One of the unfortunate consequences of the Jason Arday debacle is that it has thrown the entire discipline of sociology into disrepute. In the minds of many, his shoddy scholarship, lazy methods and recourse to obfuscating jargon are not an aberration, but reflect the dubious standing of a social science which has always had unjust pretensions to an actual science.
Sociology is not alone in having succumbed to gobbledygook and hard-left propagandising
There’s been a chorus this week of those repeating this familiar accusation on social media. ‘I have yet to be convinced that sociology is an academic discipline at all never mind that it is important. It seems to be just a vehicle for advancing left-wing policies with a veneer of academic respectability.’ That’s a typical example. In Unherd, we have Richard Dawkins adding his voice to this chorus. He observes of this disgraced Professor of Sociology and Education that ‘the gobbledygook of his writing style’ was to be expected, because ‘practitioners of a subject that any fool can understand may suffer from what has been called “physics-envy”.’
While the soft science of sociology has often been regarded with condescension or scorn by practitioners of the hard variety, what its latest critics fail to acknowledge is that sociology is not alone in having succumbed to gobbledygook and hard-left propagandising. All the humanities, including and especially and English and History, haven been infected by outlandish and invasive theories related race and gender. And as Dawkins knows well, not least because he has fought against it himself in New Zealand, biology has also been compromised, by those who would teach Maori creation myths alongside ‘Eurocentric’ science in schools. Even maths is being ‘decolonised’ across universities. No-one’s suggesting now that mathematics is inherently worthless.
