Samuel Johnson should be best known as the father of modern literary criticism. Before him, there were mostly what we would today call works of literary theory, such as Sir Philip Sidney’s “Art of Poetry”, which explained the nature of literature. That had mostly been the case in literary studies since antiquity. Commentary was reserved for the Bible and the works of theologians. Johnson, on the other hand, made observations about the author and about lines within the texts of Shakespeare and all the other major poets in English in the century before he wrote so as to make the texts more accessible and therefore pleasurable for the reader and so led to the false conclusion that criticism was a parasitic discipline that lived off the literature upon which it commented rather than was the application of the personality, wisdom and wit of the commentator to make these secular texts come alive by providing comments on them.
Read MoreAccessible Art in Chicago
I had an art Trifecta when I visited Chicago last week. I saw a comprehensive Cezanne exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute, its premiere museum. I saw at the Museum of Contemporary Art, a museum that often disappoints, a large show of installations and sculptures of Nick Cave, an artist coming into prominence, and I saw in a hole-in-the- wall gallery in a developing neighborhood, an artist that I had never heard of. What they all had in common was the accessibility of the art. The friend I was with said you could take a pre-teen to the Cave show and the child would get its intricate hangings and the monumental outre statues, knowing some to be a joke and others just dazzling, but wondered whether the visitors would get Cezanne, and I thought so, even if Cezanne is known as a great artist and people might see the show just so as to say they were there.
Read More"Eleanor and Franklin"
I am rewatching he 1976 miniseries biopic “Eleanor and Franklin'' and I find it very moving, much deeper than the romance and marriage of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII, who were ninnies who never accomplished anything other than flirt with Fascism and spend the Fifties, as I remember it, living in the Waldorf Astoria in New York and spending their time with cafe society, one evening after the other going to the famous restaurants, nor the even more dull Charles, who cruelly married Diana even though he knew himself devoted to Camilla, the true love of her life, who he reclaimed and who by now will become the Queen Consort when he finally ascends to the throne. The story of Diana is of a rather limited woman overcome by paparazzi though perhaps more so by a reigning queen who could do little else than to muddle with her family, mostly preventing them from marrying the people they wanted: her sister and then her son and finally having to give in to Megan, the divorced American Black woman who within a few years she and her husband spurned the whole family.
No, “Eleanor and Franklin” are about deep stuff, partly because it was based on the Joseph Lash biography, he having been a good friend of Eleanor’s when she was older, and because of Jane Alexander and Edward Herrmann in the title roles who while mimicking some of their peculiarities, such as her high pitched voice and his overly bon honomie, were beyond that and made the two fully human beings, their lives full of flaws and makeshift events and yet determined by both of themselves to make something of themselves, the truth being that neither of them might seem the metal to achieve high achievement.
Read MoreOriginal Good
The fundamental tenet and experience of Christianity is that people are all subject to original sin and therefore have to be released from that and the event is accomplished by God sending down His Son Jesus to suffer and therefore atone for all the sins of mankind. St. Paul, who developed that doctrine, may have done so as to explain how it was that a Messiah could have died when in Jewish tradition a Messiah had to live. So Peter found an excuse for Jesus to die: He was destined to redeem mankind from sin. But Jesus is logically secondary to the primary sense that mankind needs redemption from its failings, Christianity having an exquisite sense of misery, that people are unworthy and polluted. Jesus, in a way, is a deus ex machina: He is the one to rescue the settlers from the Indians, and He does that work whether He was a real Son of God, the incarnation of the Deity, as Paul thought, or if He is a symbolic and historical figure who shows the path to enlightenment so that people are no longer overwhelmed by their guilt and shame. Christianity prizes itself on making their people feel very deeply their blame before they are freed from it.
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 MoreNew Yorker Covers and Culture
Some years ago, my friend, the critic of culture Roland Wulbert, remarked that “New Yorker” covers contained only one joke. I did not know whether this observation was a convention unessential to the genre of the magazine’s cover or whether it was an essential point so that this form of understanding could not be the same thing if it were to include multiple jokes. I have been intrigued with this insight ever since. I want to get right what magazine covers are as forms of expression and what they tell about the message to be conveyed or about the temper of the times, cultural critics looking at the nuances of one or another aspect of culture so as to grasp the nature of reality, of existential life, or else the social ambiance of a time, for those items of culture reveal far more to me, at least, than what is told by survey research or by the not so deep thinkers who opine over the airways.
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 MoreTish Harrison Warren and Gentle Christianity
I want to comment on Tish Harrison Warren, an op-ed columnist recently added to the New York Times, who covers religion and morality from an Anglican perspective. She seems like a nice woman who exemplifies the most decent and humane instincts not only about life but as a reflection of her Christianity. I consider her one of the many people I have met or read about who give Christianity a good name even while I diverge on the basic principles of Christianity, such as the Atonement, or Original Sin, or a Virgin Birth, or history unfolding a great plan for humanity despite the fact, as Christopher Hutchins pointed out, there was an awful long history of suffering that preceded Christianity two thousand years go and Christ did not do much about it before that and, indeed, since His appearance. Christianity has also created a great deal of suffering, including the idea that people should love their oppressor, yielding a regime that is much like North Korea. But however gifted Hutchins was as a polemicist, and whatever are the outlandish and implicitly cruel policies conveyed by Christian thought and feeling, I am a sociologist of religion and so I can recognize that Christians, despite their fundamental beliefs and emotions, can behave and feel themselves to be decent people with benevolent impulses, Tish Warren one of them, and so I want to understand what she is saying in her own words for the weight that carries, rather than for what the history of Christianity may carry with it. So I have no need to insult her, just understand what her own words say about particular matters and what, in general, her particular stance on Christianity conveys.
Read MoreJane's Aphorism
My deceased wife had an aphorism that seems to ring true and to which I regularly return. It says: “If you can’t explain what you mean, then you can’t know what you mean”. She arrived at this aphorism by trial and error by noticing people who got confused when they were asked to explain themselves. This insight had been formalized by Bertrand Russell's Theory of Definite Description which propounded the idea that a wrong statement was not just incorrect but made no sense. If a statement were properly propounded, it had to make sense. Jane applied this criterion to any number of people who got very annoyed at having failed to make themselves as clear as Jane required people to be. It was a standard that also applied in the mid Twentieth Century to what was then considered an age of ideology. I would have arguments with Marxists and Stalinists where each of us would try to pick out the crucial flaw in their logic, reducing one another to basic and irreducible axioms. I would argue that Weber’s idea of status and organization were independent of social class as the ways to create power and that was all that had to be said, and a Stalinist and I also came to agree to essentials, he thinking that something called the Communist Party would govern over the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its wisdom would lead us to the future, in whatever way the Party chose and saw fit, while I thought the evolution of society was subject to the constraints of social structure. I thought him quasi religious in he giving himself over to an ultimate authority, or to put it otherwise, to an almighty, but he was clear and consistent. He knew what he meant even if his basic stated principles did seem to me muddled because any leader could call himself a Communist and lord over everyone if there were no independent standards. That point of view is very different from the present one where people can, in effect, invoke the idea actors or feigning roles that “you know what I mean” as a way of providing a sufficient explanation for their meaning, having a sense of it that it would be rude to suggest needed further explanation, and people back in those days also though rude if Jane would persist and insist on people explaining themselves i f they were not to be thought of as engaging in gibberish. No longer insisting on narrowing down to basic principles but only a general sense of things to be respected.
Read MoreThe Legitimacy of the Supreme Court
The legitimacy of the United States Supreme Court may be deteriorating, whether because so many decisions are badly decided or because too many of them are so out of general public sentiment. Leaking of Justice Alito’s draft decision to override Roe v. Wade is just a fru-fru that doesn’t amount to much even if Sen. Cruz of Texas says he is sure, without evidence, that a Liberal had disclosed it, and that the perpetrator should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, though it is not clear that this is even a minor legal infraction. After all, this is not a national security matter, just a custom of privacy before everyone has had a chance to edit a decision. Moreover, it is the Conservative Supreme Court watchers who are the ones casting aspersions to the legitimacy of the Court in that they are the ones who seem to find every recent major decision since Brown v. Board of Education to have been flawed and requires being overturned. What validity should Supreme Courts hold if they get everything wrong? Indeed, most major decisions rest on flimsy grounds. Griswald discovered the penumbra of the Constitutional right to privacy and Roe invented legislative like stipulations about when the Court could allow when the government could intervene in privacy (the last trimester), something subject to change every few years when there are advances in neonatal care that move fetal viability to ever shorter terms in their pregnancies. It is a very different way to make decisions from on high as when the Vatican insists it never makes mistakes or apologizes for few papal decisions or even administrative matters where they have erred. If errors are frequent, then how is the Catholic Church to be infallible? If the Supreme Court is regularly erroneous, how are we to think that the Court is wise and thoughtful?
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 MoreThe White House Press Conference
The White House Press Conference is a peculiar institution, one of long standing and going back to when FDR met a gaggle of reporters to crowd around his desk and throw out questions, knowing that FDR could handle any ones that came up, avoiding hot potatoes and providing answers both glib and persuasive if he wanted to say something. Steve Early, His press secretary, facilitated information traffic rather than made much news. Jen Psaki, the present press secretary, who meets in the press room to take questions most days of the work week, follows most predecessors in not trying to make much news. She refers questions to the State or Defense Departments or to agencies to get details, and works hard not to utter a striking phrase or otherwise outshine or anticipate whatever the President might have said about a matter or what the President might soon say. That was different from what happened in the Trump Administration when press secretaries vied to be as partisan as possible and so curry favor with Trump, there being an audience of one for the press room, while Psaki’s audience is to the public, to make the Administration as surefooted as possible and in line with the Administration’s point of view.
Read MoreAnarchic Democracy
Democrats are in the dumps. Poll numbers are cratering for Joe Biden. Paul Krugman says that the Republican field of Senatorial candidates are just spewing hate rather than offering policy alternatives. The Krugman analysis has credibility because Mitch McConnell has said that he is going to run the midterms on inflation, the border, and crime, though he just mentions the topics rather than offers alternative policies. McConnell is just carping, Republicans full of outrage rather than solutions, And why should that not be the case? The Democrats are on the defensive, many of them sure that they will lose both the House and the Senate even if Biden has managed Covid and the Russian Ukraine War quite well. What is the disconnect between governmental results and the electorate? That is the question I want to answer.
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 MoreWartime Atrocities
Let us try to sort out the terms that are now being applied to the newly discovered wartime atrocities found north of Kiev, that term neutral in that it remains problematic whether these events of Russian troops killing civilians, executing them after they are tied behind their backs, is to be treated as a war crime or even a genocide which is what Zelensky says is the case because the Russians are out to eliminate Ukraine as a people. Biden regards them merely as war crimes and regards Putin as a butcher and a war criminal and wants independent authorities to put on trial those who are responsible. Those events of killing civilians are vile and horrendous and certainly to be condemned, but whether to try them is a good question. Today, we say that killing civilians is a war crime because it does not fulfill a military objective. In similar fashion, it is considered a violation of the rules of warfare not to execute prisoners of war and expect combattants to either be wearing a uniform or some insignia or, at the least, be enrolled in a military so that the person is not regarded as a terrorist. But these restrictions only apply to the defeated. Japanese commanders were executed for having mistreated prisoners of war and Germans for having used slave labor camps. But the victors get scot free. Gen. Curtis LeMay was not prosecuted for leveling Japanese cities, the bombing of civilians treated as collateral damage while artillery aimed at civilians is regarded, now as then, as culpable. You could argue that hurting the morale of civilian targets is a military goal, but in that case Russians are now engaged in hurting morale by killing people and so should not be regarded as a war crime.
Read MoreNon-Sexy Dreams
Like most people, I suppose, I dream about stories and issues other than lust and ambition. As a sociologist, perhaps, I also dream about social situations and problems, sometimes quite amusing, that provide insights I would not have arrived at when awake or, when dreaming,come up with half baked solutions because my mind has not thought of a better one, either asleep or awake. I dreamed, for some reason I can't readily assign to newspaper accounts or to general knowledge, that Israeli expatriates are infiltrating non profit organizations in New York City so as to familiarize themselves with what Jewish Americans and other Americans are thinking so as to know how to respond to America. So they go to the Met or Carnegie Hall as well as synagogues and churches to take the pulse of New York culture. Is Israel threatened? Is New York about to turn against Israeli sentiment? I don’t think so in my awakened life and the tone of the dream story does not have the tone of animosity or fear. Maybe it just shows that I have a lingering identification with Israel and my dream is a better indication of that fact than my protestations to that effect when awake might indicate. To use an overworked word correctly, dreams tell me that my feelings about Israel are authentic rather than affected.
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