Lawyers develop documents whereby people contract to meet what are now their obligations. This seems a very fair arrangement in that people have written down what they have agreed to do, for a consideration, and that social life could not proceed if those undertakings, such as to pay a debt or offer a service, were not promised in writing. Contracts are as old as when contracts were made about whose grain would be sold in the future when the crops in Babylon were reaped. But this well appreciated practice of everyday social life that is best noticed and freshly appreciated through the lens of sociology rather than through the law because law may generate those documents but without exploring the social activities associated with documents other than that they become obligatory. As in most cases with social life, sociology trumps law by dealing with what actually transpires rather than the way things are supposed to happen. To wit, informed consent agreements are, in fac,t neither informed nor agreements, only the products sustained and operated by other social processes.
Read MoreThe Social and the Transcendental
When I take my daily constitutional half a mile to a convenience store and back, I am not alone even though I don’t know the names or remember the faces of people I pass. They know who I am: an elderly man with a cane who is getting his exercise, and perhaps returning with a beverage. Nobody is without their roles,some important ones of which are on display. What you see is what I am whether or not I disclose what I think are my deep thoughts. The question here is whether I can ever escape from my roles, is there some relaxation of all those roles, like tinker, would be spy or ex-professor, that cocoon me, everyone exhibiting any number of spikes that, like the coronavirus, allow identities to hang onto our projections and our awards, or ‘beings” as a particular entity. Yes there are, and among them is exhibited in that nearly daily walk, because I get so enmeshed in the walk itself, that it travels in distance, that I forget what my roles are, to the extent that such is possible. Nobody totally leaves hold of their identities, unless in an existentialist fantasy, as in Camus’ “The Stranger” and, in that case, such moments are horrendous rather than liberating.
Read MoreNon-Sexy Dreams
Like most people, I suppose, I dream about stories and issues other than lust and ambition. As a sociologist, perhaps, I also dream about social situations and problems, sometimes quite amusing, that provide insights I would not have arrived at when awake or, when dreaming,come up with half baked solutions because my mind has not thought of a better one, either asleep or awake. I dreamed, for some reason I can't readily assign to newspaper accounts or to general knowledge, that Israeli expatriates are infiltrating non profit organizations in New York City so as to familiarize themselves with what Jewish Americans and other Americans are thinking so as to know how to respond to America. So they go to the Met or Carnegie Hall as well as synagogues and churches to take the pulse of New York culture. Is Israel threatened? Is New York about to turn against Israeli sentiment? I don’t think so in my awakened life and the tone of the dream story does not have the tone of animosity or fear. Maybe it just shows that I have a lingering identification with Israel and my dream is a better indication of that fact than my protestations to that effect when awake might indicate. To use an overworked word correctly, dreams tell me that my feelings about Israel are authentic rather than affected.
Read MoreThe Ethics of Bi-Polar Roles
People engage in ethical transgressions and there are ethical ways to deal with the existence of such transgressions. People behave badly to one another all the time without being thought to have either abandoned their role or their humanity, on the one hand, or to have simply made a mistake, as happens when they apply the wrong postage to an envelope. Indeed, much of ethical life consists of people finding ways of forgiving or excusing one another's behavior while continuing a relationship, or using lapses in ethical behavior as reasons for modifying a relationship or even letting go of or breaking a relationship. People regularly tell stories to one another about why they lost friends, why people drift apart, how their bosses betrayed them. People also tell themselves or their psychologists or their lovers why past relationships foundered and what sense they make of that in constructing their present lives and relationships.
One important area of ethical life, therefore, is dealing with the consequences of ethical judgments. How does one ethically respond to the recognition or the accusation of ethical lapses by oneself or others? This question is usually applied only to the person who has lapsed from proper ethical conduct. Can that person be trusted again? Does a person caught in an ethical lapse feel guilty, apologize, make amends, commit suicide? But it also applies to how to relate to the ethical lapses of people with whom one is associated. There are ethical considerations that fall on those who deal with the lapsed, such as whether a person is obligated to forgive another. Can a coach refuse to play an athlete who had flubbed his last chance? Moreover, there are ethical considerations that a person who has failed at ethical life must take into account other than the way to overcome the stigma of having ethically lapsed. The person must learn how ethical lapses are noticed and how blame for them is placed. In short, ethical life is not only a matter of individual or collective responses to transgressions, but provides multiple structures through which can be understood the inevitable ethical transgressions that take place in social life. People can be over amorous in courtship or insufficiently diligent at work or meek on those occasions when they might assert their rights.
Read MoreBlemishes On The Soul
When I taught an undergraduate course on the sociology of everyday life, I would assign essays, lead discussions and even give lectures on such topics as friendship, love, strangers and casual acquaintanceships, as well as parties and other kinds of gatherings. My point was to show how the circumstances of these situations constrained the lives of people and would make the students aware that invisible social structures had an impact on their lives. I think that by and large I failed because students did not make the leap from psychology to sociology. They looked at the motives that led them to behave in a way and to identify the feelings or emotions they might feel in that situation. So strangers were understood as lonely and in need of solace and companionship when what I was getting at was Georg Simmel’s insight that a stranger was a person who was only very partially understood by other people with whom they narrowly engaged and so, paradoxically, became, like bartenders and psychotherapists, the people with whom someone might confide.
It is very strange that students could not engage with that subject matter in that, after all, they could engage with a discussion in a course on social policy even though they had not previously thought that there might be four or five plans to structure a national medical insurance plan, a topic of popular concern at the time, and even though the students had not before the course that there were ways to objectively compare and analyze alternative plans, social design a way of thinking about government rather than saying just yea or nay, ardently in favor of or having contempt for a policy just because their party or favorite candidate said so. I pointed out that in the 2000 Democratic primary campaign Kerry's catastrophic health insurance plan would cover anyone who had a road accident but insurance would not cover medical checkups and so cover big bills but at low cost while Dick Gephardt wanted the equivalent of Medicare for All, which was comprehensive but very expensive and no one seemed to care about a policy’s assumptions and implications and when Obamacare was adopted people got to like it only when the citizens got the benefits. Very curious that social policy was readily on the agenda, somehow legitimated, even if it was arcane, but everyday life was not a topic, an object of contemplation, even briefly, remained obscure, even though everyone understood what it was to have a friend or a stranger in their midst .Social life is very perplexing if you bother to consider the obvious social things around you.
Read MoreDaydreams and Reality
Fantasy or daydream is a kind or structure or story that is more primitive than are the kind of stories that are associated with Aristotle as having a beginning, middle and end, those that build suspense to a climax and then offer an emotional release or completion. Aristotle had in mind the sophisticated performances in drama, which are aimed at an audience who will get pleasure and meaning from having mimicked reality in their productions, requiring its audience to see how the performance is similar and different from reality, how gestures and words are like what real people say and do, and create a mood which is different from what one has felt and contemplated than what they had experienced. The audience, whatever their walks of life, only intermittently suspend their disbelief. The nature of the story is to go in and out of it so as to continually refract on the differences between reality and illusion.
Read MoreClutter in Art and Reality
All around us is clutter, these objects right at hand because they are functional in that you may need any one of them to help move along the day, but items thought so insignificant unless they are misplaced that you forget how important they are and so we dismiss them as clutter, whether a person surrounded by clutter is the kind of person who organizes the mess or lets it find itself, a person knowing where to reach to find it in its disorganization, such as a book not catalogued, or a hand lotion on the bathroom sink rather than in a medicine chest. Some of the clutter places its historical provenance while others do not. Women had sachets because people smelled bad, but there are still perfumes and room deodorants. But paper clips seem to me to have been of a time in that people needed to clip together single sheets of paper when those could be separated or mislaid, while today you just print off another copy of numerous pages from your computer and the printer staples the copies. Think of all these objects as a museum that offers time and place and general functions and so an entry into life, akin to the artists that make collages of objects atop one another so as to provide the mood of a person or a place. I have in mind Picasso and Braque and let us learn something from them before turning to the clutter of real life.
Read MoreComfort and Irony
Consider the related emotions of pleasure and satisfaction to begin a way to summarily dismiss the Utilitarian and the Kantian theories of morality. In short, the idea of comfort replaces the idea of pleasure and the idea of irony replaces the idea of obligation. Moral philosophy, after all, is a partial and recondite way of dealing with what can be described as the way emotions work. A description observes what just is, and is thereby shorn of moral values about what should be done, and so can be dealt with by what is either called the sociology of everyday life or the sociology of emotions. Reducing morality into descriptions rather than proscriptions was the point of Spinoza’s “Ethics”, nothing left of ethics except descriptions.
Read MoreLoud and Quiet Screams
Some people are loud in that they talk a lot or have a high pitched or full throated voices and so people who are usually quiet but occasionally say a good deal are thought as unusual and deep. Other people are quiet in that they say little and that can also be inferred to be people who are deep or maybe simple. Whatever the case, these conditions are considered matters of character, the kind of person a person is, rather than a superficial matter and so not at all obvious as it sounds, but something inside the personhood, some avenue into the sanctity of minds ever imprisoned in their skulls. But people who are sometimes loud and sometimes not are not regarded as another form of character but as an aberration. People are inferred to be disjointed or out of sorts, and so inferred, at the least, as a clue of disquiet, even if it might seem just as ordinary a state of things as the other more consistent tones or characters. In particular, people who scream are thought to be particularly distraught, and it is worth examining a scream as a social phenomenon.
Read MorePresent, Past, and Future
Here is an easy situation in which people can appreciate the experience of past, present and future rather than use time as something that is measured, as happens in a clock, where time is just something, whatever it is, that “moves” past. Think of a game of rummy. The cardplayer anticipates what card will come up to complete your rummy or to have a few enough cards so you can “knock”. Every time you are about to pick a card is an anticipation that is needed. Those successive picks until the one card you pick are the future. There are multiple possibilities and keep the cardplayer anxious about what the next card will be. People live in or for the future and it is not easy to describe which proposition “in” or “for” is to apply. When the card you need turns up is in the present. It is an event for the instant satisfaction that it lasts as a card player appreciates that a card has changed the situation advantageously. The memory of all of those times when an unsatisfactory card did not turn up is the past, the collection of failed opportunities, that lets a calculating cardplayer increase the chances of getting the card you want because of the failed opportunities of the cards that have been discarded. What applies to card playing as a way to emphasize the appreciation of past, present and future is the aesthetic or metaphysical pleasure of playing cards.
Read MoreApartment Life
People outside of New York don’t get New York City apartments, or maybe it is that suburbanites don’t get what it means to be in a city. They complained to me when I lived in New York City that there was so much hustle and bustle on the streets that a person could never get any rest while normal places, those that developed in the suburbs after the Second World War, allowed the streets to empty out and go to sleep and so everyone could get restful. But that was not the case in cities where you could live in a residential neighborhood while a block away from a busy commercial area, such as happened to me a number of times, as when a child when two blocks away in one direction and three in another there was a bustling place where everything could be had, like restaurants and supermarkets and pharmacies and movie theatres and haberdasheries (remember those? What happened to them? Dress shops never closed up.) My parents’ apartment fronted on a park that received great sunlight and people sitting on their benches while their children made noise in the street, though that was not cacophonous, any more than children riding their tricycles in the suburban neighborhood in which I now live. Yes, my parents and I heard the El train just a block away, but it was the other side of it that was the other side of the tracks while my side was residential, just as living a block away from Broadway in an upper storey with a view of midtime Manhattan made you private and serene once you left the streets and followed a different pace of things, those of home life, rather than the ways of commerce and occupations.
Read MoreMorals and the Taliban
Other people are regarded as taking responsibility. Then they can be blamed for it. The existential fact of doing one thing rather than another is on their hands for reasons always inexplicable and after the fact. My mother and her sister decided to leave Poland for the United States in 1939 knowing things were going bad but also knowing that they would never see their families again and must find work and people in a new life. That was the bravest thing they ever did though it seemed to them to be doing the natural thing, how fearful they were of the Germans. It seemed to them obvious self interest and, anyway, being servants and shopgirls in Poland did not seem to be an appealing future and so making a decision was like following water down an inclined street. It was bound to happen; it was the thing to do, even if their friends and relatives stayed put and were eradicated by the Germans.. People from their own mind’s eye make decisions easily and in a flash, not agonizing, even if they agonize later, as if they were contemplating other people for whom decisions in those other minds always seem paradoxical and unrequired.
Read MoreFor The Duration
“For the duration” was a term coined, I believe, during the Second World War to describe the extraordinary measures that had to be taken until the war was over. That included rationing, blackout curtains, a military draft, men away from their homes in dangerous places and women who had to raise children among other women, and women who worked in factories and retail establishments and as government workers and all the women expected to give up their work and take up normal civilian life after the war, which meant getting married, having children and being homemakers. The idea was that things would get back to normal even though it rarely happens when a war ends. The chasm in America today is not only between blacks and whites and college educated and not but also because of the Vietnam War that separated the differences between those who trust the government and those who do not, even though what happened was that the Liberals and what became the Progressives are the more trusting of the government while the Conservatives are the ones who don’t trust to vaccines or elections.
Read MoreJello Sociology: Phenomena in Themselves
There are a number of social phenomena, some fresh and some standard, that should be reconceptualized as properly ellusive and multi-dimensional rather than distinct and singly operative, as is the case with usual sociological concepts, such as class, status and party, to use Weber’s terms, if these new or newly appreciated phenomena are to be understood accurately. These topics should be seen as if it were seen with a squint, so to speak, rather than right on, which is the way most sociology operates. These matters, old and new, seem ephemeral, however much they are also ubiquitous. They make up the flavor or texture of social life rather than its structure. A shift so radical in the method of theorizing from the invisible but real forces of social life to concepts that are, as it were, seen out of the corner of the eye, deserves being called a new name and “Jello sociology” will do until something better comes along because it conveys the sense that social things are a set of ever changing objects difficult to pin down rather than the firm though invisible forces that prevail-- or at least, more likely, when the time disappears as unnecessary to point out that there has been a more careful definition of sociological analysis rather than a distinctive one.
Read MoreFolk Metaphysics
There are a set of adages that people offer to explain and organize their lives that go beyond whatever are their doctrines or experiences of their religions or their philosophies. These adages, which are foisted by relatively uneducated people as an alternative to religion and philosophy, nevertheless have a persistence which crosses generations. The point of these adages is to provide a natural justice whereby people, in the nature of things, get their just deserts as well as their opportunities to act freely in life. These adages are often harsh and crude and yet satisfying. I want to point out some of them to give a flavor of this subterranean world of understanding that surfaces whenever any of them are needed to articulate what has to be and whatever has always been.These can be considered as the folk metaphysics which is currently present but which we suspect is of very long duration in that people need a metaphysics even if and in addition to more overt and formalized systems that do exist. These constitute what we might call the implicit beliefs to which people adhere and have adhered, and so make up the social glue that sociologists search to find in community or primitive religion rather than these rational if possibly mistaken views of how the social world works.
Read MoreWomen's Secrets
A young family I knew did things together with my young family. We went to dinner together; we were in a cooperative babysitting pool; we vacationed together. On Saturday mornings, the two fathers would take their young children to the Empire State Building or to the Central Park Zoo so as to give the wives the morning off. Then, as happened in those years, my family moved to a larger apartment in Manhattan where we spent most of our lives, while my friend and family moved up to Westchester, finding the suburbs a more appealing way to live. But not too much later, that other family divorced and the woman raised her two sons by herself. We kept in touch. When the eldest son was in college, he had a first love affair and, when it broke up, he was heartbroken. His mother said to me that she understood that women are upset, very badly upset, when boys break up with them, but she hadn’t quite believed that boys could also get heartbroken. Now, understand, she was exaggerating a bit and didn’t mean quite what she said. She had intellectually known that men also had feelings. It was just that it had never penetrated her very deeply until she had seen it happen in her own family life that men and boys could be emotionally crushed. My wife had the same experience when our son broke up with his first serious girlfriend. My wife kept asking me what was happening, whether he would recover, whether we should send him into therapy, and I said that is what happened to young men and he would get over it-- or not-- and he did.
Read MoreWulbert Culture
When Bill Cosby was released from jail a few weeks ago, there was no celebration. After all, Cosby had not been exonerated; he had just beaten the wrap even though he had spent three years in jail for a tainted conviction for having plied women with drugs so as to have sex with them. No talking head that I heard of said that there had been a grave injustice just a few years ago when the judicial process had outrun itself, quick to convict on unsound grounds, people now returning to due process when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided that the prior district attorney had said that Cosby would not be prosecuted again after a hung jury in his first trial if Cosby told of having given drugs so that plaintiffs could then pursue a civil suit because a second criminal trial would also not be convicted, but the next DA decided to prosecute anyway, such was the frenzy for convicting sexual offenders, and then used that same damaging evidence against Cosby. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had righted matters by saying that Cosby was convicted of double jeopardy and forced to testify against himself. And so the conviction was voided and Cosby set free. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court did not even have to reach the second issue that the second trial used too many witnesses of a pattern of Cosby doing a similar thing, that Cosby was apparently convicted of a slew of victims rather than the one for which he was actually indicted. But rather than a sense that Cosby had been convicted because there was a period of outrage by Feminists that an accusation was always to be believed, there were few comments. After all, Cosby got off on what was considered a technicality though civil libertarians might say that was a very serious matter in that due process of law was a fundamental part of all western societies.
Read MoreHousing is Not a Home
“Housing” nowadays is understood as a social problem. How are we to establish enough residences so as to make populations both affordable and comfortable? It is difficult to do so because there is always a tendency to build luxury housing rather than build low cost housing. All you have to do is put in gold knobs and the price jacks up, while low cost housing has a small profit margin. Moreover, people away from transit lines or commercial areas will not provide the amenities upper income people desire. That is why municipalities offer rent controls and other devices so that the populations of people will remain mixed rather than just enclaves of very high incomes, though that is an always losing battle, Manhattan, for example, replacing lower income housing with luxury housing. The drive to provide affordable and manageable housing is at least as old as the New Tenement Law in New York City in 1901 which required apartments in buildings to include running hot and cold water, indoor toilets, ventilation and other amenities to be certified for inhabiting these structures. The idea was that housing was a home in that it was a place where people felt comfortable and sufficient in that they could deal with their basic needs for food, heat and grooming. It was a place where people could be at peace when they were alone with their families rather than engaged during the day with commerce and work and schooling and all the other activities or purposes whereby people left their homes so as to joust with their incomes and their bureaucracies. That was different from what happened in mass public supported buildings in the mid Twentieth Century when housing projects such as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis was notorious for elevators that didn’t work and young people wandering around the halls intruding into any apartment they care to and so providing neither amenities nor security for the occupants. The entire edifice had to be torn down because it was an urban pest hole that no one wanted to live in.
Read MoreThe Iron Laws of Emotions
The theory of emotions is a field of endeavor that concerns the causes of emotions, whether they are responses to physiological events, or are mediated by thoughts, or some combination of the two or is impacted by some other kind of factor offered for consideration. Are you anxious because you sweat or sweat because you are anxious or because you think there is a reason to be anxious? I want to suggest a different approach. Consider the nature of emotions rather than the cause of emotions. What are their basic characteristics? Identifying those is, first of all, possible and, second of all, result in non-obvious findings about emotions.
Read MoreThe Anger of Rashida Tlaib
An event in current events prompted for me a consideration of the nature of anger. Rashide Tlaib, the only Palestinean American person in Congress, was at the tarmac in Dearborn, Michigan meeting with President Biden a week or two ago when he was touting the recovery and promise of the Ford River Rouge auto plant and she was reported to have had a heated exchange with him about what was the then continuing war between Israel and Gaza, she reported to have claimed that Netenyahu was a “aparteid prime minister”. Afterwards, at the auto plant, Biden had publicly praised Tlaib as an eloquent and passionate spokesperson for her own point of view and that he hoped her family on the West Bank was doing well. The question is how she would have taken to his response, putting aside that the meeting itself, as that had been engineered by the President, allowed the congresswoman to be known as someone expressing the concerns of her constituents in a particularly pointed manner. Quite aside from these politics where one hand washes the other and that Biden might need a favor from her later on for his having given her the opportunity to speak out, a deeper question is whether she would have felt the President was to be noticed as having been gracious rather than angry for what she said, certainly not how Biden’s predecessor would have done, which was to angrily chastise Tlaib for her point of view. Rather, Biden and Tlaib had acted in a civilized manner to one another. Biden had in effect said that being cordial whatever are the political differences, however emotional they can become, and that recognizing familial loyalty is something everyone can embrace. Biden. In his brief remarks, refused to villainize an opposition just as George Bush ‘43 had done when he did not villainize Arab Americans after the World Trade Center disaster. Biden, I might take it, was binding wounds and making all of us feel better, rejecting animosity in favor of mutual respect. That is the way I first took it. Biden’s remark was to remind us that American politics can put aside personal rancor while pursuing the political process, each of those who hold positions in the government to be treated as worthy of dignity. We all become warm, or many of us do, for having risen to this occasion.
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