ANALYSIS OF "THE SOCIOLOGICALLY EXAMINED LIFE" (part 29)

Stability and Change

by

Charles Lamson

In this book, The Sociologically Examined Life, the writer (Michael Schwalbe), perhaps, makes it seem that social life is random and chaotic - as if every event is unique and surprising. Clearly that is not true. Most of the time, social life is orderly and predictable. You might think that this oderliness refutes the idea that events and actions always arise out of a swirl of contingencies. However, there is really no contradiction. The social world is both changing and stable at the same time.

Because human lives are short, we often mistake temporary stability for performance. You might think mountains and buildings, for example, will last a long time. Yet even now, they are crumbling to dust. The sun and earth might seem truly permanent; but in another four billion years the sun will burn out, collapse and then explode to obliterate the earth, before collapsing again. So even the planet on which we live is temporary.

Consider too, that it takes work to keep the world orderly. If the sun did not pump energy into the earth's atmosphere, all the plants and animals we know - including ourselves - would soon vanish. To keep the social world humming along from day to day, we have to put energy into forming and transmitting cultural habits. If we did not do so, order would break down. The order we see in the world is thus not simply how things are, or the result of inertia. Order and stability are the results of action.

So when circumstances shape up in just the right way to produce surprising change, it is always against the background of conditions that are relatively stable. In the case of the Gulf War of '91, the background was an oil-hungry global economy, dominated by a few powerful capitalist nations. Even though the war was brief, these background conditions existed before the war, and still exist today. Being sociologically mindful, we remember not to take such conditions for granted, seeing them as part of the web of causes, and the swirl of contingencies, out of which emerges all that is predictable or surprising.

In Conclusion

Being sociologically mindful means not only recognizing that our explanations are always incomplete, but also trying to see how they are selective and incomplete, Why do we choose to identify certain conditions as causes, while taking other conditions for granted? The answer lies in examining our preferences for seeing some things as extraordinary, while not seeing some things at all.

*SOURCE: THE SOCIOLOGICALLY EXAMINED LIFE, 2ND EDITION, 2001, MICHAEL SCHWALBE, PGS. 117-118*

END