How to Change the World
Maybe you’ve said that out loud before: “I want to change the world,” or you’ve heard someone else say it—a political or religious leader, friend, family member; an idealistic adolescent or a frustrated adult. A cynical person might say that people who want to change the world just want the world to go their way, that it’s a way to seek power to reshape the world according to one’s own selfish desires. Maybe sometimes, but this does little to help us understand what actually happens when the world changes, or why. Many who seek to change the world claim to want to change something specific about the world, something that strikes them as unfair or unjust or wrong. Fairness and justice and right or wrong are in many ways social things; they deal with relationships between people, and sometimes, between people and their environment.
If biologists study life, and chemists study chemicals, then sociologists study interactions. Interactions can be verbal or nonverbal, and they create and sustain a complex and ever-changing social world. I’m interacting with you right now; my words are in your head as you read, and your head is full of thoughts. It might contain some different thoughts after reading this, and form some still different thoughts based on what you were already thinking about before—that’s the point of reading, right? But reading isn’t the main kind of interaction that’s involved in changing the world. We U.S.-Americans are a stubbornly practical people, who want to draw some bright line between thinking and doing, between “book smarts” and “common sense.” Whether or not such a line exists doesn’t really matter here. What matters is that wishing to change the world or reading about changing the world doesn’t make it so.
Can a person change the world all by themselves? No. We have movies about heroes and histories written to tell the stories of “great men” (and they are usually men in these sorts of stories), but the power for a person to make change comes from connections to other people, the relationships they build and institutions they are part of. And what are these, at their most basic level, except the product of ongoing interactions? Each of us can make a dent, to be sure, but really, changing the world means changing the social world; we’re really talking about social change, and the process is going to involve lots of people. A social movement is how you change the world. One of the things I spend my time doing as a teacher, writer, and researcher in sociology is teaching people how to change the world.
That could be easily misread. I don’t teach people to make the world into what I would want it to be. My job, as I see it, is to draw some general conclusions about what social movements are, and how social change works, by looking at how others have done it, how they are trying to do it now, and what can be learned from their successes and failures. Some of the things I have learned from this point of view are not just or moral or uplifting. Many are uncomfortable, amoral, and cynical. Social change, and the social side of politics, can be ugly and is usually messy.
This is because changing the world means confronting opposition. Some people like the world the way it is, others think it’s changed too much already, and still others think change should be orderly and gradual and have little patience for efforts outside established institutions and channels. Some people, groups, and institutions have a lot to lose if the world changes in certain ways, and they’re going to find ways to push back, to prevent change, or to make sure change occurs in the ways and on the timetables they see fit. Social movements often fail; they can be stopped, sidelined, resisted, or crushed. Not all social movements can succeed because different movements want different things to change or stay the same, and most (if not all) social changes would not be desirable or beneficial to everyone at the same time.
Social movements and social change from a sociological perspective is about asking questions about how movements work, how to study them, make sense of them, by looking at what kinds of interactions are happening and why. The knowledge gained from this kind of work can be put into practice by those who want to pursue, or prevent, social change. It can be used to show how people are persuaded to do the things they do, and how to make sense of things that may seem unfamiliar or scary from the outside looking in. It may flatter our egos to think people are crazy or stupid or evil for the things they’re doing, but an effort in earnest to understand will often show that others’ reasons for doing what they’re doing are just as complex, and from their own perspectives, reasonable, as our own.
So, to prepare for what is to come, let us step back for a moment and consider a big question, a question that is really six questions to unpack and captures the complexity of social movements, and social change: Which persons, conceiving themselves to be what “People” in what environment, use what networks and what adaptive strategies with what results? (Stewart, Smith, and Denton 2012: 39).
Source: Stewart, Charles J., Craig Allen Smith, and Robert E. Denton, Jr. 2012. Persuasion and Social Movements, Sixth Edition. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Publishers.
