The Post-War Years

November 17, 2024

That was also a towering generation.

For some reason or other, I was particularly struck at a young age by political and otherwise public matters. I remember the day FDR died, which is when I was four. We were visiting relatives and heard it on the radio and my parents were very distressed even though they were not particularly political. My mother thought about the fate of Jews but did not remember when I asked her years later of walking with me down the Grand Concourse in the Bronx to celebrate Israel’s Independence Day. For his part, my father just insisted that all rich people were crooks, getting their ill gotten gains, even George Washington. I have other early memories during and after the War ended. (I still think of the Second World War as “the War” whatever were the wars that came afterwards.) I remember blackouts. My parents put in a night light near my bed because it was so dark when the drapes and curtains were drawn. Men complained about how little gas was allocated through their ration categories but my father always seemed to get enough gas to travel between the Bronx and his father’s house in the Catskills. The three of us were able to take a trip to Akron, Ohio so the family could work in a bakery owned by the rich uncle who had brought my mother and her sister to America. The women in the extended family worked at the front selling baked goods while the men in the back made the baked goods, the kids just getting out of the way because the multiple families were so busy. Maybe Uncle Benjamin had gotten a lot of flour on the Black Market. The store was always filled with customers. Back in the Bronx, there was plenty of meat available in the local kosher meat market, and women would bring their ration stamps to be given to the butcher along with the cash. People were not hungry and rationing quickly ended after the War ended even though rationing in Great Britain didn’t end until the Fifties.

Re-release: Class and Gender in Thirties Movies

October 22, 2024

Men, like the poor, are stolid and reliable, while women, like the rich, are diverse and uncertain.

In four years we will mark the centenary of “The Jazz Singer”, the first talkie movie. That is as long a time as the century between the time of “Great Expectations” and when I graduated from college. That seems to me to be a very big difference. There should be a major celebration of the invention of the talkies, as important as great battles or other events so dedicated, because so much was ushered into our consciousnesses. Maybe the publication dates of great novels, those who always seemed to have been here once they were created, should also provide a new version of a saints calendar, also now forever once canonized. Oh, and how the talkies talked! The dialogue of Thirties films, often based on plays and novels, were crisp and witty and eloquent, characters saying what they had to say about themselves and other people and their situations, even including “The Grapes of Wrath”, where Henry Fonda makes clear enough what an Okie immigrant family off to California had to say for himself in his understated way. But that decade was so long ago, however vibrant they may still be, that the topics covered in them, across the genres of comedy, tragedy and melodrama, are very different from the ones seen today and so it takes some excavation so as to mine them.

The topics for the decade were the condition of women and the condition of the rich. In both cases, the conditions were problematic in that it wasn’t clear what women or the rich were like or what they should be like. Both of those kinds of people were murky and so difficult to understand. Ernst Lubitch, known for his scintillating touch, starts “Bluebeard’s Ninth Wife” with whether Claudette Colbert is married or unmarried or a loose woman or not because she is buying the trousers of men’s pajamas. It turns out that she is buying it for her father and so that is respectable and so the romance can begin, Gary Cooper, not known for comedy, the usual and unproblematic man who is daring, decisive and stoic, just what a stereotypical man should be, just as he is in all his stereotypical roles all the way through “High Noon” and beyond, while Grace Kelly is surprising in that she appears ats the decisive decision maker at the end of that movie. Women are amazingly different from one another even if also attractive while male heroes like Fonda and Heston and the aforementioned Cooper are true to form even if also deficient rather than fulfilled, as happens in “The Wizard of Oz”, where the Tin Man is lacking a heart and the Scarecrow lacks a brain, and the cowardly Lion lacks courage. A true man has to gain all three attributes, while Dorothy and the other women and girls all have their own peculiar motives, Dorothy wanting just to go home, and all those witches, some good and some bad.

The same is true of the women in the melodramas of the Thirties that were regarded as “women movies” because they explored the varieties of what were women, ever fascinating and to men alluring even if subject to conversation as “only” about women’s concern. The queen of the sub-genre was Bette Davis who could be everything: an ugly duckling who becomes a therapist and a lover to a limited Paul Henried in “Now, Voyager”, a flibbertigibbet who becomes a heroine as she faces death in “Dark Victory'', men in these movies dutiful, like George Brett, never fully aware of what is going on in women’s secrets, as when he is killed in a duel in “Jezebel” because Bette Davis eggs him on about supposed slights and then she turns into a hero by taking Henry Fonda into a pest house during an epidemic, she more likely to manage through it if anybody could. Women could be anything, but men were the same old.

The same division between women as problematic as to what they are while men have problems, whether of enemies or existential issues while remaining true to their identity or just failing to accomplish it by being too soft or insufficiently suspicious or overtaken by lust, as happens in “Double Indemnity”, something Catholics understand as an overabundance of a natural thing, also applies to the rich, who are problematic in that they are opaque, not quite revealing what they are up to. The young George Cukor’s movie “Holiday” enters a rich home to find out what those people are like. The girl to whom he is engaged but he knew little about her turns out to want him to become a banker, which he, Cary Grant, finds boring, himself a self made man through Harvard and a fancy law firm, and wants to try out new things, which is admirable for men, and so she tires of him, while her sister, Katherine Hepburn, perhaps at her most glamorous rather than overly angular, wants Grant to follow his whims, which is what a respectable and loving girl wants her man to happen, a lapse into conventionality unbecoming of Hepburn as the independent woman, but there being other fish to fry, and so the two at the end come to one another, as would be expected from the first moment the two stars meet with one another because, after all, they are the stars. The financial magnate of the family, on the other hand, is difficult to understand other than that he has connections but does not know why capitalist fetishism is a concept much less a fault, just trying to meet his potential son in law by offering his own connections and wealth, having disregarded his own son who drinks too much because he is so tied to the loathsome bank when he had wanted to be a musician. Woe is me to the children of the rich. They are all psychologically scarred and most of them would be better off without money, which is a fantasy that other than rich people in the audience might find as a compensation for not being rich.

Unlike most Thirties movies, which are long on talk and short on visuals, Cukor is alive with set decoration, leading to his visualization thirty years later of “My Fair Lady”, what with all those flowers. Here, in “Holiday”, Cukor contrasts the mansion with staircases and internal elevators and regal paintings and adornments, with the room Hepburn has set aside for herself as having a fire, comfortable sofas, bookcases and the piano and barbells her brother used before he gave up his childish ways. (Someone else, I suppose, stokes that fire. As Mel Brooks might say, “It's not bad being rich.”) Hepburn is comfortable rather than stuffy, and that seems all to be said of the difference between the rich and those not inclined to be rich, the father saying he does not understand what is happening to the world other than that it makes him uncomfortable. The rich are not greedy, just confused, a set on the way out if they could bother to notice. Maybe the title is called “Holiday” because viewers are on holiday visiting the rich but knowing the rich are dodos, those people making themselves rather than their employees miserable.Feel sorry for them. That is a kind of vacation.

On the other hand, the poor are not problematic, even if they are also tragic or flawed. To use the terms used by Civil Rights activists in the Sixties, when whites asked what Blacks wanted, the answer was that Blacks wanted to have what white people already had. Similarly, the poor in the Thirties, wanted the comforts of the rich, by hook or by crook. Edward G. Robinson in “Little Caesar” wanted to become a powerful boss and his nerve, intelligence and diligence, all male traits, led that to him, even though he is machine gunned in the end, a classic tragedy about the wheel of life, ending with his remark “Is this the end of Rico?”, which sadly it is. The hero of “Scarface” also rises to the top and also is upended, even more unsettled by his unaware lust for his own sister. But that is aside from the rise and fall, all the way through to the Godfather trilogy, where he cannot free himself from crime and become, let us say, a Senator. His greatest betrayal is that of his wife, who aborts his child, because she does not want to live with this gangster family, and that is the only time that Michael Corleone rages rather than calculates, while his older brother Sonny is always raging, and so weaker as a man. The type of men runs through the movie decades.

One of those so-called “screwball comedies” of the Thirties combines the two binaries of male and female and rich and poor. It is Gregory De Cava’s “My Man Godfrey” starring William Powell and Carol Lombard. The magnate father is annoyed at the spendthrift ways of his wife, who is a ninny, as well as his two daughters, one mean and vindictive and snooty while the other is ditzy, and supposed to have had a nervous breakdown in the past when in fact she was trying to escape from her madcap lives. The two daughters compete in a scavenger hunt, which means they are so mean spirited and callous and humiliating so as to recruit some poor person as well as a live goat to show himself to a society party to win points for having accumulated worthy objects that are useless. The mother has what is called a “protege”, which is an exiled Russian who amuses the family by walking around the living room like a gorilla to amuse the family, in return for which he gets canapes and the chance to play the piano. The idle rich are women who don’t know what to be or to do with themselves.

Into their lot comes a bum who, it turns out (spoiler alert!) to be down on his luck because he was a Harvard graduate who had been spurned by a woman and thought of suicide but was impressed by the stoical men who endured their poverty and so he lived in a shanty near a refuse dump and is picked up for the scavenger hunt and then asks to serve as a butler for what shows itself to be a ditzy family. He too is the compassionate, articulate, well mannered and stoical and resourceful person who can lead the labile young girl out of her distress and she falls for him even though he is thought to be a bum, hardly likely given his bearing, while another bum just wants his reward for having been entered into the scavenger hunt. Poor men have dignity while rich girls are mean or atwitter.

I take note, again, of the set decoration and the costumes. The, at the time, well appointed kitchen has a refrigerator with a cylindrical portion on top of it which I take was the refrigeration unit, and is, of course, now antiquated. Technology marches on.. The women wear Thirties gowns that seem to me colorless and dowdy though no doubt glamorous at the time. Fashion also moves on. The dump where Godfrey is found is just off Sutton Place, which means, I infer, before the FDR Drive built in that area and doing away with the dumps and the bums. Infrastructure changes. The value of a movie made in a time will last as physical culture is available to be appreciated from another time for its atmosphere whatever the time’s only much more slowly changing social structure.

How different it is in the movies twenty years later. In the musical remake of “The Philadelphia Story”, with Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby, called “High Society”, only the just teen daughter acts haughty and weird, everyone else normal people. Another movie at the time, “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” has Frederic March as the haggard advertising mogul who blames himself for having neglected his troubled daughter, je in despair about her rather than, in the Thirties, indulging her. Gregory Peck is the up and coming advertising executive, also forthright and stoic, who arranges to provide regular money to the child he had made when in Italy during the war when he finds out about their condition, and the wife supports him in his plan, something regarded as heroic.

Skip another generation. The rich are like Michael Douglas in “Wall Street”, from 2010, just greedy rather than people who can justify themselves, as investment bankers do, of making it possible for the economic market to work, and young women are physically exploited by rapacious men, as is clear in “The Handmaid's Saga”. Reese Witherspoon in the recent miniseries “The Morning Show” offers up many victims of rape because of men using their powerful positions, a version of the idea of a previous generation where Andrea Dworkin saif that all sex is rape, just modified enough to be plausible, when what I think is that Jane Austen got the relation of the sexes and the rich and the poor just about right, however are the changes since then of costume and mores. Mr. Wickham, in “Pride and Prejudice”, is a cad, but he is an exception to the rule, not the rule itself.

A word should be said about the relation of fiction to reality. Should we trust to Thirties movies and those films that follow them about the reality of what is depicted there? After all, fiction, whether a novel or a movie, is made up. Its characters and plots are concocted even if films claim to be “based on a true story” because scriptwriters put in events and characters so as to make the films clearer to follow and so as to fill out a generic type.Its hard to make up settings, it is true, especially in science fiction, where even Kubrick’s “2001” is an extrapolation of how women and men would dress and how no one would smoke. So a reader is unlikely to trust fiction. People are distorted from what people really are and situations are abbreviated or just insufficiently imagined rather than an accurate depiction of reality.

But what is the alternative? Voting behavior measured through polling data may have said somewhat accurately from 1940 to about 1980 or so who would vote for whom, that moment past in that people came to hide their preferences by lying. And even the most innocuous question, such as whether you approve of the President, is ambiguous, in that it doesn’t make clear whether you approve his way as a person or approve of his policies. And much of history is to condense contemporary newspaper reporting with some documents added on. So what else is there to do but find the truth through fiction, especially when it comes to the temper of the times or the fads of the moment, like Hula Hoops and the war between the Communists and the ex-Communists that Whittiker Chambers regarded as the central debate and war of his time?

I would suggest we follow Georg Simmel who thought that what was embedded inevitably in fiction was not the mores or the fashions or the technologies of a time, however much those artifacts are accurately recorded in film s of the past, but what Simmel regarded as the inevitable consequences of sociation, which means the qualities that emerge from people dealing with one another. Things like cooperation and conflict and hierarchy are everywhere the same down to the higher apes and I would suggest the same for friendship (as old as “Gilgamesh”), and courtship and political negotiation. Simmel modified only to mean that social structures may change, but only very gradually, even as those other things feel quite different from one generation to the next. Men and women haven’t changed since Samson and Delilah, even if Feminists say otherwise. So trust the Thirties movies as telling the truth.

Recording Events

August 15, 2024

Framing events, like Facebook, can make people vulnerable so that they think themselves as victims.

It used to be that only special people, like St. Augustine or Rousseau, thought they needed to explain themselves by recording themselves, but that seems, over time, to have become a prominent feature of contemporary consciousness, perhaps augmented by Kodak cameras which every person could record their family growing up and so not restricted to rich people who people like John Singer Sargent could portray of their daughters or portraits painted by Gainsborough of beer barons. Computer technology allows everyone to write and publish a memoir. But recordings predated advanced technology. Yes, people had diaries but with rare exceptions those were not meant to be made public. Tombstones had inscriptions of dates, family and epigrams, but those were not from the dead but from the living. Pharaohs followed the traditional idea that only singular people deserved being remembered in gigantic tombs.

The best example of this being an age of self regard is Facebook, a phenomenon only some twenty years old and yet to seem essential to many of its ardent participants. People post their everyday activities, such as pictures of friends and cats and homes and brief videos of jumping into the lake and announcing what of the voluntary community events in which they participate. The purpose is not to create art because no standard of proficiency is required or applied but to make one’s personal activities visible just so as to make these public and therefore a record of one’s activities rather than a list of accomplishments as one might find in a vita offered to a possible employer. That display allows a person to communicate with others in a harmless way and simply to be present in that they are part of the digital world, and so different from personally addressed letters where an attempt is being made to communicate a particular fact or feeling to the addressee. This is a pure example of being neither artistic nor practical even if part of the membership is trying to do just that. Rather, Facebook contributors are just trying to be recorded and vindicated as that by their posts.

Trump's Charisma

February 29, 2024

Max Weber defined “charisma” as a personal quality but I prefer to regard it as the attribute of an office rather than as a personal quality because of the derivation of the term “charisma” as referring to people being invested with an aura like power by higher authority as happens when there is a laying down of hands in a church congregation or empowered by regulations in Catholic Church so that one is made a priest or a bishop. Hebrew rabbis earned their charisma by the number of their followers. In a modern secular world, political figures get their charisma through election into office, Donald Trump thinking that a President has the right to kill his political opponents, so universal is the power of the charisma of that office. That is very different from the popular version of charisma where the term refers to personal charm and attractiveness, which applies to movie stars and pop singers and may indeed be part of what leads some people, such as Ronald Reagan, to be elevated to the Presidency.

More formally put and more up to date is to define charisma as a role in that it has a body of attributes that make it recognizable as having a distinctive set of activities, such as being a bus driver or a physician or a father who is called upon to do the things that are part of those roles or to be found lacking in that role, so it can be said some people are bad parents or inept at repairing a computer glitch even if they pretend to be otherwise. Roland Wulbert has suggested to me that a person is charismatic if they are never contrite, just as Jesus was never contrite and Donald Trump was criticized for not being contrite even though not being so was at the heart of his being and so violated normal behavior. But he was being what he was, which was charismatic, and there are oyster attributes to be added as the qualities of charisma, including incisiveness that sees farther than ordinary people do, or confidence despite what ordinary people may think, or as Trump points out, being a stable genius, even if he is not eloquent, as Hitler was, and so may mangle or exaggerate or even lie, the truth underlying his words an expression of his charisma.

Here are some other attributes of the role of the charismatic. Such a person has authority to declare meanings as legitimate, as when supreme court justices decide whether separate but equal is fair at the turn into the Twentieth Century and is a contradiction half a century later. Charismatics endure slander against them, as is the case with Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Trump. Charismatics draw their followers to themselves, which is the case with Luther and Lenin and Trump. Why do their followers do so? That seems the most central power and so is taken to be a magic like enchantment of the charismatic person by the followers, as if they were indeed pop stars. But the basis of charismatic following can be tawdry and unholy. Gandhi pedaled a retrogressive economic policy but adopted a garb and a demeanor and attracted publicity that made contributions to Indian independence. Trump was an inherited real estate mogul who bankrupted his own casinos but had an afterlife as a celebrity selling the idea of being a mogul on television who dreamed of being trich and respected, which was every Ralph Kramden’s dream, and that led him into a political venture he expected to lose and wound up the possession of a gigantic following. Barnum would be proud. Nothing very impressive is needed to get one’s credentials as a charismatic person. That is why Weber thought charisma introduced something new into the social mix but was unreliable because it was untethered. FDR had charm and he did win over the American people, but Al Smith thought there wasn’t much to be said for a cripple who would die soon, and instead persevered for thirteen years as President.

So if personal charm is not the key to being charismatic, unlike movie stars who have to fill the screens with their magnetism,.what is it that people make of Trump that gives him his hold on them? People interviewed about Trump, including both ordinary voters and people like Lindsay Graham, who seems to just admit accepting to the fact that Trump has his loyal supporters and that is reason enough to make his peace with him, is that he expresses himself crudely towards women, or with exaggeration, though not quite willing to say he lies, because Trump apparently evokes a deeper sense of what is wrong with American politics. Yes, Trump is a braggart and a loudmouth and always mean and angry but maybe people feel liberated by having someone voice feelings and ideas that they themselves would be ashamed to voice. Trump is naughty and that makes respectable people feel glad about it even if they say tsk tsk to his more outrageous claims or secretly sympathize with his racist thoughts to, for example, reinstate an Arab ban on immigration, only letting Europeans in. Trump expresses their darkest angels. That doesn’t mean he is not likable. It is that supporters either feign likeability, as with Graham (who early on despised him) or have transmuted unlikeability into its opposite, seeing the virtue of being at odds with everything in government they find objectionable as one Trump supporter in 2016 who was against government intervention but demanded saving her Social Security, as if that weren't a government program.

It is a good question whether Trump found an audience looking for him or whether his support was generated out of the shambles of the 2016 Republican primary battle, where no opponent seemed to be able to deal with his demeaning jokes about his contenders. They still thought candidates should maintain some dignity and he didn’t or treated their opponents with it.

Weber thought that charismatics brought innovation into social life because that was the only alternative to custom and law as forms of social control, custom being the time immemorial way to do things, and law and bureaucracy, by which Weber meant the same thing, as having begun to prosper in the late Medieval period with the development of joint stock companies. But innovation is only a universal claim by charismatics that they are doing so. In fact, charismatics use innovation to establish retrogression. Jesus announced a new dispensation of being kind to people when, in fact, the Prophets had said the same while introducing the retrograde idea of miracles and pagan mythology. Hitler announced the innovations of technology, such as planes and cars and weaponry, but was reviving an older spirit of family values and ethnic warfare. Stalin was ushering in a new age of economic organization when he was establishing himself as the most bloodthirsty of the Czars. In general, it is incorrect to agree with “Ideology and Utopia” and think the cutting division is between past and future mindedness.

Trump is also a charismatic who pretends progress but engages in retrogression. He says he will be revolutionary by dismantling “the deep state”, suspend parts of the Constitution and creating detention centers for hundreds of thousand illegal aliens, but what he actually proposes is an old fashioned border wall, the self same restoration of Fifties family values, and punitive forms of law and order, a platform adopted from traditional Republicans so as to get their support when, pre-political, he had been open on social issues, as might be expected of most New Yorkers. Trump has joined a Know Nothing nativist party, though he may not mean he knows only Americanism but that he really doesn’t know very much about anything.

Weber misunderstood the innovativeness and potency of custom and law. Custom does not mean mores of very ancient times but only practices that seem to have ever been and forever to be even if they last only for a brief period of time. So the double standard whereby sexual chastity was expected for only women existed for hundreds and hundreds of years or maybe for thousands but was suspended a genera tion or two back and now it seems natural for women to have sexual relations as they please. That is the new natural and an amnesia sts upon what was the natural previously. Similarly, law also seems to suspend time in that what a law does is make edicts stated in the past binding in the future. But laws can be modified. The Founding Fathers developed the Constitution as an original form of government as that was expressed in a set of intersecting fundamental laws that emphasized the balance of power and Supreme Court rulings are able to create rights and abolish them, as when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Roe v. Wade and abolished the right of abortion fifty years later. Law is flexible and those who make it and administer it are also flexible, rather than an iron rule of delegated authority responsible only to an original charismatic. Weber was being too Lutheran in thinking that the sole freedom of a person or a society was to submit, to engage in free will, to be obedient to God or some other charismatic, and that applies to custom as well, whereby people adopt and dispense with hula hoops, the moon walk, Taylor Swift and hiding under student desks so as to train for an atomic invasion.

Another cardinal characteristic of a charismatic person is not to take their words too seriously. The allegiance of the follower to the charismatic is formed by the strength of the personality of the charismatic, the follower trying to gauge the subtleties of the emotions conveyed even if not clear on the character underlying the personality. The charismatic remains an enigma, obscured from others even as followers try to grasp his meanings or being. Jesus remains enigmatic, his personality obscure, seen mostly from the outside, and his sayings enigmatic, deliberately confounding his listeners, though those who wrote down and edited his sayings were developed well enough to constitute a literature, in that people have pondered their meanings for thousands of years. Moses was charismatic even though and maybe because he stuttered and had a temper, and smote a person, as did Billy Budd. Washington was not charismatic, even though he was tall and dignified, because he stated what he said clearly and neither was Lincoln charismatic in that he was eloquent, even though both figures are retrospectively regarded as central iconic figures. Hitler’s strong suit was his emotional fervor, not the strength of his reasoning. He was fascinating rather than taken as wise.

Jesus is understood as charismatic and has been recognized as such for a very long time, whatever He was in life. Giotto painting “Jesus at Calvary”, from 1305, makes that clear by having his face turned to the viewer while the other figures are part of the mise en scene. Jesus is without expression, an icon of a figure, rather than realistic and so Giotto is bringing a Medieval representation of Jesus into Giotgto’s realistic setting. Jesus is different from other people and also silent and expressionless while other people bustle about, whatever His other concerns might be, about heaven or His Father or the plight of mankind, speculations where Jesus’ consciousness is never plumbed. His charisma is for the ages rather than the property of the historical Jesus.

Donald Trump should therefore not be expected to offer wisdom but rather his fierce meanness, as I have suggested, which gives him his allure, and it is his followers to explain that as an attractive feature, just as why the early followers of Jesus are to find attractive an itinerant preacher who was crucified, whatever was the evolving church structure that sustained him. Maybe Trump’s hold on people will dissipate if he is convicted of multiple felonies, but maybe, then again, not. Alive or dead, he may remain appealing to a figure who garners resentments both those real and imagined. Mankind is not likely to be rid of resentment.

The Awareness of Society

January 19, 2024

Society is an intimation or an idealization rather than a social structure.

What is a society? It appears to be a group of people, like a tribe or a nation state or a civilization, which is self sufficient in that it provides in its institutions all that is required to provide a distinctive way of life for a people. The trouble is, though, that these entities are not self-sufficient, as when the Arab civilization has to sell oil and is beset by the inroads of Western civilization and so grapple with what is essentially Islamic, becoming more and more like a set of nation states. And, more grandly, what is society in itself, that to be understood as a simile for the sea in which the fish swim? What is that overarching but central and essential object for sociologists to study? Take note that in looking at that large item a choice is being made between examining the thing as a whole rather than the basic building blocks out of which it is made. Biologists can look at living bodies for the various functions they undertake, such as respiration and digestion and reproduction, but can also look at the life of the cell and so see that is the real meaning of biological life. Similarly, sociologists can study the role or the norm as the building block which animates society as that appears to be the overwhelming and encompassing social entity which is indispensable to mind.

A usual and workable idea of society is that it is the intersection of all the social forces that are in play within a society and so make people familiar with it. So a society is made up of social class and ethnicity and institutions of politics and religion and the mass media, and everybody responds to these structures and so are in society whether or not people think of society as an object in itself. Society recognizes us even if we don’t recognize it. But that is the rub. People can recognize they have familial obligations and interests without thinking themselves trapped or maybe safe within its strictures. Society is therefore the opposite or the residual of all the actual relations people have, in which case sociology sets society in opposition to the individual, ever diminishing the ability to act as individuals as when political sociologists ever more restricted the voter to make an independent rational decision about who to select by showing that voting was contingent on social class or education and less and less on beliefs or doctrines.The opposition between the individual and society as the two negations of one another is also manifested in psychological life when people are unhinged from their self directed mental decision making by the mind being invested and overcome with totalitarian or cultish thinking or by the pernicious effects of social media. It is always possible to find the pernicious cause that leads the individual to become absorbed by society, as happened when people thought that comic books were the poison that destroyed reason before comic books became regarded as an art form.

Middle Brow Cultural Taste

January 8, 2024

Cultural tastes are more ingrained than social class.

The “Partisan Review” crowd of the Forties through the Seventies, had a very clear sense of how culture and society interacted with one another and was best stated abstractly by Dwight Macdonald in an article and then a book published in 1960, called “MassCult and MidCult”. That view could be considered a rejoinder to the Cultural Marxism which vied during the same time with a key and distinctive understanding of how culture and society interacted. Cultural Marxism was an intellectually heavier point of view and was a response to the fact that economic Marxism had not accurately predicted the eventual immiseration of the working class so that they would overthrow capitalism either through Leninist violence or Bernstein-like use of the democratic ballot box. To the contrary, economic capitalism flourished. The Fifties were an affluent society and labor unrest turned to detailed collective bargaining arrangements about wages and perquisites where both sides wanted to make a deal so the corporations could get on selling their cars and workers could get their raises and benefits, never mind whether the work itself was arduous or mind numbing. The cultural Marxists insisted, however, that there was a price for economic prosperity. It was that people were spiritually impoverished by late stage capitalism. The population as a whole was subject to alienation in that their work and their selves were lost to meaning and that the mind itself had lost the ability to engage in reasoning, that meaning, as Horkheimer put it, in the title of his book “The Eclipse of Reason'' whereby people became mindless automatons, society not run by selfish capitalists, but going on its way on its own, a totalitarian society without a Fuhrer. The best statement of this view on the American scene was Herbet Marcuse’s “One Dimensional Man”, published in 1964, which portrayed Americans of all classes, including the capitalists, obsessed with capitalist fetishism, buying until it hurt, with deodorants and slightly more upscale cars as fueled by tv and radio jingles so inane as to dumb down the populace.

Exclusive Social Movements

January 5, 2024

Whether you have or only try to parade allies makes a difference.

Sometimes a sociologist finds a simple description of a social situation that cuts through a great g slighted or dismissed or badly handled and so resentful of the ways in which the social world worked. The idea is a repeat of Hegal’s idea that the slave knows better than the lord what are the conditions of the slave’s role, but Merton had generalized that deal of ideological verbiage and makes other argumentation superfluous, so much so that once the social characteristic is identified it seems so obvious that it had always been understood as such. Robert Merton did so in one of his late essays about insiders and outsiders. Addressing the political and ideological turmoil of the Sixties, he distinguished between people who were or identified with people within institutions and those people who were outsiders, each side claiming that they better understood what was going on in social life. Insiders included politicians and academics and corporation executives who knew how the world worked, understood the mechanisms of the social world, while outsiders were people who understood because they were on the receiving end of the results. They included poor people and students and people of color and women, members of each of these groups having suffered from and outraged about their conditions. Merton was like Hegel in pointing out that the slave understood his condition more than did his master, but Merton was transferring the issue to be a general state of knowledge, each with its own claims, rather than a difference in situations. Which group, the insiders and outsiders, had more legitimate knowledge or was there such an unbridgeable gap that a person could choose the wisdom of one or the other and that was all there was to be said? Professors pontificate and students talk straight and that is just the way things are never mind the intricacies of their alternative explanations. Either you don’t trust people over thirty or you don’t.

What is Society?

November 14, 2023

Society is a concept not a thing.

What is a society? It appears to be a group of people, like a tribe or a nation state or a civilization, which is self sufficient in that it provides in its institutions all that is required to provide a distinctive way of life for a people. The trouble is, though, that these entities are not self-sufficient, as when the Arab civilization has to sell oil and is beset by the inroads of Western civilization and so grapple with what is essentially Islamic, becoming more and more like a set of nation states. And, more grandly, what is society itself, that understood as a simile for the sea in which the fish swim? What is that overarching but central and essential object for sociologists to study? Take note that in looking at that large item a choice is being made between examining the thing as a whole rather than the basic building blocks of which it is made. Biologists can look at living bodies for the various functions they undertake, such as respiration and digestion and reproduction but can also look at the life of the cell and so see that as the real meaning of biological life. Similarly, sociologists can study the role or the norm as the building block which animates society as that appears to be as the overwhelming and encompassing social entity which is indispensable to mind.

A usual and workable idea of society is that it is the intersection of all the social forces that are in play with a society and so make people familiar with it. So a society is made up of social class and ethnicity and institutions of politics and religion and the mass media, and everybody responds to these structures and so are in society whether or not people think of society as an object in itself. Society recognizes us even if we don’t recognize it. But that is the rub. People can recognize they have familial obligations and interests without thinking themselves trapped or maybe safe within its styrictures. Society is therefore the opposite or the residual of all the actual relations people have, in which case sociology sets society in opposition to the individual, ever diminishing the ability to act as individuals as when political sociologists ever more restricted the voter to make an independent rational decision about who to select by showing that voting was contingent on social class or education and less and less on beliefs or doctrines.The opposition between the individual and society as the two negations of one another is also manifested in psychological life when people are unhinged from their self directed mental decision making by the mind being invested and overcome with totalitarian or cultish thinking or by the pernicious effects of social media. It is always possible to find the pernicious cause that leads the individual to become absorbed by society, as happened when people thought that comic books were the poison that destroyed reason before comic books became regarded as an art form.

Soft and Hard Relativism

July 7, 2023

Many years ago, an historian friend engaged in what I thought was and remain to believe was “soft relativity”. He had read Max Weber on the sociology of religion and come to the conclusion that Weber was a relativist. Each of Weber's books, one on ancient Judaism, one on ancient China, one on ancient India, using the best available scholarship of the time, were describing the distinctiveness of the various religions. The particular points of view and quirks of each are insular and therefore incomparable on a common yardstick. They were therefore all culturally equal and all that could be said was that human society was splendid in its diversity. But that was to read Weber incorrectly. Weber was showing that most great religions were each defective in that they came short of being rational, while Christianity was different in that it was wedded to reason, as Pope Benedict said a century later than Weber, by declaring that Greek rationality was an essential part of Christianity rather than simply a cultural artifact of the time with which might then over time become antiquated. Weber would and did go further. Only Protestantism was rational, for the reason, I suppose, that all Protestant experience is mediated by consciousness and so belief is an expression of thought, people feeling in their hearts that they have heard the voice of God, while Catholics insist on believing in miracles and other transactions between the natural and the supernatural. To Weber, some religions are superior to others rather than subject to a putative equality that is to be identified with the concept “relativism”.

The Decline of the Liberal Arts

April 11, 2023

Does it have a use?

A recent report in the New Yorker documents a precipitous decline in liberal arts in colleges and universities. The number of students in history, English and philosophy are in decline and many departments in those colleges have closed entirely. A report replicates the same finding and adds that some politicians are disparaging liberal arts, one suggesting that students majoring in liberal arts pay higher tuition. The author of this and the other article cited are not good, however at explaining why this has come about, the New Yorker article scattershot in blaming it on Sputnik and also the difficulty of children to become fluent at reading. The article entitled “Colleges Should Be More Than Just Vocational Schools”, written by Melanie Lembrick and published in the NYT on April 2, 2023, seems to argue but only in an abbreviated manner that the decline of liberal arts is due to poorer people entering college and so not able to indulge such frivolous pursuits as liberal arts. As a product myself of the liberal arts and having devoted my life to it, I want to go more deeply into explanations and not just the facts of the decline and I conclude that there is a cultural mind shift whereby you don’t need to get educated so as to become a fuller human being and the significance of that new mindset, should it be sustained, is staggering to what it is to be a human being and a society, more important than Artificial Intelligence learning how to write an essay.

Merit in Higher Education

December 19, 2022

There is something very appealing about the idea of merit. Fantasies about merit abound in Utopias where everyone is graded in comparison with one another and rank rewards on what they are. That happens in Plato’s Republic and even in the Social Darwinist point of view presented in nineteenth century America or its derivative ideas of Ayn Rand, however many people who lose in the competitive race get squashed. That too is a kind of justice. No wonder the rejection of that idea by the New Deal that however low people score in tests or in the struggles of life, everyone should have a safety net, able to get by even if not prosper. Think of chess competition as this meritocratic regime. The recent miniseries “The Queen’s Gambit” shows how an orphan prospers from winning local, then national and then world status because of her grit, drive and brilliance, innate features honed by hard work and application. She moves up the rankings where everyone knows where they stand with regard to the other competitors and she comes quickly enough to outshine a state champion who falls into being her chess coach, himself giving up the competition and then also turning a national champion into her aide in helping her to become world champion. Everything is fair and clean and other activities allow similar rankings where merit reigns. Think of baseball and academic medicine and nuclear physics and, to some extent, academia, where the brighter do best, though there are some slippages in academia because of the way rankings are distorted by ideologies. Merit even serves a role in the grocery store business where some people are savvy enough to see what locations to rent, how to merchandise and where to get supplies regardless of their prior education. The smart ones get ahead, as was true in my high school, where people felt the pressure to compete up to the level of their abilities and to learn to be satisfied with that (or not) and accept the justice of this ranking.

Apply the idea of merit as the yardstick in the present political debate about affirmative action. Some argue that only merit should be considered in giving applicants admission into fancy schools because to do otherwise is to discriminate against certain protected groups such as Asian applicants while others suggest that preferential treatment for Black students is a way to redress past forms of discrimination even if some forms of discrimination such as preferences for legacy students or the children of big donors should be abolished. Both seem to be against anything but merit except for necessary exceptions and this exception may not hold indefinitely and not therefore to be treated as a matter of principle. And that is where the debate seems to stand, the Supreme Court having to decide one way or the other. A Justice who is inclined to the merit only requirement makes fun of colleges that think diversity includes having a good squash team or awarding an applicant to admission because his or her father can buy an art museum, which are clearly frivolous ways to award spots.

Latest Posts

Stories & Analysis of the Intersection of Culture & Social Structure