A Meditation and Manifesto for a Renunciative Social Science
April 18, 2025
I’ve use the word “manifesto” in the title for this essay because it ended up being a longer piece of writing than I expected and it also lays out some fundaments of an approach to social science inquiry that I suppose are “manifesto-like.” But I also urge the reader to take the declarative tone of the word with a grain of salt. Ultimately, this essay is more of a mediation than a manifesto (which is why “meditation” is the first word in the title). It is an invitation to think about how an ethos of renunciation can enrich the way we approach social science investigation.
Please also don’t feel like you have to complete this essay in one read (or at all). There are repeating themes and novel observations threaded throughout but no big surprises tucked away at the end of the essay that are worth skipping ahead for. I also want to suggest that the presence and stillness of mind that is required to digest a piece of writing like this isn’t too different than what’s required for any kind of meditative practice. So you could approach the reading of this essay as an opportunity to enter into the weltanschauung it is describing.
Anyhow, here goes…
Connecting the Dots between Doubt and Renunciation
Scientific investigation could be described as the practice of learning how to doubt in a systematic way. The reason why we’re bothering to collect data is because we’re trying to advance a new explanation of something, or improve an existing explanation.
At the bottom of this desire to learn and say something new there’s a restlessness with the accepted wisdom. The accepted wisdom must be doubted, because this doubt is the necessary precondition for the act of scientific investigation.
There is something inherently ascetic about the mindset required of this process, even if it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with spirituality or faith—or might even appear to be its opposite. Doubt is the renunciation of our assumptions of what necessarily must be true; doing without these comforting foundations.
Ancient ascetics took on an analogous challenge when they chose to sleep without relying on a supporting surface—no lying down or leaning against trees—you only slept while sitting or standing upright. The only foundation was self-created; relying on your own backbone.
It bears noting, however, that the point of these austerities was not to celebrate individual self-reliance but to renounce the self, and to demonstrate how the individual could accomplish seemingly impossible things when they opened themselves up to a power greater than themselves.
And what is this greater power? For the spiritual ascetic it is God, of course. Austerities are used to calm the passions of the body so that the intellect can more freely contemplate the super-reality of the ultimate being and in so doing, understand the nature of existence.
Scientists are also, in their own way, trying to understand the nature of existence and this process is also premised on the existence of something that is greater than the self. You use your research to understand the workings of a larger physical reality (and sociocultural reality—in the case of sociologists). Research methodology could be viewed as a scientific equivalent to the austerities embraced by spiritual ascetics…sort of.
The methodology helps you to discern whether what you think you are seeing in your data is “really there”; correcting for the play of bias (which occupies the same place in the schema of secular-scientific knowledge as the worldly passions that spiritual ascetics seek to bring under control).
But a methodology isn’t really the same thing as an ascetics. Methodological solutions are premised on the idea that the bias of a researcher can be corrected by a protocol that governs the way you gather and analyze information, but it doesn’t attack the source of the bias itself. In many ways, modern science is still lagging far behind the ancient ascetics in its appreciation of this distinction.
Mainstream science tends to depict knowledge creation as an additive process: science adds “more” to our existing knowledge base. The more you know the better off you are. And this process directs us entirely to the world outside ourselves. The ascetics, on the other hand, viewed prayer and meditation as the “science of sciences” (the first science); a regimen as rigorous as any research methodology which pointed inward and is used to act directly on our perceptions and emotions.
Before we can see what lies “outside” of us; we have to better understand what’s going on inside of us (also noting that, from a sociological perspective, the stuff that’s “inside” us has been shaped by the larger social context and so, it’s by engaging our “insides” that we most palpably encounter the influence of the external reality on our emotions, desires, instincts and beliefs).
Understanding Ascetic Practice as a Science of the Self
Today there is a growing awareness within social science research for the value of meditation and of things like “mindfulness” that are similar to the qualities of “watchfulness” and “stillness” that are extoled by spiritual ascetics. But for the most part, the selves of social researchers are still treated as if they are completely separate of the research they are producing. Furthermore, the scholars who see this as a problem have mainly concerned themselves with getting social scientists to become more aware of our social background and how it influences our research.
But ascetic practice takes this all several steps further. The ascetic is not just concerned with seeing these influences, but controlling and transforming them. The goal is to use rigorous self-examination to locate a space in yourself that is not wholly subsumed by all the social identities and obligations you’ve been saddled with; and to deliberately change the way you live and interact with others, so that you’re more open to this other aspect of yourself.
If we think about these practices in the context of a research project, it’s possible that they could improve the researcher’s ability to evaluate their data, but again, these practices are not the same thing as a research methodology. They are geared toward dismantling your social programming so you can see more of what’s “out there” in the social world (stuff that your programming wouldn’t otherwise allow you to see).
Notably, this is a change-oriented view of the self and scientific practice. It views social problems as the result of deeply engrained patterns of social interaction that are tied to widely accepted social convention and institutions; and posits that you can only change these problems by creating new kinds of space for interaction that are not determined by the status quo.
And it also insists that the practice of creating these spaces starts with the inner life of the researcher. These motives are not so different from those of the ancient ascetics and the monastic orders they founded. You retreat from the world—not to escape—but to create an autonomous space from which you can re-engage the world (in such a way that you can transform it rather than being perpetually over-determined by it).
This process also provides another perspective on what it means to be “objective” (an idea that is closely related, historically and intellectually to the ascetic virtue of “dispassion”). Objectivity isn’t just an intellectual stance you adopt, it is something that has to be actively generated—and painfully won—by practices of self discipline that engage the person as a social, emotional and embodied being (but which also seek to transcend all of this).
Becoming more “objective” or “dispassionate” about the “ways of the world” doesn’t mean you ignore all of this stuff. To the contrary, it means you have to pay much closer to attention to it; you have to become a lot more mindful of what’s flowing through you, so that you can better understand how all this stuff is shaping the way you think and act.
Clearly, this isn’t a kind of objectivity that is value free. It is guided by value commitments (which at minimum allow you identify a problem you want to fix or better understand) and it is change-oriented, precisely because the practitioner is invested in what happens to real people in the real world.
Nevertheless, there is an emphasis on cultivating a space inside yourself that allows you to see familiar things in new ways and to create new perspectives (and social networks) that can be used to examine and transform these things.
From a sociological perspective—as George Simmel intimated many decades ago—this “objectivity” is best understood relativistically. It’s about creating a space or a position that allows you more intellectual freedom (more detachment) relative to a given set of social influences or social processes).
And this is where asceticism looms significant, once again. It’s easy to criticize ascetic spirituality for being other-worldly—being too invested in a “life hereafter” that clouds our ability to understand the issues of the day. But in many ways, asceticism is more practical than anything contemporary social science has to offer, because it understands that the kind of objectivity I’ve described can’t be cultivated simply by reading theory and adopting a new intellectual standpoint on things. It requires a change in daily bodily, social and intellectual practice, down to the finest minutiae, which must be approached in a manner similar to athletic training.
You can’t simply profess; you have to “do”; and be committed to this “doing” for the long term. And again, these practices are not the same thing as your actual/formal research, whereby you study the world around you (even if that world happens to consist of the inner lives or identities of others).
This is not about producing scientific knowledge about the self. What I’ve just described is the regimen of practices through which you act on your self, which feeds back into how you do your research. I’ve described these practices as secular version of prayer, only to indicate that they don’t require a particular kind of faith commitment, but they certainly don’t exclude faith-based prayer either. What matters most is how these practices feed into the schematic that governs your research activities (and your theory).
Toward a Renunciative Social Science
The big problem, however, is that these practices of the self are not a serious object of discussion in contemporary academia—at least not in the way I’ve just described. There are no manuals out there for sociologists that offer practical tips for how you go about doing what I’ve just explained; nothing comparable at all to the great monastic texts—like, for example, Unseen Warfare or the Philokalia, which give the reader very precise and detailed instructions about how to cultivate stillness and war against the passions.
And the silence on this matter points toward a huge contradiction—or tension—that lies at the heart of contemporary sociological practice. There is a sociology which is invested in creating social stability by rationalizing the virtues and benefits of things as they are. It acknowledges that there are social problems, of course, but it also presumes that existing social institutions have the capacity to solve all of these problems and that, at the end of the day, you make things better by helping people get more connected to established institutions.
This kind of sociology has little use for the kind of dispassionate regimens of self discipline I’ve just described. It isn’t particularly interested in creating new forms of consciousness/ Instead, it views the role of the sociologist as a caretaker and ambassador of the existing social order. The evolution of society proceeds by maximizing the integration of “lost souls” into this order.
On the other hand, a sociology that is steeped in an ethos of renunciation is premised on the understanding that there is always some relationship between a social problem and patterns of social interaction that we take to be normal and desirable (which are typically threaded into larger social institutions). Io effectively address the problem, you have to be prepared to change your relationship to all the social dynamics that are feeding into it (a renunciation that extends beyond the care of the personal self to the operation of the group, the socius, and their relationships to the natural world).
Society evolves precisely through the process of creating new spaces from which to engage these sedimented ways of being and doing (manifested in dominant institutions, identities, etc). If you acknowledge this much, it also means that you have to be willing to see the vestiges of these problematic social relations within yourself, and you need to think about how you control your relationship to these things in your personal life, so that you can see with “clearer eyes” as you move forward with your teaching and research in the public sphere.
This is the kind of sociology that requires an ethos of renunciation and which still has something to learn from the ancient ascetics. Social change is also, always, a process of perpetually “dying to the world”; sloughing off the old skin so the new life can shine through.
A renunciative sociology should always be looking to interrogate and refine the moral-cultural frameworks that we use to make sense of our social world. The analysis of these these ways of seeing goes hand in hand with a process of renunciation.
We diagnose and analyze these things so as to put them behind us; to weaken the hold they have over us. And this process is manifested not only through our research but through practices of the self that recalibrate the intellect—allowing it to operate in a way that is not strictly defined by what is (i.e. prevailing patterns of socialization/interaction).
Of course, all of this still begs the question of what these practices of the self really entail. For the ancient ascetics, they were centered around physical austerities (fasting, the discarding of possessions) and meditation. These practices are not irrelevant to contemporary sociological practice or contemporary life in general (there’s ample research extolling the benefits of diet, exercise, frugal living and meditation).
But as this passage has indicated, there is also a kind of renunciation specific to sociological practice. That is, we are challenged to renounce things that are specifically sociological in nature (a type of social narrative or ideology, social interaction, or social hierarchy etc) and the influence of these things can be countered by an ascetic practice that is, similarly, sociological in nature – meaning that stuff that it is focused on … the things it is rejecting and the practices it is inculcating, can all be understood in sociological terms.
So what is the sociological equivalent of ascetic practice? Or what are the components of a sociological asceticism? There are already many things that sociologists are doing that fall in this category: social practices and beliefs that are, effectively, renounced (even if the language of renunciation isn’t used) and practices that are used, in a more or less systematic way, to cultivate a different way of seeing.
This essay has only suggested an answer to these kinds of questions. It’s main goal has been simply to put these questions to you, and to invite you to think about the potential relevance of ascetic practice and sociological practice. I’ll do my best to provide more granular and practical examples of what this all entails in my upcoming posts.