By Jonathan Wynn

Recently, when the Canadian
Government arrested men suspected of planning a terrorist attack, Prime
Minister Stephen Harper warned the media not to “commit sociology” by asking for their motives. (It’s a
reference to a W.H. Auden poem.)
Best not to think too much, apparently, about the world around you.

In my Foundations of Social
Theory class, we began the semester with the broad, big worldviews that many
people often use unreflexively and to their own detriment: horoscopes,
homeopathy, numerology, dousing, conspiracy theories, and the like. I hope you
are equipped for the task of making sense of the world you’ll find around you:
to “commit sociology.” 

Maybe you ascribe to one of those all-encompassing meta-theories:
the astral alignments determining behaviors and the gods working in mysterious
ways. What have you learned about sociology that will explain your everyday challenges? An
engineering class may help your colleagues get jobs but it won’t help them
understand the dynamics of the world they live in. The same could be said about
journalism, food studies, and management classes. How could I not try to
convince you that sociology, and theory, will?

I understand the resistance.
It’s a hell of a lot of work. Maybe it’s too French, too dense, or too
depressing. I do not expect you to all be sociological theorists. I don’t
expect you all to be sociologists—and that’s a good thing. But I hope you’ve
found something of use. I hope that you have with more questions than answers,
and I hope you think that’s yet another good thing.

What I hope is this: At the
very, very, very least, there will be a point in your life, when you’ll look
down a road of inquiry at some opening of your mind. And you’ll allow yourself
to walk along just a little bit further that way, just a little bit deeper, to
think about the conflicts inherent between in-groups and out-groups when we
debate immigration reform, or the logics that perpetuate the inequalities of
culture when we valorize one set of ideals over others, or the structural conditions
that led you to see that homeless man on the sidewalk. You won’t think of your
assignments or specific theorists or your TA or instructor. But I sleep at night hoping you’ll
think of the world through more than one set of goggles, and get a little double
consciousness from the interplay of what you learn here and your everyday
lives outside the classroom.

Theory can be a supplement
for existence in that outside world. "Theory" is not a broad and sweeping
answer for everything. But when you look for a job you would be well served in
thinking about Pierre Bourdieu’s
social capital to
develop a wide circle of contacts that could get you on a shortlist—and hope that
there are other candidates who didn’t have the connections you did. 

When interviewing for that
job, the more you reflect on Erving Goffman’s
presentation of self and Bourdieu’s cultural capital the better off you will be—and
you’ll know that others aren’t as lucky to be as reflexive as you. When you get
that job you’ll be well served in thinking about Max Weber’s understanding of
bureaucracy to make sense of the administrative power that your superiors may
hold over you—and the alienation and powerlessness your subordinates may feel.
When you think about your fellow workers, perhaps you can think about how their
differences can provide you a window into a different kind of experience—or how
you, yourself, hold an awareness that can contribute to your job, neighborhood,
or community. When you come home at night you might think about Harriet Martineau’s
understandings of the home—and Betty Friedan’s reasons
for not thinking about the home.

Cultural sociologist Ann
Swidler says that there is a tool kit theory about culture, and there’s a tool
kit approach to theory too. There is no one theory. The days of Big Umbrella
frameworks—religion, communism, liberalism, Structural Functionalism, or
whatever—are perhaps in the past. 

In David Foster Wallace’s 2005
Commencement Speech to Kenyon College, he talked about making the choice
not to set our daily lives to the “default setting,: but rather to continually
engage with your own preconceptions.  He
was talking about the checkout line and sitting in traffic:

The
insidious thing about [our] forms of worship is not that they’re evil or
sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the
kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and
more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being
fully aware that that’s what you're doing. And the world will not discourage
you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money
and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and
frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has
harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and
comfort and personal freedom.

Bourdieu used the term doxa to describe the default setting. He said that the
doxic world encourages us to not think about the economic, cultural, and
symbolic powers reinforced on a daily basis. He was deeply troubled that we stay
at this level of unthinking, defaultedness without an awareness of the
consolidation of resources in the hands of the few.

The key for Wallace is hidden
in a joke about two fish that are too wrapped up in their own stories to know
what they’re swimming in:

 The
capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or
maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple
awareness – awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain
sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over:
“This is water, this is water…”

"Committing sociology" is about
learning how to use the tools that work for particular practical tasks, sharing
those tools with others, and acknowledging
that some other folks don’t have those tools at all.