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Manifesto for Deep Democracy

Bernard Phillips and David Christner

Chapter 1  The Promise

Escalating Problems in the 21st Century

            Is it possible that the long journey of the human race will end in the annihilation of our species, whether through war, climate change or the development of micro-organisms designed to kill everyone?  Will all of our accomplishments in medicine, science and the arts, technologies for communication and transportation, ideals for the progress of the individual and society, have gone for naught?  Will our skyscrapers, bridges and dams suffer the same fate as our cultures, philosophies and religions?  Will our leaders and experts continue to be helpless in the face of events, just as they have proved to be helpless--despite all of their well-meaning efforts--in the past? Will the Holocaust prove to be a preview of what "advanced bureaucratic societies" have in store for all of us?  Will our children be confronted by a world that we have already seen in disaster films?  Will there be any future at all for our children, much less our grandchildren? Will we ourselves experience, for example, what has happened to the people of Iraq and Darfur? Will all of this happen not today or tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow?

            In his small book, Can Science Save Us?, the sociologist George Lundberg quoted from an article by Nikita Krushchev that appeared in the October 1959 issue of Foreign Affairs:

Is it possible that when mankind has advanced to a plane where it has proved capable of the greatest discoveries and of making its first steps into outer space, it should not be able to use the colossal achievements of its genius for the establishment of a stable peace, for the good of man, rather than for the preparation of another war and for the destruction  of all that has been created by its labor over many millenniums? Reason refuses to believe this (Lundberg, 1947/1961: 133).

            It has been half a century since Krushchev's article was published, and it appears that at present we are much closer to the catastrophes that he and many others feared during those years of the Cold War. We should not forget the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962, that brought the United States and the Soviet Union extremely close to nuclear war. Since then, the number of states with nuclear weapons has increased substantially.  Although there are efforts to contain this continuing spread, it is questionable as to how long they will prove to be successful. Not only has war not been eliminated, but the twentieth century was the bloodiest in human history, with civilian populations targeted along with military forces.  And greatly increasing the threats to the human race in the twenty-first century is the rise of non-state terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda with its numerous small groups, multiplying the potential sources of horrific events.  Although it was largely the threat of nuclear retaliation that kept nuclear weapons off the table during the Cold War, such threats make no sense where such organizations are involved.

            Yet nuclear catastrophes are by no means the only basic threat confronting contemporary societies.  Martin  Rees, England’s Astronomer Royal and a professor at Cambridge University,  has analyzed the range of such  problems in Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future in This Century--On Earth and Beyond. Rees claimed that “The ‘downside’ from twenty-first century [biological  and chemical] technology could be graver and more intractable than the  threat of nuclear devastation that we have faced for decades” (2003: vii).  For example, it would be possible in the near future for no more than a single individual to concoct a micro-organism in a laboratory and then release it that would prove to be deadly enough to wipe out not merely millions but perhaps all of us.  Apparently, biological research that can yield such organisms is continuing at a rapid pace as we move further into the twenty-first century.

            As if all of these problems do not cause enough nightmares, we have an environmental crisis that has yet to be resolved despite increasing awareness of its dangers along with numerous efforts to address such problems as global warming and environmental pollution threatening our air, water and the habitats of plants and animals. For example, Vice-President Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," documents the enormous scope of environmental problems linked to the relentless onslaught of global warming. A new book, The Treadmill of Production:  Injustice and Unsustainability in the Global Economy (Gould, Pellow and Schnaiberg, in press), links such increasing problems to both the basic economic structure throughout the world as well as the growing gap between the rich and the poor, making environmental problems incredibly difficult to solve.   Just as nuclear, chemical and biological research continues to emerge with ever more deadly phenomena, so do economic forces across the globe continue to yield an ever more dangerous and toxic environment despite all of our present efforts to reverse this situation.

            The above threats to the human race--whether from the products of continuing research by physical and biological scientists or from increasing environmental problems --are all relatively visible, although we have yet to figure out how to confront them effectively and, indeed, we may fail to do so despite all of our efforts.  But there are also threats that are relatively invisible and, as a result, impossible to confront unless we somehow learn to become aware of their nature.  A recent book, The Invisible Crisis of Contemporary Society (Phillips and Johnston, 2007),  centers on bringing to the surface a range of problems generally not reported in our mass media, problems that can help us to understand the forces that are generating our visible problems.  These problems are largely invisible because they have to do with our general ignorance of the complexities of human behavior, an ignorance deriving largely from our neglect of the social sciences in favor of the far simpler phenomena addressed by the physical and biological sciences.  Basic aspects of the human being--thoughts and feelings--are relatively invisible, yet they shape human behavior from one moment to the next, and they have yielded our many contemporary crises.  At present our understanding of human behavior--such as the causes of war, terrorism, and environmental crises--is extremely limited, as evidenced by our failure to confront effectively our full range of social problems.  For example, what have we actually achieved in our efforts to confront the widening gap between the rich and the poor, genocide among religious and ethnic groups throughout the world, racism, sexism and ageism? Our record up to this point is indeed a dismal one.  

            I could go on and on about our increasing possibilities for a catastrophic future, based on our visible and invisible problems--given our failures to understand and confront them effectively. For example, what are the chances that the terrors of living outside of the Green Zone in Iraq at this time of daily carnage--including beheadings--are scheduled to visit a great many of us as present trends continue? That a large proportion of us will live to experience the horrors that were visited on the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, or by the residents of Dresden during the firestorm wiping out the city earlier in World War II?  That our children will experience steadily decreasing chances to enjoy a life without crippling fear and imminent death?  That society will become ever more of an armed camp with less and less hope for the future?  That dirty bombs, deadly micro-organisms and devastating floods will make their way into our world?  That disaster movies such as "Armageddon," "Titanic," "Tidal Wave" and "The Towering Inferno"--which are in ever greater demand as a result of 9/11 and increasing threats throughout the world--will prove to be nothing less than a preview of things to come?

            Why are we all up against the wall at this time in history?  How are we to understand the emergence of all of these problems?  Why are they continuing to increase? Is there something fundamentally wrong with the nature of the human being?  Is the human race inevitably doomed to extinction?  More specifically, why are we unable to solve the problem of war and learn to achieve peace?  Why can't we stop the continuing development and spread of weapons of mass destruction?  Why aren't we able to figure out how to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor throughout the world?  Why can't we learn to create the conditions where people would no longer be motivated to commit acts of terrorism and crime?  Why can't we remove the conditions that are causing global warming and other environmental problems?  Why can't more parents take full responsibility for bringing up their children to respect others and behave in responsible ways?  Why can't our schools do a much better job in educating young people to understand themselves, their friends and families, and the present world situation? Why can't we develop an economy where every worker would come to enjoy work, earn a living wage and have opportunities for creative work as well as for advancement?  Why can't we develop a political system where all of us are motivated to participate actively in the decisions that affect our present and future? Why can't we learn to get rid of our harmful addictions like smoking, using drugs, alcoholism and eating to excess? Why can't we develop the mass media--including television and the cinema--as far more effective forces for both education and recreation?

The Human Potential

            Despite all of our unsolved visible and invisible problems, despite increasing threats to the very survival of the human race, and despite the pessimism about the future that is so widespread--as suggested by the popularity of our disaster films--there is a great deal of room for optimism.  We humans are without doubt the most intelligent creatures throughout the known universe.  Along with the horrors and bloodshed introduced by the twentieth century, that century has also yielded an understanding of the almost unbelievable potential that language has given to us.  Although we have apparently failed to learn how to fulfill much of that potential, language makes it possible for us to continue to learn throughout our lives with no limit whatsoever.  And such learning is by no means limited to our understanding of self and world, for we also have the capacity to learn how to develop our emotional lives as well as how to solve problems ever more effectively. From this perspective, the greatest figures throughout history--whether we choose, for example, Einstein, Gandhi, Churchill or Buddha--only fulfilled their capacity for using language to a very limited extent.  Also from this perspective, the hierarchy we have established that views the Ph.D. as having much greater inborn intellectual capacity than the illiterate is completely false.  For language gives all of us much the same infinite capacity to learn from our experiences, granting that our experiences in society teaching us that we are severely limited--and that some are much more limited than others--have become self-fulfilling prophecies.

            Stephen Jay Gould, the well-known biologist, has looked to the biological characteristics we humans have that support our capacity to learn:

 We are, in a more than metaphorical sense, permanent children. . .Many central features of our anatomy link us with fetal and juvenile stages of primates:  small face, vaulted cranium and large brain in relation to body size, unrotated big toe, foramen magnum under the skull for correct orientation of the head in upright posture, primary distribution of hair on head, armpits and pubic areas. . .In other mammals, exploration, play, and flexibility of behavior are qualities of juveniles, only rarely of adults.  We retain not only the anatomical stamp of childhood, but its mental flexibility as well. . .Humans are learning animals (Gould, 1981: 333-334).

            Instead of writing about how our biological nature limits our potential, Gould writes about how our biological structures develop our possibilities.  Gould sees us humans as learning animals, detailing how those structures give us the basis for learning.  In particular, it is our large brain that makes possible our development and use of a complex language.  Another biologist, C. Judson Herrick, has focused on  our biological evolution. We evolved as vertebrates and large-brained mammals, and that yielded a dramatic contrast with the social insects and their specialized castes, such as workers, drones and queens (Herrick, 1956: 172-175). Within those totalitarian social structures, the group is the cardinal unit, and the individual blindly conforms to biological impulsions. By contrast, vertebrates, mammals and especially human beings are far more individualistic biologically.  Each of us apparently has the biological capacity to develop without any limit, granting that we have learned to conform to an extremely limited way of life.

It is language that has given us humans the crucial basis for developing the scientific method, a method of learning to solve problems that has succeeded in shaping our world over the past five centuries, following a long period of limited change during the Middle Ages.  Of course, other changes contributed to the development of the physical and biological sciences, such as the invention of the printing press, the explorations of the New World, the establishment of universities and school systems, the Renaissance with its re-discovery of the ancient knowledge of Greece and Rome, the Protestant Reformation with its focus away from the Church hierarchy and on the individual worshipper, the movement of populations from farms to factories and the development of an industrial economy, and the decline of the power of kings and aristocracies coupled with the rise of democratic institutions.  Yet the creation of the scientific method--along with all of these changes--depended on the potential of language to give the individual the basis for solving problems.  For it is language that enables the individual to see personal experiences in relation to the experiences of everyone else, living and dead, as well as to the entire physical and biological universe.  And it is language that gives the individual a basis for applying all of that information to any problem whatsoever.  The scientific method enables the individual to carry much further that language-based ability to solve problems, given its systematic procedures for organizing available knowledge and for gaining new knowledge by testing  ideas against experience.

An Effective Science of Human Behavior?

Yet if the scientific method is indeed so effective for solving problems, why do we experience continuing failures to solve our escalating social problems? Why are we faced at this time in history with environmental crises, with war and terrorism, and with less visible problems like racism, sexism, ageism and the growing gap between the rich and the poor?  One answer was given by George Lundberg in that same small book--Can Science Save Us?-- quoting Krushchev's plea for world peace:

A leader, however admirable in ability and intentions, attempting to  administer centrally a large society today is somewhat in the position  of a pilot trying to fl y the modern stratoliner without an instrument  board or charts. That is to say, it cannot be a very smooth flight. If he  succeeds at all, it will be at the expense of much wreckage of men  and materials. Successful piloting depends directly upon the adequacy  and accuracy of the instruments in the machine, the charts by which  a course can be pursued or modified, and the training of the pilot to  read both aright. Only as a result of the development of the basic physical sciences can a large modern airplane either be built or flown. Only  through a  comparable development of the social sciences can a workable world order be either constructed or administered. The appalling  thing is the flimsy and inadequate information on the basis of which  even a conscientious executive of a large state is today obliged to act.   It comes down, then, to this: Shall we put our faith in science or  in something else? . . . If it is answered in the affirmative, then social  research institutions will make their appearance, which will rank with Massachusetts and California Institutes of Technology, Mellon  Institute, the research laboratories of Bell Telephone, General Electric and General Motors, not to mention several thousand others. . . .

To be qualified to pull a tooth or remove an appendix, we require people  to study systematically for seven or eight years beyond high school. To  keep nations from flying at each other’s throats, any political hack will  do. Human relations will improve when we undertake serious scientific  study of how to improve them. In the meantime, we continue to rely on  incantations, denunciations, exhortations, and exorcism exactly as our  pre-scientific forefathers did regarding their physical maladjustments  (1947/1961: 77).

            Lundberg is quite clear:  It is not knowledge from the physical or biological sciences that is needed by the pilot of the ship of state. And modern society has failed to fund the research that is desperately needed to develop that knowledge.  The result is that governmental leaders are forced to act much like witch doctors, relying on "incantations, denunciations, exhortations, and exorcism exactly as our  pre-scientific forefathers did regarding their physical maladjustments."   Lundberg concludes that "We shall probably become much sicker before we consent to take the only medicine which can help us."  Following Lundberg's analysis--an analysis I completely agree with--it is social scientists far more than any other group in contemporary society who hold the key to our ability to learn the nature of our ever-more-dangerous social problems that threaten us over the years with nothing less than extinction.  Little did Lundberg know just how much sicker we have become.  The medicine he appears to be prescribing is nothing less than a very heavily funded crash program involving research by social scientists throughout the world, and including the development of research laboratories that rank with "Massachusetts and California Institutes of Technology, Mellon  Institute, the research laboratories of Bell Telephone, General Electric and General Motors."

            Lundberg's conclusions must appear very strange to most of us living in the 21st century.  Instead of looking to political leaders, billionaires, journalists, celebrities, religious leaders, educators, generals or novelists for help in understanding our escalating problems, he claims that we should turn to social scientists--sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, economists, political scientists and historians--for the deepest insights into what is wrong and how to fix it.  Looking back to the period following World War II, that was a time of great optimism about the possibilities of the social sciences.  Focusing on sociology in particular--the most general of the social sciences--that was a period when sociologists believed deeply that scientific research on basic social problems could yield both deep understanding and the basis for solving them.  Although granting agencies still favored supporting the physical and biological sciences along with their problem-solving technologies, agencies did give some support to social science research.  American sociologists, for example, were proceeding to build on the work of classical European scholars who had founded the field and had developed profound insights into the nature of society and social change.  Those early sociologists in the latter part of the 19th century were much influenced by 18th century "Enlightenment" ideals--deriving largely from the successes of the physical and biological sciences--as to human possibilities. And they were much concerned with attempting to understand the enormous upheavals and problems in European life resulting from  the accelerating industrial revolution, with the rapid shift away from a feudal and farming society to an urban and industrial society.

            Yet the 1950s and 1960s failed to yield the breakthroughs in understanding that sociologists had hoped for.  The continuing Cold War, the war in Vietnam, the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, the urban riots and the economic recession in the 1970s all contributed to increasing beliefs that the social sciences were largely irrelevant to efforts to solve the big problems confronting society.  Social scientists themselves began to abandon their earlier ideals, and they moved toward ever increasing specialization that involved communicating almost exclusively with others within the same specialized area.  This was a far cry from the breadth of perspective of the founders of sociology.  For example, within the American Sociological Association there are no less than 43 Sections that cover the discipline's diverse interests, such as the family, occupations and work, emotions, social movements, children, migration, education, environment and technology, population, peace and war, aging, mental health, political processes, culture, science, alcohol and drugs, religion, race and class, economics, sexuality, children, crime and medicine. Sociologists along with other social scientists focus  on communicating only within such quite narrow specialized areas. Further, only a small minority of social scientists attempt to communicate widely outside of their discipline.

            The present state of the social sciences should be intolerable to society as a whole if, indeed, social scientists hold the keys to mounting the kind of research that can gain insight into our threatening problems and yield the basis for solving them.  What is wrong with social scientists?  Why have they failed us in our time of need?  Why have almost all of them turned inward to their highly specialized areas instead of communicating outward to society as a whole? Why do they generally fail to communicate even to social scientists in other specialized areas? Why have so many of them given up on their earlier ideals of making progress on the large problems of our world?   Why have a substantial number of them even given up on the idea that a science of human behavior ispossible?  What happened to the scientific ideal of opening up to the full range of phenomena involved with any given problem, by contrast with a narrow orientation?  Why have so many turned to focusing only on having a successful career within a particular institution of higher learning, abandoning the importance of advancing the field of sociology as a whole?  Given this situation, it is easy to understand why so many people outside of the academic world have come to see the social sciences as largely irrelevant to the needs of the times.

Breakthrough in Sociology: Mills and Gouldner

            This would prove to be a most depressing situation if we focused only on the vast majority of social scientists.  But let us, instead, look to two most unusual individuals,   C. Wright Mills and Alvin W. Gouldner, who developed an approach to sociology much closer to the ideals of the scientific method.  Indeed, we might come to see their work around the middle of the twentieth century as yielding a fundamental breakthrough in our understanding of how to apply the scientific method to the full complexity of human behavior.  The failure to understand our escalating problems does not appear to be due to any lack of effort by social scientists. Neither does that failure seem to be the result of any impossibility of penetrating human complexity and developing an effective science of human behavior.  Rather, it appears that social scientists along with the rest of us have never taken into account sufficiently the enormous complexity of human behavior.  As a result, they have never adapted the scientific method--that has proved to be so effective in yielding understanding of relatively simple physical and biological phenomena--to address that complexity.  Neither have we all taken into account the relatively short time over which social science has existed, by comparison with the five centuries of the existence of the physical sciences.  For example, sociologists have been around for no more than a century and a half. Yet their contributions in the 19th and 20th centuries have proved to be enormous.  However, those contributions remain scattered in bits and pieces buried in our libraries, waiting to be brought up to the surface and integrated so that they can shed light on our problems.

            We can begin to understand the approach to the scientific method that Mills developed by examining his second letter to the student newspaper at Texas A & M. As a freshman, Mills took to task the hierarchy there, illustrated by the disciplinary oppression that freshmen had to undergo at the hands of upperclassmen.  His first letter to the student newspaper protesting such practices was met by a rejoinder that accused him of a lack of "guts."  Mills then fired off a second letter with these closing words:

Just who are the men with guts?  They are the men who have the ability and the brains to see this institution's faults, who are brittle enough not to adapt themselves to its erroneous order--and plastic enough to change if they are already adapted; the men who have the imagination and the intelligence to formulate their own codes; the men who have the courage and the stamina to live their own lives in spite of social pressure and isolation.  These my friends, are the men with "guts" (Mills, 2000).

            Mills proved to be a man with "guts," just as he described such men in his letter, and just as I remember him as his student at Columbia University in the 1950s.  While still a graduate student, he published an article criticizing fifty textbooks on social problems--including two written by the Chair of his own Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin--because of their failure to build on European sociological theory as well as their conservative bias.  He took on the biggest problems of society in books and magazine articles that were oriented to a wide audience and not just to the academic world.  Those books covered the different strata of the American class system: labor (The New Men of Power, 1948), the middle class (White Collar, 1951), and the elite (The Power Elite, 1956), and they also dealt with the dangers posed by the Cold War (The Causes of World War Three, 1958). 

            At Columbia he arrived on the campus by roaring into the college quadrangle on his motorcycle, wearing a coonskin hat with its tail waving in the breeze.  I remember his impish grin when he told his class a story of an encounter with Dwight Eisenhower, who was President of Columbia before he became President of the U.S.  When Eisenhower walked into his classroom unannounced one day and took a seat in the back row, Mills instantly changed his lecture to discussing plans for a violent overthrow of the U.S government, with the class functioning as a key cell during the revolution.  Eisenhower's face turned redder and redder, and finally he stood up and hurriedly walked out the door, never to be heard from again.  Throughout his life Mills' style was that of a lone cowboy out of Texas--where he had come from--like those very few individuals "who have the courage and the stamina to live their own lives in spite of social pressure and isolation."  Getting together with Eisenhower--or with other social scientists, or with any political group--in order to advance mutual interests simply did not fit into his "loner" way of life.

            It was in one of his last books, The Sociological Imagination (1959)--published  three years before he died of a heart attack at age 46--that he took on the nature of the scientific method itself.  He gave us a vision of that method that is drastically different from what is almost universally practiced throughout the social sciences.  His vision, following the ideals of the scientific method, was broad enough to yield procedures for penetrating the mysteries of human behavior.  He revealed a staggering breadth of perspective, as illustrated by his view of "the sociological imagination":

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography  and the relations between the two within society.  That is its task and its  promise. . . . The sociological imagination . . .is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another—from the political to the psychological; from examination  of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of  the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from  considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry. It is  the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self—and to see the  relations between the two (1959: 7).

            It is this extremely broad approach to the scientific method--that Mills saw as giving sociologists the basis for fulfilling "the promise of sociology"--which today has became the rallying cry for those sociologists who refuse to succumb to the present castration of the social sciences, a result of a failure to follow scientific ideals.  It was Mills' vision of the sociological imagination that resulted in his book being voted by the members of the International Sociological Association as the second most influential book for sociologists published during the entire twentieth century. Even among most sociologists who presently have little understanding of the scope of Mills' achievement, "the sociological imagination" has become a slogan for any vision of sociology that points toward the possibilities of this discipline, a slogan to be found within countless textbooks and courses.  He viewed the sociological imagination as an extremely broad and creative way of thinking that every one of us can develop--certainly not just sociologists--so that we can learn to understand our "personal troubles" as well as "public issues," a path that can take us away from the narrow pattern of thinking that has imprisoned our minds.

            Yet how would it be possible to integrate the vast amounts of knowledge that social scientists have collected over the years?  It is one thing to put forward a vision of intellectual breadth, but it is quite another thing to develop procedures for actually achieving the integration of knowledge.  However, Mills does succeed in at least giving us a hint--in the same article he published, while still a graduate student, criticizing textbooks on social problems--on how social scientists might proceed:

The level of abstraction which characterizes these texts is so low that  often they seem to be empirically confused for lack of abstraction to knit  them together. They display bodies of meagerly connected facts, ranging  from rape in rural districts to public housing, and intellectually sanction  this low level of abstraction. . . . Collecting and dealing in a fragmentary  way with scattered problems and facts of milieux, these books are not focused on larger stratifications or upon structured wholes (1943: 168).

            Mills implies here that a focus on concrete details while ignoring wide-ranging ideas, or seeing the trees while neglecting the forest, is no way to develop understanding of social problems. Mills gave us far more than a hint on how to integrate knowledge in The Sociological Imagination:

One great lesson that we can learn from its systematic absence in the  work of the grand theorists is that every self-conscious thinker must  at all times be aware of—and hence be able to control—the levels of  abstraction on which he is working. The capacity to shuttle between  levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the  imaginative and systematic thinker (1959: 34).

            Mills was getting at nothing less than the power of language itself to enable social scientists to integrate their bits and pieces of knowledge and, as a result, to enable them to penetrate the incredible complexity of human behavior.  For example, when we move up language's "ladder of abstraction" or levels of generality from "rose," "daffodil" and "tulip" to the concept of "flower"--and continue further up to the concepts of "plant" and, still further, "organism"--we come to understand more fully the nature of roses, daffodils and tulips.  For we come to apply all of our biological knowledge about the nature of flowers, plants and organisms to understanding the nature of roses, tulips and daffodils.  In the same way, social scientists can move up that ladder of linguistic abstraction or generality from the more concrete concepts of "racism," "ethnocentrism," "sexism," "ageism" and "classism" to the more general or abstract concept of "social stratification"--or persisting hierarchy--and thus can come to understand more fully the nature of these different patterns of hierarchical behavior.  For they can come to apply all of our social science knowledge about the nature of social stratification--including thousands of studies--to gaining understanding of racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, ageism and classism. 

            Yet, for Mills, moving up that ladder was, by itself, completely inadequate unless

it was accompanied by movement down that ladder so as to test those general ideas.  He referred to "grand theory" as having exactly this problem, as we can see from the above quote, which refers to the "systematic absence in the work of the grand theorists" of awareness of the importance of the different levels of abstraction.  He devoted a chapter to condemning the failure of grand theorists to move down language's ladder of abstraction so as to take into account, for example, very specific historical situations.  Moving down language's ladder of abstraction is essential if we are to test our general ideas against our concrete experiences. This testing of general ideas or scientific theories and hypotheses by such means as experimentation and observation is central to the history of the physical, biological and social sciences.  And it constitutes a crucial distinction between religious dogma during the Middle Ages and scientific efforts within the modern world.  However, attention to concrete historically-based phenomena without equal attention to abstract or general theory--with Mills equally castigating that one-sided approach in a chapter labeled "abstracted empiricism"--is no more scientific than is "grand theory" with its failure to become concrete or empirical.  By contrast with both grand theory and abstracted empiricism, Mills emphasized the social scientist's "capacity to shuttle between  levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity."

            Overall, Mills succeeded in putting together four pieces of the puzzle of how to construct a scientific method that can confront effectively the enormous complexity of human behavior, pieces that were only partially in evidence before his time.  One piece was his profound commitment to facing up to the deepest problems of society and the individual.  The second and third pieces involved movement both up and down language's ladder of abstraction with respect to general social science theory and concrete research.  It is this combination which is betrayed by a focus on either what he called grand theory or abstracted empiricism.  And  a fourth piece was the integration of knowledge by pulling together the many pieces of research resulting from the first three pieces of the puzzle and applying them to a particular problem.  Mills' exceedingly broad vision of the sociological imagination pointed toward the importance of profound knowledge of the widest possible range of forces affecting human behavior, knowledge that requires the integration of whatever understanding has been developed.  Yet despite all of these accomplishments, there were still missing pieces to the puzzle. No great waves of effective sociological research followed the appearance of Mills' book, partly due to those pieces still remaining and partly due to Mills' failure to work closely with a group of colleagues. Even now, with widespread reverence within sociology for the importance of his ideas, there is still no groundswell of research that builds on his framework.

            A decade after the publication of The Sociological Imagination, three missing pieces to the puzzle of a scientific method for understanding human behavior were implied in Alvin W. Gouldner's The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970). Gouldner was a sociologist whom I also was fortunate enough to know personally. He was quite tall, and that imposing height was combined with a large shock of red hair, interests in both abstract or general theories  of human behavior as well as the concrete workings of bureaucratic organizations, and a deep commitment to addressing world problems along with working toward the development of sociology.  One missing piece had to do with the sociologist's failure to pay serious attention to his or her own role within the research process:

What sociologists now most require from a Reflexive Sociology, however,  is not just one more specialization, not just another topic for panel meetings at professional conventions. . . . The historical mission of a Reflexive  Sociology as I conceive it, however, would be to transform the sociologist,  to penetrate deeply into his daily life and work, enriching them with new  sensitivities, and to raise the sociologist’s self-awareness to a new historical  level. . . .  A  Reflexive Sociology means that we sociologists must—at  the very least—acquire the ingrained habit of viewing our own beliefs  as we now view those held by others   . . .(1970: 487).

            The importance of this factor of "reflexivity," where the researcher looks to his or her own behavior, cannot be overestimated.  For the investigator influences the research process at its every stage:  in the initial formulation of the problem, in determining what previous research and theory is most relevant to the new investigation, in developing ideas on how to investigate the problem, in proceeding with the investigation, in analyzing the data or information resulting from the research, and in communicating the results of the research that was undertaken.  However, with the literally hundreds of thousands of pieces of research that have been published, only a negligible number take seriously the importance of assessing the researcher's impact on any aspect of the research process.  For example, I assume that an interviewer generally has a substantial impact on the responses obtained from most interviewees.  For one thing, the interviewer generally betrays attitudes or convictions at least to some degree--such as through the way questions are asked--attitudes that may well bear on at least some of the questions asked and, as a result, influence the responses of the interviewee.  There is a concept for that influence:  "investigator effect."  Yet the assessment of the investigator effects within published research is extremely rare.  The "reflexive" approach advocated by Gouldner points us toward the importance of assessing investigator effect along with other things.  By so doing, Gouldner adds to the breadth of the investigation--following Mills' fourth piece of the puzzle--by opening up to inward as well as outward phenomena within the research process.  As a result, Gouldner emphasizes the importance of a very broad approach to research on human behavior.  Social scientists should be well aware of how much human beings affect one another and, in particular, the widespread phenomenon of conformity, yet somehow they almost universally fail to assess investigator effect.

            A second missing piece to the puzzle of a broad scientific method has to do with the basic assumptions that all of us make about the nature of self and world, assumptions that generally are invisible yet guide all of our behavior from one moment to the next. This is illustrated by the "outward" orientation of social scientists--along with the rest of us--that blocks their understanding of the importance of assessing investigator effect. Philosophers generally are much concerned with those assumptions, as illustrated by this passage from a work by the American philosopher, William James:

There are some people—and I am one of them—who think that the  most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the  universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important  to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy.  We think that for a general to fi ght an enemy, it is important to know  the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s  philosophy (1907/1995: 1).

            Unfortunately, social scientists generally ignore the importance of philosophy in their attempts to become as scientific as possible, where their focus tends to be on moving down language's ladder of abstraction rather than both up and down that ladder.  But the result is a simplified view of phenomena that cannot easily be linked to research by other social scientists.  We might recall here Mills view of the importance of moving both up and down language's ladder of abstraction and not merely joining "abstracted empiricists" by centering in downward movement.  Gouldner joined Mills in his emphasis on shuttling both up and down.  He went further than Mills in advising that social scientists should move up far enough so that they reach their own most general background assumptions, assumptions that he called "world hypotheses." These are the very same kinds of assumptions that philosophers like James have called "metaphysical"  assumptions.  They are the individual's deepest beliefs, almost invariably invisible, about the nature of reality.  Although social scientists generally see the philosophical field of metaphysics as pointing away from scientific concerns for knowledge of very concrete phenomena--because metaphysical ideas are so abstract or general--in fact they themselves remain unaware of just how much their own invisible metaphysical assumptions influence their research, as perhaps illustrated by their failure to assess their own investigator effect.

            Gouldner, however, understood the importance of metaphysical assumptions, which he called "world hypotheses."  In this passage from The Coming Crisis he indicates his views:

Background assumptions . . . influence the social career of a theory, influencing the responses of those to whom it is communicated. For, in  some part, theories are accepted or rejected because of the background  assumptions embedded in them. . . . Background assumptions come in different sizes, they govern domains of different scope. They are arranged,  one might say, like an inverted cone, standing on its point.  At the top are  background assumptions with the largest circumference, those that have  no limited domain to which alone they apply. These are beliefs about  the world that are so general that they may, in principle, be applied to  any subject matter without restriction. . .Being primitive presuppositions about  the world and everything in it, they serve to provide the most general of  orientations, which enable unfamiliar experiences to be made meaningful.  They provide the terms of reference by which the less general assumptions, further down the cone, are themselves limited and influenced. World hypotheses are the most pervasive and primitive beliefs about  what is real. . . . World hypotheses—the cat may as well be let out of the  bag—are what are sometimes called “metaphysics” (29–31).

            "World hypotheses,"  worldviews or metaphysical stances are sufficiently powerful to trump other beliefs of the individual that conflict with them.  Could it be, for example, that social scientists fail to analyze their own impact on the research process--their "investigator effect"--because doing so would conflict with their invisible worldview?  Could it also be the case that they ignore the scientific ideal calling for opening up to all relevant factors involved within a given problem--opting instead for narrow specialization--because that openness conflicts with their worldview?  And could it be that social scientists generally fail to communicate to the public at large because, once again, such communication would violate their worldview or world hypothesis?  Could it be, then, that fundamental factors that we should look to for an explanation of the limitations of social science knowledge should include not only the enormous complexity of human behavior but also the worldview, world hypothesis or metaphysical stance of social scientists?  If this were the case--given the power of our worldview--then good intentions about following scientific ideals coupled with hard work would by no means be sufficient to prevail if indeed those efforts conflicted with one's deeply-hidden metaphysical stance. Gouldner achieved, with his reference to world hypotheses, what appears to be a missing key to our understanding of the present limited situation of social science knowledge.

            After his publication of The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, Gouldner was asked to comment on a review of that book.  And here he reaches out beyond sociology and the academic world in his emphasis on the importance of communication to the public at large:

The pursuit of . . . understanding, however, cannot promise that men  as we now find them, with their everyday language and understanding, will always be capable of further understanding and of liberating  themselves.  At decisive points the ordinary language and conventional  understandings fail and must be transcended. It is essentially the task  of the social sciences, more generally, to create new and “extraordinary”  languages, to help men learn to speak them, and to mediate between  the deficient understandings of ordinary language and the different and  liberating perspectives of the extraordinary languages of social theory. . . .  To say social theorists are concept-creators means that they are not merely  in the knowledge-creating business, but also in the language-reform and  language-creating business. In other words, they are from the beginning  involved in creating a new culture (Gouldner, 1972: 16).

            Granting that Mills communicated outside of the academic world with his books and magazine articles, his focus was on the education of sociologists.  Yet, following the ideas in this passage, Gouldner sees the sociological imagination as something that everyone can and should aspire to.  In this way he carries forward Mills' vision of the sociological imagination as well as the scientific method in general.  We might, then, see this extremely democratic view of knowledge, education and culture as yet another piece to the puzzle of a broad approach to the scientific method.  If we see one piece as the idea of reflexivity and a second piece as the idea of metaphysical assumptions, worldviews or world hypotheses, then a third piece is the idea of communicating very widely so as to help create a new culture that makes full use of social science knowledge by individuals and society as a whole.  It was Gouldner's three pieces of the puzzle of a broad scientific method added to Mills' four pieces--as discussed above--that provided the senior author and a number of colleagues with the basis for our efforts to answer the question of why the social sciences have largely been ineffective in understanding the escalating social problems of modern society.  Granting the enormous complexity of human behavior, they came to believe that social scientists were simply not following the ideals of the scientific method.  Those ideals call for what Mills illustrated:  deep emotional commitment, shuttling up and down language's ladder of abstraction, and efforts to integrate knowledge, based on a very broad approach conveyed by the idea of the sociological imagination.  And those ideals also call for what Gouldner illustrated:  a reflexive orientation, raising to the surface one's metaphysical stance, worldview or world hypothesis, and efforts to create a new culture where all of us learn to use  social science knowledge.

Building on the Mills-Gouldner Breakthrough

            Near the turn of the century the senior author had become motivated--not only by Mills and Gouldner but also by sociology's failure to live up to its ideals--to develop a broad approach to the scientific method.  By contrast with Mills' lone-cowboy orientation, he proceeded to work with two individuals--Harold Kincaid and Thomas Scheff--to found what became known as the Sociological Imagination Group, based on the title of Mills' most well-known book.  Kincaid, a philosopher of social science, helped him to feel comfortable about moving far up language's ladder of abstraction, even to the level of metaphysics.  He also helped him to become aware--partly through his Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences (1996)--of the almost unbelievable complexity of human behavior and, as a result, the need for an extremely comprehensive scientific method.  Scheff had already written three books during the 1990s (1990, 1994, 1997) that had yielded a broad approach to sociological research.  He emphasized the importance of addressing the momentary changes within any given concrete situation, such as emotions with concrete labels far down the ladder of abstraction like shame, fear and hate.  The senior author launched the first annual meeting of the Sociological Imagination Group in August, 2000, based on what he saw as a way to build on Mills' and Gouldner's achievements.  And he presented those ideas in Beyond Sociology's Tower of Babel:  Reconstructing the Scientific Method (2000), relying substantially on Kincaid's and Scheff's ideas.  Shortly afterwards, Kincaid and Scheff joined him in editing the first volume of the Sociological Imagination Group--Toward a Sociological Imagination: Bridging Specialized Fields (2002)--based on the papers presented at that first annual meeting.

            These books, were critical of the research methods that were being used throughout the social sciences, as illustrated by the title of that first book, Beyond Sociology's Tower of Babel:  Reconstructing the Scientific Method.  They also built directly on the work of Mills and Gouldner, focusing on the development of a more systematic approach to the scientific method than they had achieved.  In the Babel book, the first chapter was devoted to outlining this approach to the scientific method, with attention to building on the four pieces of the puzzle of the scientific method that Mills uncovered.  The second chapter centered on Gouldner's three pieces of the puzzle, and the remainder of the book proceeded to illustrations of these seven pieces.  This passage illustrates the orientation of the book as a whole:

Although he [Mills] never developed a systematic direction for just how sociologists should proceed to employ the scientific method, the body of his work suggests five components:  (1) We should not shirk from addressing absolutely fundamental problems within society.  (2) We should move far up language's ladder of abstraction so as to utilize very abstract concepts.  (3) We should come far down that ladder so as to examine the concrete evidence that bears on our ideas. (4) We should work to integrate our knowledge so that our approach is broad enough to enable us. . .to shift from one perspective to another.  (5) We should develop ourselves as individuals with the ability to think in this broad way, developing a "sociological imagination" that suggests a new vision of society [later in the chapter Phillips expanded on this fifth point to include "reflexive analysis and interactive worldview, emphasizing Gouldner's ideas] (Phillips, 2001: 4).

            We might think of this broad approach to the scientific method as much like a pendulum that swings in ever-widening arcs.  Its swing to the left side yields awareness of and commitment to solving a problem.  That emotional commitment then yields the momentum required for a swing to the right side, where some progress is achieved on understanding the problem and providing the basis for confronting it effectively.  In turn, that progress provides the momentum needed for a swing further to the left side for a deeper awareness of and commitment to the problem, and so on from one side to the other with no limit whatsoever on how far that pendulum swings to both sides.  From this perspective, Phillips had been appalled by the failure of sociology and the other social sciences to move very far toward solving the pressing problems of modern society.  And he saw that failure as a product of a failure to follow the ideals of the scientific method, as illustrated by this image of a pendulum. Mills and Gouldner, along with the work of Kincaid and Scheff, helped Phillips to see the barriers that social scientists had erected on both the left side and the right side of the pendulum that blocked its swings.  On the left he saw limited commitment to addressing the deepest problems of society. On the right he saw an approach to problems that was far too narrow to deal with human complexity.  He was convinced that the approach to the scientific method that he put forward--if adopted by social scientists--would yield their ever-increasing effectiveness.  And he saw the material in those two initial books as illustrating deeper understanding of a range of problems that could provide a basis for that ever-increasing effectiveness.

            That swinging pendulum applies to the problem of the further development of the scientific method itself just as much as it applies to the ever-increasing ability to confront social problems.  It took several years for the Sociological Imagination Group to develop further its approach to the scientific method, and during this period two books were published that made use of its approach (Stebbins, 2004; Scheff, 2006).  A key problem is to achieve a deeper understanding of what Gouldner called "world hypotheses," having to do with our fundamental metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality.  The problem is much like that of a fish attempting to become aware of and understand the nature of the water in which it swims from one moment to the next.  To say that this is a difficult problem is a vast understatement.  A next book, The Invisible Crisis of Contemporary Society: Reconstructing Sociology's Fundamental Assumptions (Phillips and Johnston, 2007) focused on exactly this problem.  Yet another problem had to do with making more headway on some particular social problem, as distinct from illustrating the waterfront of problems. A volume called Understanding Terrorism--collecting the papers given at the 2004 meetings in San Francisco of the Sociological Imagination Group--was an attempt to accomplish this (Phillips, ed., 2007).  Also published around this time were two other books that made use of the Sociological Imagination Group's broad approach:  Goffman Unbound! A New Paradigm for Social Science (Scheff, 2006), and Struggles before Brown: Early Civil Rights Protests and Their Significance Today (Van Delinder, 2007).  Another book making use of this approach, scheduled for publication in 2008, is The Treadmill of Production:  Injustice and Unsustainability in the Global Economy (Gould, Pellow and Schnaiberg, in press).

            Yet new problems with the development of a scientific method that can be applied with ever-increasing effectiveness to human behavior still remain, and presumably they will remain indefinitely.  One new manuscript just submitted for publication has the title, "Armageddon or Evolution?  The Scientific Method and Escalating World Problems" (Phillips, 2007).  And another manuscript just submitted--a volume collecting the papers given at 2006 annual meeting in Montreal--is called "Confronting Fundamental Social Problems: Advancing the Sociological Imagination (Knottnerus and Phillips, eds.).  We might see the earlier books as yielding an eighth piece of the puzzle of the scientific method by systematically integrating the seven pieces provided by Mills and Gouldner.  These two manuscripts break new ground with their focus on how any individual--whether a social scientist or someone else--can apply the scientific method to his or her everyday life. In so doing, they yield a ninth and a tenth piece of the puzzle.  The ninth has to do with what is called "deep dialogue," involving the kind of conversation that brings to the surface at least some aspect of the worldviews or metaphysical stances of those involved.  The tenth, called "the East-West strategy" for problem solving, centers on the individual's  learning to make use of the previous nine pieces as he or she goes about the business of living, confronting the problems of everyday life.

            Both new manuscripts are efforts to respond to Gouldner's call for nothing less than "a new cujlture": "It is essentially the task  of the social sciences, more generally, to create new and “extraordinary”  languages, to help men learn to speak them, and to mediate between  the deficient understandings of ordinary language and the different and  liberating perspectives of the extraordinary languages of social theory." Overall, the phrase "the scientific method in everyday life" summarizes all ten pieces of the puzzle of developing a scientific method that is broad enough to apply to the full complexity of human behavior.

            The foregoing pages are essential for providing the framework on which this book, Manifesto for Deep Democracy, rests.  I might return here to part of the earlier quote from George Lundberg as we proceed to focus on where we go from here:

A leader, however admirable in ability and intentions, attempting to  administer centrally a large society today is somewhat in the position  of a pilot trying to fl y the modern stratoliner without an instrument  board or charts. That is to say, it cannot be a very smooth flight. If he  succeeds at all, it will be at the expense of much wreckage of men  and materials. . .The appalling  thing is the flimsy and inadequate information on the basis of which  even a conscientious executive of a large state is today obliged to act. . .Human relations will improve when we undertake serious scientific  study of how to improve them. In the meantime, we continue to rely on  incantations, denunciations, exhortations, and exorcism exactly as our  pre-scientific forefathers did regarding their physical maladjustments. . . .We shall probably become much sicker before we consent to take the only medicine which can help us.  (1947/1961: 77, 143).

            Lundberg was contrasting the political situation in modern societies in the middle of the 20th century with what it might be with the aid of truly effective social sciences. The above material suggests the idea that the tools for achieving that effectiveness have finally been developed to a substantial extent.  At this point, then, we are in a position to carry Lundberg's argument much further.  On the one hand, we are in a position to sketch what might happen if we continue as we are.  Following Lundberg, "We shall probably become much sicker before we consent to take the only medicine which can help us."  On the other hand, we can learn to take that medicine.  At this point, I would claim that indeed we are very sick, given the escalating problems of the modern world.  In the next section of this chapter  I will contrast these alternatives.

Alternative Ways of Life: Bureaucracy or Deep Democracy?

Bureaucracy

            Max Weber was a founder of sociology whose book on the economy was ranked by the members of the International Sociological Association as the most influential book for sociologists published during the entire twentieth century. In his analysis of bureaucracy he claimed that no other form of organization is as effective as bureaucracy (1964).  Yet he also claimed that industrialization along with its large bureaucratic organizations has created "specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart," people who somehow manage to survive while living in an "iron cage" (1905/1958). How are we to understand Weber's contradictory view of bureaucracy?   How could it be linked to such negative emotional results and also prove to be so effective?

            Following Weber's image of the "iron cage" of bureaucracy, we might think of it as a jail cell holding every one of us inside it, with a steel door that has both vertical and horizontal bars.  The horizontal bars suggest (1) the up-and-down hierarchies that we see in all of our organizations, with leaders on top and the rest of us further down.  The vertical bars suggest (2) different areas of focus.  And the steel door (3) prevents us prisoners from moving out of our cells so as to solve our day-to-day problems.  Those three aspects of bureaucracy are illustrated within the social sciences, with the horizontal bars suggesting (1) the hierarchy of power, with college presidents on top, students on the bottom, and professors just above them.  Those vertical bars are illustrated by (2) the different social sciences as well as the sub-specialization illustrated by the 43 Sections within the American Sociological Association.  And the steel door preventing movement out of the cell is illustrated by (3) the failure of the bureaucratically-organized social sciences to make much progress in solving social problems.

            To understand Weber's favorable view of bureaucracy despite its iron cage, we must adopt his long-term historical perspective, where he compared organizations in his own day of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with European pre-industrial organizations during the Middle Ages and in ancient times.  Before the scientific revolution in Western Europe starting in the sixteenth century--and before the industrial revolution that followed it shortly afterwards--pre-industrial organizations lacked the specialized scientific knowledge that came later along with the further development of universities.  More generally, they lacked the newly-developing scientific spirit that no longer bowed down to the authority of the Church and the nobility as to what is true and false and what should and should not be done.  Instead, organizations came to be established more and more by people who had opened up to the new scientific spirit of the age.  That spirit was reinforced by the invention of the printing press, by the explorers who discovered the New World of the Americas, by the Renaissance that recovered the learning of ancient Greece and Rome, and by the Protestant Reformation that questioned the authority of the Church hierarchy.  Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism alerted scholars to the ways in which that Protestant Reformation--motivating the individual to accumulate wealth as a sign of having achieved salvation--became a fundamental basis for an economic system yielding our present-day global bureaucratic organizations. 

            It was the enormous contrast between pre-industrial and industrial organizations that led Weber to see the modern bureaucracy as the most effective type of organization that human beings had achieved, despite its iron cage for the individual working within a bureaucratic organization.  For example, apparently it was modern achievements--such as in transportation and communication, in architecture and medicine, and in the sciences and the arts--that helped to convince him of the importance of bureaucracy in his time. And it was the emergence of science that yielded knowledge far superior to previously-existing knowledge that affected him as well.  Yet it is now a century after Weber wrote favorably about bureaucracies, granting that he also saw them as iron cages,  We are now in a position to see their failures relative to contemporary problems.  If we focus, for example, on the effectiveness of the bureaucratic organization of the social sciences, we can easily become aware of those failures, just as they have been outlined in the above pages.  As for hierarchy--the horizontal bars of the bureaucratic cage--we have the failure of governmental and academic organizations to give the social sciences the financial support that would help them to penetrate the enormous complexity of human behavior.  With respect to specialization--the vertical bars--this has taken the social sciences far from the broad approach illustrated by Mills that is required to confront that complexity.  And in terms of effectiveness in solving our threatening social problems--opening and stepping outside of the cage's steel door--the result has been most disappointing.

            In examining modern bureaucracies, we must be careful to avoid simply assessing them relative to pre-industrial organizations.  Instead, we must look to our contemporary situation.  From this perspective, it appears that the negative impact of the bureaucratic form of organization on the social sciences can be generalized to its negative impact on society as a whole.  With respect to hierarchy--the horizontal bars--modern trends have yielded an increasing emphasis on the widely shared value of equality, as illustrated by the spread of democratic political institutions throughout the world, in opposition to bureaucratic hierarchy. As for specialization--the vertical bars--we have one-sided materialistic societies throughout the modern world,  based on the successes of the physical and biological sciences rather than the social sciences. And, largely as a result, we learned how to build and use weapons of mass destruction, but we failed to learn how to avoid constructing and using them.  As for bureaucracy's ability to solve problems--the steel door of the cage--massive and increasingly threatening visible and invisible problems have developed in modern society, with our bureaucratic organizations continuing to fail us by their inability to confront them effectively.

            The senior author along with a colleague analyzed thirty-three works by social scientists, philosophers, educators, novelists and others in The Invisible Crisis of Contemporary Society (Phillips and Johnston, 2007), all bearing directly on the possibility of a close link between the bureaucratic orientation of society and the development of massive social problems.  And they discovered the existence of an invisible crisis resulting from such a close relationship between that type of organization and escalating problems in society. More specifically, they discovered that at least some aspects of a bureaucratic orientation--whether by the individual, within an organization, or throughout society--were found by every single author to be tied to a large gap between what people wanted and what they were in fact able to obtain.  And that "aspirations-fulfillment gap" was also found to be increasing--over a very wide range of human aspirations--as we move into the future.  For example, the aspiration for equality--whether racially, ethnically, with respect to income, sexually or with respect to age--increasingly opposes bureaucratic patterns of hierarchy, or the horizontal bars on our iron cages. As for the vertical bars on those cages, they found an increasing gap between aspirations for breadth of experience--illustrated by Mills' concept of the sociological imagination--and bureaucracy's high degree of specialization. And the result, they concluded, was nothing less than an "invisible crisis" adding to the visible crises of contemporary society--with respect to our inability to move outside of our iron cages and learn to solve our escalating social problems.

            To explain more fully the nature of this increasing "aspirations-fulfillment gap" that is the basis for the "invisible crisis" linked to a bureaucratic way of life--a gap central to all of the publications of the Sociological Imagination Group--we must look to our long-term history. For example, we have learned to emphasize the value of equality, or at least equality of opportunity.  That learning is part and parcel of the "revolution of rising expectations" that accompanied our scientific and industrial revolutions over the past five centuries.  Along with the scientific and industrial revolutions in Western societies we have experienced the American and French revolutions in the 18th century. Those revolutions emphasized not only equality but also freedom along with the ultimate worth of every human being.  This is a very far cry from earlier values in ancient times.  The scientific and industrial revolutions have taught us to want more and more things.  And these political revolutions have taught us to want more and more the fulfillment of these humanistic values.  Yet all of these wants conflict dramatically with bureaucratic patterns throughout society that work to limit that fulfillment.  For example, we have learned to want jobs where we are treated with respect, where we have some measure of control over our work, where we have job security, where our work is satisfying to us, where our salaries satisfy our basic needs, and where we have opportunities for advancement.  Instead, such jobs are increasingly becoming available only to a minority of individuals. Internationally, there are increasing economic gaps between first-world or rich nations and third-world or poor nations, just as there are increasing gaps between the rich and the poor within any given country. And it is bureaucratic patterns throughout society that work to increase those gaps. Thus, we are experiencing ever more of a gap between what people throughout the world want or expect and what we all are actually are able to obtain.  And it is that increasing gap between aspirations and their fulfillment that constitutes what we might call "the invisible crisis of contemporary society."

Deep Democracy

            The works by thirty-three authors examined in The Invisible Crisis generally saw alternatives to a bureaucratic way of life, although they used many different ideas to examine those alternatives. The idea of "deep democracy," seen as the extension of democratic relationships among individuals throughout all aspects of life and not just within the political arena, appears to capture the wide range of those ideas.  On the website of the Sociological Imagination Group--www.sociological-imagination.org--is "The Evolutionary Manifesto," a document written by the authors.  We put forward two recommendations on the basis of a brief analysis that parallels the argument in this chapter.  Our first recommendation was for "deep democracy," an idea that we explained as follows:

Deep Democracy:  We see a broad approach to the scientific method as yielding the basis for a long-range goal of a much deeper form of democracy than has yet been achieved anywhere on the globe.  It was Jane Addams who claimed in her Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) that "The cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy."   Those ills, as illustrated by widespread patterns of social stratification [persisting hierarchy] which point far away from egalitarian ideals, are evident in the United States and Western Europe as well as in other nations. Our first recommendation, then, is that a long-range goal for all peoples should be the continuing extension of democracy far beyond political processes and into the everyday behavior of individuals and groups.  During the 1960s the "countercultural" movements in the United States pointed toward the achievement of more equality throughout society without emphasizing the importance of gaining further understanding of human behavior by building on the achievements of the academic world.  We believe that they failed to achieve their aims largely as a result. 

To begin to spell out just what "deep democracy" means to us, we might parallel the speech that Martin Luther King gave at the Civil Rights March in Washington on August 28th, 1963:   "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood" (King, 1963). We have a dream that     . . . .

one day we will all learn to pay close attention to the accomplishments of all peoples throughout history as well as to our own personal accomplishments, and we will also learn to pay close attention to the failures of the human race and to our own personal failures. . . .

one day we will see peace on earth and fellowship among all humans.

one day we will no longer look down on any other human being.

            Our idea of "deep democracy" has the breadth put forward by Jane Addams:  "A conception of Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith."  Addams, then, saw democracy as involving nothing less than the practice of democratic ideas and sentiments or emotions in everyday life.  Our own view carries forward Addams idea about "a  rule for living," for a broad approach to the scientific method can help us develop the understanding we require if we are to make democratic decisions as we proceed with our lives. Our second recommendation within our Evolutionary Manifesto takes into account the importance of such usage of the scientific method as a basis for supporting the ideal of deep democracy, a usage that includes all ten of the pieces of the puzzle of a broad scientific method that have been outlined in this chapter:

 The Scientific Method in Everyday Life:  If the scientific method is to help all of us move toward deep democracy, then we should all have as a fundamental goal our movement toward learning to use a broad approach to the scientific method in our own everyday lives. We recommend, then, that using a very broad approach to the scientific method in our everyday lives should be a priority for us that is no less fundamental than our making the development of deep democracy a priority. 

 We see the human situation at this time in history through the eyes of the poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour

Rains from the sky, a meteoric shower

                        Of facts. . . .

They lie unquestioned, uncombined.

Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill

Is daily spun, but there exists no loom

                        To weave it into fabric.

            We are committed, along with Edna St. Vincent Millay, to the importance of a "loom to weave. . .into fabric" our "meteoric shower of facts" in our "dark hour," and we have outlined in this chapter what we believe are the ten pieces of the puzzle of that loom. The 9th and 10th pieces that have been developed most recently--"deep dialogue" and "the East-West strategy," are particularly relevant for an ability to use the scientific method not only in a professional setting but also in everyday life. The ten pieces together are a loom that we believe must be built with a view to our learning--by social scientists no less than by everyone else--to use the scientific method in our everyday lives,.  Yet how are we to proceed on the basis of those insights?  What are the next steps that we must take to succeed in developing that loom and weaving our facts into a fabric that can be used to help all of us confront our invisible and visible crises?

            Alvin Gouldner's analysis can help us here.  Let us recall this passage from his reaction to a review of his The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1972):

The pursuit of . . . understanding, however, cannot promise that men  as we now find them, with their everyday language and understanding, will always be capable of further understanding and of liberating  themselves.  At decisive points the ordinary language and conventional  understandings fail and must be transcended. It is essentially the task  of the social sciences, more generally, to create new and “extraordinary”  languages, to help men learn to speak them, and to mediate between  the deficient understandings of ordinary language and the different and  liberating perspectives of the extraordinary languages of social theory.

            All of the publications of the Sociological Imagination Group have emphasized the importance of what Gouldner called the "extraordinary" language of social science.  Just as the physical and biological sciences are dependent on special concepts like "force," "valence" and "natural selection," so are the social sciences, as illustrated by the concept of "bureaucracy."  Unfortunately, however, only some of those extraordinary concepts--like "bureaucracy"--take us far up language's ladder of abstraction to the level of what Gouldner called "world hypotheses, which deal with our fundamental metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality.  Further, those concepts generally have not been constructed so that a relatively small number are all linked together systematically and cover the wide range of phenomena we require for penetrating the complexity of human behavior. Still further, neither have those concepts been developed so as to present a sharp contrast between bureaucracy and deep democracy as ways of life. In this book, however, our focus will be on paired concepts from ordinary or vernacular language that sharply contast bureaucracy and deep democracy, that are few in number yet are designed to penetrate the complexity of human behavior, and that are linked systematically for ease of communication to a wide audience.  And those ordinary concepts suggest the "extraordinary" social science language to be found in the publications of the Sociological Imagination Group.  Thus, learning to organize our thinking processes with the aid of those ordinary concepts can help us to build on the "extraordinary" social science language.

Plan of the Book

            The two chapters to follow are "Bureaucracy as a Way of Life" and "Deep Democracy as a Way of Life."  Our focus within each chapter will be on a substantial number of newspaper clippings that bear on a wide range of social problems.  Our approach will be based on all of the publications of the Sociological Imagination Group as well as those manuscripts awaiting publication.  As we proceed we shall develop and make use of a small number of paired concepts, with one oriented to bureaucracy and the other oriented to deep democracy. In that way, those concepts move us far up language's ladder of abstraction to the level of metaphysics or fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality. Those concepts have been constructed so that they all are linked together systematically and, together, address the wide range of phenomena needed to penetrate the enormous complexity of human behavior. And those concepts make use of our everyday or vernacular language, yet they can be easily linked to the "extraordinary" language of the social sciences. Our aim within these chapters is to illustrate how we all might learn to use a very broad approach to the scientific method --one that can actually penetrate human complexity--in our everyday lives.  Although we believe that we can fulfill this goal, that assessment depends on the reaction of readers.  Can this approach to thinking, feeling and acting in fact help you in your own life as you confront both personal problems as well as look to problems throughout the world?  Mills also wrote about this wide range of problems in The Sociological Imagination when he discussed "personal troubles" and "public issues."

            Previous publications of the Sociological Imagination Group were addressed to academic social scientists, and they built on specialized knowledge.  However, the problems we are all facing at this time in history are far too threatening and widespread for this book be addressed only to social scientists.  Indeed, their past failures should alert us to the necessity for the rest of us to join them.  Indeed, the very idea of democracy, as developed by the ancient Greeks, requires nothing less than this.  For how are we to help our elected leaders steer the ship of state unless we are educated to understand the problems facing society and the individual at this time in history and are able, as a result, to make choices based on such understanding?  We do not claim that this book is a substitute for the wide range of knowledge to be found throughout the social sciences.  Yet we do claim that this book can guide the reader to develop a broad and profound understanding of personal troubles and public issues.  And we also claim that it can guide the reader to a second career in gaining profound understanding of the key contributions throughout the literature of the social sciences.  However, the book will prove to be useless relative to the reader's ability to address troubles and issues effectively unless he or she in fact uses it as a guide for confronting those problems in everyday life.   We believe that such testing of the worth of these ideas will prove fruitful.  And, from a wide perspective, we believe that it will help all of us at this time in history, for our window of opportunity for confronting escalating world problems is rapidly closing down on us.

References

Addams, Jane.  Democracy and Social Ethics. 1902.

Gould, Stephen Jay.  The Mismeasure of Man.  New York:  Norton, 1981.

Gould, Kenneth A., David N. Pellow and Allan Schnaiberg.  The Treadmill of Production:  Injustice and Unsustainability in the Global Economy.  Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm, (in press).

Gouldner, Alvin W.  The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology.  New York:  Basic Books, 1970.

GouldnerGouldner, Alvin W.  “The Politics of the Mind:  Reflections on Flack’s Review of The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology,” Social Policy  5 (March/April 1972), 13-21, 54-58.

Herrick, C. Judson.  The Evolution of Human Nature.  Austin:  Univ. of Texas Press, 1956.

James, William. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New  York: Dover, 1907/1995.

King, Martin Luther.  Speech at the Civil Rights March in Washington on August 28, 1963, in the New York Times, August 29, 1963.

Kincaid, Harold.  Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences.  New York:  Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Lundberg, George A.  Can Science Save Us?  New York:  David McKay, 1947/1961.