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?

[Zoeisright]

1. That is a great point.

But many of them can't change. Studies show that once a belief is firmly fixed, when a fact that contradicts that belief comes up, many people (and most conservatives) reject the fact and hold on to the belief.

How Facts Backfire:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/

So we are just going to have to keep opposing these people, and fighting them in elections. As more minority classes grow, eventually the white repuke is going to have less and less influence on elections and the country. Which is, ultimately, what they're afraid of.

[MH1]

2. Sociology 101 should be required for all college students

heck much of it should be taught in high school.

But I think most conservatives have just been raised to be self-centered, and raised on the meritocracy myth.

[Ghost Dog]

9. Meritocracy myth == cronyism truth?

That and just general social conformity (obeying the rules)?

[Donnachaidh]

18. IIRC it was required when I was a freshman in college

And it was at the University of Maine -- no irony, considering that rectal ventriloquist the people of that state just voted in as Governor.

I second the motion to make it a requirement -- and graded. No pass/fail for the challenged conservative class. :rofl:

[mix]

3. I agree.

Structure and agency. Rather than seeing how structures constrain and enable people, conservatives remove the individual from his or her social context.

In their eyes we are each entirely autonomous, free floating atoms left to confront market forces alone.

[d_r]

4. That's a useful construct

A useful way of thinking about it.

There are many other constructs that explain portions of it also.

mechanistic vs. organismic, system vs. individual, multivariate vs. univariate

Piaget said that one of the limits of preconventional thought was the tendency to focus on observations of one isolated event that seemed to support one's preconceived schema to the exclusion of overall patterns of data that contradict it.

Authoritarianism. Egocentrism. Cognitive dissonance.

[snagglepuss]

5. Have you ever read Philip Slater's Pursuit of Loneliness?

[fascisthunter]

6. Two are Lost at Sea, freezing, using the very wood that keeps them afloat for a fire.

[DCKit]

7. Sociopaths lack a lot of things the rest of us cherish.

On Edit:

Great post.

[Ghost Dog]

8. To have a sociological imagination

is to put yourself in someone else's shoes-- to see the world from other people's perspectives.

I like the way you write.

You'd like to "teach a huge, nation-wide sociology class these days"? Publish your class notes, your teaching plan and all the detail, little by little in a 'blog' and you could reach a wide audience, these days, surely.

[jwirr]

10. My major was sociology and that is what I was thinking when they

keep denying that the shooter was mentally ill and thus not influenced by outside events like Sarah and Beck. ALL of us are a product of our surroundings. When I think of my own life and ideals it is so clear that it was evident even before I ever took a class in sociology.

In many other issues they likewise ignore the environment: poverty, war, terrorism, etc.

But we all know that they will never accept what we are saying - it is a science after all.

[fishwax]

11. k/r

:kick:

[rucky]

12. Lakoff called it a failure to think about things as systematic & interrelated.

Roughly the same theory - and it has alot of merit, IMO.

I always joke about the Conservative mindset being like The Hulk. "Hulk no like. Hulk destroy!"

Their views are rooted in tiny truths that are evident in any institution: They're not perfect, but they were created to serve a purpose. It's easy to focus on the fraud, corruption or general inefficiencies that exist in any scaled institution ("government program"), but when they focus on it, they use it as an excuse to toss it out completely - ignoring the intended and actual benefits that others have received from the system (and even at the expense of their own benefit).

If a police precinct has corruption and inefficiency in it, nobody - not even a hardcore conservative - would support it's dismantling. Crime would run rampant.

But when schools, social programs, or pretty much anything not involved with security, have corruption and inefficiency (and they all do to various extents), they want to dismantle them. They ignore the consequences, because they can't imagine how they currently benefit from good schools and strong social programs.

What boggles my mind is how they're convinced to believe there is cause and effect between, say, regulations and economic strength, or that Healthcare Reform is "job-killing", when reality runs opposite to their beliefs about those relationships. I guess they just don't think it through for themselves, and let the special interests & FOX do the thinking for them on these matters.

[Odin2005]

13. I think MOST people have a problem understanding abstract issues, not just RWers.

Most people are concrete thinkers, their daily personal experience is more important to them then abstract data and models. This is why most people, including many DUers, are so easily swayed by anecdote despite being given the facts. It's not just social issues, but tons of other things, like psudoscience and anti-vax BS.

Indeed, many will get angry and feel insulted if you question their personal experience with abstract factual data, it a large cause of why people hate "pointy-headed intellectuals" that "think they are so much smarter than them".

[dynasaw]

14. Their Response to Each of Your Examples

would be "but that's socialism!!" :sarcasm:

[eppur_se_muova]

15. Will have to look for that book -- had started "The Power Elite" a few years ago.

If not for DU, I doubt I would have recognized that name if I saw it in the bookstore.
http://www.powells.com/s?author=C%20Wright%20Mills

[Odin2005]

16. KICK

[Urban Prairie]

17. I tend to believe that conservatives really don't consider the long-term effects

of what "taking back their country" would mean, and what they expect their vision of a theocratic "Christian" nation to be like.

Or most actually do realize the possible/potential horrific consequences of too quickly stripping away all government-provided "entitlements" but don't care, and would demand their "theocratically" governed, conservative-led nation to treat those who depended on the federal government to survive, in the same manner as migrating Europeans, and later the pre-20th century American government itself did with native Americans, as being mere "savages" who would need to be disarmed, arrested. or even killed if many were to riot as a result. The native Americans were forced to move to reservations, but in this era they would be perhaps at best moved into FEMA camps or sentenced to prisons, because those millions who are healthy enough to do so, many would most likely be forced to turn to crime to survive, and many who are not very healthy and/or are disabled/elderly would rapidly become amongst the additional millions of vagabond/transient homeless, most of whom would probably not be able to survive for very long, lacking enough medicine, food, and potable water, and especially those who live in many states that have long and frigid winter weather.