Politics vs. Sociology

Week after week, I am amazed at the disparity in terms of brain cell count (or to be more diplomatic - critical faculties) between the two disciplines my degree course uncomfortably straddles.

Political science - or, the 4 hours a week when I feel the overpowering urge to drop out of college, because I clearly haven't a prayer. I have no idea where these kids come from, or more to the point where their knowledge, poise and capacity to string words together to make beautifully incisive, pertinent & eloquent statements comes from.

Sociology - or, the 4 hours a week when I feel the overpowering urge to drop out of college because I'm surrounded by intolerable half-wits. There's a few people in particular, who've incurred my wrath with their inane contributions. I don't name names of course, but I will spout quotes. Especially gems such as:

"But isn't, like, nature, like, too big to manage? I mean - the Nile is, like, huge."

Yes. You're not wrong, the Nile is, effectively, huge. And so is the Amazon, for that matter!
...was the altogether too forgiving response of our docile lecturer. No sharp-tongued lashing to the tune of "Good God, the Nile might well be somewhat on the large side, but have you even stopped to consider, for one second, the sheer scale of the entire human industrial entreprise you STUPID CHILD."

The Irony (with a capital), as I see it, is the remarkable lack of correlation between these (admittedly anecdotal) observations, and the nature and demands of the disciplines themselves. Or at least, the disciplines as taught by our esteemed, now-ranked-top-53-in-the-world-according-to-the-Times, thank you very much mr Provost, educational institution - Trinity college.

Political science, in essence, once you've nailed down a decent research question, really boils down to applying rigorous methodolgy, quantifying "stuff", totting up data - a monkey could do it.
Sociology, on the other hand, as I learned last year in France (as opposed to how I was taught it for the two years prior) is complex beyond imagination. It's a horrifying mess of historical legacies, underlying socio-economic factors and, worst of all - individual motivations. But more than that - it effectively requires the ability to see the invisible, to posess real mastery in terms of critical thought, to be able to extrapolate the underlying values & assumptions which you don't see because you're not MEANT to see them, because you've been conditioned not to, and because everything has been engineered precisely so you won't see them, so you'll be without any shred of doubt that some things just are neutral, natural, eternal & universal - that some things just "are". When really, they just aren't. At all. Or at least, who says they are? Because somebody is or has, that much is certain.

And this is what so irritates me about the failure of some to take sociology seriously (justified in some respects - it's ok to be a joker in a joker's course such as "Gender & popular culture" of course, in fact it's almost impossible not to be, but we all know how I feel about that one). I didn't take it seriously, until I was faced with the revelation, that nothing is beyond question, or goes without saying (something I should have realised well before as it had been heavily hinted at in a remarkably prescient and important course the IB involves - Theory of knowledge).

When I say my degree course straddles two disciplines uncomfortably - this is not limited to the purely academic endeavours and the disparities between them. As this term has gone on, I've come to realise that the two disciplines correspond to two different, contradictory world views of my own.

In sociology, I find myself in staunch support of those who advocate a new form of citizenship, of greater participation, of realising democracy - in order to acheive environmental justice, perhaps as part of a pragmatic or "real" world approach to concretising that ubiqutous & slippery concept of sustainable development.

In political science, on the other hand, I adhere to Platonic view that really, we'd all be better off if we scrapped democracy and put in place a merit-based system where competent people are in charge, and make all the decisions on behalf of "the masses". I won't shy away from the terms "despotism" and "autocracy", because I'm well aware that's what it amounts to. But perhaps this model is limited to the theoretical, notional world of ideas, of the endless philosophical dialectic that ties itself in knots in search of the elusive utopia.

What fundamentally differs here is a judgement on the capacity of human beings to make intelligent decisions for themselves, to run their own lives, and just how much power & influence should be allocated to them accordingly.

And yet somehow, my appraisal of this capacity (ie. in sociology - considerable, in politics - zero) is curiously inversed to my experience, in terms of the scholars of both schools.