Why we should study how societies function?

To commence sociology is defined as: “the study of social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behaviour” (American Sociological Association). We should study this because they are what we are; our past, present, and future. We can observe ourselves and take notice of our previous mistakes, fix them and see which way we are moving in.

Studying other ancient societies such as ancient Rome, the Mayans, the Greeks, etc. could help us by seeing their downfalls and taking note on them and hopefully learn from them. From the prologue of “A Tale of Two Farms”, Jared Diamond says that: “past collapses tended to follow somewhat similar courses constituting variations on a theme” (p. 6). If we apply what he has said here, we should be able to collect data about past collapses of other societies and use them to help us protect our own society to prevent past mistakes. He also takes examples of other societies that have collapsed (ex: Easter Island, Mangareva and Norse Greenland) and others that have flourished (Highland New Guinea, Japan, Tikopia and Tonga) who have taken action to their problems or did nothing about it. This basic concept proves that Diamond believes that we should study our society to learn from our history and apply it to today’s problems.

In an Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore discusses how climate change is forever changing our world and what we should be doing to stop it. He collects data about our population, the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere, the average temperatures around the world, etc; this data shows us how our society is functioning and how it is causing bad effects on our environment. He studied the way our society is functioning and applies it to the problem of global warming (or gwobal waffle, in the terms of a little girl whose only concern is her ice cream). He believes that if we continue to be a society that pollutes and emits harmful things into our planet, we will suffer the consequences through nature’s “fury”. Gore demonstrates how we can apply our knowledge of today’s society and attribute it to our future.

In conclusion, we should study sociology for the reasons that Jared Diamond and Al Gore have mentioned in their works, we learn from our mistakes, apply them to our future and get an idea as to where our society is going.