I would like at least that my own intellectual activity should not make things worse or more dangerous, and, preferably, that it would make things by a tiny margin a little bit better, a little bit clearer, a little bit more rational, even a little bit more compassionate.
Conor Cruise O’Brien
In theory it was possible to wind up being full professor while doing nothing except to be permanently absent on some kind of sabbatical grant or fellowship.
David Lodge, Small Worlds
My two sojourns at the Center (1987-88 and 1996-97) were among the best of many travel experiences as an academic.* Here I will refer only to the first stay (memories of the second being filed away in files I can’t now find). In the 1980s vernacular of my children the year at the Center was sweet –a dream and a fantasy. It would be hard to invent a better version in fiction, something that can hardly be said of most social organizations. I am deeply grateful to the visionaries who created it, the foundations which sustain it and the staff who, in good spirit make it all happen so invisibly and effortlessly.
The Center year was perfect for the kind of portable scholarship involved in self-editing, re-writing, and checking that turns beginning drafts into polished products. It also offered time to experiment with more creative writing. The Center offered support far beyond what the overworked support staff of universities provide –rapid turnover time for library requests, typing, photo-copying and statistical and computer support a few feet away. The Center’s culture was understood and strongly supported by the staff.
A positive labeling effect can be present. When you work in isolation at your home base what even Robert Merton has called “the blue devils of self-doubt” have more room to come out. An important factor in some types of creativity is belief in oneself and a willingness to confront establishments and established truth. The support and respect from distinguished peers that the Center offered was important for that. Having specialists from other approaches and disciplines (for me in ethics and psychology) so accessible was also helpful. At home when I needed a reference or to discuss an idea, the logistics of departmental and even university separation meant delays and often as not letting it go.
I also came to appreciate the role the Center and related organizations play in building and sustaining the infra-structure of American social science. The groups that meet here several times a year are instructive in that regard. The Center helps to socialize and creates networks among emerging social science leaders.
The tangible results for my first stay at the Center were finishing the book Undercover. I finished an article on fraudulent identity and biography and one on “The Maximum Security Society”. That was the basis for Windows Into the Soul published more than a quarter of a century later. I also did satirical writing on social themes. Such writing communicated more widely than all my academic work together (e.g., “Raising Your Hand Just Won’t Do” Los Angeles Times, April 1, 1987. http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/raising.html). The year at the Center helped me better define what I would do next and led to the realization that my writing goal is social understanding. While social science is central to that, it is not necessarily sufficient for it. I saw that I was a social studies scholar (a label that requires both social scientific and humanistic approaches).
While I have never thought of myself as a sociologist of science, the year sparked my interest in that field. Being at the Center is a bit like traveling in a foreign country –at least in so far as it broadens your views, introduces appreciation of cultural relativism and permits standing outside of one’s taken for granted world. Time at the Center offered an unexpected bonus in the chance to do field work. I did not start with a plan to study my colleagues, but as time went on that is what I did. I became as, or more, interested in the way questions were framed and in tacit assumptions and conceptual and methodological inclusions and exclusions as in substantive answers.
These concerns are reflected in a talk I gave at the Center and in so many informal sessions. In that talk I asked the following questions:
–Can we reject the dogmatic observations of both Lord Devlin who advises us that a phenomena has not been properly understood until it has been numerically measured and law professor Thomas Powers who wrote that, “in the end the counters don’t think and it is the thinkers that count”, while understanding the concerns that lead to their statements?
–Can we view our generalizations as rules of thumb, not as rules of science?
–Can we get it tight, as well as right?
–Can we be wise and good, as well as smart?
–Can we pursue grants as well as truth?
–Can we establish the legitimacy of the social sciences on their own terms and as disciplines that stand midway between natural sciences and humanities, drawing from, but not being fully defined by either?
–Can we have better dialogue between the multiple strands of social science, rather than dealing with tensions only by compartmentalization, isolation and tribal language?
–Can we value and study meaning and feelings as well as overt behavior, reasons as well as causes, subjective experience understood empathetically and more easily quantifiable, seemingly objective factors? Can we note the similarities as well as the differences between colliding billiard balls and colliding hockey players?
–Can we effectively balance and integrate description, classification, measurement, explanation and prescription-proscription?
–Can we understand where the seed comes from, what makes the soil fertile, why it grows and what sustains it and that different answers may apply?
–Can we create an environment where a focus upon content, substance, process, and social problems is valued rather than focusing only, or unduly, upon structures, forms, boundaries and methodological or theoretical purity? Can the latter get their due without descending into intellectual anarchy, flabbiness and an empirically and morally unsupportable relativism?
–Can we have the good sense to know when to collect new data and when to draw on the vast amount of secondary data?
Can we find a middle ground between being independent an uncontaminated basic scientists and scholars setting our own agendas and following our own muses and pursuing knowledge as an end in itself with little concern with whether, how and when and where it will be used, as against being hired guns seeking normatively based solutions to applied problems with methods determined by others?
–Can we take the devil’s money to do the Lord’s work?
–Can we disapprove the quip that social science is to public policy what a lamp post is to a drunk, something that offers support rather than illumination?
–Can we learn from journalists and marketers without becoming them? Can we write in such a fashion that our work is well received by both the educated public and our peers?
–Can we be aware of social definitions and measurement choices while struggling to keep questions of fact separate from those of value, even as they may overlap?
I later incorporated some of these into 37 moral mandates for aspiring social scientists: http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/37moral.html
To the extent that the Center can continue to engage these questions, the future of the republic may not be assured, but the Center will be fulfilling its mission.
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*My reflections on the more personal side of a career are in articles such as From Conservative and Optimistic to Reactionary, Counter-Revolutionary and Pessimistic: Sociology and Society in the 1960s http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/conoptreactcounter.html and In Gratitude: The Right Chemistry, Timing, Place and Organization http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/sssp.html and in the articles in the next to the last section of www.garymarx.net on Academic Careers.
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