Another Marathon of Theorists

Weber

In "Basic Concepts of Sociology" he discusses the validity of order.  What does that mean?  Well, it's the validity of rules.  If I think that it's not okay to leave the house naked, then how many other people also think that?  If no one else felt that way then it wouldn't be a very valid rule. 

Weber also asks why we follow the rules that we do as a society.  He justifies the following of these rules by explaining that some of it is based on tradition, we've always followed them, so why question it now.  He also mentions charisma.  People in power often have it and so we listen to them more easily than if they did not.  Weber also discusses the rationality of order.  We as a society believe that without rules we would not have order and so we follow the rules for the good of the people.

Weber, Max.  Basic Concepts of Sociology.  (http://courses.djjr.net/soc112/readings/weber-basic-concepts-sociology-excerpts.html).

Durkheim

Organic verses Mechanical Solidarity.  Mechanical solidarity is based on everyone in society working in the same way together, where everyone is fairly equal.  Organic solidarity is based on everyone in society having very specialized positions and jobs to do.  No one here is equal.

Durkheim, Emile.  Social Solidarity.  (Wikipedia).

Tonnies

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.  Gotta love those Germans.

Gemeinschaft is based around community and Gesellschaft is based around society.  I see it as sort of the same switch that Durkheim talks about from mechanical to organic solidarity.  

Tonnies, Ferdinand.  Ferdinand Tonnies.  (Wikipedia).

Olson

Mancur Olson discusses the "Logic of Collective Action".  He explains that individuals act towards the collective good only if there is a reward to counteract their inherent selfishness.  If we all were able to benefit from the work of others without having to do work ourselves then no work would get done at all.  Olson states that in order to avoid this society must only hand out the benefits to those who are contributing.

Olson, Mancur.  Mancur Olson (Wikipedia Article).  (http://courses.djjr.net/soc112/syllabus/index.html).

So Many Theories, So Little Room

Okay, so I just read... a lot.  I'll try to make as much sense of this as I can.

First there's Plato:

He speaks of the Charioteer as a metaphor for society trying to balance between the good and bad nature.  Good being what is best for the whole and bad being what is best for self.  

Plato.  "The Charioteer". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariot_Allegory).

Next is Thomas Hobbes:

In Leviathan, Hobbes talks of the individual's fear of other people in society and their intentions.  To overcome individuals come together and create a society which offers everyone protection.  In this society there must be a single source of power for everyone to follow in order for it to work.

Hobbes, Thomas.  Leviathan. (http://courses.djjr.net/soc112/readings/Hobbes-Leviathan.pdf).

Then we have Jean Jacques Rousseau:

Rousseau focuses on why individuals within society find purpose to sacrifice meeting needs of their own for the good of society as a whole.  He seems to be looking at the same area that Plato did but asking how it works.  I'm not sure I understand very much of this, it was a little difficult for me to digest.  I may update the post after class, and taking another look at the reading.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques.  The Social Contract (excerpt).  (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/Rousseau-soccon.html).

And last but not least we have Adam Smith:

Ah... Wealth of Nations, such an easy read.  If you couldn't smell the sarcasm that that statement was reeking of then you should sit down and read a few pages of the book.  Yes, it's brilliant, but no, I do not want to spend my free time pouring over it.

That said, I did absorb a little bit.  Smith discusses the innate desire of human beings to trade with one another.  This implies that as society stratifies a specialized labor force will develop to support that desire.  And, that's about it folks.  Again, I'll try to update this after class, maybe I'll have absorbed  a bit more by then.

Smith, Adam.  Wealth of Nations (Book I Chapter II).  (http://art-bin.com/art/oweal1a.html).

"A Social Experiment"

So there's this really creepy show on the Discovery channel called The Colony.  They've put a group of people together in a post-apocalyptic setting and given them almost nothing to survive on to see what they do to get by.  It's the kind of thing that the Human Subjects Review Board would never approve of and that TV producers drool over.  

The colony sets up camp in an abandoned warehouse and loots nearby buildings for canned goods and medical supplies.  They have to collect water from the Los Angeles river and then they develop a filtration system to make it drinkable.  The picture I have here shows them using solar panels that they found on another building to collect energy to charge up batteries so that they can have power at night. 

While the show is incredible in that these people come up with amazing ways to overcome the obstacles they are faced with it's also a pretty dark commentary on the human condition.  It's like a horrible train wreck that you just can't stop staring at.  So there's the question.  Are the colonists the ones being controlled by some production studio in L.A.? or Am I the one that's being controlled by being sucked into this mess of a show?

Public Health?

In, "The New Public Health Hegemony: Response to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in Toronto", Sarah Sanford and S. Harris Ali, discuss the SARS outbreaks in Toronto and the subsequent effects through the lens of hegemony. Hegemony "... explains how the dominance of one group emerges in society through the acquisition of compliance from the general population" (Sanford & Harris, 2005, p.2). This becomes a very effective form of social control because those who are being subordinated are willing participants in the subordination and those who are subordinating are put into their positions by those below them.

The article also discusses the "underlying ideological element of public health as a 'moral enterprise' " (Sanford & Ali, 2005, p.7). Public health services tell us the way we should be living our lives and there are consequences for those who do not. People who get lung cancer are immediately assumed to be smokers whether they are or not, and then it is considered their fault that they have this horrible disease. Even today there is a debate over whether or not soda should be taxed because of its implications in obesity and other health problems. Many people see it as okay to tax soda because it is bad, and the people who drink it willingly deserve the health problems they get.

The inequalities that are inherent in a capitalist society are also inherent in the systems within it. Just because the public health systems are charged with maintaining the greater good, does not mean that they are blind to class, creed, or even color. The incidents in Toronto at the height of SARS only give us a window into the possibilities of complete and utter inequities that could take place if a true outbreak of any magnitude ever took place here.

Sanford, Sarah & Ali, S. Harris. (2005). "The New Public Health Hegemony: Response to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in Toronto." Social Theory and Health, 3(2), 104-125.

Cops and Robbers

I was walking through town today after a lovely brunch with friends and we decided to explore the local toy store.  It was fantastic with all sorts of vintage and unusual offerings.  We spent a while looking through the "special" section and then ended up in the everyday toys section.  It was there that I saw it, right in the middle of all the other play sets.  Instead of your average castle or school or maybe even pirate ship there was a police station/jail play set complete with escapee.  There are also all kinds of weapons on the wall in the police station, so that your police man (there were no visible females) can kick some plastic butt.  It's just not what I expected to see, especially in the "regular" section of the toy store.  

It just seems strange to be marketing this type of toy to a child.  I mean, I remember playing cops and robbers when I was little but for that you had to make up everything on your own.  There was no plastic jail cell and no plastic police men to beat down the robber with plastic batons.  It seems dangerous to me to start prescribing this type of play to children in such a bright and shiny way.  

Is the real intention here to offer kids a fun and wholesome toy?  Or is to normalize the idea of social control to children early on?  I guess it's obvious how I feel.  If you get kids to enjoy being the "good guy" that keeps the "bad guys" in jail then they'll learn to trust the good guys and support them with a little less push back.

"Harsh Interrogation Techniques"

Discipline and Punish Part III Discipline

Foucault, Michel.  1975.  Discipline and Punish.  Penguin Books Ltd.

Phew!  I've finally conquered the Discipline section of Foucault's Discipline and Punish.  Well, started to conquer it anyway; but it still deserves a "phew!".  

In this section he begins to discuss the evolution of Discipline and how it begins with the availability of a malleable society and develops into a orderly and unified society all working towards the greater good because of constant indoctrination.  

Individuals are first sorted through to distinguish what types of actions they should take on in order to benefit society the most.  Then they are trained to take on specific roles through establishments like schools, churches, or boot camps.  This training internalizes specific actions from the simple to the highly complex to the extent that they become second nature.  Once these actions have become internalized so deeply society becomes what Foucault calls panoptic, or all seeing.  Every action that an individual makes or chooses not to make is seen by someone else and it is that pressure that causes us to conform to actions that work toward the greater good.  

It's my own feeling that these expected actions become so internalized that we don't even care that anyone is watching anymore, we just continue to do them because we feel that that's the only way there is to do things.  For example, I wake up every morning and get dressed before I leave the house.  I do not get dressed because I worry about the looks I would get if I didn't, I get dressed because that's what I've always done.  It's difficult for me to even imagine what it would be like to leave the house naked.  The panopticism has grown to such a level that we are the ones watching ourselves, so now there is truly no escape from the eye of society because it has been internalized.

Habitual Conformity- Is it a Class Issue?

Have you ever noticed that really sexy cars look so much sexier without extra junk all over them? Especially the bureaucratic kind.

Over the weekend my husband and I were walking in the Mission district of San Francisco when we saw two police officers on bicycles pointing at cars and demanding that the drivers pull over. I was wondering what on earth was happening and why they were pulling over cars that were seemingly following all of the rules. My husband (speaking from experience) said that they were cracking down on drivers that had no front license plates on their vehicles. He then added that this is the kind of thing you would never see in Pacific Heights (a very well off neighborhood of San Francisco).

California state law requires that all vehicles must have a front and rear license plate. Most of us take that rule for granted. We receive 2 plates from the DMV and so we put 2 of them on our car. Those people who are lucky enough to drive beautiful cars (my husband for example) receive 2 plates from the DMV and then are racked with the issue of whether or not to ruin the aesthetic lines of their precious car or to comply with California law. Many decide that the risk of leaving off that front plate is worth the benefit of keeping their cars just a little bit sexier. But the question still remains, "Is this something you would see in Pac Heights?"

The question arose again yesterday in class. We were discussing the probability of receiving a ticket for not putting money in your parking meter. While most people habitually get out of the car and put money into the meter, there are those who calculate whether to take the chance of getting a ticket or to pay the meter. One student then mentioned that part of that calculation is what kind of neighborhood you're in. Aha! There it is again! She mentioned that it is much more likely that police are vigilant about the rules in lower income areas than they are in higher income areas.

While I don't have any concrete answers about this, I'm certainly intrigued. How does class effect one's willingness or even necessity in conforming to these little laws that so many of us take for granted?

Wayward Puritans: Chapter 5

Erikson, Kai T.  2005.  Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance.  Pearson Education Inc.

In this chapter Erikson discusses the Puritan view of deviant behavior and the ways in which they tried to control it.  

To understand their views Erikson states that we must first understand the Puritan belief in predestination.  This is the idea that everyone on earth is born into the world with their life already planned out by God.  No matter what you do or don't do there is no way out of this set course, so that means that whether you are going to end up in heaven in hell is also out of your hands.  Therefore if you were chosen for heaven, God would bless you here on earth and you would then be so thankful for this blessing that you would be a great person to society.  If you were damned to hell you would be angry and take it out on society through acting deviantly.

I guess it was the idea that these people, who acted deviantly, were destined for hell that made the Puritans feel justified or maybe even obligated to punish them so severely.  They did things like burning people at the stake which Erikson likens to the flames of hell.  He says that since Puritans believe that God had already damned these deviants, the tortures they had to face had already been determined, all they could do was follow God's will.  Half way through page 194 he tells us that the Puritans believed "... deviant behavior was a kind of illness, not an occasion for warmth or sympathy, to be sure, but an emergency condition which had to be treated with every resource at the community's disposal, whether or not the patient suffered any discomfort in the process". 

Erikson goes on to contrast the Puritan idea of predestination with the Quaker view that anyone can change.  He mentions two prisons that were developed after the American Revolution, one leaned towards Puritan ideals and the other toward Quaker.  It turned out that the prison that was more Puritan in model was not very successful in the rehabilitation department.  To me it makes sense that you can't rehabilitate a criminal if you think she is destined to always be one.  You must believe on some lever that she can turn her life around, if you will ever be able to help her do that.  

Erikson also adds that this Puritan prison model is now the one that is most U.S. prisons are using even today.  It explains so much about our prison system and the state that it's in today.

Punishment and Deterrence: General Prevention-Illusion or Reality?

Andeneas, J.  Section I

The main thing I picked up from this reading was the author's classifications of specific prevention and general prevention.  The former is the idea of preventing future deviance by focusing specifically on the criminal.  The latter prevents future deviance by cautioning the deterring the entire population.

I'm a little foggy on the distinct lines between the two types of prevention because there seems to be a type of overlap between the them.  I feel that when you punish one person for a crime (specific prevention) you also deter the entire population from deviant crime (general prevention) because they now see what happened to the criminal and they wouldn't want that to happen to them.  

Maybe after discussing this in class a bit, I'll have a clearer idea about the differences and how to use them properly.

Capital Punishment

I just read an article from the New Yorker which perfectly illustrates the idea that we are still in the same pattern of punishment as we were long ago.

Although we'd like to believe that we are a civilized society that no longer tortures individuals for the crimes that they commit against us, we still sentence people to a life behind bars, or even worse to spend years on death row contemplating the execution that is eventually to come. If that isn't torture, then I don't know what else to call it.

Mr. Willingham has spent thirteen years in prison and was then executed by the state of Texas for allegedly murdering his 3 daughters by setting fire to their home. As the article states, this conviction is now highly questionable, leading us to ask the question, "What on earth is civilized or humane about imprisoning and then executing the father of 3 young girls who were just burned alive in their own home?" Not only did Willingham lose his children, he barely survived the fire himself, almost passing out inside in an effort to save their lives. As if that weren't enough, he spent the remaining years of his life "paying his debt to society" by recounting the loss of his children over and over in his mind. Torturous indeed.

Although the process of execution in our society has been sterilized from the messy public affair it once was, it still maintains the horrific end result. That is that a person who is accused of a horrific crime is the one who carries the burden of proving their innocence, and that without that proof their death is inevitable. Whether that death is clean and quick or messy and drawn out is not the issue, the matter that someone else holds it in their hands is the true point that likens this type of punishment to that which Foucault discusses throughout the first section of his book.

Discipline and Punish Part I

Foucault, Michel.  1975.  Discipline and Punish.  Penguin Books Ltd.

I must preface this by saying that this is the first time I've read any of Michel Foucault's work. While his use of language is incredibly poetic and beautiful, I must admit that it is incredibly difficult to digest. That said, here is my account of the first section of his book, Discipline and Punish.

In this portion of the book, Foucault juxtaposes the types of discipline and punishment that were practiced in the 18th century with those that emerged in the 19th century, some of which are still practiced today. He begins with a graphic account of torture that was inflicted upon a man accused of regicide in 1757 and goes on to describe the daily activities of prison life some eighty years later. Foucault's argument is that while we may believe one form of punishment to be more civilized than the other we are still exercising enormous amounts of control over those who we feel are deviants in our society. In fact we are showing even more control in scheduling out every aspect of their day year after year than we once did in inflicting upon them grave tortures in the public square.