Sociology: The Manic Religion of Leftism By James Reed
From the very beginning, in the foundation works of Marx, Durkheim and Weber, sociology has been enmeshed in Leftist politics, something which is inevitable give its metascientific orientation. Above all else, even with Marxist historical materialism, sociology is based on the view that humans are primarily socio-cultural entities, and biology does not intervene. This is seen most clearly in the work of Durkheim, where in addressing phenomenon like suicide and the division of labour, he explicitly rejects any bio-social explanation, all that is relevant is social facts. Immersed in social bs, where else can one go? The development into a religious attitude, rather than science, would be inevitable. Christian Smith, The Sacred Project of American Sociology, (2014), explores this theme.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2019/10/31/sociology-as-religion-part-1/
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2019/11/01/sociology-as-religion-part-2/
“Smith, a professor at the University of Notre Dame, believes academic sociology had an auspicious beginning as a scientific, secular, and naturalistic enterprise. Over time, however, it lost much of its scholarly objectivity. Today, “American sociology is, rightly understood, actually a profoundly sacred project” (X). The author uses the term ‘sacred’ in the Durkheimian sense of something holy, revered, and beyond question.
To my mind the sacred project that Smith describes in Chapter 1 bears a striking similarity to the cultural Marxist or Social Justice ideologies, though he does not use those terms. This sacred project (thenceforth, the Project) is a spiritual quest, a secular religion that seeks to end human inequality, human hierarchies, and constraints on humans by other humans, and even by nature. Such utopian and unobtainable goals have in the past, and will in the future, lead to frustration and fanaticism.
Political ideologies can, at times, be nebulous concepts, and some dislike using the Left-Right axis. But that model is useful here for contrast. The authentic Right believes that it is noble to be bound by duty and loyalty to one’s family, community, and ethny. Rather than equality they celebrate excellence — strength, beauty, and intelligence. Inequality and hierarchy are intrinsic to the human condition, and constraint upon individuals and groups is often a positive necessity. And while the Right, if in power, would seek to end injustice, exploitation, and poverty, these efforts would not be global, but focused on their own ethnic communities.
In contrast, The Project is ultimately self-centered individualism. It seeks “the emancipation, equality, and moral affirmation of all human beings as autonomous self-directing individual agents . . . [who should] live their lives as they personally so desire by constructing their own favored identities, entering and existing relationships as them choose . . .” (7-8). Though he concedes that “the Marxist tradition” adds a “revolutionary and socially utopian edge,” and “a therapeutic outlook . . . received from the Freudian tradition,” has influenced it, Smith believes the Project is, at its core, simply Western individualism within the larger Enlightenment tradition (9). This is certainly one perspective, the Project as liberalism taken to its illogical extreme.”
However, I prefer the conclusions of a book I read years ago by Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972), which argues exactly for its title thesis, “much of what passes as scientific study of human behaviour boils down to an equivalent of sorcery’ (p. 10). He wrote about this discipline where jargon, mostly meaningless constituted “theory.”
Almost 50 years later, the discipline has fallen into sub-tribal groups like critical race theory, queer theory, varieties of postmodernism, you name it. We have situation where it is no longer productive to try to rationally critique this garbage, because it is an intellectual waste of time, since reason itself is rejected as white male logic, and sexist, and the people are not worthy of debating, only sacking. That was my prime motivation for believing that the weeds can only be controlled by cutting off the water and food supply, and closing down the universities.
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