A snare in private life, and a shift of perspective

Modern people often feel that private life is caught in a series of snares. They think the troubles of everyday life cannot be overcome, and that thought is often right. What people are directly aware of, and what they set out to do, is usually confined to a personal setting, and their vision and their force are confined to a close-up of job, family, and neighbors. Elsewhere they act as extras, or remain spectators. The more they become even vaguely aware of ambitions, and of threats, that reach beyond that immediate field, the thicker the feeling of being snared becomes. Underneath that feeling, a change in the whole social structure — a change that looks impersonal on the surface — is at work.

The facts of modern history are facts about the success and failure of each man and woman. When a society industrializes, a farmer becomes a worker, and a feudal lord goes bankrupt or becomes an entrepreneur. As classes rise and fall, a person is hired or left without work. As the rate of capital investment rises and falls, some take courage and some go bankrupt. When war breaks out, an insurance salesman may become a rocket-launcher crew member, a shop clerk a radar operator; a wife is left alone, and a son grows up without a father. A person’s life and a society’s history cannot be understood unless the two are understood together. People seldom try, even so, to read their suffering as a matter of historical change and institutional contradiction, or their comfort as a matter of the great rises and falls of the society they live in. The subtle relation between a life pattern and the course of world history is, as a rule, barely noticed.

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) named a sociological imagination: a shift of perspective that reads a personal trouble in the direction of the historical social structure working behind it. From that vantage it matters to understand personal and social problems in relation to the values one holds dear, to turn a personal trouble into a public issue, and to relate a public issue back to the meaning of individual lives. One example offered here is a hard-line view of security, or a nationalism, held among some of the older generation, thought in the light of a Confucian culture or of the Korean War. In 1950s America, inside a social system that had grown too large, a person who met a trouble that could not be handled alone — the Great Depression is named — could not even grasp what the problem was by personal effort, grew desperate, and grew anxious at not knowing where they stood in society.

Modern society is too complex for one person to understand and meet in every part. A farmer in an older setting could live reasonably well by knowing and managing a field; a modern person cannot, in a lifetime, experience everything that happens in society, and social relations are unprecedentedly fluid, so that pushing only a personal judgment will not yield a stable social life. Through a sociological imagination, even without living an event oneself, one can, by an indirect route, see into a social structure, find a cause, and decide what action a solution needs. A social problem that seems unrelated can come back as a boomerang; indifference is a poor reply. The invitation is to analyze a situation in which a social problem has appeared, or may appear, and to take part in working it through.

Polarization, youth unemployment, and a public issue

The writing then turns to polarization and youth unemployment in Korea, and to the writer’s own adolescence. Intergenerational inequality between the young and an older generation is read less as a simple ranking of the powerful over the weak, and more as an unevenness among people who are both in a weaker position. The young are scolded for lacking a so-called hungry spirit, and the phrase “back in our day” is all too familiar. They are pressed to take older ideas and culture as they stand. A classing talked about as spoon theory, a serious skew of wealth in which the top 10 percent’s income concentration is given as second in the world — no calendar year is attached — and a class ladder compared to a camel passing through a needle’s eye are set beside that pressure. Even as the social setting and the ideas have changed, the young are still told to act by an older standard.

Institutions that can mend injustice are also named as needed, of the kind that, over some two hundred years, barred slavery and child labor, opened the vote to women, and barred racial discrimination. Conflicts between irregular and regular workers, and between residents of rental apartments and of sale apartments, are given as tangled relations between strata that call for a shift of recognition of the kind Durkheim once asked for. Public education is named as an important institution that confers equality of opportunity. Institutions themselves are not a natural result; they are made by social agreement inside a community. Democratic citizenship, and institutional devices, are called for, and the most important channel named for that work is the power of voters through elections. A 2006 study by Moon Yun-su, on advertising as a social phenomenon read through a sociological imagination, is listed among the sources. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A Korean discussion of C. Wright Mills’s sociological imagination and of polarization and youth unemployment, listing Moon Yun-su (2006) among its references.

Last updated: 14 November 2026