Physics can teach you how to split an atom; deciding whether you want to build, or advocate for or against, nuclear power or nuclear weapons or both or neither involves application of that knowledge. Knowledge has value in and of itself because it gives you agency, the ability to more effectively influence what happens in your own life. Some of the findings of sociological research are grim; and might make you feel out of control. But the purpose of knowing is to figure out how to take that knowledge with you and use that knowledge in your own life. What you ultimately do with that knowledge isn’t up to me; it’s up to you.

The interaction is the basic unit—the atom—of sociology. Economists study the economy; chemists study chemicals; sociologists study interaction.

If I left society and became a hermit, living in the woods and detached from all other human contact, I would still be a product of society, because everything I take with me, knowledge-wise, came from someone or somewhere else. I probably didn’t learn it on my own; it was taught to me. Even the words I speak, and the thoughts I think in those words, are the product of the social environment in which I was raised, schooled, taught how to be a person. This is the fundamental lesson of sociology, I think: socialization. People learn how to be people from other people, through the process of interacting with them.

One of the challenges of sociology is how to see the human world from multiple perspectives at the same time. From above, from the window of an airplane in mid-descent, you can see the structures, both complex and orderly. As the plane gets ever closer to the ground, individual buildings and roads, and then individual houses and cars, sharpen into focus, and finally, near the ground, the people that have made them what they are, come into view. The view from the ground reveals the same social world seen through very different eyes. Disembark from the flight, enter the airport terminal, grab your luggage, and a new world opens up before you. The bustle of travelers, the rolling of wheeled luggage, and the harried conversation of families, friends, and airport staff…from the ground, the personal abounds, replacing the majestic order from above with the messy flux of everyday life.