SAVING SOCIETY
Advancing the Sociological Imagination
A Series from Paradigm Publishers
Edited by Bernard Phillips and J. David Knottnerus
Goffman Unbound! A New Paradigm for Social Science
By Thomas J. Scheff (2006)
The Invisible Crisis of Contemporary Society: Reconstructing Sociologys Fundamental Assumptions
By Bernard Phillips and Louis C. Johnston (2007)
Understanding Terrorism: Building on the Sociological Imagination
Edited by Bernard Phillips (2007)
Postmodern Cowboy: C. Wright Mills and a New 21st-century Sociology
By Keith Kerr (2008)
Struggles before Brown: Early Civil Rights Protests and Their Significance Today
By Jean Van Delinder (2008)
The Treadmill of Production: Injustice and Unsustainability in the Global Economy
By Kenneth A. Gould, David N. Pellow, and Allan Schnaiberg (2008)
Armageddon or Evolution? The Scientific Method and Escalating World Problems
By Bernard Phillips (2009)
Bureaucratic Culture and Escalating World Problems: Advancing the Sociological Imagination
Edited by J. David Knottnerus and Bernard Phillips (2009)
Ritual as a Missing Link: Structural Ritualization Theory, Sociology, and Research
By J. David Knottnerus (2011)
Saving Society: Breaking Out of Our Bureaucratic Way of Life
By Bernard Phillips and David Christner (2011)
Elder Care Catastrophe: Rituals of Abuse in Nursing Homes and What You Can Do About It
By Jason S. Uslperger and J. David Knottnerus
First published 2011 by Paradigm Publishers
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Phillips, Bernard S.
Saving society: breaking out of our bureaucratic way of life / Bernard Phillips and David Christner.
p. cm. (Advancing the sociological imagination)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59451-776-1 (hbk.: alk. paper)
1. Bureaucracy. 2. Organizational sociology. 3. Social
problems. I. Christner, David. II. Title.
HM806.P55 2010
302.35dc22
2009026875
Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.
ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-776-1 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-777-8 (pbk)
SAVING SOCIETY, WHICH BUILDS ON THE IDEAS within six books published since 2000, needs a short introduction to help the reader understand its significance. For it makes use of what we see as a fundamental breakthrough in the social sciencessociology, psychology, anthropology, history, political science, and economicsto yield, in our view, an integrated understanding of modern problems and directions for solutions. This preface consists of two parts: an introductory section that puts forward the vision of the breakthrough promised by the book and an outline of the books basic procedures for moving toward that vision, with both sections making references to specific material within Saving Society.
A Vision: If You Dont Have a Dream, How You Gonna Have a Dream Come True?
The Evolutionary Manifesto
An old proverb claims, Where there is no vision, the people perish. More recently we have Happy Talk from the musical South Pacific, revived on Broadway in 2008 and shown on PBS in 2010: If you dont have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true? It was President Obamas message of hopewith the idea that we can indeed solve our problemsthat was much of the basis for his victories in the primaries and in the election of 2008. We illustrated this optimistic view of human possibilities on the website of the Sociological Imagination Group, www.srocirological-imagination.org, a group that we founded in 2000 with the help of others. Just as Martin Luther King had a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood, we too have a dream, a dream that:
there will be a future for our children, our grandchildren, our greatgrandchildren, and their great-grandchildren;
one day we will all learn to see ourselves as children who are only just beginning to understand ourselves and our world, and we will also learn to dream about our infinite possibilities and move toward those visions one step at a time;
one day we will all learn to pay close attention to the accomplishments of all peoples throughout history as well as to our own personal accomplishments, and we will also learn to pay close attention to the failures of the human race and to our own personal failures;
one day we will be able to bring to the surface and reduce our stratified emotions like fear, shame, guilt, hate, envy, and greed, and we will learn to express ever more our evolutionary emotions like confidence, enthusiasm, happiness, joy, love, and empathy;
one day we will see peace on earth and fellowship among all humans;
one day we will no longer look down on any other human being;
one day we all will learn to be poets, philosophers and scientists.
It was Fred Polak, a Dutch sociologist, who saw ones image of the future as potentially the most powerful force for actually creating the future, as he wrote in his The Image of the Future. Saving Society ends with a quote from Polaks book in which he views images of the future as essential in order to release the Western world from its too-long imprisonment in the present. We see that imprisonment as most dangerous, given our conviction that problems are increasing throughout the world. The above evolutionary manifesto might well appear to point toward a utopian book. Yet deep immersion within the discipline of sociology has taught the senior author that realism is essential to achieve any fundamental change in society.
Realistic Optimism: The Sociological Imagination
Along with Polak, we are not just interested in dreaming: we are equally interested in fulfilling our dreams. That is what Saving Society is about: both the dream and the fulfillment of the dream. The dream gives us the potential that its fulfillment is in fact possible, and our resulting confidence in that possibility helps us to face up to the forces that are working against the dream. In that way we become realistic as well as optimistic. It is when we combine our optimism with such realism that we can emerge with what we might call realistic optimism or realistic idealism. Indeed, the entire history of Western philosophy is a history of idealistic philosophies as well as realistic philosophies, although never do the twain meet.
