Avant-garde

Everyone asks “why” at least once in a while. Anyone who thinks will probe for the meaning of life and the meaning of history at least once in their lifetime. And by happenstance, some of us are put in the position to give the answer. Or at least we are put in the position to make an educated effort to give an answer that is perhaps acceptable or satisfactory to others. Also, are we as individuals at fault for how we behave and for what we do when we fight the forces that be? Or is there someone else to blame for our behavior? To borrow from C. Wright Mills:

“It is true, as psychoanalysts continually point out, that people do often have the ‘increasing sense of being moved by obscure forces within themselves which they are unable to define.’ But it is not true…that ‘man’s chief enemy and danger is his own unruly nature and the dark forces pent up within him.’ On the contrary: ‘Man’s chief danger’ today lies in the unruly forces of contemporary society itself, with its alienating methods of production, its enveloping techniques of political domination, its international anarchy – in a word, its pervasive transformations of the very ‘nature’ of man and the conditions and aims of his life.” 

We are therefore sticking it to certain people for a reason. We are getting into certain people’s faces for a reason. For a legitimate reason and for a legitimate cause. And given that we know and we thoroughly understand the reasons for why some of us do what we do, we are experienced and trained enough, we are also in a position to explain everything to others as well. To borrow from Mills yet again:

“It is now the social scientist’s foremost political and intellectual task – for here the two coincide – to make clear the elements of contemporary uneasiness and indifference. It is the central demand made upon him by other cultural workmen – by physical scientists and artists, by the intellectual community in general. It is because of this task and these demands…that the social sciences are becoming the common denominator of our cultural period, and the sociological imagination our most needed quality of mind.” 

Nor is any of this is a coincidence. This discourse and this flow and stream is not a mere coincidence. In fact, all of it is necessary. It is necessary for someone like me or for someone else to probe their biography and their contents of mind in order to understand and make sense of history and their surroundings so that others understand as well. After all, one cannot know either biography or history unless one knows and probes both. In a word, reflection and thoughtfulness. All other attributes and qualities can go missing or can be discarded. But if reflection and thoughtfulness are demonstrated and shown, it compensates for everything. To borrow from Mills: “The sociological imagination is becoming…the major common denominator of our cultural life and its signal feature.”

But others are slow to catch onto it. They are slow to catch onto the sociological imagination, while we painstakingly and diligently serve as the avant-garde of today’s sociological imagination. Nor do they realize the centrality and essentiality of the sociological imagination in what they do intellectually or professionally. In short, they do not realize it because they are void of it, they are void of the sociological imagination, even though it is exactly what is demanded of them “in this time of civil unrest and ideological conflict” to borrow from Mills. Moreover, it is both a unique style and a unique state of mind. It is in fact the one and only style and state of mind which beats out all the rest. To conclude: “It is a quality of mind that seems most dramatically to promise an understanding of the intimate realities of ourselves in connection with larger social realities. It is not merely one quality of mind among the contemporary range of cultural sensibilities – it is the quality whose wider and more adroit use offers the promise that all such sensibilities – and in fact, human reason itself – will come to play a greater role in human affairs.”