WHEN ART FAILS TO IMITATE LIFE, even the unafflicted are driven to make their lives somehow imitate art. Building an inner world is exhausting: we look to film and television to show us versions of ourselves, to allow us to process our lives, to excuse them, and maybe to ennoble them. And yet, at this task, Hollywood is notoriously deficient. Some stories do not get told. Some identities are never offered up for examination.

When we’re very young, many of us subscribe to the “great man” theory of history: things are the way they are because someone wanted them to be that way. As we become educated, we learn that adults see beyond individuals and focus on systems (hence the elevation of “process” over substance, which in journalism leads to the exaltation of media reporters at the expense of other beats). The problem with the worldview of Slate, where all events are phenomenalized and all outcomes foretold by demographic destiny, is not that it threatens the “inexplicable nature of genius” or steals the spotlight from the litterateur, but rather that it erodes our sense of history, delivering us into a postapocalyptic reverie where individuals no longer shape the world except to the extent that they represent certain types. Learning to view the world from a mature, aerial perspective often coincides with losing the revolutionary sensibilities of childhood and acquiring the fatalism of the urban professional.

For those who obtain real power, though, or witness it in action, there lies the further insight that the great man theory is mostly correct, and that false consciousness lies not so much in clinging to the fantasy of individualism but in failing to realize that many seemingly impersonal institutions and processes — from Fordism to the Metropolitan Opera to the Justice Department — are in fact the expression of individual wills. When assessing the ways that Wal-Mart, one of the world’s largest employers, is shaping the 21st century, we make a grievous error if we lose sight of the Waltons, who stand directly behind the corporate Leviathan as majority shareholders.

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The answer to the abuse of sociological categories, which often but not always coincides with a pseudostatistical rigor, is not to retreat into the pseudospirituality of aesthetic formalism. Some phenomena lend themselves to systematic explanations; others do not. What’s crucial for commentators is to acknowledge the limits of modeling human behavior. We should welcome contributions from the likes of Nate Silver, who for every confident prediction issues seven warnings about how prognosticators overplay their hands. The answer to “too much sociology” is not to fall back on myth, but to embrace the priority of individual choice in the face of epistemological humility.