Return-Path: list-relay@UCSD.EDU
Date:         Sun, 19 May 96 08:09:22 EDT
From: "T R. Young" <34LPF6T@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU>
Organization: Central Michigan University
Subject:      The Incredible Stupidity of Computers
To: GRADUATE STUDENTS IN SOCIOLOGY <SOCGRAD@UCSD.EDU>
Continuation of a mini-lecture on the Complexity of Being...

[I'm not sure what happened but, in the middle of the 4th of 6 points
I was making, the cursor refused to move; the commands were ignored.
Maybe Kermit went on a coffee break??].

4.  [I think]  About 400 years ago, commodity capitalism exploded
    into a great maritime endeavor...about 200 years ago, the steam
    engine kicked off industrial capitalism.  By 1990, there were
    tens of thousands of occupational identities with which to label
    categorize, count and confine people into neat and tidy algebras.

    But...with industrial capitalism ownership of occupational
    identities was transferred [Marxists use the word, Appropriated]
    from the self system of the crafts-person to the Table of
    Organization of the Corporation.  The historical link between
    Mind, Self and Society began to pull apart in ever increasing
    fashion.

5.  By the turn of the 20th Century, the massification of school,
    church, work and politics were well under way...in a mass insti-
    tution, the link between self and society become ever more
    fragile and fragmented...for most hours in most days, one was
    involved in short social takes which did not emerge out of the
    core of social being but was taken on for brief and ever more
    'rationalized' encounters.  In 1800, being a Student was being
    a student...in 2000, being a student is being a well managed
    statistic.  In 1800, being a Christian was a life style; in
    2000, being a Christian is watching a tele-evangelist sing and
    stomp on about sin.

6.  With the globalization of the economy and the dis-integration
    of occupational, religious, educational and gender socialization
    and social being, identity wars break out...some try to reclaim
    ethnic and religious identity as a solution to the collapse of
    the social base of self in mass, industrial, globalized and
    fragmented social life.  Some turn to exotic eastern religions as
    a way to fill in the blanks of the social self.  Some use clothes,
    body work, or Astrology with which to create a semiotic self
    in a mass, impersonal society.  Some turn to drugs to obliterate
    the existential pain of non-being in a racist society hostile to
    its young and its marginal men and women.  Sports serve some.

    Sociologists are now caught up in the middle of these identity
    wars, charged as they are to count and to correlate.  For many on
    the Right, the problem is, itself Sociology and the solution is
    to dismantle the sociology departments which support those who
    watch and teach about such transformations in the structure of
    self and society.

    I don't want to leave the lecture on such a terrible, frightening
    and pessimistic note...it is well to understand what tearing
    self and society apart but it is not well to treat the present as
    if it is the future.  There is much which gives hope; the socio-
    ologist can be part of that or can be apart from it...both stances,
    are, I think, needed.  Some of us can help work toward a society
    in which mind and self are well connected to friend, family,
     church, market and government...some can relentlessly critique...
    some of us can count and correlate the ever-changing dialectics
    between self and society.

    Human beings are very creative and very inventive.  In our life-
    time, entirely new solutions to the dialectics of mind, self and
    society will emerge in the war torn towns of Bosnia, in the
    killing fields of Cambodia, on the farms and in the factories of
    the world.  Religion will be a very important part of those new
    solutions; Psychology will play a positive role.  Sociology; you
    and I together with hundreds of others will be very important
    to the incredible complexity of praxis, being and becoming in
    the postmodern world which is upon us.  It should be very inter-
    esting and most rewarding...if we do our part and do it well.

                                                   TR Young