Fascist Science Fiction


Fascism can be attractive.

A golden age of science fiction took place between the late Forties and the Seventies when the new technologies that made readers think they were in the future were atomic weapons and spaceships where everyone could jaunt to strange places and alien civilizations distant and isolated from one another just as had been the case when Gulliver could get on ship and also visit very different kinds of societies and apply an anthropological eye. That period had not yet invented computers and a previous period in “Brave New World”, from the Thirties, had invented test tube babies and mood altering drugs, and the Thirties and before had envisioned a war made destruction of civilization, though the image of plagues were as old as “Exodus” and as current as Poe. Moreover, the post WWII science fiction age carefully distinguished between science fiction, as driven by technology, from science fantasy, which was driven by medievalist sentiments concerning fairies and goblins, that best represented in Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” where the aliens are ghostly specters surrounding the Earth visitors who  have colonized Mars.

Read More

The Decade of the Forties

The temper of the Forties was resiliance.

Memory is a first resource for capturing the aura of a decade, every decade defined by its specific theme and concern, as the Depression was in the Thirties, which began in the crash of 1929 and ended abruptly in 1940 hen the United States became the Arsenal of Democracy and everything was paid for on government credit and that made the Depression disappear. The Forties as a decade was marked by the Second World War and its recovery afterwards and the looming Cold War and ended in 1950 with the Invasion of South Korea. Here are three ways to take the temper of the Forties: personal memory, the movies of the time, and the cultural structure implanted in the period to accomplish particular goals but also provide meaning for the decade.

Read More

A Century of Decolonization

Colonialism is cultural not economic.

Suppose European  colonialism began with Columbus, though other people, like the Chinese and the Arabs and also the Israelites, who colonized the Canaanites. were also peoples who invaded and controlled for long times a less culturally advanced people. What conquerors do is bring their religion, dominate the natives with their own political structure and, by the way, gain economic advantage, as when the Israelites descended into a land of milk and honey and that Cortez did find gold enough to laden ships to travel back to Spain. What the American colonists found were settlements  for places to live. They had some fertile land but only some of it and went to the east coast of America because Europe was not hospitable to those people. They had nowhere else to go and that meant being willing to displace or kill the indigenous people.

Read More

Trump's Charisma

Giotto, The Road to Calvary, c.1305

Max Weber defined “charisma” as a personal quality but I prefer to regard it as the attribute of an office rather than as a personal quality because of the derivation of the term “charisma” as referring to people being invested with an aura like power by higher authority as happens when there is a laying down of hands in a church congregation or empowered by regulations in Catholic Church so that one is made a priest or a bishop. Hebrew rabbis earned their charisma by the number of their followers. In a modern secular world, political figures get their charisma through election into office, Donald Trump thinking that a President has the right to kill his political opponents, so universal is the power of the charisma of that office. That is very different from the popular version of charisma where the term refers to personal charm and attractiveness, which applies to movie stars and pop singers and may indeed be part of what leads some people, such as Ronald Reagan, to be elevated to the Presidency.

More formally put and more up to date is to define charisma as a role in that it has a body of attributes that make it recognizable as having a distinctive set of activities, such as being a bus driver or a physician or a father who is called upon to do the things that are part of those roles or to be found lacking in that role, so it can be said some people are bad parents or inept at repairing a computer glitch even if they pretend to be otherwise.  Roland Wulbert has suggested to me that a person  is charismatic if they are never contrite, just as Jesus was never contrite and Donald Trump was criticized for not being contrite even though not being so was at the heart of his being and so violated normal behavior. But he was being what he was, which was charismatic, and there are oyster attributes to be added as the qualities of charisma, including incisiveness that sees farther than ordinary people do, or confidence despite what ordinary people may think, or as Trump points out, being a stable genius, even if he is not eloquent, as Hitler was, and so may mangle or exaggerate or even lie, the truth underlying his words an expression of his charisma. 

Here are some other attributes of the role of the charismatic. Such a person has authority to declare meanings as legitimate, as when supreme court justices decide whether separate but equal is fair at the turn into the Twentieth Century and is a contradiction half a century later. Charismatics endure slander against them, as is the case with Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Trump. Charismatics draw their followers to themselves, which is the case with Luther and Lenin and Trump. Why do their followers do so? That seems the most central power and so is taken to be a magic like enchantment of the charismatic person by the followers, as if they were indeed pop stars. But the basis of charismatic following can be tawdry and unholy. Gandhi pedaled a retrogressive economic policy but adopted a garb  and a demeanor and attracted publicity that made contributions to Indian independence. Trump was an inherited real estate mogul who bankrupted his own casinos  but had an afterlife as a celebrity selling the idea of being a mogul on television who dreamed of being trich and respected, which was every Ralph Kramden’s dream, and that led him into a political venture he expected to lose and wound up the possession of a gigantic following. Barnum would be proud. Nothing very impressive is needed to get one’s credentials as a charismatic person. That is why Weber thought charisma introduced something new into the social mix but was unreliable because it was untethered. FDR had charm and he did win over the American people, but Al Smith thought there wasn’t much to be said for a cripple who would die soon, and instead persevered for thirteen years as President.

So if personal charm is not the key to being charismatic, unlike movie stars who have to fill the screens with their magnetism,.what is it that people make of Trump that gives him his hold on them? People interviewed about Trump, including both ordinary voters and people like Lindsay Graham, who seems to just admit accepting to the fact that Trump has his loyal supporters and that is reason enough to make his peace with him, is that he expresses himself crudely towards women, or with exaggeration, though not quite willing to say he lies, because Trump apparently evokes a deeper sense of what is wrong with American politics. Yes, Trump is a braggart and a loudmouth and always mean and angry but maybe people feel liberated by having someone voice feelings and ideas that they themselves would be ashamed to voice. Trump is naughty and that makes respectable people feel glad about it even if they say tsk tsk to his more outrageous claims or secretly sympathize with his racist thoughts to, for example, reinstate an Arab ban on immigration, only letting Europeans in. Trump expresses their darkest angels. That doesn’t mean he is not likable. It is that supporters either feign likeability, as with Graham (who early on despised him) or have transmuted unlikeability into its opposite, seeing the virtue of being at odds with everything in  government they find objectionable as one Trump supporter in 2016 who was against government intervention but demanded saving her Social Security, as if that weren't a government program.

 It is a good question whether Trump found an audience looking for him or whether his support was generated out of the shambles of the 2016 Republican primary battle, where no opponent seemed  to be able to deal with his demeaning jokes about his contenders. They still thought candidates should maintain some dignity and he didn’t or treated their opponents with it.

Weber thought that charismatics brought innovation into social life because that was the only alternative to custom and law as forms of social control, custom being the time immemorial way to do things, and law and bureaucracy, by which Weber meant the same thing, as having begun to prosper in the late Medieval period with the development of joint stock companies. But innovation is only a universal claim by charismatics that they are doing so. In fact, charismatics use innovation to establish retrogression. Jesus announced a new dispensation of being kind to people when, in fact, the Prophets had said the same while introducing the retrograde idea of miracles and pagan mythology. Hitler announced the innovations of technology, such as planes and cars and weaponry, but was reviving an older spirit of family values and ethnic warfare. Stalin was ushering in a new age of economic organization when he was establishing himself as the most bloodthirsty of the Czars. In general, it is incorrect to agree with “Ideology and Utopia” and think the cutting division is between past and future mindedness.

Trump is also a charismatic who pretends progress but engages in retrogression. He says he will be revolutionary by dismantling “the deep state”, suspend parts of the Constitution and creating detention centers for hundreds of thousand illegal aliens, but what he actually proposes is an old fashioned border wall, the self same restoration of Fifties family values, and punitive forms of law and order, a platform adopted from traditional Republicans so as to get their support when, pre-political, he had been open on social issues, as might be expected of most New Yorkers. Trump has joined a Know Nothing nativist party, though he may not mean he knows only Americanism but that he really doesn’t know very much about anything.

Weber misunderstood the innovativeness and potency of custom and law. Custom does not mean mores of very ancient times but only practices that seem to have ever been and forever to be even if they last only for a brief period of time. So the double standard whereby sexual chastity  was expected for only women existed for hundreds and hundreds of years or maybe for thousands but was suspended a genera tion or two back and now it seems natural for women to have sexual relations as they please. That is the new natural and an amnesia sts upon what was the natural previously. Similarly, law also seems to suspend time in that what a law does is make edicts stated in the past binding in the future. But laws can be modified. The Founding Fathers developed the Constitution as an original form of government as that was expressed in a set of intersecting fundamental laws that emphasized the balance of power and Supreme Court rulings are able to create rights and abolish them, as when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Roe v. Wade and abolished the right of abortion fifty years later. Law is flexible and those who make it and administer it are also flexible, rather than an iron rule of delegated authority responsible only to an original charismatic. Weber was being too Lutheran in thinking that the sole freedom of a person or a society was to submit, to engage in free will, to be obedient to God or some other charismatic, and that applies to custom as well, whereby people adopt and dispense with hula hoops, the moon walk, Taylor Swift and hiding under student desks so as to train for an atomic invasion.

Another cardinal characteristic of a charismatic person is not to take their words too seriously. The allegiance of the follower to the charismatic is formed by the strength of the personality of the charismatic, the follower trying to gauge the subtleties of the emotions conveyed even if not clear on the character underlying the personality. The charismatic remains an enigma, obscured from others even as followers try to grasp his meanings or being. Jesus remains enigmatic, his personality obscure, seen mostly from the outside, and his sayings enigmatic, deliberately confounding his listeners, though those who wrote down and edited his sayings were developed well enough to constitute a literature, in that people have pondered their meanings for thousands of years. Moses was charismatic even though and maybe because he stuttered and had a temper, and smote a person, as did Billy Budd. Washington was not charismatic, even though he was tall and dignified, because he stated what he said clearly and neither was Lincoln charismatic in that he was eloquent, even though both figures are retrospectively regarded as central iconic figures. Hitler’s strong suit was his emotional fervor, not the strength of his reasoning. He was fascinating rather than taken as wise.

Jesus is understood as charismatic and has been recognized as such for a very long time, whatever He was in life. Giotto painting “Jesus at Calvary”, from 1305, makes that clear by having his face turned to the viewer while the other figures are part of the mise en scene. Jesus is without expression, an icon of a figure, rather than realistic and so Giotto is bringing a Medieval representation of Jesus into Giotgto’s realistic setting. Jesus is different from other people and also silent  and expressionless while other people bustle about, whatever His other concerns might be, about heaven or His Father or the plight of mankind, speculations where Jesus’ consciousness is never plumbed. His charisma is for the ages rather than the property of the historical Jesus.

Donald Trump should therefore not be expected to offer wisdom but rather his fierce meanness, as I have suggested, which gives him his allure, and it is his followers to explain that as an attractive feature, just as why the early followers of Jesus are to find attractive an itinerant preacher who was crucified, whatever was the evolving church structure that sustained him. Maybe Trump’s hold on people will dissipate if he is convicted of multiple felonies, but maybe, then again, not. Alive or dead, he may remain appealing to a figure who garners resentments both those real and imagined. Mankind is not likely to be rid of resentment.

The Primary System

Trump keeps winning but stioll might lose.

  1. A point I did not notice in the columnists and cablecasters, who said Nikki Haley was soundly defeated in the New Hampshire Primary by Trump, who won by eleven points or so, was that Halley had doubled her percentage of participants by winning over 40% of the vote in New Hampshire white getting less than 20% of the caucus participants in Iowa. That meant that most of the Desantis supporters, who dropped out of the presidential race just a few days before the New Hampshire primary, had switched to Haley rather than Trump. It seems that the maximum support for Trump in the Republican party is around fifty percent and that the rest of the Republicans are not happy about Trump and likely in a general election not  to vote or maybe support Biden. That does not mean Haley can keep climbing and defeat Trump in the primaries, but it might mean that in  the general election, Biden might win by a landslide despite the prevailing view that 2024 might be a very close election. But predictions based on primaries are reading tea leaves, given how much can change between now and then, and it would be better to think about the significance of the primary system itself. 

Read More

The Fani Willis Saga

A moment of time in an ethnic group.

Southern courtroom dramas are very rich and I would expect many more of them than there are. They combine courtly gentlemen who have known one another for years engaged in verbal combat in a courtroom to find out the truth and are accompanied by salacious claims, exotic characters, unruly mobs and a degree of fear and violence, all to tell far more about the those  characters and situations than the people involved mean to leave on. Examples are “To Kill A Mockingbird”, which pulls its punches about how dastardly was a lynch mob in that it would not be deterred, as the story tells it, by the presence of a child, as is also the case in “My Cousin Vinnie” where everyone is nice, but also includes the rancid characters in “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”, which describes sex hustlers and a murder and trials in Georgia, and the real life story of the Scottsboro Boys when a New York Jewish lawyer goes South to get justice from Black hobos accused of having raped a white prostitute and has to contend with both Communists and Southertn bigots. Not to mention “In Cold Blood” and “Anatomy of a Murder” who are both placed in the Midwest.

Read More

The Colorado Case

An expected Supreme Court case that will be shameful.

A textualist, whether of the Constitution or any other declarative writing, says that the clear and obvious meaning of a word or passage prevails, while an originalist  claims that what words mean depends on the historical context in which the words were said, Supreme Court originalists saying the Constitution means what it was sent to mean when the passage was enacted. By both standards, the Colorado case which barred Trump from a presidential primary because he was an insurrectionist after having taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, is correct even though that provision in the Constitution might have been unwise in that it can lead to any number of forms of mischief, such as such as having Trump on some ballots but not on others. But the Constitution cannot simply be disregarded, a provision neglected because not in fashion, people defending the Second Amendment as incontrovertible even though its provision had in mind long single shot rifles. Rather, what is likely to happen is that the Supreme Court will go around section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment by hedging what words mean, torturing them into being what they clearly are not. Trump on some ballots but not on others.

Read More

The Spirit of an Age

Stories precede doctrine.

Many descriptions in literature about kinds of social reality can be confirmed with evidence independent of the literature. You know that the parapet constructed in York, England in the Victorian Era and described by Wilkie Collins in “No Name” could be confirmed from maps of the time and local histories. How Parliamentary politics operated in the late Victorian Era as that was described in Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” could be verified in newspapers and memoirs. The ideas and emotions of Naziism as presented in Mann’s “Dr. Faustus'' could be buttressed by reading books about Hitler.  But here is another species of social reality that cannot be accessed by anything other than through literature and that is what is properly called the spirit of the age, which is the pervasive, encompassing sentiments that underskirt what is happening in a culture. Some commentators make a try at capturing that, as happens when Jimmy Carter made a speech about how America was undergoing a period of malaise, and David Riesman’s “The Lonely Crowd” got it wrong that Americans were fighting conformity when they were embracing it. Literature provides the true compass if you just jiggle it.

Read More

The Quality of "NYPD Blue"

Is “NYPD Blue” art or just entertainment?

Return to this long standing issue of mine as to the difference between art and entertainment.  Literature that is artistic in its product whatever its intent presents itself as a self contained fictional sphere which can be found to be coherent and vivid when it deploys plot, imagery, characterization and those other elements of story. You know “Hamlet” is art because you care about penetrating Hamlet’s character as he resides in the very credible atmosphere of Denmark. Literature can be found in the canon of work from the Iliad to Thomas Mann that are assigned to students, recent works not yet judged to have met that standard, though I think Ishiguro is probably a worthy advocate who has not yet been anointed at a Cooperstown because anointing a member of the canon is a matter of critical consensus rather than even having won a Nobel Prize in literature, which was awarded to Ishiguru.. Some contestants, over time, fade in their grasp of having created an artful sphere of their own, and that is true with Steinbeck and O’Hara. We can think of those two and others as falling just short of making literature however commendable were their efforts. The question is what are the qualities of the literature itself that commend a work to be considered literature rather than an entertainment which provides a passtime for engaging a reverie, like most westerns or mysteries, these using the devices of literature but not accomplished enough for a reader to become resident in its work. Critics discuss whether some writers have come close but not quite there, as is the case with Conan Doyle or Mrs. Gaitskill, honorable attempts at literature, and even praise Agatha Christie for her plotting while admitting weaknesses in characterization that limit a reader’s full emotional and intellectual involvement. My own purpose is to find the qualities that make a work literature or not rather than think approbation a matter of taste or a reflection from outside the work, such as the social background of the reader that make a reader like rural or urban settings. Literature is to be treated as an objective matter rather than a matter of taste, the experience of art an exquisite accomplishment of the spirit rather than a bauble to be put in a china shop so as to remind people of what is already familiar.

Read More

My Colleagues and I


A memoir of education.


The colleagues who had washed up in the early Seventies at Quinnipiac, this backwater college, established into a full college with liberal arts and health sciences added to a business school and a junior college in the late Sixties, were a varied crew, many of them quite interesting and thoughtful despite having long delayed or never completed doctorates. Few of them were so immodest as to think that they were creators of knowledge rather than purveyors and explainers of knowledge already established but they were quite knowledgeable about their own specialties though many lamented what a medievalist among them said to me, which was that he was not trained to deal with such deficient students.The chemistry professor would joke by  saying “Scotty, beam me up; there are no intelligent life forms on this planet”. When Eunice Shriver came to campus for an honorary degree, she quipped to the assembled faculty that they might never have expected to award a degree to a developmentally challenged  student, as had just been the case, and it got a big laugh because it seemed, actually, not that unusual at all. The more literary of the faculty read John Williams’ “Stoner”, a novel about a pedestrian academic at the University of Missouri in the Twenties who never gets anywhere and devotes himself to raising his daughter. Stoner is not a very good teacher, either. No “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” with its inner rewards despite what seems such an unspectacular life.


Rather, as the administration understood, the faculty did academic and scientific life to stay alive intellectually and were therefore generous in travel grants to conferences to support that and so I went to Toulouse, where the food was superb, and to darkest Louisville where I discovered that a local community theater had flattened out all the double entendres and other ironies so as to make it more acceptable for the locals than had been the case in the Broadway production I saw. The same thing happened when my wife and I, on our own ticket, went to Dublin, and went to an Indian restaurant where all the spices were toned down for local tastes. So much for Judith Blau adding up all the repertory theaters to see how cultural America is.  A local theater means a different thing in a different place.


A biology teacher found a wise and clever way to communicate with students. The medical services offered an expo on “Boobs and Weiners”, as it was called on the placards. When students asked the biologist in class why sex was so exciting, he said that there were a plethora of nerve endings in the genital areas but that sex was largely in the mind. He introduced students to the idea of evolution by declaring that giraffes did not exist because no one has figured out the hydraulics whereby the blood of giraffes is sent up to the brain so as to complete the circulation of the blood, much less how there were intermediary steps to their very long necks. When students said giraffes did exist, he said “aha!” and evolution is the theory of how that can work, disregarding that there might be a storehouse in Heaven that includes the blueprints for all biological creatures. He was respectful of my own view that I could not go past Steven Jay Gould idea of “punctuated evolution” whereby evolution takes place in spurts for reasons unclear and that Gould offered only a history of evolution whereby you can trace which species did in fact develop rather than explain why some species had to develop.


A psychologist was concerned with addiction. He wondered whether the term should be limited to substance abuse like heroin and alcohol or those other habits like gambling or shopping that also had highs and were addictive but did not require a substance. He was himself a bit of a gambling addict who claimed he only a few times left track of time at the poker tables, which is what the windowless rooms of the casinos encourage. I had a relative who had to make his  football bets high enough so that it would hurt if he lost. My psychologist friend thought that the cure for compulsive gambling was to teach people to be better or more rational gamblers. Set limits on how much to lose in a session. Don’t go for broke but gain on the margins. Master the odds and play those and then concentrate on  reading the faces of the poker players so as to pick up their “tells”. I was not convinced but he was trying to figure out addiction and he gave me a high compliment because, as he put it, I had mastered my own field and so could offer descriptions of the social class standing of my students. Their parents had  some money but their children were first generation students and so were only just middle class rather than established middle class.


Another psychologist colleague missed his calling, I think. He had started college to learn accounting but an introductory course in psychology had caught his fancy and he went into that field and became quite proficient at social psychology, a field of which I was quite skeptical, over the years criticizing Milgram and Kahane and he told me that I was lucky I wasn’t in a major university where I wouldn’t get away with that. He also was what psychologists considered “a natural” in that he quickly and accurately was able to appreciate people. He sensed that I had a troubled childhood and was still dealing with that many years later. But he didn’t become a clinical psychologist and he didn’t finish his dissertation but settled down at Quinnipiac with a very nice life, a big fish in a small pond, at a nice house he had built in a nearby rural town. What he really cared about, I think, was American history, of which he read a great deal, and he offered a course on baseball history so as to allow topics like integration and ethnicity and unionization to go down easy for students by putting them in the baseball setting.


My friend also became an advisor on academic problem students and in that role asked me to give a grade for a deaf student who had been asked to enter a normal introductory sociology class. I suppose he was thinking highly of me in that I would give an honest evaluation. He gave me no instructions as to how to handle the situation. The student had a notetaker and recorded my lectures as well but what she wrote on exams was very poor. Her mother asked me why I flunked her and I said quite honestly that I generally judge essays on the prepositions and other connectives whereby a student shows inferences and her daughter could not do that. The mother said somewhat smilingly and resignedly that a lack of connectives was part of the problem and I did not add that such inferences were also the heart of learning. So I think I had taken the burden from the college. There was no lawsuit. On the other hand, a blind student did quite well. She was clever and all she needed was for me to say in words the diagrams I had put on the chalkboard. More frazzled was the Vietnam veteran who had been a medic with a special forces unit but couldn’t manage the biology classes so as to enter a medical program. But he died not too long afterwards from cancer, the result of Agent Orange. A colleague of mine who was a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces served as an advisor to the Vietnam vets who passed through Quinnipiac.


I, on the other hand, did not miss my calling. I liked doing the combination of skills I was good at: teaching, because I liked explaining things over and over again as if I was discovering the material fresh, teachers having to be unlike actors in that they had to write their own scripts, resplicing their mental tapes for different courses and situations, and also writing and talking about social theory and social policy. It is just that I wasn’t very successful professionally at applying my long to develop writing craft and so went usually to only minor conferences. Finding one’s true calling did not guarantee a successful career. Some did and some didn’t. Barbara once said to me that I was Salari trying to be Mozart, but in truth I was just trying to be Salari who could, after all, appreciate Mozart.


The second generation of recruits to Quinnipiac were not as eccentric or interesting. They were more pedestrian sorts who had narrower intellectual and scholarly interests but had marched through their graduate studies at lesser universities and had also been recruited on the basis of knowing about topics to suit the proliferation of programs that the President of the college, then renamed “university”, was creating so as to increase enrollments in what after all was a tuition driven economy in that it bhad no endowment and so needed increased numbers of students to service its mortgage debts. He added a law school and a medical school and I was involved early on with the development of a Masters of Teaching Arts program which was at the time an elite degree whereby graduates of elite bachelor degrees could get a teaching credential but was now to be offered to the general population of college graduates as an entrance into public school teaching. The members of my committee were dubious about education schools and wanted to craft our program as more aligned to liberal arts values so that teaching literature was by a professor of literature who would help people what literature was rather than just go through the books that would be assigned to students when the graduates went to teach high school. But the accreditation agency who came to visit, all made up of professional educators, were dubious of that, and insisted that the head of the program had to be someone from a teacher training institute and for my part I was dubious about our own people could manage the professional educator very well, and that is what proved to be the case. I was asked to teach the required course on the history and sociology of education because I was the only person in the program qualified to do so while most of the program was devoted to classroom management and the psychology of adolescence and other topics drawn from usual schools of education. But while it lasted, I had fun, until people were found who had an educationalist background to replace me.


I offered my course for two sections of it during the summer for four days a week for three weeks and insisted that there be a hundred percent attention and that provided an immersion experience parallel to what happens in intensive foreign language learning programs  and which I think is still preferable to the usual thirteen week semesters where faculty and students meeting two or three times a week.(It also meant I was well remunerated for the work in a brief period of time.) 


I assigned the usual classics in the sociology of education, such as the description in Lynd’s “Middletown” of the high school of the Twenties which provided little educational quality and instead cultivated what it called its “Bearcat Spirit” of school camaraderie, and still is what most high schools are about. And then there was also the educationally adrift high school of the Forties in Hollingshead’s “Elmtown’s Youth”, the lack of achievement explained as the result of tracking that relegated non-wealthy students to lower tracks and so never to learn very much. I raised the question whether tracking was the cause of poor performance or just the result of the disparity of children to learn based on their social class upbringings. The poor are way behind by the time they reach first grade. And also there were some new books at the time, such as “Small Victories”, an inner city high school of the Sixties, where a very able teacher working at an underachieving student body thought of that entitled accomplishment as a success, and I wondered whether that goal was enough. I thought these successful courses because the discussions in class were lively but the adult women who were most of the students  thought just to get through their credential and I have  and had long thought that if all you wanted out of  an education was a credential that was all you would gain from it rather than open oneself up to an education.


Another foray into a new program was a criminology program that was put in place as part of the sociology department, and which I thought appropriate because the first course I ever taught other than introductory sociology was criminology, which I learned about from books on the topic and was easy enough to master because its ideas had been written by or borrowed from sociologists, such as the idea that people become criminals because they become associated with others on that career track. But criminology became as it once had been a separate area of study and the people we hired from it knew only criminology. I liked one fellow who needed to go through the rigoramole of getting a visa and a green card because he was a Canadian and so the Quinnipiac administration had to attest that he had specific qualities that could not be found in an American and Quinnipiac was willing to attest to that. The real reason he wanted to come to the United States was that his girlfriend was American and he wanted to be close to her, which seemed to everyone to be a sensible reason. Love conquers all. He came here and married her. Not so fortunate were the Iranian students at Quinnipiac who did not want to go back to Iran after its Islamic revolution and where the registrar insisted on following regulations rather than find excuses for allowing the students to stay in the United States. There are always refugees and I was partial, given my mother, to letting anyone into our shores, to the land of the free, rather than return to some foreign land of the oppressed.


The problem was that some of the students in the program which prepared students to  become prison guards were attracted to the work because they liked the idea of controlling and punishing inmates rather than just managing them. The department discussed how to respond to the students that were outspoken about their animus against their potential inmates. Punishment meant managing security rather than inflicting additional punishment. I was not sure that this was under the rubric of providing an objective social science orientation but instead offering a professional judgment, akin to law and medical school, of what were the preferred practices for engaging in an occupation. Liberal values rather than objective theories kept creeping into my own above the fray point of view. It reminded me of students in Berkeley who were taken with Barry Goldwater and his book “The Conscience of a Conservative” and would write about that in Freshman English class and the professors would say in an amusing offhand bravado way that  they would find a way to chastise them for engaging in such deviant ideas.. And those professors were merely English professors, not specialists on politics, but just part of what seemed to me a very illiberal idea of holding differing views against them.


Another program the President of Quinnipiac proposed and implemented to attract more students was one on mass communications, this program part of the English Department. President Leahy had established a center with all the latest technology for television and filmmaking and had located some CBS broadcast veterans on the time of their retirement to have greener pastures. One did tell me he found the students unsettling because people like themselves who had gone into broadcasting were news junkies who kept up in detail with the news. It was their mother’s milk, while the students didn’t care for the news. That was correct. The students were taken with the technology itself: film and tv cameras, how to handle and master those things rather than what topics about which to communicate. But it brought students onboard and also a few faculty members who cared about the art of film.


I became involved for a few years in the mass communications program by teaching a course on the sociology of mass communications, a major field of sociology for a few decades, and for which a course was required by the advisory agency, just as had been the case when I got to teach sociology of education in the MAT program. Sociology had indeed become what I had hoped, which was a field where you could study a wide variety of fields from a sociological point of view, minding myself to be sure to be informed by theory and fact rather than just blowing off opinions. My point of view on mass media was very sociological in that I thought the impact of the mass media on public and private opinion was overrated as opposed to the psychologists I knew who thought the impact profound, my own view to be thought of as the mosquito bite theory, a minor annoyance rather than the brainwashing that alarmists and theorists like Herbert Marcuse  thought it was. People respond more to their social class and ethnic attributes than to what they saw on tv and in movies which were just entertainment. I was thinking of the earlier time when people thought comic books would corrupt the population and I still think that superhero movies are artistically deadening but to no great personal effect. That is why I am dubious about social media as a blight on mankind, but I don’t keep up with the field and so can nowadays offer only an opinion rather than a considered view.


As for the courses that I developed myself, I got to teach courses outside my specialties of politics and what I called “everyday life”, which was a cross of Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman on friendship, courtship and social gatherings, and it fell like a thud, producing only essays about what I did on my summer vacation rather than the nature and complexities of having a vacation at all, how it was a reevaluation as well as a recreation. “Everyday life” did not seem to my students to be a real subject matter while social policy was a legitimate subject matter even if they did not know much about it. A curious phenomenon which I still ponder: when does a subject matter become an object of study? It was an historical event when universities, such as John Hopkins, invented political science rather than regard it as a part of social philosophy. 


More student appreciation, as measured in faculty student interaction, occurred in a course on race relations, which, as I gather, I would not have been able to do some years later because I was white. Most of the Black students in the college came to that course and some said they were surprised to find that someone who was white knew so much more about Black history than they did but all I was doing was trotting out standard ideas about prejudice and discrimination and Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement as part of the waves of minority groups--Jews, Italians, Irish, Slavs and Puerto Ricans as well as Blacks--who had reached these shores, the theme being that the adaptation to America was a matter of resources brought with departure and circumstances and evolutions that occurred after arrival and that America was a place where succeeding waves became absorbed into the nation, through some Black students thought it would never come for them, while my view was in keeping with the sociological insight that whatever is at the present the normal situation does not seem capable of being altered.


One Black student thought that Black urban areas should not be demeaned by being called “ghettos” and he was suddenly clarified and enlightened, a big smile on his face showing he got it, when I explained that the term was originally applied to the areas in which Jews were confined. Facts redefine concepts and so are a part of education. But many Black students in this and in introductory sociology dropped out before the end of the semester, as colleagues told me also occurred in other low prestige colleges, because they found keeping at it exhausting or no longer novel or perhaps offensive. One Black girl who later in the term dropped out thought I should not assign “Life at Hamilton High” because its theme was that students were unruly and that is why they didn't learn. I was just going over the difficulties of inner city life to which students should be exposed.


Another course I would not have been able to teach in a major college or university because neither myself or my colleague in the joint course on the Bible knew neither Hebrew nor Greek. The course got a large following until I had to end it because more straightforward courses in sociology were more pressing. What we provided was what was once called “the Bible as literature”, which is misleading because the Bible is always literature whether or not you care to add doctrine which, as Bert Erdmann likes to say, is always speculative, theologians saying whatever they might care to. My take on that was that believers were credulous about matters of the supernatural that I thought definitely incredible, meaning not to be tested as assertions. But people I know who are devout Jews and Christians are dealing with the same texts and so draw the same observations, such as that it is a sublime moment when Abraham argues with God about how many good people are to be found in Sodom so as to spare it from destruction, thereby indicating that God is now conceived of as subject to morality. Or also sublime is that the parting of the Red Sea could be treated, as by Poussin, as a singularity which can be observed and therefore grasped only after it had passed. These literary matters are the paydirt. So I was able at Quinnipiac to keep up my interest in religion through Bible study but found a try at a course on the sociology of religion a bit too foreign for students to handle. A Catholic colleague wondered how two lapsed Jews teaching a course on the Bible could handle Jesus other than by saying that He was a nice man. My colleague joined us to hear us for a few sessions and paid us the great compliment of saying that both of us sounded like Jesuits. 


In general, the students of Quinnipiac were not lazy. They worked multiple part time jobs to make ends meet or loaded up on classes so as to graduate early. They just didn’t like school. They did not think, as I did, that school was a kind of liberation but thought instead that classes were just to be endured. They explained their low SAT scores to being poor test takers, that measure apparently independent of what they understood about life, and when I said that just going through one of those paperbacks of old tests would raise scores considerably, even without the cost of test tutoring services, they asked why they should engage in that ordeal. School classes, I gathered, were the real ordeal.


Faculty tried. Early on, a dean wangled a government grant to jump start ill prepared students, as the expression went, to function on a higher academic level. There were a number of faculty members who cooperated in delivering films, lectures and discussions in a large lecture hall to immerse students in culture rather than in a language. It didn’t work. The students were offended by being exposed to “Triumph of the Will” and didn’t follow a brief selection of Hobbes. It was possible for a faculty member to feel despair and just claim that if all students want was a credential that is all they would get. A journalist who visited a class to City College in New York  soon after Open Admissions began in  the Seventies to allow more less prepared students and not just Black ones to have a chance for college said to a professor of Russian Studies that her lectures on the Russian novelists were brilliant but that most of what she said passed over the heads of the students, and she responded that she didn’t want to hear about it. But most of the faculty that had washed onto the shores of Quinnipiac were interesting people who tried to devise ways to reach their students, each developing a set of tricks that got lost when they retorted because they were each personally crafted to suit their own abilities  and their students' limitations. A math professor found a subject matter that avoided the quadratic equation in a college math course, though I never solved the mystery of how. 


I crafted a course in what a colleague, who was a demographer, called “qualitative demography”, which was an oxymoron, but could be slotted into the college catalog as “Communities” that would not be too difficult to conceptualize but would tease students into knowing something of the wider world. I characterized and compared rural areas with towns and cities and suburbs and metropolitan areas and regions, showing how each of them are more or less creatures of political organization or patterns of commuting or economic activity, sort of a throwback to the ecological school on the study of cities done at the University of Chicago in the Twenties. I asked the class what the difference was between the parallel roads that came east through Connecticut: U. S. I, which went through the center of villages and towns; the Merritt Parkway, with limited numbers of access ramps, built in the Forties; and Interstate 95, built in the Fifties, where the lanes were more numerous and flattened out. One student was confused and flustered, saying that they were just built, avoiding my point that these constructions were historically occasioned and so gave me some evidence that explaining such things was worthwhile because they were not obvious to all the students. I also discussed the  upheavals that led to social displacements, such as the Warm Medieval Period that lasted from 900 A. D. to 1300 A. D.; the Black Plague, cribbing from Boccaccio and then Defoe; the Irish Potato Famine, stolen from Malthus and John Stewart Mill; and the great migration from Europe to America that I surmised was dependent on reliable steel made ships that doubled the population of the United States during the second half of the Nineteenth Century. These studies made me dubious, by the way, of speculations about climate change in that climate fluctuation preceded the Industrial Revolution which polluted the air with its waste products. Greenland had been relatively green in the Eleventh Century and there had been grapes at the time in Newfoundland. How come?


The best course I crafted, I think, was one entitled “Government and Business” which the Liberal Arts dean asked me to create so as to have as many seats as possible for Liberal Arts students by offsetting one semester of the year long economics requirement which many students found too quantitative, and so I got large audiences for what they thought was easier stuff, that buttressed by offering test essay questions pre approved by the students. What I did was to analyze the economic-political landscape. I covered monopolies and what “the free market” meant, and interstate commerce and how corporations worked. I made it clear to distinguish between what was the general consensus of scholars from what was a contested point of view and labeled when I was offering my own educated point of view so as to give students what objectivity meant. I compared the elements of business they learned in their business courses, such as finance, administration and marketing, with the similar aspects of government, which were, respectively, taxation, running the executive, and campaigning.


An election year was the best time for the course so you could see what the policies of each of the candidates would offer as hoped for impacts on the economy. I could read the Times each morning on the train trip north so as to find the material I would discuss in class that day. I remember comparing and contrasting the views of the Democratic candidates for the Presidential nomination for the election. I particularly remember the 2O04 primary debates. The election would be about foreign policy, on whether the Iraq War was wise or not, Kerry arriving to accept his nomination by saluting and saying he is ready to serve, but there were domestic issues as well, especially in health care, given what a debacle occurred when First Lady Hillary Clinton had failed to get through a national health insurance plan less than ten years before. The topic remained on the national agenda. Representative Richard Gebhardt, the Missouri populist, wanted to cover everyone and paid for through taxation, something similar to what Bernie Sanders proposed ten years later, a rather radical idea, while what was to be the eventual  nominee, John Kerry, proposed the novel idea of only having federally funded catastrophic insurance, which meant people would have to cover their own checkups and minor injuries but would not have to pay any large expenses, which is what people worried about, and was much less expensive than the Gebhardt plan but the Kerry plan also meant people might avoid checkups and minor ailments that might become major ones. My general point was that policy matters were consequential.


A girl came after class to say that after a few weeks of class she could anticipate what I was going to say about a topic. That is one of those moments that make a teacher think it has been worthwhile, an important influence reserved to be recognized years later if at all. She had picked up on my patter and saw that I was systematic and turned to the same insights and formulas over and over again. I had long ago abandoned the Socratic approach in elite classrooms whereby students were allowed to clash their opinions after the teacher had set the scene by providing some information and then asking some provocative questions. The students at Quinnipiac did not know enough to discuss what were not really even opinions to be honed. So I represented myself as a model for how an educated person talked about things, some of these traits perhaps somewhat rubbing off as happened in my own education or at least providing a standard for what constituted reasoning.


My work as a teacher made me part of the more than half century effort to improve school results that equalized ethnic and class disparities between students by equalizing spending and engaging in teacher training, which for many years my wife did, by providing new curricula and school reorganization. This effort could not be called a social movement because it did not involve marches and banners but nonetheless was a pre-occupation across schooling from the most elementary to the collegiate and seemed to those involved to be very important in making the nation more just however intransigent to change the nature of education proved to be. I even voted two times for Rudolph Guiliani sas New York Mayor because he wanted to take over the Board of education and revitalize a department of education. 


But the effort didn’t work. The disparities in test scores between Black and Hispanic students on the one hand and white and Asian students on the other remain. The increases in Operation Head Start and then in Operation Follow Through in the Sixties and Seventies were not sustained but students fell back to the achievement levels they would have had if the programs hadn’t taken place. A key data point when I followed those matters was the Ypsilani study which was very well designed and showed that students in an intensive preschool education benefited years later from that organizational intervention in that they were more likely to go to college and less likely to get involved in  crime. I would argue against the significance of these salutary results by addressing the fact that students did not improve their test scores. More optimistic experts said that educational improvement must follow from the social measures but I insisted that academic achievement, which after all was a major purpose of education, was independent of students becoming more disciplined or more orderly. 


Getting educated was a tough nut to crack. What worked for poor or educationally deficient students was very expensive schooling, triple what public schools could manage, those private schools supported by rich alumni or by philanthropy. They provided very small classes (not just from twenty five down to, let us say, twenty, but to, let us say, ten), and hired social workers to go into family homes to help them help their children to learn. As a skeptical sociologist said to me and which I persisted to think was otherwise, learning is done around the kitchen table and not in schools. Joe Biden wanted to revive a dead issue by funding universal pre-school and making community college available to all, but those parts of his program had to be shelved, perhaps to await another day.

Read More

The Awareness of Society


Society is an intimation or an idealization rather than a social structure.

What is a society?  It appears to be a group of people, like a tribe or a nation state or a civilization, which is self sufficient in that it provides in its institutions all that is required to provide a distinctive way of life for a people. The trouble is, though, that these entities are not self-sufficient, as when the Arab civilization has to sell oil and is beset by the  inroads of Western civilization and so grapple with what is essentially Islamic, becoming more and more like a set of nation states. And, more grandly, what is society in itself, that to be understood as a simile for the sea in which the fish swim? What is that overarching but central and essential object for sociologists to study? Take note that in looking at that large item a choice is being made between examining the thing as a whole rather than the basic building blocks out of which it is made. Biologists can look at living bodies for the various functions they undertake, such as respiration and digestion and reproduction, but can also look at the life of the cell and so see that is the real meaning of biological life. Similarly, sociologists can study the role or the norm as the building block which animates society as that appears to be the overwhelming and encompassing social entity which is indispensable to mind. 

A usual and workable idea of society is that it is the intersection of all the social forces that are in play within a society and so make people familiar with it. So a society is made up of social class and ethnicity and institutions of politics and religion and the mass media, and everybody responds to these structures and so are in society whether or not people think of society as an object in itself. Society recognizes us even if we don’t recognize it. But that is the rub. People can recognize they have familial obligations and interests without thinking themselves trapped or maybe safe within its strictures. Society is therefore the opposite or the residual of all the actual relations people have, in which case sociology sets society in opposition to the individual, ever diminishing the ability to act as individuals as when political sociologists ever more restricted the voter to make an independent rational decision about who to select by showing that voting was contingent on social class or education and less and less on beliefs or doctrines.The opposition between the individual and society as the two negations of one another is also manifested in psychological life when people are unhinged from their self directed mental decision making by the mind being invested and overcome with totalitarian or cultish thinking or by the pernicious effects of social media. It is always possible to find the pernicious cause that leads the individual to become absorbed by society, as happened when people thought that comic books were the poison that destroyed reason before comic books became regarded as an art form. 

Read More

The Children of Abraham

A memoir of Woodridge, N. Y.

My great grandfather Abraham Wenglinsky, who died from natural causes in Czestochowa, Poland a few months after the German occupation in 1939, was called “Black Abraham'' because of his being so mean spirited. My father’s siblings jokingly claimed that he was so mean not even the Germans would kill him. My grandfather Louis, who I met many times, also was given the sobriquet “Black” because he was also so mean spirited. He bullied his wife and children. He threw a knife at my father because my father wanted to continue doing his elementary school homework rather than go down to work at the bakery he owned and that was on the property. Louis had his youngest daughter wash his feet. It wasn’t sexual, as far as I can tell, just a service, but she felt humiliated, not what proper people did, and she was aspiring to be more. She became what Adam Sandler called “a wedding singer”, Sandler just having eliminated its Jewish identification, thanks to my own father sending her money so she could get voice lessons and then, later on, working as an optician. Louis calmed down somewhat when his wife got a bit elderly, not knowing how to handle her when abuse no longer worked and when she became diminished because the youngest child had been killed when a truck backed up over him and she, Rose, would tell people not to sit next to her on a bench because that child was sitting next to her. When I was a child, Rose would give me raisins and cinnamon from the barrels in the bakery. 

Read More

Middle Brow Cultural Taste

Cultural tastes are more ingrained than social class.

The “Partisan Review” crowd of the Forties through the Seventies, had a very clear sense of how culture and society interacted with one another and was best stated abstractly by Dwight Macdonald in an article and then a book published in 1960, called “MassCult and MidCult”. That view could be considered a rejoinder to the Cultural Marxism which vied during the same time with a key and distinctive understanding of how culture and society interacted. Cultural Marxism was an intellectually heavier point of view and was a response to the fact that economic Marxism had not accurately predicted the eventual immiseration of the working class so that they would overthrow capitalism either through Leninist violence or Bernstein-like use of the democratic ballot box. To the contrary, economic capitalism flourished. The Fifties were an affluent society and labor unrest turned to detailed collective bargaining arrangements about wages and perquisites where both sides wanted to make a deal so the corporations could get on selling their cars and workers could get their raises and benefits, never mind whether the work itself was arduous or mind numbing. The cultural Marxists insisted, however, that there was a price for economic prosperity. It was that people were spiritually impoverished by late stage capitalism. The population as a whole was subject to alienation in that their work and their selves were lost to meaning and that the mind itself had lost the ability to engage in reasoning, that meaning, as Horkheimer put it, in the title of his book “The Eclipse of Reason'' whereby people  became mindless automatons, society not run by selfish capitalists, but going on its way on its own, a totalitarian society without a Fuhrer. The best statement of this view on the American scene was Herbet Marcuse’s “One Dimensional Man”, published in 1964, which portrayed Americans of all classes, including the capitalists, obsessed with capitalist fetishism, buying until it hurt, with deodorants and slightly more upscale cars as fueled by tv and radio jingles so inane as to dumb down the populace.

Read More

Exclusive Social Movements

Whether you have or only try to parade allies makes a difference.

Sometimes a sociologist finds a simple description of a social situation that cuts through a great g slighted or dismissed or badly handled and so resentful of the ways in which the social world worked. The idea is a repeat of Hegal’s idea that the slave knows better than the lord what are the conditions of the slave’s role, but Merton had generalized that deal of ideological verbiage and makes other argumentation superfluous, so much so that once the social characteristic is identified it seems so obvious that it had always been understood as such. Robert Merton did so in one of his late essays about insiders and outsiders. Addressing the political and ideological turmoil of the Sixties, he distinguished between people who were or identified with people within institutions and those people who were outsiders, each side claiming that they better understood what was going on in social life. Insiders included politicians and academics and corporation executives who knew how the world worked, understood the mechanisms of the social world, while outsiders were people who understood because they were on the receiving end of the results. They included poor people and students and people of color and women, members of each of these groups having suffered from and outraged about their conditions. Merton was like Hegel in pointing out that the slave understood his condition more than did his master, but Merton was transferring the issue to be a general state of knowledge, each with its own claims, rather than a  difference in situations. Which group, the insiders and outsiders, had more legitimate knowledge or was there such an unbridgeable gap that a person could choose the wisdom of one or the other and that was all there was to be said? Professors pontificate and students talk straight and that is just the way things are never mind the intricacies of their alternative explanations. Either you don’t trust people over thirty or you don’t.

Read More

Cold War Nightmares

The prospect of nuclear anihilation was and is terrifying.

No atomic bombs were ever used during the Cold War and by the time of the end of it in 1987 it had become clear that Mutually Assured Destruction had worked to deter the use of atomic weapons. They had not been abolished by law, as had chemical warfare, but like chemical warfare were not useful as military weapons because chemical weapons were unreliable and nuclear weapons more than reliable for wiping out the country that used it first. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Millay said to Russian military leaders exactly what the United States would do if the Russians used even tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine and that warning was heeded. Nuclear weapons were off the table and the threat that the United States had or would develop a protection against nuclear weapons, however much its cost and implausibility, had been part of the decision by the USSR to give up the Cold War.

But the prospect of a nuclear exchange that would devastate the United States, the Soviet Union and Europe dominated all their imaginations during the time of the Cold War. Nuclear warfare was the apocalyptic event that everyone dreaded even while the various homelands remained intact and the United States and Europe became even more prosperous while the Soviet Union was in economic decline, which was the real reason the Soviet Union had to capitulate. It couldn’t come close to meeting American military expenditures. So the Cold War was filled with forebodings and we have to rely on books, films, and academic studies of what atomic war would be like to provide the texture of the Cold War, to spell out what never eventually happened but what might well have been.

Read More

War in the Fifties

The Cold War was the war of the century.

I was already an experienced political hand when I opened up my sixth grade first issue of Junior Scholastic of the fall term which announced the invasion of South Korea. I had been following the events in Korea in the New York Post ever since the war started in June. And much before, in 1948, I had listened to H. G. Kaltenborn say on the radio in his staccato voice that  Dewey would win and both I and Harry Truman went to bed after that news and were both surprised in the morning to find that Truman had won though my personal choice of the American Labor Party, whose standard bearer was Henry Wallace and backed by Socialists and Reds, had not even won New York State and so did not even have a symbolic victory.

Read More

Breaking News

Breaking news doesn’t tell the whole story.

There have been flashpoints in the last seventy-two hours that suggest something important is happening in some of the ongoing issues of our times that make them part of the temper of our times: the legal issues about whether Donald Trump had tried to overthrow a presidential election, an issue only some three years old but destined to remain with us historically; the issue of the Israel Hamas War, which goes back to the creation of Israel since 1948 or if one cares to ever since Jews have been an irritant to others, which goes back for thousands of years; and the issue of American border immigration, which go back to the 1850’s when the Know Nothing Party originated in its rejection of Irish Immigration. The first two flashpoints do not upon analysis as being of significant importance and it is uncertain whether the third will be, which suggests that flashpoints don’t tell what is really going on, They are driven instead by the need for breaking news to fill up media hours rather than the contexts which explain the ongoing issues. Yes, the times are full of issues but the abundance of flashpoints is just the fluff to fill airtime.

Read More

Daydreams

   Daydreams are structued as stories.

Imagining  oneself as having another life, different from the one you have lived, is one version of a daydream, and there are other kinds of daydreams that will be referred to later. What happens in that particular daydream, let us say in Boise, Idaho or Lincoln, Nebraska, is that a person imagines how he or she took one or more forks in the road and so came to live in a different place or time, a satisfying conjecture given the pleasures of time travel romances and disasters, people finding love in another age, or fining the world on the other side of apocalypse, both of them the case in the granddaddy of the literary version of the genre, E. G. Wells’ “The Time Machine”. The thing about daydreams is  that they are not random thoughts but are stories, filled with incidents and described situations and even dialogue, and so are subject to the restraints of stories and so not to be dismissed as mere reveries. 

Read More

The Taste of the Eighties

 What it felt like back then.

The temper of the times for a particular decade can be described by the social upheavals that mark the decade. The Thirties were the Depression; the Forties were theWar and its reconstruction; the Fifties were the affluent society and the civil rights movement, and so on and so on, with each decade having its characteristic sociological events. It is difficult to characterize decades with their cultural emanations in that culture is unevenly produced. The Thirties was sparse on novels though it did produce memorable films and popular music. The Forties had an outpouring of drama, both Miller and Williams doing their best work. The Fifties included novelists and writers such as Bellow and the immigres Nabakov and Arendt, which did give a sense of the deeper meanings of the decade. But it is also possible to speak of what we might call “the taste of the times'' referring to the felt rather than the deeper meanings of a time, what is experienced and readily available, even as that quickly passes and so has to be recovered or exposed from memory as the way it was, never mind the deeper currents. I am reminded of this more restricted focus by having looked at the first season of “LA Law” a network tv series originally aired in the Eighties, which does not seem so long ago but which the usual process of cultural amnesia has abolished until it was made available this fall on Hulu streaming, a service that did not exist when  “LA Law'' first aired. Think of those episodes as a way to recover Eighties fads and preoccupations even if current cultural commentators recently offered in the New York Times find the series quaint or distasteful rather than engaging the truths of the times they told.

Read More

Advocacy and Analysis

 Being reasonable is always the uphill climb.

The academic world has been replete with the clash between advocacy and analysis, particularly in the clash between Palestine supporters and Israel supporters. Advocates stand by their beliefs and deny the claims of the opposite side even if I think the arguments unequal in that the historical evidence supports Israel’s history and the Palestinian argument is that relative suffering makes you right on the merits. It just depends on when you start your grievances: the expulsion of the Jews to Persia or the Nakba, the withdrawal and removal of Palestinians from Palestine during the Israeli War of Independence. In academic terms, and preceding for decades the present war, advocacy meant promoting a conclusion so as to consult only the evidence that suits you and framing the terms as inevitable while analysis meant going where the facts and ideas will lead-- new facts, clarified ideas-- so as to find out something new. Academic life consisted of honing arguments so that it was more analytic rather than just advocated. So students who argued that the United States was a colonialist could indeed cite the results of tube Spanish American War but had to stretch the term to include the Marshall Plan which reinvigorated Western Europe and colonialism had to be transformed into a Cold War between the only two superpowers, which is a kind of warfare rather than the exploitation of the poor rather than the rich, however much subsidiary people like Katanga or Vietnam became embroiled in that conflict. The entire academic enterprise is endangered, so the argument goes, if people don’t attend to complexities, to make distinctions, rather than marshall only the arguments on one's own point of view. Rationality is itself at stake, as it always has been as when American Firsters could make a case that the United States could avoid entanglement with Europe but could no longer do so after Pearl Harbor, while George Wallace could defend “Segregation Now and Forever” because Americans of African descent seemed inevitably backwards. African-Americans were inevitably tainted by their origins, but that was advocacy rather than analysis because Wallace was not facing up to African American advancement, that nurture overcame what seemed to be nature.

Closer to home and in a political rather than an academic setting, was the debate on Fox News a few nights ago between Gov. Desantis of Florida and Gov. Newsom of California . Their fireworks provided some entertainment, though the Liberal media panned the event as so vituperative as to diminish both debaters, which is what happens in most recent debates, where Nikki Haley seems reasonable by comparison even if she is largely a trimmer. Look with some care at part of the Desantis-Newsom debate just so as to clarify the difference between advocacy and analysis and why that is important.

Sean Hannity started the debate by claiming he would be an impartial moderator and then offered as his first question a gotcha one aimed at playing to the Conservative playbook. He asked Newsom why it was that so many Californians in the last two years had left California while so many people were moving to red state Florida?  Hannity pointed to the fact that taxes were higher in California than in Florida. Newsom’s answer was rather lame or so fatuous that he had not prepared an answer. He said more people were leaving Florida for California than Californians going to Florida which was beside the point about the overall trend. Newsom also vaunted the educational and economic preeminence of California, which did not go to the point of why people were leaving. 

Hannity had leveled a logically flawed advocacy argument to make his point. He had asserted a fact  and then inferred whatever he might offer as the explanation of that fact without detailing the fact or the connection to the inference. If I had been the analyst I would have asked about the fact. A two year finding is hardly much of a trend in demographics. Second, were there any studies of interviews of emigres to examine why they left California? Without those, there are only suppositions that are not evidence but predilections already believed in, which is that taxes rather than other matters is the main issue. As an analyst, I would look more largely as to why people move from their home state. People have been moving south ever since air conditioning and the end of legal segregation. California is spreading to satellite states like Nevada and Utah. My own family moved to Utah just three years ago because it was their ancestral home and because, yes, they found the political climate more amenable. But does that mean that going was a sign that Utahns are more insular rather than willing to intermix with people of different persuasions? That would put leaving California a bad trait rather than the good one of leaving a high tax state. As an analyst, forget whether the outcome is good or bad, only why it is happening, just part of the reasons people do thighs. Just look at the factoid bauble and don’t justify a fact with a premeditated directive but engage in facts as Newsom tried to do when he said only rich people in California had high tax rates. Analysts look at complexity not simplicity. 

I am afraid that media and public discourse very much engages in the flawed reasoning I pointed out in areas other than that of Californians going East. You take an uncertain fact and then deduce the premise that makes the fact acceptable. That reasoning leads to very extreme conclusions. Trumpists assert the fact that Jan. 6th was a lark in the park because they do not want to believe Trump was trying to overturn the government and when press footage showed otherwise it was possible to consistently say the footage had been doctored, which meant there was a vast conspiracy afoot to mislead  Trump. Facts will not get in the way of the original premise however outlandish the inference required to keep the proposition true. Analysts, on the other hand, are free to go where they will go unburdened by having to reach a set conclusion. Analysts who examined civil rights could still admit not as a concession but just as a fact that inner city gang violence was a problem  for Black advancement.

Conservatives seem particularly inclined to posit some fact, however dubious, and then infer as obvious any pet policy they may already favor.  Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, who is intelligent and articulate but not very sophisticated about social life, worked that in a committee hearing recently when he insisted that his witnesses answer whether there were two sexes or four or six? He was flabbergasted to find the experts could not answer that simple question. It did not occur to him that sex was a sliding scale or that biology, being what it was, would not occasionally have mismatches between sexual identity and sexual anatomy and that was as natural even if much more rare than the  usual association, and to be managed as best doctors can without adding the inference that helping people to adjust to that situation was horrific rather than humane. After all, only a minority of people are lactose intolerant and rather than blame them for that condition or try to convince them to change their minds, milk companies provide lactose free milk. Conservatives tend to say that whatever is uncustomary is unnatural.

For their part, contemporary Progressives engage in a similar short circuiting of reasoning but with a different concept than nature. They regard as a fact that minority and poor people are exploited, the rich receiving their ill-gotten gains at the expense of the poor and the minorities. Black slave labor allowed capitalism to flourish, some people say, and so the present day injustice is how much wealthier the rich have become rather than how just crumbs more in taxes on the rich would allow providing generous entitlements to the poor and the minorities. The inferences or compensations offered by Progressives are far afield and have to do with pet projects like reparations or District of Columbia statehood or voting rights legislation rather than looking at them on their individual merits. Why isn’t D. C. absorbed into Maryland? Why not bring back the full Voting Rights Act of the Sixties? Who would qualify for reparations? Kamala Harris? An octoroon?

Sometimes the reasoning is so short-circuited that there is no way for two sides to argue. Pro-Palestinians will say that the slaughter on Oct. 7th was done by the Israelis or that Palestinians had the right to kill women and children because of the indignities in Gaza.Then there is no alternative than war to settle the matter and the Israel-Hamas War is inevitable and very long lasting, for decades or centuries. The ideological gap between Democrats and Republicans seems almost as deep a cleavage in  that both Biden and Trump regard the other as anti-democracy. But advocacy can still be modified by analysis by most citizens, I like to think and I find it difficult to imagine how the two sides would engage in military combat however many Ultraconservatives imagine themselves as the descendants of Minutemen and Confederates. Just defeating Trump in 2024 would ease the advocacy, voters  forced to choose between an  insurrectionist and an institutionalist, no ifs and buts about it. A binary ballot cuts through the qualifications, the specious facts and the dubious inferences.  

Rationality is always at stake always and not only in demented times. Marcuse claimed that modern capitalism was irrational as could  be evidenced by listening to the nonsense of jingles and the insatiable consumer demands foisted by the advertisers even though rich Romans also engaged in baubles like nightingale tongues. Are they also capitalist? And why are multiple brands of bbq chicken wings so terrible? Or buying a car that shows your career accomplishment? Rather, the eclipse of reason is ever av available and cooler heads have to prevail, as Jefferson did when he explained why the Colonies needed to sever themselves from Great Britain as opposed to voicing a slogan such as “Give me liberty or give me death” just as centuries later people voiced “Better dead than Red “ in advocating against the Soviets rather than figuring a way through that. Stay calm and carry on being analytic even in bad times.