ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Sorry. I’m just testing this camera. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: What is Speaker? Hey? I’m over here. Can you see me? Camera? No. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: supposed to do ZR DE-Yuba 1019: alright? Well, welcome back to sociology one.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So the other day I had my recording of the class didn’t come out very well because I left this screen sharing on so everything I was doing ended up just being a little box up here, and all you see is
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: this screen sharing that says something unintelligible on there, that whiteboard thing I was trying to do. So so what I wanna do is just review real quickly some of the things we said the other day, so that we can still use this video to make sure. We have a complete set of notes.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So we’re trying to understand the key terms. And these are overall key terms, you know, every throughout the course will have key terms, but these are sort of overall ones to help us.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: start the class because these are terms that will bring up again and again. And I just wanna make sure we understand that. And the first one is sociological imagination. And somebody asked the other day, you know which is the key term here, and this is the key term. But there are a few things. I wanna make sure you understand about this concept.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: One is, you know, with C right? Mills was the American sociologist who came up with this idea. I wanna highlight that because we’re gonna learn more, that sociology more came from Europe. And it came from a long time ago. But thinking about mills kind of connect so selfie to us here in America and makes us feel like, okay, sociology isn’t just some weird thing from a long time ago, but does connect to us today in a lot of ways.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And he wanted to understand, you know, why are people seem like they’re cheerful robots.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: That’s another idea I’m holding you responsible for here. And that was this idea that he thought a lot of Americans at that time in the 19 fifties were to engage in mindless conformity, or this kind of going along
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: with what society said they should be doing. So that meant, for example, women just accepting, being secondary to their husbands and not having power in the society or non white people, excepting that they don’t have power in society, or people of various alternative lifestyles. What we nowadays people and things like that, how they should just stay in the cause and be required, and not
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: try to shake up anything, and Mills felt like, well, maybe it’s a good idea for people to shake up things. He’s takes a lot of people suffer from what we call private troubles.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: but if they were to make these into public issues. in other words, bring them into public awareness
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and get people talking about them and get politicians thinking about how to fix them, that that’s how you can make society better, and that that’s what we in sociology are trying to do. I mean whether you’re a small s sociologist is what I call all of us be meaning. We’re not professional sociologists, your first sociology class, but you already are a sociologist. You already are trying to live in society and navigate it.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Capital S. Sociologist. Our professional sociologists like myself, who’ve gone through training and you’re gonna be getting some training this term. But whether you’re a capitalist, sociologist or a small associologist, the goal is to try and make social life work better. And so some people think you can’t do that. I mean, some people believe that there’s a human nature that we are just human to work with bad people, and we go around harming each other, not just how it is.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And sociology really starts from the perspective that no humans can change our nature. Maybe for the last
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: 100,000 years we’ve been killing each other and being selfish and depriving each other of things. But that doesn’t mean we always have to be that way, and that if you shape your society in a better way than the people living in it could act better and treat each other better. That’s the main hope of sociology, I would say, and and Bill says, if you have that hope for yourself, I can make things better for
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: myself and people like me. If you don’t have that hope. If you’re just like I think to start the way they are.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: everything happens for a reason. I hear people say that it’s it’s a fatalistic attitude. It’s just accepting things as they are. But Mill said, don’t accept it, challenge it. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: You can change it, you can make it better.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And so and so how do you do that? He says we have to think about how our biography intersects with history
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: how we are just an individual person growing up. I was talking. If I can mention you, Lindsay, can I talk about you a little bit so she was saying. You know her grandma, grandpa were migrant farm workers here in California, and she hasn’t learned too much about what they experience.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and I would think, like comparing her grandma and grandma’s experiences being market farm workers in California. Compare that to her mom’s experience. Mom and dad, what has been their experiences. Latino people in California.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: What’s your experience as a Latina person in California, and thinking through those things learning about them? We don’t just know them. You have to go interview people, talk to people, study things, read books, but gaining this knowledge of who you are.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: what’s my biography? Who are the people that made me who I am, and how does it fit into history right now? And and so when we said biography, it meant things like our class, our race, our gender, all these social groups that we fit into
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: those all have a history, and knowing yourself sociologically, means knowing ZR DE-Yuba 1019: all those histories of who you are, and then and then trying to understand how the things you’re facing today may or may not connect with that issue.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: You know, you may have problems that don’t connect with your history and your ethnic group and your class group. And they may just be personal issues that you have for whatever reason. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But there are some times when we face issues that
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: that do connect back to that. You know, it’s a black history month right now, and one reason that we study black history. And and, as educators have said, you know, we want to pay attention to black history is because, you know, if you’re a black student right now, struggling in school.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: then understanding the history of black people in this country and their experience in schools, and like how it used to be illegal to teach black people to read, for example.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: so it might make sense that it’s harder now to compete against the very people that made it illegal for you to learn. You know. That’s you know, it helps black students understand that history. And I think all of us can understand ourselves better. We understand.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So all these ideas, you know, see right now, cheerful robots. Mine is conformity related to cheerful robots. Private trouble issues. All of that is a part of this idea of the sociological imagination. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And the second term that we talked about was the idea of social structure.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And again, I want to connect these ideas because I think things stick in your mind better when you understand how things are all related to each other, and all the knowledge fits together. How do we connect social structures to
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: to social imagination? Well, public issues, when we say something is a problem that’s a public problem. It isn’t just a private problem. We’re saying that it exists outside the individual. It exists somewhere in society and social structure is a term we can use for for that idea. But we also compare that idea to culture.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And we said that social structure is really a matter of who has one in society is the things in society more or less. The material distribution of goods is the way sociologists put it. Things like money, things like housing things like healthcare. These are things people either have or don’t have. What do people have?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: What do? What do people have or not? ZR DE-Yuba 1019: That’s what we’re talking about. We talk about structure of society as sociologists. So we say, a problem like a structural problem. We’re saying, it’s a problem that comes from people not having enough of this or that.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So like a good question, we could ask that we talked about what’s another problem? We could talk about like homelessness is a good one, you know. I’ve heard some people say homelessness is a housing problem, and I heard other people say, homelessness is not a housing problem.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Well.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: what do we mean by that? Is there? If there was more housing available, would there be less homelessness? Probably. I mean, that’s the idea. You don’t have a home then having a home means they’re not homeless. On the other hand, a lot of people say that homelessness is a result of other things like people being addicted to drugs, or mentally ill, or some or bad values, or they’re just lazy, or something like that.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: If you’re homeless, you know. Maybe it’s something you did personally to yourself, in a way, through what? Through what you what people think and feel
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: is culture. So I’m I’m simplifying things. And you know you could quibble with my definitions. But when it’s hot, this says something’s a cultural problem. They’re saying it has to do with how people think and feel. Something’s going on inside them, and they’re thinking in their way, they feel about stuff that’s making them behave in a certain way. That’s a problem
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: which is different from saying a problem as a result of people just not having enough. So, for example, if you were totally saying and had no drug problems at all, and what had good morals and values. But you didn’t have a home, and you were living on the street. Well, we’d say you’re you know.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: What would you need to to solve that problem? Home? So we’re saying, your, your. Your problem is one of not having something. On the other hand, if you’re choosing, you know, if you’re mentally ill and you’re just living in the forest or something.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: you know, we need to fix something going on with your head in the heart. So anyway, that’s ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and and when we but really what we weren’t, I, I’m complicating matters, or or maybe confusing things by talking about an individual. Really, we’re talking about both societies here.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And so, John, just compare societies like some like communities. So if we compare, like homelessness in Santa Barbara, California, to homelessness in Sacramento, California? Yeah, we could ask ourselves, what are the differences between these places? Is it the exact same problem with the same solution work in one place as another. And we have to ask ourselves, is the problem mainly a structural one or cultural one, or how to culture and structure affect each other. How do people thinking and feeling
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: affect their the way they distribute the resources in the community?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: I was just reading about. For example, what is the term elite? We say we have an elite who are the elite, and why do they get to be the elite, and I was learning about like in France, I mean in Rome, Egypt, Rome, when you ate together with a big group of people. If you were in the elite. That means you get to E line down.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and if you were in the if you were slave, you had to stand up through the whole meal. If you were a kid, you had to sit at a table and eat, and so, in their view, you know, getting to lie down while you’re eating was real privilege.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But anyway, you know, that’s their culture. They think it’s cool to lie down while eating, but it reflects the structure of the society? Who has? What if you own the building where, the food being served and you made for the food? Then you get to tell people you stand and we lay down anyway. So structure and culture go together.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But they’re 2 terms we use a lot in in this class. And how do we know whether a problem is cultural or structural? We have to look at the data. And what kind of data do Socialists look at? We look at social facts.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and I won’t go all back into suicide again. That was a depressing topic. But the basic idea of social facts ZR DE-Yuba 1019: is that we look in sociology and aggregate behavioral. we don’t really look at individuals. And why an individual does what they do.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Psychology is the field that does that psychology. If it wants to understand why an individual person would commit suicide comparing individuals, why is this person this one did? ZR DE-Yuba 1019: We can look at individual factors like things that happen to them, chemistry of their brain, or something like that.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But in sociology we’re looking at groups of people, and we’re trying to understand the rates of behavior. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Why, for example, Protestants commit suicide more often than Catholics and Jews.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But again, I said, I wasn’t gonna talk about suicide. But there’s lots of rates of behavior we could look at, for example, homelessness rate. Some cities have high percentage people without homes. Some cities don’t.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: We could look at team pregnancy rates. We can look at murder rates, we can look at unemployment rate. We can look at all all kinds of questions about. And what is a rate of behavior? It’s saying, out of a certain number of people it can be out of 100 of 1,000, out of 100,000, whatever it is.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: out of a certain number of people. What percentage have this issue? ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And when we look at numbers like that, we’re not comparing individuals to each other. We’re comparing groups to each other, so we can ask, for example.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Well, speaking of black history month, I was just hearing on the radio about menthol cigarettes.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: They ban flavored cigarettes. A few years ago the Federal Government said, you can’t make cigarettes tastes like a certain fruit or thing like that because it’s a way of marketing the kids. But they didn’t say that you couldn’t market fresh, or whatever.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And if you go compare groups to each other well, who smokes menthol cigarettes? Well, in the black community ZR DE-Yuba 1019: the rate of out of 100,000 smokers. What rate of them smoke? Menthol cigarettes are very high rate. It’s very popular in that community, in other communities it’s not.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And so you could ask, well, why did they ban flavored cigarettes for all the other groups, but for black people. They said, No, and now they’re trying to ban it. But then you have other groups saying, Well, why should black people get smoked the cigarettes they want to, anyway, that’s a different debate. But the question of the rate of behavior. And then, when you look at the cancer rate out of 100,000 people who smoke mental cigarettes and compare them to 100,000 people who don’t smoke, who smoke a different kind of cigarette.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: The cancer rates for menthol are higher.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So it’s this idea that it isn’t just cigarettes. It’s killing them. It’s meant all cigarettes in particular. I don’t know if you know what I mean by menthol cigarettes, but those are things like tools. If you don’t know. Good, you’re not a smoker.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: but what I’m saying is is, there’s a
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: rates of behaviors, many millions of things we could look at. But comparing rates means we’re comparing groups like black people or menthol cigarette smokers and non menthol, cigarette smokers or black people to white people, to other groups or comparing communities like Santa Barbara versus Mary as well. There’s lots of ways we can break people up into groups of 100,000, or a thousand, or whatever map we’re using.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But it’s that we’re comparing groups and trying to see what it tells us about these groups.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: for example. I’ll give you another example that really a lot of students wanna, ask them, who are they? Sociologically, they say they’re introverts. And that’s a psychological term. So sociologists, we’re not really that concerned over who’s an introvert and who’s an extrovert that psychologists want to know that.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But I’d be interested as a sociologist if I took all the Latino students in Yuba College, all the Latino women and asked, Are you an introvert or extrovert, how many would say they’re an introvert, and if I took all the male white students and I took all the female Asian students, and I took all the male Asian students, and I compared them. What percentage of this group says they’re an introvert. And what percentage of this group would there be differences in the groups? I think there would. I have a theory that white males are less likely to say that they’re shy.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and women, especially brown women are more likely to say they’re introvert, and a lot of them will say, Well, once I’m around my friends, I’m totally outgoing. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So in other words they’re saying when I’m comfortable socially with people like me. I can be myself
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: when I’m in a classroom, and I’m the only Latina woman or something.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: I’ve introverted that client. And so that’s so. Well, what I’m saying is that individual trays. Maybe if we look at it from a sociological standpoint, comparing groups to each other, and we find, well, why is it? This group has a higher rate of introversion, and this group has a lower one.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: then, that raises sociological questions about things like, well, who has the permission to speak in society, who has power and who doesn’t. And it raises structural and cultural questions about our society.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So we’re comparing and sociology groups and communities and whole clusters of people, not usually comparing one individual to another and trying to figure out what makes one tick and another one not.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Does that make sense alright? And so So another term, by the way, just quickly that’s mentioned in your textbook is structuration.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and I won’t spend a lot of time on it. It’s interesting because the main author of your textbook is a guy named Anthony Giddens, and he’s one of the most famous sociologists in the world, and this is one of his big ideas that he himself invented. And so we would be remiss. I guess in this class, if we’re using his textbook, we don’t talk about structure.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: The basic idea is that we, as individuals are products of our social structure. And II guess that would include culture. Your society shakes you as the individual.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: In other words, you can’t. Just we like to think. And and here’s another way to think about sociology. Sociology kind of argues with mainstream American culture. When we talk about what we think and believe as Americans
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and feel we like to feel the individual gets to be, whoever they want to be. You get to be whoever you want to be in life, and it’s all up to you, and that’s what we say in America. But in sociology we kind of argue against that. We say, well, no, really, as an individual, you’re a product of your society.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: You didn’t just get to choose everything about who you are and how you are. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: For example, I’m a sociologist that I just willingly choose sociology, just as a free choice to become a sociologist in a way.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But another way. My dad was a sociologist, and if I’m trying to make it in America get a good middle class job that pays my bills. It makes sense to do something that I already kind of have an idea of how works, because my dad already did it.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and a lot of us tend to go into the things that we already know about, because our parents did them, or we were exposed to it.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But that means I didn’t get to be an investment maker. I knew when I went to college. There were guys made millions of dollars investing in the stock market. But that wasn’t my world. They became that. And I became a teacher. But when I’m saying is. So do you just get to totally choose what you want to be in life? Or do you get to be the kind of things you’re set up to be.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: At the same time we feel like we do have free will. And I’m not being the exact same sociologist that my dad is. I’m not just a a carbon copy of my of the previous generation. Each individual can also shape their society. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: social structure.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and culture. You can contribute to your society and your culture, and you can now change it.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And so that’s why social change happens. If we were always just products of our society, then things would never change. We would just be carbon copies of our parents, and we would do things just how they did, and things wouldn’t change much.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But each generation can look at the world as it is, and say, Hey, I don’t think I like this part or that part. I want to do things this way. And so each young generation, as it comes up, does change the world a little bit.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: It happened slowly over time, and not all at once. But social change does happen. And so Gins was trying to give us a theory. and that, by the way, was another key term for us. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Theories are attempts to explain social facts.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: saying here, one way we can explain social change is by this idea of structuration that people yes, they’re they’re products of their social structure and culture, and they think and feel the way society tells them that they can feel, and they have or don’t have, what society allowed them to have or not have.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: but they also have their own independent mind, and they can challenge those things and look at those things kind of objectively, and say, you know, try to fix them so things. And so that’s his theory. It’s an attempt to explain the fact that things do tend to. People do tend to get a lot of, you know, do the things their parents did very common to have the same political beliefs. Your parents did, same voting patterns, the same general career patterns.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But things do change.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So both are true anyway. So that structure Asian and and theory, by the way, when we were trying to explain suicide when dirt time said, you know, I think it’s social solidarity. That’s what I talked about the other day when people are connected to each other, then suicide less likely to happen in a social group type, net social solidarity. If it’s a weak social group where people aren’t really connected to each other, then suicide more likely to happen in that group. So again, he was comparing groups, and then
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: the the social facts about those groups that they have different suicide rates, and it’s trying to explain why. That’s the case. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: I’m trying to remember I’m skipping any key terms.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: I don’t think I am for now. But now I want to kind of try to illustrate the key terms by giving you a social fact ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and asking you to come up with some theories that could help explain that social fact.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So here’s the social fact. I know not. All of us are numbers oriented people. So I’m not gonna get into a lot of numbers with it. but the fact has to do with binge drinking among college students.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So first of all, what’s been drinking? Ben’s drinking is just drinking to get drunk. I mean, if you sit down to drink alcohol, and your goal is to, you know, feel it, and get a little drunk, then that stop in drinking from man. It means, you know, drinking more than like 4 drinks at a time.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: For women it might be like more than 3 drinks at a time. If you’re sitting down to get drunk, that’s called binge drinking
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: issues around. College students been drinking, you know, have been on the minds of a lot of college professors, and especially college presidents. You know, some schools have problems with students. Drinking Chico state is one that’s had problems just up the road here, where people drink too much, and they
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: get into accidents or sexual assault situations, or they ZR DE-Yuba 1019: are there, you.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: you know, get poisoned from alcohol. Uc. Davis had some of these problems. I don’t know that we have that problem here at, but community colleges aren’t as much a party schools as places like Chico state might be in Uc. Davis. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Sax State.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But Benjamin college students is higher today. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Then, in the 19 seventies. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: been thinking rates are higher today than in the 1970. I’m not even sure if this fact is a real fact at the moment. But let’s say it is.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: It was a few years ago. I don’t know exactly what the current been drinking rates are. But
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: so my lecture is a little outdated, and that I’m using this example. Well, I don’t know, because I don’t know what the mid regular at the moment. But let’s just assume this is the true fact. I’m giving you that been drinking rates right now are higher than they were in the seventies among college students.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And I’m asking you, what are your theories
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: about? Why, that might be the case. You guys are today’s college students. And I’m telling you that you guys are more likely to bing drink again. Likely this when we say, you know, add a hundred 1,000. That doesn’t mean you are in that 100,000. Just means out 100,000 more of them. Now, Ben, before
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: the rate has gone up. So what theories do you have about? Why, that might be the case. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Okay, so what? What’s your theory there
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: that self medicating or dealing with more mental health problems. And so they’re using alcohol to self medicate. Okay? And I’ll call itself ZR DE-Yuba 1019: medication for mental health reasons. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Okay?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Solid theory. Maybe certainly a lot of reasons to think students today are facing more mental health issues than before, although that’s what I would press you to develop in your theory is, why is there more mental health now issues than before? What? What’s
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: the explanation for that? And you could maybe bring up things like, I don’t know covid ZR DE-Yuba 1019: social media. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: There’s other reasons, way, maybe, why people are more stressed out. Okay? And other theories.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: My, my insistence that you engage in the class. If all you want to do is passively take the class online is great for that. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: If you want to take the live class, you gotta be ready to meet in your face and raise your hand. Yeah.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: I guess maybe like technology. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: especially younger kids. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Okay, so people are more just staying by themselves, and they’re drinking alone, maybe, or
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: or because they’re more, they’re less social. When they get to college, they need more liquid courage to be able to deal with other people, to be able to be social and stuff like that. And so you’re saying more. Maybe II think I’m gonna find yours more social anxiety. Now.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: people have anxiety about being dealing with other people, and so they drink to loosen up. And
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: okay, any other theories? Yeah. tip it in. So if you think everybody else is drinking, you feel like I better drink, too. And so it’s a peer pressure kind of thing, I mean. Again I would say, why is there more peer pressure now than there was in the seventies? What what’s your theory about? Why, the peer pressure is higher.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: You don’t have to have what I’m putting on the spot I could suggest. So ZR DE-Yuba 1019: maybe it’s because there’s a more diverse colleges now like back then it was more just mainly white males in college and some white females. But nowadays we have very diverse college
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: environment which can lead to more social anxiety. It can also lead to more desire to find a friend group and really just fit in with your friend group and feel like you have them, and if you feel your friend group drinks and you better drink with them. Okay?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Glorified by ZR DE-Yuba 1019: television. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Okay, mass media and influences. And a lot of times when we’re dealing with sociological problems. People point to the media as being the thing. And you’re saying media glorification alcohol. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: again, I’d ask for why is it more glorified now than it was, or in what ways is it? And I can answer that for you. One is, you know, they used to the alcohol industry purposely didn’t advertise hard alcohol on television. There was a a self imposed rule that they said, we’re only gonna advertise beer and wine on TV
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and not things like whiskey burden vodka. Those are hard spirits, and they can mess you up much easier than beer and wine can. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But in recent years. They just
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: took that rule off themselves, and if you look at a lot of cable shows, they show Jack, Daniels and vodka and all kinds. So they are showing more on the media. More people drinking harder stuff. Another thing I’ve mentioned is the alcohol industry has tried very hard to market directly to college students. They got in trouble, in fact, but
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: few years ago started making their bottles in the colors. The school colors of the colleges where they were selling it by. So if it was near Ucla, blue and yellow, if it was near, Stanford was red, you know, and people were saying, Well, you’re marketing the college students, but most of them are under 21. So aren’t you just purposely trying to get under 21 year old people to drink beer? And they had to stop doing that. But that’s
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: that certainly fits your theory that the alcohol industry is trying, and we are trying harder to get college students to drink any other theories. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and women drink more
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: things are marketed to women with colorful, pretty cans. And all this stuff. alright. So any other theories you wanna suggest.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: let me throw a wrench in your theory a little bit a wrench, meaning, let’s break out the data a little more. This is a very raw data thing. All college students are drinking warm.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But when we break out data, what people mean by that is, let’s break it down by social groups like the ones we’re talking about. Let’s break it down into things like race and class and gender, and see if the binge drinking rates are the same for all those sub groups of college students.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So if I ask you, who do you think, what’s your profile in terms of race, class and gender? Who do you think is the most likely to be a bit stranger when they come to college?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: What’s their race like? What’s their gender like? What’s their class like think it’s white people. How many think it’s white people? ZR DE-Yuba 1019: How many think it’s black people. I mean, think it’s Latino people. I mean, think it’s Asian people number one person sent to drink his wife. Yes.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: are they dude? ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Alright? Do that mostly dudes? A lot of them are dude, so they’re mail. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Are they poor working class people? First generation, college student is that who he is.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: or seem more likely to be, an upper middle class person with the dad that went to college, and your granddad that went to college.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Which do you think? How many think is the upper middle class? How many think it’s the working class. It’s the upper middle class guy ZR DE-Yuba 1019: that’s who’s doing a lot of the drinking.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: who’s at the bottom of the list, who, when they came to cause the first day is the least likely to be a big drinker that year. What’s her Grace? Do you think it is a woman. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Asian? Nope? ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Black ZR DE-Yuba 1019: women working class.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: She’s the first person to ever go to college in her family, and they call her up. How? How’s how it’s going? I’m getting drunk every night. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: No, I’m studied. I went to class. I went to a special lecture. She’s really excited to do there at college.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: His dad, grandpa, great grandpa all went to Stanford, and he’s the fifth tenth generation. Stanford student. Hey? How did? How’s it going there at Stanford, where I’m so? Which one getting drunk all the time. Football games. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: It’s great.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: These are caricatures, but that if we’re trying to understand the data. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: why is it that a black woman personal. Now, again, if we’re talking about nonprofits, we’re talking about people, general population, these
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: racial profiles and class profiles are probably different. But if we’re trying to understand college students, and they’ve been drinking, just lumping them all together as college students and trying to come up with a theory
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: might not get us very far, we want to break out the data and compare groups to each other. So if we say, like, mental health problems are white, rich guys having a lot more mental health problems and challenges. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Then poor black women.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: I mean, is our mental health theory holding water here as we break it down that way? Who’s number 2 up here, do you think? ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Who’s drinking with this white dude? ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Right white, wealthy dude? ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Wait. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: female
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: upper middle class. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: That’s another person that’s likely to get drunk at college at Stanford. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Who else? Who’s down here? Who’s also not getting drunk?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: We love to take the Asians aren’t getting drunk. But actually, the third group up there is Asian male upper middle class.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: just because somebody is serious about school doesn’t necessarily mean. And that’s this Asian stereotype of the model minority, the model student. But that doesn’t mean they don’t like party or have the means to party.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So who else? So that’s so when we start asking, Well, why? Who’s partying at college? And who is it? ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Is it cultural, like thinking and feeling, or is it structural?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Who has what I mean? If you have money. you have money to drink and stuff. If you have money, you don’t need to worry about failing a class, because you can pay for tutors, or you can take the class again and stuff like that.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: If you don’t have money, you don’t have those privileges. If you so, who’s it down here, not drinking with her Latina
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: women working class. When we talk to them about their college experiences, they’re not saying, Oh, yeah. I went out and got got drunk out so wasted every night. They’re going to class. They’re studying. They’re doing the things college students are supposed to do, not the things that partiers are supposed to do
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: who’s also up here? Well, black ZR DE-Yuba 1019: males. upper middle class.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: We don’t pick the black males as being upper middle class in general, that’s our stereotype. But in colleges again, and and on the West coast we don’t see it as much, but the East Coast has some wealthy colleges, and there definitely is a class of American people that are black, that are in the upper middle class.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And so what what are we comparing here? ZR DE-Yuba 1019: You have a different theory here. Now, what could explain why, when you go to Pod’s campus, you might find wealthy white people. These are people and black people getting drunk on a Friday night ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and not seeing
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: working class students. And down here working class. White students are down here, too.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: They’re the ones not getting joking when I say working class, I mean, you’re the kind of person who’s your first generation and your family to go to college. Your parents might not own their own home. They might not make over $100,000 a year.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So that’s what we mean by class. Any other theories like, what? Why is there been drinking going on on the college campus? And where is it happening? What’s your theory now? ZR DE-Yuba 1019: No theory.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Sorry this is going to. I’m glad that’s the drinking and cost campus is not in your experience, and it doesn’t matter to you. Good but it is a big issue up in Chico state, like I said at Uc. Davis. And where are these problems occurring?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: What’s your theory here? The basic idea here is this is all part of fraternities and sororities. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: or what’s called the Greek system.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Again, if you don’t know about it, you’re not missing much, but most universities have what are called sororities and fraternities, their private clubs for the wealthier students. You have to pay a lot of money each year to be a member of the fraternity or sorority.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and when you get to be the fraternity sorority, you get to live a special house for your fraternity story. If you go into Uc. Davis, there’s a whole row of houses they call Fraternity Row. A lot of them have big neon signs on them. The neon signs are sometimes provided by the alcohol industry because they have these parties, and on Friday nights you can go up and down the streets all the different fraternities and sororities and drink and party, and it’s just like a downtown club scene.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: only it’s not 25 year old. It’s 1821 year old. It’s a little bit scandalous because the alcohol industry promotes these fraternity and sorority parties at colleges, and a lot of students get drunk and get heard when we get solved in the alcohol. Industry makes a lot of money.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Well, what I’m saying is the bin drinking problem is concentrated
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: in the first for Chinese and sororities. And if you’re a working class student for student. First in your family, you go to college. You’re probably not even going anywhere near those places. You’re more focused on the library, on your classroom, on other things that are more about academics.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So that changes our theory here again, it’s not about
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: maybe not about these other things we thought might be about, but really just about a structural thing of people with the means, with houses, fraternity houses with extra money on hand, with the privilege to do well in school because their parents already went to college. They’re the ones exercising privileged by partying their way through college, and the ones who are not as privileged, who don’t have as much have a different culture in mind, a culture of study, and so they have less what they again, are getting back to structure and culture.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: This shows a structuring culture. When you have more, you can have a culture of partying and drinking and fraternities and sororities. When you have less in terms of money, a place to get drunk. Then you have a different culture.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And so and and it also raises the question, well, how then, should we solve the problem? How would you solve the problem
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: if you were a college president? If they said, Okay, you’re President of chief of state right now, and your task is to reduce Binge drinking by 30% at your college. How are you gonna do that? Do you have any.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: What would be a good way to do it. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Well, why not get rid of the fraternities, authorities? If that’s the place where all this is happening.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: That would be the obvious choice. If you’re present is this is where the problem is, it’s all happening right there. It’s because of these clubs that do underage shrinking. So let’s get rid of these clubs and focus on academics. Why not do that?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: You have? And by the way, they tried to, or some people have floated the idea. But why do you think it doesn’t happen. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Lindsay? Maybe the the money that’s coming in?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Exactly. So these fraternities authorities are some of the wealthiest people on campus. It’s the alumni. I don’t know if you know how causing universities work, but people whose parents and grandparents went to the college. They donate money to the college in a big way. And so if you’re a president, you you propose to your community, we’re gonna get rid of the fraternities and sorties, you would have all your wealthiest donors calling the school, saying, What are you doing? That’s my fraternity. That’s where I went.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: I love. They have this thing called homecoming universities do every year homepage needs to come back to your college and watch your old football team play and go back to your old fraternity and get drunk with the new students. When I went to college they had these all the time. We used to get drunk with all these old guys, and they’re like.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and and so, but it’s so it’s it’s it’s again a question of power and social structure. And if you are college president trying to run a college, then trying to challenge those wealthy, powerful people in the college community is not gonna work for you, so they haven’t done it. So what do they do? Well, a bunch of college presidents got together and they took out an ad college. We’re worried about this problem with Binge drinking about campuses.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And so they took out an ad in the New York Times, trying to convince ZR DE-Yuba 1019: the American population that we need to solve this problem. And what was their solution to house presidents said ZR DE-Yuba 1019: our solution would be, let’s lower the drinking age
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: question mark. There, you think that’s a good idea? Why, we why would the college presidents? ZR DE-Yuba 1019: These are supposedly smart people with Phds and stuff like that? Why would they ZR DE-Yuba 1019: proposed lowering the drinking age
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: as a way of solving the problem I’ve been drinking. Doesn’t that seem counter ZR DE-Yuba 1019: contradictory? Why, why do you think they would propose that. Can you think of any good logical reasons why that might? Yeah. Good idea.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: If you, if you make it legal for college students to be drunk 18 year olds. Would that solve the problem of people drinking too much, and sexual assault and accidents and stuff ZR DE-Yuba 1019: alcohol poisoning? ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Why do they think it might help with that. Think
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: they wouldn’t have to go to the parties to get it? You’re getting there. I mean, they they set it in there when they were justifying this idea, and they wrote this whole full page ad, so they didn’t just say, Let’s, here’s why.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Why, what was their justification? Well, what is the idea of the forbidden fruit syndrome. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: You know what the forbidden fruit syndrome refers to? Who had the forbidden fruit?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Anybody read the Bible here? Do you remember we’re told. My God, you cannot have apple, that’s an apple tree, and there’s apples on there, and there’s shiny and red. But don’t you know? ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And what did they do? Okay.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And that was said and and but one idea is, if you tell people not to do something. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Sometimes it makes it more attractive to them to want to do it. They want to know what they’re missing.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and that’s what these cost students say. Maybe by saying the conference. You can’t have alcohol. You better not have alcohol calls off limits. Maybe we’re making it more attractive in a way.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and they pointed to Europe. For example, many European countries don’t have a strict drinking age. It’s it’s, you know, and a lot of European people get experience drinking alcohol before they reach 21, and they see it as food, like I have a glass of wine with my spaghetti.
And it’s not this thing that it’s forbidden, and once you get it. You drink as much of it as possible. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: It’s this thing you have a little bit of with your spaghetti. bend your cheese.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and so the call of presence were saying, we need to be more like Europe, where I’ll call just a normal part of life is that this forbidden thing that once you get access to it, you’re gonna go crazy with it.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And so yeah, places where young people can get access to alcohol. But by having it be this forbidden thing. It makes them want to do it more. And I’m only dwelling on this, not because been drinking such an important topic for us, but this is an interesting sociological idea that we, as a society, if we keep telling people? No, no, no.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Does that really solve our problem? If we keep raising penalties and say, no. And if you do it, we’re gonna punish you for it.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: I think it’s a. It’s a big misconception a lot of people have. It’s bad sociology. A lot of people have a lot of parents have it. A lot of managers have it. They think if you just scared people really hard to away from something that they won’t do it
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: like you say, your kids, you better not go out at night. I’ll catch you, and you’ll be in so much trouble, young lady. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and every girl I know who told that by her dad did go out of.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: whereas if you have a more understanding relationship with your kids. Here’s the reason why I want you home by this hour.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and they have some say in that to me is a much better form of authority and management than just telling people better, or else because people don’t necessarily don’t do something just because the people in charge of them told them not to but anyway,
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: it. What I’m saying is consent of the Government when you are being told not to do something. If you agree. That’s a good rule. You’re more likely to follow it when you’re told by somebody you better follow up hurt you?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Well, then, you’re not being asked to agree with Google. You’re just being a grad as to follow it, and you might not. And most of us don’t like all the world. We don’t agree with
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: so same fruit. Syndrome was one idea, another idea here. And I think this kind of goes to your point. They wanted to change ownership of the problem is the way I would put it. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Whose problem is it
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: that college students are getting drunk and getting sick and beating each other up or falling off balconies or raping each other. If if drinking’s illegal.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: then the cops are in charge of it. It’s their problem. Illegal behaviors going on over there at the college campus, and we’ve got to go over there and handle it.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And if it’s an illegal problem, then the cops own it. Do the cops on the problem. Is it the cops problem.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: the college president, for trying to say, if you lower the drinking age and make it legal for college students to drink. Then any problems that are occurring. Those are our problems to handle as a college. So boys are, you know, people are being unsafe. If they’re getting sick will handle it. I went to a very elite college on the East coast, where they had their own police force.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and if they caught you doing illegal stuff? They didn’t send you to the real cops like, if people were high on illegal drugs, they would like give them some more shoes, put them in a nice little room so they could get better. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: If you are, you know.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: having too much alcohol growing up, they come and give you some detox or something like that. My point is, that was a lead school. The rich people who send their kids there didn’t want their kids getting arrested, and so they had set it up so that any illegal problems going on on the school wouldn’t lead to actual arrest by the real authorities, but would need to be, you know, managed by the the school authorities.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and that’s, I think, essentially, with these college presidents were saying they wanted for their big public schools like Uc. Davis and Chico State. Let us handle this problem with students drinking, and they shouldn’t be. But we can handle it as a discipline problem. We have our own forms of authority here, and punishment and correction and rehabilitation. And so we will help these students get off their main drinking. We don’t want the cops being the ones that arrest people, put them in jail do that kind of stuff.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So it’s again a question of power. And who has it and how it works in our society. And yeah, creating a support group to help the drinkers that might or might not get us somewhere. But
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: if the if it’s a structural problem, then just trying to change how people think and feel about alcohol might not work. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: You know, might be a structural thing. And that’s with these
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: college are kind of saying is, it’s a structural thing, and we should be the ones in charge of this matter, because it’s our college who has what we have discussed. We don’t think the cops should have problems and their ownership
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: anyway. So those are some key terms for sociology, and we again will be coming back quite a bit to a lot of these ideas. But I wanted to make sure we had them under our belts at this point.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So we’re asking, really, at this point in the class. what is sociology? And really in a lot of ways. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: as I think I mentioned on the first day of school. We’re answering that question the whole the whole semester who’s gonna take us to answer that question.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: because there isn’t just one answer to it. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And so what answers have we gotten so far to this question? Well, we said, there is such a thing as small as sociology.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: That’s what we all do is the knowledge we all need to to function in society. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: That’s the sociological imagination. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: We also said, it has the study of social groups. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So when I ask you, who are you? Sociologically?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And I said, well, to describe yourself sociologically, really needs to name and list the groups that you’re a member of ZR DE-Yuba 1019: cause. That’s who you are. It’s your family, it’s your religion, it’s your town, it’s your country, it’s your ideology. It’s your gender class, your race.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So that’s another way of putting it. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: It’s the most probably you could put it into the study of society. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But that’s kind of a ZR DE-Yuba 1019: a broad term.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So we’re gonna start getting into now what I would call capital S sociology. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: which is the kind of sociology that people with training in sociology do sociology that’s taught in colleges and universities by people who are capitalized, sociologists who have degrees from colleges and universities
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and sociology. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So that’s where we’re going now is to take a a deeper look into capital as sociology sociology. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and that is a little more specific than just saying, sociology is the study of society
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: capital, that sociology is more specific than that. We don’t study all societies throughout time. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: It’s pretty pretty limited, really, which societies we focus on in sociology. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And I wanna suggest to you that 1492
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: is the key. So the answer one answer to the question is. It’s the study ZR DE-Yuba 1019: modern ZR DE-Yuba 1019: societies. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: We don’t study ancient societies in sociology. We don’t even really study medieval societies. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: In sociology. We are focused on modern society
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and what some people call modernity. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: That’s a term you’ll probably hear a lot in your college career. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: especially if you take humanities, courses like history and English and stuff like that.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So it’s not to say we are living in a society today that we can call modernity. It’s it’s it’s modern society. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: When when well, when did it start? And how? How is it different from other possible things to study?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Well, 1492, I say, is the key ZR DE-Yuba 1019: turning point. I think it’s very accurate and simple to say that the modern world starts becoming modern. The world starts becoming modern, right around 1,492. What happened in 1,492? Can you tell me and Ryan anybody in 1,492 Columbus?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: They don’t teach that rhyme anymore. But in in elementary school, in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. It’s an old saying they used to teach in elementary school. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: That was the year Columbus set foot on North America. They brought over the Santa Maria 3 ships from
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: why is that such an important event? ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Well, that’s the discovery of the New World. Right? Imagine if today we found out there’s a whole nother planet Earth
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: just as big as ours. But there’s no people on it, but it’s filled with trees and animals and all kinds of plants that we’ve never seen before, and animals we’ve never seen before, and but then we can live on it. It’s got oxygen atmosphere, and it’s like right behind the moon.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: We didn’t know. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Would that change anything here on if we suddenly found out there was a whole. Another earth.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: I think, would change things dramatically. Right would stop talking about all the battles we’re having here and start thinking about, how do we get to go visit this other place? Whole new products would start coming in from this other place. All kinds of new animals, new foods, new plants, new products.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: It would be a whole new experience, a whole radical change in how we’re experiencing life on climate, earth, and for Europe, discovering a whole new world was, and not just Europe. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: For Asia to this whole new world suddenly changed. What planet Earth was all about?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And up until that time we can say, Well, there’s couple of different periods that we don’t study. The year 0, you know, is when Jesus Christ, the year we use the year 0 before. That is ancient times, ancient society
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: in ancient society. We don’t really. I’ll say a little bit about it in this class, but
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: if you want to go steady, like ancient Rome, ancient Greece, or the Pyramids. And you know those places all have a lot of things. I’m talking about social structure and class and gender and stuff like that.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But we don’t spend a lot of time in. So shall we study those? Why? Well, one reason is because there’s a whole bunch of other fields in the university where, if you wanna go study those things, you can go take a class in antiquities or archeology, or, you know, other things like that. So there are other scholars that study those things, and they were studying them before. So if you ever came into being. So we just kinda leave those ones aside.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But it also doesn’t really relate to sociology. There was no sociology in those days. so we don’t have much to say about it after year. 0. That’s what we talk about the Middle Ages, or medieval society, or the Dark Ages.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: We don’t have much to say about that, either.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: The kings and queens, the great monarchies of Europe, you know all these battles, and you know, crusades that were going on. You can go watch Harry Potter movies and stuff like that if you wanna learn about kings and queens and arm knights and armor and all that stuff.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But we don’t focus on that. In sociology. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: we focus on what happened after that modern society. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And I’m putting a little arrow here because it’s not complete yet. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: I mean, it isn’t done becoming modern in the world.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: If we look around the world, there’s places around the world that are still living in societies that are more like what we would call middle age societies, and some that are even in like ancient kind of situations.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But we in society tend to focus on the modern world. But what I’m saying is, the modern world is an unfolding thing. The whole world is becoming more and more modern every day, we should say. and why is that? ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Well? 1492 set off revolutions?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: It was such a big discovery that it revolutionized the world. What revolutions! Well, I would say some of the the first one really was ZR DE-Yuba 1019: religious.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: I think it’s significant that the Inquisition started in 1,492. That was when the Pope started saying, You better be Catholic, or I’m kicking you out of Spain. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: What was it, Spain that it started?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And they were talking to Jewish people and stuff like that. hey? ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Why was there a religious revolution? Well, the Catholic Church was in charge of religion through all the centuries before this, and the Catholic Church have been saying for centuries. The world’s flat.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and the sun revolves around the earth. and if you try to say it’s anything different than that. Well, we’ll kill you. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And when Columbus discovered the New World it confirmed what some people had already been saying. We think the world’s round.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and we think. Actually we revolve around the sun. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And when, before saying that, like Copernicus and Galileo, and stuff they were, you know, punishing them for saying it. But when Columbus proved it. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Then Catholic Church has to sit there and go. Well, yeah.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Well, people started saying, maybe we don’t listen to you anymore. You’ve been killing people for saying this. But now it’s clear that it is true. So
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: we don’t know if we wanna listen to you anymore. And I mentioned the other day. Protestantism, you know, new religion started to say there’s other ways for us to worship God than how the Church tells us to.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and that religious kind of change in thinking about what is the center of the universe? Is it earth, or is it actually the sun? And we’re revolving around it that really be centered a lot of people’s understanding of where is the place of earth in the universe?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And where are we? And that decentering led to political revolutions. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So there’s kind of religious revolution or kind of the enlightenment is what I call it. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: People started saying.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: we don’t. We don’t believe the Church anymore. And the church has been keeping us ignorant, keeping us in the dark ages. And now we’re going to enlighten ourselves. We’re going to become shed light on things like Columbus show to light that we are, you know.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: round and moving around the sun. And what else can we discover? That was what was amazing. Is, he discovered it by getting in a boat and going as far as he could a certain direction, and people started saying, Well.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: what else can we discover. There’s probably a lot of other knowledge out there that the church didn’t tell us about or didn’t know itself. And if a guy like Columbus can discover stuff. Then any of us could discover stuff, and people started discovering all kinds of stuff. But I’ll get to that in a second. The political revolution, though we’re almost the immediate thing
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: which local revolution, when the kings and queens were all Europe right.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and if you ever asked as a regular person if you were the king and queen, or some kind of noble, or some kind of aristocrat, why do they get to be in charge and tell me what to do like what’s so great about them
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and the church? And they would. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: the noble would say, You go ask the church why I get to tell you what to do. And the Church would say, they tell you what to do, because they’re divine. They’re descended from God, and you’re not. You’re just common.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: they’re noble, you’re common. So you have to do what they tell you. And people stop listening to the church because of the lie about the earth. And so then they wanted to stop listening to them about this idea, that certain people are
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: chosen by God to rule over them.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and so they start overthrowing the kings and queens, and in England they got rid of the King and Queen and America. We said, We’re not listening to you anymore. In France they killed the king and queen and chop their heads off, and many other countries. The democratic revolution began happening. In other words, democracy.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: the challenge to the kings and queens. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and once the kings and queens were challenged, and their power was no more absolute, no longer absolute, over people that allow people to start questioning a lot of things. And so another revolution is the scientific revolution.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: People realize you could discover stuff. And you don’t have to just listen to the church. The Church doesn’t know everything, and not all the knowledge is contained in the Bible.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: The trick would tell people you don’t need to know anything. It’s all right here. God told us everything we know. It’s right here. and scientists began saying, well, I discovered all kinds of stuff. We discovered electricity in America, been, Franklin discovered. Discover Co. You know, coal power, all kinds of ways of doing things also really small things
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: with microscopes. Well, there’s cells down there, and bodies are made up of cells and telescopes. Wow! There isn’t just the moon out there. There’s planets. There’s other galaxies. There’s a whole universe out there. They didn’t tell us about.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And so, as people began to learn about all the stuff that’s out there that the church wasn’t talking about. it led to a whole scientific revolution, and all kinds of new discoveries happen. The age of discovery is sometimes called
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: so. This didn’t all happen in 1492. Obviously. But it’s this ongoing revolution, these American Revolution, 1776, French Revolution around the same time. So it did not happen immediately. But what I’m trying to tell you is sociology is a product ZR DE-Yuba 1019: of all of these revolutions.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Sociology is about science. It’s about trying to have a scientific understanding
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: of how we work and how the world works and how to make it better. It comes out of this idea that we don’t just have to do what God tells you, that, or what the Church tells you that God told you, but what we could figure out ourselves about how to do things better. We could figure out better government, better social arrangements, better neighborhoods, better buildings, all kinds of ways of living better.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: It was also about, you know, democracy, this idea that individual people ZR DE-Yuba 1019: can
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: have rights and have some say in how their society is run, and then you don’t just have to be told what to do by people above you, but that everybody could have some say in how things go
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And so sociology is a product of all of this. You wouldn’t have a science of society, trying to understand democracy, trying to understand individuals. That’s another
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: way. We could see all of this. Is it really freed individual people from being stuck in a certain religion or certain political, I mean, it was really about liberating the individual
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: from all these ties that we were stuck with through previous centuries, and sociology is trying to understand all these changes. You wouldn’t have to tell you without these changes. But also sociology is trying to look back on the changes and critique modern society.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: So sociology is very modern. It’s a science. It’s cares about individual rights and improvement and development.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But it also was started by people who said, this modern world isn’t perfect yet. It got rid of a lot of things we used to have. We used to have traditional society back here. That’s another way. I’ll put it.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Traditional society is how people live in medieval times and still do in a lot of places on planet Earth. When we think of traditional societies, one way to think of them is ZR DE-Yuba 1019: villages, village life
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and sociology is in some ways, if it’s the study of modern society. It’s really the study of how we shifted our lives as we move from living in villages ZR DE-Yuba 1019: to living in city life. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: modern world. More and more people live in cities.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: In fact, the cities are still growing on planet Earth, and a lot of the villages are emptying out. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: In China, for example, big cities are growing, and the old traditional villages are emptying out.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: which is a problem for China. For example, you have a lot of old people still live in the villages where the young people have all moved to the cities for work. And so you have old people sitting in the villages with no one to take care of them. Problems like that. And you have similar situations in places like Mexico and India, and I mentioned places that you may have experience with where you have older relatives, family members that are still living in traditional societies where things like traditional religion, you know religion.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: agriculture. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Well, that’s the other thing I forgot to mention. The scientific revolution also caused the Industrial revolution. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Industrial revolution is the idea of making things in factories, in villages people make their own stuff. Every village makes its own stuff.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: But in the modern world we industrialize production. So things are made in factories, and they’re made in places where all the factories are concentrated. So that’s why cities grow is, that’s where the factories are. And then you have other things serving the factories like equipment shops and repair shops. And so once you have a factory, a lot of other work grows up around the factory, and people go over, the work is.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And so people in the modern world have been going to where the factory production happens. And you couldn’t have factory production without the scientific revolution, where things like electricity and full power were discovered.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And so sociology says this rapid change where lots of people have moved into cities. and they’ve given up their own traditional lifestyles with their own religion, their old family ties, their old ways of doing things like just growing food and making your own hand crafts.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: That’s the old way of doing things. And that’s the traditional way. And that’s the pre modern way. But in the modern world we tend to live in cities, things are made in factories. We just buy things at the store. We didn’t make them ourselves.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: It’s a very different lifestyle, the modern world. And there, and a lot of the So and sociology started ZR DE-Yuba 1019: in the nineteenth in the 19 hundreds, I mean in 18 hundreds, the nineteenth century
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: again, a little bit critical of all of this and saying, Well, our city is healthy. Is everyone okay? In the cities? Are people able to live without their traditional ways of thinking and feeling and knowing. I mean, if you’re just a free, floating individual living in a big city with all these products to buy and stuff, are you gonna know how to live?
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Or do you need your traditional religion and your traditional structures and your traditional ways of living so that people can be happy and healthy. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and this division between. And you know
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: you may experience this division between traditional and modern in your own life. You may have grandma’s and grandpa stuff that are very traditional in their way of thinking. Man over here. Women over here, strict religion, you know, work with your hands, work with the land, and they don’t understand, you know, things like social media and things being stored in the cloud and stuff like that. Or you know, people are worried. You know the the traditional people are worried that the modern people won’t know how to live. You won’t know how to
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: make good choices. You’ll be simple, for example.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: because in the traditional world your behaviors regulated by the Church, by your elders, by all these people making sure you’re kept in line. But in the modern world who tells you what to do? You’re living an apartment somewhere. No, grandma around, no preached around. Yeah. Drink. Yeah. Drug. Yeah, you know, do whatever.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And so a lot. So so one distinction between the traditional world minor world is this question of how are individuals gonna manage themselves and take care of themselves. And are they gonna be healthy, happy people? Are they gonna have mental health problems and drug addiction problems and
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: moral problems and all kinds of stuff like that.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And so the so so sociology is both a product of the modern world. We wouldn’t have sociology without all these revolutions, and sociology wants to help promote this change where we become more democratic and more technological and more scientific as we grow forward. But sociology also is worried about it.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: just like the grandma in the traditional village, saying, You know, are we hurting ourselves, or what are we missing in this modern world that we may have used to have. And what are some problems in this modern world that we’re facing? Because we don’t have the things we used to have.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And so that’s all my kind of tia. For why did these founding fathers is what we’re gonna call them? Why did these European men ZR DE-Yuba 1019: in places like Germany and France in the nineteenth century. Why did they decide? We need this new thing called sociology.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And as I mentioned to you.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: there’s at least 3 different kinds of sociology. So as we try to figure out, why did they start sociology? We also wanna ask, why didn’t they all disagree on what social ideas way? And so we won’t get to this today. But on starting next week we’re gonna talk about the founding fathers
Sociology. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: And I put that in quote because they weren’t. Really, I mean, that term found me. Fathers
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: comes from the United States Revolution. Like George Jefferson and Washington, they were the founding fathers of America. But in sociology. Nowadays. We use this term to refer to Marks, Karl Marx. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Max Dabur, and Emil Durkheim ZR DE-Yuba 1019: we already met, but we will next week.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: and as well also see they weren’t the only people that help start sociology. There were women involved. There were non people involved. But the way that things have progressed in the world. A lot of those people kind of got forgotten over time. And nowadays we’re trying to remember that there were black and women and people that did help start sociology, and we’ll talk about them as well, too. But we’ll orient oriented discussion around these.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Quote unquote founding fuzz. Alright. So we’ll see you meanwhile try to avoid binge drinking and other modern problems as you go out in the world this weekend. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: It’s got a Tuesday. ZR DE-Yuba 1019: Just locate you to take care. see you bye, bye.
ZR DE-Yuba 1019: thank you.
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