Society is Like a Spider Web

Society is like a spider web.  Every part is interconnected.  Touch one part of the web and all parts move.  No one person can understand all of the complex web of society.

Sociologists in this day and age, so-called experts in society, tend to over specialize in studying one, two or three factors.  For example, an expert on past slavery may miss or underemphasize a current system of oppression.

In terms of society, any one person's life experience is extremely limited.  A white rural person knows little about what a poor black person living in the inner city experiences and vice versa.  At best, we make judgments about the other based only on fragments of information.  I have lived in black communities for 35 years, but I often run into whites who have spent zero years in black communities pontificate as though they were experts.

There are always multiple causes or factors at work at work.  Be very wary of single cause explanations which take an important half truth and make it into the whole truth.  For example, poor black women may experience three different types of oppression at the same time---gender oppression, racial oppression and economic oppression.

Or one social institution may have two functions---one positive and one negative---at the same time.  The Temple was a legitimate place of worship for the Jewish poor and a system of oppression that exploited the poor.  Jesus called the sacred temple a den of robbers.

The American criminal justice system was created to maintain law and order, but currently in the U.S. it has a second function---racial profiling that results in unjust mass incarceration of young black and Hispanic males.

It helps enormously to have a biblically based theology of society to inform us, plus some understanding of history.  Few Americans have these perspectives so often they draw wrong conclusions about social problems.

The white church in Mississippi and Iowa has two functions: a place of worship and a place of segregation, a place of worship and a place of white privilege, a place of worship and a place that neglects justice and the love of God expressed as love of neighbor.

Theologians that specialize in the cross and resurrection and justification by faith often neglect the kingdom of God as justice that releases the oppressed poor.  Billy Graham, late in life, admitted that he had neglected the important kingdom of God message which he defined as justice for all.

Most Americans see the Washington Monument as a proper and fitting symbol that honors our heroic founding father.  I see the Washington Monument as a symbol of oppression because Washington was our first bigoted billionaire.  He and his wife owned around 300 slaves making him a very wealthy man.  In my eyes, a slaveowner is an automatic bigot.

The same with the St. Louis Arch. another famous monument.  For most white Americans, the Arch is a symbol of westward expansion---the spread of American civilization and Christianity to the West coast.  To Native Americans, the Arch is a symbol of oppression---the beginning of the end of Indian peoples and cultures west of the Mississippi.  One Arch with two radically different meanings.