Week 27: Denaturalizing what we see

Image credit: The Financial Times

The crux of sociological inquiry is denaturalizing what we see.....

The COVID – 19 pandemic and ensuing vaccine apartheid is not natural. 

Socio – economic migrations and the life jacket mountain of Greece are not normal. 

Indefatigable war, disease and poverty in the abundance of wealth in DR Congo are not natural. 

Inequalities and social exclusions are not natural. 

Slums are not natural. 

A nationally funded social security plan that caters for a teensy of its citizens justifying exclusion on ignorance and unculturedness of the masses is preposterous. 

When we begin to question: Why this?, and even more poignant, Why now (in our times)? we open our mind to the possibility of an alternative reality and the ability to question the structural misnomers that incubate and perpetuate the present day.

The spring of imagining an alter reality is grounded in the ideation of man as born free with full capabilities and that any caveats to this are anomalies to the true state of man in nature. In the words of Political philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.”

Beyond the nationalistic and, in some sad shades, racial ego’s around COVID – 19 (and its continued evolution from Alpha, to Beta to Gamma to Omnicron) its ever-present threat to life and disruption to economies and social order portends that “no one is safe until everyone is safe”. Sociological inquiry pierces through the finicky human egoistic barriers to ridicule the harebrained policies at play today.

Sociological lens mocks the present-day imagination that in a globalized connected world we can put a lid on the atrocities in Congo, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Afghanistan and Syria, and whistle with no care in our peaceful geographical bubbles. The bubble leaders then quibble when a sea of humanity knocks on their borders seeking survive.

Present day urban sociological inquiry ridicules “progress”, “modernization”, “urbanization” and “development” that manifests in “Islands of wealth in a sea of slums and homelessness”. The case of Vancouver, Canada provides an apt Petri dish. In a city with more housing units than the enumerated human households, a human being sleeping out in the blistering cold of winter wading off stray dogs from decaying feet sticks out like a sore thumb. In my home country of Kenya, the oxymoron of pervading informality in Nairobi City housing structure sets up two – thirds of the city living in inhumane slum conditions with children wading through green pools of garbage and human waste from school to get to their 3 by 3-meter iron sheet shack. Paradoxically the quantity and quality of the informal shack, electricity and water fall way below standards of human dignity and yet cost much more per unit compared to formally recognized housing units (the poverty penalty)

While sociological inquiry cannot offer hard and fast rules of “What then should be”, peeling back the layers of dominant ideologies, compromises on social order and power asymmetries that influence the present-day unnaturalness gravitates arguments to the core of humanity and the tenets of the prevailing social contract – essentially how much should human beings owe to each other? What is the legitimacy of authority and how is it duty bound to notion man towards a state of freedom and flourishment?

From the virginal arguments of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean – Jacque Rosseau on man's desire for security and maximization of opportunities, to the conceptualization of a fair agreement and justice as fairness by John Rawls, to justice as a state of man equipped to flourish by Amartya Sen, the rational justification of the prevailing political settlements – expectations and actualizations are examined as dynamic variables actively renegotiated in space and time.