged as one so lacking in function that even its adepts cannot tell whether it is being employed in parody or in serious speech. We may gauge the scientific pretensions of sociology by imagining this happening to a chemist. Sociology's more realistic professionals confess the inadequacies of their field and blame them on its adolescence as a science no further along in its progress than chemistry and physics were in the Seventeenth Century. If that is the case, then no science has ever rushed so precipitately toward a private speech isolated from the comprehension of the society around it. Persons innocent of physics can read Newton without particular pain or puzzlement, and the cultivated society of his time could do even better. The men who advanced the natural sciences seem, in fact, to have made a special effort to speak clearly; the charlatans and the deluded who hampered them had a monopoly on bizarre and incomprehensible language. Only the alchemists were arcane; it helped them in their business.

The language of sociology has something familiar about it – an echo of the style and manner of scientific socialism as developed by Marx and codified by Stalin. This resemblance is noted with no intention to suggest that the sociologists are subversive; most of them are plainly safe fellows who not only accept our society but show strong signs of commencing to enjoy it. What they do have in common with the scientific socialists is the period of their origin. By the late Nineteenth Century, if a man wanted to invent a religion, he could only sell it by calling it science. Marx took an ethical concept, the desired triumph of the poor and humble, and elevated it to a pseudoscientific notion – the inevitable dictatorship of the proletariat. Sociology, at least in Europe, began with some of the same evangelism. Its pioneers would have thought themselves poor stuff if they had not felt that to describe the beast was to take a step toward taming it. Max Weber, sociology's great progenitor, for example, was engaged in a highly adventurous, if somewhat pathetic, intellectual search: he was trying to find out how decent and reasonable men could function in German politics.

Evangelism has had its hour in American sociology, a time visibly passing. It produced so many excesses that the profession could hardly have survived married to it; but, on balance, it might have been better for its evangelism to have outlived sociology than for sociology so bloatedly to have outlived its evangelism. Throughout the Thirties and Forties, sociology carried a strong current of hope that persons immune to ethicalo considerations might be brought to grace by scientific ones. That delusion produced a cluster of studies designed to prove that people who do not like Jews and Negroes had deprived childhoods. Some sociologists are now at work disproving these studies: thanks to them, we can now say that a man who has received love from his father and mother can still be a bigot. In other words, sociology is beginning to suspect what the church fathers knew 1500 years ago – that È man can be happy and still go to hell.

The sociologists are now developing a manful resistance to the temptation to load their dice on the side of good rather than what they choose to describe as fact. The profession proclaims a new distaste for value judgements, making their devotions instead to cloudy observation and clear acceptance. The current tendency, to summarize it somewhat unfairly, is to assume that dear old society has worked out neat ways to order the existence of man, and that the study of society is a study of how it goes about producing its happy consensus. Who but a sociologist, for example, could write of Adolf Eichmann, as one did some months ago in The Nation, "Terrible as Eich-mann's crimes were, if one is going to insist on being negatively emotional about him . . ."? This graduate-school callousness is expressive of the sociological attitude called "functionalism," which has done so much to clear away the roadblocks of conscience between the young sociologist and the market research agency. With luck and prayer and fasting, sociology may yet arrive at the ultimate comfort of deciding that whatever is is right.

Young men in the field can take encouragement from the career of Alfred Kinsey, who died, if cocktail-party conversation is the measure, our most successful sociologist. His findings, offered as cold science stripped clean of value judgements, were, in fact, a powerful argument for the exotic and the experimental. To say you have no value judgments is, after all, a way of pronouncing a value judgment, and the final effect of Kinsey's charts is an argument for the rightness of what is; they offer the excuse of custom. However, it is not fair to credit Kinsey with creating the moral condition of our society; girls otherwise impregnable can probably not be seduced by books. The worst that can be said of him – and it is plenty – is that he has made discussions of sex more tedious than they have ever been.

More tedious because they made sex inconsequential. The great novelists, like Proust and Gide, could seldom write about their own particular distractions of the flesh without all the elements of passion. For contrast, set their pages, alive with the pain, laughter and suffering that accompany sex, next to the wasteland of Professor Kingsley Davis' role assignment for the mystery: "Legitimate sexual relations ordinarily involve a certain amount of reciprocity. Sex is exchanged for something equally valuable." Only the sociological outlook could be at once so bleak and so comfortable and call the resultant fatuity "functional."

So the sociologist and his society turn out to be made for each other, both sending forth products that are badly manufactured but distributed ever more widely. The same face confronts the same face. The phony in each mixes unrecognizably with the real; each combines ignorance with assurance. They celebrate together the marriage of pretension with bad journalism. And in both the heart dies in the bosom. The sociologists have met the monster. They have made it them. Now they can live content off their share of the monster's property.

On the royal road to Thebes I had my luck. I met a lovely monster, And the story's this: I made the monster me. – Stanley Kunitz: The Approach to Thebes