There have been much congratulations offered by Black activists and observers as well as the President and Vice-President about the fact that Derek Chauvin was convicted on all charges for the murder of George Floyd. Those surrounding Floyd’s family think that this decision was pivotal. Police officers whose actions that illegally kill Black citizens are usually covered up and police officers charged with such a crime are usually vindicated. This time was different and the conviction will increase the pressure for Congress to pass the well crafted and long overdue George Floyd Act which would restrict police violence. But remember that we just barely missed the bullet shot against both social order and equal rights for Blacks and whites under the law. The building where the trial was held and the decision delivered was crowded with National Guard members and other kinds of police officers because there might have been significant rioting if the verdict had been otherwise, whether to acquit Chavin or just to convict him only of manslaughter. That shows there is an imbalance of forces in that the Black community has a sense of justice on its side and also a threat of rioting while the white population has an ingrained sense that the Black community is not on the side of social order and that its grievances are exaggerated even if the outrage against police violence is eloquent. The combination of justice upheld and violence deterred suggests that race relations are very bad. Blacks have a justified grievance against persistent police violence and whites think that Black neighborhoods are suspect because there are hoodlums and gangsters among them that the rest of the community cannot control. And Black advocates do not help the matter because they come up with preposterous slogans that offer justice or nothing instead of a balanced and nuanced presentation of the issues as they were once proclaimed by the Black leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, and especially by Dr. MLK, Jr.
Read MoreUtopias, Individuality and Law
My friend David Konstan was prompted by a post I wrote entitled “Utopias” to expand my view in a particularly elegant way that showed the humanities could be systematic and cumulative. I had said that utopias (and dystopias) were forms of society that had abolished the distinction between public and private life. Plato’s Republic is a place where the types of people correspond to the types of roles provided in the society. “1984” shows that the private impulse to have sex is the great danger to Big Brother’s society. David had elaborated this view so that individuality is always a critique of utopias and dystopias. Moreover, among his many nuanced ideas about the way an individual can struggle with both utopias and dystopias, is the observation that most of these erstwhile antagonists are of familiar types, like the loner who roamed the western frontier but was transplanted into a post-apocalyptic environment and who had not changed because of this new environment. Konstan is engaging with a prime idea of utopias and dystopias: people will be changed, a new person, a New Soviet Man or a Winston beaten down and newly dedicated to Big Brother. The question for utopias, then, is whether people are transformed. Otherwise it isn’t really a utopia.
Read MoreBiden's Gun Control
Biden is going big in his Liberalism in that he believes that big government is the solution rather than big government being the problem, which is what most Conservatives think. Big Liberalism thinks that government can provide money and programs that will alleviate inequities and discrimination between class and ethnic groups, as happened when Social Security and Medicare led to abolishing the fact that the elderly were poorer than the other age groups in the population. Laws to insure equal accommodation transformed the southern states. Conservatives may think that government might tweak the market system, such as by creating incentives whereby private companies could expand broadband to rural areas, but Liberals think that only a government effort can make broadband universal so that it can become the basis for educating young people through distance learning and so broadband has to be the equivalent of a public utility, part of the national infrastructure, rather than a luxury item for those able to buy the product. You can’t have elementary and middle school and high school students attend distance learning if broadband isn’t universal. The prior model was rural electrification, where the government had to step in because customers were far enough apart that it made no sense for private power companies to expand their reach to rural areas and the cost of some areas, should the private companies enter the field, were prohibitively expensive. The government, such as in the TVA, had to do it, and so does broadband today, where a third of rural areas do not have broadband.
Read MoreJoe Biden's Radical Liberalism
Rahm Emanuel, when he was Chief of Staff to Barack Obama, said “No crisis should be wasted”. What he meant was that when there is a legislative moment where there is an urgency and general willingness to act, measures should be added to the package of other measures that are a long time part of the leadership’s agenda. That is what happened with the passage yesterday of the American Recovery Act. No Republicans joined to aid the Democrats, truthfully saying that many of the measures had nothing to do with coronavirus relief but were part of long time Democratic wish lists, but some of the Democrats did not waver too much from the bill, except for eliminating the fifteen dollar minimum wage and forgiving student loans, and did approve of provisions that could be considered radical in a liberal way in that they moved forward major programs to expand entitlements so as to provide a more substantial way of life for all citizens and particularly those who were all but the rich, the rich not needing the assistance. Biden’s law is incremental but substantial, a firm way whereby economic situations do not interfere in people achieving their life, liberty and quest for happiness. From a Liberal point of view, this is the greatest advance since the New Deal, and Democrats from Bernie Sanders to John Manchin are impressed by the audacity, even if Larry Summers says that the package of money is so large that it will lead to inflation. The U. S. has had no inflation since the late Seventies, which is two generations ago, and the Federal Reserve has the ability and the power to squeeze out any inflation should it arise. Look at the solid policy accomplishments rather than speculation.
Read MoreSchool Integration and School Effectiveness
This is a sad story. It is the story of the failure of the promise to equalize the outcomes between black and white students in the years after segregation ended. The irony was that the desegregation of schools was supposedly to be for that end, and was the clarion call for the Civil Rights Movement in the Fifties and Sixties, that emblemized by the Norman Rockwell painting of the little Ruby Bridges being escorted into a New Orleans elementary school by burly protectors. So many other changes in race relations did change. A Black middle class and a Black professional class has entered the ranks of doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs. There are numerous bBlack politicians in that the percentage of Black congresspeople is about the same as that of the population at large even though there are, at the moment, only three Black Senators, but then there has been a Black President and, currently, a Black Vice President. The Secretary of Defense is a Black man. Perhaps most important as a measure of normalizing Black people in the United States, is that Black women are featured in fashion magazines and that there are a large number of Black people as reporters and news talk hosts and commentators. But not so with education.
Read MoreValues
The Classic comic books version of the short story “The Man Without a Country” presented Philip Nolan’s staterooms in one or another United States warship, him forever exiled from having said he hated the United States when he had been part of the insurrection by which Aaron Burr tried to wrest the trans-Appalachian mountains from the United States, these later of his staterooms festooned with banners and flags and portraits of Presidents that showed him as forever pining for his country, this a sentiment appropriate when Edward Everett Hale wrote the story in the midst of the Civil War. It struck me then and remains so that flags and banners were not the proper ways in which to display tribute to the idea of the United States. That was because these visual effects were present in all nations and no more than an icon of the team of the National Football League. Every nation has banners and so those are just lapel buttons rather than explanations of why someone would feel worthy of the nation for which it stands. What makes its images, ideas and expressions distinctive?
Read MoreNostalgia and History
Nostalgia is the modern form of pastoral in that it gives an emotional expression to much of contemporary historical consciousness. It is no more debased than pastoral itself in that it shares with all pastoral a fawning view of time past. It differs from other forms of pastoral in that the usual pastoral connection of violence, death, simplicity and virtue to a bucolic time is made instead to the sense of time past that cannot at all be remote because it is a time that is still can be remembered as having been real. Nostalgia cannot predate what happened before a person is born though I can be nostalgic about the Thirties in that I can be fanciful about the times that were close enough to be in my time to think them as similar to my times.
Read MoreFirst Contacts
“Gulliver’s Travels” is a first contact novel. Obviously inspired by the Age of Discovery, it creates four occasions during which a traveler comes to a culture that he had not known existed and which did not know that he and his kind existed. Never mind the political satire; Swift is telling four stories of how cultures collide. The small people, the Lilliputians, figure out how to tame him, because power is all that interests them, and he allows them to believe he will not hurt them, which is certainly the case, because he has no reason to. And so they treat him as an admiral, their own Othello. Then the very big people in the second island he visits figure out how they can use him, which is as an entertainment and a pet, which he finds disgusting, but where he has no choice because any one of them could easily crush him. He is too small, as Aristotle would say, to be part of the arrangement whereby people of relatively the same size have to form a polity lest they can choose sides against one another. Then, on the third island, Gulliver meets a passel of fantasists who think they can improve humanity but create, instead, disastrous results, such as old people who linger on into extended debility, and then, in the fourth island, he meets the horses, who try to treat him as a human being, as someone with moral dignity, and this is the most unsettling of all his encounters because he can’t live up to their expectations, and so returns home a broken man. As critics have long argued, the four alternative worlds are a sequence, the first three of them as inferior to the life in Great Britain, their home culture, because each of them are parodies of England, and the fourth culture is much superior to his own in that people have resigned themselves or else achieved a kind of serenity because they are not ambitious, the previous three cultures dominated, in turn, by power, pleasure and fantasy. What is clear is that other previously unknown other societies are either superior or inferior to our present society, and so that is just the way it is.
Read MoreEntitlements
Liberals, who believe in the intervention of government to right wrongs and to regulate the economy and the social structure, are identified with FDR’s New Deal, but FDR used a variety of mechanisms other than entitlements to achieve its ends of providing work and greater equality between peoples, the regime of entitlements meaning that legislation would consist of financial and other services and preferences to be awarded to categories of eligibility. The first acts in FDR’s First Hundred Days were not entitlements. The Glass Steagall Banking Act of 1933 provided for the separation of commercial from investment banking. It required commercial banks to have sufficient equity and provided the FDIC to guarantee that bank customers did not have to worry about runs on the banks. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, also early on in 1933, allowed for the government to buy up beef and pork so as to destroy them so as to keep up farm prices. It also allowed farmers to get money so that they would refrain from raising crops, and so also raise farm prices, even though this was sort of an entitlement because people who owned farms were paid for a purpose, the purpose more important than the mechanism. The Wagner Act of 1935 set up a mechanism whereby workers could engage in collective bargaining rather than pay or guarantee wages to union workers. The TVA put in a lot of money to build dams and create electrical grids rather than give grants to people in Tennessee. The CCC made work available to poor whites rather than give them food stamps or a dole. Yes, entitlements did come later. Social Security, passed in 1935, was a clear entitlement in that a category of people--the aged-- were entitled to get benefits when they had reached a certain age and had contributed to payroll taxes for by then just a very short time of payment. And the great last act of the New Deal, the Wages and Hours Act of 1938, did require people of occupational categories to meet pay and work standards, though not by direct payments. Nor were entitlements the only mechanisms for reform during the War on Poverty. Money was used by Lyndon Johnson to create incremental change in a variety of outcomes, such as better nutrition or availability to education, by paying programs rather than people, though some entitlements were included, as was the case with Medicare and Medicaid, so as to entitle people to the cost of health care because they qualified as old or poor.
Decades and Trends
Radio and TV d.j.’s like to talk about musical decades so as to evoke the nostalgia of there being a particular sound or style that dominated music for about a decade. I think that we can broaden it out so that each decade includes its politics and social structure so as to characterize decades as being cultural entities, distinct from the previous and the succeeding one, just as if we do when historians and literary critics speak of the periods of Classical and Romantic and Victorian, the Romantics, for example, not just meaning Jane Austen and John Keats and Charles Lamb, but also John Bright and the Luddites and Peterloo and the other early struggles of industrialism. Periodization is a different prospect from doing what a friend of mine does, which is separate before and after a critical event, which for him is 1968, That year separates two different experiences, people profoundly altered by that event so that I, for one, still expect to turn on the television and find out that there has been an assassination. Pearl Harbor was one of those events that made America different and not in just leading to the waging of the worst war in human history. It made the United States the economic, cultural and military center of the world, while the Vietnam War was just an interlude even if young people at the time, including me, found it all consuming, it instead just coming and going, which would also be the case in the War on Terror that commenced with the World Trade Center, but lasted only a decade or so, and us still not knowing whether Trumpism can outlast his separation from office.
Read MoreOrganizational Portals
There was a science fiction movie which showed people as having multiple portals on their bodies to which were attached hoses, perhaps half a dozen to a person, which swung free and were available to be connected to machines that took or received some fluids. It was very unnerving to see people so dependent on their mechanical devices that made them able to survive though, if you think about it, this was a biological metaphor in that people do have tubes that sustain life. Food goes down your gullet and wastes come out of tubes whose exit points are covered. It was just unsettling to see these processes as mechanical rather than biological. There are, however, another set of portals that, as the expression goes, connect every person to their lives. These are the organizational portals whereby you are connected to your identity and therefore have access to the services which sustain us, both biologically and otherwise. I have become particularly aware of my reconnecting to my new portals when I recently moved from New York to Salt Lake City. I did not have to change my phone number because of the miracle of a cell phone, but I did have to change addresses for my credit cards and my health insurance companies and I still keep my passport handy to identify who I am. All those verifications of my identity enable me to live an ordinary life. I don’t need one for a supermarket, but Utah requires an identification so as to access a liquor store, which was not the case in New York.
Read MoreGeography and Social Structure
Nineteenth Century historians and social analysts, in particular, thought that geography was destiny. Montesquieu had back in the Eighteenth Century said, quite correctly, that temperate climates allowed nations to prosper. Europe and China do better than sub-Saharan Africa and Amazonian Brazil. Nineteenth Century historians and social analysts fully thought that geography was destiny. De Tocqeville thought that the small steads in New England was the result of the hilly and rocky terrain, while large plantations flourished in the South because of the flat turrain. Motley thought that the Lowlands resulted from a swampy land whose water had ever to be contested through dikes. In the Nineteen Fifties, historians said that the United States prospered because it's fields and wheatlands were so fertile There is an alternative example. It is the culture and its social structure that make a nation prosperous. The United States did well because it had a genius for government. The Northwest Ordinance, which predated the Constitution, treated new territories as places to become new and equal states rather than subordinated territories. The Constitution set up a system of government that has endured for more than two hundred years despite the fact that it is rife with its division between Northern and Southern States. America has the internet and its television networks across time zones and its climates and so you are everywhere at once, so long as you have electronics. I wanted to test out the experiences of geography and the other things by looking at Utah, the place in which I have recently settled.
Read MoreThe Chicago 7
I just caught up with the Andrew Sorkin movie about the Chicago 7 showing the anti-Vietnam activists at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 being prosecuted in federal court during the following year for having incited rioting. Sorkin did a good job making the plot coherent and showing the different points of view and Sorkin, as usual, punched up some telling lines, but I felt that the whole enterprise was wrongly focussed. The trial was just an anticlimax after the events that had happened in the previous year, the images of the actual riots much more profound than a trial that was so clearly a show trial that not even the prosecution didn’t want to pursue it and a judge so biased that there was no doubt about who was the bad guy. No contest on the issue of free speech versus authoritarianism. Sorkin tried to create some controversy by comparing Tom Haydn as the one who said that all the programs depend on what happens to the vote in opposition to Abbie Hoffman saying that the demonstrations were creating a cultural revolution. So the movie had a dramatic clash between the two ideologies: Haydn as a traditional political organizer and Hoffman as crafting a new way to do politics. But that wasn’t the larger issue. Sorkin showed Haydn, at the end of the movie, reading off the numbers of people who had been killed in Vietnam during the time of the Chicago 7 trial. That was what the war was about: its carnage and the attempt to stop that. That was the view all the characters in the film portrayed as the gravamen of the war. David Dellinger, one of the Chicago 7, had indeed been a conscientious objector on the grounds of being a Pacifist. Joan Baez, a fellow traveller of that time, said she was a Pacifist because she was against violence, though she demurred that non-violent resistance against Hitler would have had many casualties before the German people had blanched at the number of deaths.
Read Morethe Heartland
My family and I visited Promentary Point where my fourth grade history told me that it was the place that the last spike was placed in1869 to connect the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific and so create a continental railroad. It was quite an accomplishment, indicated, as we drove past, by how long were the graded stone bedways so that the train would not have to rise or fall too quickly as well as all those ties and rails. A marker at the exhibit showed that the information of the event was sent by telegraph to Omaha and points East, including President Grant in Washington, D.C. I was also impressed by the arid land. It was desolate and windy and with vast vistas. Not a task without hardy people and careful planning. I also remembered in the fourth grade, where I seem to have learned a lot of things, the quick development of communications. The Pony Express had lasted for eighteen months so people could travel in 1860 and 1861 from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento. The continental telegraph system, from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., was completed in 1861 in Salt Lake City and the pinnacle of these three amazing developments in the Eighteen Sixties was the continental railway itself, which I have heard was not significantly interfered with by the Indians because by that time the Indians in the area were largely pacified.
Read MoreThe Trip West
Alister Cooke, the Englishman who had become an American citizen, was well known as the host of “Omnibus”, a fine book on the Alger Hiss case, and a long time letter on America to the BBC. Once he explained that to understand America, you had to see that America was not a nation but a continent. That quip came to my mind this week because my daughter in law drove me from Brooklyn, New York, to Salt Lake City, my daughter in law’s ancestral home and the new permanent residence for their family including me. It is the start, for me, of a great adventure, the short take of my travel showing how much its topography and agriculture certainly make America a continent. We moved from the granite rocked hills of the East, it's very filled treescapes changing with its fall colors, to a spectacular view of Iowa, flat and filled with quite clearly prosperous corn farms, their main house and farm buildings shiny and up to date, and at one point, a spectacularly sunny day having low slung clouds for a hundred miles that made the sky take up seven eights of the landscape, as if this were a Modernist painting, and then to the endless plains in Nebraska, ever more desolate and most of Wyoming unpeopled, but giving rise to spectacular and for me unfamiliar sedimentary rocks and striated hills that continued on to the Salt Lake City Basin.
Read MoreThe Stratification of Disability
The disabled, which include the blind and the crippled and other infirmities, are usually understood as deviant in that they are more or less distasteful to ordinary society because they are not part of those who are able bodied, and so the disabled are a scourge to society just because they are unfamiliar with normal society. That also happens to criminals and drug addicts and sex perverts, who also are all degrees of deviance. Normal people just feel various degrees of apprehension and disgust for the deviants, rather than there being distinct differences in kind, as if there were different feelings to people who are, let us say, of low caste rather than disfigured. People look away at disabilities of the disfigured just as they abhor associating with loudmouths. President Trump thinks it depressing to see wounded war veterans on display. The various kinds of the disabled share the fact that they are “master statuses” in that disability is a constant companion that must be managed along with a person’s other roles. You can forget to lock your front door but, if you are using braces and crutches, you cannot forget to lock your knees when you rush to get to your cab.
Read MoreWorking for Trump
Let us commit a bit of sociology by proposing a typology, which means a systematic set of ways in which something can be accomplished. Here are the ways in which a subordinate can support their superior: the subordinate can agree or disagree or disregard or amplify the views expressed by his or her superior. All four of these options apply to one or another of the people who work for Trump, and so we can explore the dynamics of subordination as well as why Trump seems so difficult a person to work for.
Read MoreUtopias
A utopia is a society that has abolished the difference between public and private life. That definition of a utopia is superior to the usual one which regards a utopia as a perfected society, whether that means everyone is equal or everyone is in their properly subordinated social positions, because the new definition reveals the mechanism by which some perfect ordering is accomplished and also because it does away with the need to distinguish between utopias and dystopias, all of whom have this same characteristic, the observer to decide whether one or another utopia is to be admired. In Plato, everyone’s character as either a soldier, an artisan or a philosopher is in keeping with their role in society. In Orwell’s “1984”, everyone is being retrained so that the only emotions that are felt internally are the ones approved of by the state, and so sex, which is personal, is a revolutionary concept. In his far more probing “Brave New World'', Aldous Huxley suggests that a person’s chemicals have been balanced and re-balanced since before birth so that the person will be an appropriate social being, only the savages who live on the fringes of society going their own way. This new definition explains the paradox of Bertrand Russell’s witty observation about Plato’s Republic, which is that it is a place where everyone is equally unhappy. It is why both North Korea and an Amish community are utopian in prospect if not in reality. The definition applies to the Christian idea of Heaven and Hell, where people get what they deserve which is what each of their nature’s require, whether that is some degree of pain for those assigned to the levels of Hell, or the equality of the ecstasy that will be achieved in Heaven. Nobody in Hell deserves to be anyplace else and there are no slackers in Heaven. So, in utopias and dystopias, there is supposedly no struggle between the internality of the individual and the person’s public function.
Read MoreWedding Announcements
A good way to see that social class is alive and well in the United States is to consult the wedding announcements in the Weekend Style Section of the New York Times. This is not what most sociologists would do. That is because those announcements are not a random sample of anything and, with the exception of the piece about the featured couple, largely contain only the information selected for presentation by the people making the announcements. Sociologists (and, nowadays, economists have entered this discussion) prefer to look at the various determinants of social class such as prior family wealth, education, and income to predict whether people are more likely over the generations or within a career to improve their chances of having power, prestige or position or additional wealth and income. But a consideration of what the Times chooses to notice about the lives of people tells more about how people make choices which have to do with social class or, more to the point, what beds they chose to sleep in for the long run.
Read MoreReligious Schools
The gimmick behind most Supreme Court decisions is to find a set of circumstances that allows the Court to kick a can down the road rather than to settle a large outstanding issue even if the Court does shift slightly the balance between obdurate public interests. I would call this doctrine of constitutional interpretation “consequentialism” because the Court becomes legitimately, in its own lights, concerned with the consequences of its decisions more than it is with the particular legal reasoning it engages in. So much for “textualism” or “originalism” or even “moral principle” as serving as the basis of Supreme Court decisions. The exceptions to consequentialism are very rare and they are often cited. Brown v. Board of Education was understood as a departure from consequentialism but understood as necessary because to uphold Jim Crow in schools was simply beyond the pale after the Second World War, and even Roe v. Wade, a notable non-consequentialist decision, hedged its bets by insisting that women had to consult their doctors before having an abortion, which is something that has now been superceded so that it is purely the woman’s decision whether she should have an abortion. The doctor doesn’t get to say whether it is a wise decision.
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