An institution of social control is a set of organizations that have the specific societal purpose of ensuring that people obey the rules and regulations and customs of a society or some institution within it. The umpires are the social control agency in a baseball game though baseball itself is a leisure activity, with all that entails in the way of allowing people of different social classes to share the same experience, even if, metaphorically, we can say that baseball contributes to the social order of society because it gives people an escape valve so that they can root for the underdog without that sentiment having any consequences. Institutions of social control exist as part of most modern, complex bureaucracies, and go under a variety of names: Internal Affairs, Human Resources, Inspector General. These adjuncts make it possible for the larger organization to go about pursuing their main purposes. In this light, it is only by way of metaphor that we can treat the IRS as an institution of social control, even if it does supervise economic activity, because its main goal is to collect revenue. Similarly, the main goal of education as an institution is to help children fit into adult roles by improving their ability to make use of whatever cognitive capacities they may have, not to serve as a boot camp for adult servility.
Read MoreThe Autonomy of Field Commanders
The field commanders of armies are notoriously unreliable. In fact, the Romans forbade them from sending their armies across the Rubicon lest they try to overthrow the government. Troops were, until recently, more loyal to their commanders than they were to their polity, perhaps because it was the military units that enforced military discipline. You could be killed for insubordination. That was the power over you, not the politicians in Rome. What is remarkable and surprising, however, is that the autonomy of field commanders to do what they wanted with their troops lasted until recent times-- the First World War, I would say. This is partly because armies in the past relied on their own supplies and the funds provided to them to keep them in the field. But twentieth century armies had come to rely on supplies of oil and munitions and tanks supplied for them by their various defense ministries and so were no longer autonomous. How this balance of field command and high command alters over the past two hundred years explains a lot about the wars fought during that time period.
Read MoreCarrying Charges
Not too long ago, commentators were saying that some people voted for Trump because they were economically pressed in that wages were stagnating, this assessment based on national wage figures. That is an economic change of which people may not be aware, but which will somehow go into their calculations of how well off they are. Somehow, voters have a sense of how only statistically significant increases or decreases in wages impinged on their own lives and respond accordingly. That is not very plausible and it is a factor in life that, one would presume, would be easily enough washed out by cultural issues like abortion or thinking that coastal people are condescending towards middle Americans. At this moment, however, a very different economic logic is being pursued by commentators trying to forecast the impact of the Trump tax bill. It may not do much good for the country, this giving away of a trillion dollars to rich people without any requirement that they invest it in productive ways, but it will put a thousand dollars or so in the pockets of many of the middle class and that is something concrete, a real if small gain, and so may lead them to stick with Trump. Note the difference between the two argument: in the first case, there is an incremental change in people’s disposable income as a result of a lack of increase in paychecks, a change of which people may not be aware, but which will somehow go into their calculations of how well off they are, and in the second case, there is an increase in take home pay because of a decrease in payroll deductions and people will be aware of this change even though it is not very sizable. I want to apply this second kind of logic, of what people know as a change in their own lives, to addressing the first question, which is why people feel squeezed, and so dispense with any need for economic metaphysics.
Read MoreThe Nominal Role of the Politician
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 MoreStandby & Operating Institutions
All organizations, and not just governments, are either standby or operating institutions, or some combination of the two, and an important basis for the division between conservatives and liberals, a distinction that goes back to the French Revolution or before, and is part of the fabric of the modern world, rests on whether government should be primarily one or the other. This is just one of the underlying and overlapping emotions and ideas that give rise to the chasm between conservatives and liberals. Another, well elaborated by Karl Mannheim about one hundred years ago, is the distinction between those who look backwards to a golden age and those who look forward to a utopia as the focus of their political imaginations. Both ideas are creatures of the imagination but both also have very different consequences. A traditionalist mind finds conventional morality and politics preferable to what seem to be the hopeless dreams of the Utopian, even though what a utopian predicts will often come true, as happened in the United States, for example, when African Americans went from being a caste to an ethnic group in two generations, from the time miscegenation was made legal to the time a mixed race person was elected President.
Read MoreSovereignty & Its Discontents: Blade runner or H.G. Wells?
The idea of sovereignty has been the prevailing theory of the state for at least a thousand years. It is the idea that the power of government was entrusted by God to kings and then, in the view of seventeenth century political theorists, the locus of power was shifted to officeholders responsible, in some sense, to the will of the people. In all of these cases, government was what the early twentieth century sociologist Max Weber defined it to be: a legitimate monopoly on the use of violence that could be exercised on any matters that came to concern the imagination of the government. First, there was the control of warfare, in that everything else was ruled by custom; then, ever more intrusion into the economy, violence used to enforce economic reforms such as collectivization or the regulation of the sale of bread; then, into ever more intrusion into social structure, so that violence or the threat of violence influences changes in the class structure and even the caste structure of the Jim Crow American South; and then into culture, strictly speaking, as journalists are swept off to gulags or killed. As Hugo Grotius, another seventeenth century savant, elaborated, the relation of nations to one another was one of perpetual war or potential war. Order existed only within the individual nation state. This is a long way from Kant’s Enlightenment vision of a state of perpetual peace ushered in by the gradual consolidation of nations into a giant single state.
Read MoreFifty Years Later: Anniversary of the March on Washington
A number of people, including myself, found the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, which took place a few years ago while Obama still held the con, discouraging as well as a cause for celebration. It is worth trying to recapture that moment for why it was the anniversary of only a partial victory, just as gun control legislation, even if it came about, would be only a very partial victory against the cultural preoccupation of Americans with guns and gun culture, something that has little place in the modern urban world but only in the minds of those who idealize a Wild West which, contrary to fact, does not have gun totters deposit their weapons at the saloon door or at the Sheriff’s office.
Read MoreThe End of Social Movements?
European social movements over the past hundred years have been largely out to change the values of one or more societies. These movements include Communism, Socialism, and Fascism and, more recently the drive to unite Europe into a federation and the counter-movement to reassert various European nationalisms. There are exceptions to this European pattern, such as the suffragette movement and the environmental movement, but the generalization holds. The United States, on the other hand, has over the course of the century from the 1880’s to the 1980’s had its history filled with movements that are interested in the issues that concern one or another particular section of the population, and that may account for the fact that American history is not regarded as a history of ideas while European history is so regarded. American movements for that period included the labor movement, which was out to protect workers; the reaction in the South against Reconstruction, which was out to re-entrench white minority rule; the temperance movement, where women wanted to save their husbands from drink; our own suffragette movement; and more recent movements, like the Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement and our own environmental movement. But all that has ended. There has been no significant social movement in this country in nearly forty years, and the question is why that is the case.
Read MoreNatural Disposition
What is the natural disposition of mankind? That is to ask what are the basic emotions that make people recognizable to one another and not the ones added on by the veneer of civilization. What, in a word, are our “true” or “truest” emotions? The great psychologist-philosophers all tried to answer this question. Aristotle thought there was a very long list of standard emotions. Hobbes thought that there was an evolution of emotions from the most simple to the most complex, the key being when people learned or came to think in practical terms. Spinoza thought that emotions changed into one another, as when love turned to hate, and dispensed with Aristotle’s notion that there was a Golden Mean, whereby the best emotions were the ones between their extreme versions. Another way to answer the question, rather than to arrange a gigantic table of emotions, is to look at the actual history of mankind so as to see what emotions were exhibited by primitive, and so presumably more natural people. Durkheim looked at Australian Aborigines and concluded, based on their funeral practices, that the most basic feeling of humanity was reverence for the ongoing community. Australian Aborigines are about as primitive as you can get on the ladder of cultural evolution. In his book “A Commonwealth of Thieves”, Thomas Kennelly supplies us with portraits of a few of the Aborigines encountered by the early English settlers in Australia, and so let us consider what Kennelly tells us about people in their full naturalness, though the consideration of different Aborigines might offer different readings. We should remember, however, that we often use people who seem lacking and insufficient in some way or another even if they are singular to tell us all kinds of things about the general human condition. Helen Keller showed that people bereft of sight and hearing could still think and Ishi and the wild boy of Avignon showed us how children raised in isolation were limited as human beings.
Read MoreReparations & Affirmative Action
Reparations are payments to survivors of atrocities or the group which suffered the atrocities as an acknowledgment of guilt and as an attempt to right at least part of the wrong. They are not a bad idea. Germany paid reparations to individual Jews and also to the newly found state of Israel to atone for the Holocaust. The money to Israel was blood money in the sense that millions of people had to die to get it but Israel accepted it anyway because they needed it at the time and because it proved the basis for what is now a long standing alliance between the two countries, the whole world having recognized the reality of Germany having overcome its past through acts such as this. Now we are in the midst of a new round of talks about reparations to African Americans for slavery. The difference here is that there are no actual survivors to whom to write checks and that the problems of African Americans in current American society are not of the sort that are solved by writing checks, even if lawyers are willing to monetize every damage. How much to a sixth generation survivor? How much to a ghetto crack addict? How much to the institutions, like education and health, that would help alleviate black poverty? Let us parse this question more carefully before arriving at a conclusion.
Read MoreThe Fifties
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”.
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