In editing Contexts articles, one of the first phrases we often cut from conclusions is the line “more research on this topic is required.” We do this because it usually is so obvious and trite, and because we believe that our readers are generally more interested in what we social scientists actually know than what we don’t know. Yet, in an increasingly angry, anti-intellectual culture, we cannot take the need for more social research for granted.

The latest to make this point is one of our favorite public purveyors of social science, New York Times columnist David Brooks. It comes in the context of a column chastising Congress for considering a bill that would eliminate funding for the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences.

“Today,” Brooks writes, “we are in the middle of a golden age of behavioral research. Thousands of researchers are studying the way actual behavior differs from the way we assume people behave. They are coming up with more accurate theories of who we are, and scores of real world applications.” Brooks goes on to provide a couple of fascinating examples of this kind of work. But the most important point of the piece is the basic insight that such research isn’t particularly costly and typically leads to much cheaper, more effective social programs and public policy. “Cutting cheap things that produce enormous future benefits,” as Brooks puts it, “is exactly how budgets should not be balanced.”

His closing line on this point is a doozie, aimed, I think, at erstwhile patriots and their contradictory economic principles and nationalistic pride. “Cutting off financing for this sort of research now is like cutting off navigation financing just as Columbus hit the shoreline of the New World.”

I went to a local production of the play Twelve Angry Men this past weekend. With its title and content as well as (in this staging) its all-white cast, I found myself thinking about a recent study from Michael Norton and Samuel Sommers (Harvard and Tufts, respectively) about white and black perceptions of racial bias and differential treatment. Given that their study has garnered a lot of discussion lately, I’d venture you’ve thought about it, too.

Based upon some experimental retrospective surveys, Norton and Sommers find (among other things) that white Americans believe that anti-white bias has increased dramatically since the 1950s, to the point that many whites now consider anti-white bias to be a greater social problem than bias against African Americans. (The original study appeared in Perspectives on Psychological Science 2011 6: 215)

On the face of it, as the study’s authors rightly surmise, these beliefs are absurd. African Americans continue to lag behind whites (and other racial-ethnic groups) in every domain that matters—educational attainment, income, poverty and wealth, health, encounters with the criminal justice system, etc. But the fact that these perceptions don’t accord with objective social patterns doesn’t make these beliefs any less real or potent.

One of my first reactions is: this actually isn’t a new phenomenon. White perceptions about “reverse discrimination” (a concept which emerged at least a generation ago in the backlash against the civil rights movements) have been on the rise in recent years, including some high profile examples such as the New Haven, CT firefighter case which was upheld by the Supreme Court. Indeed, when Joe Gerteis, Penny Edgell, and I fielded our American Mosaic survey back in 2004, we found significant evidence of whites claiming that they had been the victims of discrimination.

Another thought: one of the reasons this study and the media attention it has received have stuck with me is that I learned about them in the same week that I read about Ellis Cose’s new work, excerpted in Newsweek, which proclaims “the end of African American anger.” Cose, of course, is a journalist not a social scientist, but he is an acute observer and diligent interviewer and his 1993 book The Rage of a Privileged Class was a touchstone and a springboard for many who study race and racism in the academy.

Third: the authors interpret their findings to mean that whites “view racism as a zero-sum game, a situation in which one side’s gain automatically results only from the other’s loss.” This is provocative and compelling. After all, the finding isn’t just that African Americans experience less racism now than in previous generations. No, it’s that whites really seem to believe that they are now being actively discriminated against. There may be a bit of truth here (in terms of social policies designed to help people of color rather than whites), but I have a hard time equating that with reverse discrimination and anti-white bias. Rather, these anecdotal perceptions seem driven by more petty things like jealousy, greed, resentment and, yes, anger at the (relative) success of others than by systemic discrimination.

Finally, I can’t help considering how this contrasts with Richard Alba’s non-zero-sum mobility, introduced in his Blurring the Color Line which I reviewed recently in Contemporary Sociology. Non-zero-sum mobility, Alba writes, occurs when certain groups can advance in society without taking away from or posing a threat to the privileges and position of the existing majority group. This helps us explain how, for instance, the southern and eastern European immigrants of the previous century were able to successfully assimilate in the U.S. Alba also believes this framework may be key to better, more equitable race relations and outcomes in the U.S. especially  if economic growth combines with low birth and replacement rates among white Americans to open up new opportunities for recent immigrants and native individuals of color. I won’t recount my entire review and critique of Alba’s book here, but I was obviously struck by the contrast between his optimistic concept and the related (but opposite) concept Norton and Sommers put forward.

In the end, I find myself inclined to take Norton and Sommers’ data seriously; even if I think the perception of rampant discrimination against white Americans is factually incorrect, the fact that so many people have that perception at all is incredibly telling. And that’s not just because the contradictory notions individuals hold ring true to my vision of contemporary race relations, but  because I believe it’s often ideas—even those that don’t accord with objective social realities, indeed especially those—that are among the most powerful, potent forces in social life.

With the academic year wrapping up and Contexts winding down, I find myself thinking ahead to the project (on race, religion, and diversity in America) I said would be the basis of my sabbatical work in the coming year–what it will be, who it will be for, and how it will contribute to the discipline. So I was obviously intrigued when I heard that Sudhir Venkatesh, author of the sociological best seller Gang Leader for a Day and a Contexts board member, had written a review for Slate of Elijah Anderson’s The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life.

The review didn’t necessarily inspire me to read Anderson’s book. In Venkatesh’s description, the bulk of the writing and analysis (including the title itself) conveys an overly optimistic and superficial vision of race and race relations in America, one that fails to accord with common experience, other social scientific research and writing, or Anderson’s own interviews with African Americans who work in the corporate sector. (A “vein of distrust of whites and suspicion about racial progress” is revealed by these interviews, according to Venkatesh, which raises fundamental questions about the “celebratory canopy.”)

I can’t say that I agree (or disagree) as I haven’t yet read the book itself. However, Venkatesh’s review did get me thinking a lot about the state of sociology. Venkatesh frames the shortcomings of Cosmopolitan Canopy as “a symptom of the field… which is confused about its direction.”

Sociology, Venkatesh writes, “once gravitated to the most pressing problems,” took us into otherwise “foreign, impenetrable worlds,” and “examine[d] cherished beliefs and institutions… stereotypes and misguided policies.” In previous generations, “data-carrying” sociologists like St. Clair Drake, Herbert Gans, and James Coleman were some of America’s “most influential truth-tellers,” “important cogs in the civic wheel” who helped “end school segregation, ensure fair housing policies, [and] promote public sector accountability.” No more. Venkatesh worries that the “great American intellectual tradition” that is sociology is “weathering a troubled transition.”

Venkatesh may be accused of being an alarmist, and he is definitely more nationalist about sociology’s origins than I, but he has a point. Americans are, more than ever, in need of sociological research and analysis, but they are less and less likely to find it.

Thinking about what this all implies for me and my work on diversity in the U.S., I have been musing about the biggest challenges and deepest concerns of the nation as a whole. To Venkatesh’s list, I would add that sociology has not only data and information to contribute to public discussion and debate, but also broad, big-thinking perspective and synthesis—the kind of critical, creative work that Robert Bellah and his colleagues called “public philosophy” in Habits of the Heart, that classic sociological study of American culture and character. How this will help refine my next work remains to be seen, but as an aspirational impulse, I find it invigorating and hope others will too.

In graduate school at UCSD, I had a friend in biology (his name was Tom Langen–what’s up, Tom?, if you’re out there) with whom I shared a number of great conversations about the social nature of animals and birds and their implications (or not) for the analysis of human activity. I don’t remember many of the specifics of those conversations, but I do remember that one involving the famed E.O. Wilson ended with my buddy Tom saying, “Well, he did some great ant work.” That’s right: ant work.

I’m still generally not a big social biology guy, but I couldn’t help but think of Tom and be a bit more sympathetic to the whole Wilson crowd when I read a story in this weekend’s LA Times about how fire ants save themselves when threatened with drowning. Acting together is the key. On their own, individual ants apparently sink or drown in water—or, as they article puts it, they “flounder.” But what most do when so threatened is link themselves together into a floating life raft. The secret, according to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology writing in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has something to do with the air pockets that are formed when the little creatures fasten their claws onto each other and allow the whole group to float to safety. I guess it’s “Sink or… clamp on!”

The researchers believe these findings could provide a useful model for building complex, cooperative robots. I, however, was thinking about more basic sociological lessons and implications. For one thing, there is the obvious point about the power of the collective: on their own, ants drown; together, they survive. (Just last week I was reminding my 60 graduating seniors that the success of the human species has less to do with our individual brain power or physical strength and far more to do with our ability to work together.)

Which brings me to another, broader set of implications about knowledge and rationality—the intelligence of the collective, the group, in this case the life raft itself. These points are nicely captured in the quote from a Princeton biologist named Iain Couzin the LA Times uses to conclude the article: “The individuals acting together create this awareness of the environment that no individual ant has, and that’s what I think we find fascinating.” How true–and how fundamentally sociological. A group or collective develops into a complex system that can achieve things that no individual member could have imagined or enacted. And while the fire ants don’t have the collective ability to reflect upon and synthesize this “knowledge,” they don’t drown. For our part, we can recognize that, beyond our ability to work together, self-conscious reflection is one of humans’ real sources of power and adaptability in the natural world. The complex social systems we make ourselves into can also be the source of tremendous blindness, inefficiency, conflict, and injustice as well, but I think that’s a story to save for another day.

One of my biggest hopes (and ultimate disappointments) in editing Contexts has to do with contemporary fiction. When Chris and I took over the magazine, I was convinced that addressing literature would excite and engage the general, non-scholarly, public readership we hoped to reach. I believed then, as I still do, that novelists are among the best, most accurate and insightful, and most probing chroniclers of social life, and sociologists can learn from fiction, productively using its insights to revitalize ourselves, our work, our field, and our adoring (obviously I’m prone to flights of fictional fancy myself) public.

Obviously, that didn’t pan out. Contexts has run some literary reviews, but not many. The few we did have focused on populist works like the Harry Potter books or Twilight, but none took on the more deeply philosophical works we associate with capital-L Literature. And in spite of varied and repeated attempts, we never got anyone to do a feature on the topic. I’m still not sure why. It can’t be that sociologists don’t read fiction. Maybe we don’t have the confidence to go outside our familiar methods and areas of specialty. Maybe the fictive just troubles our empirical sensibilities.

(In my more pessimistic moods, I worry we lack the courage of our convictions: sociologists have lots of big claims and ideas about modern life, but we’re uncomfortable offering them up to inspection and critical dialog with those outside of our discipline, or even more so outside of the academy altogether. But this is probably fodder for another, more pessimistic day…)

It’s in mind of all this that I’d like to commend—and recommend—Johnathan Franzen’s recent New Yorker essay “Farther Away: Robinson Crusoe, David Foster Wallace, and the Island of Solitude.” In it, the author of Freedom, one of the most celebrated books of the past year, reveals much of what is to be gained from a closer, deeper engagement with contemporary writers.

Ostensibly, this “reflection” is a travel diary. Franzen goes to an uninhabited island 500 miles off the coast of Chile to recover from his book tour, search for a rare bird, and, most fundamentally, to grapple with the 2009 suicide of his dear friend, the astounding, incomparable author David Foster Wallace. Among the few items Franzen brings are Wallace’s ashes and a paperback copy of Robinson Crusoe. Franzen’s re-reading and rendering of the novel (perhaps the only literary love his own father ever had) animates his essay, providing its narrative thread.

The trip, nicely detailed in Franzen’s skillful telling, first unfolds as a meditation on modern fiction. “So, what exactly is a novel and why did the genre appear when it did?” The answer, for Franzen, is to situate the novel (in a fundamentally sociological fashion) in the context of the modern world’s many changes: the rise of social mobility and specialized labor, the decline of religious belief and practice, the glorification of the individual, and the emergence of leisure.

It’s this last point, that modern people have so many resources and so much time on their hands, that Franzen follows. When we moderns gained free time, it opened up leisure’s terrifying cultural cousin: boredom. Like Wallace, Franzen seizes on the themes of boredom and distraction. Both can spur pathology: “The more you pursue distractions,” he writes ominously in the first few paragraphs (reflecting on the things he tried to do to get him through his book recent book tour), “the less effective any particular distraction is.” Novels, he believes, emerged as a certain kind of answer and antidote to modernity. They offer escape—“fields of play at once speculative or risk free”—but are also reflections on some kind of real world, even in the case of Crusoe’s otherworldly, allegorical setting. They offer “a writer’s experience onto a waking dream,” but they are also true in the sense of authenticity and relevance (or, perhaps even, verisimilitude—the word Franzen poignantly employs in the essay).

As time passes on Franzen’s island, his article grows into a meditation on cultural life today. He has much to offer in sense-making about entertainment saturation, the spectre of monoculture (which Wallace’s fictional worlds so richly depicted), radical individualism and reality TV, and everything from The Godfather to Charlie Sheen and blackberries (the fruit and the device). Ultimately, he comes to rest at the emotional core of his Crusoe adventure in the South Pacific: his coming-to-terms with the life, work, and self-inflicted death of his friend David Foster Wallace.

Franzen knew Wallace on an intimate, personal level. Operating on impulses both loving and enraged, he is unflinching. They shared, he says, interests in mutual themes, but clearly believes Wallace’s writing and decisions were tragically misguided. Pathological or beautiful, depending on your point of view, Wallace believed “fiction is a solution, the best solution to the problem of existential solitude.” But, then, couldn’t fiction quell a suicidal impulse? Franzen in fact claims that Wallace’s death can be understood as deriving from the unique (and perverse) experience of over-stimulation, reflection, and boredom. “If boredom is the soil in which the seeds of addiction sprout, and if the phenomenology and the teleology of suicidality are the same as those of addiction, it seems fair to say that David died of boredom.” Too much wasn’t enough.

Midday through Crusoe, the titular character, alone for fifteen years in which he ached for companionship, finds a footprint. The novelist and his hero both recognize this moment as an ironic unraveling. Franzen writes, “Nowhere was Defoe’s psychology more acute than in his imagination of Robinson’s response to the rupture of his solitude. He gave us the first realistic portrait of the radically isolated individual, and then, as if impelled by novelistic truth, he showed us how sick and crazy radical individualism really is.”

Yes! This is, to me, so much of what sociology is about; a critique of individualism, obviously as well as a recognition of the centrality of the social, even with its particular perversions and injustices, in modern life. But I can’t say it so succinctly as the novelist can: “No matter how carefully we defend our selves [two words, not one!], all it takes is one footprint of another real person to recall to us the endlessly interesting hazards of living relationships.” What a beautiful, sparing (or is it unsparing?) formulation.

Franzen continues, bringing us even further and more concretely into the contemporary moment: “Even Facebook… contains an ontological exit door, the Relationship Status menu, among whose options is the phrase ‘It’s complicated.’ This may be a euphemism for ‘on my way out,’ but it’s also a description of all of the other options. As long as we have such complications, how dare we be bored?”

As an editor, I generally try to guard against such rhetorical questions, especially as a motivating force or a sort of emoticon wink appended to a title, but here I kind of like it. The question here is a challenge, rhetorical in its way, but really a moral taunt to obligation, responsibility, connection, and just continuing to push on with life. Generally, sociologists don’t allow ourselves to be moralistic—at least, not overtly. Yet we are, of course, deeply moralistic, insistent, and normative, if only by virtue of our core interest in the social.

And that’s how I get from Franzen and Crusoe back to the importance of fiction for sociology. It’s kind of like Erik Olin Wright’s take on the study of real-life utopias. By considering, critically and carefully, actual utopian projects, we open up a set of possibilities so that we can be ready when historical opportunities to increase human flourishing arise. Wright calls it “a sociology of the possible.” For me, fiction, too, can help us grasp our present realities and open up alternative stories of who we are and who we’d like to be—and it often accomplishes the task more powerfully and imaginatively than our own literal empiricism typically allows. After all, it’s not called the sociological imagination for nothing.

Last weekend, I read a very interesting column about populist outrage and the American dream. Written by Steven Thomma, White House correspondent of the McClatchy newspaper group, the piece got me thinking once again about the value of sociological research and thought.

Thomma’s article, which appeared in our local paper under the headline “Fading American Dream Promotes New Political Rage,” begins by detailing some of the basic social changes fueling unrest among protestors Left and Right: stagnant and declining wages, increasing health care costs, job loss, and income gaps, as well as ongoing (and ineffective) wars, corporate bailouts, and skyrocketing debt. Very empirical, sociological stuff. Indeed, Thomma drew on research and findings from our field implicitly and quoted Harvard’s Bruce Western directly (on union declines and increasing income gaps in America).

Where the piece really caught my eye–and where Thomma took it up a notch, sociologically speaking–was in situating these structural and demographic shifts in the context of “something deeper” going on in American culture.  Mobility–or the relative lack thereof–and rights were important touchstones for this discussion. However, it wasn’t just the actual facts about mobility (or rights) in the U.S. that are striking, but the American expectation and hope that both should be available and possible. For Thomma, this is where the American dream and the perceived loss of it come in. “The rules,” Thomma writes, “seem to be changing.” With these insights about cultural norms and expectations, we see that our politics, lives, and communities are shaped not only by how things are but how we want and expect them to be–and there is no greater cultural force in America than that crazy, inspiring dream so many of us share. The fact that Thomma quoted a political scientist to set up these points doesn’t make them any less sociological (or useful).

When I finished reading, I was left wondering what sociologists like me might contribute to public understanding on these themes. One contribution I can imagine centers on leadership and the American political structure. An orienting point for Thomma is that populists of both Left and Right are frustrated political leaders who have promised, but failed to deliver, change. Engaged citizens of all stripes, he believes, feel disheartened and betrayed. Clearly our political leaders have often failed us. They haven’t always done as well as they could have. But I think a more sociological orientation to the problem would situate leaders’ shortcomings in the context of our archaic and dysfunctional political institutions–two-party paralysis, decentralization, and so on–and, even more importantly, in the context of a culture that lacks a rich conception of and commitment to the public good andis fundamentally cynical about government itself.

A more sociological orientation would also, I believe, be a bit more critical and forward-thinking about the American dream itself. It wouldn’t just bemoan the loss of the dream as we have known it, but also consider how that dream–and the culture itself–is being (or perhaps  should be) reshaped and tranformed, recast to fit the contemporary moment. It’s possible that new dreams and visions of America could emerge out of this angst–conceptions that would be less driven by utopian visions of limitless mobility and unabated freedom for all and more rooted in a more humble and informed (and yes, sociological) sense of ourselves, our relations to others, and our place in the world. I offer this possibility only hesitantly because it doesn’t sound as uplifting, inspiring, and patriotic as one might like. Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking that such a vision may not only be more realistic and sustainable at this point in our history, it would also be truer to another set of values, ideals, and imaginings that have helped to make America not only a great nation but also a fundamentally good one.

Readers of Contexts will know that one of Chris and my favorite political pundits and cultural commentators is David Brooks of the New York Times. It’s not because we agree with all of his politics and opinions, but  because he is one of the few national media members who regularly reads and consistently draws upon social scientific research. On this point, take a look at his March 17 column “Social Science Palooza II.” I found at least two things interesting about the seven different pieces he profiles. The first is that four of the studies come from psychology. The other is that two of the pieces are based upon work in the domain of sports–one about how fans impact officials (which helps account for the “home field advantage”), the other about the social dynamics that propel swimmers in the last legs of relay races to swim beyond their usual personal limits. Good stuff–and a handy reminder that I want to give Brooks’s new book The Social Animal a read.

So I finally had a chance to watch the Facebook-inspired, Academy Award-winning film “The Social Network.” I found it very entertaining–Jessie Eisenberg was captivating as Mark Zuckerberg and who among us regular folks doesn’t enjoy seeing some in-fighting among Ivy League elites? That said, I was also surprised and kind of disappointed not to learn more about the social desires and dynamics that Facebook is really tapping into and driven by–I mean, in addition to sex, dating, and scoring drugs. I see the irony of a bunch socially-challenged Harvard misfits producing the most successful social networking medium in the world today. But I think there is–or at least should be–more to the story than that, more to say about why people want and need to connect with one another, why this particular technology has proven so successful and valuable for doing so, and what broader lessons these fundamentally social questions have for the future of technology of/in society. In real life, as I wrote in a post a few weeks ago, Zuckerberg talks a ton about the power and promise of all things social without really filling in the details and the backstory. I guess I had thought the film might help elaboarate that just a bit. Maybe when sociologists make their move into Hollywood, we can do the remake.

Late last week, esteemed La Salle sociologist Charles A. Gallagher put pen to paper (well, fingers to keys, more likely) with an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Living in Fictional Land of Color-Blind America: False View of Equality Blinds Us to Remaining Issues.” We encourage you all to read Chip’s piece, and to check him out in CNN’s piece from the following day. Kudos to a sociologist in the limelight!

Our colleague, Monte Bute at Metro State University in St. Paul, is many things to us: respected sociologist, friend and supporter, blogger (https://thesocietypages.org/monte/), former Contexts’ board member, and valued opinion. He’s also a true class act, and it looks like a lot of people agree.

Today we’re delighted to point you all to Minnesota Public Radio’s wonderful piece about Monte’s approach to life, death, and bringing both into the classroom. Please do check it out at http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/02/23/dying-professor-death/

And, for a little more backstage knowledge on the backstage sociologist, here’s the text of Monte’s “about” page on TheSocietyPages.org: