And the wisdom to know the difference? Freedom, control and the sociology of religion - 2002 Presidential Address

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 2003 by Eileen Barker

But as we move from the apparently immutable laws of physics, into chemistry, biology and then the human sciences, we enter areas of ever-increasing complexity and modifiability. As further levels of organization evolve, new properties emerge--by which I mean new constraints and new potentialities; new controls and new freedoms. Returning to my earlier metaphor, as we move within the ever-increasing complexities of social life, each level of organization forms yet another range of mountains, which, although in some ways more negotiable than the previous range, has, nevertheless, still the ability to restrict our potential actions in ways they would not otherwise have been restricted. Thus, there is nothing in the laws of physics that would prevent our driving on the "wrong" side of the road, or strangling our children, yet most of us are prevented by moral codes or the law of the land from performing such actions. But these are different kinds of restraint from the pull of gravity--and some people do drive on the wrong side of the road, and some people do strangle their children.

It is insofar as people participate in and share a socially constructed reality that we can detect regularities in the social sciences (Berger and Luckmann 1967). (10) Social life itself would not be possible if there were not some tacit agreements about what the world is like; and how things ought to be done. These more or less shared perceptions of how things are and how they ought to be give rise to regularities in our behaviour, and allow us to predict how others will behave--but only up to a point, and usually as a statistical probability rather than the absolute, universal, all-time, all-places certainty that is, to most intents and purposes, the case with the natural sciences. In other words, the precise nature of the reality we construct, share, negotiate and change differs (to a greater or lesser degree) from time to time, from individual to individual, from group to group, from society to society--and from religion to religion. And this means that opportunities for freedom of individual choice differ from situation to situation.

Just as we could use our knowledge of the laws of nature to vary their operation, there is a potential for manipulation of social life through an understanding of how society operates. But there is also a difference. Not only can we use our knowledge of "social laws"--or, more warily, regular relationships between variables--to control outcomes, we can also change the regularities themselves so that they no longer pertain. This is partly because the regularities that occur in social life are, obviously enough, dependent for their existence upon our existence. When talking about social regularities, as opposed to the laws of physics, we might be wise to move from the ontological statement: "if X changes in a particular way, then Y will change in a particular way" to the more cautious epistemological statement: "if X changes in a particular way, then Y is likely to change in a more or less predictable way." We can be confident that water boiled at 100 degrees centigrade under conditions of normal pressure in Jerusalem in the fifth century CE, just as it did in nineteenth century Chicago. It is likely that the price offish increased when the supply fell in both societies, but a number of other variables might have intervened: a dramatic fall in demand might have been due to the discovery that the local fish were poisoned, or to the introduction of a religious doctrine that believers should adopt a vegetarian diet. Such factors affecting demand would make the correlation between price and supply far more unstable and subject to the ceteris paribus clause. It is because social reality is an on-going process of construction, mediated through individuals with different experiences, perceptions, and interests, that it is relative to time and place--and new "knowledge" can lead to changes in regularities, which can both enhance and diminish the freedom of both individuals and groups (Popper 1961:vi).