Culture, Ethics and the Ends of Sociology

Extract

With the publication of The Enchantment of Sociology, Kieran Flanagan becomes one of the contemporary sociologists whose work is shaped by the devastating indifference which dominates so many social and cultural relationships. This is an indifference of apathy and unconcern in the face of the sense of the emptiness of so much of what passes as the good life in our commodified and media-saturated culture. It means that all the things and qualities which could once be taken to make a difference to what it means to be a human being in the world have been thrown into the flux of the quest for perpetual newness. Indifference has emerged to the extent that there has been a collapse of the chance that some quality, some ideal, or some value, might possess the abilities to make a difference.

In itself there is little new about this sociological care about the absence and lack of care. It bears some comparison with Hannah Arendt’s portrayal of dark times as those in which outrages can be perpetrated without a murmur of outrage (Arendt 1973). Meanwhile, and perhaps more pertinently for the purposes of this discussion, C. Wright Mills noted the prevalence of indifference in the late 1950s in The Sociological Imagination (Mills 1959). Mills looked at the situation which had emerged out of the settlement of the Second World War and saw people who had been left lost and alone by the erosion of their ability to accept readily the time-honoured ways of making sense of the world. He identified the outlines of what amounted to an existential and hermeneutic vacuum.