THE BIG PROBLEM: Conservatives lack a Sociological Imagination

[geekgrrl]

After two huge arguments online with people about Maine's Governor LePage's comments on the NAACP, immigration, and Sarah Palin's violent language, I feel like I want to stay off the internet completely. Instead I'm coming to the DU with a hunch. What these people miss is a sociological imagination.

I teach in my intro to sociology class about C. Wright Mills' "the sociological imagination". I find myself wishing I could teach a huge, nation-wide sociology class these days.

"The sociological imagination is the ability to recognize the relationship between large-scale social forces and the actions of individuals. It includes both the capacity to see relationships between individual biographies and historical change, and the capacity to see how social causation operates in societies." (wikipedia)

To have a sociological imagination is to put yourself in someone else's shoes-- to see the world from other people's perspectives. It's a gift, a gift that I see many people here on the DU have.

Some examples of how conservatives lack a Sociological Imagination:

** The Tuscan, Arizona shooting:
- The individualist logic: The guy must be mentally ill. His politics don't matter. The fact that there have been violent threats against politicians who support healthcare reform doesn't matter. The fact that we have public figures who use gun crosshairs to target specific politicians, and use violent language to pander to their pro-gun supporters doesn't matter. The context (political and cultural) doesn't matter. It's individual. We can chalk it up to that and criticize anyone who says otherwise as trying to make a mountain out of a molehill.
- A sociological approach: The political and cultural context matter. The violent rhetoric used by public figures creates an environment where violence is an answer to problems. Yes, the individual matters, but the individual's violent actions are shaped by outside political and cultural forces.

** Welfare dependency is a major cause of our govt/budget problems:
- The individualist logic: People should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Only people who FAIL to find work, support their families etc. need welfare and thus they don't deserve it. People depend on public assistance too much and want to milk the system. They don't need facts and figures to back this up, because there is always the individual case of someone with a big screen TV and a wii to "prove" that people milk welfare.
- A sociological approach: Nearly everyone at some point in their lives is going to need help-- is going to need public support. When our economy is bad, more people are going to need it. People who need help are often elderly or have medical problems-- they are not failures. We all need a social support system.

** Immigration is ruining the country:
- The individualist logic: People move here to milk the system.
- The sociological approach: People move here from other countries in crisis, and they come here for a better life and more opportunities. Historically, we all have immigrant roots and our relatives moved here for the same reasons. Imagine why you might want a better life for your family, and what you would do if you lived in a country where that wasn't possible? Imagine your early immigrant relatives and how hard they struggled when they got here. What would that have been like for them?

** Special interests are corrupting politics: (LePage telling the NAACP to "kiss my butt")
- The individualist logic: We're all equal and thus there are no differences between us. Anyone who points out differences is reverse racist/sexist/homophobic. We all have equal opportunities to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and if any one group is living in more poverty etc. it's because they choose to live that way. They're choice, not our problem.
- The sociological approach: Some groups of people still experience discrimination at many levels (institutional, individual etc.) and because of that, we need to point out these inequalities in order to understand them, address them, and fix them. Ignoring factual differences doesn't make them go away, it makes them WORSE.

And the list could go on and on...

This is why it's impossible to argue with conservatives-- their viewpoint is SO individualistic ("well I know someone who is here illegally for food stamps blah blah blah") that they miss THE BIG PICTURE and how interconnected we all are. They don't bother putting themselves in someone else's shoes or thinking from someone else's perspective. How sad, and I wonder how we can get people to change?