Facing Up to Modernity

PETER L. BERGER. Facing Up to Modernity: Excursions in Society, Politics, and Religion. Pp. xix, 233. New York: Basic Books, 1977. $11.50.

Facing up to the idiosyncratic sociologist is almost as hard for a humanist as facing up to all of modernity. On the face of it, there is much that is beguiling in Berger's "majority of one." His cover photo reveals a kind of Middle European Buddha, perky cheroot clenched contentiously. His print persona is no less offbeat: He brags, shall we even say swaggers, about being an unreconstructed Hapsburg! He flaunts his conservative Lutheran theology at the least hint of a liberal cliche.

He makes it clear that these old commitments do not, in the smallest way, inhibit him in his activist contempt for American racism or in his opposition to the Vietnam War. In short, Berger obviously relishes his role as the Ancient's gadfly in a too complacently Modernist sociology. In his praxis (to use a term he perversely uses as a synonym for practice), he gives a new twist to that old line of W. H. Auden: "Thou Shalt Not Commit a Social Science."

Having granted all this (mostly) in his favor, I have concluded there are at least two Bergers in this volume. One is the witty essayist for thoughtful weeklies; I should guess an ideal dining-drinking companion. The other is the aspiring (perspiring?) Big League Thinker who, after warning his readers ("We have so far avoided formulating our perspective in systematic sociology-of-knowledge terms, so as not to offend prematurely with the proverbial barbarity of the specialist's jargon" (p. 172), can deliver this body blow to the solar plexus of civilized English: "The social infra-structure of a particular ideational complex, along with various concomitant maintenance procedures, practical as well as theoretical, constitute its plausibility structure, that is, set the conditions within which the ideas in question have a chance of remaining plausible" (p. 173).

I have puzzled long and lonely over this passage, thinking it might be a public service to translate it into idiomatic English; to give it a chance, so to speak, of remaining plausible. But the passage goes on and on, glossing the truism that ideas exist in a social context. The polysyllables add not a whit to one's understanding of how that process works in discrete cases.

(Berger is a delectable whiz, on the other hand, when he probes the America which gave us Calley and Manson in the same set of headlines.) Hemingway used to argue that the first thing a serious American writer needed was an internal mechanism that made him sense when words were not reporting reality truly. Maybe social science needs a sludge rejector. And Berger One would seem to me to be the ideal person to teach this lesson to the endemic Berger Twos of his discipline.

From what I do understand in this book, I suspect I am missing a lot of significant insights because I cannot penetrate the Latinate/Teutonic barriers of Berger's Higher Style. Because almost all of these 18 essays have appeared elsewhere, there is the usual problem of having heard some points more than thrice: I got to know Fritz Machlup often, if not well, in these pages. And because the essays were written with very heterogenous media in mind, readers will have to shift gears frequently to stay on the main road. The term "excursions" in Berger's subtitle is perhaps too diffident, although it does announce the author's willingness to do battle with every facile consensus in his craft.

My favorite essays-"The Blueing of America" and "The Socialist Myth"- occur in the first section on "Understanding Modernity." He (and his wife Brigitte) are really cogent when they speculate about how upper middle class dropping out in the 1960s broadened upward mobility for blue-collar children. And his explication of the covert theological assumptions of the socialist mystique is deservedly classic in its reputation.

In part II, "Acting in Modern America," (a rubric I don't really comprehend), I found "Languages of Murder" (on Calley/Manson) and "The Greening of American Foreign Policy" particularly thoughtful. I suspect, however, that his heart is really in Part III, "Transcending Modernity," where his theological critique of secular liberalism is centered. I feel about his enterprise here the same way I feel about William Buckley's television series: However much I disagree with them on ad hoc issues, I would defend for the sake of our common intellectual life their opposition to unexamined deadliness.

Because the whole incentive structure of university and media life discourages authentic conservative voices, those few which have survived deserve our closest attention. Liberalism without disloyal oppositions leads directly to the distended bureaucracies that disfigure our public life. The more I read Berger the more I wish he would quit trying to be another Max Weber and keep writing in the English of his journalistic essays.

Source: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 439, Urban Black Politics (Sept., 1978), pp. 186-187 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. in association with the American Academy of Political and Social Science