PERSONAL TROUBLES AND PUBLIC ISSUES Assigned Reading Chapter 1. C PERSONAL TROUBLES AND PUBLIC ISSUES Assigned Reading Chapter 1. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct….. (C. Wright Mills)

Ordinary men/women are bounded by the private orbits in which they live They are vaguely aware through ambitions and threats of the external society wide environments that transcend their lives. They lack the quality of mind that sees their personal traps in terms of 1. society wide institutions and spheres, 2. the interplay of man/woman within a society, i.e. their biography, and has 3) its origins in historical developments- e.g. industrialization, world system etc.

The Sociological Imagination Is the quality of mind needed to understand history and personal biography and the relationship between the two within a society. That is its task and its promise. It helps us form LUCID SUMMATIONS of what is happening in the world and within us. 1•What is the structure of society. Its institutions and the relationship between them. 2• What period of history is it in and how is it changing. 3• What kind of men/women inhabit this society- what is the nature of “human nature” in this society. The biographies of people living in a particular era and within a particular social structure. To be able to look at structural/institutional origins of problems, relating it to your private lives, means possessing the sociological imagination.

(Public) Issues and (Private) Troubles Troubles: occur within the limited social life of the individual and involve his or her character and local environments. What are your “local environments”? The private circuits of your life? Issues: are matters that transcend local environments but affect individuals personally nonetheless. An issue involves a crisis in the institutional arrangements- a contradiction or antagonism in the way society is structured, in that it is producing problems for a large number of people regardless of what the people might or might not do. Examples of Issues vs. troubles 1.unemployment 2. War 3. Marriage and divorce

Well being: When people possess cherished values and don’t feel them threatened Crisis: When people possess cherished values but feel some of them threatened. Panic: If all their values are threatened then its total threat or panic Indifference: When people aren’t aware of any cherished values and don’t feel any threat, they are INDIFFERENT. Indifference results in political apathy, the “I don’t care attitude” Anxiety and Uneasiness: When people aren’t aware of any cherished values but feel a vague sense of threat, they experience uneasiness and anxiety OURS IS A TIME OF UNEASINESS (i.e. anxiety) and INDIFFERENCE.

Psychological Explanations versus the Sociological Imagination Mills says: “Many great public issues as well as many private troubles are described in terms of ‘the psychiatric” – often in a attempt to avoid the larger issues and problems of modern society (and to push drugs manufactured by the pharmaceutical companies): due to 1. a narrowing of interests to problems of Western societies ignoring 4/5ths of the world’s population, 2. it also arbitrarily removes individual life from the larger institutions within which life is enacted and which many times bear with greater pressure upon the individual than the personal environments.”

At the start of the 20th century there were only a dozen recognized mental illnesses. By 1952 there were 192 (DSM I)and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) today lists 374 According to some estimates over 90% of the US public has some form or the other of a diagnosable mental disorder- or so psychiatrists claim Instead of dealing with the structure of societies that produce all the problems, psychologists and psychiatrists keep inventing new labels for mental illnesses and keep pushing drugs that are profitable for pharmaceutical companies but eventually harm a lot of people

Problems of the Physical Sciences Paradigms: In every age some trend of thinking becomes Dominant (C. W. Mills, page 13 & Thomas Kuhn) In our age the physical sciences biology, physics etc have been dominant in shaping thought. Their method of inquiry, the experiment has become the dominant mode and has entered social science as well. It has been assumed that physical sciences are more certain and more concrete than the social sciences And hence sociology has become subordinate to them. This is not so..

The Problems created by the physical sciences cannot be solved by physical science alone, take the example of : 1. nuclear weapons- they have created more problems than they have solved. 2. modern technology is being used to ruin the earth’s environment and for the sake of profit and war. These problems that the physical sciences have created cannot be solved by the physical sciences. Hence there is a need for social science to solve problems faced by humankind. Not only that, the physical sciences are by no means certain, they are extremely limited.

Intellectual Limitations of the Physical Sciences Take the case of Biology: 99 % of DNA codes for no protein so its function cannot be determined by biologists, out of the 1% that does, 99% is repetition. All biologists know is the 1% There are over 100,000 confirmed deaths due to medical malpractice every year in the U.S, the real number is much higher. Remove antibiotics, which were discovered by accident, and a few basic surgical procedures that date back to antiquity and you remove a significant portion of the benefits of modern medicine.

Only 5% of the universe is visible 33% is Physics: Only 5% of the universe is visible 33% is dark matter (that is physically unobservable) and 62% dark energy (which also cannot be observed except indirectly through their gravitational effect And by mathematical calculations). However little, sociologists might know, they still know more than 5% of society. Often their picture of the makeup of society is much more real than the picture of the universe presented by physicists or the picture of the natural world presented by biologists, just given the numbers alone, sociology is more physically “real” than two so-called hard sciences. Sociology is therefore not subordinate to the physical sciences

Human knowledge in the physical sciences is Extremely limited despite the claims made. A little Knowledge, used for the profit motive, concentrated in the military sector is extremely dangerous. As a result we see that regardless of the advances in technology, human misery around the world has not ended but has grown since the medieval ages. More people are dying of hunger, disease and war in the modern and now post-modern era than in medieval times given the sheer number of the population.

Without understanding the social structure in which our lives are enacted, we can never solve the problems faced by people To uncover this BIG picture we need SOCIOLOGY and the SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION

CLASSICAL THEMES THAT GUIDED SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH All facts have political and moral relevance: “In a world of widely communicated nonsense, any statement of fact is of political and moral significance…In such a world as ours, to practice social science is, first of all, to practice the politics of truth.” (Mills 1959:178)

2. Restoring Social Science: “Social science deals with problem of biography, history and their intersection within a social structure.” ( Mills1959:161) 3. Interplay of social worlds: no country exists in a vacuum, interconnection between nation states today, globalization in terms of the economic, political and military gives great structural power to the rich nations in determining affairs of consequence in the poor nations. You have to look at these interrelationships rather than using cheap arguments that blame the poor and the weak/.

4. Alienation and the Human Condition: The sense of purposelessness, of not belonging in the world, of feeling estranged from your work, yourself, your fellow human beings and nature- what is the source of such estrangement? How do you measure it?