Peter L. Berger Quotes
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The same processes that generate consensus can be manipulated by a social group worker in a summer camp in the Adirondacks and by a Communist brainwasher in a prison camp in China.
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Specific procedures of universe-maintenance become necessary when the symbolic universe has become a problem. As long as this is not the case, the symbolic universe is self-maintaining, that is, self-legitimating by the sheer facticity of its objective existence in the society in question.
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I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization.
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Modern science is an extreme step in this development, and in the secularization and sophistication of universe-maintenance.
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Even in a society as tightly controlled as Singapore's, the market creates certain forces which perhaps in the long run may lead to democracy.
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I'm sure Putnam is right that there's been a decline in certain kinds of organizations like bowling leagues. But people participate in communities in other ways.
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One can't understand the Christian Right and similar movements unless one sees them as reactive - they're reacting to what they call secular humanism.
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Even if one is interested only in one's own society, which is one's prerogative, one can understand that society much better by comparing it with others.
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There are very few jokes about sociologists.
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Secularization theory is a term that was used in the fifties and sixties by a number of social scientists and historians. Basically, it had a very simple proposition. It could be stated in one sentence. Modernity inevitably produces a decline of religion.
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The sensible person reads the sociological journals mainly for the book reviews and the obituaries, and goes to sociological meetings only if he is looking for a job or has other intrigues to carry on.
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We are not interested in excommunicating anyone. The game of sociology goes on in a spacious playground. We are just describing a little more closely those we would like to tempt to join our game.
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Compared to the reality of everyday life, other realities appear as finite provinces of meaning, enclaves within the paramount reality marked by circumscribed meanings and modes of experience.
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An intrinsic problem, similar to the one we discussed in connexion with tradition in general, presents itself with the process of transmission of the symbolic universe from one generation to another. Socialization is never completely successful. Some individuals 'inhabit' the transmitted universe more definitely than others.
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The negative side to globalization is that it wipes out entire economic systems and in doing so wipes out the accompanying culture.
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But we don't have an example of a democratic society existing in a socialist economy - which is the only real alternative to capitalism in the modern world.
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Some people seem to gravitate from one fundamentalism to another, from some kind of secular fundamentalism into a religious fundamentalism or the other way around, which is not very helpful.
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By ‘successful socialization’ we mean the establishment of a high degree of symmetry between objective and subjective reality.
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When certain branches of the economy become obsolete, as in the case of the steel industry, not only do jobs disappear, which is obviously a terrible social hardship, but certain cultures also disappear.
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So I think one can say on empirical grounds - not because of some philosophical principle - that you can't have democracy unless you have a market economy.
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Two societies confronting each other with conflicting universes will both develop conceptual machineries designed to maintain their respective universes. From the point of view of intrinsic plausibility the two forms of conceptualization may seem to the outside observer to offer little choice.
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Like John Wesley, the sociologist will have to confess that his parish is the world.
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If you say simply that pressures toward democracy are created by the market, I would say yes.
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In science as in love a concentration on technique is quite likely to lead to impotence.