Knowing Donald Black

Some personal reflections

I’ve been struggling for a week to put into words my reaction the recent passing of sociologist Donald Black — the man I studied under at the University of Virginia, and whose influence pervades everything sociological I’ve written or spoken since.

He was one of those rare and remarkable individuals that any sensible person feels grateful just to have known.

I talk about Donald’s sociological work in nearly everything I’ve ever professionally written — citing his theories of conflict, of moralism, of partisanship, of settlement, of avoidance, of liability, of law, of feuding, of rebellion, of the interestingess of subjects, and of the success of ideas.

I probably talk about his work on Bullfish Hole less than elsewhere, because here I often write about things that I’m not already writing about for my day job. Yet you can still find his name mentioned in more than half my posts — for recent examples, I discuss Donald’s theory of scienticity in Links for January, his theory of moralistic violence in my Honors Lecture, and my entire Explaining Behavior series is me passing on what Donald taught me about sociological explanation.

For all that, the things that my mind keeps coming back to in recent weeks are the personal details that came from knowing him.

Donald was a character! Part 60’s hippie, part uncompromising Ayn Rand protagonist, part spergy intellectual.

In between talking about his intellectual obsessions, he would mention the time he hitchhiked to Mexico before attending the famous concert at Woodstock. Or the time he fell in love with an obscure musical act called The Ramones at a dive bar in New York. Tales of riding in police cars, of Detroit during the age of ghetto riots, of catching flack for his long hair and threadbare lifestyle.

Cool stories, but at the same time Donald was a nerd’s nerd, steeped in his subject, obsessed with his intellectual projects. And he was fully committed to pursuing ideas he saw as true and important, even in the face of more established figures warning him it was impossible and would be the death of his career. As he said, he’d rather fail at something new and important than succeed at something trivial or conventional.

And he meant it! His vision was all that mattered to him, and damned if he would deviate from it. He set out to create a new kind of sociology that eschewed psychology, teleology, and even people as such. He did it simply because it hadn’t been done, and he wanted to see what it would look like. And in so doing he opened up a new intellectual world for many of us.

His approach to human behavior was to not study humans at all — to study the behavior of social life, of things like law and partisanship and ideas. So much of his insight came from asking childishly simple questions and thinking systematically through the answers. He formulated simple propositions that explained a variety of things that most people never bothered to address scientifically at all, content as they were to deal with social life with an intuitive “makes sense” epistemology. He sought the principles behind what normies take for granted.

In his remembrance, my friend Bradley Campbell described Donald as “one of the most idealistic people I’ve ever known.” I can only second that. Whatever he set out to do, Donald committed to with full moral seriousness.

His main passion was sociology, and he was devoted to having innovative ideas. Convinced that something about his lifestyle as a graduate student was conducive to creativity, he vowed to forever live like a graduate student. He sought simplicity in his life, an almost monastic minimization of distractions. He organized his existence around having ideas.

But he wasn’t a workaholic or careerist in any conventional sense. He liked to say he was a hedonist. He really enjoyed having ideas, and the more scientific and purely sociological they were, the more he enjoyed him. That was his simple guiding principle: Joy.

The man was living his best life, and he knew it. “Life is a technique,” he once told me. “And most people never figure it out.” He certainly had perfected his own.

That joy was something infectious. True, Donald could put people off when crowing about how pleased his was with own work. But to me the admirable undercurrent was his complete and utter sincerity: He really did view it as a great gift of fate, a privilege and blessing, that he had been able to have the ideas he had had. There was no insecurity hiding underneath: He was just really that jazzed about what he did, and grateful to be able to do it.

His idealism extended beyond his own work. He took sociology seriously and was adamant that it had the potential to be a real science of social life, producing theories that were general, testable, simple, valid, and original. He had sure faith that the project would, at least over the long term, succeed.

Donald held that faith was not antithetical to science, but a central requirement: Great scientific advances required that someone involved have faith they could achieve something that seemed impossible to others.

Donald had faith that despite the growing mound of ideological garbage produced in the name of sociology, a scientific approach would eventually triumph, and that this own work would gain more recognition and appreciation.

Donald’s idealism also involved a commitment to truth and to high moral standards in all realms of life. I’ve seen him critique studies claiming to support his theories because he didn’t think they were well done. And while he eschewed and condemned moralizing in the name of social science, he did take morality incredibly seriously. If anything, he thought sociologists laundering their moral commitments as social science undermined moral judgement as much as it did social science.

He maintained his moral and intellectual commitments whether it was popular or unpopular. Quite often it was the latter.

His call for a pure sociology attracted much hostility — most bizarrely from sociologists! In a footnote in one of his articles he even listed the various contradictory accusations he’d attracted over the years — that he was a reactionary, a conservative, and also a long-haired hippie radical. Noting that his work was not political at all, he attributed such criticism to the unconventionality of his approach — a shocking newness that made critics perceive him as their favorite political enemies. For his part, he took the criticism as a sign he was onto something. What new ideas haven’t attracted hostility?

His death comes at a dark time for academia in general and sociology in particular. Costs are spiraling, enrollments are shrinking, and scandals are multiplying. Budget cuts have led to the decimation of the faculty here at West Virginia University, and I worry whether my job will even be around in a decade. As Bradley noted in his remembrance, the American Sociological Association is going whole hog for sociology as political activism. The predictable reaction includes things like the state of Florida declaring that sociology courses can’t count for general education requirements. And it seems like the passing of Donald Black, Rodney Stark, and others of a more serious generation leaves the field with a dearth of heavy hitters to make up for all the Jacobin LARPers and soulless careerists.

Given all that, one might expect me to harbor some resentment to the man whose charismatic vision cemented my career in sociology. But oddly enough, I don’t.

Instead, I remain grateful for Donald and his influence, for his insight and support, for the excitement he conveyed, for the stories he told, and for the intellectual vistas he opened up to me. It was an honor and a privilege to be one of his students.

And I think I owe it to him to stay positive. To have faith. And to focus on the joy and wonder in this world.