A Sociologist's Consciousness at Drynachan

Prof Eileen Barker

'Meaning and Ethics in the Philosophy and Sociology of Religion' was the title that I was asked to address as my contribution to the Drynachan Lodge meeting on Science, Reality and Transcendent Experience. This was nothing if not ambitious. Matters did not get any easier when Peter Fenwick confided that the real purpose of the weekend was (1) to discover the nature of the universe and (2) to explore the science of consciousness. I decided to leave the unravelling of the nature of the universe to the others, but that I would take up the gauntlet of the science of consciousness from a sociological perspective.

It is possible to argue, I argued, that one has to be a sociologist to understand the science of consciousness. Having made so bold a claim, one should, of course, immediately step back a bit. I would not claim that it is sufficient to include a sociological perspective, but I do believe it is necessary. Concurrently, a sociologist would assume that, while understanding of the brain (its physical structure and chemical functioning) is undoubtedly necessary for understanding consciousness, it certainly is not sufficient. I am not suggesting that one has to earn one's living as a sociologist, but rather that one has to ask some of the questions that sociologists ask, and that, perhaps, it helps to draw on some of the concepts upon which sociologists have drawn, if we want to explore human consciousness.

The Consciousness of Consciousness

Furthermore, I would take it that the human consciousness in which we are interested is not merely the awareness of the immediate environment (as one finds, to a greater or lesser degree, in all living things) that gives rise to more or less automatic responses to internal and external stimuli. I assume that it involves a consciousness of consciousness - even the possibility of an indefinite spiral of consciousnesses of consciousness of consciousness. That is, the capacity to use abstract symbols and to reflect - to draw on memories from the past in order to imagine possible futures and, in the present, with these capacities, to choose what to do. It is, moreover, assumed that these skills are not manifest at birth. Human beings are born with the potential to develop into animals with a consciousness of their consciousness, but infants do not develop into recognisable human beings without the experience of interacting not only with their natural environment, but also (and just as importantly) with their social environment.

The social environment is, almost by definition, established through interactions that result in the emergence of more or less regular patterns of behaviour ('social structures'). These in turn give rise to expectations of what are generally deemed to be appropriate actions in any given situation. At the same time, there emerge 'social cultures' - the range of understandings (more or less taken for granted systems of knowledge) about what the world is like and how it does (and ought to) operate. The structure and culture together comprise the society or, more generally, the 'social reality' that confronts all human beings, and that social scientists have as the object of their study.

The Nature of Social Reality and Consciousness

The fact that social science will never be able to predict with the degree of certainty that the natural scientist enjoys is related not merely to methodological and epistemological problems of complexity (although these certainly exist), but also, and more fundamentally, to the ontological nature of social reality, which is a veritable cornucopia of apparent paradoxes.

First, the social scientist has to be both an idealist and a realist about the nature of society. On the one hand, social reality is dependent upon individuals for its existence. If it is not recognised by anyone, it does not exist and in, acknowledging this, the social scientist has to be an idealist on the subject. On the other hand, the existence of social reality is independent of any one individual. Social reality is real in that no individual can ignore it any more than he or she can ignore a brick wall. It has to be taken it into account. We might accept it unthinkingly, we might enthusiastically endorse it; or we may attempt to change it, but, one way or another, we have to deal with it. Social reality has, moreover, emergent properties that (a) enable us to think and do some things we could not otherwise think or do, and (b) constrain us from thinking and doing other things that we might otherwise have thought or done.

Secondly, and relatedly, social reality is both subjective and objective: no two people can ever share exactly the same perception of reality, yet social reality must always be shared to some extent - if there were no overlap, it would not be social - society would not be possible, and, it can be argued, consciousness - or at least consciousness of consciousness - would be impossible.

Next, while social reality is a reality comprised of regularities, expectations and knowledge, it is also an ongoing process. It is continually being created - and recognised by different people or the same people at different times and in different situations. The social scientist has to be constantly aware of both regularity and of change. While we can assume that water at a particular pressure will, unnegotiably, boil at the same temperature whether it is 4th century China or 20th century Scotland, the content and degree of negotiability associated with any social reality varies according to time and place. In other words, while existence of social reality gives rise to regularities that can be studied by the social scientist, the changing nature of social reality means that these regularities are not invariant laws.

If we now ask why social reality has properties and gives rises to regularities of behaviour, one answer is that individuals with consciousness and the capacity to reflect will, to a greater or lesser extent, accept their group's knowledge and comply with their fellow human beings' (and their own) expectations of how one ought to behave. But, at the same time, our capacity to be conscious of our consciousness - to reflect on what we and others believe and do - means that we can alter the regularities. That is, we can draw on our beliefs, values, opinions, fears, hopes and past experiences in order to imagine (consciously reflect on) possible futures and, as a consequence, choose what to do next.

In other words, the social scientist needs to understand not only the 'out-there' content of the social reality that confronts individuals, but also the processes by which we decide on both every-day, almost taken-for granted actions, and reach the big decisions of our lives. We need, moreover, to understand the conditions that give rise to the expansion and contraction of our capacity to choose.

The Methodology of a Social Scientific Study of Consciousness

There are those who consider 'social science' to be a contradiction in terms. Perhaps they are right - it all depends what we mean by science. As already intimated, our subject matter forbids us to look for invariant laws, but, even if we deal in probabilities rather than absolute certainties (as, indeed, does a considerable amount of 'natural science'), we can discover more or less predictable relationships between variables. Our methodology reflects much of the methodology of other sciences - the systematic and rigorous construction and empirical testing of theories and models; the use of the comparative method, employing control groups and populations selected by random sampling to diminish bias. But reliability is not enough - validity is of equal importance. We need to be able not merely to describe overt behaviour; we also need to have some understanding of the meaning that actions have for the individuals performing them.

Observing humans as though they were rats in a maze is not enough to give us the knowledge that we seek. We have to employ the methodology referred to as Verstehen - that is, we need to evoke within ourselves some kind of empathic understanding of what another conscious human being might feel in a particular situation - what kind of subjective meaning it might have for a person who has been brought up in a particular kind of environment and subjected to particular kinds of experiences in the past. This we can do only in so far as we recognise and use ourselves as conscious human beings who have ourselves been subjected to and contributed to the ongoing creation of social reality. We have to recognise that we share an objective reality that contributes to the formation of our consciousness and is translated into subjective meaning. Of course, we also have to remember that we can never put ourselves completely in the shoes of another person - everyone's experiences are their own subjective experiences and there is no way of rationally or empirically working out exactly how any particular individual will react in any given situation (we are often taken by surprise by those whom we thought we knew best - even by ourselves on occasion), but we can increase our understanding, and we can predict with considerable accuracy the probability of certain types of behaviour occurring when large numbers are involved.

The Sociology of Religious Consciousness

When we come to the sociology of religion, if we wish to go beyond the mere collection of figures of church attendance, or statistics of those who reply 'yes' to questions such as 'Do you believe in God?' (when we have little idea of just what our respondent understands by the concept of God), the social scientist needs to be religiously or spiritually musical. But, at the same time, social scientists, qua social scientists, have to be methodologically agnostic; that is, they cannot draw on God or any supernatural power as an independent variable. If someone claims to have converted because of the power of the Holy Spirit, social scientists can do no more than record the claim and the circumstances leading up to the conversion. They cannot say it was or that it was not the Holy Spirit - nor can they pronounce whether or not a particular cult is, as may be claimed by some, the work of Satan.

Does this mean that the sociological study of religion is tied to a reductionist perspective? In some ways, yes. We are limited in what we can say, but we are not excluding as much as the natural scientist. And although we cannot pronounce on the nature of the supernatural, this does not mean that we have nothing to contribute to an understanding of the ways in which human beings aspire to eff the ineffable - the language, meanings and ways by which people attempt to transcend the mundane and immanent. We can recognise some of the ways in which some social realities enable and others constrain the quest for the beyond; we can expand our intellectual, emotional and spiritual comprehension; and, albeit through a glass darkly, we might glimpse, and enable others to glimpse that which enables others to enlarge and enrich (or impoverish) their lives through beliefs and practices dedicated to or celebrating that which we cannot comprehend or grasp. We can attempt to indicate ways in which social reality, for all its relativisms, enables human beings to develop a consciousness of their consciousness which, in turn, enables them to reach beyond themselves, beyond the very society that allows them to explore and celebrate that which they find both beyond and within themselves as conscious beings.