The Anthem Companion to Peter Berger

By Jonathan B. Imber

Peter L. Berger (1929–2017) was among the most prominent sociologists of the past half-century. He co-authored with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, considered to be a modern classic of social science. His work on social theory, the sociology of religion, third-world development, and the role of capitalism in modern life define his enduring importance as a leading figure in social science. Berger established an international reputation for his various studies of economic development in different parts of the world, including Central America and South Africa.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jan 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839984563

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INTRODUCTION

Jonathan B. Imber

This collection of essays on the life and work of Peter Ludwig Berger (March 17, 1929–June 27, 2017)¹ offers a broad perspective on his many contributions to sociology² and social theory. But his contributions also go well beyond these fields. His uses of both empirical observation and theoretical insight made Peter the most effective kind of activist, always committed to arguing about how to help people in various nations help themselves.³ His meditations on religion, secularism, capitalism, mediating structures, and pluralism are living proof that he saw in quite familiar commitments to family, community, and nation, those ingredients that contribute to what has lately been called flourishing. He could not be easily pigeonholed to one political side or the other. Faith and reason were for him incompatible with ideology.⁴

I first met Peter L. Berger in the mid-1970s when he was president of the Eastern Sociological Society. We met again in 1981 when his wife Brigitte hired me at Wellesley College, where I have remained for the past 40 years. Both Peter and Brigitte were everything I wanted to be as a sociologist with their ever broadening and deepening erudition that was always directed to matters of public interest and importance. With my appointment in 1998 as an Editor-in-Chief of Society, I began a fruitful collaboration with Peter and what was then the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture and what later became the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs. We worked together on many conferences that were eventually published in the journal as well as in books. This was what Peter sometimes referred to as the business side of our relationship.

I was fortunate to know Peter over these same years in special ways that others close to him knew him. I have never been very good at remembering jokes. Peter offered a constant supply of them every time we met to discuss our work together. One sociologist who reviewed Peter’s book on humor wrote, Consider it a benevolent and profound sermon about the possibilities of benign humor for lifting the human spirit.⁵ This way of characterizing Peter’s approach to social reality is an acknowledgment of the possibility of a transcendent understanding of that reality, however constructed. Peter’s careful attention to world affairs always illuminated his optimism but without a moral squint that can turn optimism into utopian pipedreams. His judgments were consistently tempered by his acknowledgment of the everyday realities of human frailty and confusion. He knew his vocation as a sociologist was never to be overly sociological; that is, he and Brigitte were given to a great generosity of spirit that brought them together on various collaborative projects and that regularly led to invitations to anyone who understood the power of faith and reason to improve human life as it is lived each day.⁶

Peter and I worked together on his longstanding project on pluralism, approaches to which are addressed in several essays in this volume. Already in 1998, he convened a conference on conflict and mediation in pluralist societies, covering empirically-based reports on 11 nations. In his conclusion he wrote:

As the normative order of society is concerned, the single most important consequence of modernization is the pluralization of beliefs and values. Despite various challenges, including bloody ones, premodern societies frequently had a reasonable chance of maintaining a unified system of norms that could command allegiance (be it by force or more or less freely) from the great majority of the population. Modernization makes such a project more and more difficult. Thus pluralism becomes not just a fact but a virtue – to wit, the ideal of people with different beliefs and values living together in a state of civic peace.⁷

He grasped the global significance of trying to determine what factors were necessary (though not always sufficient) to unite people, while at the same time acknowledging and respecting their differences. He often remarked that the hardest position to maintain on the most controversial and divisive matters was the one in the middle between opposing views. His memoir about his early life (and addressed in this volume by Samuel Heilman) is a testament to a person who knew just how difficult staying in the middle could be. He never lost his Viennese sensibilities.⁸

Between July 2010 and May 2017, Peter joined the ranks of bloggers under the auspices of The American Interest.⁹ In more than 350 blog posts, amounting to well over a half million words, he offered a cornucopia of writings on religion, politics, and much else, including refreshing and incisive humor about the facts and foibles of this world. Apropos the challenge of maintaining a middle position on the most contentious matters, his account of the Marx Memorial Library in north London combined clear insight about the fate of Marxism with his abiding wit: A difficult but workable political slogan: Moderates of all flavors unite: You have nothing to lose except the applause of screaming mobs.¹⁰ Peter L. Berger was least of all interested in having the last laugh, committed as he was to a pluralist credo of mutual understanding of remembrance and reconciliation.

Jonathan B. Imber

Medfield, Massachusetts

July 4, 2022

1See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/us/obituary-peter-berger-dead-theologian-sociologist.html?emc=edit_tnt_20170629&nlid=20621639&tntemail0=y&_r=0.

2See James D. Hunter and Stephen C. Ainley, eds., Making Sense of Modern Times: Peter L. Berger and the Vision of Interpretive Sociology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

3His work with Richard John Neuhaus was instrumental in helping to shape debate about social policy in the last quarter of the twentieth century. See To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1977). Reissued as To Empower People: From State to Civil Society, edited by Michael Novak (Washington, D.C., AEI Press, 1996, 2nd ed.).

4This is further illustrated in two novels he published, The Enclaves (1965) under the pseudonym of Felix Bastian; and Protocol of a Damnation (1975). For an account of these works, see Jay Mechling, Peter L. Berger’s Novels of Precarious Vision. Sociological Inquiry, Vol. 54, No. 4, 1984, pp. 359–381.

5Gary Alan Fine, Review of Peter L. Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience. Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 27, No. 4 (July, 1998): 484.

6A recent example of this sociological perspective is powerfully illustrated in Ilana M. Horwitz, God, Grades, and Graduation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).

7Peter L. Berger, ed., The Limits of Social Cohesion: Conflict and Mediation in Pluralist Societies – A Report of the Bertelsmann Foundation to the Club of Rome (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), pp. 352–353. See also Peter L. Berger, Four Faces of Global Culture, in The National Interest, Fall 1997: 23–29.

8See James L. Nolan, Jr., Book Review of Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World without Becoming a Bore. Journal of Classical Sociology, Vol. 12, No. 3–4: 559–562.

9Access at: https://www.the-american-interest.com/v/peter-berger/.

10 Peter L. Berger, The Marx Memorial Library. Blog post, The American Interest, December 1, 2016. Robert K. Merton mimicked Marx similarly: Insiders and Outsiders in the domain of knowledge, unite. You have nothing to lose but your claims. You have a world of understanding to win. (Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge. American Journal of Sociology, 1972, Vol. 78: 9–47.

Chapter 1

PLURALITY, CHOICE, AND THE DYNAMICS OF DOUBT

Jerry Z. Muller

Peter Berger wrote about a remarkable range of subjects in the course of his long career. But there were some key themes to which he returned time and again, with variations and refinements. One of those themes is the inevitability of what he called plurality, that is the existence of multiple religions and worldviews in modern, liberal societies, and the challenges they posed not only to religious institutions but to social and political ones as well. He explained why the dynamics of modern, liberal society created an imperative to choose. Plurality and choice generated some characteristic challenges to institutions and characteristic dilemmas for the individual. Berger explored these challenges and dilemmas with great perspicacity during the five decades that separated his early The Precarious Vision: A Sociologist Looks at Social Fictions and Christian Faith (1961) from his late In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions without Becoming a Fanatic (2009, written with his Dutch colleague, Anton Zijderveld) and The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age (2014). Berger’s analyses of these processes and dilemmas remain as insightful as when he first formulated them over half a century ago. They are arguably more relevant than ever for understanding contemporary cultural and political dynamics.

One of the key conceptual coinages with which Berger explored these issues was his notion of plausibility structures. The idea, in a nutshell, is this: to the extent that knowledge is socially constructed or conditioned, what counts as plausible knowledge depends on social context. A key function of institutions such as religions, political parties, and professional milieus is to render certain ideas into premises, that is, to make them taken for granted, and to render other ideas inadmissible or unthinkable. One of Berger’s favorite examples was the notion of natural law, which is taken for granted as true, rational, and universal in Roman Catholic circles, but is often regarded with skepticism outside of such circles. (Berger often repeated this example, and many others, across the decades. He cited the dictum of Rabbi Meir of Vilna [Berger’s own creation] If an author cannot borrow from himself, from whom can he borrow?¹) Berger took the classical Catholic theological formulation Outside the Church there is no salvation and translated it into his sociological terminology as No plausibility outside the appropriate plausibility structure.² That theme was adumbrated in The Precarious Vision under the rubric of social fictions and most fully explicated in The Social Construction of Reality (1966, with Thomas Luckmann) and The Sacred Canopy: Elements of A Sociological Theory of Religion (1967).

In formulating his concept, Berger drew upon several disparate sources. One was social role theory, as developed in American sociological theory from George Herbert Mead through Robert K. Merton. Berger spelled out the implicitly dramatic and fictional conceptions of social life that lay behind that theory. In The Precarious Vision, he characterized society as a dramatic fiction, a vocabulary he soon dropped in favor of plausibility structures.

Another of Berger’s sources was the philosophical anthropology of the German social theorist, Arnold Gehlen. Gehlen maintained that because human instincts are insufficient for survival, humans are deeply dependent on culture, that is, on humanly produced institutions that provide norms for proper behavior. These norms are created at some point, and are then internalized by subsequent generations. For Gehlen, man’s natural instinctual impoverishment makes him fundamentally dependent on this second nature of culture and institutions. Man’s instinctual flexibility also allows for human survival in a remarkable range of environments.³ This second nature is not inborn but learned, maintained, and reinforced by social interaction. It is these social contacts and our responses to them that makes the culture of institutions subjectively plausible to us. Thus, the continuity of plausibility structures over time depends on the circles of people with whom one interacts (what Merton had termed reference groups.⁴) Our identity depends in good part on our adherence to the dominant definitions of reality and the norms of the institutions of which we are a part. Furthermore, our ability to act depends in good part on having a stock of taken-for-granted assumptions about how to think and behave. Without them, we would be virtually paralyzed by our need to think everything through for ourselves.

In a series of works, Gehlen maintained that modern institutions were relatively weak, at least compared to their archaic predecessors, and this fact created dilemmas for modern individuals. Berger picked up on this theme, tying it to the theme of existentialist thinkers like Heidegger and Sartre that individuals are in fact undetermined, faced with the possibility and need for decision, and hence haunted by a certain degree of anxiety.⁵ Berger thus used perspectives from American role theory and Gehlenian anthropology to explain the social background of themes in individual psychology first articulated by European existentialists.

Building upon these perspectives, one of Berger’s ongoing interests was the way in which social structures created dilemmas for individuals. Merton too was interested in this theme, which he tackled under the rubrics of role strain and sociological ambivalence.⁶ But while Merton was primarily interested in the dilemmas created by membership in professional contexts (as bureaucrats, physicians, or scientists), Berger’s focus lay elsewhere: in macro-institutions such as religions, and on the micro level, in the way in which these strains and ambivalences were felt by the individual (drawing upon the phenomenological approach of his teacher, Alfred Schutz). Though Merton is best known as a sociologist of science, his interests and significance as a thinker stretch far beyond that field. So too, with Berger: though he is best known as a sociologist of religion, his thinking encompassed far larger themes. Indeed, almost everything he wrote about the social dynamics of religion applies to nonreligious ideological communities. Sometimes he himself offered such analyses; other extensions are there for the taking.

The driving historical force behind the phenomena that most interested Berger was what he called pluralization. In premodern societies, he argued (with Europe primarily in mind), most people lived under a monopoly of plausibility structures, namely of one religion or another, supported by the state. Under such circumstances, most people had little occasion to call into question the taken-for-granted assumptions of their faith, and those who did were condemned as heretics. Then, beginning with the Protestant Reformation, that monopoly was successfully contested. The result, at first, was the establishment of different religious monopolies in different polities. But over time, Western societies developed mechanisms by which diverse religions could coexist in the same polity, under conditions of social peace. This process of pluralization set the stage for the condition that Berger dubbed plurality, a situation in which diverse human groups (ethnic, religious, or however differentiated) live together under conditions of social peace and social interaction with one another.⁷ It might, or might not, be accompanied by pluralism, that is an ideological embrace of this situation as fundamentally salutary. Berger was a pluralist who recognized and explored the perils of plurality.

Whether embraced or resisted, plurality created novel challenges for institutions, religious and otherwise. For peaceful social interaction with people of different worldviews sooner or later fosters the suspicion that different beliefs and practices may not be perverse, insane, or evil. Slowly but surely, the thought obtrudes that, maybe, these people have a point. With that thought, the previously taken-for-granted view of reality becomes shaky. The result is what Berger called cognitive contamination.⁸ With that, previous taken-for-granted identities become precarious (a condition that in his early Precarious Vision, he dubbed precarity, though he soon abandoned this neologism). One of his key corollaries is that under modern conditions, religious identity—and eventually, other identities—is no longer perceived as a matter of fate, but of choice. Religious communities thus become voluntary associations, sometimes in spite of their traditional theology.⁹

This sets into motion a variety of processes. The first is that religions that previously exercised a monopoly over the interpretation of reality within a particular plausibility structure now have a need for an articulated defense of the previously take-for-granted. That is, they require legitimation by theologians, ideologists whose function is to provide explanations of why the religion’s tenets and practices ought to be chosen.¹⁰

Under conditions of plurality, the fundamental structure faced by all religions is that of market competition. They must compete to hold onto existing adherents and to make new ones (through proselytization). That in turn gives rise to several typical processes. Religious officials must now adapt their product (their message) to their audiences. They do so in two ways. One is to try to discover the preferences of their potential consumers, preferences that are likely to vary depending upon class, region, or ethnicity. As Berger put it in 1967,

Consumer demand in upper-middle-class suburbia in America, for instance, is different in this respect from consumer demand in the rural South. Given the variability in the degree of secularization of different strata, the secularizing influence of these strata as religious consumers will vary. But inasmuch as secularization is a global trend, there is a global tendency for religious contents to be modified in a secularizing direction. In the extreme cases (as in liberal Protestantism and Judaism) this may lead to the deliberate excision of all or nearly all supernatural elements from the religious tradition, and a legitimation of the continued existence of the institution that once embodied the tradition in purely secular terms. In other cases it may just mean that the supernatural elements are deemphasized or pushed into the background, while the institution is sold under the label of values congenial to secularized consciousness […].

Since the socially significant relevance of religion is primarily in the private sphere, consumer preference reflects the needs of this sphere. […] As a result, the religious institutions have accommodated themselves to the moral and therapeutic needs of the individual in his private life. This manifests itself in the prominence given to private problems in the activity and promotion of contemporary religious institutions—the emphasis on family and neighborhood as well as on the psychological needs of the private individual.¹¹

One effect of market competition is a degree of product standardization, in keeping with what his fellow sociologist, Philip Rieff, dubbed the triumph of the therapeutic.

Insofar as the religious needs of certain strata of clients or potential clients are similar, the religious institutions catering to these needs will tend to standardize their products accordingly. For example, all religious institutions oriented toward the upper-middle-class market in America will be under pressure to secularize and to psychologize their products—otherwise, the chances of these being bought diminish drastically. Thus even the Catholic priest in suburbia is much less likely to talk about Fatima than to engage in a dialogue with some available psychiatrist on religion and mental health. His Protestant and Jewish colleagues, of course, are likely to have legitimated their whole operations as some kind of family psychotherapy long ago.¹²

Yet in keeping with this market-like structure, religious organizations that seek to remain competitive must also engage in product differentiation. They must argue that for one reason or another—historical, theological, therapeutic, or aesthetic—their brand is actually superior, and that potential adherents ought to choose them rather than some religious or secular rival.¹³ At the same time as they compete, the structure of plurality means that religious communities must also co-operate. Recognizing that their coexistence depends on a degree of mutual tolerance and even respect, they are incentivized to engage in ecumenical and interfaith activities which civilize and to a degree regulate the competition.¹⁴

Another strategy to retain adherents under conditions of plurality is that of social and cultural encapsulation, that is, the creation of a subculture in which members are protected from cognitive contagion by minimizing social and cultural contact with outsiders. Such practices include separate educational and social institutions, voluntary endogamy, and other restrictions on close contact with others.¹⁵ They also include cognitive defenses: avoiding sources of information that call the group’s taken-for-granted assumptions into question, and classifying the bearers of dissonance under a category that totally discredits them and anything they might have to say—they’re sinners or infidels, they belong to an inferior race, they’re caught in false consciousness because of their class or gender.¹⁶

The moral and even theological upside of plurality, Berger thought, was that contact with other religions, ideologies, and worldviews creates the possibility of purifying one’s own, of separating the worthwhile wheat from the more dubious chaff. Berger was himself a pluralist. He explained why plurality was ineluctable, and he thought it intellectually and spiritually fructifying.¹⁷ But he was deeply concerned by its potential downsides, both personal and societal.

One benign way in which Berger thought that individuals confronted by a variety of competing conceptions of reality deal with their situation is by mental compartmentalization. Berger’s term for this is relevance structures (a term he took from Schutz): differing structures of thought are treated as relevant in different areas of life.¹⁸ The scientific, materialistic conceptions of the world needed to build a bridge, fly a plane, or operate on a patient can be embraced when one is at work as an engineer, pilot, or surgeon, but then tacitly abandoned or mentally hived off when one is meditating or praying. Though this entails a great deal of intellectual inconsistency, most people, Berger observed, are content to be inconsistent.

But there were also less benign possibilities—and realities.

On the personal level, plurality can create a sense of meaninglessness or paralysis. Confrontation with numerous, divergent perspectives about what to believe leads to doubt, and if that doubt leads to the conclusion that there is no truth, or no way to make compelling choices between the alternatives at hand, the result can be a sense of spiritual vertigo or meaninglessness.¹⁹ That in turn creates a market for various therapeutic practices, ideologies, and institutions that promise to fill the void and guide their followers to their real or more reliable identity. New institutions emerge that offer to individuals an entire package of beliefs, norms, and identities.²⁰

That, for Berger, helps explain the ongoing attraction of fundamentalism—religious or political. Fundamentalism is a response to the condition of plurality created by modernity, a