Review: Thinking the Unthinkable: The Riddles of Classical Social Theories
Review: Thinking the Unthinkable: The Riddles of Classical Social Theories by Charles Lemert


Finding the answer to the riddles
-Sharif Islam.

Prominent social theorist Charles Lemert in his recent book Thinking the Unthinkable: The Riddles of Classical Social Theories brings forth the puzzles and riddles associated with understanding social experiences. Like his troubled dorm roommate Kevin, who leaped at him in the dark and beat him on the head, social theory according to Lemert can be “leaping out at us from the dark, beating us on the head, forcing us to think thoughts we had never before imagined possible” (p. xii ).

He begins the book in an unusual and provocative way by talking about carnivals and the "Bead Lust” of Mardi Gras. In this case the puzzle for him is the madness involved in such celebrations. He defines such crazy-times as "inherent wildness at the heart of human societies" . He wonders how such events can coincide with the “soul of modern culture". Then he proceeds to compare this "seemingly ... minor occurrence" to events in East and South Asia:

In places like East and South Asia, which have been exposed for centuries to more paradoxical values passed down by Buddhists and Confucians, the idea that human life is not reasonable is much more common. But in the West, the presence of crazy-times and other forms of organized madness are [sic] an unexamined cultural predicament. If nothing else, the quandary is in the extremes to which proponents of the superiority of Western culture will go to avoid and deny the evidence that they too are human, hence unreasonable (p. 9).

He mentions the Eastern way again at the end of the book (p. 177) without substantiating his claims other than implying that the non-rational Eastern wisdom might have the answer to the riddles. I will focus on this particular issue at the end of the review.

What does social theory have to do with crazy madness? Lemert uses the example of carnivals in an attempt to point out the impossibility (or, the limits) of reason and the hidden unreasonableness of modern civilization. By masterfully synthesizing various classical social theories and focusing on the origins of such theories, he claims,

Social theory is, among other things, the art of tolerating the constant motion of social things that makes them all the more puzzling. If, for the time being, we accept this as the defining quality of social theories, then it is possible to distinguish a social theory from some other kind of theory and to see why social theory as we know it today began when it did.(p. 19)

By way of Marx and Foucault he is interested in specific kinds of riddle and violence, which he compares with madness in the carnival:

Violence is the unavoidable consequence of modern progress – always there, just below the surface of social things. Yet, unlike the carnival celebrations, modern violence is global and can break into the open at any moment. Violence of this kind is a plague of human craziness without limit or purpose. The better-organized crazy-times like Mardi Gras or Halloween are limited to well-defined times and places. Organized excess leaves the street filthy but the social order cleansed. The release of irrational impulses serves the common good by preparing locals for a return to the tiresome constraint of the normal. Irrational lust supports bland reasonableness. But the lust of an entire civilization for senseless violence in the guise of good intentions supports little and destroys much. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Marx used this old saying to defy the dishonesty of modern culture, which tried to steal itself from its own foolishness. At the best social theory defies the silence.(32)

Lemert emphasizes that such analyzing makes social theory the "dark twin of modern cheer" (p. 32). Social theory prepares us to think the unthinkable by making the dark thoughts of human society–-the riddles and puzzles---its driving force. Lemert organizes some of these riddles into five categories and uses the related classical theorists to answer them:

1)"Why has modern revolution not led to a better life for the masses?" (p. 35) Marx.
2)"Why is it that modernity’s rational rules of social progress resulted in an unreasonable double-bind?" (p. 36) Weber.
3)"How, in the absence of a powerful political order, can industrial society overcome the epidemic of social conflict?" (p. 36) Durkheim.
4)"What if rationally conscious thought is unable to account for the unreasonable unconscious depths of social thinking?" (p. 36) Freud.
5)"What is to be done about those who are said to possess few of the natural gifts required of modern man?" (p. 36) Charlotte Parkins Gilman.

He also brings in W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, George Simmel, and Ferdinand de Saussure. The reason for including these “so-called lesser classic theorists” is to point out that the giants (and giant-ess?) of social theory looked at the unthinkable from many sides yet there were unresolved puzzles -- "thus leaving room for the many others even in their time who refined and reformed what they had discovered" (p. 123).

That "modern reason was anything but reasonable" (p. 99) is not a novel thought. Critical theorists and post-modernists have chewed and digested this notion to the fullest. However, Lemert’s brilliance is in using the classical theorists to point out that there’s nothing postmodern about these riddles. Using theorists like Marx, Weber and Durkheim, Lemert showed that we can attempt to examine "modernity’s unthinkables", even though "[e]ach had a logic that drew heavily on the rational and reasonable in modernity itself; yet, each also came up with an important variant in the scheme of theoretically possible solutions" (p 98). They could not come up with all the solutions. Similarly later generations also stumbled upon the riddles and found themselves in the dark.

Throughout the book Lemert’s remarkable insight on classical theorists is evident, specially while he is connecting and juxtaposing different theorists. He is well known for his lucid style. The following short excerpt regarding Marx and Weber exemplifies this skill:

Between him and Marx, however, you have two sides of the riddle. Marx's social theory was vastly more comprehensive, critical, and definitive; yet his politics were almost naïve in their belief that revolutionary reason in the hands of the proletariat can free men from their chains. Weber's social theory is vastly more complicated, circumspect, and historically subtle; but his moral politics left no room for human freedom that could find a way out of the iron cage (p. 76).

Despite all this brilliance, his very last concluding paragraph was rather disappointing and confusing. Yes, in the grand scheme, these are just some last few thoughts, but their positioning at the very end of the book creates the impression that he reached these thoughts after expounding on all his previous arguments in the book. In the last few pages he acknowledges the limits of social theory while remaining optimistic that it can unfold to address the riddles of our times: "Social theories are, thereby, a continual rethinking of previous attempts to come to terms with the worlds gone by. As the new realities present themselves, social theorists must start with what they have, thus to rework the riddles and fine-tune the solutions. The unfolding of social theory in the twentieth century was, thus, a rethinking of the Unthinking that came more and more into evidence as the century itself unravelled the many layers of wrapping in which the nastier truths were mummified" (p. 167). After delineating the place of social theory in the course of the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism, at the end of book, right after pointing out that "The modern" was always a product of the West, Lemert, somewhat haphazardly, concludes that we should look towards the East for hope:

It is possible if there is something to be hoped for, that the hope will be found in the East. In East and South Asia today one sees many of the corruptions that have ruined so much of the West – greed that abuses the rural impoverished, inequalities so stark as to rock the bosom of any feeling mother; destruction of the ancient for the unproven modern. Still, one also finds in the East a persistent struggle to recover the ancient wisdom of its common pasts – of, that is, the Buddhist, Confucian, and the Taoist cultures, among others, that are still alive after so many centuries. (p. 177)

Eastern vs. Western, Rational vs. Irrational: such dichotomous thinking is almost becoming a cliché in academic writing. Either his arguments here and in the context of madness at the beginning of the book need more supporting evidence, or he is using a simplified version of spiritual East. His hope in the East thus seems to be, at best, based on some exotic new age-type spirituality.

To his defense, he does not oversimplify across the board. Rather, he carefully points out that "there are considerable differences among [Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist cultures]" (p. 177). However, he does not acknowledge the notion of multiple modernities or possibility of multiple rationalities. He does not provide any evidence of the persistent struggle to recover ancient wisdom in the East. Also, he never mentions the ancient wisdom of Hinduism which is much older than those of Buddhism and Confucianism. Especially the school of Advaita Vedanta that "shares a commitment to highly rigorous analysis of the content and meaning of human experience in very similar (or at least compatible) philosophical categories" (Baeur, 1987: 36). Similarly Confucianism can be thought of as a Chinese model of rational thought with implications of socio-economic and political development. On the other hand, while talking about the East, Lemert never mentions about Islamic traditions. For instance, the Mu'tazilite, a specific philosophical school within Islam that was partly influenced by Greek thought, talked about man as a rational agent long before the Enlightenment thinkers.

While it is true that these traditions are rooted in revelations and scriptures, when he acknowledges that "most of the ancient-wisdom traditions of the East differ from the modern European thinking by, precisely, grasping the Unthinkable as the foremost truth of the human condition" (p. 177), his point of departure is rationality and modernity. His injunction that we should look towards the East, based on the claim that "one thing those cultures have in common is a steady refusal to let reason rule the mind," only glorifies the one-dimensional view of Rational West vs Spiritual East. He is assuming that due to certain non-rationalistic aspects of Eastern thought, the East was overall not ruled by reason. On the other hand, the West was ruled by reason by allowing reason to engender the "unreasonable nature" of reason within itself. Is that another riddle? Perhaps he is alluding to the possibility that the next phase in understanding these riddles is to combine Western Social Theory with Eastern ancient wisdom, combine non-rational ancient wisdom with unreasonable reason. Only time can confirm this prediction.
References:
Bauer, N. (1987), Advaita Vedānta and Contemporary Western Ethics, Philosophy East and West. Vol 37, No 1, 36-50





This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.