There’s a lot of noise echoing down the hall. Most of the noise is in my head, admittedly, but much of it comes from the raspy voices of angry people convinced that “things” are terribly wrong. Perceptions are reality, so they must be. Wrong that is.
Here’s my perception: Sociology has created generations of provocateurs who see society as simple sets of victims and villains. In the din, they peg the perpetrators, shield the wronged and present the whole process as “social justice”. This process, in turn, sets the stage for all manner of hard feelings to erupt.
Now, before saying that my net is too wide and my grasp of “the data” is too shallow, let me say one thing: I know. I’m neither an academic nor a scholar. I have an informal working premise, derived from watching and listening, that makes sense to at least one person, me. By that measure it can’t be entirely ridiculous.
OK, it could be ridiculous, but it goes a bit like this: People are individuals who transcend their labels. These individuals, every last one of them, defy the strictures of race, gender, age, income, education or religion. Our lizard brains instinctively identify and judge the signals we get from other people’s behavior in excruciatingly subtle ways. I call those signals ‘funk’.
By affixing labels, to pursue my premise, Sociology masks the funk with simplistic explanations that are hardly as much science as sloganeering. These explanations presume to expose the wrong and to make things right, often at the expense of the actual victim. In my estimation, that’s wrong.
Let’s make up a thought experiment: Two people are hired by one company at the same time to work in the same department. They receive the same title and the same salary. Over time, the personality, interest and skill of each person becomes known to their peers as well as to their boss. Their work, initially the same, begins to diverge. One employee works faster and produces higher quality work products that anticipate unspoken needs and are easier to use. When annual review time arrives, they both get the same rating, because that’s the chunky nature of HR ratings, but the manager gives the better employee a greater salary increase. This continues, year after year, until the two employees are paid at substantially different rates.
Fair? I think so. The manager used information that was too granular for labels. But if Sociology wanted to chime in, they would insist upon restoring the missing labels. If the rewarded employee was a woman and the other a man: “justice”. If the rewarded employee was white and the other black: “injustice”.
The low-minded hypocrisy of judging a person on the basis of labels such as race or gender while in the same breath decrying that judgement is positively outrageous.
That’s why people are so insanely angry. Public policy and social discourse does not pass the sniff test. A collective cognitive dissonance permeates our experience, tainting personal relationships and driving people to become their labels instead of proudly being themselves.
So, Sociology, this is my challenge: Revise your models. Understand people as individuals. Promote diversity by measuring qualities like excellence, integrity, character, grit. Stop protecting a parochial academic hierarchy that is poisoning our institutions and fragmenting our communities, nay our nation. Embrace people in all their funky profuseness and become the diversity that you so rightly espouse.
But don’t be hypocrites.