George Orwell got it all wrong in his famous essay “Shooting An Elephant” when he says that people wanted him to exercise his authority as a policeman in India and shoot an elephant. Orwell says the locals did so because they identified authority with the English. Rather, I would say, they wanted him to assume authority so that the elephant would get shot. He would make the decision, take the risk, get the job done, and take the blame should he mess up. Otherwise, there would have been no end of haggling about who should be appointed to do the job or whether it should be done by a committee. His title was an excuse to do what had to be done, and he had considerable discretion, as all bosses do, about what that title required him to do. Any boss can follow his personality and be more or less aggressive in the policies he asks his subordinates to administer or in how he responds to the demands of clientele. Orwell could have pooh-poohed the request or referred it to local game officials.
Read MoreGender Prejudice & Sexual Harassment
Since I assume, with everyone else, and as data indicates, that women are on average smarter than men (they, for example, do better at school) and more interested in explicating personal relationships than are men, it is amazing that during the current frenzy over sexual harassment, the distinction between that and gender prejudice is obscured or neglected, which is evidence, I take it, that we are indeed in the midst of a frenzy, when an entire gender has lost its mind, something that they will recover, hopefully, before too much time has passed--say, by the end of the decade or a few years after that. So in the hope of getting things right, I will reiterate the distinction and apply it to present circumstances. But my hopes of alleviating the frenzy are dim because the basis of the frenzy is so emotionally deeply seated in the psyches of the two sexes.
Read MoreSocial Problems & Role Theory
Social structures are invisible because they are, after all, nothing more than names for coordinated activities between people, and so are not available to the five senses even though they are made up of events and so are empirical. And yet people have an apperception of these structures even if they cannot give names to them because different structures do, in fact, have different “feels” to them, the job of giving specific names to distinct social structures left to professionals, the ordinary layperson knowing well enough about how the social world works so that he or she can live in it and manipulate it. Here is an example of one of those social structures, social problems, that people sense and therefore know about without needing to know about it with any precision except when a social crisis arises as happens, for instance, when there is a President of the United States who is clearly unsuited to the job and the American people have to decide how unsuited he has to be to be turned out of office.
Read MoreOld Age is a Disease
People are more interesting when they are seventeen or twenty seven than when they are seventy seven, which is the age I have just achieved. At seventeen, they wonder about what kind of person they will be and what kind of occupation they will hold when they grow up; at twenty seven they think about whether they are good husbands and wives and whether they are any good at what they do for a living. People are concerned at twenty seven with whatever project they have taken on in life, whether that is a career goal or simply a way to provide support for the family they now hold up as the dearest thing in the world to them. But at seventy seven, as I just found out at my high school’s sixtieth reunion, people want to talk about their grandchildren, as do I, and what diseases are knocking off the people you and your interlocutor may know. It is not that the younger person is still not there, deep inside, but the self has become sufficiently polished so that only externals show.
Read MoreThe Fundamentals of Social Roles
Let us get through the tough and abstract part of saying why social roles are the fundamental unit of social life before getting on to some clear cut examples of social roles. A social role is any human activity that can be named, which is the same thing as to say that it is any human activity that can be typified, which means that it can serve as a model for such behavior, people comparing how they carry out an activity with the idea of the activity. Men and women are two different social roles, even if there are some cases that make this other than a binary choice, and even though it is a presumption to guess at some fundamental psychological makeup for these two (or more) roles rather than to settle for a definition of the two in terms of their overt biological characteristics.
A social role can be defined by its function or its circumstances or some combination of the two. Occupational roles usually center on functions. The job of a janitor is to clean up the floors so that other employees can use the offices, though it is also the case that janitors work at night when the rest of the employees are not there, and so share much in common with other night shift workers, like bakers, a lack of supervision and a family life that doesn’t follow the usual nine to five routine. Customary roles focus on circumstances. A priest may be someone who officiates at a liturgy, that being the essential function of a priesthood, even if it also provides other services to congregants, such as advice or consolation, but the main thing about a Catholic priest is a circumstance, his celibacy, which has for a thousand years been used as a sign of his elevation from his parishioners. Marriage is also mainly a set of circumstances: a shared bed and legal obligations one to another, whatever the state of affection between the two parties.
Read MoreWomen Are An Attractive Nuisance
We may well be entering upon the crest of the next wave of feminism, as happened when women gained the right to an abortion, or we may, instead, be in the midst of a dustup without consequences. The premise for change is that women will no longer put up with sexual harassment in the workplace, which means that they will not allow anyone to make them feel small or uncomfortable when it comes to sexual matters. They will come forward and speak up about gropes and rapes and untoward advances by male superiors, and males who have been subject to similar violations will also be able to come forward. But there are problems in the formulation of the changes in behavior that are to be undertaken as well as rhetorical and logical problems that did not befuddle the suffragettes, who were very straightforward in wanting something simple, which was the right to vote. That may be because what women have wanted over the past fifty years are changes in customary behavior even though that would result in major changes in the job market and workplace conditions, which do have to do with formal organizations. The definition of what is acceptable customary behavior is so much harder to formulate than are the rules about hiring practices or about the vote, which are matters of stipulated laws and regulations.
Read MoreLife Before Death
“Nature does not get what it wants because it doesn’t want anything. Nature has no intention and so cannot be seen as an antagonist. Things just happen.”
Jonathan Swift, in the Seventeenth Century, got it wrong when he described people who got their lives extended as doddering wrecks. William Hazlitt, writing at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, also got it wrong when he said most people are ready to die, look all played out, by the time they die. Modern medicine means that, to the contrary, you can live a comfortable life until you die, barring certain debilitating illnesses like cancer and ALS. Modern people want to go on as long as they can, doing the things they like to do, like reading or gardening, or taking walks and conversing with grandchildren, even though at any moment that comfortable if restricted way of life can be turned into a terminal illness by a fall, a cough that turns to pneumonia, the diagnosis of a deadly disease, and even then people want to continue as long as they can, so long as they have drugs to numb the pain and that do not render them incapable of appreciating their environment. People don’t want to give up even if they know that the burden of medical care and medical expenses takes place during the last two years of life. Their insurance companies and the government should spare no expense. After all, what do people have to look forward to once they are dead? It is an afterlife that has no substance and is therefore so far from what the present life is that it is the same thing as being dead is for a non-believer. If there is no walking on clouds or talking with angels, no sensation, then there is nothing at all. And those who cling to some substantive notion of an afterlife are merely being superstitious, having faith in eternal life because they have no reason to think there is any such thing.
I have joined the corps of people who are at age where health reverses are common rather than rare. My friends have withstood prostate surgery, multiple bypass surgery, the ravages of Parkinson’s disease, and some have died of cancer. And yet what is true of all the survivors is that they have not given up on living, have not had to combat despair because the amount of time left to them is limited, but think rather in terms of the practical things they can do to extend their comfortable lives. They go to their checkups regularly, increasing those to include podiatrists and dermatologists along with the cardiologists and neurologists they also consult. They take their medicines. They are not passive in confronting the inevitable; it is just that they are not in a war to survive. That talk is all metaphorical. The person who dies of cancer has not lost his battle; he has succumbed because nature does what it does. Nature does not get what it wants because it doesn’t want anything. Nature has no intention and so cannot be seen as an antagonist. Things just happen.
The remarkable thing is, I can report, how cheerful people can be while the sword of death hangs over them. Yes, they have their savings and pensions to live off; they have their past career successes to contemplate; they have the love of their spouses, friends and children and grandchildren to warm them. They can appreciate a sunny spring day or a chilly autumn afternoon, or the pretty, well dressed young woman who walks by. But this does not make sense to much of the literary imagination because a nemesis, such as is death, is supposed to engender fear and loathing. King Lear rails against his diminished condition of power and cognition even as he rages against the storm and his relatives, reconciled to nature only by the death of his daughter, which is heartbreaking and yet self condemning because why would it take that to pay him back for his grievances against the world and himself? Shakespeare may present Lear in this way because Shakespeare is always likely to show his tragic heroes in extreme and contrarian emotions. But, on the other hand, it may be that this view of old age is as old as the Christian tradition, which preaches that the wages of sin are death, and so suffering in old age is befitting as it harkens forward to the suffering that awaits most of us in Hell and Purgatory, given that we who all suffer from original sin deserve no better. What I am always amazed by in Dante is that humans who have already suffered for many years the unrelenting tortures of Hell retain their most human attributes. They can conduct civil conversations during which they contemplate their lives on Earth. It makes me think that Dante did not really understand the suffering to which his characters were condemned and so his whole scheme is therefore false.
The ancients, for their part, might be thought to have seen the time before death differently. Cicero sees people as only fighting what nature has bestowed when they decry old age, when what is the case is that they can continue to exercise their powers to be wise or take political action even if they can no longer climb the riggings of ships. Old people can go on doing the important things they always did if they have the good character to do those things. The trouble with this argument, of course, is even that comes to an end, and so one can deplore the end of invention and of most pleasures, whenever that should come. It may be that we are so taken up with the Christian vision that we read life backwards, from its end to its beginning, and so insist that the final twist is the important thing, not the straightforward course of a life where one just is the kind of person one is.
But go even farther back, to “Oedipus at Colonus”. Oedipus has been beaten down and suffered from a crime which he insists was just an accident or coincidence. He is blind and weak, but he retains his verbal abilities, as those are supplemented by his daughter, and he continues to live in that he still wants and expects there to be dramatic events in his life which means that there will be reversals in the plot that are revelatory. In his case, that means that some religious and political authority will provide him with sanctuary so that he can consider himself redeemed. And Cicero was also assuming that people would go on exercising their powers to make a difference, to have change take place in their lives. And so it is with moderns, with actual oldsters, who cultivate new friendships, new loves, or a new found appreciation by others, or even just do that vicariously in that they deal with the ever unraveling and revealing world of politics that never stops having dramatic revelations take place in the lives of its leading characters and in the unfolding history of the nation. We moderns may not read life backwards, from ending to beginning, but we do read it as a never ending process of change, of new beginnings even at the end.
The difference between ancients and moderns, on the one hand, and Christians, on the other, may be this: ancients and moderns are engaged, amazingly, in a great game of denial whereby they put out of their minds that they will die. They go through this difficult process so that they do not have to experience the dread that would come from focusing on the fact of death and the simple reason for engaging in this difficult process is that to do otherwise would lead to all sorts of bad feelings: fear, paralysis, bad thoughts, Christians as a matter of fact may engage in the same sort of denial for the reason that they too don’t want to dwell on death even though they accept as true an ideology that treats death as a reward or the beginning of a punishment, rather than as an ending. Every person, Christian or secularist, just wants to get on with living as long as they can.
Sociologists were wrong to think that old people are disengaging from their lives, as if in anticipation of the fact that they will undergo the ultimate disengagement, which is from life itself. Rather, what old people do, and this is more and more true as we progress further in the age of enlightenment, is to alienate themselves from their disabilities. Those are just matters to be managed. A heart is just a pump, not the symbolic much less actual seat of emotions, and a breast is a mammary gland rather than the symbol of a woman’s femininity. People can be rid of the naturally occurring versions of these things and be fully human. To be human, what you need is the desire to manage those parts of life which are manageable, and take some cheer in that.
Desperate People
A desperate person is someone who does not have the resources to sustain either his or her own life or what might generally be considered an adequate way of life. Desperate people can be homeless, or suffering a terminal illness, or victims of a war. They do not know where to turn to help them out or else, like the people of Puerto Rico, they don't know why they have not been helped out. They are different from people who are caught up in a way of life that seems normal to them, rather than desperate, but which may have many of the same sequelae. Someone living in a gang infested neighborhood may think that is just the way things are, some people getting shot at random, however unfair that may be. Others living in the same neighborhood are truly desperate because they don’t think this is normal, not the conditions under which anyone should live, a definite privation rather than a culture. People who emphasize the idea of the culture of poverty portray gang violence in the first way, as the way life is, dysfunctional for the community as a whole, but not for the gang members who get money and excitement in exchange for their shortened lives, while people who emphasize the structure of poverty portray gang violence in the second way, as the way life doesn’t have to be except for the fact that gangs provide work (in the drug trade and other illegal ventures) as well as a sense of security to people who do not have other resources. We can begin to understand the nature of desperation better by focussing on the general phenomenon of a disaster rather than looking at the ongoing disaster that characterizes some American communities and which is confused with a normal way of life.
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Blame
Everybody blames everybody for everything. Lovers blame one another when they break up; insurance companies affix blame so as to determine how much they will have to lay out; tradesmen are blamed for not having fixed the air conditioner properly. Presidents get blamed if the economy tanks. When something goes wrong, someone gets blamed. Doing so goes back to the Old Testament, but the New Testament was particularly good at making blame incapacitating. We are all to be blamed for everything because we inherited Original Sin from the fact that Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate from the Tree of Knowledge. Ever since, all we can do is atone for that, first by accepting Jesus as our savior and then by beating our chests to proclaim our shortcomings as people. So blame eats at us. Is there any way to be rid of it?
Read MoreImmigrant Rage
A standard psychological theory of rage and anger is that it is a response to frustration at having been denied something that is very important to well being. The rage of Achilles arose because he had been denied his trophy, Brisias, which was an insult to him as a warrior, and so he raged and sulked in his tent, and the outcome of that classic legend was that his best friend was killed in battle. Rage leads to bad things and so we should do something to deal with its causes. Freud, of course, had a very different view of the matter. What happened to people when they did not get what they felt entitled to because they are drawn to it is that they became fearful of those who were enforcing the frustration, and so they turn upon themselves rather than lash out at people. Let us try to sort out the dynamics of rage by looking at both fictional and real life, large scale examples of the phenomenon: what happens to immigrants when they come to this country.
Read MoreThe Damon & Pythias Paradox
The ancient story goes like this: Damon and Pythias are good friends. Pythias is sentenced to death. Damon volunteers to stand in his place while Pythias goes off to say goodbye to his family. Damon is about to be executed when Pythias returns to honor his promise. The king is so impressed that he frees both of them. The story is used as an illustration of the moral virtue of friendship. People are willing to give up their lives for a friend and friends are to be trusted even if it means they are putting their own lives in danger. Rather than search for moral meaning, however, let us look at the structural situation of the two friends in the story, what is implied about being a voluntary hostage, and what that says, if generalized, about a structural feature of social life that is ubiquitous, to wit, that people are always incrementally putting themselves into more and more threatening situations because to do so is part and parcel of taking on any number of personal and organizational roles, such as being a soldier or a doctor or even just a friend.
Read MoreThe Role of Women
I do not mean to offend anyone by acknowledging this, but I am the only male I know who does not consider himself to be a Feminist. That means I do not think women have been subject to discrimination in law or in practice in the United States by and large since the end of the Second World War except in the case of abortion, which is an issue that is fraught with complexities because childbirth is one of those existential issues, one not easily comparable to any other, that just have to be managed somehow, just as is the fact that men live on average seven years less than women do, and I prefer Bill Clinton’s position that abortions should be legal, safe and rare to the view that they are just another form of birth control. I come by this position honestly in that I was told by my mother that she would have aborted me if she had had the courage to do so. There are not many survivors to speak up in the name of those who did not survive. The law and customs against abortions saved my life even as some women lost theirs because of botched kitchen table abortions and other women were saved from having a child by successful kitchen table abortions. (It can hardly be tasteless of me to mention this bit of personal information when so many women have come forward to defend abortion by pointing out that they had undergone abortions in their youth.)
Let us turn to the general issue of discrimination against women who, to make a long story short, got into medical schools and law schools in large number as soon as they requested something more than token representation. There is a more upbeat account of the advancement of the equality of women over the past one hundred years than is usually provided.
Read MoreEducational Means & Ends
So difficult and profound is the nature of education, and so uncertain its results, since education has to do with the nature of the way people think more than what they know or what they can do, that it is not surprising that the goal of education is replaced by something else. Using history to ponder the complexities of social causation is replaced by learning the chronicles and traditions of a nation so as to implant patriotism; using math to learn how to think abstractly and logically is replaced by the mastery of times tables and algorithms. More dramatically, learning is itself replaced as a goal of education, its time taken up with the variety of services that are useful to the population that attends school, such as how to drive an automobile or protect against pregnancy. Schools can therefore become schools in name only, even though they are regulated by state education departments rather than by some other agency. That is what happens when schools serve non-educational functions for reasons of convenience, such as providing vaccinations for all students, free lunches for poor children, or day care for seriously disabled children, or warnings about not to talk to strangers. These are health and safety programs, not educational programs, even if it is also the case that children who get glasses may see the blackboard better and so learn more. Many social services make it easier to educate students, and there is no reason why these services should not be provided in schools, given that children of school age can be found there en masse, but social services are not the same thing as education itself.
Read MoreA Minimalist Definition of Education
The distinctive goal of an institution is whatever is the primary goal of the institution, whatever other functions it may carry out, and even if its budget and talk seem more devoted to other activities than those that enhance that distinctive goal. The distinctive goal of the military is to strip or counter the ability of the enemy to perpetrate organized violence through the use of its own abilities in perpetrating organized violence, never mind that the military also dallies in winning over hearts and minds and is an icon of patriotism. Other institutions, like Hollywood, also win over hearts and minds, and patriotism can be tied to vigorous, loyal dissent as well as to risking life and limb on a battlefield.
It is the same with education. Local suburban school boards may be preoccupied with making a campus shine even though their students will do well whether the campus looks good or not; local urban Parents Associations may talk a great deal about a learning environment when what they mean is that the school is safe enough for their children to attend. But a school without instruction in subject matter is a recreation program by another name, and so schools have to offer some version of the usual courses as well as the other things that motivate students to attend school so that they can be known and qualified as schools and thought to be doing the things schools are supposed to do. A college curriculum without liberal arts requirements is a training academy, and you couldn’t sell it to parents as a real college education unless you included those requirements, even if students don’t like to take those courses and even if the parents and students say that what they really want are the vocational preparation courses.
By that light, the distinctive task of education can be defined, in general, as structured instruction for the purpose of the development of disciplined thought about any subject matter. Plato thought that there was a single discipline of thought which pervades all thinking, and for which we retain the title of “logic”. Aristotle thought that there were many disciplines of thought, the rigor or “logic” of which depends on the subject matter and the audience which was to be convinced of the rightness of one or another view. This distinction between logic and logics still obtains. Some people develop large habits of thought, such as how to read texts or do statistical analysis, and some people learn particular disciplines, like economics and psychology and religious studies, and some people learn subject matters, like Southeast Asia, or mass communications, or African-American studies, and pick up smatterings of whatever disciplines seem to apply as well as a healthy dose of some particular discipline so as to provide tools for the study of the particular subject matter.
Read MoreTeaching as an Occupation
There is something peculiar about the notion that teaching is an occupation. Everybody does it: every parent and every employer tries to be calm while explaining to a child or a worker what it is they aren’t doing quite properly or how to do a task better. If explanation is provided with patience, then children and workers are likely to have a more positive attitude towards their tasks—though, on the other hand, if a lesson is reinforced with a spanking or a dressing down, then children and employees are likely to learn how important it is they learn their lesson well. Teachers are similarly divided between those who think that sticks or carrots, whether in the forms of grades, or informal praise and criticism, are the ways to advance student learning. Presumably, and contrary to the teacher unions, anyone of good will and patience and an education a little bit superior to that of their students, could be a teacher.
Read MoreMoral and Immoral Child-Rearing
I want to propose a philosophical question and then answer it with a bit of counter-intuitive sociology, and then address why people persist in availing themselves of the usual philosophical conclusion. The philosophical question is the age at which children take on moral responsibility, the so called age of consent. The usual moral answer is that children reach the age of consent when they are capable of managing their own lives, at least in the sphere in which their ability to give consent is at issue. They are supposed to be able to evaluate information and their own emotions and so give informed consent to their own action and the action of others. The law in most states sets sixteen as the age at which people can agree to sexual relations and twenty one as the age at which people can purchase alcohol. But it proves impossible to give an accurate definition to this leaping off point for adulthood. Why a particular age for one thing and a different age for another? What changes in a person that they become morally responsible or is it just that age is just a rule of thumb for developmental processes recognized to happen but not very well understood?
Read MoreSocial "Wars"
Wars in the modern age are fought to preserve and protect the ability of a nation’s population to pursue its own purposes rather than the purposes of its enemies. The Nazis thought their way of life was endangered by the Jews and the governments they controlled and the Soviets thought their country was threatened by the capitalist world that engulfed it. That is different from previous times when wars were fought to expand territory or capture natural resources. In fact, international law now holds a war of aggression to be illegitimate, while wars of self defense are legitimate. What counts is whether decisions people make as to their vocations or how they are subject to criminal law are matters which their own nation controls. We fought World War II to allow fans to call the umpire blind, though I don’t know that German soccer referees were not subject to similar abuse.
We also fight social wars, which means campaigns to allow people to continue with their ordinary way of life, getting up to go to work and take a vacation in the summer, without the intrusion of disease or crime, much less foreign invasion. That is the case with homeless shelters, which are referred to as programs rather than as wars, though they share with other social wars, such as the War on Poverty or the War on Cancer, the idea that resources will be mobilized so as to confront a problem or a threat to ordinary life that will eventually be overcome. Smallpox was eradicated, as was polio. Homeless shelters allow people to negotiate what is for them the very burdensome task of making it through the day, no other purpose able to supplant that one, while most people can take their households to be the site from which they can negotiate their purposes rather than their sole purpose becoming the maintenance of a household.
Read MoreEncapsulated Lives: The Aims of Racial Segregation
People are universally required to rationalize the relationship between the foreground and background of life so that they can go about dealing with their activities as a set of purposes not too often interrupted by items in the background of life, as happens when, let us say, people step into dog do-do when they are emerging, elegantly dressed, from a limo. One way to do that to create a stable equilibrium whereby the arena of background matters is put on hold by segregating them from the foreground events, though this may be at the cost of a heightened anxiety about the ability to maintain the truce. The lives of one group is encapsulated so that the members of that group can keep in the foreground what matters to them. An easy example of this is a retirement community. It provides physical security and other amenities that will appeal to old people who are becoming fragile so that they can go on with what seems to them a more or less normal set of activities even if these are somewhat more restricted than the lives that were led when people were living in “normal” communities. There are vans to take you from one place to another, to concerts and to downtown; there are walking trails so one can follow one’s doctor’s orders to exercise; there are small supermarkets so that one does not have to deal with the hustle and bustle of the outside world to get one’s shopping done. Political lectures and folk singers are brought “on campus”. All this is done so as to make life as stable for as long as possible before a resident is moved into the even more secure area of a nursing home.
Read MorePretty People
Here is a controversial issue that can be illuminated through the use of sociological role theory. There are a number of asymmetries between the sexes that feminists regard as unfair or unjust or to be remedied by social action. Women have weaker upper body strength, but that should not bar them from going into combat because some women can meet rigorous physical standards. Other asymmetries are regarded by feminists as just the way it is. Women are supposed to believe in compromise while men are stuck with a rigid sense of justice. Men live, on average, seven years less than women, but that is outside the interest group to which feminists find themselves responsible.
Let us turn to what may be a more essential asymmetry in that it has to do with the everyday conduct of the sexes. Attractiveness is something with which only women have to struggle. Men may clean up for a date but hardly primp the way women do even if they are also anxious about how the date will go. Women, for their part, are the sex that dresses up in tight fitting clothes, high heels and makeup so as to appear at their most attractive to a date or even at a meeting in a workplace. So women work hard at being attractive, even if there are bounds to which men must restrict themselves in looking at well turned out women, not “checking them out” for too long, or making remarks that are too appreciative of how nice they look in their presentation of themselves, for then it might be understood that the women were being judged on their looks rather than on their other qualities, though to be judged at least passingly on looks is the reason for gussying up in the first place.
Read MoreSmarts
People have higher or lesser amounts of that quality that is known as intelligence or more generally and perhaps more accurately as “smarts” because the former term connotes being good at standardized tests while the latter term means being good at having insight and turning that to the solution of problems of one sort or another. People think it is important to have smarts or at least be smart enough to manage their lives. They can claim to have emotional intelligence rather than book intelligence and to intuit situations rather than verbalize a description of situations. Fredo told his brother, Michael Corleone, that he was also smart, by which he meant that he could do things: strike up deals, carry out instructions-- even though those were just the things he was bad at. People can also define their smarts by relative comparisons. The higher functioning residents of a home for the retarded will regard the lower functioning residents as "dummies". Most people infer the intelligence or smarts of people by consulting whether or not they are articulate, can memorize or master procedures, whether they have a fund of general knowledge, and whether they are savvy about managing one or another situation, whether within a family or at business. An uneducated person can be regarded as smart if he or she can get relatives to do what is wanted of them.
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