A couple of recent columns by Eugenio Tironi, the first titled Good and the second Bad, have generated some controversy. Or at least have made it in the list Chilesoc, to which such columns was taken out of his lethargy usual.
On several occasions in this blog I have made several criticisms of the writings of Tironi, and in general the way that made sociology is not to my liking -always falling into the temptation to transform any situation in the social life of a great transformation, and repeatedly, not looking beyond the level of the conversation of coffee. But in this particular case I still don’t understand the criticism.
From my point of view the basic affirmations that raises Tironi in his columns are trivially true. They can be criticized from multiple points of view (that are partial, that hide more than they illuminate, the tone and place of observation are unacceptable), but you can not say they are false. It is trivially true that in recent decades has increased the standard of consumption in such a way that a significant proportion of the population can do things (such as vacation throughout the country) that I could not. It is trivially true that this transformation is not to look positively for those who have already agreed to do this. In fact, I think that they are so trivial that no one referred to them in greater depth.
The criticism, I understand, he preferred to devote himself to other things. I understand that upset the tone, which bothered talking in the first person plural (Tironi was identified with those who are bothered with this), who upset the descriptors used to refer to the majority (class and racist), was criticized for saying as discovery what is known (increase of consumption). Now, for example, in a country reputedly classist and racist, it is nonetheless true that this kind of descriptors are used and, then, actual: those Who do not have the physical characteristics that the bias tells us to have the high classes effectively suffer from discrimination, and those who did not noted it when describing our social life would fall into sin of deception. Regarding why only now discovered that increased consumption does not obviate an oversight, given that this is a reason that Tironi has been using since a long time (at least since the Emergence of the Masses that is 1999, and that in fact picks columns posted on What Happens, and then correspond to a vision already established in the mid – ’90s). In some sense, rather you could say that stay for interpreting the Chile of today based only on an intuition of the Chile made of more than two decades, it is partial. But we have already said that this kind of criticism, which recognize the trivial truth of the assertions to criticize them in their partiality, were not the most common.
In the last instance, the critique focuses on a complaint or ideological in a denunciation of the tone (in a complaint of the lack of reporting of things that should be reported). And apparently that is the sociology: A discipline in which nobody cares much the truth of things, but only to say things in the tone that corresponds.