Cultural commentators try to define the culture of a decade by finding themes that distinguish it from the decade before and the decade after, and so are distracted from taking note of the long term trends that develop across decades. So the Seventies are the era of Disco and high heel shoes for men and John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever”, that different from the more radical Sixties, or the computer revolution of the Eighties. As such, labelling decades by their themes is an exercise in nostalgia: a way to recall somewhat faded memories of what it was like to go to your Senior Prom. It might be better to label decades by those who occupied high office. The Nineties were the Clinton Years, and that meant both temporizing social policy and dealing with Monica Lewinsky and moving the boundaries of Europe to the Russian border. But the usefulness of giving themes to decades is that it allows the commentator to see the decade as negating what had come before. The Great Depression of the Thirties abolished the Flapper Era, even if major union organizing, such as in the garment industries, had gone on during the Twenties; the Forties banished the Great Depression, the United States winning a great war and entering a period of unparalleled prosperity, even though that decade saw only the start of the movement to get rid of Jim Crow. Sometimes this labelling process can mean thinking one decade reverses the themes of the previous decade, and that can be very misleading, as I think is the case when the Sixties is seen as setting right everything that was wrong about the Fifties, that much maligned decade that came before the revolutionary era of the Sixties. I went to high school and college during the Fifties, and so I want to set the record straight.
Read MoreFoundation Stories
Every modern nation has a foundation story, based in history and social structure as well as in fable, that is used to explain the origins of that particular nation and thereby their distinctiveness. Foundation stories, varied as they are, are cultural creations based on historical and social structural circumstances, often tell something very true and abiding about a society--but not always, as we shall see in the case of Australia.
Read MoreLocal Culture
Samuel Johnson went to what was then and may become again the Near Abroad of Scotland and the Outer Hebrides to discover what a people who were familiar yet distinctive enough to have a distinct culture and social structure were like. He captured the religious quality of the moonlight and the castles as well as the economic opportunities available in that then “underdeveloped” economy. He did not have to travel to the South Sea islands or North America to discover the exotic; it was much closer to home than most travel writers imagined. I have in the past few months begun to understand another Near Abroad. I have moved to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, which is some ten miles distant from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I lived for so many years. Here are some observations from someone who is a traveler in that my acquaintanceship with my neighborhood is fresh and catches the superficial aspects of the thing, and so predates a time when a deeper appreciation of the place will settle in.
Read MoreWhy Noam Chomsky Is Wrong
Noam Chomsky, so I am told, is much admired as a truth-teller among young people looking for accurate explanations of what is going on in America politically and economically. His basic thesis is that the small number of people who are in power in this country exert their interest in enriching themselves by pursuing imperialist policies abroad and oppressive policies at home. They keep down poor and even middle class people both foreign and domestic. I think this view is mistaken. Rather, Chomsky is just repeating shibboleths that were inaccurate when they were first enunciated by Lenin and then, for a later generation, by C. Wright Mills, who wrote in “The Power Elite”, in the Fifties, that militarists dominated the United States government and fomented wars so that they could increase the defense budget as well as keep America in control of third world countries, the natural resources and domestic labor of these countries that fell into the American sphere of influence thereby available for exploitation. Let us deaggregate this point of view into distinct propositions and hold them up for examination.
Read MoreThe Criticism of Society
Sociologists during its Golden Age in the United States, during the Forties through the Sixties, were able to notice what had just not occurred to other people, as when David Riesman, in The Lonely Crowd, saw Americans as engaged in trying to please one another, gain the approval of others, rather than engage in the dog-eat-dog tactics of interpersonal relations that had for so long been hallowed as the accurate way to assess the American character largely because that portrait was in keeping with the ideology of Social Darwinism that people claimed to believe. Insight triumphed over trumpeted theory. Robert Merton, writing at about the same time as Riesman, had an equally probing insight into American prejudice which he elaborated into an essay, “Discrimination and the American Creed”. He noted that when people said they were not prejudiced even if they engaged in discrimination they might be telling the truth. They were simply behaving as they were expected to do regardless of their personal feelings. Merton then did a twist on this insight that turned it into sociology. He created a typology of people who acted in accord with their beliefs and those who acted contrary to their beliefs and so decided that most people were “summer soldier” haters in that they would abandon prejudicial behavior if they were supported in doing so by a changed social context, which is indeed what happened over the next generation. Merton had done sociology because he had transformed what he noticed about the nuances of the human psyche into the objective, invisible social structures that give rise to these nuances.
Read MoreAn Adult Primer on Sociology
Here is a brief overview of sociology that is not for children or undergraduates but for adults who still confuse it with statistics, which is one of the methods used in sociology, and with anthropology, which studies pre-literate cultures and addresses modern cultures only to the extent that they are like pre-literate cultures.
The basic insight of sociology is that relationships, even if invisible, are just as real as atoms or people. Friendship is as old as Achilles and Patroclus, or David and Jonathan, and, if Radcliffe-Brown is right, exists in pre-literate societies, where friends also kid around with one another. The characteristics of friendship, such as trust and respect, remain constant over time even if other characteristics, such as whether people who are social unequals can be friends, either change or simply come to be thought about differently over time. The same can be said of other relationships. A general who wears a toga, as Alcibiades did, is doing the same thing as a general wearing an Ike jacket: deploying troops to go into battle and perhaps die there. What applies to individuals also applies to larger units of social life. Whether a city state or a nation state, governments will do whatever it takes to uphold the interests of their communities whatever they see them to be and whatever measures that may require. George Marshall said that the best primer on government and war was Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War. The impact of immigration on a society has not changed since the Israelites invaded Canaan: there are fights over religion and land. Sometimes, though, overall characteristics have to be modified to deal with particular circumstances. For some reason, immigrants to the United States assimilate in the space of several generations while immigrants to Continental Europe do not.
Read MoreImmigration
When I hauled myself into his cab, the driver was speaking Arabic into a phone mike. The only phrase I could make out was “long term mortgage”. I surmised he was talking to a relative because, whatever the language, only close friends and relations talk in the clipped tones and interrupted sentences that other people would take as rude. Halfway through the ride, he hung up (or whatever you do to slam down the receiver when using this kind of phone equipment). He glanced over his shoulder at me and unburdened himself. “I brought my son over from Egypt, and now he doesn’t even want to go into business with me. All he cares about is his own family.” I felt like saying “Welcome to America” because, of course, that has been the story of any number of immigrant groups. The first generation comes over knowing it may or may not be as successful as it was over there, that they may sacrifice themselves to allow some success to the next generation, as was the case for the Chinese laundryman and his wife on my old block who spoke fluent English and whose daughter became a doctor, and not so much for the Korean grocer on the corner of my old block who never learned English and so could not use his Korean degree in social work, and yet put his kids through Ivy League colleges, never allowing any of them to work in the store, one of his sons, nevertheless, eventually taking over the store.
There is, indeed, something magical about America. Its streets are paved with gold; it is indeed the gold mountain. The chances of doing well over the generations are big, though children may go through a time when they are embarrassed by the fact that their parents seem so quaint and unknowing, but that happens with all American children, no matter how many generations their families have been here. What explains the ambitions of the immigrants and the relative success of their children?
Read MoreWhat World War II Wrought
Post-Apocalyptic life is a standard literary genre. The Terminator series, as well as the Mad Max series, show what life is like when some great catastrophe has engulfed and destroyed the civilized world. According to these tales, life has once again become short and brutal, peopled by grotesquely dressed and malformed people (and by machines), some saving remnant of humanity trying to preserve what is left of and trying to re-establish what had existed before the cataclysm. My favorite of these is the Alexander Korda version of H. G. Wells’ “Things to Come”, the movie made just before the impending Second World War, when it was expected that strategic bombing might reduce cities to rubble-- which it did, without, however, destroying the governance of those cities or nations. In Wells’ vision, civilization is reduced to barbarism until it is rescued by a cadre of airmen, known as “Wings Over the World”, who then build cities that are modernistic while its inhabitants wander around in togas and are given to bombastic speeches delivered by gigantic holograms of themselves, the young people driven to go on to the exploration of the Moon.
To the sociological mind, however, whatever is imagined can be exemplified by what actually comes to pass. There are many times in world history when a nation or a new civilization is reborn or created after the coming of a dark age, or when, even more generally, the old days have rather abruptly been put to rest and a new time is emerging, a new time beginning, as happened when the French started the clock over again as part of their understanding that their Revolution had put an end to the Old Regime that would be replaced by an age of citizenry and enlightenment. The new calendar lasted fourteen years. Similar new beginnings emerge after the execution of Charles I and the Russian Revolution and Hitler’s seizure of power, while the new beginnings that started with the eight years of violence and mayhem that was the American Revolution are still going on, so much so that there are those who will claim that the American Revolution was not really a cataclysmic upheaval but just a struggle among the colonial elites for power, even though the people of the time certainly thought, as the popular song of the time went, that “The World [was] Turned Upside Down”.
Read MoreKahneman's Fallacies, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"
Daniel Kahneman, as well as being a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, is one of the subjects, along with his longtime collaborator, Amos Tversky, of Michael Lewis’ latest book, “The Undoing Project”, and so his work has drawn even more attention as the way to see through biased behavior and show how irrational people are in the conduct of their everyday lives. I want to suggest that Kahneman is dead wrong on substance, that people are reasonable rather than overcome by bias, and his deeply mistaken supposition is the result of a method that boxes his subjects into corners so that they cannot but seem hopelessly irrational. This essay, reprinted from westendejournal.com is an attempt to bring down what has been offered up as an important icon of contemporary thinking about mental and social life.
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