‘Slip, Sliding Away’: Are we any closer to understanding the stuff of which social reality is made?

For all the proliferation of models, facts, findings and speculations that have accumulated in the last 20 years, are we any closer to our destination? Do we better understand in any sense the basic phenomenon of social reality? What do the loaded words ‘better,’ ‘understand,’ ‘basic,’ ‘phenomenon,’ ‘social’ and ‘reality’ mean? Are we thus destined to get no more than brief glimpses into each of these loaded words (really questions) which then vanish into haze? The author does not intend to answer these questions because he is not sure that there ever are answers in the final sense to fundamental social problems. What he does hope to accomplish is to provide his own incomplete glimpses into them. If we cannot give complete answers, then perhaps we can at least formulate better questions.