Affective measures in the social sciences produce more ideologic agitpro

Dear WSN and Company,

In light of the recent "The mantra that means this time it's serious" post and the "War on Freedom" discussion, I see more evidence again on behalf of my recurrent thesis.  Just so long as we continue to apply affective, feelings-based measures to our studies in the social sciences, our analyses will continue to be pre-empted by soley normative, ideologic reference frames and misconstrued, thereby blossoming into more mis-applied ideology and conspiracy theory.

"Capitalism" has already gone by the wayside of unstable, inherently flawed notions due to its problematic ideological character; but will other such notions - that make social science more into social affairs and less about the SCIENCE of social behavior - go much the same route.

I mean just look at some of these categories; a critique of "Eurocentrism" should be more about pointing out a misplaced tendency in European historical scholarship & correcting for it and less about the notion of Eurocentrism as constituting a "bad" feeling or value.  The merits or de-merits of "civilization" and "culture" should be based more on those factors in history and human action that are not covered under such models (and should be covered to be deal with the realities of world history) and less about whether such models are indicative of "elitism", ethnocentrisms, or spiritualisms of social reality [such th/ "culture" = "cult" = "religion" as the spiritualized soul of a society]

Somewhere along the way, we must decide whether our social science is more about practical social issues (human services) or studying the dynamics of social groups in order better come to a knowledge of human behavior.  We will never be able to comprehend the "is" of human social organization if we continually gravitate to "is-for-ought" models in our analyses.  If we want to get beyond the agitprop of conspiracy theories and ideology that's meant merely to stir us up, then it seems to me we must dispense with the very concepts that perpetuate such things.

I do understand that we get our empirical content from the practical issues we examine in our social science studies, by means often of a contemporary context.  Granted.  But for some reason, whether we look at AGF's work, or Wallerstein's, David Christian's Big History, or the Eonic model, these models have tended to better work through the fluff of social affairs to drive at those fundamental long term principles in human experience than much of the other social science research.  The emprical content we all work through is largely the same, the micro- & macro- dynamics we explore in our work is somewhat the same, and to a degree we all come out with the same net set of conclusions.  But for some reason, "the issues" as matters of policy analysis or as objects of social values always skew the kind of empirical data we gather up for our models and the kinds, manner, and number of theoretically sound conclusions we're capable of in our research.  For much of our work, this latter pattern is what happens in social science work.  Still, for some reason these other frameworks I've highlighted and the scholars who've conceptualized them have managed to touch upon the macrosocial patterns that go beyond the superficialities of "the issues" and social affairs.  In so doing, they not only achieve a better theoretical clarity in their studies; their empirical focus is actually sharpened -> from just dealing with surface structures in the sociological overlay to arriving at the deep structures of the underlying substrate.

So, in light of these larger, better models, how should we more accurately understand and conceptualize and hopefully re-define our "issues", policy ideals, and affective/ideological values-based concepts in order to avoid the dangerous pitfalls of agitprop and conspiracy theory arising from our work?  Or should we just rid ourselves of such affective, emotionalist concepts altogether in the first place and let the chips fall where they may?

What do you all think?  Looking forward to your insights.

Best!

Luke R.

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