Sum 7

               W.E. B. Du Bois ideas of the veil and double consciousness or twoness can be represented by just about everyone in one way or another I’m sure. Everyone would have their own circumstances and conditions pertaining to their situation. Are there ever any situations where there’s a positive veil? I was thinking earlier of an attractive girl interviewing and receiving a job that she’s under qualified for, where would that be in relation to this concept? Then I got to thinking about how the military jury (in the video we watched for class) got to be there, which was probably an easy journey if they had connections through the family or just an advantage because they’re of a middle or higher class and their white.  So I’ll take that as an answer to my question.

                To make sure I have this stuff straight, I understand the veil as the characteristics of a person that most often negatively, but can sometimes positively, affect them. I believe the double consciousness to be the recognition of the characteristics that give you your veil. Du Bois, being a black man with an English education was able to see, very clearly, the differences in how he was treated in his environment compared to the white men around him and the privileges that weren’t offered to him.

                He had good ideas and concepts that I bet helped other people realize that they were in a similar situation and gave them motivation and the support to back their argument up. The Tuskegee Airmen could’ve even been some of the few that he’s helped lay foundations for.

Sum Blog 6

               Never before have I considered the concept of a sociologist making observations on their studies from the outside until reading Dorothy Smith’s piece. She explains it best, here; ‘Even to be a stranger is to enter a world constituted from within as strange. The strangeness itself is the mode in which it is experienced.’ At the time I found this idea very strange in itself because I couldn’t relate to her understanding and claim of how people were studying societies from outside them when at the same time, they were living as a part of them. Reading along further I could identify more with what she was saying because she focuses on the very specific and individual intricacies of society. She uses the example of passing a family of Indians while riding the train as she sees them through the window and how it was all relative to her perspective from her life’s experiences up to that point. Being that she hasn’t lived a lifestyle similar to theirs, she doesn’t believe that it is possible for her to fully understand their society.

                I especially loved her idea of educators in our society teaching girls as they grew up how they would be at a disadvantage and why, by our construction of society as they were growing up. What a world that would be. Maybe I’m putting words in her mouth but she put it as; ‘A sociology for women would offer a knowledge of the social organization and determinations of the properties and events of our directly experienced world.’ And that’s how I took it.

                Sociologists have been suggested to change how they study. To not ‘impose a conceptual framework that extracts from [other societal modes] what fits with ours’, to live amongst them and develop and understanding from the inside out rather than the outside in. This is not the ultimate solution though, because these interactions are only yet the product of our past societal constructions. Dorothy explains how women’s experiences allow them the ability to see the concern of how modern sociologist’s claim they are about the world when they display an ambiguous understanding of women’s experiences. 

Sum Blog 5

                A full night of drinking in a dirty city, filling your lungs with smoke and smog, disoriented, swimming in soiled sheets with someone who’ll give you the reason for your next prescription, then waking up and being flown away to a utopian valley set a top a mountain summit with nothing more on your mind than the warm breeze coming across the lake as you walk along the soft shore.  Harriet Martineau’s reading was revitalizing. Maybe not quite as extensive as that but I definitely enjoyed that very much.

                The fact that such wonderfully fresh ideas were ignored soon after she died, even with the great impression she made was a sure sign of the time, what a bummer. She had it all figured out, happiness, that’s all. If everybody’s happy what could possibly be the matter? Eliminate all created inequalities and be kind. Rationally, it’s a far out idea but it’s the blueprint to societal perfection. Her four anomalies of slavery, unequal status of women, pursuit of wealth, and fear of public opinion are wonderful. Everybody should be able to at least have an understanding for how these are “misalignments of societal morals and manners”. For me, as I’m sure for you, one sticks out more than the other. The most prominent for me is fear of public opinion. Growing up I was always concerned about others perceptions, it dictated my mannerisms, values, opinions, everything. It sucked, and in short I got sick of it and snapped. It wasn’t overnight but roughly the course of a year or two I had spun all the way around, and let me tell you what a breath of fresh air that was. I think if everyone could honestly be unapologetically themselves it would make the world a marvelous place (unless you’re a murderer or a rapist or some kind of screw up).

               Another thing I loved was how she said “the sociologist must try to develop a sympathetic understanding as a strategy for discovering the meanings of an activity for the actors.” Aristotle had said; “It’s the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” That’s the first thing I thought of after I finished reading her sentence. I love talking to people that understand (or at least try to) what you’re saying before they blurt something back. I feel like I recognized, after reading Martineau’s paper, that a few of the previous sociologists had more or less of a “my way or the highway” type of attitude. Anyway, I like what she had to say a lot, my favorite so far. 

Sum Blog 4

Weber’s “Bureaucratic Machine” illustrates the consequences of bureaucracy, one of them being that it limits our human potential. This type of system requires high specialization of an individual’s duty in order to complete a task most efficiently. I hear this and think of horse blinds, you become assigned to one task only and you complete it to their standard, that’s it. They are reducing a person’s full potential. I think it comes back to the efficiency of the company or organization, if somebody leaves that job for whatever reason; they want to be able to fill it as fast as they can and don’t want to have anything uncovered.

Another thing with this is that everything becomes predictable. In a way it’s nice because there are fewer problematic surprises and the few that do come up generally have a simple solution. Though on the other hand it’s very slow to adapting change, and with the size of the business directly correlating to the time it takes to implement the change, it’s no surprise that it can become a large problem to move things around after a certain point, that certain point is a 12 ton snow ball with a boulder in the middle, zooming down a hill that only a massive catastrophic event can stop.

           There’s one other little thing that I couldn’t quite understand, how Weber said that bureaucratic organizations come into power on the basis of leveling economic and social differences. Isn’t it a system based on levels? It seems that both democratic and bureaucratic systems have founding rules that contradict a majority of what they are today.

 

Sum Blog 2

I chose religion because as I completed the assigned reading and worksheet in class the following day I feel like there were some strings left untied as I was walking out the door. Now it’s damn hard not to turn this into a piece on why I believe in God so I’m going to try to abandon all defensive criticism.

BUT

I would absolutely love to hear what Marx would’ve said if he had a shred of faith in any god, haha. I can’t help but wonder was it the time period he lived in that he saw it used for control and personal profit, that he had such contempt. Or any other reasons, but that isn’t exactly the focus I’d like this to address.

Religion itself is powerful (and call me bias because I have faith in God) but no one can mistake the power of faith. Whether you believe because you understand it, or scared/suckered into it, it’s the feeling of security and peace of mind in a hard time, guidance and advice. I think Marx’s points address a real issue with religion and could prove them (to this day true as well) because he recognized the person/people behind it all. People want to know things are going to be alright, they’ll do what they feel they have to, to be comforted.

Marx quotes; ‘It is the ghostly realization of the human essence, ghostly because the human essence possesses no true reality.” If you don’t have any guidelines, what do you believe in? Who do you obey? Who do you disobey? Who do you praise and who do you blame? People fell obedient to religion because it gave them a sense of purpose, a purpose not posed by man.

I’d like to end this by saying religion has boundless power, it’s just the direction it’s given and took that determine the culmination. I have my side and you have yours. It’d be a fun topic over a beer.

 

Saw this movie a while ago, it stuck out like a sore thumb after last class.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar_s7w18Z_I

Sum Blog 1

Alexis De Tocqueville was a unique minded man who held great sustainable foresight, contributing several visions of outcome toward the future as he lived his life among the transitional period, late in the French Revolution while also watching a young United States develop their democratic legs. This has been a particularly difficult reading to understand for me in regard to all of the smaller ideas he uses in contribution to those on the larger scale. For example, Egoism; a doctrine that individual self-interest is the actual motive of all conscious action, then Individualism; the belief that the needs of each person are more important than the needs of the whole society or group. These two characteristics were used to support his skepticism of a democratic society. Coming from an Aristocratic age where “people are almost always closely involved with something outside themselves” (Tocqueville, 1835-40/1969:507) to the Democratic age where “the duties of each to all are much clearer but devoted service to any individual much rarer” (Tocqueville, 1835-40/1969:507). I think that he has all the bases covered, and to have predicted the consequences of producing introverted societies from way back then is pretty outstanding. “I fear that the mind may keep folding itself up in a narrower compass forever without producing new ideas, that men will wear themselves out in trivial, lonely, futile activity, and that for all its constant agitation humanity will take no advance.” (Tocqueville, 1835-40/1969:645) Now whether or not this shift would be a sole result of a Democratic society, I believe is debatable. I do think that it holds some truth though. If a group of people are spoken for by one person as a representation of common interest, after a while wouldn’t it be easier for people to follow rather than being active as they previously were? Though Democracy can be helpful to encourage and grow support for new ideas on a small stage, it is a very large uphill climb to carry those ideas/movements etc. to a grander place of recognition facing opposition from those in power already. Change is good, what good is a society that cultivates stagnation?

 

 

Every part has its purpose but when complete, will it help us or hurt us?

 

"Egoism." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 16 Sept. 2013. <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/egoism>.

"Individualism." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 16 Sept. 2013. <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/individualism>.