Defunding 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 MoreOpinions on the Current Demonstrations
Opinion 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 MoreThe Essential Forces
What is the fundamental process that governs social or physical existence? This is a very old sounding question in that the Greeks wondered which of the four elements predominated in the makeup of the world. Was it air, fire, earth or wind? And, later on in the ancient world, there was a search for the greatest good, the most perfect emotion. Was it stoicism or cynicism or pleasure? Far from being put away, this same question crops up in modern thought. When I was a graduate student, people discussed whether Hobbes had found out the true secret of social life, that the fundamental force was violence; that was what guaranteed social order and so economic forces and other social forces paled in comparison with the ability of violence to dominate the scene. Hobbes had discovered not invented a solution, never mind that Hobbes thought reason rather than violence governed human interaction or that violence is useful under certain conditions but that under other circumstances money and prestige are more important motivators. People die for their country for a reason and arms merchants are motivated by greed. Violence is useful only when there is anarchy in the air or when there is foreign invasion or there is a crime of passion.
Read MoreThe Current Riots
When 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 MoreHammett's Thugs
Dashell 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 MoreThe Talking Pineapple
Back 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 MoreSilences
There was a newspaper report of an armed gunman who said, when told by his victim that it was a policeman that he was holding up, “You know, now I have to kill you.” That is the stuff of gangster melodrama, and may even be true. The exchange reminded me of “The Asphalt Jungle”, John Huston’s film noir movie of 1950, which was a remarkable movie because, among other things, it violated the movie convention whereby people who have others at gunpoint keep talking until the person with the gun pulled on him finds a way out of the situation. Rather, Louis Calhern just starts to sweat and lose his game face as he realizes that his erstwhile comrades in crime are going to kill him. However much they talk, the gangsters in “The Asphalt Jungle” don’t talk about what they are doing while they do it.
Why does the movie convention violated by “The Asphalt Jungle” make sense? Why do characters say what they are going to do rather than just do it? That is the same thing as asking why such dialogue occurs in real life, because the movie convention is simply exploiting and adopting a usage of everyday life, in that dramatic tension arises from whether an assailant will speak or not. So why did the gunman in the newspaper report act the way he did? (Here, I am engaged in applying Georg Simmel’s dictum, which is contrary to the accepted wisdom, that the sociologist can analyze fiction as well as real situations because both make use of the formal properties of social life.)
Read MoreTime Sets
A time set is the number of moments that are tied together because of a place or an occasion. We all deliberately refer to time sets when we celebrate birthdays and Thanksgiving. We for a moment remember when a child was born or what it was like at the first Thanksgiving, or at least the way we are taught about what had happened then. Every June Sixth, I remember D-Day and also recall the decreased attention it has garnered over the years. The contemplation of a time set does wonderful things for our imaginations.
Read MoreConsumerism and the Pandemic
According 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 MoreThe Triple Heresies and the Western World
There 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 MoreRegional Museums
Cultures reside in formal institutions designed for their preservation. Whether those are newspapers or universities or secondary schools or church congregations or seminaries or legal systems, they are all self conscious about the need to protect the past by finding ways in which it relates to the present. The United States Supreme Court defends and protects the Constitution of the United States by giving it often quite controversial interpretations, just as English professors defend and protect the canon of great literature by finding new interpretations for old texts, by understanding how the texts fit into their own time and place, and by making room for new texts, so that American literature anthologies now include a number of African American writers.
Read MoreThe Age of Illustration
An illustrator is someone who provides pictures or graphics to help break up the text of a book or article and also provides a visual representation of something going on in a text. Illustration can therefore be thought of as a derivative form of art because the art does not rely on itself alone to convey its experience and message and that designation as derivative is also earned because illustrative art will have to be relatively simple and of conventional taste so that it will satisfy its magazine and best seller audiences. “Illustrator” can be thought of as a term of condescension by someone concerned with “high art”. Yet there was a great age of illustration that accompanied the popularity of wide circulation magazines, the technology available, from the 1880’s on, to give good quality reproductions of the artwork, and there was also a mass market for illustrated best selling novels, such as “Treasure Island”. Moreover, the age of illustration is not totally past. Consult the front page of the New York Times and congratulate the paper’s photo editor for having picked out what is usually a very artistically composed illustration for some top story. So let us consider the accomplishments and the point of view of some master illustrators from its Golden Age.
Read MoreThe Core Dilemma of Social Movements
Social 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 MorePolitics Before and After the Pandemic
What happened to the Squad of Four? You remember them, don’t you? They were the set of leftish congresswomen that came into office after the 2018 election: Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and, most notably, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes, the firebrand from the Bronx, quickly in the spotlight because she was so young and had a mouth on her. Trump and his acolytes were quick to pounce on the Squad of Four and proclaim that the Democratic Party had been taken over by Socialists (and AOC was indeed a member of Social Democrats of America). That was what Trump was going to run against in 2020. Right wing rhetoric quickly turned racist, asking these women to go back to where they came from though that meant, in the case of AOC, going back to the Bronx, three of the four women born here though one was black and two were Muslim and AOC was Puerto Rican. It doesn’t take much to see the racism there. Nancy Pelosi had to pass a resolution rejecting racism however much she held these four at arms length, at one point remarking that they were only four of her members and so hardly spoke for her caucus. AOC disappointed people like me who had hoped she would bring new life and fresh ideas to the Democratic Party by opposing the deal whereby Amazon would bring 50,000 jobs to New York City, even though the plan, including tax favors that wouldn’t occur until the project was done, was supported by labor unions, the local Congresswoman, and political leaders throughout the city. Enough with this jejune radicalism.
Read MorePostmodern Portraitists
There was a new flowering of portraiture after the end of Abstract Expressionism. The painters involved were representational, and so not like De Kooning at all, in that they did not want their figures to disappear into the swaths or streaks of color. But neither were they realists, in that their object was not to accurately portray those they represented but to develop new ways of representing people so that each painter had his own signature style, that not just what happens because a painter paints in the way he knows how to paint, but because the creation of a distinctive style was the basis of his accomplishment: his models served his style rather than the other way round. The inspiration for this movement was Andy Warhol who did not enhance our understanding of the figures he portrayed, like Mao and Marilyn Monroe. It was, rather, that the figures were already popular icons and what he did was to industrially produce a large number of copies through a silkscreen process that allowed each of the standard images to be produced in different colors. Warhol’s imagination rested on standing aside from his images to note that they were images rather than on enhancing the images, and so what he produced seems to me very cold and devoid of the life of the people who lend him their images, but that may be what he was, after all, out to do, postmodern art, now included in what is called contemporary art, prizing coldness and irony rather than depth of feeling or character analysis as its primary virtue. Now those who entered this common project of making the art more important than its subject did not see Warhol as their inspiration and one, Alex Katz, thought that Warhol had stolen from him, but artists throughout the centuries view with their competitors for stature and are most upset with those who would claim to be their betters. Consult Vasari to see professional competition at play, or consult any biography of Picasso. Let us consider the different ways some contemporary artists did their number on the artistic presumption they shared that the model served the artist rather than the other way around.
Read MoreThe Social Significance of Strangers
We are, all of us, in the midst of a natural experiment in what it is like not to be in the company of strangers, and it makes us all feel very weird, and so in the need of assessing whatever it is that makes even casual interaction with strangers a component of ordinary social life. I have my family around me and I communicate with friends and relatives via telephone and email, and am able to keep up with the news even more than I think I should and have sufficient books around me and an endless supply that Amazon can deliver so that I am neither lonely nor lacking in stimulation, but there is something else that is missing and it is, indeed, the presence in my life of strangers: either just the people you pass on the street who look like they have interesting presences and lives as you catch a glance at their faces or posture, and also the occupations you run into, such as the waiters in restaurants, the tellers at banks, the woman in the pharmacy who calls you “sweetie” because you are old, the young woman at the supermarket checkout counter whose first name you know and who looks out for you because you are an oldster, she an instant granddaughter, so I fancy, in that my own granddaughter also takes an interest in my welfare. Why are these relations important?
Read MoreComedies With Music
It is easy enough to dismiss a comedy with music as not to be taken seriously, the plot just an excuse for the music. I know people who think that Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutti” is just that: a farce about feigned infidelity that the viewer puts up with so as to enjoy the wonderful music. My own opinion, not at all unusual, is that the plot delves very deeply into the nature of the relations between men and women and does not decide whether their differing roles in courtship are the result of nature or nurture, but does insist that women are not given enough credit for seeing through the men they deal with. But what if a comedy with music is indeed just a confection designed as a platform for its songs? Does that mean that a musical comedy has no meaning in the sense of a heavy moral unless it is Rodgers and Hammerstein pushing their ideas about racial tolerance? I want to pursue that question about a musical comedy that is clearly a romp, Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”, and suggest that what it puts together, if you consider its various devices of construction, is a kind of utopian community that makes the metaphysical parameters of our lives less confining. The audience might prefer to live in that condition even if only for the duration of the performance and in our memory of the performance, it adding a little lightness to what was described in “Singing in the Rain”, another of those musicals about nothing, as “the drabness of our lives”.
Read MoreReopening During the Pandemic
Dave 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 MoreThe Psychoanalytic Movement
Psychoanalysis 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 MoreThe Culture of the Pandemic
The heroes and heroines of the current pandemic are the front line medical workers and first responders who are, very properly, cheered, applauded and sung to by people trapped in their New York apartments. Also, the clergymen who try to offer comfort to those who are in some sense dying alone even if we all in some final sense die alone. The platitudes of clergy take on meaning because those clergy seem to be truly anguished. These are some of the memories we will take with us from the experience of the pandemic; they will last long after the pandemic is over. That is part of the cultural residue or, maybe more simply put, just the culture of the pandemic, along with emptied out Times Square and St. Peter’s Square and also a pathetic President jousting with his health care advisors, as well as with the press and some state Governors.
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