CLAUD

Wednesday, March 09, 2011

Knowing enough just to be dangerous

Yesterday while talking to jwen at the bookdrop, I accidentally returned an important book that I ACTUALLY need to read. =.= SOOOO irritating. Luckily that's the book that is easily borrowed, if not my group mates will have my head on the chopping block.

In any case, these few days is book-hunting day - when it's the literature review phase of the project =) my second favourite part of the essay. The sexy parts are of course the analysis, but literature review always gives me a buzz.

So this thing that I wanted to blog about was quite overdue. Given how it happened a month or so ago?

I was having Sociology of Deviance (think: nuts, sluts and perverts) tutorial. Then we were discussing how street crime i.e. drugs, theft, robbery is a class based issue. Where a disproportionately large number of offenders come for the lower or even underclasses. Then, we were discussing a functionalist theory of this type of crime when this student in class, actuall said this

"Drug addicts should be punished what, they serve no function in society…I mean they're not like doctors saving lives, but like…harm other people by selling and taking drugs."

That statement is very convincing isn't it? But the problem is, that is not the functionalist approach….that's what I mean by knowing enough sociology to be dangerous - to use sociological theory to justify the kind of normative statements that the discipline itself is critical of.

In the first place, when we say that 'crime serve a function', we meant the Durkheimian body of thought that crime is used to remind the vast majority about the morality of our society. By punishing paedophiles, it serves to reinforce the fact that our share consciousness is against paedophiles - because people forget. So, while every member in society has a function, who determines whose value is higher? Who said that doctors or professionals are more highly valued that nurses and janitors?

Hence, these kind of views scare me because it's like a nightmarish combination of naiveté and elitism - which unfortunately, is disturbingly common. University is supposed to open up your mind, and from the looks of it, some people have slipped through the sieve.

Knowing me, I just argued against her firmly and politely of course.

That's why I have a mind to always doubt everything and question underlying assumptions. I think it's important to ask this question: "Who told you this? How is this fact?"

Once you do so, you'll realise that you know NOTHING for fact and the things we know, are dominant discourses that are fleeting around which we have internalised FOR fact.

Excluding faith of course, because that simply cannot be reasoned with logic. It runs on it's own rationality.

09:13