I loved sociology before I even knew what sociology was. That’s how hardcore I am. I believe it’s totally possible to think sociologically without having ever had an actual sociology class (I see you, Glennon Doyle). In high school when I was trying to figure out the rules for how popularity worked as a social system, I was thinking sociologically.
Than you for sharing your knowledge. Particularly liked the voting stats. I've been trying to move away from thinking everyone else is stupid, not successfully yet but trying. Thanks for working so hard.
It is hard, but I reserve all my “people are stupid” energy for sports, like anyone who thinks Pete Rose still shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame is CLEARLY stupid.
I’m a curious person and have always considered myself a searcher of sorts BUT truth be told, I don’t often seek information that contradicts what I believe to be fair and just. I think the us vs them narrative encourages that tendency in many of us because we’re afraid to identify with even a piece of something in someone we see as problematic overall. This is something I want to work on because no problem will ever get solved if we can’t find something in everyone we can connect to on some level. Thanks for the reminder.
It is hard sometimes. I can’t agree with ideology or beliefs that deny people’s basic humanity. But there are some areas of overlap, even if they’re small. For example, I think a lot of conservative voters are frustrated with how things work in DC and I agree that a lot of aspects of our government do look broken. We may not have the exact same ideas for how to fix it, but it’s a place to start, maybe? Thanks for reading and commenting.
I spent my adult life living and traveling abroad. I listened a lot and I watched a lot. Most of the time, I didn’t say anything because I felt that as a guest in a country, I should keep my opinions to myself. But I hear a lot of echoes from my past back here at home and that concerns me.
“Trump supporters are morons / subhumans/ etc.”
“Tutsis are cockroaches.”
It begins that simply, but it doesn’t end there.
Near my home in Baku, Azerbaijan, was a cemetery where all the Armenian graves were desecrated. When I traveled to Yerevan, I found Azerbaijani graves desecrated.
In Zimbabwe, I lived through the Gukarahundi, when 20,000 people were massacred by the ethnic majority government. 20 people I knew were hacked to death with axes over a four day period because of the color of their skin. I also saw the ethnic cleansing of white farmers, some who were my friends.
I worked in the Balkans where Eastern Orthodox Serbs destroyed the churches and mosques of Croats and Muslims. I saw Eastern Orthodox churches bulldozed by Croats and Muslims. Etc.,etc., and God damned etc. I heard the hatred in conversations among my staff about other ethnic groups when they thought I didn’t hear them. Sometimes they said those things to my face because they thought I was too naive to understand why hatred was necessary.
I saw Indian companies seized in Malawi. I saw Indian people mass deported from Uganda. Maybe it was because they were successful brown people? Did anyone lift a hand?
When the Rwandan genocide started, Susan Rice advised Bill Clinton to avoid involvement because it was not politically advantageous. More disposable people and I saw them floating face down in a river.
We demand that “Transwomen are women,” but won’t lift a hand to support the Yazidi women, the Iranian women, the Saudi women, and the women in in North Africa and the Middle East who are disfigured by FMG.
If it wasn’t for all the hatred and bigotry in world, I wouldn’t have had much of a career. Take hatred and war out of the mix, and all that is left is famine and pestilence. Did you know that there was never a famine in a truly free country. We can conquer pestilence, if we could past the other two.
I now hear that people vote for certain political parties and certain candidates because they are benighted, while those who vote for other parties and candidates are gifted with superior education and intelligence.
And so here we find ourselves, on the brink of killing one another because we lack humility, empathy, an unwillingness to compromise, and a lack of resistance to ideas from the past that have resulted in the murders of multiple millions in the 20th century alone. We are as filled with bigotry and hatred as any machete-wielding Hutu, but we dress ours in fine, academic language.
We probably deserve our fate, because we aren’t good enough to save ourselves, and I don’t know if we are past the point of no return, but I think we may be. We have no guarantees that we won’t Balkanize or butcher each other in an orgy of killing because that’s who we are and we are not good enough.
Have you read High Conflict by Amanda Ripley? She describes how we get into these situations and how dangerous de-humanization can be. But also hope for how we can get out. I don’t know what we deserve or don’t but I just don’t want to live without hope that we could do better. It might be misguided, but it’s all I’ve got.
It’s strange, but after all those experiences (and many others), I also hang onto hope. It may not sound like it in my comment, but without hope, we have nothing, except maybe a measure of patience to outlast the bastards.
I recently spent most of a year volunteering to help rebuild Paradise, CA after the town was devastated by the Camp Fire. I expected despair and self-pity, but I found the opposite. People had courage, resilience, and hope.
We are worse than we should be, and occasionally, we are better than circumstances might dictate.
I was raised by two sociologists, and I can see that I was taught to think from this perspective from all those years of hearing them, and then joining them in sociological discussions of everything from why a particular aunt had trouble getting along with her mother-in-law, to why certain people in our church didn't get excited as my family did to join in the civil rights movement, or why a girl in my class who was very smart had been tracked into the non-college bound track to be trained as a secretary (and not surprisingly was the first to get pregnant,) while her brother, who wasn't as academically inclined and would have been very happy to get into automotive trades, was being pushed to take classes that he failed. Not surprisingly, when I got my doctorate in history in the 1970s, my field of study was "social history" my minor field sociology, and I taught women's, urban, and ethnic studies classes. And I agree, this sociological frame of mind, while it doesn't keep me from knowing how bad things are, it does keep me from despair, and it does keep me from the simple dichotomies of liberal good, conservative bad. My father, as he started down the slope into dementia, was very agitated by the shift to right-wing political successes in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and he spent a year taking down his old sociology texts from the 1950s tell me that what divided Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, was the fact that conservatives had high intolerance for ambiguity, while for liberals, had a high tolerance for ambiguity. The result was conservatives would believe anything they were told was THE TRUTH, but liberals would tend to see different sides of questions, believe the answers to problems weren't black or white, and that mades it more difficult to get a unified message out there. The dementia meant he didn't understand how a letter to the editor, or challenging his church's adherence to a literal interpretation of the bible wasn't going to change everything over night, but I must say, I still believe his analysis had a good deal of merit. So, do go on with your sociological world view, and I will certainly enjoy going on reading what you are writing!
Your parents sound awesome, of course! I think a lot of what your dad said about liberals and conservatives used to be true. Lately, I see a lot of black and white thinking on the left, in ways that are really disappointing and sad, because as someone who’s on the left, I did always associate that with a tolerance for complexity and nuance. But these last few years might have eroded a lot of that. I hope I’m wrong! Thanks so much for reading and commenting.
I really want to challenge the idea that one side is more thoughtful and nuanced than the other. That’s not what I experienced in the world. Some of the worst human rights abusers were led by leftist regimes. I have written elsewhere about the racism I’ve observed in communist/former communist/ socialist countries where I’ve worked. In most of those places, dissenting against the political orthodoxy landed one in prison or before a firing squad.
One of the enduring saints of the revolutionary left is Ernesto Guevara, and I’ve read most of his writings. After the Cuban revolution installed Castro, Che’ had an office in Havana from which he could watch executions after he had a prison wall lowered, unless he was busy executing dissidents himself.
I was genuinely shocked by the racist comments he made about the Congolese in his African diaries. Full-throated KKK grade racism. After his failure to bring the revolution to Africa, he tried to light the fire in Bolivia, but the campesinos could not abide his racist arrogance and turned him over to the army, which promptly dispatched him with more due process than he ever allowed.
I’m now wading through a heartbreaking account of women who suffered through the various purges, terrors, and mundane oppression in the USSR worker’s paradise on earth. The book is called Remembering the Darkness, and there was nothing nuanced or thoughtful about how they were treated.
I can never support a political ideology or party because none of them are guided by nuance or thoughtfulness. All I ask from government is to leave me the hell alone. I can solve my own problems or freely join with as many others as necessary to solve problems.
Also, please understand that my perspective is not theoretical or dogmatic. I just happened to have experienced firsthand the shit people do to one another, sometimes because of primitive tribalism (Balkans, Rwanda) or because of high-minded idealism that would result in an earthly paradise (Soviet Union, China under Mao, etc.). Once you’ve experienced the aftermath of genocide or ethnic cleansing or gulags or terrorism, it’s tough to put much faith in hope as a strategy.
I just ordered High Conflict. Thanks for the recommendation.
Good points. That's part of how the us vs. them dynamic works. Whatever you group belongs to always seems more virtuous or nuanced or whatever. Hope you enjoy the book!
Forever grateful for the seeds you've planted that have grown into a forest in my mind, it's liberating to finally have the lens to see and the words to describe those things I once thought were invisible forces <3
Than you for sharing your knowledge. Particularly liked the voting stats. I've been trying to move away from thinking everyone else is stupid, not successfully yet but trying. Thanks for working so hard.
It is hard, but I reserve all my “people are stupid” energy for sports, like anyone who thinks Pete Rose still shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame is CLEARLY stupid.
I’m a curious person and have always considered myself a searcher of sorts BUT truth be told, I don’t often seek information that contradicts what I believe to be fair and just. I think the us vs them narrative encourages that tendency in many of us because we’re afraid to identify with even a piece of something in someone we see as problematic overall. This is something I want to work on because no problem will ever get solved if we can’t find something in everyone we can connect to on some level. Thanks for the reminder.
It is hard sometimes. I can’t agree with ideology or beliefs that deny people’s basic humanity. But there are some areas of overlap, even if they’re small. For example, I think a lot of conservative voters are frustrated with how things work in DC and I agree that a lot of aspects of our government do look broken. We may not have the exact same ideas for how to fix it, but it’s a place to start, maybe? Thanks for reading and commenting.
Yes! That’s a great point. I agree 1000%!
I spent my adult life living and traveling abroad. I listened a lot and I watched a lot. Most of the time, I didn’t say anything because I felt that as a guest in a country, I should keep my opinions to myself. But I hear a lot of echoes from my past back here at home and that concerns me.
“Trump supporters are morons / subhumans/ etc.”
“Tutsis are cockroaches.”
It begins that simply, but it doesn’t end there.
Near my home in Baku, Azerbaijan, was a cemetery where all the Armenian graves were desecrated. When I traveled to Yerevan, I found Azerbaijani graves desecrated.
In Zimbabwe, I lived through the Gukarahundi, when 20,000 people were massacred by the ethnic majority government. 20 people I knew were hacked to death with axes over a four day period because of the color of their skin. I also saw the ethnic cleansing of white farmers, some who were my friends.
I worked in the Balkans where Eastern Orthodox Serbs destroyed the churches and mosques of Croats and Muslims. I saw Eastern Orthodox churches bulldozed by Croats and Muslims. Etc.,etc., and God damned etc. I heard the hatred in conversations among my staff about other ethnic groups when they thought I didn’t hear them. Sometimes they said those things to my face because they thought I was too naive to understand why hatred was necessary.
I saw Indian companies seized in Malawi. I saw Indian people mass deported from Uganda. Maybe it was because they were successful brown people? Did anyone lift a hand?
When the Rwandan genocide started, Susan Rice advised Bill Clinton to avoid involvement because it was not politically advantageous. More disposable people and I saw them floating face down in a river.
We demand that “Transwomen are women,” but won’t lift a hand to support the Yazidi women, the Iranian women, the Saudi women, and the women in in North Africa and the Middle East who are disfigured by FMG.
If it wasn’t for all the hatred and bigotry in world, I wouldn’t have had much of a career. Take hatred and war out of the mix, and all that is left is famine and pestilence. Did you know that there was never a famine in a truly free country. We can conquer pestilence, if we could past the other two.
I now hear that people vote for certain political parties and certain candidates because they are benighted, while those who vote for other parties and candidates are gifted with superior education and intelligence.
And so here we find ourselves, on the brink of killing one another because we lack humility, empathy, an unwillingness to compromise, and a lack of resistance to ideas from the past that have resulted in the murders of multiple millions in the 20th century alone. We are as filled with bigotry and hatred as any machete-wielding Hutu, but we dress ours in fine, academic language.
We probably deserve our fate, because we aren’t good enough to save ourselves, and I don’t know if we are past the point of no return, but I think we may be. We have no guarantees that we won’t Balkanize or butcher each other in an orgy of killing because that’s who we are and we are not good enough.
Have you read High Conflict by Amanda Ripley? She describes how we get into these situations and how dangerous de-humanization can be. But also hope for how we can get out. I don’t know what we deserve or don’t but I just don’t want to live without hope that we could do better. It might be misguided, but it’s all I’ve got.
It’s strange, but after all those experiences (and many others), I also hang onto hope. It may not sound like it in my comment, but without hope, we have nothing, except maybe a measure of patience to outlast the bastards.
I recently spent most of a year volunteering to help rebuild Paradise, CA after the town was devastated by the Camp Fire. I expected despair and self-pity, but I found the opposite. People had courage, resilience, and hope.
We are worse than we should be, and occasionally, we are better than circumstances might dictate.
That's good to hear.
I was raised by two sociologists, and I can see that I was taught to think from this perspective from all those years of hearing them, and then joining them in sociological discussions of everything from why a particular aunt had trouble getting along with her mother-in-law, to why certain people in our church didn't get excited as my family did to join in the civil rights movement, or why a girl in my class who was very smart had been tracked into the non-college bound track to be trained as a secretary (and not surprisingly was the first to get pregnant,) while her brother, who wasn't as academically inclined and would have been very happy to get into automotive trades, was being pushed to take classes that he failed. Not surprisingly, when I got my doctorate in history in the 1970s, my field of study was "social history" my minor field sociology, and I taught women's, urban, and ethnic studies classes. And I agree, this sociological frame of mind, while it doesn't keep me from knowing how bad things are, it does keep me from despair, and it does keep me from the simple dichotomies of liberal good, conservative bad. My father, as he started down the slope into dementia, was very agitated by the shift to right-wing political successes in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and he spent a year taking down his old sociology texts from the 1950s tell me that what divided Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, was the fact that conservatives had high intolerance for ambiguity, while for liberals, had a high tolerance for ambiguity. The result was conservatives would believe anything they were told was THE TRUTH, but liberals would tend to see different sides of questions, believe the answers to problems weren't black or white, and that mades it more difficult to get a unified message out there. The dementia meant he didn't understand how a letter to the editor, or challenging his church's adherence to a literal interpretation of the bible wasn't going to change everything over night, but I must say, I still believe his analysis had a good deal of merit. So, do go on with your sociological world view, and I will certainly enjoy going on reading what you are writing!
Your parents sound awesome, of course! I think a lot of what your dad said about liberals and conservatives used to be true. Lately, I see a lot of black and white thinking on the left, in ways that are really disappointing and sad, because as someone who’s on the left, I did always associate that with a tolerance for complexity and nuance. But these last few years might have eroded a lot of that. I hope I’m wrong! Thanks so much for reading and commenting.
I really want to challenge the idea that one side is more thoughtful and nuanced than the other. That’s not what I experienced in the world. Some of the worst human rights abusers were led by leftist regimes. I have written elsewhere about the racism I’ve observed in communist/former communist/ socialist countries where I’ve worked. In most of those places, dissenting against the political orthodoxy landed one in prison or before a firing squad.
One of the enduring saints of the revolutionary left is Ernesto Guevara, and I’ve read most of his writings. After the Cuban revolution installed Castro, Che’ had an office in Havana from which he could watch executions after he had a prison wall lowered, unless he was busy executing dissidents himself.
I was genuinely shocked by the racist comments he made about the Congolese in his African diaries. Full-throated KKK grade racism. After his failure to bring the revolution to Africa, he tried to light the fire in Bolivia, but the campesinos could not abide his racist arrogance and turned him over to the army, which promptly dispatched him with more due process than he ever allowed.
I’m now wading through a heartbreaking account of women who suffered through the various purges, terrors, and mundane oppression in the USSR worker’s paradise on earth. The book is called Remembering the Darkness, and there was nothing nuanced or thoughtful about how they were treated.
I can never support a political ideology or party because none of them are guided by nuance or thoughtfulness. All I ask from government is to leave me the hell alone. I can solve my own problems or freely join with as many others as necessary to solve problems.
Also, please understand that my perspective is not theoretical or dogmatic. I just happened to have experienced firsthand the shit people do to one another, sometimes because of primitive tribalism (Balkans, Rwanda) or because of high-minded idealism that would result in an earthly paradise (Soviet Union, China under Mao, etc.). Once you’ve experienced the aftermath of genocide or ethnic cleansing or gulags or terrorism, it’s tough to put much faith in hope as a strategy.
I just ordered High Conflict. Thanks for the recommendation.
Good points. That's part of how the us vs. them dynamic works. Whatever you group belongs to always seems more virtuous or nuanced or whatever. Hope you enjoy the book!
Forever grateful for the seeds you've planted that have grown into a forest in my mind, it's liberating to finally have the lens to see and the words to describe those things I once thought were invisible forces <3
Aw! Thank you, Emily. That's aways and amazing thing to hear.