Dave Konstan reminded me of what I knew but neglected in my comments about the culture of the pandemic. Not only health care workers and grocery clerks serve in a pandemic. Humanists serve as well in that they supply observations and commentary about the passing scene as well as apply old literature to current situations. So I will try that. Here are some observations about how the social world will be different when it reopens after the pandemic, we no more likely to go back to the status quo ante anytime soon just as we are unlikely to go back to airports without security checkpoints even though the threat of airport terrorism has receded though not nearly enough to let security measures lapse. For the foreseeable future, crowds will be small and people will have their temperatures taken or have to show their cards showing that they have antibody protection before they go into restaurants and, most of all, more of life will be conducted online.
Read MoreThe Psychoanalytic Movement
Psychoanalysis reached its apex of influence as an explanation and a cure for psychological ailments in the Fifties and Sixties. The usual explanations for this fact is that the psychoanalytic quest for childhood sexual traumas as the cause of later psychological pathologies had been replaced by the psychotropic drugs that became available in the Sixties and the development of cognitive therapy in the Seventies, that form of therapy replacing the analysis of feelings with practical advice of how to manage feelings. So addictions of one sort or another were no longer addressed by plumbing for the causes of an addictive personality but by advising cigarette smokers to tie their cigarette packages in rubber bands so that a cigarette was less accessible. The new therapies might have been less profound but they seemed to work better.
Read MoreThe Civil Rights Movement
Every social movement can be thought of as either a reflection of or an intervention into a set of changing social circumstances. The Civil Rights Movement reflected the fact that the South was industrializing after World War II and so the South had to make room for a free labor market. The Civil Rights Movement also intervened to change the hearts and minds of whites in the South so that formal social segregation might be abolished. This question of whether a social movement is a reflection or an intervention is not simply the empirical one of deciding whether the movement or changed circumstances came first. Attitudes might start to change before the Civil Rights Movement made a change in attitude into a goal, and changes in legislation may indeed have been crucial in structuring a labor market already undergoing alteration. The question is a theoretical one in that it requires a re-conceptualization of the forces that might serve as either causes or effects. The idea of intervention has to be expanded to include the dynamics by which a movement defines its own purposes.
Read MoreClips from World War II
Perhaps to distract me from the coronavirus pandemic, I have been watching numerous clips on YouTube about World War II: newsreels from both British and German sources on dogfights and artillery, on ruins and the occupation of towns, on ceremonial occasions, such as V-E Day, as well as excerpts from the musicals made in Nazi Germany well into the war, the last one I could find a production number with loads of chorus boys in top hats and tails leading the very elegantly gowned Marika Rokk around a dance floor. That one, “The Woman of My Dreams”, was released in August of 1944, at the same time that Paris was liberated, the war already clearly lost by the Germans.
Read MoreAccepting the Inevitable
How do people come to accept the inevitable, such as the fact that they will die, or that a girl they love doesn't love them, or that they will never achieve a lifelong ambition? The answer requires specifying what is meant by the inevitable. Some things, like gravity, are clearly inevitable and nobody tries to rescind Newton. In fact, philosophers might say that laws of nature are not things that can be described by such words as “inevitable” or “avoidable” or “preferable” or any other adjectives that include within them the idea of volition. Then there are practices that are clearly not inevitable and, in fact, are --inevitably-- the result of choice, as when consumers choose one brand of detergent over another, however much advertisers will try to condition consumers to choose one brand rather than another. Indeed, in our time consumer choices seems the most essential aspect of human freedom, citizens of both democratic and authoritarian nations having to make multiple choices every day, what they do in the supermarket less constrained, more an expression of the ability to be arbitrary and decide based on taste, than in any other part of their lives, where they know what their obligations are to family and job. Indeed, for a long time, voting, which is supposed to be the final point of choice in a democracy, the election not over until the voters have spoken after they have made up their minds on the way to the voting booth, was also understood as a kind of consumer choice, voters preferring a particular brand of candidate depending on the demographics of the voter, that point modified in recent years to mean that voters will follow their fancies and vote for the candidate that for the moment seems most appealing. Nothing inevitable about that. And then there are matters about which it is uncertain whether to declare an outcome or a choice inevitable or not. So not just peasant people believe that a person to whom one has been married for a considerable period of time was fated for you, was an inevitable choice despite the circumstances that led to make that person a reasonable choice at the time, both psychologically and socially, because so much of your life since then has been framed and impacted by that choice that one does not care to consider that it was not inevitable that you would wind up with this spouse. It was up there, written in the stars, like gravity.
Read MoreThe Poor Suffer More
When I taught sociology of disasters, which covered everything from the Black Plague to Chernobyl, my students insisted that disasters were times that brought people together in a cooperative spirit. That is what the media would like you to believe, showing anecdotes to that effect so as to calm down the population, but it is the opposite of what usually happens, which is that disasters intensify whatever are already the lines of conflict in a society. The rich become richer; the poor suffer more. And political conflicts grow worse.
Read MoreThe Origins of Romance- III
Scholars have found other times and places to set the origin of romance than at the dawn of civilization. Each of these theories has a certain attraction because each does capture certain aspects of the experience. But none of the alternative theories explain why full blown romance appears by the time I have suggested, which is with Samson and Delilah. The theories for a later time of origin, rather, are add ons in that new features are included in the basic formula for romance, which is dedication, even beyond self-interest, to the emotional needs of the partner, as that is associated with the exchange of sexual favors. Moreover, all the theories have to deal with the problem of how to relate cultural changes to structural changes, which means what actually happens in social life.
Read MoreThe Coronavirus Pandemic
A disaster occurs when the public resources set aside to deal with any upending of social life prove insufficient to deal with the extent of the insult to the social structure. That makes a real disaster different from what might be called a local disaster, such as the forest fire that consumed Paradise, California, because that was very restricted, there not being enough fire engines to save the houses in the area, but also because local forest fires are already baked into the social structure of California in that people buy a lot of insurance and are not surprised if they have to move from one abode to another in the wake of a fire that burns up parts of the Oakland Hills. Also to be distinguished from a true disaster is what might be considered the collective tragedies regarded as just part of ordinary life, as the fact that tens of thousands of people die every year from influenza, hospitals and morgues and funeral parlors prepared to deal with the influx and processing of victims. And then there were the people who died during summer heat waves in cities because of the lack of air conditioning, that absence not considered a failure of public services to intervene in what was a public health emergency.
Read MoreLiving in the Past
A number of old fogies, including me, were lined up in front of the steam tables at a Chicago cafeteria (“Mannie’s”, for those of you in the know) a few days ago when the first guy on the line, an old, thin, stooped, Black dude with very few teeth, started inquiring about what was in stuffed derma and what was the difference between corned beef and pastrami, apologizing to the rest of us for making us wait, we returning the good humor by remarking that we were all old and retired and so had nothing else to do but kill time. I, on the other hand, was listening with my inner ear to the counterman, wondering whether he would say something condescending or dismissive to the old black man. Would he act as if the customer should have known what the different products were? Would he be annoyed that the oldster was holding up the line? No, he just described the cuisine in a chatty and goodhumored manner. I, however, was looking to hear something from fifty years ago, which would then have been seen as an expression of prejudice and would today be called an example of “microaggression”. That places me. I am still conscious of the feelings I had at the time of the Civil Rights Movement and so the lack of hostility by the counterman was a sign of how far we had all come even if I could not get over noticing how far we had come.
Read MoreBeneath Self Interest
People from most classes, when they are young, are out to find a vocation and try to do well at it. The people I knew when I was young were all out to be doctors or lawyers or professors (noone I knew wanted to go into business, because the working class and the petit bourgeois were the classes we were all rising out of) and most of the young men did just that, becoming what they wanted to be. That applied to women as well, who also became doctors and lawyers and professors although one young woman I knew didn’t think she could become what she wanted, which was a Rabbi, not possible at the time, and so she became a law professor instead. The same was true of people who did not expect to do better than the working or middle class. They too wanted to take up a place where they could have an occupation that filled up their time with purpose even as it supplied the living that enabled them to support their families and so made of them successful people, coming home after work to the house or apartment that they paid for and to a dinner with their children and a few hours of television before retiring to bed and arising the next day for another long session of work. That is the round of life for most people of most classes.
Read MoreWendy Brown's "Neoliberalism"
Political theory in the Twenty-First Century is very old fashioned because it engages in the kind of theorizing that took place in the Nineteenth Century, when Marxism was in vogue. That means that Wendy Brown, among others, is still mired in the attempt to separate illusion from reality, the ruling classes and the working class engaged in a dialogue whereby the ruling class is trying to foist upon the workers and the poor a distorted view of their real economic condition. For Marx, that meant that religion served as an opiate of the people. Racist ideology and a moronic popular culture would also serve as ways to keep the poor, the working class, and even part of the middle class, from recognizing the true root of the evils that befell them, which was a social structure controlled, as the contemporary argot has it, by the upper one-percent of the population. Ideology and cultural superstructure keep the exploitative economic and social system in place.
Read MoreThe High Victorian and The Late Victorian
The Victorian period shares the characteristics that mark other cultural periods. It lasts about fifty years, in its case from the accession of Victoria to the throne in 1840 to the performance in London in 1893 of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome”, so different in texture from the melodrama and sanctimonious morality of Pinero’s “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray”, which had appeared earlier in the year, and so illustrates another characteristic of periods, which is that periods come to abrupt ends and beginnings. (Queen Victoria herself lingered on until 1901.) A cultural period also has a set of themes that are unifying among the various arts of literature and painting and drama, which in the case of the Victorian means the fate of the individual in the complex world of the city and in the midst of an industrialized landscape, every person both ambitious to make their own way and also alienated from what seems emotionally unsatisfying about generally accepted customs and overly rigorous laws, as that is exemplified by both Oliver Twist and Jean Valjean. A cultural period is also international in scope in that all the nations of Europe and North America are part of it even if it is known in France as the era of Pre-Impressionism and Impressionism in honor of the central role of painting in French culture during those years. A cultural period is also dominated by certain cultural forms, and in the Victorian that means the novel and grand opera, both of which are sprawling affairs, employing plots and subplots wherein often outrageously individual characters play out their lives against the background of a richly imagined society. Think of “Great Expectations”, “The Count of Monte Cristo”, and “Rigoletto”.
Read MoreTrump and Decorum
Now that events are moving quickly and Trump may not be in charge for much longer, it is time to consider what it was that made him such a galvanizing figure and why that ran out of steam so quickly. It is important to answer these questions in part to create a historical record while the flavor of him is still with us and also because the way he exits office, whether in chains or on a gurney, as opposed to in a Nixonian display of bravado, may lie in his character, and the clue to that character is why people were drawn to support him in the first place as well as in the three years of his Presidency.
Read MoreThe Mass Shooting Epidemic
An epidemic is an affliction, often understood as a “disease”, which spreads geographically, killing or maiming any number of people in its wake. The Black Death of the Middle Ages reduced the population of Europe by a tenth. Smallpox decimated British troops during the American Revolution. It does not matter whether the vector of spread is regarded as a swampy miasma or microbes. The point is that something is spreading the harmful disorder. The Black Plague moved from Southern Italy through Italy and France to England, and so people looked for and continue to look for a way to stop its spread, just as when they build firebreaks to keep forest fires from jumping from one place to another. Dennis Defoe records in his “A Journal of the Plague Year” how people were not allowed to leave houses that were quarantined because an infected individual was in there. The residents could only put out their dead bodies for disposal upon the arrival of wagons designated for that purpose.
Read MoreThe Undeserving Rich
George Bernard Shaw in his still very witty and relevant play of 1914, “Pygmalion”, has Eliza Doolittle’s father describe himself, very eloquently, as one of “the undeserving poor”. They also have their needs even if they don’t want to work hard and prefer a life of women and drink. That is a comeuppance to the bourgeois morality of Shaw’s audience who might find room in their hearts for the deserving poor, who are people who work hard to improve their condition, accept standard middle class moral values, but for reasons not their fault cannot make a go of it. We still feel more compassionate for those burdened by life than we do for people who accept their poverty as a way of life. We want to raise the poverty class into being a working class whether they like the idea or not.
I would suggest that the distinction between the deserving and undeserving is even more important in our own time as a distinction to be made about the rich. There are the undeserving rich who, like Jeffrey Epstein, squander their money on sex and estates, while the deserving rich spend their honorably gained fortunes on philanthropy. Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and the Koch brothers qualify for this latter category. They buy honor from their peers and the public and perhaps justification for themselves through their money, their wealth being something they might otherwise have to live down. The rich sometimes feel guilty for being so much better off than other people, however cheap they may also be, sometimes bringing their lunches to the office in a brown paper bag because what they care about, as the Protestant Ethic thesis would suggest, is the making of it rather than the spending of it. The rich also have consciences and so, again following the Weber Thesis, they want to prove themselves spiritually worthy.
Read MoreSchool Dynamics
Roland Fryer is a MacArthur Grant winning behavioral economist at Harvard University where, at the age of thirty, he was the youngest person ever awarded tenure, though he is now temporarily in eclipse because of sexual harassment charges. Fryer takes on as his major field of inquiry a major policy issue that has plagued social science ever since Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954: why is it that the achievement scores of African American students continue to lag significantly far behind the achievement scores of white students and that nothing much seems to be able to close the difference? Various theories have been offered. These include the idea that African American students are anti-intellectual, or that there are no books in their households, or that African American students need teachers of their own race to motivate them and act as role models, or that the conditions of poverty make it difficult for African American students to focus on schoolwork or that the socio-economic status of a family overdetermines the likelihood of academic success, people of lower SES always getting lower scores than the children of a higher SES. Fryer pursues this issue possibly because he was a poor Black kid who somehow made it and wants to open the gates for others. He uses some very sophisticated statistical analysis to make his cases in his studies of the matter but, I am sorry to say, is somewhat rickety in his reasoning. His studies are very valuable, however, because they open a window onto the present state of social scientific thinking on this matter.
Read MoreThe World You Never Made
People come into life as if into the midst of a movie, trying to catch up with what has gone before as the story continues to follow its course, except that people in their real lives, or so I claim, are so taken up with the decade or two when they entered the scene, and maybe even a little bit with the times before that, that those are the times that continue to transfix and inspire them, that being when they got their bearings and those being what their bearings continue to be, while in movies we forget that we learned the beginning only through inference and cared about when we came in not at all but just want to get on with the story now that one knows what is going on. Let’s go over present, past and future of the moment you came into your own story in more detail.
Read MoreModern Advertising
A long time ago, Marxist social theorists thought that advertising was the new opiate of the masses, up there along with religion and drugs. In making people think they were happy in a society in which they were exploited or at least not dealt with fairly, the rich able to continue in their money grubbing ways by lulling most people into a sense that they were both in control of their lives and also satisfied with those lives. Automobiles let people think they were free because you could get into your Chevrolet and tour the American countryside, going where you wanted when you wanted, when, in fact, people were tied down to their boring and unsatisfying manufacturing and white collar jobs, prisoners of the wage/salary system. People could improve their love life if they wore the right lipstick and deodorant, and that would make up for the unpleasantness of work life, sex another opiate of the masses. Cigarettes would relax them and appliances and dishwasher detergent would make the life of the harried housewife so much easier that she had time to indulge her fantasies of romance. There was nothing that advertising couldn’t fix.
Read MoreSteady Life
Both life and literature are usually understood in terms of drama. People make choices which alter them and their circumstances and it is problematic what will come next. That is especially true of courtship, where people know that life with this person will be different and somehow unexpected, and so our romances, which means potential marriages, makes each of us a hero or heroine within our own lives, and that is even true of arranged marriages, where at least the woman is going to live with a new family and put up with a man whom she may barely know. It is also true of the years one spends in college, transforming oneself into a different person, each person the hero of his or her own bildungsroman. So everyone is either young Werther, or the young artist portrayed by James Joyce. Prince Hal became a different person when he became Henry V and Hamlet became a different person we find out only when he returned from college to a home he found passing strange. This dramatic texture of life continues throughout the life cycle, though often, in its later stages, because of changes not of one’s choosing: the death of a spouse leading a person to alter their sense of their place in the world as well as possibly their living arrangements. Even retirement can lead to life alterations if for no other reason than that a person has to find out what they want to do with their time, which is a matter of choices not previously thought possible. Are their hobbies to be expanded into new vocations? Is it time for something different: a bucket list rather than an intensification of an already established side of one’s personality?
Read MoreCarol Gilligan
I have come to understand that Carol Gilligan, whom I thought would be a passing fad when she first published, has come to be treated as a serious psychological theorist, taught along with Freud and Erikson, all of these psychological theorists treated as purveyors of what are, after all, just their own opinions about the driving forces in human psychological life. Well, that is not what theory is about, and any sensible theory of theory would not find room within it for Gilligan.
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