I imagine that these entries are going to make little or no sense to many people who read them, both because they’re dealing with terminology that some people are unfamiliar with (I have to include them to prove that these ideas are coming from the reading) and also because I am still trying to figure out what this all means. But I am hopeful that by the end of this semester it will all start to make a bit more sense.
I guess my major problem right now is that sociology seems to be a bunch of people trying to attack these tiny aspects of human interaction without considering all the other tiny aspects that everyone else is working on. It seems foolish to me to try to understand human behavior as symbolic interactionists do by just looking at the immediate and momentary interactions between people because you’re ignoring the big picture, conversely it is also limited to just look at overarching views of society without examining the individual. Additionally both of these views tend to ignore both the derivative influences from the past on society and the individual as well as the importance that biology has in determining social interaction. Examining each of these on their own seems to reveal commonsensical truths about human beings, while taking them together creates a overlapping, interwoven, patchworked, and just generally more interesting tapestry of human experience.
I can’t really accept any view of sociology as being truly fleshed out without incorporating all (or at least most) of these pieces: individual, society, context, and biology.
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After six weeks of postgraduate education, I now believe that humanity is a venn diagram of:
a.) People who Think about Stuff, and
b.) People who Do Stuff.
Most people who Think about Stuff seem to have once nurtured ambitions of Doing Stuff, but wanted to learn more about that Stuff before they started Doing It Willy-Nilly. So they spent a lot of time in Higher Education, which taught them that there is too much to understand before you can even begin to think about Doing Stuff Correctly. This made them go out and write Books About Doing Stuff Correctly, filled with things that plebians would call "common sense," but these people call "theory." Then these People who Think about Stuff become professors, and spend a lot of time teaching people who want to Do Stuff that the world is too complicated for them to Do Stuff without Thinking Way Too Much About It First. And the cycle continues.
Now the trouble with Doing Stuff without Thinking It Though To Its Logical Conclusion leads to all sorts of nonsense (financial crises and inextricable military operations in middle eastern countries come to mind) so the ideal is to be one of the very few people in the middle of the venn diagram-- a person who does stuff AND thinks about stuff.
Most sociologists are not in the middle of the venn diagram, that's all I'm saying.
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