Facing Up to Modernity: Excursions in Society, Politics, and Religion by Peter L. Berger (review)

682 BOOK REVIEWS Facing Up to Modernity: Excursions in Society, Politics, and Religion. By PETER L. BERGER. New York, Basic Books, 1977, Pp. ix & iss. $11.50. Peter Berger has defended the possibility of a value-free sociology in many places, and he has attempted such a sociology in a variety of books, including The Social Construction of Reality (1966) and The Sacred Canopy (1967). He is at loggerheads in this enterprise with many contemporary social theorists who see all social science as essentially valueladen . But Berger has another face which he has never hesitated to reveal. He is a human being with intense moral and religious concerns which he has spelled out in numerous works from The Noise of Solemn Assemblies (1961) and The Precario1ts Vision (1961) through A. Rumcr of Angels (1969) to Pyramids of Sacrifice (1974). Both sides of his career appear in the essays and addresses composed over the past dozen years and gathered together now under the title Facing up to Modernity. Even in these pieces, Berger wishes to keep distinct the labors of the sociologist trying " to see the social world as clearly as possible, to understand it without being swayed by [his] own hopes and fears" and the reflections of one who is also " a concerned citizen of the United States in a very troubled period, as well as ... a Christian." Seeing the two threads juxtaposed to each other does help to unravel a puzzle evoked by his writings. Many readers have been surprised that he has maintained an essentially conservative social and religious posture despite the relativizing character of his sociology. What Facing up to Modernity makes clear, unsystematic though it is, is that that the conservatism is a consequence rather than an accident. This relationship stands out in a speech delivered at Loyola University of Chicago in 1970 and presented here as an introduction . The sociologist is subversive of any established society inasmuch as he endeavors to look without prejudice at structures which are usually taken for granted and inasmuch as he tends to highlight their contingency and relativity. Thus Berger's essays "Marriage and the Construction of Reality" and " Toward a Sociological Critique of Psychoanalysis " suggest the ways in which one might begin to study the normally hidden and always problematic functions of institutions. But the other side of the sociological revelation of contingency and relativity is the exposure of the precariousness of a human situation in which all social frameworks take on the character of "Potemkin villages" (a metaphor used frequently in Berger's books). A sensible person hesitates, then, to demolish the inadequate buildings of the present in the name of a future village which would itself be man-made and therefore no more godly than the ones demolished. Facing up to Modernity issues a strong caveat in the face of critics who would proclaim the virtues of an imaginary socialism as a final alternative to the weaknesses of the capitalistic system and even in the face of those who would lightly propose counter-revolution in the socialist countries. Es- BOOK REVIEWS 688 sential to the whole argument is the claim that the chief difficulties of capitalist and socialist societies come not so much from their diverse economic arrangements as from the rationalization and bureaucratization affecting all modern technological societies. Berger's conservatism does not rest, however, simply on a recognition of the common weaknesses of social orders. Beyond the shaky walls of the " Potemkin village," he glimpses other dime'Il.sions of reality which must be taken into account. It is people who erect the structures, who fend off chaos through them, who suffer from their inadequacies and from their collapse. Berger the moralist protests against the pain inflicted-at times intentionally, at times mindlessly-on people in the present age. His protest goes out no less against the defence of murder in the name of conservatism (vide the Calley case) than against its defense in the name of revolution (vide the Manson case). In The Pyramids of Sacrifice, he argued at great length for a calculus of pain in approaching development strategies for the third world. The argument is more rudimentary in Facing up to Modernity, but...