The Fanciful and the Real

Here is something deep about all literature, whatever their formats or genres, whether opera or novels or poems or plays or whether comedy, tragedy or melodrama. All such works are either fanciful, in which case there is a fantastical story, full of implausibility and wonder and exaggerated figures, whereby an audience tries to find in that material and structure something that illuminates real life, as is the case when an Ovid myth is reread to let the reader understand that is about normal human emotions, as when Narcissus is preoccupied with himself, as any one of us can be, or else an audience or reader gets into the details of life presented so as to acquaint ourselves with real life so as to draw out archetypal figures and morals beyond the humdrum, as when “Death of a Salesman” resonates as a kind of grand tragedy worthy of the Greek tragedians. One of the other puts out its opposite, the audience or reader necessarily interpreting one as the other in order to make sense of it. That is the complexity and irony required of literature so that it can be literature. Even trivial stories such as Batman do the same thing, superheroes made human, played with to make them ordinary, Bruce Wayne turned into the Caped Crusader because of a childhood trauma when his parents are killed by criminals and so ingenious in his mastery of techniques whereby he is triumphant even if only over an underworld full of distorted criminals rather than god-like ogres and devils. Watch how the dynamics of literature work.

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Actual Reasoning

People have a sense or some indication or belief in what we might call the pulse of history in that they try, inevitably, to outguess the future, whether that means who will win a Presidential election or whether the animals in the wild will come out and harass the cavemen during a dry season. This sense or practical understanding is described in metaphors because the pulse of history is not really a sine curve by which to follow a human heart but is, to use another metaphor, a way history will jump, and it is often described in literary terms, as when Marx said that history comes first as tragedy and then by farce and that we can suggest that Nixon was a tragic figure and that Trump is a farcical one, even if much more dangerous. These perceptions are not quite accurate, the second one only vaguely parallel to the other incident, but giving the idea of a theme and variation. My mother knew nothing of the theory of probability, but advised me that the card I needed would turn up in a rummy deck especially when the deck was getting depleted. Be patient, she warned. She was also a good poker player. But let us not consider the clear comparison between the mathematical rules of probability in contrast to intuition. Think of real life ways in which people try to grasp how things will turn out and see how those insights get formalized into scientific like procedures, the model of natural science overshadowing how it is that people actually do what seems reasonable. Here are three examples.

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Miracles

All miracles are violations of what ordinarily happens. Here are four conceptions of the idea of what gets violated. Each of them have successively created a more symbolic or metaphorical idea of miracle and so can be thought as markers in the evolution from supernatural religion to a religion which is only moral rather than factual. Looking at the meanings of miracles reveals the ways in which religion can sidestep or excuse its claims without abandoning a sense that miracles are somehow real.

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Re-release: Kahneman's Fallacies, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

Daniel Kahneman, as well as being a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, is one of the subjects, along with his longtime collaborator, Amos Tversky, of Michael Lewis’ latest book, “The Undoing Project”, and so his work has drawn even more attention as the way to see through biased behavior and show how irrational people are in the conduct of their everyday lives. I want to suggest that Kahneman is dead wrong on substance, that people are reasonable rather than overcome by bias, and his deeply mistaken supposition is the result of a method that boxes his subjects into corners so that they cannot but seem hopelessly irrational. This essay, re-released from my archives, is an attempt to bring down what has been offered up as an important icon of contemporary thinking about mental and social life.

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Original Good

The fundamental tenet and experience of Christianity is that people are all subject to original sin and therefore have to be released from that and the event is accomplished by God sending down His Son Jesus to suffer and therefore atone for all the sins of mankind. St. Paul, who developed that doctrine, may have done so as to explain how it was that a Messiah could have died when in Jewish tradition a Messiah had to live. So Peter found an excuse for Jesus to die: He was destined to redeem mankind from sin. But Jesus is logically secondary to the primary sense that mankind needs redemption from its failings, Christianity having an exquisite sense of misery, that people are unworthy and polluted. Jesus, in a way, is a deus ex machina: He is the one to rescue the settlers from the Indians, and He does that work whether He was a real Son of God, the incarnation of the Deity, as Paul thought, or if He is a symbolic and historical figure who shows the path to enlightenment so that people are no longer overwhelmed by their guilt and shame. Christianity prizes itself on making their people feel very deeply their blame before they are freed from it.

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Informed Consent Agreements

Lawyers develop documents whereby people contract to meet what are now their obligations. This seems a very fair arrangement in that people have written down what they have agreed to do, for a consideration, and that social life could not proceed if those undertakings, such as to pay a debt or offer a service, were not promised in writing. Contracts are as old as when contracts were made about whose grain would be sold in the future when the crops in Babylon were reaped. But this well appreciated practice of everyday social life that is best noticed and freshly appreciated through the lens of sociology rather than through the law because law may generate those documents but without exploring the social activities associated with documents other than that they become obligatory. As in most cases with social life, sociology trumps law by dealing with what actually transpires rather than the way things are supposed to happen. To wit, informed consent agreements are, in fac,t neither informed nor agreements, only the products sustained and operated by other social processes.

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The Social and the Transcendental

When I take my daily constitutional half a mile to a convenience store and back, I am not alone even though I don’t know the names or remember the faces of people I pass. They know who I am: an elderly man with a cane who is getting his exercise, and perhaps returning with a beverage. Nobody is without their roles,some important ones of which are on display. What you see is what I am whether or not I disclose what I think are my deep thoughts. The question here is whether I can ever escape from my roles, is there some relaxation of all those roles, like tinker, would be spy or ex-professor, that cocoon me, everyone exhibiting any number of spikes that, like the coronavirus, allow identities to hang onto our projections and our awards, or ‘beings” as a particular entity. Yes there are, and among them is exhibited in that nearly daily walk, because I get so enmeshed in the walk itself, that it travels in distance, that I forget what my roles are, to the extent that such is possible. Nobody totally leaves hold of their identities, unless in an existentialist fantasy, as in Camus’ “The Stranger” and, in that case, such moments are horrendous rather than liberating.

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Non-Sexy Dreams

Like most people, I suppose, I dream about stories and issues other than lust and ambition. As a sociologist, perhaps, I also dream about social situations and problems, sometimes quite amusing, that provide insights I would not have arrived at when awake or, when dreaming,come up with half baked solutions because my mind has not thought of a better one, either asleep or awake. I dreamed, for some reason I can't readily assign to newspaper accounts or to general knowledge, that Israeli expatriates are infiltrating non profit organizations in New York City so as to familiarize themselves with what Jewish Americans and other Americans are thinking so as to know how to respond to America. So they go to the Met or Carnegie Hall as well as synagogues and churches to take the pulse of New York culture. Is Israel threatened? Is New York about to turn against Israeli sentiment? I don’t think so in my awakened life and the tone of the dream story does not have the tone of animosity or fear. Maybe it just shows that I have a lingering identification with Israel and my dream is a better indication of that fact than my protestations to that effect when awake might indicate. To use an overworked word correctly, dreams tell me that my feelings about Israel are authentic rather than affected.

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The Ethics of Bi-Polar Roles

People engage in ethical transgressions and there are ethical ways to deal with the existence of such transgressions. People behave badly to one another all the time without being thought to have either abandoned their role or their humanity, on the one hand, or to have simply made a mistake, as happens when they apply the wrong postage to an envelope. Indeed, much of ethical life consists of people finding ways of forgiving or excusing one another's behavior while continuing a relationship, or using lapses in ethical behavior as reasons for modifying a relationship or even letting go of or breaking a relationship. People regularly tell stories to one another about why they lost friends, why people drift apart, how their bosses betrayed them. People also tell themselves or their psychologists or their lovers why past relationships foundered and what sense they make of that in constructing their present lives and relationships.

One important area of ethical life, therefore, is dealing with the consequences of ethical judgments. How does one ethically respond to the recognition or the accusation of ethical lapses by oneself or others? This question is usually applied only to the person who has lapsed from proper ethical conduct. Can that person be trusted again? Does a person caught in an ethical lapse feel guilty, apologize, make amends, commit suicide? But it also applies to how to relate to the ethical lapses of people with whom one is associated. There are ethical considerations that fall on those who deal with the lapsed, such as whether a person is obligated to forgive another. Can a coach refuse to play an athlete who had flubbed his last chance? Moreover, there are ethical considerations that a person who has failed at ethical life must take into account other than the way to overcome the stigma of having ethically lapsed. The person must learn how ethical lapses are noticed and how blame for them is placed. In short, ethical life is not only a matter of individual or collective responses to transgressions, but provides multiple structures through which can be understood the inevitable ethical transgressions that take place in social life. People can be over amorous in courtship or insufficiently diligent at work or meek on those occasions when they might assert their rights.

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Blemishes On The Soul

When I taught an undergraduate course on the sociology of everyday life, I would assign essays, lead discussions and even give lectures on such topics as friendship, love, strangers and casual acquaintanceships, as well as parties and other kinds of gatherings. My point was to show how the circumstances of these situations constrained the lives of people and would make the students aware that invisible social structures had an impact on their lives. I think that by and large I failed because students did not make the leap from psychology to sociology. They looked at the motives that led them to behave in a way and to identify the feelings or emotions they might feel in that situation. So strangers were understood as lonely and in need of solace and companionship when what I was getting at was Georg Simmel’s insight that a stranger was a person who was only very partially understood by other people with whom they narrowly engaged and so, paradoxically, became, like bartenders and psychotherapists, the people with whom someone might confide.

It is very strange that students could not engage with that subject matter in that, after all, they could engage with a discussion in a course on social policy even though they had not previously thought that there might be four or five plans to structure a national medical insurance plan, a topic of popular concern at the time, and even though the students had not before the course that there were ways to objectively compare and analyze alternative plans, social design a way of thinking about government rather than saying just yea or nay, ardently in favor of or having contempt for a policy just because their party or favorite candidate said so. I pointed out that in the 2000 Democratic primary campaign Kerry's catastrophic health insurance plan would cover anyone who had a road accident but insurance would not cover medical checkups and so cover big bills but at low cost while Dick Gephardt wanted the equivalent of Medicare for All, which was comprehensive but very expensive and no one seemed to care about a policy’s assumptions and implications and when Obamacare was adopted people got to like it only when the citizens got the benefits. Very curious that social policy was readily on the agenda, somehow legitimated, even if it was arcane, but everyday life was not a topic, an object of contemplation, even briefly, remained obscure, even though everyone understood what it was to have a friend or a stranger in their midst .Social life is very perplexing if you bother to consider the obvious social things around you.

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Daydreams and Reality

Fantasy or daydream is a kind or structure or story that is more primitive than are the kind of stories that are associated with Aristotle as having a beginning, middle and end, those that build suspense to a climax and then offer an emotional release or completion. Aristotle had in mind the sophisticated performances in drama, which are aimed at an audience who will get pleasure and meaning from having mimicked reality in their productions, requiring its audience to see how the performance is similar and different from reality, how gestures and words are like what real people say and do, and create a mood which is different from what one has felt and contemplated than what they had experienced. The audience, whatever their walks of life, only intermittently suspend their disbelief. The nature of the story is to go in and out of it so as to continually refract on the differences between reality and illusion.

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Clutter in Art and Reality

All around us is clutter, these objects right at hand because they are functional in that you may need any one of them to help move along the day, but items thought so insignificant unless they are misplaced that you forget how important they are and so we dismiss them as clutter, whether a person surrounded by clutter is the kind of person who organizes the mess or lets it find itself, a person knowing where to reach to find it in its disorganization, such as a book not catalogued, or a hand lotion on the bathroom sink rather than in a medicine chest. Some of the clutter places its historical provenance while others do not. Women had sachets because people smelled bad, but there are still perfumes and room deodorants. But paper clips seem to me to have been of a time in that people needed to clip together single sheets of paper when those could be separated or mislaid, while today you just print off another copy of numerous pages from your computer and the printer staples the copies. Think of all these objects as a museum that offers time and place and general functions and so an entry into life, akin to the artists that make collages of objects atop one another so as to provide the mood of a person or a place. I have in mind Picasso and Braque and let us learn something from them before turning to the clutter of real life.

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Comfort and Irony

Consider the related emotions of pleasure and satisfaction to begin a way to summarily dismiss the Utilitarian and the Kantian theories of morality. In short, the idea of comfort replaces the idea of pleasure and the idea of irony replaces the idea of obligation. Moral philosophy, after all, is a partial and recondite way of dealing with what can be described as the way emotions work. A description observes what just is, and is thereby shorn of moral values about what should be done, and so can be dealt with by what is either called the sociology of everyday life or the sociology of emotions. Reducing morality into descriptions rather than proscriptions was the point of Spinoza’s “Ethics”, nothing left of ethics except descriptions.

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Loud and Quiet Screams

Some people are loud in that they talk a lot or have a high pitched or full throated voices and so people who are usually quiet but occasionally say a good deal are thought as unusual and deep. Other people are quiet in that they say little and that can also be inferred to be people who are deep or maybe simple. Whatever the case, these conditions are considered matters of character, the kind of person a person is, rather than a superficial matter and so not at all obvious as it sounds, but something inside the personhood, some avenue into the sanctity of minds ever imprisoned in their skulls. But people who are sometimes loud and sometimes not are not regarded as another form of character but as an aberration. People are inferred to be disjointed or out of sorts, and so inferred, at the least, as a clue of disquiet, even if it might seem just as ordinary a state of things as the other more consistent tones or characters. In particular, people who scream are thought to be particularly distraught, and it is worth examining a scream as a social phenomenon.

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Present, Past, and Future

Here is an easy situation in which people can appreciate the experience of past, present and future rather than use time as something that is measured, as happens in a clock, where time is just something, whatever it is, that “moves” past. Think of a game of rummy. The cardplayer anticipates what card will come up to complete your rummy or to have a few enough cards so you can “knock”. Every time you are about to pick a card is an anticipation that is needed. Those successive picks until the one card you pick are the future. There are multiple possibilities and keep the cardplayer anxious about what the next card will be. People live in or for the future and it is not easy to describe which proposition “in” or “for” is to apply. When the card you need turns up is in the present. It is an event for the instant satisfaction that it lasts as a card player appreciates that a card has changed the situation advantageously. The memory of all of those times when an unsatisfactory card did not turn up is the past, the collection of failed opportunities, that lets a calculating cardplayer increase the chances of getting the card you want because of the failed opportunities of the cards that have been discarded. What applies to card playing as a way to emphasize the appreciation of past, present and future is the aesthetic or metaphysical pleasure of playing cards.

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Apartment Life

People outside of New York don’t get New York City apartments, or maybe it is that suburbanites don’t get what it means to be in a city. They complained to me when I lived in New York City that there was so much hustle and bustle on the streets that a person could never get any rest while normal places, those that developed in the suburbs after the Second World War, allowed the streets to empty out and go to sleep and so everyone could get restful. But that was not the case in cities where you could live in a residential neighborhood while a block away from a busy commercial area, such as happened to me a number of times, as when a child when two blocks away in one direction and three in another there was a bustling place where everything could be had, like restaurants and supermarkets and pharmacies and movie theatres and haberdasheries (remember those? What happened to them? Dress shops never closed up.) My parents’ apartment fronted on a park that received great sunlight and people sitting on their benches while their children made noise in the street, though that was not cacophonous, any more than children riding their tricycles in the suburban neighborhood in which I now live. Yes, my parents and I heard the El train just a block away, but it was the other side of it that was the other side of the tracks while my side was residential, just as living a block away from Broadway in an upper storey with a view of midtime Manhattan made you private and serene once you left the streets and followed a different pace of things, those of home life, rather than the ways of commerce and occupations.

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Morals and the Taliban

Other people are regarded as taking responsibility. Then they can be blamed for it. The existential fact of doing one thing rather than another is on their hands for reasons always inexplicable and after the fact. My mother and her sister decided to leave Poland for the United States in 1939 knowing things were going bad but also knowing that they would never see their families again and must find work and people in a new life. That was the bravest thing they ever did though it seemed to them to be doing the natural thing, how fearful they were of the Germans. It seemed to them obvious self interest and, anyway, being servants and shopgirls in Poland did not seem to be an appealing future and so making a decision was like following water down an inclined street. It was bound to happen; it was the thing to do, even if their friends and relatives stayed put and were eradicated by the Germans.. People from their own mind’s eye make decisions easily and in a flash, not agonizing, even if they agonize later, as if they were contemplating other people for whom decisions in those other minds always seem paradoxical and unrequired.

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Jello Sociology: Phenomena in Themselves

There are a number of social phenomena, some fresh and some standard, that should be reconceptualized as properly ellusive and multi-dimensional rather than distinct and singly operative, as is the case with usual sociological concepts, such as class, status and party, to use Weber’s terms, if these new or newly appreciated phenomena are to be understood accurately. These topics should be seen as if it were seen with a squint, so to speak, rather than right on, which is the way most sociology operates. These matters, old and new, seem ephemeral, however much they are also ubiquitous. They make up the flavor or texture of social life rather than its structure. A shift so radical in the method of theorizing from the invisible but real forces of social life to concepts that are, as it were, seen out of the corner of the eye, deserves being called a new name and “Jello sociology” will do until something better comes along because it conveys the sense that social things are a set of ever changing objects difficult to pin down rather than the firm though invisible forces that prevail-- or at least, more likely, when the time disappears as unnecessary to point out that there has been a more careful definition of sociological analysis rather than a distinctive one.

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