Transcript REASON AND FREEDOM

PERSONAL TROUBLES
AND PUBLIC ISSUES
Assigned Reading Chapter 1.
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination
Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are
a series of traps. They sense that within their
everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles,
and in this feeling, they are often quite correct…..
(C. Wright Mills)
Ordinary men/women are bounded by the private
orbits in which they live
• They are vaguely aware through ambitions and
threats of the external society wide environments
that transcend their lives.
• They lack the quality of mind that sees their
personal traps in terms of 1. society wide institutions
and spheres, 2. the interplay of man/woman within a
society, i.e. their biography, and has 3) its origins in
historical developments- e.g. industrialization, world
system etc.
The Sociological Imagination
Is the quality of mind needed to understand history and
personal biography and the relationship between the two within
a society. That is its task and its promise.
It helps us form LUCID SUMMATIONS of what is
happening in the world and within us.
1•What is the structure of society. Its institutions and the
relationship between them.
2• What period of history is it in and how is it changing.
3• What kind of men/women inhabit this society- what is the
nature of “human nature” in this society. The biographies of
people living in a particular era and within a particular social
structure.
To be able to look at structural/institutional origins of
problems, relating it to your private lives, means possessing
the sociological imagination.
(Public) Issues and (Private) Troubles
Troubles: occur within the limited social life of the individual
and involve his or her character and local environments.
What are your “local environments”? The private circuits of your
life?
Issues: are matters that transcend local environments but affect
individuals personally nonetheless.
•
An issue involves a crisis in the institutional
arrangements- a contradiction or antagonism in the way
society is structured, in that it is producing problems for
a large number of people regardless of what the people
might or might not do.
Examples of Issues vs. troubles
1.unemployment 2. War 3. Marriage and divorce
Well being: When people possess cherished values and
don’t feel them threatened
Crisis: When people possess cherished values but feel
some of them threatened.
Panic: If all their values are threatened then its total
threat or panic
Indifference: When people aren’t aware of any
cherished values and don’t feel any threat, they are
INDIFFERENT. Indifference results in political
apathy, the “I don’t care attitude”
Anxiety and Uneasiness: When people aren’t aware of
any cherished values but feel a vague sense of threat,
they experience uneasiness and anxiety
OURS IS A TIME OF UNEASINESS (i.e. anxiety)
and INDIFFERENCE.
Psychological Explanations versus the
Sociological Imagination
Mills says:
“Many great public issues as well as many private
troubles are described in terms of ‘the psychiatric” –
often in a attempt to avoid the larger issues and
problems of modern society (and to push drugs
manufactured by the pharmaceutical companies): due
to 1. a narrowing of interests to problems of Western
societies ignoring 4/5ths of the world’s population, 2.
it also arbitrarily removes individual life from the
larger institutions within which life is enacted and
which many times bear with greater pressure upon
the individual than the personal environments.”
 At the start of the 20th century there were only a dozen
recognized mental illnesses. By 1952 there were 192
(DSM I)and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorder, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) today lists 374
 According to some estimates over 90% of the US public
has some form or the other of a diagnosable mental
disorder- or so psychiatrists claim
 Instead of dealing with the structure of societies that
produce all the problems, psychologists and psychiatrists
keep inventing new labels for mental illnesses and keep
pushing drugs that are profitable for pharmaceutical
companies but eventually harm a lot of people
Problems of the Physical Sciences
Paradigms: In every age some trend of thinking becomes
Dominant (C. W. Mills, page 13 & Thomas Kuhn)
In our age the physical sciences biology, physics etc have
been dominant in shaping thought. Their method of
inquiry, the experiment has become the dominant mode
and has entered social science as well.
It has been assumed that physical sciences are
more certain and more concrete than the social sciences
And hence sociology has become subordinate to them.
This is not so..
 The Problems created by the physical sciences cannot
be solved by physical science alone, take the example
of :
– 1. nuclear weapons- they have created more problems than
they have solved.
– 2. modern technology is being used to ruin the earth’s
environment and for the sake of profit and war.
These problems that the physical sciences have created cannot be
solved by the physical sciences. Hence there is a need for social
science to solve problems faced by humankind.
Not only that, the physical sciences are by no means
certain, they are extremely limited.
Intellectual Limitations of the Physical Sciences
1. Take the case of Biology:
1. 99 % of DNA codes for no protein so its function
cannot be determined by biologists, out of the 1%
that does, 99% is repetition. All biologists know is
the 1%
2. There are over 100,000 confirmed deaths due to
medical malpractice every year in the U.S, the real
number is much higher.
3. Remove antibiotics, which were discovered by
accident, and a few basic surgical procedures that
date back to antiquity and you remove a significant
portion of the benefits of modern medicine.
Physics:
•Only 5% of the universe is visible 33% is
dark matter (that is physically unobservable) and 62% dark
energy (which also cannot be observed except indirectly
through their gravitational effect And by mathematical
calculations).
However little, sociologists might know, they still know more
than 5% of society. Often their picture of the makeup of society is
much more real than the picture of the universe presented by
physicists or the picture of the natural world presented by
biologists, just given the numbers alone, sociology is more
physically “real” than two so-called hard sciences.
Sociology is therefore not subordinate to the physical sciences
 Human knowledge in the physical sciences is
Extremely limited despite the claims made.
A little Knowledge, used for the profit motive,
concentrated in the military sector is extremely dangerous.
As a result we see that regardless of the advances in
technology, human misery around the world has not ended
but has grown since the medieval ages. More people are
dying of hunger, disease and war in the modern and now
post-modern era than in medieval times given the sheer
number of the population.
Without understanding the social structure
in which our lives are enacted, we can
never solve the problems faced by
people
To uncover this BIG picture we need SOCIOLOGY and the
SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
CLASSICAL THEMES THAT GUIDED
SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH
1. All facts have political and moral relevance:
“In a world of widely communicated nonsense,
any statement of fact is of political and moral
significance…In such a world as ours, to
practice social science is, first of all, to practice
the politics of truth.” (Mills 1959:178)
2. Restoring Social Science:
“Social science deals with problem of biography, history
and their intersection within a social structure.” (
Mills1959:161)
3. Interplay of social worlds: no country exists in a vacuum,
interconnection between nation states today, globalization
in terms of the economic, political and military gives great
structural power to the rich nations in determining affairs
of consequence in the poor nations. You have to look at
these interrelationships rather than using cheap arguments
that blame the poor and the weak/.
4. Alienation and the Human Condition:
The sense of purposelessness, of not belonging in the
world, of feeling estranged from your work, yourself,
your fellow human beings and nature- what is the source
of such estrangement? How do you measure it?