Toward a Sociology of Unmasking

On finding hidden truths

A few years ago I was asked to contribute an article to The American Sociologist on Peter Baehr’s book The Unmasking Style in Sociology. This post is a streamlined version of that.

Sociologist Peter Baehr coined the term “unmasking style” to refer to a kind of sociology that claims to show that the apparent truth of something is just a superficial façade hiding the real truth. Social theories that employ the unmasking style claim to remove disguises, expose delusions, and “show that what people believe to true is in reality false.”

You see this style in the work of Karl Marx, who sought to unmask capitalist ideology and dispel the false consciousness that kept workers from fighting against their oppressors. And you see it in the host of neo-Marxian critical theories in contemporary sociology. Baehr notes that in both cases the unmasking is bound up with moralistic critiques of society. In his words:

Social theory texts convulse with hegemony, matrix of domination, ideology, subaltern, resistance, emancipation, therapeutic retrieval, invisible meanings, hidden elements, insurgent cosmopolitanism, imperial democracy, imperial unconscious, symbolic violence and epistemic violence. Such terms are a perennial of sociology conference keynotes, journal special issues, and social theory overviews. All signal that someone or something is about to be denounced, that an idea has been inverted and that emancipation is at hand.

We can understand and explain this in two ways. One way is to focus on unmasking theories as theories, ideas about the world that can be explained by a sociology of knowledge. The other way is to focus on unmasking theories as critique — as a species of moralism that identifies enemies and accuses them of wrongdoing.

Unmasking Theories as Theories

Many theories tell us that apparent reality is not actual reality. In a 1971 article, Murray Davis argued that what makes a sociological theory attract attention and generate discussion was not its truth or accuracy, but rather the extent to which it contradicted some taken-for-granted assumption about the world. A theory that only affirms our common sense is old news, and one that is orthogonal to our common sense is irrelevant. One that contradicts something we thought we knew is, however, quite interesting — even if we believe it to be wrong, we’re willing to invest time in talking about it and arguing over it.

Sociologists have long been obsessed with contradicting established ideas about the social world. In his 1963 book Invitation to Sociology, Peter Berger wrote “The first wisdom of sociology is this — things are not what they seem.” It’s a popular statement, appearing on sociologists’ tote bags and coffee mugs.  And the claim to have access to hidden knowledge is a common feature of attempts to introduce students and other outsiders to the discipline.

The first sociology textbook I encountered as an undergraduate student began with a bullet-point list of “surprising” facts presented as evidence that the students did not really know the truth of the world. Other professors in their introductory courses try to draw attention to counterintuitive theoretical claims, such as Durkheim’s notion that suicide rates go up during economic booms as well as busts (they don’t). Even if they have no surprising facts, sociologists often claim to be gifting students with a special form of insight called “the sociological imagination.” All this gives the field the flavor of a mystery cult.

The urge to surprise might even overshadow any concern with being correct. Years ago, sociologist Patrick Nolan argued attempts to shock and amaze led to sociology textbook writers continually recycling the same accounts — such as the story of the Hawthorne Electric study — even after they had been exposed as inaccurate. More recently social psychology has had a replication crisis in which its most celebrated findings, staples of every introductory class, have fallen to new evidence.

Right or wrong, it seems that sociologists have a strong concern with painting their insights as non-obvious — see, for instance, the title and subtitle of Randall Collin’s book for introductory students. Why?

One factor may be the difficulty in topping common sense when it comes to human behavior. Many of the scientific theories celebrated for their counterintuitive ideas about reality deal with phenomena invisible on the scales at which humans live their lives — we have no firsthand experience with the world of subatomic particles, velocities approaching light speed, or the geological timescales over which continents drift and species diverge. Neither personal experience nor biological instinct nor cultural tradition gives us good intuitions for these things. When it comes to the world of human interaction, we should expect that intuitions do a better job.

This is not to say scientific theory cannot exceed common sense in this domain. But science is hard, and probably the quickest and easiest way to deviate from common sense is in the direction of being wrong. This incentivizes and/or selects for both the unmasking style and poor theories.

Another way to think about this is in terms of the social structure of ideas. Donald Black proposes that ideas with closer subjects tend to be less successful — that is, the closer the subject, the less likely the idea is to be treated as true and important. If so, then all else equal people are more inclined to dismiss sociological ideas even when they do contain new information — for instance, if they report some statistical pattern it would have been very difficult for the average person to observe from personal experience. Generalizations are dismissed with singular counterexamples (“but that’s not true of my cousin Barry!”) or, with the benefit of hindsight bias, are defined as obvious even if they’re something that audience never would have guessed in advance (“yes, of course that makes sense, because [rationale they think up on the spot]”).

Following this logic, the bar of commonsense is set higher for social science, since social scientific facts and theories are more likely to be defined as common sense regardless of their actual content. Even good sociologists might have a chip on their shoulder about showing that they are in fact telling their audience something they didn’t already know. This would also contribute to an intellectual environment dominated by ideas that most loudly and forcefully claim to overturn common sense.

If so, this dovetails with another proposed effect of close subjects: They tend to repel scientific ideas altogether. Black proposes that the closer the subject, the less likely ideas about it are to be general, testable, and valid scientific theories. Closer subjects not only attract more common sense, but they also attract more ideas of a moralistic and critical nature. And unmasking theories are well-suited to this, too.

Unmasking Theories as Moralism

As a tool of critique, the unmasking style is evaluative and accusatory in nature: It identifies nefarious hidden motives, reveals sinister hidden meanings, and transforms its targets into evil enemies or deluded dupes. Insofar as it is a tool of argument, it often involves something along the lines of an ad hominem attack — bad motives, hidden bias, or guilt by association render the opponent’s argument unworthy of consideration.

Accusations of wrongdoing are a realm of overlap between the sociology of ideas and the sociology of conflict. We can draw on both to explain why, for example, people make and believe false accusations, including about such fantastical things as witchcraft or a global Jewish conspiracy against the German race. Such accusations might be an especially useful example of showing how the patterning of social conflict affects what ideas people will believe: When the social structure is conducive to harsh moralism, offenders will be found, even if the offenses are invented whole cloth.

False accusations about conduct provide one source of leeway in labeling people as deviants or enemies. Another source is the attribution of motives. The same conduct might be more or less blameworthy depending on whether we believe it was directed toward good ends or bad. One student brings me an apple and I think her a kind and thoughtful person; another brings me an apple and I judge him to be making a hamfisted attempt to win my favor. Thus the attribution of bad motive, like the attribution of bad behavior, is often a feature of conflict. And spreading accusations of sinister motives is a way of defining someone as deviant and mobilizing sanctions against them.

Finding hidden meanings is yet another way to label someone or something deviant. Human communication has a degree of ambiguity, and symbols can be interpreted in different ways. Any conditions that facilitate harsh judgments of a person or group also facilitate interpreting their statements to have the worst possible meaning. Extremely moralistic interpretation might posit a meaning that is evident only to the accuser and his or her supporters, and might put the accused in a situation where there is nothing they can say that will not be posited to have a sinister meaning.

Insofar as identifying hidden actions, hidden meanings, and hidden motives is an aspect of moralism, one can explain these ideas with a theory of moralism. Donald Black proposes that moralism is a direct function of the social distance and status inferiority of the target. Look for the harshest judgments, quickest suspicions, and most brutal punishments in history, and you will most often find them directed at strangers and foreigners, peasants and slaves. This helps explain the extremes of moralism historically displayed toward socially segregated cultural minorities, such as Christians in pagan Rome or Jews in medieval Christendom. And it also helps explain why such groups are perennial targets of stories about their secret evil rituals.

But neither moralism nor conspiracy theories are limited to powerless minorities and other low-status targets. From the Great Fear in seventeenth century France to the belief that “9/11 was an inside job,” citizens sometimes promulgate and accept stories about nefarious hidden conspiracies among their own leaders. Similarly, people sometimes become partisans to whichever side of the conflict appears to be the underdog, sympathizing with the needy against a bully.

As Bradley Campbell and I have argued, segments of the modern world — including much of academia and journalism — have a moral culture in which remedying intercollective inequality is the main moral concern. Social reality is by and large seen as a matter of some social groups oppressing others, leading to a moral world divided between victims and oppressors, the marginalized and the privileged. And within this Manichean distinction it is the privileged that are the deviants — the moral inferiors who attract suspicion and condemnations.

For instance, a false story published by Rolling Stone implied that members of a University of Virginia fraternity engaged in premeditated gang rape as a kind of recurring ritual or rite of passage, and this story was uncritically accepted by many just as were accusations against Christians and Jews in earlier historical periods.

The interpretation of hidden meanings and attribution of hidden motives also follows the contours of this moral system. According to guidelines published by the University of California, seemingly innocuous statements by members of cultural majorities to minorities are actually “microaggressions” that carry unpleasant hidden meanings: “Where are you from?” really means “You are not a true American;” “Why are you so quiet?” really means “Assimilate to the dominant culture.”

In a post at our now defunct blog, Campbell contrasted these nefarious hidden meanings with the hidden positive meanings said to lie behind a successful journalist’s apparently hostile and bigoted remarks:

“In the past week…we’ve seen people defending the new New York Times editor Sarah Jeong’s tweets expressing hatred toward whites by saying they aren’t expressions of hatred at all, but complaints about injustice. Thus Ezra Klein says a statement like ‘cancel white people’ is just about challenging the dominant power structure. He also says that ‘Kill all men,’ a hashtag popular among many feminists, just means, ‘It would be nice if the world sucked less for women.’”

Attributing bad meanings and motives is moralism against enemies, while attributing positive meanings and motives is partisanship toward allies.

The Joys of Unmasking

The unmasking efforts of Marxist and neo-Marxian theories proceeds along these lines, and so have several advantages in the marketplace of ideas.

They claim secret knowledge and revelations that make them highly interesting to their audience. They reveal hidden truths and dispel myths. Yet they do not contradict too much. They conform to the contours of moralism in social settings in which a particular moral culture dominates. They hew to their audience’s central assumption that the world is mainly ordered by domination, with superior groups using various means to benefit at the expense of inferior groups. To the extent they attempt to shock and surprise, it is not by questioning the centrality of oppression, or, usually, the identities of victim and oppressor. Rather, it is usually by identifying some hidden way in which something that might not have seemed exploitative actually is.

In this way they contradict apparent reality and appear interesting and important, but also potentially benefit from confirming suspicions about the deviant actions of our enemies. It is easy to know in advance whose hidden motives are bad and whose are good, whose meanings are noble and whose are dog whistles, and whether or not some social setting will turn out to contain hidden mechanisms of oppression. Ideas in the unmasking style benefit from offering surprises and secrets but are in other ways predictable and easy to intuit. Primates are good at taking sides.