Peter L. Berger - Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore

Published 2011 by Prometheus Books

Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World without Becoming a Bore. Copyright 2011 by Peter L. Berger. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, elec-tronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Berger, Peter L., 1929

Adventures of an accidental sociologist : how to explain the world without becoming a bore / by Peter L. Berger.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-61614-389-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-61614-390-9 (e-book)

1. Berger, Peter L., 1929- 2. SociologistsUnited StatesBiography. 3. Sociology. I. Title.

HM479.B47A3 2011
301.092dc22
[B] 2011004919

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

PREFATORY NOTE

I n the summer of 2009 I was invited to give a public lecture at the Central European University in Budapest. When asked what they wanted me to lecture on, they said that this was completely up to me. I hate that. I'm not a missionary, and I don't have a sermon to be preached in Budapest. They then said that they found useful a format they called ego-histoire. Did they mean autobiography? No, they meant an account of the lecturer's intellectual careerthe issues he had dealt with, the people and adventures he had encountered on the way. I thought that would be fun. Not only did I have fun giving the lecture, but appar-ently the audience had fun listening to it. Back home, I went to work on a book. Here it is.

The same summer, just before traveling to Budapest, I had a conver-sation in Vienna with the daughter of a friend of mine. She had just started studying sociology at the university, and she was disappointed. She had read my old book Invitation to Sociology and had expected an exciting intellectual experience. Instead, she was very bored. I don't know what kind of sociology is being taught at the University of Vienna these days (when I am back in my hometown, I have more interesting things to do than inspect the state of Austrian sociology). But if the curriculum there is similar to what is mostly taught elsewhere in Europe or in America, I'm not surprised that this very bright young woman was bored. There are very few jokes about sociology. One of those few is directly relevant here : A patient is told by his doctor that in all likeli-hood he has only a year to live. After absorbing this awful news, the patient asks what the doctor would recommend.

Marry a sociologist and move to North Dakota.

Will this cure me?

No, but the year will seem much longer.

In recent decades sociology has been suffering from two diseasesmethodological fetishism, only studying phenomena that lend them-selves to quantitative methods, and ideological propaganda, repeating the same old mantras (sometimes with an enriched vocabulary). Both diseases produce deepening boredom. There is nothing wrong with quantitative methods in themselves, and they can be useful, but because of the interests of those willing to fund the expensive budgets of survey research, the result is often increasingly sophisticated methods to explore increasingly trivial topics. As to the ideological mantras, they may have been exciting thirty years ago, but today they are prone to pro-voke yawns. Of course there are exceptions. Some sociologists produce interesting and important work. I think it is fair to say that they are a minority.

I told the young woman in Vienna that sociology need not be boring. If she continues in this field, it will be up to her to do things that are not boring. Especially after an academic has achieved a tenured posi-tion, she can do pretty much what she likes. There are lots of niches even in universities run by petty bureaucrats, the pay is usually adequate at that level, and (perhaps most important) there are all those long sum-mers. There are also jobs for sociologists outside academia. Sociology, unlike most other social sciences (except anthropology), allows its prac-titioners to deal with a very broad array of topics. As I found it to be, it is well suited for someone who has an abiding fascination with the vast panorama of the human world, someone who has a passion for discov-ering what is really going onsomeone who, if necessary, will look through keyholes and read other people's mail.

During my days as a graduate student, I once committed the latter offense. My then girlfriend shared an apartment with another young woman, a law student. This individual was rather sloppy and left her things lying around all over the apartment. One day, while I was sitting in the bathroom, I came across a letter of hers to her boyfriend. I read it with mounting fascination. It was about four pages long, in single-spaced typescript. Almost all of it was a psychological dissection of their past weekend together with each incident explained in basically Freudian terms what he said, what he really meant to say, how the weekend's events related to his underlying neuroses, how his mother entered the picture, what all this was doing to the letter writer, and so on and on. I stole the letter. I found it to be a priceless cultural document that had to be preserved for posterity (somewhere along the line, I'm sorry to say, it got lost).

A final acknowledgment: I want to express my appreciation to Laura Gross, my agent. She has been greatly supportive throughout, and she has been so with an unusual combination of intelligence and personal warmth.

BALZAC ON TWELFTH STREET

M y intellectual career was launched by a mistake. I came to America with my parents, who settled in New York. I was barely eighteen years old, inspired by religious fervor (which, happily, I soon lost in that distinctive American immigrant experience that John Murray Cuddihy called the ordeal of civility). I wanted to become a Lutheran minister. Perhaps I already had doubts about this vocational intention. In any case, I got the idea of postponing the beginning of my theological education in order to learn more about the American society in which I was to work. I had only the vaguest notion about sociology, but it seemed to be the right discipline to find out about a society.

I had no money; neither did my parents. I had to work full-time to support myself and to come up with tuition. To my knowledge, the New School for Social Research was the only academic institution in the city where one could do all one's graduate work in the evening. Thus I enrolled there in a master's program in sociology. Of course I had no idea how marginal the New School was on the American social science scene.

There is rather cruel Jewish joke: A man goes into a kosher restaurant in New York. To his surprise he is served by a Chinese waiter, who speaks to him in elegant Lithuanian Yiddish. Upon leaving, he spots the owner of the restaurant.