Unlike Prohibition, which was a failure at abolishing alcohol because rates of alcohol use were by the Seventies back to pre-Prohibition levels, social programs to eliminate tobacco were extremely successful and should be applied to another addiction problem, those of illegal drugs like cocaine and heroin. The soft approach to the very harsh reality of drugs which diminish the capacities of the users and plague the neighborhoods whereby drug financed gangs engage in drive by and random shootings and seem incapable of becoming resolved are programs that do not require Supreme Court decisions or major legislation, while the abortion debates seem never to end and environmental debates on air pollution and fossil feul emissions remain a quandary despite efforts of legislation to control them. The soft model is large scale reeducation of the population and making drug use simply inconvenient. Tobacco use was everywhere present in 1965 in that 42% of Americans used cigarettes and cigarette encouragement was everywhere in TV and print advertising. Cigarette companies had major lobbies so as to maintain their power. But by 2018, smokers were now down to 14% of the population and, even more, only 8% of those between the ages of 18 and 24, suggesting that the younger cohort of the population were using even fewer smokes, that defined as daily or every second day use, and so the habit was dying off. This happened, even though it took half a century to accomplish, because there was widespread publicity of the report of the Surgeon General’s Report of 1965 that smoking led to cancer, and lawsuits by state Attorneys General to sue tobacco companies for providing cancer killing products, and also, perhaps most important, restrictions by municipalities, one by one, to make cigarette smoking more difficult. Public buildings were barred from smoking, and so smokers congregated on their plazas during work breaks. Then universities and colleges barred students and teachers from smoking, and then restaurants. It just became just too difficult to manage. Rather than treating personality problems to be the cause of addiction, with studies showing how useful tobacco addiction is to well-being, there was the development of operational shortcuts to avoid smoking, such as tieing a box of cigarettes with rubber bands so that it took time and effort to get at a cigarette. People eliminated ashtrays, much less cigarette boxes, on their coffee tables and side tables. And so cigarettes are largely over. Solution accomplished. What next for a public outcry, this time against heroin and cocaine, that is beyond the political, that sidesteps the political?
Read MoreThe Top of the World
Heading west on Interstate 84 in eastern Oregon, the route passes through the Rockies in an unusual way. Rather than trails and roads finding their way through passes between the mountains so as to see the valleys between, which is what happens later on in our route to Seattle, when the lush valleys can be seen suddenly uncovered in their sunshine and shadows, idyllic places rather than the rough places of the peaks that are higher by far than where the roads go through it, Interstate 84 instead finds its way on top of the mountains, moving from high point to high point, these not apexes but extended ridges where the trees to both sides are of the same elevation as the road, no cliffs to see, nor the valleys either, because the trees are enough to prevent looking at a gap or offering a clearing. The result is that the passing cars offer a sense of being on top of the world, a continuous thing that goes for a long distance and so making the whole vistaless view seem miraculous, a deep insight into how there is nothing higher but nothing depressed and so offering a very little angle of vision. This experience is remarkably pleasurable partly because it is so unusual a vantage point, or rather the lack of a vantage point, and even more so because the whole scene seems to float without a top and a bottom, as if there were a natural equality in which people (or trees) were embedded, rather than a natural inequality whereby something is always either higher or lower, these the differences in geometry about something very fundamental about social life, which is that equality and inequality are the two natural states of social existence with inequality the predominant quality. We all float amidst the unusual sight of the equal society of trees surrounding one another and those who observe them rather than some more elevated than others, looking at other companion trees rather than in the distance. Isn't equality grand?
Read MoreThe Haitian Mess
There are three ways to approach the mess in Haiti, its failure as a society, which was best symbolized by the 15,000 Haitian refugees, now down to zero, that for a week or so crowded in an underpass near Del Rio, Texas. What was to be done about them and what to do with Haiti? The first proposal, propounded at the time by journalists, local politicians and the American diplomat who resigned over the issue, is to do the humane thing, regardless of what the law says, and grant asylum to the Haitians because there is no life to be found in Haiti given its earthquake, its political disruption and its failure to make a living for its people. After all, we allow any Cubans who get to the United States to remain there because of the remnants of a Cold War that ended 35 years ago. Haiti has about the same population as Cuba, about 11 million, even if Haiti is one third the size of Cuba and Haiti is the most densely concentrated population in the Western Hemisphere. Why not let in the ones who can manage to get to America, the failure of Haiti to thrive being sufficient reason? The Monroe Doctrine has been taken to mean that the United States takes responsibility for its hemisphere so as to preclude foreign control of the area, and so the United States cannot pawn off Haiti to France just because of their related language and history. Moreover, the United States has regularly intruded into Haiti. The U. S. Marines occupied the nation during the Twenties so as to pacify the nation and Bill Clinton both restored a legitimate Presidency to Haiti and then took up a major initiative to reconstruct the nation economically after one of its regular earthquakes. Why not now, after another earthquake and another period of political unrest? What was done before can be done again, never mind the debate about immigration policies having to do with any number of other peoples trying to make it into the United States. Think of immigration as a blessing rather than a problem. It shows that people want to come to the United States so as to achieve better lives. Would one prefer people not to want to get to the United States, legally or not? The pressure of immigration shows the U.S. is thriving. As one wag put it, take two billion dollars from Biden’s 3.5 trillion dollar reconciliation package, and then Haiti could be reconstructed into being a respectable nation.
Read MoreIn Praise of Dogma
Contemporary sociologists of religion claim that they should develop what they call “real religion” or “informal religion” which discusses the emotions, the situated practices and the personal identities affiliated with religion rather than the liturgies and doctrines concerning religion if they are to get their subject matter right. Susan Nidich argues that the post-Exilic time when Jews returned to Israel and Judah were ripe for development in new religious understandings and literary forms because it was such a time of turmoil, though it seems to me it is difficult to name a time when the history of Israel was without turmoil. Certainly not so was the time of the books of Samuel when Saul and David contested with one another, a time of politics mixed up with dastardly deeds that rival the intrigues and murders of the early Tudors.
Read MoreFor The Duration
“For the duration” was a term coined, I believe, during the Second World War to describe the extraordinary measures that had to be taken until the war was over. That included rationing, blackout curtains, a military draft, men away from their homes in dangerous places and women who had to raise children among other women, and women who worked in factories and retail establishments and as government workers and all the women expected to give up their work and take up normal civilian life after the war, which meant getting married, having children and being homemakers. The idea was that things would get back to normal even though it rarely happens when a war ends. The chasm in America today is not only between blacks and whites and college educated and not but also because of the Vietnam War that separated the differences between those who trust the government and those who do not, even though what happened was that the Liberals and what became the Progressives are the more trusting of the government while the Conservatives are the ones who don’t trust to vaccines or elections.
Read MoreJello Sociology: Phenomena in Themselves
There are a number of social phenomena, some fresh and some standard, that should be reconceptualized as properly ellusive and multi-dimensional rather than distinct and singly operative, as is the case with usual sociological concepts, such as class, status and party, to use Weber’s terms, if these new or newly appreciated phenomena are to be understood accurately. These topics should be seen as if it were seen with a squint, so to speak, rather than right on, which is the way most sociology operates. These matters, old and new, seem ephemeral, however much they are also ubiquitous. They make up the flavor or texture of social life rather than its structure. A shift so radical in the method of theorizing from the invisible but real forces of social life to concepts that are, as it were, seen out of the corner of the eye, deserves being called a new name and “Jello sociology” will do until something better comes along because it conveys the sense that social things are a set of ever changing objects difficult to pin down rather than the firm though invisible forces that prevail-- or at least, more likely, when the time disappears as unnecessary to point out that there has been a more careful definition of sociological analysis rather than a distinctive one.
Read 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 MoreCompetition and Cooperation
Here is a species of group phenomena that can be called “oppositionists”. These are a group of people or organizations (or, for that matter, higher mammals) who compete with one another but do so within a set of rules that are useful for furthering their individual interests. A good example of oppositionists are gladiators. They fight with one another and may even kill one another, but they have a guild whereby they mutually train or from which they receive common services such as food, shelter and medical attention. We are familiar with such groups in the movies “Spartacus” and “Gladiator”. It is strange to contemplate how people out to kill one another can bond with one another emotionally, but there you are. The consequence of being practical and also the practice of admiring the heroism of one another even if pitted against one another as deadly foes. The same could be said of other deviant groups. Prostitutes compete with one another and will trick one another but they may share with one another the hazards of their work and so train another in the skills that allow them to survive in that endeavor. They are all in the same boat. The same is true with non deviant groups. Baseball teams compete with one another under the rules of the league and baseball players honor one another’s servicn e as they compete with one another on the field and are traded to different teams when those holding their contracts may do. A Red Sox player won’t hate the Yankees even if the fans feign to do so so as to gin up team rivalry. After all, most players will easily adjust to the new team to which they have been traded. Johnny Mize moved from the New York Giants to the Yankees and Johnny Damion from the Red Sox ro the Yankees. Loyalty to the profession and to money rather than the competition provides real loyalty and motivation.
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 MoreCriticizing Critical Race Theory
When critical race theory was a manifesto proposed by Black lawyers and other Black intellectuals in 1980 to set straight American history, claiming that Black people were the backbone for creating American society and yet its endemic racism had turned the tables and victimized Black people and it was time to restore to Black people the rightful historical and present order of things, I thought the theory, though it was not worked out well enough to award that term of praise, was both jejune and meretricious, and I thought the so-called theory destined to fall on its own weight and to be overtaken by more enlightened Black intellectuals because its success would turn back race relations for generations. The movement it has inspired, however, has become hallowed in its brief history and has inspired a counter movement to abolish it, in school boards and state houses, both the advocates and their opponents neither of them appreciating history as the way to see history is complicated but instead think of history as a way to take sides on peoples and races and so the controversy has indeed set back a more enlightened view of race relations and so there is indeed a need to point out the shortcomings and malice of the movement and the same of its opponents. It is just another case of bad ideas continuing to fester and we would all be best rid of it, which is also the case of Naziismand Qanon. Bad ideas, after all, do matter. I will grant, however, that the two sides are ignorant rather than as meanspirited or vicious as those other benighted movements.
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 MoreJustice Is A Bad Idea
I am going to say something outrageous, but hear me out. What I will say is clear and has deep philosophical roots. I am saying that there is no justice. I do not mean that the ideal of justice is rarely fulfilled, that life is full of disappointments. I mean that the concept of justice is empty. It is a word without a meaning and so not part of the metaphysical furniture of the world, while truth, beauty and goodness are some of the many metaphysical things that do exist. The word “justice” is used to evoke a sense of a final rectification whereby wrong action is compensated through the action of courts, whether by those who adjudicate that Orestes should not be punished or that Charleton Heston intones the Ten Commandments. Life can do without the concept and is better rid of it because the invocation of justice always creates unnecessary suffering and so people are worse off rather than better off.
Read MoreVictimized and Non-victimized
Critics have a way of judging with hindsight what writers said or should have said about them while knowing what has happened since. A case in point is a recent article of The New York Review of Books which reappraises what Faulkner should have done about segregation during the period in the early Fifties when he thought in favor of a gradualist approach to restructuring the South. What I too him to mean was that Southern whites were soon to undergo an agonizing reappraisal of the South and that we should not expect them to readjust quickly, to which I would have responded, as MLK did, to ask how long are Blacks to wait to get their redress of grievances, but that was a consideration at the time, to easily dismissed nowadays as Faulkner simply being not up to the moral and political challenges of his times. I want to generalize this problem. Like Faulkner, there are some people that have to deal with the fact that they are now to recognize themselves as having been exploiters, and how they are to regard that fact. Southerners have to come to terms with the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Other ex-exploiters include those who ravaged the American Indians and Germans have to deal with the Holocaust and the British with what to say about the imperial control of Africa. Other people, on the other hand, are those who are or are the children of those who were the victimized, such as blacks and native americans and Jews and so they also have to deal with the psychological and structural advantages and disadvantages of being in those roles. Lets elaborate the ways in which people of either sort understand these roles: the ex-exploiter and the ex-victim.
Read MoreRace Relations Today
There have been much congratulations offered by Black activists and observers as well as the President and Vice-President about the fact that Derek Chauvin was convicted on all charges for the murder of George Floyd. Those surrounding Floyd’s family think that this decision was pivotal. Police officers whose actions that illegally kill Black citizens are usually covered up and police officers charged with such a crime are usually vindicated. This time was different and the conviction will increase the pressure for Congress to pass the well crafted and long overdue George Floyd Act which would restrict police violence. But remember that we just barely missed the bullet shot against both social order and equal rights for Blacks and whites under the law. The building where the trial was held and the decision delivered was crowded with National Guard members and other kinds of police officers because there might have been significant rioting if the verdict had been otherwise, whether to acquit Chavin or just to convict him only of manslaughter. That shows there is an imbalance of forces in that the Black community has a sense of justice on its side and also a threat of rioting while the white population has an ingrained sense that the Black community is not on the side of social order and that its grievances are exaggerated even if the outrage against police violence is eloquent. The combination of justice upheld and violence deterred suggests that race relations are very bad. Blacks have a justified grievance against persistent police violence and whites think that Black neighborhoods are suspect because there are hoodlums and gangsters among them that the rest of the community cannot control. And Black advocates do not help the matter because they come up with preposterous slogans that offer justice or nothing instead of a balanced and nuanced presentation of the issues as they were once proclaimed by the Black leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, and especially by Dr. MLK, Jr.
Read MoreUtopias, Individuality and Law
My friend David Konstan was prompted by a post I wrote entitled “Utopias” to expand my view in a particularly elegant way that showed the humanities could be systematic and cumulative. I had said that utopias (and dystopias) were forms of society that had abolished the distinction between public and private life. Plato’s Republic is a place where the types of people correspond to the types of roles provided in the society. “1984” shows that the private impulse to have sex is the great danger to Big Brother’s society. David had elaborated this view so that individuality is always a critique of utopias and dystopias. Moreover, among his many nuanced ideas about the way an individual can struggle with both utopias and dystopias, is the observation that most of these erstwhile antagonists are of familiar types, like the loner who roamed the western frontier but was transplanted into a post-apocalyptic environment and who had not changed because of this new environment. Konstan is engaging with a prime idea of utopias and dystopias: people will be changed, a new person, a New Soviet Man or a Winston beaten down and newly dedicated to Big Brother. The question for utopias, then, is whether people are transformed. Otherwise it isn’t really a utopia.
Read MoreBiden's Gun Control
Biden is going big in his Liberalism in that he believes that big government is the solution rather than big government being the problem, which is what most Conservatives think. Big Liberalism thinks that government can provide money and programs that will alleviate inequities and discrimination between class and ethnic groups, as happened when Social Security and Medicare led to abolishing the fact that the elderly were poorer than the other age groups in the population. Laws to insure equal accommodation transformed the southern states. Conservatives may think that government might tweak the market system, such as by creating incentives whereby private companies could expand broadband to rural areas, but Liberals think that only a government effort can make broadband universal so that it can become the basis for educating young people through distance learning and so broadband has to be the equivalent of a public utility, part of the national infrastructure, rather than a luxury item for those able to buy the product. You can’t have elementary and middle school and high school students attend distance learning if broadband isn’t universal. The prior model was rural electrification, where the government had to step in because customers were far enough apart that it made no sense for private power companies to expand their reach to rural areas and the cost of some areas, should the private companies enter the field, were prohibitively expensive. The government, such as in the TVA, had to do it, and so does broadband today, where a third of rural areas do not have broadband.
Read MoreJoe Biden's Radical Liberalism
Rahm Emanuel, when he was Chief of Staff to Barack Obama, said “No crisis should be wasted”. What he meant was that when there is a legislative moment where there is an urgency and general willingness to act, measures should be added to the package of other measures that are a long time part of the leadership’s agenda. That is what happened with the passage yesterday of the American Recovery Act. No Republicans joined to aid the Democrats, truthfully saying that many of the measures had nothing to do with coronavirus relief but were part of long time Democratic wish lists, but some of the Democrats did not waver too much from the bill, except for eliminating the fifteen dollar minimum wage and forgiving student loans, and did approve of provisions that could be considered radical in a liberal way in that they moved forward major programs to expand entitlements so as to provide a more substantial way of life for all citizens and particularly those who were all but the rich, the rich not needing the assistance. Biden’s law is incremental but substantial, a firm way whereby economic situations do not interfere in people achieving their life, liberty and quest for happiness. From a Liberal point of view, this is the greatest advance since the New Deal, and Democrats from Bernie Sanders to John Manchin are impressed by the audacity, even if Larry Summers says that the package of money is so large that it will lead to inflation. The U. S. has had no inflation since the late Seventies, which is two generations ago, and the Federal Reserve has the ability and the power to squeeze out any inflation should it arise. Look at the solid policy accomplishments rather than speculation.
Read MoreSchool Integration and School Effectiveness
This is a sad story. It is the story of the failure of the promise to equalize the outcomes between black and white students in the years after segregation ended. The irony was that the desegregation of schools was supposedly to be for that end, and was the clarion call for the Civil Rights Movement in the Fifties and Sixties, that emblemized by the Norman Rockwell painting of the little Ruby Bridges being escorted into a New Orleans elementary school by burly protectors. So many other changes in race relations did change. A Black middle class and a Black professional class has entered the ranks of doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs. There are numerous bBlack politicians in that the percentage of Black congresspeople is about the same as that of the population at large even though there are, at the moment, only three Black Senators, but then there has been a Black President and, currently, a Black Vice President. The Secretary of Defense is a Black man. Perhaps most important as a measure of normalizing Black people in the United States, is that Black women are featured in fashion magazines and that there are a large number of Black people as reporters and news talk hosts and commentators. But not so with education.
Read MoreValues
The Classic comic books version of the short story “The Man Without a Country” presented Philip Nolan’s staterooms in one or another United States warship, him forever exiled from having said he hated the United States when he had been part of the insurrection by which Aaron Burr tried to wrest the trans-Appalachian mountains from the United States, these later of his staterooms festooned with banners and flags and portraits of Presidents that showed him as forever pining for his country, this a sentiment appropriate when Edward Everett Hale wrote the story in the midst of the Civil War. It struck me then and remains so that flags and banners were not the proper ways in which to display tribute to the idea of the United States. That was because these visual effects were present in all nations and no more than an icon of the team of the National Football League. Every nation has banners and so those are just lapel buttons rather than explanations of why someone would feel worthy of the nation for which it stands. What makes its images, ideas and expressions distinctive?
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