I am thankful for the invitation to read these illuminating conversations and to be part of a performance of cross-disciplinary scholarly exchange. As a scholar who finds himself betwixt and between, I am grateful for this moment of community.
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The genealogical turn to secularism has forged a conversation between religious studies and science studies scholars in which the making of religion and the making of science (and social science) could be understood as part of the same discursive weave. There is much to learn from each other: how history is embedded in sociality and material conditions both, how the social is an ecological confound, and how the interiors of subjects and researchers alike are difficult to conceptually ascertain let alone measure.
Although I am not a faithful reader of Latour, I am keenly interested in what you might call the tension in his typology of the social as adjective—between the social as substantial and made of stuff and the social as “movement between non-social elements.” This is a problem of description for all involved, of finding the right word(s) to account for matter and spirit—from “god” to “ether” to “culture” to “statistics” to “political economy” to “society” to “information theory” and “the brain.”
Such concepts are solving terms with distinctive epistemic and affective ecologies. In addition to enabling communication, they resolve intractabilities and name indeterminacies. They congeal and contain so that our descriptive language does not dissolve into dust. They make worlds possible and maintain them after the fact.
Inquiry into solving terms and strategies—their audacity, intensities, and power—seems a shared agenda and shared space for robust discussions between religious studies and science studies. A throughline in this conversation would be that sensing the social is a problem that does not lend itself to easy resolution precisely because it is a historically and culturally situated proposition. Indeed, shared interest in sensing the social is an incredibly fruitful way to begin the conversation.
For the scholar of religion, practices of sensing the social are integral to world building, cosmos construction, and prophetic utterance. Or, as Durkheim as my witness, any practice of sensing the social is, by elaborate definition, religious. I think the field of science studies arrives at a very similar place but from a slightly different path through a certain French style (less Durkheim, more Foucault) angle. For the STS scholar, attending to the sense of the social among scientists is a way to read those scientists (and institutions, etc.) at least partially against their grain—as world builders with ideological lacuna and unconscious proclivities. What a great opening query! Hey there, Mr. Science, how do you sense the social and how has it inflected your objectivity or design or affect when working in the laboratory or field site? How do you recognize the imprint of the culture which contains you and the histories you are working in and through?
Such questions are difficult for everyone. But they do turn our specific attention to the fear, desire, and anxiety underlying the will to mastery within scientific circles—a pressing point made by Sarah Hammerschlag. Asking such questions also commits us to what Taylor Moore calls “the messy work of sensing past and present social worlds.”
The rich exchange between Hammerschlag and Moore helped me to think in more subtle ways about another line of inquiry that religious studies and science studies might share: investigations into how flat senses of the social often correlate with an insistence on the lonely integrity of the subjects within the social. Which is to say that I wholeheartedly agree with their insight that the scholarly pursuit of beautifully unsettling and/or irreverent lines of inquiry often involves a “certain suspension of agency.”
For I, too, aspire to objectivity without believing in it, that is, without setting aside relationality, play, material frictions, and the depth to which the disciplines of the social are incessantly working themselves out, on, and through my fingers as I type. Perhaps that is why I lean in to sensing the social at odd angles, spying its integrative function and feeling its strange presence—all in order to counter its increasing proclivity to remain hidden, to produce little if any friction. (“You will never have to think alone again,” says the radioman).
This is not boring work.
Non-specific Protestant boredom
I could not stop thinking about the juxtaposition between Caleb Smith’s description of being “twitchy with boredom” and the scientists who were the subjects of Henry Cowles’s research who idealized boredom as both an object of interest and a scientific state of mind.
Smith recalls “the old feeling that I used to have in the pews of the Methodist Church in Arkansas, where I was just inconsolably twitchy with boredom.” He describes a weird space of “pastoral discipline”—moralistic in its tone yet suffused with possibilities. I filled out the scene with my own memories of a similar boredom. In the pews of the First Baptist Church in Barberton, Ohio, the preacher’s cadence blends with my scribbles on the mimeographed folded program. I feel the hints of eternal condemnation but also the sense of something elsewhere. I’m alone with myself but not. Scanning the pews—tense and jittery—I catch the gaze of those looking at me look at them. My attention is on everything and nothing at once. I’m open to salvation but salvation never comes.
Smith survived to tell his tale and so did I.
These peculiarly Protestant experiences of being betwixt and between are disciplinary forces, constituting an early training ground for sensing the social and thinking about it. But only in hindsight and at least once removed. For as Smith notes, that disciplinary space of the Methodist pew gave way to a higher order of reflection: the “church of Fugazi” and the hardcore music scene. He and others “wore combat boots and cropped our hair close. We rejected consumerism and the prevailing kinds of high school popularity. You could say that, in the old ascetic way, we tried to disconnect ourselves from ‘worldly things.’” As Smith poignantly says, his new “congregation” was “mimicking discipline.”
Cowles points us to a different kind of boredom when he talks about scientific practices whose disciplines lacked any critical appreciation of the culture which contained them. Specifically, Cowles discusses his research into “new psychologists” in the early twentieth century who celebrate and enjoy boredom as a mark of their professional virtue and expertise. In a chapter Cowles published elsewhere, we are witness to William James shaking his head at this new crop of researchers bent on measurement and closure. That occult edge of James comes into tension with his rationalist protégés and illuminates their boredom as an effect of their mistaking self-denial for objectivity.
My sense is that many scientists (then and now) still sway slowly in the pews (and not the church of Fugazi, unfortunately!). Theirs is a pleasurable claustrophobia that is worth their repeated investments. They sense the social but do not risk being surprised or disturbed by its movements and materiality. Their insights become aesthetically flat, more therapeutic than unsettling. Their “knowledge” seemingly ready-made to be incorporated into training data for large language models. These are worthy subjects of collective exorcism by a band of punk-curious practitioners of religious studies and science studies.
Ghosts of Scottish Common Sense philosophy
The exchange between Smith and Cowles had me thinking what a genealogy of boredom might look like and, even more specifically, how to think about the kind of boredom premised on attenuating one’s sense of the social and limiting discussions about it. How have and how do individuals and institutions put the brakes on being reflexive and eventually come to secure their righteousness through boredom?
My own minor contribution to such a genealogy would be to point to the thin version of reflexivity and shallow sense of the social that came of age in antebellum America and has been carried forward in behavioral and psychological sciences in the early twentieth century and is now surging in the age of neural networks (and the blur between real and artificial).
To make a long story as short as possible, Scottish Common Sense philosophy was the epistemic handmaiden of secularism in the nineteenth century and the dominant mechanism by which Protestants of various and vague persuasions (from pious to erstwhile) learned to think and convinced themselves that they believed. The nova effect of Scottish Common Sense encouraged people to distinguish but also to narrow religious and scientific practice (part of their categorical constellation not mine) in the service of political security, evangelical versions of “true faith,” and successions of biopolitical incorporation. A reverberating key of American modernity was struck that traded in the epistemics of surprise for an embrace of psychic and political stability. As Thomas Reid, a popular source of the Scottish Enlightenment in America, wrote, it was “desirable” that the “decisions of common sense . . . be brought into a code, in which all reasonable men should acquiesce.”
Common Sense philosophers (in addition to sidestepping Hume) offered a version of reflexivity that gave one license to stop. They and their readers were confident in the capacity to become immediately aware of the process of awareness as the basis of objective knowledge. For measuring one’s interior state was to better grasp how deeply felt intensities were themselves an integral part of cognition. Feelings, taste, and non-rational spasms, then, were acknowledged but only in order to put them in their proper place and to defend against surprise.
Adopted in America as a sturdy counter to the tumult of European philosophy, Common Sense Realism cultivated a sense of righteous boredom. Supplements to reason and potential predictability—emotions, passions, appetites, taste—needed to be harnessed in order to make reason reasonable.
A popular textbook, for example, instructed its reader in the best ways to approach those “instances [when] an unexpected object overpowers the mind, so as to produce a momentary stupefaction.” In order to promote rational judgment Common Sense philosophers produced a taxonomy of novelty, wonder, and surprise. Such “designing wisdom” allowed the mind of the reader to recognize “new objects” when they first made an appearance. And it would prevent the mind from becoming “totally engrossed with them,” so as to “have no room left, either for action or reflection.” Something like wonder, according to Scottish philosopher and jurist Lord Kames, was a positive good only in the service of its eventual effacement. The experience of novelty was disciplined, muted, and catalyzed the accumulation of knowledge for and about the self.
In giving much lip to reflexivity with little service, Common Sense philosophers modeled a dutiful appreciation for those forces that threatened a buffered self but did not break through. In other words, the social forces that they insisted on sensing were the ones that already made sense to them.
In readings of Scottish Common Sense, conservative and liberal Protestants alike—alongside phrenologists, spiritualists, and self-styled ethnologists—posited the uniformity of a symbolic system that made all human differences part of the same epistemic arena. Here was the will to read a code that confirmed, in the act of reading, that everything was connected and connectable. The “uniformity” of “man’s constitution,” declared The American Whig Review in an authoritative article on the subject in 1849, was “attended by a like uniformity of natural consequences, as resulting almost of necessity in corresponding uniformity in his beliefs and conceptions, and their modes of manifestation.”
A rather boring and sterile symmetry on which to cut your analytic teeth.
Conclusion
Forms of this particularly Protestant boredom do a nice job of staving off the ruptures of materiality and relationality that would unsettle a singular focus on the interiority of experience (cognitively defined) and its correspondence with a uniform external world. Which is to say that I am bored with non-specific forms of Protestant boredom.
One of my favorite weeks of teaching is to pair two texts: William James’s second lecture on Varieties of Religious Experience and chapter ten from W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Students find James’s capacious yet stubborn focus on religion as solitary, well, commonsensical. For them, James confirms their intuitions about religion (or spirituality) as first and foremost experiential. The next class, when we turn to “The Faith of Our Fathers,” we get to experience Du Bois turn a mentor’s insight in a direction that is often not as intuitive for them. In DuBois’s discussion of double consciousness and the “peculiar problems of the inner life” in African American culture, he points to an emergent and radical form of reflexivity. Born of an appreciation for loss and sorrow, DuBois articulates an emergent sense of the social—one that maintains a focus on experience but insists that the self is always experiencing the world in relation to other powers; to other people; to other cadences, frenzies, colors, and cacophonies; to the demands of the past and future—operating, that is, within a swirl of social forces.
I was reminded of Dubois’s slap back in some of the spot-on questions about sensing the social raised in the exchange between John Tresch and Tanya Lurhmann (e.g., “What about the external apparatus which orients and gives form to these possible relationships?”) From these I wondered: How do institutions, social structures, and other concrete objects such as images mediate experiences of the social field? How to define let alone get at the material and moving conditions of the social? How to move sociological analysis and descriptions (broadly understood) beyond the “primarily personal, individual, and internal” into robust questioning of materiality, aesthetics, and history?
These are not boring questions. They are Duboisian. They should neither be avoided nor dismissed. For they are an opportunity for scholars of religion and science to double down on rigorously, dizzily, tragically, and unendingly sensing the social in non-uniform ways.