Social Science and the Public Interest
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SOCIAL SCIENCE AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST
Social Science and the Public Interest July/August 2020
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Editorial: The Grim Reader SIR THOMAS MORE Death . . . comes for us all, my lords. Yes, even for Kings he comes, to whom amidst all their Royalty and brute strength he will neither kneel nor make them any reverence nor pleasantly desire them to come forth, but roughly grasp them by the very breast and rattle them until they be stark dead! So causing their bodies to be buried in a pit and sending them to a judgment . . . whereof at their death their success is uncertain. From Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons I write this in a great moment of despair, not so much personally, but in acknowledgment of what has been taking place in the world of words, in the different collective reactions to words written and spoken, in sum, across a broad spectrum of diverse outspokenness that expresses an extraordinary impatience over the rift between words and the reality that these words claim exists. For some, including philosophers, words are reality, that is, in real time and space what we say to others may hurt them in incomparable and unpredictable ways. It behooves us not to dismiss these concerns because civility and manners are the foundations for any recognition of what is uncivil and ill-mannered. A “micro-aggression” is based not only in a personal judgment that emerges from experience, but also in a substantive account of its expression about how it is delivered, not necessarily only in words but also in gestures. Charles Horton Cooley’s “looking-glass self” offers insight into the nature of the inevitable risks of misunderstanding in all human interactions in which what I say to you and what you say to me may be interpreted in ways that each of us can only know for ourselves because we have no certain way to experience another person’s thoughts as their thoughts without their being communicated to us in words and gestures. Cooley’s approach was entirely mentalistic. He was correct in
assuming that anyone’s thoughts are hidden from another’s view, creating the conditions for approval and disapproval and their possible confusions. But thoughts are also embodied, and W.E.B. Du Bois recognized that the embodiment and not exclusively the thoughts was part of a lived reality that could be elided and denied by anyone at any moment. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois observed “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” The embodiment is represented by that “tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” “White supremacy” is a trigger point that signals the drastically different perceptions of that “tape of a world” now revealed in conflicts and disagreements. Movements challenging how to address these conflicts and disagreements are our present reckoning. But that reckoning h
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