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Basic Concepts In Sociology

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I sympathize with Max Weber, who some considered the greatest scientist of his particular time and place. Those who consider themselves part of an elite intellectual effort to understand our situation ought to have some familiarity with the ideas in BASIC CONCEPTS IN SOCIOLOGY, in which Max Weber attempts to define how science defines an ideal type for particular forms of behavior and then considers other factors which make life much more fluid than any single concept could encompass. What seems strange to me a century later, was how often he could summon up enough optimism to make statements like:

"Only the final result of the conflict provides us with a solid basis for judgment. The verification of interpretation by results, i.e., the decisiveness of the actual course of events, is, as is true of all hypotheses, indispensible. Unfortunately, such verifiable interpretations can be obtained with relative accuracy only in a very few and special cases of the kind suitable for psychological experimentation; or, aiming at a different degree of approximation, through statistically quantifiable data of mass phenomena. For the rest, there remains only the possibility of comparing a maximum number of historical processes or routine phenomena of everyday experience and of similar appearance but differing substantially regarding the motivational factor under investigation. This is the fundamental task of comparative sociology. Unfortunately, there often remains only the uncertain instrument of purely hypothetical experiments, which ignores certain elements in the chain of motivation and leads instead to the construction of a merely probable course of events that might lend itself to causal attribution." (pp. 37-38).

This hardly applies to anything in a thoroughly comic society, where the only information that reaches people is determined entirely by its ability to keep people entertained or glued to their source of information as the only reliable indicator of what is likely to happen next, come hell or high water. An ancient Greek play called `Clouds' pictured Socrates telling someone that the art of persuasion is most effective for those who believe heaven is a stove and men are charcoals. Now that we have thousands of years of accumulated observations which allow us to do the hot stove thing ourselves technologically, any consciousness of heaven is merely an individual or group hypothesis that gets group verification only when death wish activities manage to get into the papers or electronic media. Reality is such a strange trip, it might involve a missle flying through the TWA 800 747 near Long Island, New York, in July, 1996, or the FBI lying about who called down fire from heaven on Mt. Carmel near Waco, Texas, on April 19, 1993, because the existence of the actual perpetrators was classified.