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.
Read MoreRadical Sociology
The philosophical movements of the Twentieth Century included Anglo-American analytic philosophy, Existentialism, Phenomenology, and social and psychological theories that had philosophical implications, such as psychoanalysis and Marxism. But the one I have found the most important philosophical perspective is that of the sociological perspective that developed in mid twentieth century America and Europe that had been based on the earlier generation of American Pragmatism, by Dewey and Nagel, even though the sociologists themselves, such as Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton, were not philosophers but sharp observers and analysts of the social scene. I want to take note of their dominant procedures because they do what all philosophers do, which is to turn ideas about what has to be to go topsy turvy as when they eliminate ideas that are to be regarded as superfluous because they are not necessary ideas, which is the case when Spinoza thought that “justice” and “cause” were unnecessary terms, or thought that terms are to be added as necessary, as when Kant based the idea of free will on the necessary invocation of the word “should” so as to make the world what it is.
Read MoreOpposites
A friend suggested that I read Rachel Kushner because she is just the opposite of me. But because every difference is an opposite in that one characteristic is the negation of all the other ones, so that black is the opposite of white but purple is also the negation of all the others in the spectrum put together. Here is another example. Various ethnic groups who came to the United States have various characteristics, but which of these groups is the opposite of all the others? Jews had been a pariah group for two thousand years. The Irish had come to a British Protestant country, which was what they had left and had been disdained there for a very long time. But the only group that can be considered as the opposite of all the others is that African Americans had been involuntary immigrants while the others (except for some indentured servants or ex-criminals) had not and that this is such a deep cleavage that it can be considered opposite, a term based on a judgment of substance rather than a simple logical negation. So “opposite” means more than different; it means a special quality which makes the two parties very different from one another so that the two parties are essentially different. I wanted to know what was important enough a difference to be considered a deep chasm between the two of us. I am familiar with Conservatives as being the opposite of being Liberal and Romantics the opposite of being Classical, so what was the difference between me and Rachel Kushner? My friend said that she was a nihilist and I was not and I wanted to consult the multiple ways in which the two differed so that the summary judgment of nihilism was worth invoking.
Read MoreApparant Meaning and Actual Meaning
Here is a difficult and deep literary question. What is the difference between apparent meaning and actual meaning and how do texts make use of that distinction? The actual meaning of a text is what critics will say is the accurate meaning even if people are misled to think the text is otherwise, as when readers have a sense of what they are getting at, what the text is communicating, even if the text has not been sufficiently analyzed so as to find what it actually means by looking at its words, phrases, images, and all the other apparatus through which critics or just careful readers interrogate a text. An ordinary communication exemplifies the difference of the two meanings. You get a sense that a beloved loves you even if the spouse sends you unclear or stunted signals. A person won’t rely on the words rather than appreciate the meanings of the words, consulting the intentions rather than the words themselves. The same thing happens if people swear an oath to God. It doesn’t mean that God will punish the person for having broken the oath, but a person has just indicated that they will speak truthfully by whatever one holds dear, such as a mother’s grave. The intention is more important than the formula of words even as in literature a reader can get a sense that people seem polite in Jane Austen because they use what seem to us today to be cordial words, when in fact, critics would say, Austen characters are very cutting with one another, some readers preferring politeness to incisiveness, and so separating “Janites”, as they were and are called, from the darker Austen considered by some critics. While, then, there is evidence in the text that leads people to misinterpret the text, and so the text gives off an apparent meaning, there is also and better evidence which justifies the actual text, which is the accurate or, at the least, the more accurate text as constituting the actual text.
Read MoreModern Taboos
Taboos are usually associated with ancient ways, sometimes religious, whereby people are separated with one another because they are so horrified by their physical or social conditions. Women were separated into their huts during their periods because the women were regarded as unclean, possibly because, as has been said, that women have a wound that never heals. Jews and Muslims did not eat pork perhaps because it was diseased but more likely because it separated these groups of people from other groups of people. Taboos are therefore irrational in that they are responses to fear and without the need to explain why these taboos are. Durkheim updated that idea when he said that people ostracized or did worse to people who behaved differently rather than violated rituals when people violated norms as to sexual practices, beliefs and, as Goffman added, personal disfigurement.
I want to suggest a different way to understand the way peoples are separated from other groups of people in the modern way but this time for reasons that are very rational. People are separated by keeping secret to the deviants that they are not pretty or handsome, that they are not very able at their work, or that even if they are just not very nice people. These verbal separations are accomplished so as to provide people with respect, so as not to hurt them, and so become or remain part of the community at large, and so is a progressive rather than a deeply unnecessary set of practices.
Read MoreNostalgia and History
Nostalgia is the modern form of pastoral in that it gives an emotional expression to much of contemporary historical consciousness. It is no more debased than pastoral itself in that it shares with all pastoral a fawning view of time past. It differs from other forms of pastoral in that the usual pastoral connection of violence, death, simplicity and virtue to a bucolic time is made instead to the sense of time past that cannot at all be remote because it is a time that is still can be remembered as having been real. Nostalgia cannot predate what happened before a person is born though I can be nostalgic about the Thirties in that I can be fanciful about the times that were close enough to be in my time to think them as similar to my times.
Read MoreA New Adventure
People are engaged in new adventures at least in part because of the coronavirus pandemic. My family resettled West in part of the fear of declining property values in New York City and because where we settled seemed so open and clean and so much more safe, which is what I think, even if the mountain and plains states are reaching new highs of illness. A friend of mine in New York City is thinking of trading to a larger condo in her apartment building because, I think, she wants to do something busy rather than sit in her chair waiting for the pandemic to pass. Another New York City friend goes to restaurants that are open and also to the Metropolitan Museum of Art which has opened but with conditions including limited entrants spaced far apart and only one bookstore. Going to visit is a kind of adventure because there may be some risk but that is a very marginal one. They are casting their vote for the city by making their presence felt. Most people don’t have adventures in that waitresses wear masks to serve patrons, those put in significantly separated tables and store clerks moving about their wares and their customers. These people are not in adventures because they are just continuing their jobs because they have to make a living.
Read MoreThe Trip West
Alister Cooke, the Englishman who had become an American citizen, was well known as the host of “Omnibus”, a fine book on the Alger Hiss case, and a long time letter on America to the BBC. Once he explained that to understand America, you had to see that America was not a nation but a continent. That quip came to my mind this week because my daughter in law drove me from Brooklyn, New York, to Salt Lake City, my daughter in law’s ancestral home and the new permanent residence for their family including me. It is the start, for me, of a great adventure, the short take of my travel showing how much its topography and agriculture certainly make America a continent. We moved from the granite rocked hills of the East, it's very filled treescapes changing with its fall colors, to a spectacular view of Iowa, flat and filled with quite clearly prosperous corn farms, their main house and farm buildings shiny and up to date, and at one point, a spectacularly sunny day having low slung clouds for a hundred miles that made the sky take up seven eights of the landscape, as if this were a Modernist painting, and then to the endless plains in Nebraska, ever more desolate and most of Wyoming unpeopled, but giving rise to spectacular and for me unfamiliar sedimentary rocks and striated hills that continued on to the Salt Lake City Basin.
Read MoreDown to Essentials
I have had the opportunity to downsize my home twice. I left a very large West End Avenue apartment where I had lived for forty-five years to move into a small apartment in South Brooklyn after my wife died and now I am pruning again to move with my son’s family to a Mountain state, thinking of this as a new adventure for an old man and therefore blessed, even though it is not exactly a great trek in that the national chains of banks and pharmacies have all the same records and so there is not much to change in my life as to commercial matters. What I have found out about pruning is that it is not all that jarring however much I am sentimental. Memories are more real than things. If there is a lesson in this adventure it is, as might be expected given my presumptions, getting rid of things is not like that very vivid scene in “2001” where the file books empty out of HAL’s computer until there is nothing left, his voice getting ever more base and then nothing. Rather, every person parrs down to an essence, which is their consciousness. Spinoza would say it more exactly. The essence is the complexity of a person’s experiences and ideas and that is irreducible and intact so long as the person lives. In that sense, every person, however reduced, has a “free will”, though Spinoza did not use the term as being irrelevant or redundant. What does having “free will” add to saying a person’s consciousness is more or less complex?. Ideas and emotions modify each other and themselves. That’s called “thinking”.
Read MoreThe Incomplete Status Sequence
Social theorists have connected social structures to what literary or philosophical people regard as the existential situation, which means the universal and fundamental experience of being in the world. That ties together social scientific objectivity with the realm of humanistic experience. Karl Marx connected some of the divisions of labor with alienation, which is a deeply and ubiquitous experience that it is difficult to pin down. Emile Durkheim connected the idea of norm with the experience of anxiety, everyone concerned to achieve conformity. Georg Simmel connected multiple lives and roles with the experience of metropolitan life, people now alive with choice and variety. Here is another connection between structure and experience, one that is a variation of Robert Merton”s role theory. The purely formal structure of what I will call an incomplete status sequence explains the sense of every person in life as caught between the present and the future and, as well, an experience as life always changing and surprising, which is different from the Durkheimian view, that everything is in a permanent present so that whatever is the norm is what that seems to be as it always has been and will be. A sociological concept therefore is able to unravel what might seem the always squishy and uncertain of what is the philosophical view.
Read MoreA Taste for "Lost Horizon"
On the one hand, I think Frank Capra’s “Lost Horizon”, from 1937, is a great movie that explores everyone’s sentimental search for a place of peace and quiet. On the other hand, I think that Howard Hawks’ 1938 “Bringing Up Baby”, despite its excellent pacing and performances, is just mildly amusing rather than hilarious. This preference may be merely personal, and so just a matter of taste in that limited meaning of the word, some people having a taste for salami while others do not, but perhaps taste is much deeper than that, about the way in which I apprehend the universe, taste then becoming a very profound matter indeed.
Read MoreSports and Other Entertainments
A good way to see the difference between art and entertainment is to consider sports. Yes, there is the ballet of basketball, and a batter’s swing can be said to be beautiful. But these are stretches, metaphors parading as accurate descriptions, as when baseball is described as an American religion when it is just something that excites a feeling of loyalty about something not to be taken all that seriously. Bostonians and New Yorkers make believe they hate one another’s baseball teams, but in a crunch, as after the Patriot’s Day bombing, the police and fire departments work closely together. The conflict between Red Sox Nation and the Yankee Empire is an affectation. The same is the case with sports and art. Sports are not taken seriously as art. They do not make the same claim at the transcendental, or at originality. A batter is not rewarded for the creativity of his swing, just how dependable is his production of hits or home runs. Even very well paid players know their place. They say, at least, that what is important is providing for the economic security of their families; sports, after all, is just a game.
Read MoreHeroism
Heroism or courage is usually thought of as a personality attribute. People are either brave or they are not when they are called on to be so, which means a hero is the opposite of the normal person who could not or would not rise to the circumstances. Achilles was brave; Audie Murphy and Sergeant York were brave; Freud was brave, in an extended sense of the term, because he was willing to challenge the conventional thoughts of his time in a major way that earned him derision at best and a suspicion that this man was preoccupied with things better left alone. Part of his success was to legitimize the connection between sex and ordinary feeling as a fit subject for communication. Most of us just keep our secrets.
There is another way to look at heroism or courage. It is to emphasize the situation rather than the person. Certain situations require a person to take an action that will be thought brave or courageous; to act otherwise is cowardly rather than ordinary. The soldier who is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for throwing himself on a grenade to spare his comrades is brave, though, depending on the details of the circumstances, if he had acted otherwise so as to save himself when that would only have meant that all the people in his foxhole would have died, would have made him a coward, and we do not know whether there was a way he might have hunkered down and saved only himself and still have been considered honorable.
Read MoreThe Talking Pineapple
Back in the old days, before the coronavirus, educational policy that is nowadays about how to open schools at all and what are the tradeoffs between distance learning and classroom learning, was about whether standardized testing was a good thing. Everybody, apparently, except those who make money off of them, was against standardized testing, though for different reasons. Most teachers and administrators criticized the tests for the burden they placed on teachers to raise the test performance of students ill equipped to take such tests, the teachers getting blamed if kids didn’t do better than students with the same demographic characteristics had done in the past. And that is not to speak of the unreliability of the tests. Reformers, on the other hand, criticized the tests for not allowing teachers to teach the students as they are or in creative ways, the tests measuring minor skills rather than the overall intellectual growth of a child, something that may not show up until years later.
Read MoreSilences
There was a newspaper report of an armed gunman who said, when told by his victim that it was a policeman that he was holding up, “You know, now I have to kill you.” That is the stuff of gangster melodrama, and may even be true. The exchange reminded me of “The Asphalt Jungle”, John Huston’s film noir movie of 1950, which was a remarkable movie because, among other things, it violated the movie convention whereby people who have others at gunpoint keep talking until the person with the gun pulled on him finds a way out of the situation. Rather, Louis Calhern just starts to sweat and lose his game face as he realizes that his erstwhile comrades in crime are going to kill him. However much they talk, the gangsters in “The Asphalt Jungle” don’t talk about what they are doing while they do it.
Why does the movie convention violated by “The Asphalt Jungle” make sense? Why do characters say what they are going to do rather than just do it? That is the same thing as asking why such dialogue occurs in real life, because the movie convention is simply exploiting and adopting a usage of everyday life, in that dramatic tension arises from whether an assailant will speak or not. So why did the gunman in the newspaper report act the way he did? (Here, I am engaged in applying Georg Simmel’s dictum, which is contrary to the accepted wisdom, that the sociologist can analyze fiction as well as real situations because both make use of the formal properties of social life.)
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