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s EC OND
NAD IAN
D ION
 Sociology
as a Life or Death
Issue
SECOND CANADIAN EDITION

ROBERT J. BRYM

University of Toronto

NELSON EDUCATION
 D U C A T I O N
NELSON E

Sociology as a Life or Death Issue,

Second Canadian Edition
by Robert J. Brym

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 In memory of my mother
Sophie Brym (1912-2004)
^Tl-TlffiN IT ID 01303
7"T

and my father
Albert Brym (1911-2008)
inN] OTN ,D',13
7 "I
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2018 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/sociologyaslifeoOOOObrym
 Table of
Contents

The Fifth Dimension vii

About the Author xi

1 Sociology as a Life or Death Issue 3

2 Hip Hop from Caps to Bling 13

3 Explaining Suicide Bombers 33

4 Hurricane Katrina and the Myth of Natural Disasters 53

5 The Social Bases of Cancer 81

6 Sociology as a Vocation 105

Glossary 121

References 125

Index 146

V
NEL
vi • Contents NEL

FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures
Figure 1.1 Durkheim’s Theory of Suicide 9

Figure 2.1 Male Homicide and the Sex Ratio by State, African
Americans, 2003 16

Figure 3.1 The Middle East 35

Figure 3.2 Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza 36

Figure 4.1 The Caribbean Basin and Gulf Coast 56

Figure 4.2 Hurricane Katrina Disaster Areas 57

Figure 4.3 The New Orleans Levee System 59

Figure 4.4 Relative Vulnerability to Hurricanes, 1980-2000 65

Figure 5.1 The Alberta Oil Sands 91

Figure 6.1 The Research Process 109

Figure 6.2 Positive by Negative Freedom in 123 Countries 116

Tables
Table 2.1 African American Men in Professional Sports,
2008 25

Table 31 Suicide Bombing and the Second Intifada: Causal

Mechanisms (in percent) 43

Table 5.1 Age-Standardized Cancer Incidence Rates (per 100 000

People) for the Four Leading Cancer Sites, Canada, 1973
and 2010 84

Table 5.2 Cancer Deaths and Their Proximate Causes, White

Americans Younger Than 65,1940s to 1970s 87

Table 5 3 Foods and Physical Conditions “Convincingly

Associated” with Elevated Cancer Risk 88
 The Fifth
Dimension

We say an object is three-dimensional if it possesses length, width, and

depth. It resides in the fourth dimension—time—if it exists more than an
instant. People usually experience the four dimensions effortlessly. You
don't have to think much to know that you’re holding a book in your
hands and that time is passing as you read it, and most 14-year-old boys
don’t have to try hard to find the sleek shape of a shiny pair of Zoom
Kobe II basketball shoes pleasing and know that they are brand new.
In contrast, you need training to see the fifth dimension. Is it worth
the effort? I invite you to read the next 120 or so pages and judge for
yourself. I argue that the benefits are enormous. Seeing in five dimen¬
sions helps people live longer and fuller lives.
The fifth dimension is the social. Those new Zoom Kobe IIs, which
sell for $130, cost about $7 to make in a crowded and poorly ventilated
Indonesian factory. While Kobe Bryant and major Nike shareholders get
rich selling them, the 16-year-old girl who makes them works 15 hours
a day for 20 cents an hour. Some college students find this situation
deplorable and have organized an anti-Nike campaign and boycott to
fight against it. Other college students note that the young factory
worker probably prefers her job to the alternative—taking care of her
siblings and the family goat back in her village for no pay and no
prospects at all—and that she is helping her poor country industrialize.
From their point of view, buying Zoom Kobe IIs benefits everyone.
Boycott or buy? Seen from the fifth, social dimension, an entire world of
human relations and a moral dilemma are embedded in those basketball
shoes. And what is true for Zoom Kobe IIs is true for everything else in
your life. Like it or not, you are part of society, and your actions, no
matter how personal they appear, have consequences for others. It
follows that if you want people to enjoy longer, richer lives, you need to
make informed decisions about Zoom Kobe IIs—and everything else
you see before you.
NEL vii
viii • The Fifth Dimension NEL

That’s where sociology comes in. Sociology is the systematic study

of human action in social context. Sociologists analyze the social rela¬
tions that lie beneath ordinary aspects of everyday life—everything from
basketball shoes to homelessness, fame to racial discrimination, sex to
religious zeal.
At its best, sociology speaks to the big issues of the day and the big
issues of life, and it speaks to a broad audience. Accordingly, my aim in
writing this little book was to speak plainly about the urgent need to
think sociologically. Sociological understanding, I argue, is a life or
death issue. I don’t make that claim for dramatic effect. I mean it liter¬
ally. By helping us understand the social causes of death, sociology can
help us figure out how to live better. Hence the urgency of sociological
knowledge.
I develop my argument in six linked essays. In the title essay I argue
that it is useful to keep in mind the inevitability of death, because doing
so compels us to focus on how to live best in our remaining time. I then
outline how higher education in general and the sociological perspective
in particular can contribute to that goal.
The next four chapters add substance to the assertions of the opening
essay. I examine death due to violence, disease, and supposedly natural
disasters and find that in all three cases powerful social forces help to
determine who lives and who dies. To make my case, I enter three worlds
that figure prominently in popular culture and the evening news—those
of American hip hop, Palestinian suicide bombers, and the victims of
cancer and of hurricanes in the Caribbean region and the coast of the
Gulf of Mexico.
Hip hop arose in desperate social circumstances and was originally
a protest against them. However, its message got diluted as the music
became commercialized, and now it misguides many young people
about how to best live their lives. A sociological understanding of hip
hop holds out hope for correcting the problem.
Many Westerners think that suicide bombings are conducted by
crazed religious zealots and that the appropriate response to them is
overwhelming military force. My sociological analysis of Palestinian
suicide bombing against Israelis shows that this way of thinking is
flawed. The conflict between Palestinians and Israelis has deep political
and emotional roots. Responding to suicide bombing with overwhelming
military force only worsens the conflict and causes more death on both
sides. Sociological analysis suggests an alternative approach.
NEL The Fifth Dimension ix

When Hurricane Katrina killed about 2300 Americans in 2005, some

people said the deaths were an awful consequence of a rare natural
disaster, while others said they could have been avoided if the President
weren’t a racist. Sociologically speaking, these judgments are hopelessly
naive. They do nothing to help us understand how disasters like Katrina
can be prevented in the future. In contrast, my sociological analysis
shows that patterns of class and racial inequality were responsible for
most Katrina-related deaths and that other societies with different
patterns of class and racial inequality have been more successful than the
United States is in avoiding such catastrophes. Again, sociology points
the way to avoiding death and improving life.
Cancer is the leading cause of death in Canada. About 40 percent of
women and 45 percent of men will develop cancer, and approximately
24 percent of women and 29 percent of men will die of the disease.
People tend to think of cancer as a genetic problem, yet 90 percent or
more of the genetic mutations that lead to cancer have environmental
causes, including smoking, eating unhealthy food, and being exposed to
toxic chemicals in the workplace and at home. In principle, we could
remove all these environmental causes and eliminate most cancers. Why
we don’t do that is a sociological puzzle that I investigate in Chapter 5.
I find that class inequalities, industrial interests, and government inac¬
tion conspire to make cancer the scourge that it is, and I propose a series
of policy innovations that could change this state of affairs.
Many students just beginning college want to know what sociology is
and what they can do with a sociology degree. In the concluding essay,
I draw on material from the preceding chapters to sketch the broad
outlines of the discipline and offer career advice to undergraduates. I
argue that my analyses of the social causes of death illustrate the funda¬
mental aim of sociology at its best. Learning about the fifth dimension
allows us to extend the third and fourth dimensions, helping us deepen
and prolong life.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Authors often say that they alone bear responsibility for their work. For
two reasons, I make no such claim here.
First, 1 am a sociologist, and 1 therefore delight in acknowledging
that I am embedded in intellectual and publishing networks whose
members have helped to shape my work. I gladly share with them a full
x • The Fifth Dimension NEL

measure of responsibility for this book’s strengths and weaknesses.

Among the co-owners of this volume are colleagues who read and
offered critical comments on all or part of the manuscript and provided
useful bibliographic assistance: Bader Araj, Shyon Baumann, John Kirk,
Rhonda Lenton, Malcolm Mackinnon, Adie Nelson, Larissa Remennick,
Lance Roberts, Jim Ron, Jack Veugelers, David Zitner, and nine anony¬
mous reviewers selected by the publisher. I also want to single out my
brilliant undergraduate Research Assistants, who helped me compose
Chapter 5 and whose names are listed on p. 81. Also culpable are the
members of the editorial, marketing, and production team at Nelson
Education Ltd., who saw the value of my initial proposal and offered
much encouragement and useful critical advice: Maya Castle, Laura
Macleod, Mark Grzeskowiak, Terry Fedorkiw, Dawn Hunter, and Natalia
Denesiuk Harris. I hope you all feel that the final product justifies your
deeply appreciated efforts.
A journalist once asked the great Jewish poet Chaim Nachman Bialik
(1873-1934) whether he preferred speaking Hebrew or Yiddish. Bialik
answered in Yiddish: "Hebraish ret man; Yiddish ret sikh (“Hebrew
one speaks, Yiddish speaks by itself "). I understand what he meant.
Like all authors, I have struggled mightily on many occasions to get
things right. This time, however, the job was almost effortless. That is
the second reason I don’t claim sole responsibility for this book: it prac¬
tically wrote itself.

Robert J. Brym

Toronto
 About the Author

Robert J. Brym (http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/brym/) is Professor of

Sociology at the University of Toronto, a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Canada, and the winner of numerous research and teaching awards. He
has published widely on politics and society in Russia, Canada, and the
Middle East and is currently researching prospects for reconciliation in
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Bob’s popular introductory sociology text¬
books have appeared in American, Canadian, Brazilian, Australian, and
Quebec editions. Bob began teaching introductory sociology immediately
after graduate school and can’t stop.

Photographed by Liam Sharp for U of T Faculty of Arts and Science.

NEL XI
Source: Alex Colville, Pacific., 1967, acrylic on hardboard. Courtesy of A.C. Fine Art
Inc., Nova Scotia. Photographer: James Chambers.

NEL
 1 _

Sociology as a
Life or Death
Issue

A DETOUR
To inspire you, I will take the unusual coiuse of talking about death. I apol¬
ogize in advance if this makes you uncomfortable. I know it is customary
when addressing undergraduates to remind them that they are young, have
accomplished much, and are now in a position to make important decisions
that will shape the rest of their lives. I will eventually get around to that too.
But to arrive at the optimistic and uplifting part, I feel I must take a detoiu
through the valley of the shadow of death.
When I was seven years old, I lived across the street from a park where
I engaged in all the usual childhood games with my friends. We played tag,
hide-and-seek, baseball, and cops-and-robbers. We also invented a game
that we awkwardly called 'See Who Drops Dead the Best.” We would line
ourselves up on a park bench and choose one boy to shoot the rest of us
in turn, using a tree branch as a machine gun. Once shot, we did our
best to scream, fall to the ground, writhe, convulse, and expire. The
shooter would choose the most convincing victim—the boy who dropped

1 This is an expanded version of a commencement address delivered in May 2005 to graduates of the
“Steps to University” Program, University of Toronto. “Steps to University” identifies promising
senior high school students who might otherwise not complete school or attend college or university
because of their economic and social circumstances and offers them selected university courses to
encourage them to pursue postsecondary education.

NEL 3
4 * Chapter One NEL

dead the best—to play shooter in the next round. The game would occupy
us for ten minutes or so, after which we 'd pick ourselves up and move on
to baseball. At the age of seven, death was entertaining.
I didn’t live in a war zone and there were no deaths in my family, so
I really didn’t begin to take death personally until I was 15. Then, one
Sunday evening, it quite suddenly dawned on me that someday I would
really die, losing consciousness forever. The moment this realization
hit, I ran to my parents in panic. I rudely switched off the TV and
asked them to tell me immediately why we were living if we were going
to die anyway. My parents looked at each other, stunned, and then
smiled nervously, perhaps thinking their son had taken leave of his
senses. They were not especially religious people and they had only a
few years of elementary schooling between them. They had no idea how
to address questions about the meaning of life. Eventually, my father
confessed he didn’t know the answer to my question, whereupon I ran
to my bedroom, shouting that my parents were fools to have lived half
a century without even knowing why they were alive. From that
moment and for the next three decades, death became a source of
anxiety for me.

DENIAL
And so it is for most adolescents and adults. We all know that we might die
at any moment. This knowledge makes most of us anxious. Typically, we
react to our anxiety by denying death. To a degree, denying death helps us
to calm ourselves.
The denial of death takes many forms. One is religious. Religion offers
us immortality, the promise of better times to come, and the security of
benevolent spirits who look over us. It provides meaning and purpose in
a world that might otherwise seem cruel and senseless (Janies, 1976:
123, 139).
In one of its extreme forms, religion becomes what philosophers call
determinism—the belief that everything happens the way it does
because it was destined to happen in just that way. From the determin-
ist’s viewpoint, we can’t really choose how to live because forces larger
than us control life. Even religions that say we can choose between good
and evil are somewhat deterministic because they guarantee eternal life
only if we choose to do good; and that requires submitting to the will of
God as defined by some authority, not us. Many people worry less about
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