Sociology and spirituality: Can they talk to one another?

Abstract

The ideas of spirituality and sociology rarely occur together. Certainly, the sub-discipline of the sociology of religion is long established, but this is the sociological study of religion, not of the potential penetration of spirituality into sociology. Such a move suggests the possibility of transforming the discipline of sociology in general into something very different from its ‘traditional’ or more conventional forms. This essay, building on a conversation initiated in this journal, explores the possibility of a fresh dialogue between sociology and spirituality, drawing mainly on Buddhism as its inspiration. It is suggested that Buddhism fundamentally challenges many of the assumptions on which ‘mainstream’ (largely Western and now hegemonic) sociology is based, including notions of causality, the self, suffering, ethics and ontology. It suggests ways in which such an alternative cosmology and image of social processes might greatly transform the nature, objectives and methodology of academic sociology.

The intriguing possibility has been aired in the pages of this journal of a ‘spiritual sociology’ (Saito, 2024), a possibility that if pursued (in many potential directions) could well open up very new perspectives on the nature of sociology, and indeed of society, its purported object of study. This brief paper is intended to further advance discussion on this theme, rarely if ever seriously entertained in ‘mainstream’ professional sociology. One of the objectives of this essay is to rescue the idea of a ‘spiritual sociology’ from the remote edges of ‘respectable’ approaches to the discipline, and to re-locate it at the very centre.

To begin with, some distinctions need to be made. It can be easily admitted that there is the real possibility of a ‘spiritual sociology’ if what is meant by that is a sociology derived from the principles of a particular religion – a sort of ‘liberation theology’ perhaps transposed into sociological terms, and something like this is already happening as both religions and sociology begin to respond to the ecological crisis. There have been attempts, that have never penetrated mainstream sociology, to formulate a ‘Christian sociology’ (Lyon, 1985; Milbank, 2006; Poloma, 1982). Certainly at least one book exists on the possibility of their being an Islamic sociology – one based on Koranic understandings of the human, the nature of society, and of course the role of divine revelation in directing that society (Ba-Yunus and Ahmad, 1985; Shahidpak, 2022).

These attempts are perhaps in effect the revival of the older idea of a philosophical anthropology, or some kinds of applied sociology, concerning how might Christian ideas inform such areas as the sociology of the family, development, crime, or education, for example. In Francophone circles, a distinction used to be made between the sociology of religion (the study of religion using conventional sociological approaches and methodology), and ‘religious sociology’ – the attempt, mainly in Catholic circles, to utilise sociology as a kind of supplement to theology.

This is fine insofar as it goes. But I would suggest that it does not go nearly far enough, but again it can be to specific religious traditions to which we might turn for inspiration, not to the great monotheisms, but in this case to Buddhism.

Let us again try a thought experiment – what might a ‘Buddhist Sociology’ look like? I have suggested elsewhere (Clammer, 2023) that it would be one no longer based on what are, frankly, profoundly Western epistemological foundations, a hegemony that needs challenging (and has been challenged) in a post-colonial world, and with spreading awareness of other philosophical traditions – Asian and African in particular, but also the indigenous knowledge systems familiar to anthropologists, which, if taken seriously rather than as ethnographic curiosities, deeply undermine the hegemony of Western philosophical concepts and their practical outcomes (Kohn, 2013). There is a remarkable convergence between much of the data revealed by the anthropology of many ‘alternative’ knowledge systems on the one side, and Buddhism on the other.

What might these convergences look like? There are many, but let me list what I think are the main ones that would define a Buddhist sociology. Buddhism has some profound parallels with post-modernism, certainly in that it is a radical form of deconstructionism – the questioning of basic categories through which we thought the world was to be understood.

In no particular order, the first of these is that Buddhism (at least in its original form) did not offer itself as a ‘religion’, but as a methodology – one which sees the universal existence of suffering as the central experience of being human and which offers a solution to the overcoming of that suffering. Few sociologists have considered this (a rare example being Ian Craib's (1994) work on what he called the ‘importance of disappointment’, although it is not clear that this is exactly what a Buddhist would call suffering).

The basis of this Buddhist methodology is the radical questioning of the concept of the Self. In the monotheistic religions, the notion of a permanent self is deeply embedded, particularly as that self has, literally, an afterlife, and the English-language literature in sociology, especially during the late 1980s to the early 2000s, shows a strong preoccupation with that subject. But if, as Buddhism suggests, there is not a permanent self and that the idea of the ego is an illusion (alas poor Freud!), then questions of personal identity, agency and causality, as understood in mainstream sociology, are fundamentally undermined, and so of course are conventional ideas of social structure and process.

It is here that the Buddhist notion of ‘emptiness’ or non-being is often misunderstood. Clearly in an empirical sense, human beings exist. The Buddhist notion, however, is that they do not exist – and this is true of all other phenomena – as discrete or separated individuals. Impermanence is the essential condition of the world, for both humans and all other entities. Entropy rules. In such a world, a form of chaos theory is probably the best model for understanding society, not the conventional models that pepper sociology textbooks. ‘Emptiness’ then does not mean a form of nihilism, a void which is the end of both personal and cosmic existence, but rather holism: the idea that everything is connected, so there are no ‘first causes’. Rather, everything is implicated in everything else, and a surprising or unidentified ‘cause’ can have profound consequences that cannot be captured in linear models.

The small self – the individual human – being does not ‘not exist’ but is embedded in what some schools of Mahayana Buddhism call the ‘Great Self’ (ultimately the entire universe), or what the Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy has called the ‘ecological self’ (Macy, 1990). Sociology as a result must itself be concerned with a relational model of human social activities, not an atomistic one, since once a sense of separate identity is abandoned, a very different model of both society and desirable human and ecological relationships emerges. If I am in some sense also you, and we are both embedded in nature, then it follows that an ethic of care is implied, not one of competition, aggression, acquisition, and power seeking (Jones, 2003). The goal becomes one of achieving a cosmocentric, rather than purely anthropocentric, world view, gained in part by sloughing off attachments, not multiplying them through greed. The secret is clear perception, or what is usually glossed as ‘Enlightenment’.

There are many other implications in Buddhism in relation to conventional Western social science, including the fundamental non-dualism of Buddhism, although at bottom it can be seen as a radical spiritually based alternative to the rationalism and reductionism of much social science, and to the fact that the social sciences do not seek for factors outside of themselves. This does raise the interesting question of how individual sociologists who are religious believers relate that to their professional practice – perhaps through instrumental means (what they can usefully do with sociology, perhaps in such areas as criminology or development), rather than by pondering both the epistemological and ontological issues that their position raises (or perhaps the faith/profession division is simply ignored as being a problem).

Up until this point, I have taken Buddhism as one extremely interesting path through which to explore the possibility of a spiritually informed sociology. Other sources might be sought – in the many schools of mysticism, Eastern and Western, for example (Gill and Clammer, 2018) and their implications for formulating alternative models of reality, or indeed, of what that ‘reality’ consists of in the first place. The emergence of the idea of the ‘pluriverse’ (for example, Kothari et al., 2019) brings back into play the vital idea that there are many local knowledges, and that there is no a priori reason to assume that any is superior to any other, or better still, to recognise that they embody profound wisdom (often ecological), and represent very different philosophical anthropologies from which other societies might learn a great deal.

Interestingly, science fiction and utopian experiments, literary or actual, might provide similar routes to enlightenment and liberation. Certainly, all these approaches suggest that the idea of human perfectibility, if not a false goal, is one that cannot be achieved simply by improving our political and economic arrangements, and that something else is missing. This is perhaps most evident in development sociology, where, if anything fundamental has been learned, it is that the bright future is not obtainable through simply technical means: ‘spirit’ must be added.

Indeed, sociological methods themselves are very much at fault here, being so frequently reductionist and of course numerical. Many new routes of exploration begin to emerge if we can contemplate the possibility of different forms of sociology. By these I do not mean the ‘indigenous sociologies’ idea – a Thai Sociology, an Indonesian sociology, an Icelandic sociology, as interesting as these might be, for they do not necessarily touch on the fundamental questions, but almost always reproduce, just in a local language or some local form, the ‘traditional’ textbook methodologies (Walter et al., 2023).

But what if we seriously consider contemplative practice as method? Or as the Sri Lankan sociologist Susantha Goonatilake (2013) has suggested, again with reference to Buddhism: ‘There are elements within Buddhism on how to observe the world while being within it. A good observational metaphor used in Buddhism is that one should be like the lotus leaf floating on water, being both within water as well as outside it (Goonatilake, 2013: 275).

Sociology is good at surfaces, but can it penetrate to deeper levels, one in which real existential issues are foregrounded? To discuss spirit in sociology is not to retreat into some obscure and irrelevant fringe, but to repose to the discipline the questions that it should be asking, to inquire whether conventional methodologies are up to this task, and to suggest some pathways through which renewal might take place. This includes the incorporation of the very dimension that is essential, but paradoxically excluded, in the search for understanding of human nature and human society, including its dark sides, which scientific rationality cannot reach, yet which collectively constitute a core experience of human ontology, and in the face of which so much social theory is ultimately silent, despite its range of sociological, economic, and political explanations. This is, however, the existential ground of Being, perhaps indeed best encapsulated in the notion of suffering of which Buddhism speaks, and other spiritual traditions too.