Immanuel Kant is a philosopher who is easily parodied as the one who thought people should tell the truth in all circumstances, no matter what, because only in that way would a person be treating himself and those he was talking to as full human beings. You should even reveal the whereabouts of a friend to the murderer who comes to your door asking where your friend is. Kant had obviously never heard of the Gestapo.
Not so fast. Kant's depiction of moral life makes sense if we compare his description of true lies—lies that are truly lies—with something else that is closely akin to true lies: white lies, the kinds of things people do all the time and which are regarded as necessary evasions that help move life along without doing great damage to our stature as moral beings. Consider the following examples of white lies that are drawn not from fiction but from social transactions in which I was myself involved.
Read MoreDefunding the police is a policy initiative that has arisen in recent days perhaps because of the exuberance of protesters who see that the protests have sustained for a while now and so want to implement something that will really change the lives of people in their communities as well as settle old grievances held in their communities. So the idea of funding new programs that aren’t all that new is yoked with taking revenge on the institutional oppressors, the police, by hitting them where they can be hurt, in their funding. But this is a very bad policy initiative. It does not stand up to scrutiny and so Joe Biden was correct to deny any interest in it right away and not just because Trump wanted to pin the policy on him.
Read MoreOpinion is a burden. If I have an opinion about something, whether a Presidential candidate, or when is the right time to reopen the economy, or whether the protesters in the street are correct even though looting is going on under the cover of protest, then I am responsible for saying why that is plausible to me or even just feel the emotion that goes along with the opinion and so attest to the validity of that insight even if I cannot explain it. Time can tell whether my opinion was correct or not and so an opinion is a forecast, as when one says bad people receive their just deserts, even if proof or refutation is never unambiguous. I am rooting for the future to be one way or another, to support or negate my opinion, and so I am always, as an opinionator, making a gamble on the future and that can render me tense, because I could be wrong about the future, while to be liberated from opinion means that I do not have to worry about the future. I can just watch it play out, proceed as it will, me a bystander rather than a participant. Being without opinions is therefore to no longer carry everywhere Kant’s burden of responsibility, life one set of obligations after another, even if there are also judgments of taste that people also make, but those have no cost, in that whether you prefer Schiller to Lessing makes no difference unless you mix with a set of people who think taste has a moral gravity. Rather, to be without opinion is to leave to history and, more directly, the knowledge of experts, how to proceed from here. They will know when to open up the economy if anyone knows because it is a technical matter rather than a moral one or open to everyday reason, and the unfolding statistics will tell if they are wrong or right. As a citizen, I am entitled to my opinions, but they are relevant only at election time or when a profound change of group opinion takes place, as happens when people may, now, at this moment, come to think that occasional instances of police brutality are not to be swept aside but are perhaps part of the continued subjugation of black people.
Read MoreWhen the worst riots since those of the Sixties broke out only a week ago, I thought that I was ahead of the curve by opineing to friends that outside agitators were behind them. However much I dislike conspiracy theories, in that I did not think either the left or the right had brought down JFK, even though there did seem some money behind James Earl Ray, the assassin of MLK, so that he could temporarily avoid capture, this time the pattern seemed to be clear. In many cities across the country with not enough time for the rioting to mushroom beyond Minneapolis, there were peaceful demonstrations in the daytime and evening followed by arson and looting in the night by people who were unknown to the local community and who did not identify themselves. That has since become the standard explanation provided by the media, whose interviews of peaceful protestors tell them the arsonists and looters are shadowy figures. I speculate that they are leftists or rightists or agent provocateurs employed by the Russians, who mean us no good and are availing themselves of a tactic well known to the Czarist regime and afterwards. This theory has been picked up by the Trump administration, though they are careful to accuse only the left wing Antifa and not white nationalists of being the perpetrators.
Read MoreDashell Hammett and Lillian Hellman were known to have kept their Stalinist sympathies long after such sentiments were no longer in fashion, which is close to what Hellman said in her defense during her appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hellman’s Stalinism is clear in her writing. Her “Watch on the Rhine”, which gained fame for its prematurely anti-Fascist sympathies, to adapt another phrase that had weight in its time, should also be remembered for its major plot device: an ostensibly all American family becomes involved in a plot to murder a Nazi envoy, despite the fact that committing political murder is illegal in the United States, as well as a violation of the spirit of the national political culture, even if the play provides prudent motives for doing so. Hellman approves of thuggery as sometimes moral. It is a necessary means to a good end: participating on the right side of a world wide war that at the time happened to be undeclared. By that reasoning, anti-Communists would have been in their rights, some fifteen years later, to kill her. Politics may go in and out of fashion, but American political principles, I like to think, are for the long run. It is better for Jews and Arabs to live together in peace in Brooklyn than to carry over to here the conflicts that inflame some other region of the world.
Read MoreBack in the old days, before the coronavirus, educational policy that is nowadays about how to open schools at all and what are the tradeoffs between distance learning and classroom learning, was about whether standardized testing was a good thing. Everybody, apparently, except those who make money off of them, was against standardized testing, though for different reasons. Most teachers and administrators criticized the tests for the burden they placed on teachers to raise the test performance of students ill equipped to take such tests, the teachers getting blamed if kids didn’t do better than students with the same demographic characteristics had done in the past. And that is not to speak of the unreliability of the tests. Reformers, on the other hand, criticized the tests for not allowing teachers to teach the students as they are or in creative ways, the tests measuring minor skills rather than the overall intellectual growth of a child, something that may not show up until years later.
Read MoreAccording to the visuals and the commentary in the media, people want back their bars and beaches. They also want back auto racing and baseball even if there are no crowds in the stands. This goes contrary to what health specialists are saying, which is that opening up the economy will lead to an increase in the number and rate of deaths from coronavirus. It may be that people are willing to pay in lives lost for their pleasures, whether those are haircuts or tattoos or hanging out on crowded streets. The problem, however, is that this is more than an economic argument, in which case it would refer to the fact that all those people unemployed as a result of the shutdown need to be rehired so that they can put food on their tables. It goes deeper than that. I have heard people protesting in front of state legislatures that they are losing their liberties, that they are being imprisoned, which is a passionate and meaningful plea despite the fact that health emergencies have always been regarded as problems that can be subject to the intervention of state authorities who can order quarantine or keeping the bodies of plague victims in a house that included uncontaminated people until the time of the regularly scheduled pickups of corpses arrived, and also that I don’t know any provision in the Constitution that says that you have a right to infect other people with your diseases. Yes, coronavirus has deprived people of their liberty without due process of law, but this is a special kind of liberty, not the political kind which is what the Constitution refers to. Now what is this liberty that the protesters and I are speaking of?
Read MoreThere is an even broader claim that can be made about my thesis that social movements have three generic types, the Manichaen, the Donatist and the Arian, those terms adopted from three major Christian heresies. Christianity doesn’t just provide names for and historical examples of the three strands inherent in any social movement. It is that a social movement is not a formal idea, something inherent in the nature of social behavior. Rather, a social movement is an historical invention, and it was invented only once, by Christianity, because of some inherent feature of Christianity, which is that it can generate, out of its own religious and intellectual resources, these three kinds of heresies or specialized understandings of the overall doctrine and experience of the religion.
Read MoreSocial movements are social structures and not just sets of ideas. The three strands of any social movement can be reduced to variations on a structural feature of social movements. That feature is the role of the elite. Marxists wondered whether the vanguard served as educators of a working class destined to wrest history from the grasp of their oppressors, or as leadership cadres for democratic parties, or as the dictatorship of the proletariat. The psychoanalytic movement provides a similar trinity of roles for its elite, each of these anchored in one of the three strands a social movement generates.
Read MoreDave Konstan reminded me of what I knew but neglected in my comments about the culture of the pandemic. Not only health care workers and grocery clerks serve in a pandemic. Humanists serve as well in that they supply observations and commentary about the passing scene as well as apply old literature to current situations. So I will try that. Here are some observations about how the social world will be different when it reopens after the pandemic, we no more likely to go back to the status quo ante anytime soon just as we are unlikely to go back to airports without security checkpoints even though the threat of airport terrorism has receded though not nearly enough to let security measures lapse. For the foreseeable future, crowds will be small and people will have their temperatures taken or have to show their cards showing that they have antibody protection before they go into restaurants and, most of all, more of life will be conducted online.
Read MorePsychoanalysis reached its apex of influence as an explanation and a cure for psychological ailments in the Fifties and Sixties. The usual explanations for this fact is that the psychoanalytic quest for childhood sexual traumas as the cause of later psychological pathologies had been replaced by the psychotropic drugs that became available in the Sixties and the development of cognitive therapy in the Seventies, that form of therapy replacing the analysis of feelings with practical advice of how to manage feelings. So addictions of one sort or another were no longer addressed by plumbing for the causes of an addictive personality but by advising cigarette smokers to tie their cigarette packages in rubber bands so that a cigarette was less accessible. The new therapies might have been less profound but they seemed to work better.
Read MoreEvery social movement can be thought of as either a reflection of or an intervention into a set of changing social circumstances. The Civil Rights Movement reflected the fact that the South was industrializing after World War II and so the South had to make room for a free labor market. The Civil Rights Movement also intervened to change the hearts and minds of whites in the South so that formal social segregation might be abolished. This question of whether a social movement is a reflection or an intervention is not simply the empirical one of deciding whether the movement or changed circumstances came first. Attitudes might start to change before the Civil Rights Movement made a change in attitude into a goal, and changes in legislation may indeed have been crucial in structuring a labor market already undergoing alteration. The question is a theoretical one in that it requires a re-conceptualization of the forces that might serve as either causes or effects. The idea of intervention has to be expanded to include the dynamics by which a movement defines its own purposes.
Read MorePerhaps to distract me from the coronavirus pandemic, I have been watching numerous clips on YouTube about World War II: newsreels from both British and German sources on dogfights and artillery, on ruins and the occupation of towns, on ceremonial occasions, such as V-E Day, as well as excerpts from the musicals made in Nazi Germany well into the war, the last one I could find a production number with loads of chorus boys in top hats and tails leading the very elegantly gowned Marika Rokk around a dance floor. That one, “The Woman of My Dreams”, was released in August of 1944, at the same time that Paris was liberated, the war already clearly lost by the Germans.
Read MoreHow do people come to accept the inevitable, such as the fact that they will die, or that a girl they love doesn't love them, or that they will never achieve a lifelong ambition? The answer requires specifying what is meant by the inevitable. Some things, like gravity, are clearly inevitable and nobody tries to rescind Newton. In fact, philosophers might say that laws of nature are not things that can be described by such words as “inevitable” or “avoidable” or “preferable” or any other adjectives that include within them the idea of volition. Then there are practices that are clearly not inevitable and, in fact, are --inevitably-- the result of choice, as when consumers choose one brand of detergent over another, however much advertisers will try to condition consumers to choose one brand rather than another. Indeed, in our time consumer choices seems the most essential aspect of human freedom, citizens of both democratic and authoritarian nations having to make multiple choices every day, what they do in the supermarket less constrained, more an expression of the ability to be arbitrary and decide based on taste, than in any other part of their lives, where they know what their obligations are to family and job. Indeed, for a long time, voting, which is supposed to be the final point of choice in a democracy, the election not over until the voters have spoken after they have made up their minds on the way to the voting booth, was also understood as a kind of consumer choice, voters preferring a particular brand of candidate depending on the demographics of the voter, that point modified in recent years to mean that voters will follow their fancies and vote for the candidate that for the moment seems most appealing. Nothing inevitable about that. And then there are matters about which it is uncertain whether to declare an outcome or a choice inevitable or not. So not just peasant people believe that a person to whom one has been married for a considerable period of time was fated for you, was an inevitable choice despite the circumstances that led to make that person a reasonable choice at the time, both psychologically and socially, because so much of your life since then has been framed and impacted by that choice that one does not care to consider that it was not inevitable that you would wind up with this spouse. It was up there, written in the stars, like gravity.
Read MoreWhen I taught sociology of disasters, which covered everything from the Black Plague to Chernobyl, my students insisted that disasters were times that brought people together in a cooperative spirit. That is what the media would like you to believe, showing anecdotes to that effect so as to calm down the population, but it is the opposite of what usually happens, which is that disasters intensify whatever are already the lines of conflict in a society. The rich become richer; the poor suffer more. And political conflicts grow worse.
Read MoreScholars have found other times and places to set the origin of romance than at the dawn of civilization. Each of these theories has a certain attraction because each does capture certain aspects of the experience. But none of the alternative theories explain why full blown romance appears by the time I have suggested, which is with Samson and Delilah. The theories for a later time of origin, rather, are add ons in that new features are included in the basic formula for romance, which is dedication, even beyond self-interest, to the emotional needs of the partner, as that is associated with the exchange of sexual favors. Moreover, all the theories have to deal with the problem of how to relate cultural changes to structural changes, which means what actually happens in social life.
Read MoreA disaster occurs when the public resources set aside to deal with any upending of social life prove insufficient to deal with the extent of the insult to the social structure. That makes a real disaster different from what might be called a local disaster, such as the forest fire that consumed Paradise, California, because that was very restricted, there not being enough fire engines to save the houses in the area, but also because local forest fires are already baked into the social structure of California in that people buy a lot of insurance and are not surprised if they have to move from one abode to another in the wake of a fire that burns up parts of the Oakland Hills. Also to be distinguished from a true disaster is what might be considered the collective tragedies regarded as just part of ordinary life, as the fact that tens of thousands of people die every year from influenza, hospitals and morgues and funeral parlors prepared to deal with the influx and processing of victims. And then there were the people who died during summer heat waves in cities because of the lack of air conditioning, that absence not considered a failure of public services to intervene in what was a public health emergency.
Read MoreA number of old fogies, including me, were lined up in front of the steam tables at a Chicago cafeteria (“Mannie’s”, for those of you in the know) a few days ago when the first guy on the line, an old, thin, stooped, Black dude with very few teeth, started inquiring about what was in stuffed derma and what was the difference between corned beef and pastrami, apologizing to the rest of us for making us wait, we returning the good humor by remarking that we were all old and retired and so had nothing else to do but kill time. I, on the other hand, was listening with my inner ear to the counterman, wondering whether he would say something condescending or dismissive to the old black man. Would he act as if the customer should have known what the different products were? Would he be annoyed that the oldster was holding up the line? No, he just described the cuisine in a chatty and goodhumored manner. I, however, was looking to hear something from fifty years ago, which would then have been seen as an expression of prejudice and would today be called an example of “microaggression”. That places me. I am still conscious of the feelings I had at the time of the Civil Rights Movement and so the lack of hostility by the counterman was a sign of how far we had all come even if I could not get over noticing how far we had come.
Read MorePeople from most classes, when they are young, are out to find a vocation and try to do well at it. The people I knew when I was young were all out to be doctors or lawyers or professors (noone I knew wanted to go into business, because the working class and the petit bourgeois were the classes we were all rising out of) and most of the young men did just that, becoming what they wanted to be. That applied to women as well, who also became doctors and lawyers and professors although one young woman I knew didn’t think she could become what she wanted, which was a Rabbi, not possible at the time, and so she became a law professor instead. The same was true of people who did not expect to do better than the working or middle class. They too wanted to take up a place where they could have an occupation that filled up their time with purpose even as it supplied the living that enabled them to support their families and so made of them successful people, coming home after work to the house or apartment that they paid for and to a dinner with their children and a few hours of television before retiring to bed and arising the next day for another long session of work. That is the round of life for most people of most classes.
Read MorePolitical theory in the Twenty-First Century is very old fashioned because it engages in the kind of theorizing that took place in the Nineteenth Century, when Marxism was in vogue. That means that Wendy Brown, among others, is still mired in the attempt to separate illusion from reality, the ruling classes and the working class engaged in a dialogue whereby the ruling class is trying to foist upon the workers and the poor a distorted view of their real economic condition. For Marx, that meant that religion served as an opiate of the people. Racist ideology and a moronic popular culture would also serve as ways to keep the poor, the working class, and even part of the middle class, from recognizing the true root of the evils that befell them, which was a social structure controlled, as the contemporary argot has it, by the upper one-percent of the population. Ideology and cultural superstructure keep the exploitative economic and social system in place.
Read More