Decades and Trends

Radio and TV d.j.’s like to talk about musical decades so as to evoke the nostalgia of there being a particular sound or style that dominated music for about a decade. I think that we can broaden it out so that each decade includes its politics and social structure so as to characterize decades as being cultural entities, distinct from the previous and the succeeding one, just as if we do when historians and literary critics speak of the periods of Classical and Romantic and Victorian, the Romantics, for example, not just meaning Jane Austen and John Keats and Charles Lamb, but also John Bright and the Luddites and Peterloo and the other early struggles of industrialism. Periodization is a different prospect from doing what a friend of mine does, which is separate before and after a critical event, which for him is 1968, That year separates two different experiences, people profoundly altered by that event so that I, for one, still expect to turn on the television and find out that there has been an assassination. Pearl Harbor was one of those events that made America different and not in just leading to the waging of the worst war in human history. It made the United States the economic, cultural and military center of the world, while the Vietnam War was just an interlude even if young people at the time, including me, found it all consuming, it instead just coming and going, which would also be the case in the War on Terror that commenced with the World Trade Center, but lasted only a decade or so, and us still not knowing whether Trumpism can outlast his separation from office.

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Organizational Portals

There was a science fiction movie which showed people as having multiple portals on their bodies to which were attached hoses, perhaps half a dozen to a person, which swung free and were available to be connected to machines that took or received some fluids. It was very unnerving to see people so dependent on their mechanical devices that made them able to survive though, if you think about it, this was a biological metaphor in that people do have tubes that sustain life. Food goes down your gullet and wastes come out of tubes whose exit points are covered. It was just unsettling to see these processes as mechanical rather than biological. There are, however, another set of portals that, as the expression goes, connect every person to their lives. These are the organizational portals whereby you are connected to your identity and therefore have access to the services which sustain us, both biologically and otherwise. I have become particularly aware of my reconnecting to my new portals when I recently moved from New York to Salt Lake City. I did not have to change my phone number because of the miracle of a cell phone, but I did have to change addresses for my credit cards and my health insurance companies and I still keep my passport handy to identify who I am. All those verifications of my identity enable me to live an ordinary life. I don’t need one for a supermarket, but Utah requires an identification so as to access a liquor store, which was not the case in New York.

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Geography and Social Structure

Nineteenth Century historians and social analysts, in particular, thought that geography was destiny. Montesquieu had back in the Eighteenth Century said, quite correctly, that temperate climates allowed nations to prosper. Europe and China do better than sub-Saharan Africa and Amazonian Brazil. Nineteenth Century historians and social analysts fully thought that geography was destiny. De Tocqeville thought that the small steads in New England was the result of the hilly and rocky terrain, while large plantations flourished in the South because of the flat turrain. Motley thought that the Lowlands resulted from a swampy land whose water had ever to be contested through dikes. In the Nineteen Fifties, historians said that the United States prospered because it's fields and wheatlands were so fertile There is an alternative example. It is the culture and its social structure that make a nation prosperous. The United States did well because it had a genius for government. The Northwest Ordinance, which predated the Constitution, treated new territories as places to become new and equal states rather than subordinated territories. The Constitution set up a system of government that has endured for more than two hundred years despite the fact that it is rife with its division between Northern and Southern States. America has the internet and its television networks across time zones and its climates and so you are everywhere at once, so long as you have electronics. I wanted to test out the experiences of geography and the other things by looking at Utah, the place in which I have recently settled.

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The Chicago 7

I just caught up with the Andrew Sorkin movie about the Chicago 7 showing the anti-Vietnam activists at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 being prosecuted in federal court during the following year for having incited rioting. Sorkin did a good job making the plot coherent and showing the different points of view and Sorkin, as usual, punched up some telling lines, but I felt that the whole enterprise was wrongly focussed. The trial was just an anticlimax after the events that had happened in the previous year, the images of the actual riots much more profound than a trial that was so clearly a show trial that not even the prosecution didn’t want to pursue it and a judge so biased that there was no doubt about who was the bad guy. No contest on the issue of free speech versus authoritarianism. Sorkin tried to create some controversy by comparing Tom Haydn as the one who said that all the programs depend on what happens to the vote in opposition to Abbie Hoffman saying that the demonstrations were creating a cultural revolution. So the movie had a dramatic clash between the two ideologies: Haydn as a traditional political organizer and Hoffman as crafting a new way to do politics. But that wasn’t the larger issue. Sorkin showed Haydn, at the end of the movie, reading off the numbers of people who had been killed in Vietnam during the time of the Chicago 7 trial. That was what the war was about: its carnage and the attempt to stop that. That was the view all the characters in the film portrayed as the gravamen of the war. David Dellinger, one of the Chicago 7, had indeed been a conscientious objector on the grounds of being a Pacifist. Joan Baez, a fellow traveller of that time, said she was a Pacifist because she was against violence, though she demurred that non-violent resistance against Hitler would have had many casualties before the German people had blanched at the number of deaths.

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the Heartland

My family and I visited Promentary Point where my fourth grade history told me that it was the place that the last spike was placed in1869 to connect the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific and so create a continental railroad. It was quite an accomplishment, indicated, as we drove past, by how long were the graded stone bedways so that the train would not have to rise or fall too quickly as well as all those ties and rails. A marker at the exhibit showed that the information of the event was sent by telegraph to Omaha and points East, including President Grant in Washington, D.C. I was also impressed by the arid land. It was desolate and windy and with vast vistas. Not a task without hardy people and careful planning. I also remembered in the fourth grade, where I seem to have learned a lot of things, the quick development of communications. The Pony Express had lasted for eighteen months so people could travel in 1860 and 1861 from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento. The continental telegraph system, from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., was completed in 1861 in Salt Lake City and the pinnacle of these three amazing developments in the Eighteen Sixties was the continental railway itself, which I have heard was not significantly interfered with by the Indians because by that time the Indians in the area were largely pacified.

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The Trip West

Alister Cooke, the Englishman who had become an American citizen, was well known as the host of “Omnibus”, a fine book on the Alger Hiss case, and a long time letter on America to the BBC. Once he explained that to understand America, you had to see that America was not a nation but a continent. That quip came to my mind this week because my daughter in law drove me from Brooklyn, New York, to Salt Lake City, my daughter in law’s ancestral home and the new permanent residence for their family including me. It is the start, for me, of a great adventure, the short take of my travel showing how much its topography and agriculture certainly make America a continent. We moved from the granite rocked hills of the East, it's very filled treescapes changing with its fall colors, to a spectacular view of Iowa, flat and filled with quite clearly prosperous corn farms, their main house and farm buildings shiny and up to date, and at one point, a spectacularly sunny day having low slung clouds for a hundred miles that made the sky take up seven eights of the landscape, as if this were a Modernist painting, and then to the endless plains in Nebraska, ever more desolate and most of Wyoming unpeopled, but giving rise to spectacular and for me unfamiliar sedimentary rocks and striated hills that continued on to the Salt Lake City Basin.

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The Stratification of Disability

The disabled, which include the blind and the crippled and other infirmities, are usually understood as deviant in that they are more or less distasteful to ordinary society because they are not part of those who are able bodied, and so the disabled are a scourge to society just because they are unfamiliar with normal society. That also happens to criminals and drug addicts and sex perverts, who also are all degrees of deviance. Normal people just feel various degrees of apprehension and disgust for the deviants, rather than there being distinct differences in kind, as if there were different feelings to people who are, let us say, of low caste rather than disfigured. People look away at disabilities of the disfigured just as they abhor associating with loudmouths. President Trump thinks it depressing to see wounded war veterans on display. The various kinds of the disabled share the fact that they are “master statuses” in that disability is a constant companion that must be managed along with a person’s other roles. You can forget to lock your front door but, if you are using braces and crutches, you cannot forget to lock your knees when you rush to get to your cab.

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Working for Trump

Let us commit a bit of sociology by proposing a typology, which means a systematic set of ways in which something can be accomplished. Here are the ways in which a subordinate can support their superior: the subordinate can agree or disagree or disregard or amplify the views expressed by his or her superior. All four of these options apply to one or another of the people who work for Trump, and so we can explore the dynamics of subordination as well as why Trump seems so difficult a person to work for.

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Utopias

A utopia is a society that has abolished the difference between public and private life. That definition of a utopia is superior to the usual one which regards a utopia as a perfected society, whether that means everyone is equal or everyone is in their properly subordinated social positions, because the new definition reveals the mechanism by which some perfect ordering is accomplished and also because it does away with the need to distinguish between utopias and dystopias, all of whom have this same characteristic, the observer to decide whether one or another utopia is to be admired. In Plato, everyone’s character as either a soldier, an artisan or a philosopher is in keeping with their role in society. In Orwell’s “1984”, everyone is being retrained so that the only emotions that are felt internally are the ones approved of by the state, and so sex, which is personal, is a revolutionary concept. In his far more probing “Brave New World'', Aldous Huxley suggests that a person’s chemicals have been balanced and re-balanced since before birth so that the person will be an appropriate social being, only the savages who live on the fringes of society going their own way. This new definition explains the paradox of Bertrand Russell’s witty observation about Plato’s Republic, which is that it is a place where everyone is equally unhappy. It is why both North Korea and an Amish community are utopian in prospect if not in reality. The definition applies to the Christian idea of Heaven and Hell, where people get what they deserve which is what each of their nature’s require, whether that is some degree of pain for those assigned to the levels of Hell, or the equality of the ecstasy that will be achieved in Heaven. Nobody in Hell deserves to be anyplace else and there are no slackers in Heaven. So, in utopias and dystopias, there is supposedly no struggle between the internality of the individual and the person’s public function.

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Religious Schools

The gimmick behind most Supreme Court decisions is to find a set of circumstances that allows the Court to kick a can down the road rather than to settle a large outstanding issue even if the Court does shift slightly the balance between obdurate public interests. I would call this doctrine of constitutional interpretation “consequentialism” because the Court becomes legitimately, in its own lights, concerned with the consequences of its decisions more than it is with the particular legal reasoning it engages in. So much for “textualism” or “originalism” or even “moral principle” as serving as the basis of Supreme Court decisions. The exceptions to consequentialism are very rare and they are often cited. Brown v. Board of Education was understood as a departure from consequentialism but understood as necessary because to uphold Jim Crow in schools was simply beyond the pale after the Second World War, and even Roe v. Wade, a notable non-consequentialist decision, hedged its bets by insisting that women had to consult their doctors before having an abortion, which is something that has now been superceded so that it is purely the woman’s decision whether she should have an abortion. The doctor doesn’t get to say whether it is a wise decision.

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True Lies

Immanuel Kant is a philosopher who is easily parodied as the one who thought people should tell the truth in all circumstances, no matter what, because only in that way would a person be treating himself and those he was talking to as full human beings. You should even reveal the whereabouts of a friend to the murderer who comes to your door asking where your friend is. Kant had obviously never heard of the Gestapo.

Not so fast. Kant's depiction of moral life makes sense if we compare his description of true lies—lies that are truly lies—with something else that is closely akin to true lies: white lies, the kinds of things people do all the time and which are regarded as necessary evasions that help move life along without doing great damage to our stature as moral beings. Consider the following examples of white lies that are drawn not from fiction but from social transactions in which I was myself involved.

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Defunding the Police

Defunding the police is a policy initiative that has arisen in recent days perhaps because of the exuberance of protesters who see that the protests have sustained for a while now and so want to implement something that will really change the lives of people in their communities as well as settle old grievances held in their communities. So the idea of funding new programs that aren’t all that new is yoked with taking revenge on the institutional oppressors, the police, by hitting them where they can be hurt, in their funding. But this is a very bad policy initiative. It does not stand up to scrutiny and so Joe Biden was correct to deny any interest in it right away and not just because Trump wanted to pin the policy on him.

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Opinions on the Current Demonstrations

Opinion is a burden. If I have an opinion about something, whether a Presidential candidate, or when is the right time to reopen the economy, or whether the protesters in the street are correct even though looting is going on under the cover of protest, then I am responsible for saying why that is plausible to me or even just feel the emotion that goes along with the opinion and so attest to the validity of that insight even if I cannot explain it. Time can tell whether my opinion was correct or not and so an opinion is a forecast, as when one says bad people receive their just deserts, even if proof or refutation is never unambiguous. I am rooting for the future to be one way or another, to support or negate my opinion, and so I am always, as an opinionator, making a gamble on the future and that can render me tense, because I could be wrong about the future, while to be liberated from opinion means that I do not have to worry about the future. I can just watch it play out, proceed as it will, me a bystander rather than a participant. Being without opinions is therefore to no longer carry everywhere Kant’s burden of responsibility, life one set of obligations after another, even if there are also judgments of taste that people also make, but those have no cost, in that whether you prefer Schiller to Lessing makes no difference unless you mix with a set of people who think taste has a moral gravity. Rather, to be without opinion is to leave to history and, more directly, the knowledge of experts, how to proceed from here. They will know when to open up the economy if anyone knows because it is a technical matter rather than a moral one or open to everyday reason, and the unfolding statistics will tell if they are wrong or right. As a citizen, I am entitled to my opinions, but they are relevant only at election time or when a profound change of group opinion takes place, as happens when people may, now, at this moment, come to think that occasional instances of police brutality are not to be swept aside but are perhaps part of the continued subjugation of black people.

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The Current Riots

When the worst riots since those of the Sixties broke out only a week ago, I thought that I was ahead of the curve by opineing to friends that outside agitators were behind them. However much I dislike conspiracy theories, in that I did not think either the left or the right had brought down JFK, even though there did seem some money behind James Earl Ray, the assassin of MLK, so that he could temporarily avoid capture, this time the pattern seemed to be clear. In many cities across the country with not enough time for the rioting to mushroom beyond Minneapolis, there were peaceful demonstrations in the daytime and evening followed by arson and looting in the night by people who were unknown to the local community and who did not identify themselves. That has since become the standard explanation provided by the media, whose interviews of peaceful protestors tell them the arsonists and looters are shadowy figures. I speculate that they are leftists or rightists or agent provocateurs employed by the Russians, who mean us no good and are availing themselves of a tactic well known to the Czarist regime and afterwards. This theory has been picked up by the Trump administration, though they are careful to accuse only the left wing Antifa and not white nationalists of being the perpetrators.

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Hammett's Thugs

Dashell Hammett and Lillian Hellman were known to have kept their Stalinist sympathies long after such sentiments were no longer in fashion, which is close to what Hellman said in her defense during her appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hellman’s Stalinism is clear in her writing. Her “Watch on the Rhine”, which gained fame for its prematurely anti-Fascist sympathies, to adapt another phrase that had weight in its time, should also be remembered for its major plot device: an ostensibly all American family becomes involved in a plot to murder a Nazi envoy, despite the fact that committing political murder is illegal in the United States, as well as a violation of the spirit of the national political culture, even if the play provides prudent motives for doing so. Hellman approves of thuggery as sometimes moral. It is a necessary means to a good end: participating on the right side of a world wide war that at the time happened to be undeclared. By that reasoning, anti-Communists would have been in their rights, some fifteen years later, to kill her. Politics may go in and out of fashion, but American political principles, I like to think, are for the long run. It is better for Jews and Arabs to live together in peace in Brooklyn than to carry over to here the conflicts that inflame some other region of the world.

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The Talking Pineapple

Back in the old days, before the coronavirus, educational policy that is nowadays about how to open schools at all and what are the tradeoffs between distance learning and classroom learning, was about whether standardized testing was a good thing. Everybody, apparently, except those who make money off of them, was against standardized testing, though for different reasons. Most teachers and administrators criticized the tests for the burden they placed on teachers to raise the test performance of students ill equipped to take such tests, the teachers getting blamed if kids didn’t do better than students with the same demographic characteristics had done in the past. And that is not to speak of the unreliability of the tests. Reformers, on the other hand, criticized the tests for not allowing teachers to teach the students as they are or in creative ways, the tests measuring minor skills rather than the overall intellectual growth of a child, something that may not show up until years later.

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Consumerism and the Pandemic

According to the visuals and the commentary in the media, people want back their bars and beaches. They also want back auto racing and baseball even if there are no crowds in the stands. This goes contrary to what health specialists are saying, which is that opening up the economy will lead to an increase in the number and rate of deaths from coronavirus. It may be that people are willing to pay in lives lost for their pleasures, whether those are haircuts or tattoos or hanging out on crowded streets. The problem, however, is that this is more than an economic argument, in which case it would refer to the fact that all those people unemployed as a result of the shutdown need to be rehired so that they can put food on their tables. It goes deeper than that. I have heard people protesting in front of state legislatures that they are losing their liberties, that they are being imprisoned, which is a passionate and meaningful plea despite the fact that health emergencies have always been regarded as problems that can be subject to the intervention of state authorities who can order quarantine or keeping the bodies of plague victims in a house that included uncontaminated people until the time of the regularly scheduled pickups of corpses arrived, and also that I don’t know any provision in the Constitution that says that you have a right to infect other people with your diseases. Yes, coronavirus has deprived people of their liberty without due process of law, but this is a special kind of liberty, not the political kind which is what the Constitution refers to. Now what is this liberty that the protesters and I are speaking of?

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The Triple Heresies and the Western World

There is an even broader claim that can be made about my thesis that social movements have three generic types, the Manichaen, the Donatist and the Arian, those terms adopted from three major Christian heresies. Christianity doesn’t just provide names for and historical examples of the three strands inherent in any social movement. It is that a social movement is not a formal idea, something inherent in the nature of social behavior. Rather, a social movement is an historical invention, and it was invented only once, by Christianity, because of some inherent feature of Christianity, which is that it can generate, out of its own religious and intellectual resources, these three kinds of heresies or specialized understandings of the overall doctrine and experience of the religion.

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The Core Dilemma of Social Movements

Social movements are social structures and not just sets of ideas. The three strands of any social movement can be reduced to variations on a structural feature of social movements. That feature is the role of the elite. Marxists wondered whether the vanguard served as educators of a working class destined to wrest history from the grasp of their oppressors, or as leadership cadres for democratic parties, or as the dictatorship of the proletariat. The psychoanalytic movement provides a similar trinity of roles for its elite, each of these anchored in one of the three strands a social movement generates.

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