My latest essay includes this:
Regardless of whether informal authority is to be praised or condemned, it is with us. Informal authority is worth the attention of anyone interested in human conflict and cooperation. In short, sociology matters.
The essay discusses a book by David Swartz on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. You can think of the book as a condensation of Bourdieu’s life work. You can think of my essay as a condensation of the book. You can think of this blog post as a condensation of my essay.
I am intersted by your definition of sociology as the study of informal authority. To what extent does that match Sociologists’ own description of their field?
One interesting observation one can make if operating in a Bourdieuian framework of interpretation is that modern progressive elites have discovered an incredibly powerful way to neutralize “subversion” by being able to smear any heterodox views as “hate” and pushing any really threatening dissent out of the Overton Window and deterring it with credible threats of social ostracization. I think after the Trump era we’ll see them shift into concentrating more on conservation and succession.
And I think that will lead to even nastier rhetoric and tribal polarization.
One can think about incentives to maintain civil etiquette as similar to those that exist in a family gathering, even among relatives with tense relationships and diametrically opposing viewpoints. Even if some contentious topic should arise, people operate under a working assumption that they are “stuck with each other” and “all in the same boat” and that maintaining long-term relations with at least a minimal level of harmony and comity is much more valuable and important than any points to be scored in advocacy for ones position, or venting of emotional tensions with insults and the like. Being pleasant with each other is part of a strategy to prevent subversion and defection to which one fears one is vulnerable.
These are really discrete modalities that are triggered by differing social contexts.
The “family dinner” situation is a version of your “try to open the minds of members of the other side” strategy.
But as soon as people don’t feel any need to preserve relations with opponents, they will switch into “try to close the minds of members of their own side” and double down on demonization and polartization, to include “altruistic punishment” of those “traitors” on their own side pursuing the first strategy.
I loved your paragraph beginning, “I think of the larger domain of social science as human conflict and cooperation.” Partly because I recently finished Morris Hoffman’s excellent The Punisher’s Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury. It’s actually a lot broader than the subtitle; at one point, he says, “This deeply embedded tension between cooperation and cheating, between community and individuality, between selfishness and selflessness is what I call The Social Problem. It has been the central challenge of our species since our emergence.”
The book shares a lot with Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony and The Secret of Our Success.
One more quote: “We have always been presumptive cooperators and occasional defectors. We have always been social animals, and have always had and cared about the rules of group living, and what to do about members who violate those rules. We have always been governing and legal animals. Law and morality are not cultural constructs we stumbled on to save us from our natures. They are part of our natures.”