Joone Xyron Creencia Socio 11 WFW

2015-03303 Prof. Hannah Glimpse Nario-Lopez

Sociology: Two Perspectives

In “The Promise” C.W. Mills writes about the feelings of entrapment that
people feel and why they do so. According to him, what people are directly
aware of and what they try to do are bound by their private orbits and their
power and vision only limited to their immediate social surrounding, and how
being aware of things which transcend their immediate locales make them feel
even more entrapped. He explained that the feelings of entrapment of people
are somehow connected to changes in societies. He said that contemporary
historical facts are also facts about the successes and failures of individual men
and women, just like when a society is industrialized, even the very titles used to
call people change: a peasant becomes a worker, and a feudal lord is either
liquidated or becomes a feudal lord. He also stressed that an individual’s life or
a society’s history cannot be understood without understanding the interplay
that happens between the both of them (Mills 1959). But it is not so simple to try
to understand both of these partly because men do not usually define the
troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction.
But probably the main reason why it is hard is that because ordinary men do
not have the quality of mind that is needed to grasp the interplay between man
and society, and as such, they cannot cope with their troubles in ways that can
control the structural transformations behind these troubles (Mills 1959).

Mills states that the reason why ordinary people lack this quality of mind is
because we were subjected to a very fast pace of groundbreaking change;
what were once ‘historical facts’ are now becoming ‘merely history’ (Mills 1959).
He emphasizes his point as he states that in the course of a single generation a
sixth of mankind is already transformed from feudal and backward to modern
and fearful, and that while political colonies are released, there are newer and
less visible forms of imperialism installed. He said that the very shaping of history
outpaces people’s abilities to orient themselves in accordance to their own
values, making them feel that while the older ways of feeling and thinking have
collapsed, newer beginnings were ambiguous to the point of moral stasis. They
become morally insensible because they cannot understand the meaning of
their lives which were suddenly confronted with the larger world (Mills 1959).

To cope with such a change, Mills said that what people needed, and
what they feel they needed was not only the skills of reason, but also the quality
of mind that will help them use information in reasoning to achieve lucid
summation of the current situation, something that he called the sociological
imagination(Mills 1959). According to Mills, the sociological imagination has
three main functions; it enables its possessor to understand the larger historical
scene in the sense of the inner life and external career of people, distinguishes
between the ‘personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social
structure’, and to identify the major issues for publics and key troubles of private
individuals in the current time. The first function mainly asks three questions: First,
it asks what the structure of a particular society is as a whole, what are its
components, their relation to each other and their differences from other
varieties of social order. It also asks for the inherent meaning of any particular
features for its continuance and also for its change, the second asks where a
particular society stands in human history; he asks what the society’s mechanics
are for change, its place and meaning for humanity’s development as a whole
and how any particular feature affects and is affected by the period it moves in,
as well as the current period’s essential features, its differences and its
characteristic ways of history making; and lastly, it questions what varieties of
men and women prevail in the current society and period, the ways that they
are selected formed, liberated, repressed, made sensitive, or blunted, as well as
the kinds of ‘human nature’ in the current period, and its meaning for each and
every feature of the society (Mills 1959). The second function puts forth a clear
distinction between public and private problems. Mills stated that troubles occur
in the character of an individual and within his immediate relations with others
while issues occur within an organization of many such milieu into into the
institutions of a historical society as a whole. To further explain his point, he gave
a few examples, some of which I would also use to explain; consider
unemployment, say if in a city of 100,000 and single person is unemployed, it is
his personal trouble, but if 15 million men are unemployed in a nation of 50
million, the very structure of opportunities has collapsed and it becomes a
public issue. Lastly, the third defines what different experiences are; well-being is
when a person’s set of values is cherished and not threatened, but when they
are, it is either a personal trouble or a public issue; indifference is when a person
is neither aware of a cherished set of values nor experience any threat; while
anxiety is when people are unaware of a set of values but are still aware of a
threat (Mills 1959).

Mills defines sociology as a way to clarify the elements of contemporary

uneasiness and indifference, it is the study which bridges together people and
society through biography and history. Berger, on the other hand, defines
sociology as a form of consciousness. He stated that it was neither a timeless nor
a necessary undertaking of the human mind (Berger 1963). He wrote that
sociology is constituted by a peculiarly modern form of consciousness, which
becomes clear after reflecting on how the word ‘society’ is defined (Berger
1963). According to him, ‘society’ may mean many things, either a particular
band of people, people endowed with great prestige or privilege, or maybe
simply company of any sort; but to sociologists, ‘society’ is used to denote a
large complex of human relationships, or technically, a system of interaction
(Berger 1963). Berger also said that the adjective ‘social’ must be refined as
well for sociological use as it may denote a number of different things in
common speech: it could be the casualness of a gathering, an individual’s
altruistic attitude, or anything derived from contact with other people (Berger
1963). He also explained that the sociological perspective is more distinctive
than other fields of science like economics. Economists, he said, were
concerned with the process of the allocation of scarce goods and services
within a society while sociologists, on the other hand, would be interested in the
relationships and interactions that happen during the process which may be
irrelevant to the economic goals in question; in other words, sociology is like a
special sort of abstraction, as it does not look at phenomena that nobody else is
aware but looks at the same events in a different way (Berger 1963).

Berger said that to ask sociological questions presupposes that one is

interested in looking beyond the commonly accepted goals of human actions,
making it appear plausible for it to have the best chance of development in
historical circumstances marked by severe jolts of to the self-conception of a
culture as it is only in such circumstances that perceptive men are likely to be
motivated to think beyond said self-conceptions and question the authorities
(Berger 1963). It would also not be wrong to say that sociological thought is part
of what Nietzsche called the ‘art of mistrust’ as it requires us to see through the
facades of social structures, and perceiving the reality behind the facades
demands considerable intellectual effort. To illustrate his point, Berger gave the
denominations used by American Protestants in their ‘polity’, the officially
defined way in which the denomination is run, as an example; he said that some
may speak of an Episcopal, a Presbyterian or maybe a congregational ‘polity’
but a sociologist studying the government of American denominations, he
stated, should not arrest himself at these official definitions, as he will soon
discover that the real questions of power and organization have little to do with
‘polity’ in the theological sense, but rather that the basic form of organization in
all sizes of denominations is bureaucratic. The sociological investigator will then
be able to quickly ‘see-through’ the mass of confusing terminology and
correctly identify those who hold executive power, whether they be called
‘bishops’, ‘stated clerks’ or ‘synod presidents’, and observe that the internal and
external pressures brought to bear on those who are theoretically in charge
(Berger 1963).

He then wrote that the problems that will interest the sociologist are not
necessarily what other people may call ‘problems’, as the way public officials
and newspapers speak about a ‘social problem’ is when something in society
does not work the way it is supposed to according to official interpretations,
while sociologists define a sociological problem as not so much as why things
‘go wrong’ from the point of views of the authorities but how the whole system
works, its presuppositions, and the means by which it is held together (Berger
1963). As an example, he said that it is naïve to concentrate on crime as a
‘problem’ just because law-enforcement agencies define it as such or on
divorce because that is a ‘problem’ to the moralists of marriage. He also stated
that the sociological consciousness has a tendency to debunk things, as the
sociologist would be driven by the nature of his discipline to debunk the social
system that he studies but is by no means due to the sociologist, rather it is due
to the methodology of the science; what sociology looks for are levels of reality
other than the ones given in the official interpretations of society, together with
the intention to unmask the pretensions and propaganda that mean use to
cloak their actions (Berger 1963).

The articles that were given to our class to read were rather interesting;
learning about sociology and how it is defined by sociologists is actually quite
interesting, though after reading through both, there are some things that were
quite different between the two. Comparing the two articles that I read, I found
out that though Berger and Mills have different explanations regarding the
nature of sociology, they more or less point to the same thing: sociology is an
unconventional science. I say that it is unconventional because, as Berger
stated, it is neither timeless nor necessary, and it never looks at things that no
one else is aware of, only studying the things already known to us, only looking
at them in a different way. To Mills, he believed that what sociology needs is
imagination and I agree, since sociology is a study that is not like any other
science, as its views on the same subjects are different from other scientists, and
even different sociologists would have different views on the same topic. From
the way Mills wrote about the sociological imagination, I imagine that he likens
sociology to an art, even though strictly speaking it is a science, its very nature
also makes it resemble an art. He calls it imagination because he defines
imagination as the capacity to shift from one perspective to another, which is
essential in sociology as Mills describes it as a science that states the obvious but
with the air of discovery. Going by Berger’s definition, it is quite contrary to
what I surmised from Mills; by Berger’s definition, sociology is a form of
consciousness, a system of thinking—in short, a science. And a science it is, and
even though it could be said that he defines sociology as something like a more
intellectual version of the ‘art of mistrust’ defined by Nietzsche because it
requires the intellectual ability to ‘see through’ the facades of reality it is also a
form of consciousness as it makes us aware of the meanings behind what we
see as normal in our society.

Bibliography:

Mills, C. Wright. 1959. “The Promise” pp. 3 – 24 in The Sociological

Imagination. New York: Grove Press Inc.

Berger, Peter L. 1963. “Sociology as a Form of Consciousness” pp. 37 – 67

in Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective. Middlesex Penguin