For half a century, let us say from 1930 to 1980, there was an intellectual movement, now forgotten, which premised that the queen of the disciplines was tracing how ideas emerged and then, over time, altered or were corrected, and then either ended or were transformed into a different basic idea. What people thought was always framed by where they stood in the development of some key idea and, during that time, history of ideas was more important than, let us say, administrative or political history for explaining how history worked. Many movements came afterwards, such as environmental history or post colonial history, but there it was during its reign. There was Arthur Lovejoy expounding how for many centuries thought was dominated by a great chain of being so that there was an inherent hierarchy whereby every person and every animal had their place in nature. There was Carl Becker’s analysis of how the Enlightenment and the American Revolution ticked. There was Ernst Cassierer’s magisterial view of how the Renaissance and the Enlightenment evolved into Kant. There was F. R. Leavis tracing the moral arc of the English novel from Defoe to Virginia Woolf. There was even the early Herbert Marcuse criticizing, early on, the limitations of the Weberean sense of capitalism before going on to see how Marxism transformed itself into Soviet Marxism before in the Sixties becoming the spokesperson for a leftist ideology in America. That point of view was different from the concurrent interest in intellectual history, which concerned more details, such as what books Rousseau or Darwin had consulted or whether Mendel had faked his counts on whether peas were in proper proportions to what genes would predict should happen. It was about big ideas, how they changed, not how people changed, and I thought of myself as seeing as well that this was the way to unfold history.
Read MoreRe-release: Why Noam Chomsky Is Wrong
Right wing Americans explain themselves with either the primitive thought of conspiracy theories such as Qanon or the more sophisticated ideologies of Nazi style racial warfare. Left wing Americans invoke the warfare between the rich and the poor. One of the most prominent of the Leftists for many years has been Noam Chomsky whose ideas sum up most of the memes used by the left and are therefore quite distinct from what was considered the Liberal and now the Centrist Democratic view that is ideo;ogically based on democratic constitutionalism and on the concepts of rights and a policy of ever extended entitlements and the structures that are within the U. S. Constitution. I have therefore re-released my post about Noam Chomsky so as to provide a challenge against the leftist shibboleths.
RE-RELEASE: WHY NOAM CHOMSKY IS WRONG
June 12, 2017
Noam Chomsky, so I am told, is much admired as a truth-teller among young people looking for accurate explanations of what is going on in America politically and economically. His basic thesis is that the small number of people who are in power in this country exert their interest in enriching themselves by pursuing imperialist policies abroad and oppressive policies at home. They keep down poor and even middle class people both foreign and domestic. I think this view is mistaken. Rather, Chomsky is just repeating shibboleths that were inaccurate when they were first enunciated by Lenin and then, for a later generation, by C. Wright Mills, who wrote in “The Power Elite”, in the Fifties, that militarists dominated the United States government and fomented wars so that they could increase the defense budget as well as keep America in control of third world countries, the natural resources and domestic labor of these countries that fell into the American sphere of influence thereby available for exploitation. Let us deaggregate this point of view into distinct propositions and hold them up for examination.
First is the idea that the United States turns underdeveloped countries into colonies so that it can steal their natural resources and employ their work forces at very low wages. Chomsky, in “Who Rules the World?”, applies his brush of derision for United States foreign policy very broadly and very thinly, to Haiti, to Cuba, to Palestine, and even to the springboards for 9/11. The United States just can’t do anything right. But foreign policy is more complicated than that. Barrington Moore, Jr. showed long ago that homelands spent more on their colonies than the wealth they brought in from them (with the possible exception of Belgium’s grim rule of the Congo, which much enriched the royal family). For the most part, colonies were ways of increasing national pride, especially among the newly enfranchised working classes which would therefore vote for jingoistic politicians. As far as the United States is concerned, it acquired from Spain its Caribbean and Pacific empire at the end of the nineteenth century because some nation was going to take it away from Spain and it might as well be us, we not wanting Europeans to be involved in the Americas and when it was clear that Japan was the rising power in Asia and we did not want the Philippines to fall to them. As usual, the explanation for American foreign policy is geo-political, a calculation of realpolitik, which means what is in our national interest, whatever the claims of morality or of economics. The United States has been bailing out Puerto Rico ever since it took over the island.
That insight applies to our Cuban policy, much chastised by Chomsky for having turned against Castro because he was going to distribute land to the peasants. Batista, whom Castro overthrew, had served the interests of the United Fruit Company, the Bell Telephone Company, and American sugar interests. But those corporations had made use of the opportunity to invest in Cuba rather than were the cause of our engagement with Cuba. Yes, one issue that led to a severing of relations with Cuba after Castro took over the government (not mentioned by Chomsky perhaps because he was not familiar with the fact) was that Castro did not want to honor the sugar quota that had limited exports of Cuban sugar to the United States so as to protect the American domestic sugar industry. But protectionism is not imperialism. Moreover, the break with Cuba was over political matters. Liberals like myself, who were reluctant to regard Castro as a menace or see him as a Communist until he declared himself to be one (and even then wondered whether he was saying that just to curry favor with his new masters in the Kremlin) were appalled by the show trials Castro staged immediately after taking power. Batista officials were tried in football stadiums, rapidly convicted and quickly thereafter executed. Castro also clamped down on the press and began a persecution of gays. Castro showed himself not to be a small “d” democrat, but just another Latin American strong man, this time the client of our arch enemy, the Soviet Union, and it made no sense for the United States to allow Soviet penetration into the Caribbean, the Cold War waging all around the globe, from the Caribbean to Europe to Afghanistan, to Vietnam and Korea and the Horn of Africa. There was more at stake than the price of sugar.
If there is imperialism in the world today, it does not involve the developed world exploiting Latin America and Africa; it is in Europe. The North of the continent exploits the South of the continent by offering it loans that it knows can not be paid back and then, like American bankers, foreclosing or threatening to foreclose on the Greek or the Spanish economy unless those countries engage in painful austerity measures to allow them to repay their debts at least in part. But the more important message is that the European Union never learned the lesson demonstrated by Alexander Hamilton when he helped to further the cause of the new union of American states by having the federal government assume the debts of the states, thereby making the federal government the center of economic power and stabilizing the currency and increasing commerce. Rather, Brussels was too hesitant to federalize economic policy and so keep Southern member states from borrowing more than they could afford. As with the American mortgage crisis, don’t blame the people who take out loans but those who offer them to borrowers they know cannot pay them back.
The second and conjoined idea is that the rich people get richer by making poor and middle class people poorer right back here in the United States. That is certainly what Republican tax policy adds up to. Chomsky makes the idea that the rich rule the country for their own benefit by blaming it, in his book “Requiem for the American Dream” (2017), on the shift in power from the industrialists to the money managers, those same people responsible for the Great Recession. But both Chomsky and Bernie Sanders are wrong to think that the extravagant salaries and bonuses the rich bestow on themselves is what makes everybody else worse off and that thereby the incomes of the rich need to be curtailed except to the extent that they can provide the wealth, through taxation, to build infrastructure, fund entitlement programs, and improve the lives of the poor and middle class. Rather, Hillary Clinton, however flawed as an explicator of her own policies, was closer to the mark. What the poor and middle class need are higher basic standards of living and a promotion ladder that allows them to improve their condition of life over the course of a work life. That is why a much higher minimum wage, expanded healthcare coverage, and scholarships to community colleges where people can learn a trade, are more important than reducing the wealth of those on top. How does making the rich suffer help the poor and middle class except, as I say, by providing more taxes to support programs that help the poor and middle class? Punitive taxes don’t accomplish anything except to make radicals like Chomsky feel satisfied that they are creating a more just system simply by making rich people suffer. Rather, look at what the poor and middle class need and go from there.
So, in short, Chomsky supplies neither a detailed study of particular issues or a sustained exercise in creating an analytic framework within which to place these issues, even if any number of social commentators on both sides of the political aisle, such as John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen and William Graham Sumner have done just that. Rather, Chomsky is doing on the left what William Buckley, Jr. and Barry Goldwater did two generations ago on the right. He is just pushing out platitudes that those who are already convinced that there is something rotten in Denmark can glom onto without needing to think through. Let us hope he is not as successful as they were in providing the rhetoric that would get Presidents elected.
Johnson's "Tour of the Hebrides"
Johnson’s “Tour of the Hebrides'' is two things. It is an entertaining account of his travels with Boswell to the Near Abroad that begins in Edinburgh, which Johnson thinks will be a familiar enough city to his readers so that it need not be described, and works its way to the remote islands off the northwest coast of Scotland, and then back again, revealing things about the places and the peoples that might seem a bit strange to his London readers. Second of all, in this mild guise, Johnson presents what is an analysis of the social structural differences between a backward place and a modern, affluent place, as Britain is, and how one can become the other. This is the self same project that was taken on by the Nineteenth Century sociologists who also wanted to explain how the modern world differed from the feudal or other pre-modern worlds, and so I think it would be correct to treat Johnson as one of the founders of sociology even if he is not given credit for being so because he is a literary man and so his most incisive social structural observations are not particularly abstracted as such, even as other contemporary proto-sociologists such as Thomas Malthus, are given their due because he originates of formulas to describe the whole of social life something sociologists never following up on this promise while economists have tried, however fruitless they are at making predictions. Moreover, Johnson makes his comparison between two societies that are very similar to one another. The two share an island, a language, a Protestant religion, even if Johnson says early on that Scotland has abandoned the more rigorous forms of Calvinism which had earlier inflamed it, as well as having been a single nation, at least officially, for some fifty years. His book is, therefore, much like Young’s “Travels in France'' where Young, some fifteen years later, will treat travel to the land across the Channel as something of a voyage of discovery, finding the natives to be somewhat backward by English standards, neither their farms nor roads up to his standards.
Read MoreShould Trump Be Prosecuted?
Whether to prosecute Trump for his various crimes, including the incitement to riot against the Congress, is a difficult question. I infer that the Founding Fathers would have thought not to do so. There is no provision in the Constitution for a judicial procedure for a crime committed by the President. Rather, there is the political decision to relieve a President of office through impeachment and conviction. The United States does not want to follow a path of getting rid of a President by jailing or executing him, something the Founding Fathers might have anticipated would happen more than a century later when politicians out of favor in the Soviet Union were put into kangaroo courts and were executed for their so called crimes. Conservatives also think that a President has a wide leeway as to how to act while in office and so should not be tried for what he deems it necessary to do in the interests of the nation. Lincoln had suspended habeas corpus. Should he have been prosecuted for that if he had lived even if it had been a useful expedient? But, as a matter of fact, few Presidents go even close to engaging in crimes. Nixon did, but how many others? FDR didn’t and the closest Truman did during his very active Presidency was the Youngstown Steel case, where he nationalized factories so as to prosecute the Korean War, and that was a political matter, purely above board rather than conspiratorial, and was overturned by the supreme Court as having gone beyond the scope of Presidential powers. What happens rather than a trial is a scandal, such as Reagan’s involvement with Iran Contra. He was never prosecuted for violating the Boland Amendment not to send money to the Contras.
Read MoreTwo Sides Going Past One Another
History is informative when it allows for comparisons but not predictive because it does not tell you how things will work out. It is therefore informative to point out that there are ways in which the era of the Fifties and Sixties is repeating itself in the Twenties by presenting an intensity of events in the public arena that are unsettling and foment change and are perfectly visible. That earlier era saw assassinations and riots and major landmark legislation and Supreme Court decisions, deeply flawed Presidents contending with real statesmen (though today including stateswomen) and simultaneous actions here and abroad: a war then as well as a major domestic upheaval over race, based on regional conflict, while today there is a still minor scale (for American) war alongside an upheaval over the rights of women and attendant other “minorities”, again based on regionalism (the west coast and the east versus the south and the mountain states). There was rioting in a number of cities after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. and a little bit of rioting after the death of George Floyd a few years ago. There was back then a President assassinated and one resigned and today there is a recent President who was twice impeached and leads an insurrection and a President, two incumbent’s before, who qualifies now as the second worst President ever for having gone into war on the basis of a lie, the real reason for it still unclear. History, for the duration of the periods, then and now, seems to be moving at quick speed, not having to absorb one moment before there is another one demanding its attention. What is happening that makes us attend to what will happen next, what will unfold in the news cycle, is the long slumbering answer or backlash against the Fifties and Sixties, an attempt to regain what had been supposedly lost as a result of those reforms some fifty or more years ago and reestablish the social order that existed before those changes. It has been a long time in coming, but it has come, and it is unclear which of the two major factions, those who prefer what existed before the Fifties and what came after it, will prevail.
Read More"Gilgamesh" and How Things Change
There is a great leap between the gods as they are recognized by anthropologists concerning pre-literate peoples, where the gods are like spirits of nature anthropomorphized into being people because the wind or the ocean or the trees have spirits of their own and so act like free will or are places mysterious enough so as to think of them as having special and conscious like qualities, as is the case with mountains or rivers, and those gods or God who come later. What is to be done with man made creatures rather than with the facts and forces of nature once they have evolved that far into cities? What are those gods like? The Greeks are too late so as to assess that transition. Their gods are immortal and they have superpowers but are subject to normal or extreme family relations and their feelings and so are like superhero movies who have frailties and so fit into everyday soap operas. Even “Gilgamesh” portrays the spats between the gods as resulting in the flood and the making of an ark to withstand the flood. It is only Abraham who stands out as a figure, what we might call a modern figure, who conceives of God as different in nature from other gods in that it is invisible rather than of a place or time and that is subject to morality, even if God remains as a largely quiet figure who sometimes lashes out or bothers to say something profound, God not at all an ordinarily to be understood person. A way to understand that period between spirits and God can be revealed in “Gilgamesh” itself by looking at what are the social structures that have already been obtained by that level of civilization and those that have not yet been accomplished. The effort is not to find new things in the epic as it is to see what is obvious about what things are still same and what things have profoundly altered, what are the greater parameters of social life before they became what was already familiar in Greek and Hebraic life.and literature.
Read MoreWhere Morals Can't Go
Hobbes is treated by intellectual historians as a pessimist because people are so anxious to enter into a social contract that will protect their lives and livelihood that they will rush to anyone who offers such guarantees, including potential leaders who are demagogues or charlatans, so long as they offer peace and security. Never mind that Hobbes gives a back door way to democracy because he is saying that the authority for leadership is the result of the consent of the governed in that the popular majority decides whether they can live with the going or the proposed political arrangement. John Locke, on the other hand, is to be regarded as an optimist in that there is never an end to how people can form a new social contract, a new one created as soon as an old one ends, people always political in that they can frame an ever more useful constitution-- or, at least, the British are always able to. Moreover, there is, in addition to the overall social contract, there are any number of individual contracts that people can make which are mutually advantageous, such as contracts for employment, or to rent land, each crafted that is voluntary and reasonable, even if some people can arrive at a disadvantage as when a person agrees to work for low wages because poor people need the work more than the rich people need to hire one or another of them. Bad contracts are still effective except when people’s lives are endangered, and so slavery is prohibited by Locke as an individual contract because becoming a slave means putting one’s life in danger. And, according to Locke, people have innate rights, regardless of the nature of the constitution or the laws, whereby people are recognized as morally free to act because such things, like free speech or privacy, are recognized as part of a person’s nature rather than just the sufferance allowed by the government. It would therefore seem, in Locke’s view, that morality orders most of social life in that people can appeal to government, freely agreed to contracts, and personal rights, as allowing people to defend, of right, their dignities. But the Lockean question remains: where are the areas of social life where morality doesn’t prevail? What parts of social life have no moral sway, either because of a general social contract, or a particular contract, or as a matter of right? Where is the abyss into which people can descend where there is no morality?
Read MoreInformed 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.
Read MoreThe Social and the Transcendental
When I take my daily constitutional half a mile to a convenience store and back, I am not alone even though I don’t know the names or remember the faces of people I pass. They know who I am: an elderly man with a cane who is getting his exercise, and perhaps returning with a beverage. Nobody is without their roles,some important ones of which are on display. What you see is what I am whether or not I disclose what I think are my deep thoughts. The question here is whether I can ever escape from my roles, is there some relaxation of all those roles, like tinker, would be spy or ex-professor, that cocoon me, everyone exhibiting any number of spikes that, like the coronavirus, allow identities to hang onto our projections and our awards, or ‘beings” as a particular entity. Yes there are, and among them is exhibited in that nearly daily walk, because I get so enmeshed in the walk itself, that it travels in distance, that I forget what my roles are, to the extent that such is possible. Nobody totally leaves hold of their identities, unless in an existentialist fantasy, as in Camus’ “The Stranger” and, in that case, such moments are horrendous rather than liberating.
Read MoreProphesying From Fall, 1943
By the fall of 1943, World War II, for the United States, was half over and so the contours of what the war was like was well established and what would have to ensue was foreseen. It was two years since Pearl Harbor but it was clear that the Axis powers were in retreat. The Japanese were no longer expansive, the pivotal victory in Guadalcanal victorious, and the ever increasing American armada moving up the island chains in the Pacific to deal with the eventual defeat of Japan, however problematic whether that would need invasion rather than isolation, and not considering what would eventually happen, which was an atomic bomb. What was also forecast were very bloody campaigns, the United States having conquered what might seem the inconsequential island of Tarawa, which devastated the U. S. Marine Second Division, but was a stepping stone to the East. Iwo Jima and Okinawa would follow. And in Europe, it was also the case that Germany had spent its strength, sure to be defeated unless Hitler came up with new wonder weapons, such as sufficient numbers of jet planes and rockets, so as to make up the difference of ever growing American armament. Hitler had already by then failed at Stalingrad, and in a slow but definite retreat on the Italian boot, but everyone knew that a cross channel landing and progress to Berlin would neccesitate great casualties. The war was not over even if the Allies were clearly winning. The question is what was the state of the nation in the midst of the war and what did it foretell about what post-war America would be like, whether the war was transformative as it would show itself to be rather than to fall back into a pre-war mode, has happened in the South after the end of the Civil War, or destabilized, as happened to Germany after the First world War, or surprisingly having few consequences after the Vietnam War, and England, the victor of the First World War, not really changed until after the second World War when Labor created the nationalization of industry and social services, such as education and health. Can we see into the crystal ball of 1943 so as to predict its future?
Read MoreKonstan Theorizing About Sin
A social or a literary theory can be classified as a kind or type or genre of theory in that each type uses a particular way of theorizing whatever its subject matter or particular hypothesis. Theorizing is therefore akin to the premise of literature, which can be broken down to its tone, which are the conventions whereby individual works are recognized as tragedy, comedy, melodrama and so on, and also their textures, whereby works are recognized for the sets of assumptions that make them distinct worlds. But whereby there is a limited catalog of tones or genres, there are any number of textures, and literary and social theories are akin to tone in that there is also a limited catalog of them, a great number of theories fitting into a particular type.
Read MoreThe Ethics of Bi-Polar Roles
People engage in ethical transgressions and there are ethical ways to deal with the existence of such transgressions. People behave badly to one another all the time without being thought to have either abandoned their role or their humanity, on the one hand, or to have simply made a mistake, as happens when they apply the wrong postage to an envelope. Indeed, much of ethical life consists of people finding ways of forgiving or excusing one another's behavior while continuing a relationship, or using lapses in ethical behavior as reasons for modifying a relationship or even letting go of or breaking a relationship. People regularly tell stories to one another about why they lost friends, why people drift apart, how their bosses betrayed them. People also tell themselves or their psychologists or their lovers why past relationships foundered and what sense they make of that in constructing their present lives and relationships.
One important area of ethical life, therefore, is dealing with the consequences of ethical judgments. How does one ethically respond to the recognition or the accusation of ethical lapses by oneself or others? This question is usually applied only to the person who has lapsed from proper ethical conduct. Can that person be trusted again? Does a person caught in an ethical lapse feel guilty, apologize, make amends, commit suicide? But it also applies to how to relate to the ethical lapses of people with whom one is associated. There are ethical considerations that fall on those who deal with the lapsed, such as whether a person is obligated to forgive another. Can a coach refuse to play an athlete who had flubbed his last chance? Moreover, there are ethical considerations that a person who has failed at ethical life must take into account other than the way to overcome the stigma of having ethically lapsed. The person must learn how ethical lapses are noticed and how blame for them is placed. In short, ethical life is not only a matter of individual or collective responses to transgressions, but provides multiple structures through which can be understood the inevitable ethical transgressions that take place in social life. People can be over amorous in courtship or insufficiently diligent at work or meek on those occasions when they might assert their rights.
Read MoreBlemishes On The Soul
When I taught an undergraduate course on the sociology of everyday life, I would assign essays, lead discussions and even give lectures on such topics as friendship, love, strangers and casual acquaintanceships, as well as parties and other kinds of gatherings. My point was to show how the circumstances of these situations constrained the lives of people and would make the students aware that invisible social structures had an impact on their lives. I think that by and large I failed because students did not make the leap from psychology to sociology. They looked at the motives that led them to behave in a way and to identify the feelings or emotions they might feel in that situation. So strangers were understood as lonely and in need of solace and companionship when what I was getting at was Georg Simmel’s insight that a stranger was a person who was only very partially understood by other people with whom they narrowly engaged and so, paradoxically, became, like bartenders and psychotherapists, the people with whom someone might confide.
It is very strange that students could not engage with that subject matter in that, after all, they could engage with a discussion in a course on social policy even though they had not previously thought that there might be four or five plans to structure a national medical insurance plan, a topic of popular concern at the time, and even though the students had not before the course that there were ways to objectively compare and analyze alternative plans, social design a way of thinking about government rather than saying just yea or nay, ardently in favor of or having contempt for a policy just because their party or favorite candidate said so. I pointed out that in the 2000 Democratic primary campaign Kerry's catastrophic health insurance plan would cover anyone who had a road accident but insurance would not cover medical checkups and so cover big bills but at low cost while Dick Gephardt wanted the equivalent of Medicare for All, which was comprehensive but very expensive and no one seemed to care about a policy’s assumptions and implications and when Obamacare was adopted people got to like it only when the citizens got the benefits. Very curious that social policy was readily on the agenda, somehow legitimated, even if it was arcane, but everyday life was not a topic, an object of contemplation, even briefly, remained obscure, even though everyone understood what it was to have a friend or a stranger in their midst .Social life is very perplexing if you bother to consider the obvious social things around you.
Read MoreWhoopie's Free Speech
Current issues having to do with free speech are repetitive, boring and obfuscating in that they have to do with defending the rights of people not to be insulted and that makes what is no longer permissible speech very broad rather than limited to only important exceptions from free discourse. This idea that people are free from being offended has been a major change in discourse, and was inaugurated, as best I can tell, when universities decided or some of the students decided that classrooms were safe spaces where professors had to be warned if they said something controversial or contrary so as not to make students uncomfortable rather than regard classrooms as places whose purpose was to make students uncomfortable with their received opinions. There are any number of school boards who insist that the curriculum should not include books or ideas that offend either Blacks or whites, as when Governor of Texas Greg Abbott says that no group is to be denigrated in history books, which means you can’t decide that slavery was a bad thing because the white people cannot be thought of having done bad things. I think of such people as Gov. Abbott as being culturally illiterate because they are opting out of trying to understand how complicated things are but retain a naive view of all people as being well meaning rather than having views placed in their own contexts that nonetheless result in differential advantages. Neither slave owner or enslaved can be condemned, in that point of view, even though they are all long dead, and that is to the detriment of all and whatever are the descendents.
Read MoreStratification Is Everywhere
Equality means that the social order is based on each group or person having universal rights that guarantee that they can each act independently and are not be subordinated to one another. Individuals and ethnic groups are equal even if their average wealth or modal prestige are different but because none can claim moral superiority one from the other as was the case when Blacks and whites were separated as castes into superior and inferior kinds of people. Under equality, everyone can take pride in their ethnicity and everyone can take pride in their occupations, or in their own individual pursuits of happiness, only some of those occupations, like prostitution or drug dealing, seen as dishonorable. There was a time when actors and actresses were regarded as disreputable and perhaps their celebrity makes them stand out as exceptionally honored, but all an occupation needs to be considered as an honest living to be considered a worthy occupation by politicians and preachers is that it is lawful. In the light of equality, an individual can cultivate his garden or write his essay or support his family or live off his rents, and each can be thought a free choice as a way to live one’s life. Authority, on the other hand, is that the social order is marked by ranks all of them under command of hallowed leaders, whether as persons, such as God or charismatic figures,or captains of industry, or by invisible forces, such as norms or traditions, which require people to know how they are to behave in the subordinate ways of life to which they are assigned. There is always an external instruction and one cannot very well see how it could be otherwise, for then would come chaos.
Read MoreGetting Through to 6ers
The New York Times, in a front page article a week or so ago, could not understand what was so upsetting to large parts of the population of Enid, Oklahoma, and neither could I. It seemed to be about mask mandates, but how could the local populace be so energized about what was a practical and usual public health measure of the sort that had been in place for hundreds of years so as to avoid pestilence? There had to be something more about the matter and the anti-maskers said it had to do with liberty, which is a very big deal concept not to be invoked so cavalierly. So the Times and others tried out alternative explanations which I, for one, found wanting. The article noticed that local residents were concerned about uncertain sexual identifications, but those people have been going on for thousands of years. The article also mentioned that there are more diverse populations in the area, but how does that demographic change impact on a particular person rather than serve as a background for the entire group, and how masking and sex orientation and government distrust are all tied together even though the issues are so different from one another? Masks are a pretext for outrage, but about what? The experts cited said that it had to do with emotions about conflict, but that does not tie it down very much. I will give it a try.
Read MoreKant and Marx: Should We Hate Jessica?
Here Is a radically different approach to describe morality, which is usually thought of as adding something to the descriptions of the world so as to provide a fuller picture of life. Kant put that usual view clearly and succinctly. It was inevitable, he thought, that people came up with the word “should” to describe the fact that people chose to do one thing rather than another out of obligation rather than just custom or taste or else people would not have real choices and that was clearly part of the nature of the world. I am saying otherwise. People use moral categories for a particular reason, which is to blame people, and they do so by noticing the aggregation of individuals into types or roles that are in opposition to one another and find that satisfying, which means that morality is in most cases unnecessary even if blaming people, including oneself, is an easy thing to do to explain people, as when one says that all people are subject to original sin or that some part of people can be clumped together as deficient morally because of their poverty or race. Aggregation is a useful device for illuminating the social world but it is a dangerous one because it breeds unnecessary anger and allegations and, like a good medicine, should be attributed only advisedly. The significance of this proposition is that morality is an attribute for manipulating language to different purposes rather than a discovery about morality as an inevitable feature of the universe that is.
Read MorePower Is What It Seems To Be
What is power? Max Weber defined it as the ability to get people to do what they don’t want to do while influence is to be defined as the ability w to convince people to do what it is you want them to do. Employers have power over employees because they can fire them and so those who have unequal power will do what the boss wants because the employee wants his or her paycheck. A priest has power because a member of the laity believes there are serious consequences if the churchman decides the member to be engaged in sinfulness. On the other hand, a charismatic churchman can lead a follower to prefer to do what the churchman thinks is the right thing. That is influence rather than power. So far so good. The difficult question about power is whether all the different kinds of power are versions of the same thing or process, to be known properly as power itself, or whether each form of power is independent of one another and arises out of the particular process under observation. In that case, and here I follow Weber in his view of power, there is no need to even any longer use the term “power” except as a metaphor for some of the consequences of deploying some of the traits of the process under examination. An employer has power because he or she can fire someone when firing people is just an aspect of being in an employment arrangement in the first place just as social power is just a fanciful way of saying that men will disparage ugly women and so in this way men have power over women. Moreover, whether to think or not that there is an essential quality called power has consequences for understanding how society operates and also taking sides on particular controversies.
Read MoreMoney Isn't Fungible
Economists say that money is fungible. What they mean by that is that it can be traded for any number of different commodities. A school can use its money to replace the roof or to buy new textbooks. That is why some legislators don't like giving private schools money to compensate for keeping attendance records or having school lunches. It means their money can be reallocated to religious instruction. Some other than money certificates are also at least partially fungible. Frequent flier miles can be credited for gaining flights to any number of destinations so long as you use the same airline.There are also other matters that do not seem to be economic which are also fungible. Affection is partly fungible in that the affection of a spouse is transferred to an inlaw or at least given the benefit of the doubt until events warrant treating a person otherwise. All that is required is that something can be spread around by a party which has some entitlement to do so, as is indicated by a dollar bill, and whatever is exchanged can be retained by the person who engages in the trade. The exact value or unit of exchange may not be clear,but it is useful to provide denominations whereby amounts of the fungible product are comparable. It is hard to trade diamonds all of which are large but there can be produced diamonds of various qualities and sizes. Sex is clearly fungible in that it is a service that can be traded for any number of different things, from money to social position to affection and so the market on sex is highy controlled by the customs and laws of society so as to assure the value remains of high value, so that it can be exchanged for marriage, and so that people do not become too coarse in their exchanges, and so people continue to ssociate sex with affection, though some people think it liberating to dissociate the two.
Read MoreThe Shopkeeper's Lament
Karl Marx used the petit bourgeoisie, which are the small shopkeepers in organizations of, let us say, ten or less-- the people nowadays who run restaurants and got such a hard time because of Coronavirus-- so as to distinguish them from the haute bourgeoisie, who are the entrepreneurs of wealth and with large organizations that have a significant impact on the means of production: the factories and the mines that make steel and locomotives. The petit bourgeoisie are not really important business people, just occupations that offer a living. But Marx was a genius at identifying a distinctive mentality that went along with a particular line of work. He later developed the idea of “functionary” to describe the civil servants and other hangers on that allowed France’s Second Empire to continue to survive despite its political and economic failures. The shopkeepers are also a type in that they follow a way of life determined by their economic situation that molds the way they live and think and feel. My father was one of these, though not started out as one, but rather as a baker, who is a member of the skilled working class, and he adjusted to the new role of running a ma and pa grocery store and then to the proprietor of a small supermarket.
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