I hated Sociology class in college. A good friend of mine was considering a major in Sociology and couldn’t understand my perspective. I attended approximately one week of Sociology 101 and then, quickly, before the deadline, dropped it. I think my dislike for Sociology gives insight to where I was mentally at age 20-ish. I was bound in the logical and could not have cared less about the theoretical. If the information wasn’t going to directly educate me further in my study of Linguistics, I didn’t want to learn it. I managed to get by learning the bare minimums to achieve good grades. I know what you might be thinking. Sociology and Linguistics are connected. The way we use language both influences the language itself as well as the society using it. For instance, new to Websters Dictionary in 2011 were words that reflected cultural changes like social media, tweet, fist bump, bromance, and helicopter parent. And, even though I didn’t particularly care for Sociology 101, I have always been interested in books that examine society and the future. Books like Farenheit 451, 1984, etc. Books like this have always fascinated me and scared me at the same time.
Recently I read the book The Giver by Lois Lowry. I’m not sure if I’ve ever read it before, but I think I might have in 7th grade. I was on a big Lois Lowry kick that year and I think I was in 7th grade the year the book came out. Again, reading this book I was both fascinated and scared; angered and awed. There were many times I would think, “Why would they do that?” and then, as I considered why, I could rationalize it, and again I would get scared.
To give you a little background on the book, it is set in a futuristic society of unknown location and time, as far as I can tell. It takes into account the ideas that society is in balance: to feel joy, you have to feel pain; to have choices, you have to have consequences; to have benefits, you need risks; to have order, you need rules; to have complete equality, you have to have what the book calls Sameness. The people in this society do not experience true feelings, only surface feelings. They have no concept of war or murder or theft or disaster. The sun doesn’t even shine there. The weather is always comfortable and overcast the best I can tell. If they fall and skin their knee, they take a pill to erase the pain. These people have very little to no choices. Their routine is set. Their family is designed. Their destiny is determined by the Council of Elders. Food is delivered daily and never hoarded, never wasted. The rules are strict. Even child development is controlled and things that make people unique or different are minimized and never discussed. Children are born via Birthmothers – 50 children each year. Those children are divvied up among parents who have applied for a child. Each family receives one male, one female, already named and taught to sleep through the night.
As I start to ponder this family arrangement, I can see why it may have started. Right now in our society, there are couples out there trying to conceive a child that cannot; there are people out there having children that cannot afford them, there are mothers who give birth to 5 girls, left to desire a son and vice versa. I can see a glimmer of why this might seem like a good idea. To elicit fairness for families; to eliminate the feelings of sorrow and loss that come with infertility and miscarriage; to dampen the reliance of large families on government assistance to survive; to keep population growth under control; to balance the need and distribution of resources, etc. It seems like a good idea. There are psychological, societal, environmental, and governmental benefits from controlling the design of the family unit.
But, in my own case, none of my children would have existed in this scenario. My husband had a child in his first marriage. There would have been no divorce. To rid The Community of negative ideas like divorce, unions are arranged between two adults that share the right level of compatibility and balance each other’s weaknesses exactly. There would have been no second marriage between us. No Natalie. No James. No Liberty. Or no first marriage, no Taylor. Even in your case. Do you have more than two children? Do you have two girls? Two boys? Forget it. It would not have happened that way for you. You would have simply been given either a boy, then a girl or a girl, then a boy. No pregnancy. No birth. No caring for a newborn baby – getting to know him, and his needs. Looking into his eyes for a hint of what he will become, what personality will emerge, what traits he will inherit from you. No adoption process. No knowing the history of where he came from. No knowing about his birth mother or her story. And, if you were given the job of Birthmother, you would give birth to a set number of children whom you could never hug or name or raise. You would likely never even know who they even were.
Society has balance. With the good, you have to experience the bad. To experience the joy of birth, you have to endure the pain of labor and delivery. The changes to this dystopian society may have seemed small at first. They may have seemed insignificant. But insignificant changes can add up and become and ugly monster. There are signs of this everywhere. Elective c-sections take the uncertainty of out of labor and delivery, medications mask symptoms without dealing with underlying causes, awarding “participation medals” takes away the pain of a losing soccer season… The message of this book, to me, is to be aware. Be aware that with freedom, comes increased risk; with choices come consequences; with knowledge, comes understanding of both the good and the bad. But, without freedom, without choices, without knowledge, life ceases to exist. Consciously decide knowing both sides of the coin. For every discomfort you attempt to decrease for your children, you diminish their ability to make choices based on the knowledge of the consequences. Let them experience the consequences of going barefoot in the snow or skipping dinner and feeling hungry. It is with these consequences they will experience choice; with these risks, they will experience freedom. If we don’t keep this spirit alive, we could end up in a Community like the one portrayed in this book – blindly following the rules, regulations and destinies set before us without the knowledge or ability to ask why.
When I was college, I hated Sociology, but today, I find the ideas fascinating. And, I still have the freedom to change my mind.
