In Praise of Dogma

Contemporary sociologists of religion claim that they should develop what they call “real religion” or “informal religion” which discusses the emotions, the situated practices and the personal identities affiliated with religion rather than the liturgies and doctrines concerning religion if they are to get their subject matter right. Susan Nidich argues that the post-Exilic time when Jews returned to Israel and Judah were ripe for development in new religious understandings and literary forms because it was such a time of turmoil, though it seems to me it is difficult to name a time when the history of Israel was without turmoil. Certainly not so was the time of the books of Samuel when Saul and David contested with one another, a time of politics mixed up with dastardly deeds that rival the intrigues and murders of the early Tudors.

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Morals and the Taliban

Other people are regarded as taking responsibility. Then they can be blamed for it. The existential fact of doing one thing rather than another is on their hands for reasons always inexplicable and after the fact. My mother and her sister decided to leave Poland for the United States in 1939 knowing things were going bad but also knowing that they would never see their families again and must find work and people in a new life. That was the bravest thing they ever did though it seemed to them to be doing the natural thing, how fearful they were of the Germans. It seemed to them obvious self interest and, anyway, being servants and shopgirls in Poland did not seem to be an appealing future and so making a decision was like following water down an inclined street. It was bound to happen; it was the thing to do, even if their friends and relatives stayed put and were eradicated by the Germans.. People from their own mind’s eye make decisions easily and in a flash, not agonizing, even if they agonize later, as if they were contemplating other people for whom decisions in those other minds always seem paradoxical and unrequired.

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A Bit of Decoration

When Andy Warhol in the Sixties started making his silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe and Mao Tse Tung, he changed what art had been for twenty five hundred years or so and did something very different and not for the better. Previously, art had been a window into life, a depiction of scenes and arrangement and color that conveyed meaning and emotion, within a frame even if there was no frame and even if very large, as was still true in the Abstract Expressionism of the Fifties. Instead, the difference of one object to the other of his silkscreens were colors that added nothing to the emotion or meaning, instead only providing a differentiation that could allow even the multiple copies of one of the images differentiated enough to be peddled as being something different. Nothing changed after that revolution in that art has dry ironies but little emotion or arrangement, one exception being the quartet of women whose photo was taken every year and so allow how these distinct but familially related people age over time, true to the oldest instinct of portraiture, which is to see what is the person behind the face. I want to look at some of the holdings in the contemporary wing of the Chicago Art Institute to see whether I can reap something of value for my pre Warhol aesthetics.

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Jello Sociology: Phenomena in Themselves

There are a number of social phenomena, some fresh and some standard, that should be reconceptualized as properly ellusive and multi-dimensional rather than distinct and singly operative, as is the case with usual sociological concepts, such as class, status and party, to use Weber’s terms, if these new or newly appreciated phenomena are to be understood accurately. These topics should be seen as if it were seen with a squint, so to speak, rather than right on, which is the way most sociology operates. These matters, old and new, seem ephemeral, however much they are also ubiquitous. They make up the flavor or texture of social life rather than its structure. A shift so radical in the method of theorizing from the invisible but real forces of social life to concepts that are, as it were, seen out of the corner of the eye, deserves being called a new name and “Jello sociology” will do until something better comes along because it conveys the sense that social things are a set of ever changing objects difficult to pin down rather than the firm though invisible forces that prevail-- or at least, more likely, when the time disappears as unnecessary to point out that there has been a more careful definition of sociological analysis rather than a distinctive one.

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Politics Akilter

There is a widespread perception afoot, so announced by a number of pundits, that American politics and American society are out of whack. The evidence that suggests that the regular institutions and the usual arrangements and interests of the various demographic populations are not doing what they are supposed to be doing include the fact, central to me, that half of the Republican congresspeople have not admitted that Biden was legitimately elected, that Congress does not want to investigate an insurrection at the Capital, and that poor people are supporting Republicans and that farmers are also supporting Republicans even if trade wars against China have not been to their economic advantage. What is going on? The usual explanations have come up empty.

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Folk Metaphysics

There are a set of adages that people offer to explain and organize their lives that go beyond whatever are their doctrines or experiences of their religions or their philosophies. These adages, which are foisted by relatively uneducated people as an alternative to religion and philosophy, nevertheless have a persistence which crosses generations. The point of these adages is to provide a natural justice whereby people, in the nature of things, get their just deserts as well as their opportunities to act freely in life. These adages are often harsh and crude and yet satisfying. I want to point out some of them to give a flavor of this subterranean world of understanding that surfaces whenever any of them are needed to articulate what has to be and whatever has always been.These can be considered as the folk metaphysics which is currently present but which we suspect is of very long duration in that people need a metaphysics even if and in addition to more overt and formalized systems that do exist. These constitute what we might call the implicit beliefs to which people adhere and have adhered, and so make up the social glue that sociologists search to find in community or primitive religion rather than these rational if possibly mistaken views of how the social world works.

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Religion, Scholarship, and Jesus

Karen King is a professor at the Harvard Divinity School that specializes on the shards that remain of the documents concerning the time of the Gospels that are not considered part of the canonical literature, particularly the one called “The Gospel of Mary'' where Mary Magdalene is treated as a figure that led the Christian community even if that role is attributed to Peter as the one upon which the Church was set. Like Elaine Pagals, just one generation before her, King thinks that these gospels discovered in the last 150 years shows that the well known gospels suppressed the roles of women and perhaps led to a patriarchal sense of Christianity that has persisted ever since. Scholars investigating these non-canonical texts will reveal a very different history for Christianity than is the one with which people are familiar. One of those texts King investigates is a shard that refers to both “Jesus” and “wife”, which would suggest that Jesus rejected a wife or treated the Church as his wife or even had married her. That would be quite a finding.Ariel Sabar’s new book “Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” tells the story of that discovery within the very rich context of contemporary Biblical scholarship and eventually unravels the fact that this text was a forgery, fooling even the most authoritative of scholars.

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Women's Secrets

A young family I knew did things together with my young family. We went to dinner together; we were in a cooperative babysitting pool; we vacationed together. On Saturday mornings, the two fathers would take their young children to the Empire State Building or to the Central Park Zoo so as to give the wives the morning off. Then, as happened in those years, my family moved to a larger apartment in Manhattan where we spent most of our lives, while my friend and family moved up to Westchester, finding the suburbs a more appealing way to live. But not too much later, that other family divorced and the woman raised her two sons by herself. We kept in touch. When the eldest son was in college, he had a first love affair and, when it broke up, he was heartbroken. His mother said to me that she understood that women are upset, very badly upset, when boys break up with them, but she hadn’t quite believed that boys could also get heartbroken. Now, understand, she was exaggerating a bit and didn’t mean quite what she said. She had intellectually known that men also had feelings. It was just that it had never penetrated her very deeply until she had seen it happen in her own family life that men and boys could be emotionally crushed. My wife had the same experience when our son broke up with his first serious girlfriend. My wife kept asking me what was happening, whether he would recover, whether we should send him into therapy, and I said that is what happened to young men and he would get over it-- or not-- and he did.

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Wulbert Culture

When Bill Cosby was released from jail a few weeks ago, there was no celebration. After all, Cosby had not been exonerated; he had just beaten the wrap even though he had spent three years in jail for a tainted conviction for having plied women with drugs so as to have sex with them. No talking head that I heard of said that there had been a grave injustice just a few years ago when the judicial process had outrun itself, quick to convict on unsound grounds, people now returning to due process when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided that the prior district attorney had said that Cosby would not be prosecuted again after a hung jury in his first trial if Cosby told of having given drugs so that plaintiffs could then pursue a civil suit because a second criminal trial would also not be convicted, but the next DA decided to prosecute anyway, such was the frenzy for convicting sexual offenders, and then used that same damaging evidence against Cosby. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had righted matters by saying that Cosby was convicted of double jeopardy and forced to testify against himself. And so the conviction was voided and Cosby set free. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court did not even have to reach the second issue that the second trial used too many witnesses of a pattern of Cosby doing a similar thing, that Cosby was apparently convicted of a slew of victims rather than the one for which he was actually indicted. But rather than a sense that Cosby had been convicted because there was a period of outrage by Feminists that an accusation was always to be believed, there were few comments. After all, Cosby got off on what was considered a technicality though civil libertarians might say that was a very serious matter in that due process of law was a fundamental part of all western societies.

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Competition and Cooperation

Here is a species of group phenomena that can be called “oppositionists”. These are a group of people or organizations (or, for that matter, higher mammals) who compete with one another but do so within a set of rules that are useful for furthering their individual interests. A good example of oppositionists are gladiators. They fight with one another and may even kill one another, but they have a guild whereby they mutually train or from which they receive common services such as food, shelter and medical attention. We are familiar with such groups in the movies “Spartacus” and “Gladiator”. It is strange to contemplate how people out to kill one another can bond with one another emotionally, but there you are. The consequence of being practical and also the practice of admiring the heroism of one another even if pitted against one another as deadly foes. The same could be said of other deviant groups. Prostitutes compete with one another and will trick one another but they may share with one another the hazards of their work and so train another in the skills that allow them to survive in that endeavor. They are all in the same boat. The same is true with non deviant groups. Baseball teams compete with one another under the rules of the league and baseball players honor one another’s servicn e as they compete with one another on the field and are traded to different teams when those holding their contracts may do. A Red Sox player won’t hate the Yankees even if the fans feign to do so so as to gin up team rivalry. After all, most players will easily adjust to the new team to which they have been traded. Johnny Mize moved from the New York Giants to the Yankees and Johnny Damion from the Red Sox ro the Yankees. Loyalty to the profession and to money rather than the competition provides real loyalty and motivation.

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A Competent Admininistration

The Biden Administration is churning along on its various projects but things are in stasis, at the moment, because the fruits of their endeavors have not yet arrived with the exception of that easy one that occurred early on when the Recovery Act passed and, among other things, provided jobs for health care workers and cops, and gave everyone a fourteen hundred dollar check, and covered the costs of Covid relief. Not minor but the real test is whether Biden will get his infrastructure bill and his family plan, both of which should result whether from bipartisanship or reconciliation in late summer. As it is, there is no movement on the George Floyd Act to deal with police violence, where negotiators are still negotiating and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act seems to be getting nowhere however much Biden says he is strongly in favor of those two bills. So Biden will either be a great success and run in the midterms on his success at the infrastructure and family bills, a tribute that government can work in spite of the fifty fifty tie in the Senate and only a majority of a handful in the House, or he will be a failed President, in which case the Republicans who had blocked his efforts will run against him as a do nothing President. Either a hero or a failure rather than just middling with just some accomplishments along with his defeats. So we all wait and think that the very fabric of democracy is in the balance in that a Republican majority in Congress, most Republicans still not having pledged itself to the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and those Republicans might do any number of deplorable matters though. like as not, will do not very much other than allow states to undercut democratic elections because doing nothing and being obstructionist is what Republicans have done for a while, even before Trump, in that their creed is no longer balancing the budget or being aggressive at foreign powers or fighting the cultural wars like abortion, the last issue to be dealt with next year by the Supreme Court when its 6-3 majority will likely seriously curtail the right to an abortion just as this year it seriously curtailed the 1965 Voting Rights Bill, leaving only the possibility that the Biden Attorney General will cleverly find a way to sue states for voting rights incursions even though the Supreme Court limited that by saying these suits had to be significant and cognizant of the need to avoid voter fraud even though the Court never had to say the states had to show there had indeed to be voter fraud before restrictions to protect it from happening occurred. The Supreme Court is not simply wrong headed; it is fatuous. So we wait and so have foreboding about what will happen when events break.Meanwhile, I get some solace, despite my anxieties, for watching the Biden Administration perform itself so smoothly. It is a pleasure to watch given the chaos of the Trump Administration when that President made off the cuff and erratic and wrong and lying remarks and performances and his Executive Branch was understaffed or ever changing or riddled with ideologues and ignorant people and Trump, for the nation’s relief, was not able to control the reins of government because he didn’t know how to and so could do trivial things by clearing rioters so he could have a photo op at a church, to no effect, although reports have it that he did plan to undermine institutions, while only undercutting Bill Barr and his predecessor because of the only parochial concern over whether the two of them had supported him in the investigations by Congress of his misdeeds. No big policy agenda. Just a wall to nowhere and giving money to rich people, that last something Republicans always like to do so as to get reelected to office.

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Directing, Scripting, and Acting

Henry King was a successful but rarely artistically accomplished movie director. From the time of the silence through the mid Fifties, which is an eon of changes through the talkies and then Technicolor, from slow and leisurely storytelling as in the black and white “State Fair” to the lavish melodrama of “Love is a Many Splendored Thing”, King’s movies made it at the box office but did not have the acclaim that was associated with the first rate directors like Wyler and Wellman and Ford. His movies were workmanlike but, to tell the truth, fell dead. Whether when it was a color musical such as “Carousel”, its boxy pacing and sets did not make Shirley Jones and Gordon Macrae soar. They both seemed doughty even though they were young and fresh, as Jones had shown a few years before in “Elmer Gantry”. The big interest in King’s “State Fair” was the pig. There was, however, an exception, when King seemed to go beyond himself, for reasons unclear, whereby he put it together so that the script, the cutting, the scenery and the acting made one movie spectacularly effective, ever a tribute to the mysteries of art. Here is the one that seems to me to be far above the rest of his oeuvre: “Twelve O’Clock High '', made in 1949.

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Foreground and Background in Ozu

It is simple enough to understand the difference between the foreground and the background in a novel or a film. “Pride and Prejudice” has a background of small villages and manor houses and smaller homes who at least have a few servants, as well as roads to London and comfortable places there in which people can live, while the foreground, the action of the story, concerns how young people of various stations of life pursue courtship and marriage. That is the adventure or story of the novel, even though by the time Jane Austen does his last and best novel, “Persuasion”, the foreground of the story is about love lost and then regained has also changed its background in that a class situation dominated by property and station is transmuted into social position dominated by wealth. Sometimes, there is a novel or film preoccupied with the background rather than the foreground. Tolstoy shows the social life of upper class Russia in both “War and Peace” and in “Anna Karenina”, the characters appealing enough but not highly distinctive. Pierre, in “War and Peace”, is the type of someone who doesn’t belong, useful as a companion to go with and elucidate battlefields, while Levin, in “Anna Karenina”, is a type of person trying to be progressive by becoming reactionary, he becoming a bit more human when he notices that he is old enough so that his teeth are beginning to rot. (I guess there were few dentists.) The same focus on background also applies to “Gone With the Wind”, a way of life overturned and ended after what was its brief flourish, the author making believe, as it was for historical consciousness, a way of life that had lasted for only a few generations from the time when the plantations were established and the destruction of the South brought about by the war. Enough figures populate the present so that the background is explored. The same is true with much greater effect in James Gould Cozzens’ much underappreciated “Guard of Honor” where a dashing World War II Air Force officer is tested as a leader, the foreground, when the real drama is how his air base, as an organization, measures up to adapt to changing circumstances. The background, not the foreground, is the issue.

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Housing is Not a Home

“Housing” nowadays is understood as a social problem. How are we to establish enough residences so as to make populations both affordable and comfortable? It is difficult to do so because there is always a tendency to build luxury housing rather than build low cost housing. All you have to do is put in gold knobs and the price jacks up, while low cost housing has a small profit margin. Moreover, people away from transit lines or commercial areas will not provide the amenities upper income people desire. That is why municipalities offer rent controls and other devices so that the populations of people will remain mixed rather than just enclaves of very high incomes, though that is an always losing battle, Manhattan, for example, replacing lower income housing with luxury housing. The drive to provide affordable and manageable housing is at least as old as the New Tenement Law in New York City in 1901 which required apartments in buildings to include running hot and cold water, indoor toilets, ventilation and other amenities to be certified for inhabiting these structures. The idea was that housing was a home in that it was a place where people felt comfortable and sufficient in that they could deal with their basic needs for food, heat and grooming. It was a place where people could be at peace when they were alone with their families rather than engaged during the day with commerce and work and schooling and all the other activities or purposes whereby people left their homes so as to joust with their incomes and their bureaucracies. That was different from what happened in mass public supported buildings in the mid Twentieth Century when housing projects such as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis was notorious for elevators that didn’t work and young people wandering around the halls intruding into any apartment they care to and so providing neither amenities nor security for the occupants. The entire edifice had to be torn down because it was an urban pest hole that no one wanted to live in.

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Is Civic Education the Answer?

George Packer is a seasoned and judicious political journalist and has offered in the Atlantic magazine this week a very pessimistic portrait of the American scene. He says that we are engaged in an extended civil war in that people have difficulty recognizing themselves as fellow Americans because of their ideologies, emotions and customs. The other side is the enemy. Hillary Clinton’s side thought she was right to think her opponents deplorable and irredeemable while those opponents thought that the coastal elites, as they considered them, condescending and remote from ordinary life, not willing to recognize that so many families of both stripes supported Little League and soccer practice. I observe the truth of this view when I see and hear people who are committed to law and order and think the looting that occurred last summer during the reaction to George Floyd was unconscionable while those who attacked the Capitol in January were people out on a lark and visa versa, the insurrectionists unpardonable and the looters understandable. Moreover, Packer thinks this situation is likely to remain of longstanding, each side more deeply sunk into its own silo of thought, fact and observation, whatever is the order of these three perceptions, and may lead to the disintegration of the American polity and something could set off a spark that not even the military should or could suppress.

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Historical Mysteries

An historical mystery arises when historians consider why events happened and, after considering all the forces that are at work, there is no satisfactory explanation for why the event or events took place. A good example of an historical mystery is the outbreak of World War I, a topic rigorously investigated from the overly ample materials of the circumstances and events of what is called The July Crisis that occurred after Prince Ferdinand (and his wife) had been assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914 and had for some reason precipitated a World War from which we might say we did not all recover until the Soviet Union collapsed and Germany was reunited in the late 1980’s. How had this apocalypse, none of its member states believing it would happen (Germany mistakenly thinking it would be a short war), had nevertheless occurred?

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Criticizing Critical Race Theory

When critical race theory was a manifesto proposed by Black lawyers and other Black intellectuals in 1980 to set straight American history, claiming that Black people were the backbone for creating American society and yet its endemic racism had turned the tables and victimized Black people and it was time to restore to Black people the rightful historical and present order of things, I thought the theory, though it was not worked out well enough to award that term of praise, was both jejune and meretricious, and I thought the so-called theory destined to fall on its own weight and to be overtaken by more enlightened Black intellectuals because its success would turn back race relations for generations. The movement it has inspired, however, has become hallowed in its brief history and has inspired a counter movement to abolish it, in school boards and state houses, both the advocates and their opponents neither of them appreciating history as the way to see history is complicated but instead think of history as a way to take sides on peoples and races and so the controversy has indeed set back a more enlightened view of race relations and so there is indeed a need to point out the shortcomings and malice of the movement and the same of its opponents. It is just another case of bad ideas continuing to fester and we would all be best rid of it, which is also the case of Naziismand Qanon. Bad ideas, after all, do matter. I will grant, however, that the two sides are ignorant rather than as meanspirited or vicious as those other benighted movements.

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Communism and Qanon

Frank Lovejoy was a mid-level supporting movie actor whose base voice, prominent chin and dour personality should have given him more recognition, much more so than Robert Stack, who also developed a persona as a stone face and became a Hollywood fixture for twenty years. But Lovejoy did manage to act as the star of a minor movie, “I Was a Communist for the FBI”, made in 1950, close to the top of the Second Red Scare, and he portrayed a Communist undercover agent for the FBI so as to let the audience see both the workings of Communism in the American midst as well as how the hero persevered to finally reveal himself as a true patriot, something all right thinking people would endorse because all the Reds were bad and devious and violent while the FBI and civilians understood that all Reds were bad, no ambiguities allowed. As Whittiker Chambers put it, the real war was between Reds and ex-Reds. They would decide the fate of the world. Other movies such as “I Led Three Lives'' and “Dear John'', which starred Helen Hayes and the last year of the overweight Robert Walker, made the same point: monolithic heroes and monolithic villains in our midst. The point of these movies was to see the Communist side as impenetrable, beyond the ability to understand what ordinary people thought of them, and nothing redeeming about them, and so it was that there was a gnostic divided between the two that was not mediated by ideological interchange or mixed feelings, the female Communist in the movie realizing it was a lost cause as soon as she realized what the Party was doing, never wondering whether allowances might be made for its imperfections after she had joined its initial idealistic enthusiasm. Even German generals within a few years of the war were recognized as having human touches and mixed feelings and a kind of honor, but not so for Communists.

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The Iron Laws of Emotions

The theory of emotions is a field of endeavor that concerns the causes of emotions, whether they are responses to physiological events, or are mediated by thoughts, or some combination of the two or is impacted by some other kind of factor offered for consideration. Are you anxious because you sweat or sweat because you are anxious or because you think there is a reason to be anxious? I want to suggest a different approach. Consider the nature of emotions rather than the cause of emotions. What are their basic characteristics? Identifying those is, first of all, possible and, second of all, result in non-obvious findings about emotions.

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