Organizing for Collective Well-Being
Sociological Meanderings: I wrote this for my Introduction to Sociology students, but am sharing it here:
American Democracy is an ideology, and not necessarily a given. The Civil War was a fight over slavery, which was an economic system that relied upon white supremacy, and also a fight over oligarchy (the wealthy elite few controlling the government). When the North won the war, slavery was dismantled (though white supremacy was not), and democracy was re-organized to include Black men as voters, though white supremacy kept most of those men from actually voting. White women won the vote in 1920. The 1965 Voting Rights Act granted the right to vote to men and women of color. In the 1970’s Nixon began the expansion of mass incarceration, thus stripping the vote of millions of people through felony — mostly drug — convictions. In 2013 the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. In 2021, many states are attempting to pass laws that curtail voting rights even further. The right to vote is still not a given, rather it is at risk, and so is American Democracy.
Democracy is a way to organize a government, but it is not inevitable. It must be constantly (re)negotiated and protected and maintained. That is because democracy is one way among many to organize a government, thus making it fragile. Democracy and the government are not the same thing: this is what we learn about social institutions when applying the “sociological imagination” (Mills 1959). The government is a social institution that organizes the basic needs of collective safety, needs and behavior. Democracy is how the United States has attempted to go about organizing collective safety, needs and behavior since the late 1700’s.
See, while individuals have needs (oxygen, water, sleep, food, shelter, safety), so too does society. First and foremost, to have a society is to have social organization and the goal of social organization is collective well-being. But the question becomes: How will we organize? What will we organize? We must organize so as to co-exist, because we always co-exist. As previously established, while we have a psychological sense of an individual “self,” sociologically speaking we always exist in relationship; we are interdependent. So, studying society is really about studying how we facilitate our co-existence. How we organize our relationships. How we live together among loved ones and strangers alike.
The government is one of the primary social institutions that oversees this organization. Take vehicular transportation. Every day, millions of people get into very large and dangerous machines, and then go out and drive together in a dance of interdependence. This is a very dangerous enterprise, and thus, as part of it’s task to organize collective safety, the government organizes vehicular traffic systems in order to keep us safe. Our personal responsibility is to value collective safety as much as the self (knowing that the safety of the self is dependent on the collective), and thus, to follow these transportation guidelines. So, we take and pass the drivers test, get a license, stay sober, wear seat belts, put away our phones, follow the speed limit, use blinkers, stay inside the yellow lines, only cross dotted lines, stop at stop signs and lights, and yield to yellow, pedestrians, and bicycles. There’s no sugar coating this: when we don’t do these things people die. These things are also true of vaccines and masks and social distancing: the government institutes policies to protect us and our personal responsibility is to value collective safety as much as the self, and thus, to follow these pandemic guidelines.
But, organizing transportation and the pandemic response is also organizing work, and family, and religion, and education. So, in organizing transportation and mandating vaccines, the government isn’t just keeping as many of us alive as possible, but also allowing us to go to work, to visit family, to go to school, and to pray with a community of others. And these things also keep us alive: at work we produce food and clothes and shelter, at home and in congregation we feed and clothe and love.
There is no such thing as a society without a system of governance. The question isn’t should we have a government or not? The question is always instead, how are we going to organize the government? You might believe in “big” government or “limited” government. You might be disenchanted by the people in your government, or frustrated by what they are or are not doing. But to opt out is to maintain the hegemonic status quo, because there is nowhere you can go to escape government. Because again, there is no society without a system of governance.
The question isn’t IF we have a government, but HOW we organize the government. We can have democracy, or theocracy, or monarchy, or oligarchy, or colonialism. We can have elected presidents or prime ministers, or we could have a dictator put in office by coup. This isn’t the stuff of past history or other countries. This is what’s at play, right now, right here. What system of governance we have is based on how each and every one of us acts in relation to our society (it’s not just the politicians who make these decisions, but all of us!). As Mills argues, we inherit a particular history from the past, but our biographies are what shape present and future history. How we — yes, I mean you and me — act today (and tomorrow) will determine if we have democracy tomorrow (and the next day).
If society’s basic needs are not being met, then sociologists take a critical approach. Which means we are more focused on the outcomes of social organization than a particular type of social organization. So, we care more about whether or not people are fed/hungry than we care about maintaining a particular type of economy (such as capitalism). So, things like homelessness, hunger, mass incarceration, and the on-going public health crisis, these things make us ask critical questions.
If our basic needs are not being met, what aspect of our social system needs to be reorganized? How are we going to address the spread of (very profitable for Facebook executives) disinformation and its impact on our Democracy? Are we going to choose Instagram scrolling to stave off boredom while Democracy slips into the past? Or are we going to put down our phones and help register new voters? Or, how are we going to operationally define freedom? Will we define freedom as the freedom to choose between 100 different kinds of fairly expensive breakfast cereals, thus rendering some unable to eat? Or will we define freedom as freedom from hunger, where everyone eats but the choices are fewer (say, 5 kinds of cereal)? Will we continue on a binary path that asks us to choose between individual freedom or public health, or can we take an expansive critical approach that allows for both individual freedom and public health? As critical thinkers, you have to answer these questions for yourself.
Society is an organized collective bound by a particular time and a particular place. Thus, we must understand that the needs of society will constantly change, so the questions will also always change.
But still, whatever the questions, as sociologists our answer is always the one that leads to greater collective-well being.
As always, please take good care of yourselves and of each other.
Dr. Monica Edwards (10/12/21)
