By Stanley K. Ridgley, Ph.D.
“Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! . . . Moloch the incomprehensible prison!” – Allen Ginsberg, Howl
Much of what is considered bleeding edge theory in sociology today consists of articles propounding theories that cannot be falsified, that are grounded in confirmation bias, that are crafted in a strange and inaccessible argot, and that appeal to pathos in the creation of a Moloch upon which to hang blame for the world’s ills. Any one of these contentions about modern sociological writing could and probably should be the subject of expanded study – taken together, they constitute a tendency in sociology toward a New Metaphysics. This tendency represents a profound change in the modern zeitgeist – a reversal, in fact.
We are experiencing a reversal of the ascendancy of science and scientific thinking and a resurgence of medievalist magical thinking about society – how we live, how we exchange with each other, how we are governed. This essay ranges far in this regard and charts a course for further exploration. It examines the rise of the New Metaphysics and its primary means of communicating its ideas. It draws parallels between today’s new meta-physicians and those schoolmen of the middle ages, whose embrace of magic thinking was so complete that its straitened medieval orthodoxy not only hindered scientific, economic, and commercial progress, but also often punished such progress as heretical. Finally, this essay suggests that in its embrace of its own truth and with its “praxis-oriented” posture, the New Metaphysics poses a growing threat to the scholarly traditions of the university and itself constitutes a barbarous pseudo-science that begs unmasking.
Introduction
When we attempt to make sense out of a welter of facts, we bring order to chaos at risk of criticism, for critics breed freely wherever there are those who create, who offer uncomfortable explanations, who generalize about tendencies. This paper examines one of those tendencies – the coalescing of a New Metaphysics and its expression in the social sciences, primarily in sociology.
This New Metaphysics is characterized by theories that are non-falsifiable, theories that are constructed almost entirely of confirmation bias, theories that are unnecessarily inaccessible by virtue of an idiosyncratic argot adopted for obscurantist purposes rather than clarity, and the return of magic thinking in the form of a Moloch responsible for evil and which must be vanquished.
This essay forays as a first attempt to trace the outlines of this New Metaphysics and to disaggregate its approach, so to understand its durability, its persistence, and the continued attraction of its ethos for those who practice it. Here I draw parallels between today’s New Metaphysicians and those schoolmen of the middle ages, whose embrace of magic thinking was so complete that its straitened medieval orthodoxy not only hindered scientific, economic, and commercial advance, it punished it as heretical.
This paper calls attention to the general spirit and direction of academia; here, with regard to academia, I speak generally about the humanities and social sciences and the direction of Western academia, broadly conceived.
By “direction,” I mean the general thrust of questions discussed, the research interests of its chief practitioners in its leading departments, the articles appearing in their leading journals. In Bourdieusian terms, this would constitute the portion of the field of permissible discourse. I offer the notion that this current “new” direction is toward nothing new, fresh, different, or progressive; it marks, instead, a regression from the principles of the Renaissance and Enlightenment and a return to the darkness of metaphysics, mystification, and magical thinking of the middle ages.
The task, here, is to identify the tendencies and assay their content, which could reveal a mechanism at work in the social sciences that begs description and analysis. In this essay, I first discuss the general state of sociology, juxtaposing it with traditional sociology as it was largely practiced before, roughly, 1960. I then review the four key debilitating factors that comprise New Metaphysics theory-building in sociology and why, in toto, they constitute a barbarous pseudo-science.