Too stressed out, or bored. Too aggressive, or too afraid to stand up for yourself. Too unfocused, or overly fixated on one tiny detail. Too unorganized, or too inflexible to deal with change. Racing around to please everyone, or withdrawing into the self, unwilling to risk trusting another. I’ve been all these at times, and still am to degrees; I doubt I’m alone, though it’s not something I’m proud of. Around the New Year is often a time to reflect on such things. I am thinking about how to address these things constructively via ancient Greek philosophy, particularly Plato.

An introduction to my SOC 3001 Statistics course, Spring 2022. More writings on statistics to come.

I do not believe. That is a complete sentence. I am not a nihilist. In fact, no one is a nihilist because nihilism doesn’t make sense—to attack, or defend, a viewpoint, you have to have standards of truth (what is), morality (what ought to be), or both—the very things nihilism is defined by rejecting. What I mean is that as soon as I discover a new idea inspires or fascinates me, I set to work trying to figure out how it might be incomplete or wrong.

This isn’t an attempt to solve a problem: the problem I raise is moral, not technical, and therefore cannot be solved by technical means. This also isn’t an attempt to create another evil “they” to shift blame for my own missteps and incompetence onto, be it soci@l med!a or other manipulations of public opinion; I see the moralistic hypocrisy of that, and I reject the idea that we human beings, you and I, are just pawns or unwitting dupes. This is a “me and it” problem, not an “us and them” problem, if you like; if I am right, then I am a sucker, as much as any and more than some, and some time away to clear my head should make that evident. I can’t singlehandedly change the game, but I can leave it for a while.

It wasn’t until very recently, when I got around to taking assessments like the one that got me the results below, that the other pieces seemed to fit together. Survey self-reporting, as I well know, is not perfect, and I am not an expert in psychology or mental health, so I take the results with a grain of salt. Multiple tests have put me on the autism spectrum. My own biases and ignorance may be misleading me, and so my next step will be finding people who know more than I do about this, and whom I can trust to help figure things out. I didn’t even consider this possibility, so I never bothered to take the assessments until now. But the other results led to new questions, and somehow knowing this makes a lot of other things make more sense, too.

People, especially we denizens of western civilization, are often linear critters. Things had a beginning and will have an end. Life is a journey from birth to death to whatever comes after that (I don’t pretend to know). We mark off lives in time relative to predictable expectations and norms and “acting our age.” I am entering what is called “middle age,” bringing with it the expectation that my life is halfway between its beginning and its end, as well as expectations about what I should or shouldn’t do. This linear story often has “high points” and “low points,” an expectation of “glory days” and “good times” (usually in the younger years) and a long, steady decline full of anxiety, nostalgia, and reaction beginning around 40. Is this why middle-aged people so often start thinking the world is coming to an end?

I am going to start with an unfashionable idea: there is such a thing as truth, and over time, people who are willing to put in the time, effort, and hard work can get closer to it. I don’t care if anyone agrees with me, because if I am right, then the practical consequences of seeking truth (or not) will happen sooner or later regardless. I’m much more interested in why this idea has become unfashionable.

I don’t teach people to make the world into what I would want it to be. My job, as I see it, is to draw some general conclusions about what social movements are, and how social change works, by looking at how others have done it, how they are trying to do it now, and what can be learned from their successes and failures. Some of the things I have learned from this point of view are not just or moral or uplifting. Many are uncomfortable, amoral, and cynical…

Anthropologists tell us: people gossip. They spread rumors. It’s really common, in some form or another, across place and time. That isn’t a good thing or bad thing in itself; people are storytelling critters, and social critters, and it’s a way to make sense of the world we live in and find out things about each other…

When I’m having trouble making sense of things, I re-read William James’ (1842-1910) essay The Will to Believe. James was a U.S. psychologist and philosopher who wrote and spoke on topics from psychedelics to suicide to the scientific method. The Will to Believe is about religion, directed by James, a Christian, at an increasingly secular and agnostic Ivy League culture. To be clear, I’m not promoting or criticizing Christianity here; I’m sharing thoughts on James’ work because it offers me comfort in making tough decisions.

In the fall of 2020, I finally got the chance to teach a course on Religion and Politics from a sociological perspective. Here’s a bit about how and why. Edited and updated.

I’ve never heard a child say, “I want to be a sociologist when I grow up” in the same sense that children want to be firefighters, doctors, professional athletes, or celebrities. And when I explain to family or old friends from my own blue-collar upbringing in Arlington, Texas that I study sociology, they’re often puzzled. “A degree in sociology? What are you going to do with that?” This is a brief response, a personal take on what sociologists do, and what sociology can offer.