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Further, though, the entire concept of “assimilation” suggests a kind of absorption that erases the experiences and values families bring with them. In truth, what happens is that those families’ experiences and values are added to the culture of their new home. Presuming otherwise can justify a scientifically inaccurate and personally hurtful disregard for those families’ contributions. Cultural integration doesn’t have to be a win-lose process of “assimilation”; it can be a win-win process of addition and enrichment.
Bureaucracy is Dehumanizing
This myth is touched on in Chapter 12. Like you (I’m guessing), some of the most brilliant sociologists in history have had concerns about the effect of bureaucracy on society. Max Weber called it an “iron cage” that locks people in its cold grip.
But those same sociologists also appreciated its virtues. Most obviously, there’s the fact that bureaucracy allows people to do more, more efficiently; Marx, Durkheim, and Weber all understood this and alluded to it in one way or another. By raising productivity, the widespread adoption of bureaucracy has meant a higher standard of living for people around the world. If business was still done through informal understandings and personal contact, it would take much more time and be much more expensive to get anything done, and accordingly, prices of goods and services would skyrocket.
It’s also true, though, that sometimes a little dehumanizing can be a good thing. It may seem infuriating when you can’t get a human being on the phone, or can’t convince anyone to bend a policy when you accidentally miss a credit card payment — but that “dehumanizing” property of corporate bureaucracy also makes it much harder for those companies to discriminate or mistreat people for arbitrary reasons. Bureaucracy can sometimes feel cold and impersonal, but it also gives you a tremendous amount of freedom to be who you want and do what you want, to be treated simply as a number rather than as a person about whom others have expectations and to whom they will extend only certain privileges. In that way, bureaucracy can actually allow you to be more human.
People Who Make Bad Choices Are Just Getting the Wrong Messages
There’s a persistent belief that people who make “bad choices” — whether they’re choices you simply disagree with, or choices that seem to actively contradict their values or goals — are “getting the wrong messages,” that they’re somehow under the influence of people or publications that are
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persistently misleading them about what the “right choices” are. And sometimes they are.
Most people, however, in most societies, are getting a lot of messages from a lot of sources. Those sources may include:
Friends
Family members
Teachers
Coworkers
Spiritual leaders
Physicians or counselors
The media
Among those messages, the ones they pay attention to may vary from situation to situation, and from day to day.
Sociologist David Harding’s study, mentioned in Chapter 7, shows that people who get conflicting messages are often more confused and may have less predictable behavior than people who are hearing consistent messages; but everyone has a number of different sources of information to inform their decisions.
If you make poor decisions, it probably does mean that you’re getting “the wrong messages” . . . but you’re probably getting “the right messages” as well. Which messages you choose to act on is up to you.
Society Prevents Us From
Being Our “True Selves”
Some psychologists believe that the process of growing up is, at least in contemporary society, almost universally traumatic — that as people learn to adapt to social expectations, they are forced to betray their “true selves.”
It certainly feels like that sometimes, but most sociologists believe that it doesn’t even make sense to think about a “true self” that stands outside of society. Who you are and what you do is fundamentally social, from the
moment you are born. It’s your society that gives meaning to your life, that gives you a language, history, friends, and family. For your entire life, even your most intimate, personal thoughts are deeply wrapped in your social life. Your “true self” cannot be separated from your society: Even if you leave your society, your experiences there will continue to give shape and meaning to your experience for the rest of your life.
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This may be the very best reason to study sociology because unless you understand your society, you cannot really understand yourself. And if you don’t understand yourself, how can you understand anything else?
There Is Such a Thing
as a Perfect Society
Auguste Comte, the man who coined the term “sociology,” thought that one day we’d get it all figured out, that with enough effort and study we’d achieve the perfect society and that would be that. Needless to say, sociologists would be the ones in charge. (See Chapter 3 for more on Comte.)
Comte’s intellectual descendents, those being sociologists today, don’t believe that any more. Never in the history of the world has there been a society without inequality, conflict, crime, and unhappiness. Whatever you might consider to be a “perfect” society, we haven’t figured it out yet and we almost certainly never will.
Why? Because we’re not perfect people. People are selfish, foolish, and inconsistent, and they make mistakes. Building a perfect society out of human beings is like trying to build a cathedral out of Gummi Bears. It’s just not going to happen.
But that doesn’t mean you should give up hope! With the help of sociology and the other social sciences, we’ve come a long way since Comte’s time, and you and I have every reason to think that social conditions will get better yet. People aren’t perfect, but nor is there reason to think they’re fundamentally wicked or destructive. By working together, and by asking tough questions and demanding the best answers we can get, we can make the world a better place to live. It will never be perfect, but you know what? I’m okay with that.