Issues of Social Consciousness - (Was "Social Science

Alan Spector Wrote:

Thank you for the references. They’ll be a great help I’m sure. I deem this discussion to be an important one; even more than it’s ‘ethics/ontology’ dimension or that of ‘theory/method’, the topic is significant because it focuses our attention on at least two crucial matters

(1) the comparison/contrast of “social science” to human services/social work disciplines

(2) the overall knowledge ( … a kind of “science”, in which we might call “Law” a science …) of operating/living in society as opposed to the epistemology of how societies function and people as social entities, organisms, and physical beings behave

Now I’ve focused my greater emphasis on the second matter. But the first is important as well. And, both together give us cause to consider a number of other crucial issues as social thinkers.

One of the big ones – what’s the merit of teaching a brand of knowledge called “social studies” to young people in K-12 schools (that is, is the content and ideas of grade school social studies programs adequate to the task of instructing young people in both civics/history and giving them a basic introduction to human social behavior plus the structure/dynamic of social systems)(in a way that that does not trivialize the epistemology and methods of hard social science)? That’s one question we must start out with if we are to ever more fully comprehend the interzone of “socscience” and “society-science.”

A second issue: “symbolism” studies may prove essential to our exploration of a connection between social consciousness understandings and social science. Our ability at symbolization (alongside other psychological domains where deeper mental functions and higher ones intersect) allows us the opportunity both to rise above and (to an extent) to re-program our basic drives in human experience. It allows not only the opportunity to transform our perceptions of our world (-system), but also (in essence) to shape/alter its very framework. We re-shape the very structure of our societal systems (paradoxically perhaps) by and through our “socscience.” At least, this is what appears to be the picture arising out of the convergence of “symbolism”/”symbolization” scholarship (esp. the current work of John Fraim, Benedict Anderson’s classic Imagined Communities, and David Christian’s work titled Maps of Time to be released in 2004, where among other things he posits the adaptation of a new capacity for creating & transforming symbols in our human societies <post bio-evolutionary changes in our species> whereby people can now largely rise above their old biological drives and evolutionary programming.

Yet, despite the clear importance of having “socscience” being intimately connected to “society-science,” it is not without its problems. Chief among these is its tendency to be tied in with personalist and humanist paradigms of our kind’s social existence. The contradiction of such lies in the fact that a so-called “real world” of ‘people’ (instead of ‘masses’), {conventional}’groups’ and ‘organizations’ (instead of ‘social structures’, ‘institutions’, and ‘systems’), and ‘[social] activities’ [& experientialism](instead of social ‘behavior’) is itself as contemporaneously created and shaped by the modern media as any other human system of meaning is. It is no more real, solid, or concrete than any other means of knowledge we possess about the world. In fact, it may be less so since this system of meaning is structured, not in the actual grassroots experience of modern social groups, but in a media-induced paradigm set in upon our world by today’s social, economic, and cultural elites [read “Capitalists” if you’d like].

In any case, this “socscience” paradigm of our world today [a contemporary version of Plato’s Cave] shouldn’t be blindly accepted as being any more real, practical, or experientially-concrete than other grounded systems of meaning about our societal/ civilizational system; there needn’t be only this one kind of social consciousness or social awareness (“socscience”) about our modern human condition. Other paradigms may be as equally (or moreso) applicable to modern experience than this particular one we are accustomed to dealing with.

Welcoming your insights. (Luke R.)

Luke Rondinaro,

Group Facilitator, The Consilience Projects