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.
Read MoreThe French Submarines
The decision by the Biden Administration to declare that it would build nuclear submarines with Australia and the United Kingdom rather than conventional submarines with the French was significant and controversial and leads into some very complex matters even though that decision is only a very short blip on the political horizon and will have no impact on the midterms. First off, that decision would have seemed unnecessary. Ever since Henry Kissinger negotiated the Shanghai Communique in 1972, it might have seemed unnecessary to present a significant military force to confront the Chinese by having nuclear subs stay indefinitely on station between China and Formosa, something conventional submarines apparently can't do. The Kissinger plan was that China and the United States would become economically interdependent and so not likely to face up in a war. The two powers avoided the containment policy that relied on military power to keep the Soviet Union under control until it had matured enough as an economic nation and had put aside its totalitarian political and social system so that it would no longer be a belligerent party. Maybe all the submarine sabre-rattling is overdone because it only means that there has to be an additional force to help guide the two superpowers through the inevitable antagonism that results from the fact that the two are so powerful, but it is still unnerving in that the United States was in a Cold War in the Twentieth Century that lasted from 1949 until 1989 and that except for particularly adroit mutual management and a lot of luck, the two superpowers might have gone on to a nuclear war, and the fear of that shrouded two generations. We don’t want that again. I went through it the first time and the prospect of it by younger people may not appreciate its gravity.
Read MoreThe Secret of Education
Georg Simmel, one of the foundational theorists of sociology, never offered a theory of education, but he observed many strange or exotic social structures that are applicable to a variety of very usal events. One of these is the secret society, where people bind together with one another through oaths and rituals and signs known only to their other members and that accomplish and share between themselves a special illumination or purpose. Secret societies include the Ku Klux Klan, the Shriners, and the Masons, and so seem outlandish and different from the usual walks of life. That definition, however, includes some pretty pervasive and even largely inclusive parts of a population. Christianity is a secret society. Part of its genius is that membership is offered to anyone who sincerely agrees to be a follower of Jesus and there are numerous rituals, such as the Mass or declaring one to have been born again, which make you within the community rather than outside of it, the reward of which, for that belief, is that in some sense or other a participant or member is offered eternal life, whatever that may come to mean over time. Fellow members understand what they are up to so that Christians may think that an annulment is not much different from a divorce but for the sake of form the distinction is respected as the Catholic way of doing things, and Protestants will think themselves transformed or saved in that they have been financially successful. Those inside get one another or act as if they do, however much friction there may be between denominations or national churches, some theologians and pastors arguing the cut off point between membership and its reward and those outside of membership. Is a Mormon a Christian or is a Mormon not so, whatever their protestations, because Mormons do not believe in original sin while all other Christians do? Other secret societies may be more trivial but also pervasive. Children join clubs that have special jackets and thereby are entitled to friendship and loyalty, as do military organizations, where there is less emphasis on illumination than on duty and suffering.
Read MoreWhat's Next?
When dealing with politics or whatever is large enough as a social matter to be considered history, those of us who are viewers or observers or whatever is the audience to politics and history always await what will happen next, knowing that, except for people who are alarmists or very certain about how well off they may be when the world ends, there is no end of new things, just like in a soap opera, where characters emerge and reemerge if the audience likes them or pass from the scene to new figures and their problems. In politics, there is always a new campaign, a new Young Turk, a superannuated figure who lingers on to become President, and new configurations whereby Jews and Blacks and women and Gays can become part of the political elites as well as the political masses. There are new issues, like climate change, and older issues, like abortion or voting rights, that get revived with a slightly different spin. Politics is like going to a carnival where you pick out which game you wish to take part in. The only cost to the game is the willingness of time and attention to deal with it, everyone is a master strategist or a tout who predicts which horse will win. Consequently, the viewers or observers are always trying to construct the succession of events as comprising a story so as to make sense of those events. What candidate will peak too early (like Kamala Harris) or just hold on, like Joe Biden, when, in fact, Biden was always ahead in the popularity contest even if he did not make headway in the delegate votes until after the South Carolina Primary. Nixon thought a candidate should peak just right while Nixon thought you go full out all the time. So, at the moment, a viewer like me thinks politics is at a lull, the dust up over Afghanistan over, waiting for whether Biden can pull off his reconciliation and infrastructure bills, neither voting rights or police violence going to amount to much, Biden a hero if both of the major bills pass and a good chance for him to retain congressional control after the midterms, while losing both will make him regarded as a failed President, and the press uncertain what to make of it if Biden gets infrastructure but has to be very scaled down to get reconciliation of what has now been called social infrastructure, which means the extension of entitlements, which is always the goal of Liberal politics. My theory is that there are lulls and moments of high drama, as when John McCain sustained the Affordable Care Act over President Trump’s objection, partly out of policy and partly out of pique. Isn’t that usually the case?
Read MoreWhy Heaven and Hell
Bart Erdman is a Biblical scholar who is prolific and clear. He says that his job is not to say whether religious beliefs are true or not but to examine how the ideas and emotions associated with them develop. He does, however, offer hypotheses or explanations for why they develop, and so I can wander in as a mere sociologist of religion to offer alternative explanations. Erdman claims that the reason people venture into ideas of Heaven and Hell is because people are just about universally afraid of death, the afterlife portrayed, at best, as a dismal thing. Erdman thinks that people elaborate on Heaven and Hell so as to posit an afterlife. There has to be a just reward for the pains of life while one is living and so there has to be a way to mete out that justice by having both options. A lifetime is long enough by which a person can establish whether one is worthy of the better of the two alternatives-- or provide for a third possibility, which is to work off one’s liabilities after death through Purgatory.
I don’t think Erdman is correct because, among other things, it is necessary to contemplate why so much pain is involved in Hell and why people for most of Christian history have had relish of how awful are the conditions that prevail in Hell. Why does God require so much suffering? A modern Christian might say that there are no occupants in Hell, but certainly most of Christian history thought otherwise. Why the gore along with the glory? I want to offer two standard explanations for the punishment of the dead and then offer two fresh ones, one psychological and one sociological.
Read MoreThe Expanse of Landscapes
The essence of the visual arts is to show what things look like. The visual arts can also offer designs or illustrations of ideas, but those are not the main thing. Picasso’s “Guernica” shows the anguish of a gored bull and viewers read about it to learn that the painting was about the Spanish Civil War. The commentary, not the picture, told the viewer that. Lenze’s “Crossing of the Delaware” commemorates an important event in American history and so convey’s patriotism, but what the viewer sees is all these people jumbled together in a boat and wondering whether the boat will capsize. More important as for the aesthetics of the visual arts is that each of the major genres of the visual arts find the particular subject matter whereby what is to be shown. Still lifes show arrangements of articles so that the juxtaposition is quaint of vases and fruit or even rotten fruit so as to gather the experience of having all of those experiences put together for their textures or shapes or the different kinds of those things, some ceramic, some organic, some sleek, some mottled. Portraits, for another example of the genres of the visual arts, show faces for whatever it means for people to interpret what is to be made of faces, how faces reveal or cover up minds. You may look at Rembrandt’s “ The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild” as a presentation of how important people are meeting with one another, and so a record or a commemoration of that event, but the primary thing to notice is the faces, what particular people look like and how they are different and the same as people’s other faces.
Read MoreThe Drama of the A-Bomb
There are many accounts of those distinctive images and situations that are associated with the atomic bombing that ended the Pacific War in World War II. Very well told is Ian Toll’s “The Twilight of the Gods” in that he covers everything, including whether a diplomatic tweak on the part of the Americans might have ended the war without requiring the A-bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Toll does not provide anything new but he is well balanced. There is the Oppenheimer operation in Los Alamos, a city of young scientists doing with limited comforts. Then the first A blast in the New Mexico desert, the sun rising twice, as has often been said, and toll’s retelling of the green ferrous oxide that was all that was left at the original site of the blast.Then the shift to the politicians when the scientists turn their weapon to the decision makers. Then the hordes of B-29 fleets pulverizing the Japanese homeland and then delivering the bombs themselves, and then the stunned aftermath where the agonizing decision was made for the Japanese to surrender, and then the start of the occupation, Americans startled that the Japanese people who greeted them when they arrived as conquerors in their home territories were grateful and joyous rather than sullen or dejected.
Read MoreApartment 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.
Read MoreThe Art of Miracles
There are relatively few miracles in the Old Testament and they vary in quality in that some are artistically rendered and so provide lasting images, like the Burning Bush, or seem just a trick, like Daniel in the lion’s den, that simply occasioning surprise in that he simply survives rather than the miracle conveying meaning on its own, as happens when Lot’s wife turns to a pillar of salt when she looks back to see the destruction of Sodom, and so indicates that people ought not to turn back on their lives lest they become frozen or transfixed in that reverie rather than move on to new events. That particular miracle is deep, something more than a violation of physical nature. It is about the actuality of social and psychological nature. When Joshua stopped the sun so that his army had time to win the battle, it was a sense that a long and bloody afternoon kept on and on until this battle was done, as if it were that the sun had not been allowed to set. The Bible is replete with this imagery, only some of them considered miracles so as to make a point and also to show that God, one way or another, intervenes in things. It would have been not at all that surprising for a spark to set off a burning bush. Its significance was in that a voice was associated with it and so is in keeping with the very deep Hebraic insight that God appears in voices as a kind of event rather than in other events, like catastrophes or places that are holy in themselves.
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 MoreMorals 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.
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 MoreA Bit of Decoration
When Andy Warhol in the Sixties started making his silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe and Mao Tse Tung, he changed what art had been for twenty five hundred years or so and did something very different and not for the better. Previously, art had been a window into life, a depiction of scenes and arrangement and color that conveyed meaning and emotion, within a frame even if there was no frame and even if very large, as was still true in the Abstract Expressionism of the Fifties. Instead, the difference of one object to the other of his silkscreens were colors that added nothing to the emotion or meaning, instead only providing a differentiation that could allow even the multiple copies of one of the images differentiated enough to be peddled as being something different. Nothing changed after that revolution in that art has dry ironies but little emotion or arrangement, one exception being the quartet of women whose photo was taken every year and so allow how these distinct but familially related people age over time, true to the oldest instinct of portraiture, which is to see what is the person behind the face. I want to look at some of the holdings in the contemporary wing of the Chicago Art Institute to see whether I can reap something of value for my pre Warhol aesthetics.
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 MorePolitics Akilter
There is a widespread perception afoot, so announced by a number of pundits, that American politics and American society are out of whack. The evidence that suggests that the regular institutions and the usual arrangements and interests of the various demographic populations are not doing what they are supposed to be doing include the fact, central to me, that half of the Republican congresspeople have not admitted that Biden was legitimately elected, that Congress does not want to investigate an insurrection at the Capital, and that poor people are supporting Republicans and that farmers are also supporting Republicans even if trade wars against China have not been to their economic advantage. What is going on? The usual explanations have come up empty.
Read MoreFolk Metaphysics
There are a set of adages that people offer to explain and organize their lives that go beyond whatever are their doctrines or experiences of their religions or their philosophies. These adages, which are foisted by relatively uneducated people as an alternative to religion and philosophy, nevertheless have a persistence which crosses generations. The point of these adages is to provide a natural justice whereby people, in the nature of things, get their just deserts as well as their opportunities to act freely in life. These adages are often harsh and crude and yet satisfying. I want to point out some of them to give a flavor of this subterranean world of understanding that surfaces whenever any of them are needed to articulate what has to be and whatever has always been.These can be considered as the folk metaphysics which is currently present but which we suspect is of very long duration in that people need a metaphysics even if and in addition to more overt and formalized systems that do exist. These constitute what we might call the implicit beliefs to which people adhere and have adhered, and so make up the social glue that sociologists search to find in community or primitive religion rather than these rational if possibly mistaken views of how the social world works.
Read MoreReligion, Scholarship, and Jesus
Karen King is a professor at the Harvard Divinity School that specializes on the shards that remain of the documents concerning the time of the Gospels that are not considered part of the canonical literature, particularly the one called “The Gospel of Mary'' where Mary Magdalene is treated as a figure that led the Christian community even if that role is attributed to Peter as the one upon which the Church was set. Like Elaine Pagals, just one generation before her, King thinks that these gospels discovered in the last 150 years shows that the well known gospels suppressed the roles of women and perhaps led to a patriarchal sense of Christianity that has persisted ever since. Scholars investigating these non-canonical texts will reveal a very different history for Christianity than is the one with which people are familiar. One of those texts King investigates is a shard that refers to both “Jesus” and “wife”, which would suggest that Jesus rejected a wife or treated the Church as his wife or even had married her. That would be quite a finding.Ariel Sabar’s new book “Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” tells the story of that discovery within the very rich context of contemporary Biblical scholarship and eventually unravels the fact that this text was a forgery, fooling even the most authoritative of scholars.
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.
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