| Manning Zhang PhD Candidate Department of Sociology and Social Policy Brandeis University On April 17, 2023, the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association held a live discussion themed “Theodicy and the Problem of Meaning,” as the third event of this year’s Culture and Contemporary Life Series. Miray Philips (University of Minnesota) moderated the discussion. Zeina Al Azmeh (Selwyn College and University of Cambridge), Christina Simko (Williams College), and Biko Mandela Gray (Syracuse University) participated as panelists. You can watch the recording of this event on YouTube. Here are highlighted remarks from the discussion. This panel conversation tackled the intricacy of assigning significance to acts of violence and the experience of suffering. While certain individuals find meaning in suffering, others dismiss it, claiming that suffering lacks purpose and sacredness. The first question concerned how sociology, particularly cultural sociology, talks about theodicy and meaning. Christina Simko argued that theodicy is where sociology touches on theology and philosophy. Just as philosopher Susan Neiman contended, the obscure theological or philosophical questions may target at the confusion that 17-year-olds share towards the world. Sociology and allied social sciences share “lay” responses to these big questions. Following that, Miray Philips raised a question concerning Zeina Al Azmeh‘s contention about the division between those who have the right to attribute meaning and those whose lives are considered devoid of meaning. Philips invited Al Azmeh to elaborate on this dichotomy and share thoughts on the decolonization of the study of meaning. Al Azmeh responded to the first question from the perspective of people’s right to meaning. Her interviews with 30 exiled Syrian intellectuals, artists, and writers in the revolution suggested that the meaning of suffering is in four distinct but interconnected ways: linguistic, existential, significance, and meaning as essence. Al Azmeh observed the shift from a state where the revolutionary movement was the quest for its essential and political meaning and the reclaiming of the political meaning, gradually to a question of meaning and the loss of meaning, specifically when revolution turned to war. For her research participants, even when they took great risks to enact their political agency to fight for a better, fairer, more meaningful life, Syrians are still commonly reduced to their life – the meaning of their movements are stripped. Regarding Philips’ second question, Al Azmeh mentioned Jeffrey Alexander’s central paradox of cultural trauma theory, which regarded the failure of raising awareness of the non-Western regions’ traumas in the wider population. Al Azmeh argues that there’s no failure in delivering the message of suffering, but such messages are not always received and interpreted properly, which highlights the specificity and the misunderstanding of non-Western trauma. Al Azmeh aimed to open a research front for a decolonial cultural trauma theory, which shows examining the traumas beyond the US and Europe might qualify some theoretical assumptions about how cultural trauma processes and how meanings are made and contested, and how collective identities are changed after the tragedy. Miray Philips then asked Biko Mandela Gray if suffering is meaningless, and how the theodicy is leveraged to justify violence. “No, it’s not,” Gray answered, “but the question for me actually is what kind of meaning gets attributed to what kinds of suffering. Gray introduced that in the philosophical tradition, there are two kinds of evil in relation to theodicy: natural evil and moral evil. He argued that the question of meaning usually has little to do with the value of the sufferer’s life, but with the act of suffering itself. Theodicy is used to play a logic game with the inconvenience of the idea of the Good God, suffering, and evil in the world. Gray argues that theodicy is secularized in the modern period, where it is not God but the society that needs to be justified in front of human suffering. After the one-on-one conversations, Philips invited all the panelists to discuss how meaning and theodicy are discussed in their empirical research contexts, and their opinions on what is at stake. Al Azmeh contended that the question of theodicy emerged in its secular form, and confirmed the idea that we need to give meaning to suffering, such as religion and conversations about God. Her research suggests that the theodician question of meaning is central to the Syrian intellectuals’ work in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War. Gray made two quotes to suggest the relationship between anti-blackness and theodicy. The first one is “Not all cops are bad,” which he believes is a theodician statement to justify the goodness of the State in the face of what Black people understand as unjust violence and suffering. The second quote was made by Nancy Pelosi in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, “He sacrificed his life for justice.” Gray considered it as a socio-political theodicy, which justified George Floyd’s death retrospectively as a good thing in order for the country to gain justice and progress. He also mentioned Afro-pessimists’ thoughts about the immateriality of the question of meaning for Black life, insofar as their personal meaning-making of suffering cannot register in the larger socio-political consciousness. Simko argued that what is at stake is ultimately life and death, in response to different forms of violence. Drawing from her own research, she cites Tom Brokaw and NBC’s statement shortly after the 9/11 tragedy, labeling it as an act of war. This example serves to propose a significant juncture in the theodicy of 9/11’s history, rather than approaching it as a heinous crime that should have been addressed through international law. She insisted that there are suffering that we should and must ameliorate, and there should be spaces in social science to further discuss it. Philips’ next question was about the role of academics in front of inequality, suffering, and violence. Gray made a critical comment that “wokeness” is a euphemism for a racial slur. He pointed to the academics’ responsibility to clearly define the conditions of violence and adopt the morality of care in teaching and research. Simko echoed the emphasis on the modality of care in classrooms. She also urged for more open space to discuss how to better explain and ameliorate the violence and suffering, and what kinds of suffering we have to hold on to as a remainder. Al Azmeh argued that constraints towards academics may vary, and a universalist view on academics’ role may be misleading or even dangerous. For instance, intellectuals working under the dictatorship may cause incredibly high costs to exercise the role that academics can take on in a neoliberalized academia. But across different contexts, she believed it is important for academics to keep asking “why suffering and violence exist,” instead of accepting it as a reality or distancing themselves psychologically from it. The last question pertained to the essential questions concerning suffering and theodicy that should be further investigated in the future. Al Azmeh contended that we still have a long way to overcome our internalized biases in the sociology of meaning, which creates selective solidarities that reinforces the “global color line.” Within the realm of cultural sociology, it is urgent to unsettle the hegemonic theories by engaging with the thoughts and analyses of the Global South. Gray quoted Toni Morrison’s book Sula to ask a question: How can we move away from theodician reasoning and instead begin to think about how to deal with those who have been deemed as evil? During the Q&A session, the audience raised a couple of thought-provoking questions, delving into topics like the connection between Western modernity, the privileges of thoughts, and the weaponized meaning. The panelists provided insightful responses to these inquiries. Bios of Participants Dr. Zeina Al Azmeh is the Centenary Research Fellow at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and a guest lecturer at the Department of Sociology. She is also a research associate at the Centre for Governance and Human Rights, University of Cambridge. With a multidisciplinary approach that bridges cultural and political sociology, Zeina’s research centers on the experiences of academics and intellectuals in exile. Dr. Biko Mandela Gray is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Syracuse University’s College of Arts & Sciences. His work operates at the nexus and interplay between continental philosophy of religion and theories and methods in African American religion. His research is primarily on the connection between race, subjectivity, religion, and embodiment, exploring how these four categories play on one another in the concrete space of human experience. Miray Philips is currently a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Minnesota. In the fall of 2023, she will join the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department. Her research explores the transnational politics, meaning, and memory of violence and suffering. She is especially interested in how religion and rights shape interpretations of violence and chart trajectories for mobilization. Dr. Christina Simko is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Williams College and the author of The Politics of Consolation: Memory and the Meaning of September 11 (Oxford University Press, 2015). Her article “The Problem of Suffering in the Age of Prozac” was published in To Fix or to Heal: Patient Care, Public Health, and the Limits of Biomedicine, edited by Institute Research Director Joseph E. Davis and Ana Marta Gonzáles (New York University Press, 2016). |
section CULTURE 