Economists say that money is fungible. What they mean by that is that it can be traded for any number of different commodities. A school can use its money to replace the roof or to buy new textbooks. That is why some legislators don't like giving private schools money to compensate for keeping attendance records or having school lunches. It means their money can be reallocated to religious instruction. Some other than money certificates are also at least partially fungible. Frequent flier miles can be credited for gaining flights to any number of destinations so long as you use the same airline.There are also other matters that do not seem to be economic which are also fungible. Affection is partly fungible in that the affection of a spouse is transferred to an inlaw or at least given the benefit of the doubt until events warrant treating a person otherwise. All that is required is that something can be spread around by a party which has some entitlement to do so, as is indicated by a dollar bill, and whatever is exchanged can be retained by the person who engages in the trade. The exact value or unit of exchange may not be clear,but it is useful to provide denominations whereby amounts of the fungible product are comparable. It is hard to trade diamonds all of which are large but there can be produced diamonds of various qualities and sizes. Sex is clearly fungible in that it is a service that can be traded for any number of different things, from money to social position to affection and so the market on sex is highy controlled by the customs and laws of society so as to assure the value remains of high value, so that it can be exchanged for marriage, and so that people do not become too coarse in their exchanges, and so people continue to ssociate sex with affection, though some people think it liberating to dissociate the two.
Read MoreThe Shopkeeper's Lament
Karl Marx used the petit bourgeoisie, which are the small shopkeepers in organizations of, let us say, ten or less-- the people nowadays who run restaurants and got such a hard time because of Coronavirus-- so as to distinguish them from the haute bourgeoisie, who are the entrepreneurs of wealth and with large organizations that have a significant impact on the means of production: the factories and the mines that make steel and locomotives. The petit bourgeoisie are not really important business people, just occupations that offer a living. But Marx was a genius at identifying a distinctive mentality that went along with a particular line of work. He later developed the idea of “functionary” to describe the civil servants and other hangers on that allowed France’s Second Empire to continue to survive despite its political and economic failures. The shopkeepers are also a type in that they follow a way of life determined by their economic situation that molds the way they live and think and feel. My father was one of these, though not started out as one, but rather as a baker, who is a member of the skilled working class, and he adjusted to the new role of running a ma and pa grocery store and then to the proprietor of a small supermarket.
Read MoreThe Human Condition Persists
How do you evaluate the human condition? Are the basic and inevitable characteristics of human life such that it is great or lousy or so-so? It might be more like Hobbes’ brutish and nasty, red in tooth and claw, a dog eat dog existence only barely mitigated by civil order or, on the other hand, the human condition might be like a weekend family barbeque where the only anxiety amidst the enjoyment of gazing at your wife and children is making sure to turn on the tv to see the football game. Is the human condition closer to heaven or to hell? This question is very difficult to answer because there is only one human condition to contemplate, all the comparisons merely thought experiments. Moreover, it is difficult to assess what is to be included within the human condition. It could include that people are not able to directly enter the consciousness of another person, as if there were a mind meld, or there were just a shared experience for a brief period of time with someone else’s thoughts and feelings about their own discreditable habits or cravings (horrible) or only their more attractive features, such as a will to do the decent thing (heavenly or still just awful to experience in someone else’s skin). Another thing to think about that it is possible to imagine but not realize is that people cannot travel in time so as to alter or even just contemplate when Washington crossed the Delaware or when Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment or when the west was anything over the Appalachians. Did our sense of ourselves very different when traveling in those circumstances? We experiment at that all the time by reading history, our imaginations conveyed to us through books, but would we be very different if we could in fact transport ourselves in that way? I wonder how awful it would have been to confront a world where Hiitler was alive and well in 1940. Would I always be terrified or just continuing on the usual things of getting through school and work and courtship or, more likely, having to do all of those things all at once, aware of both world politics and the quotidian, as one does every day during this or any other time.
Read MoreAbolishing Drugs the Soft Way
Unlike Prohibition, which was a failure at abolishing alcohol because rates of alcohol use were by the Seventies back to pre-Prohibition levels, social programs to eliminate tobacco were extremely successful and should be applied to another addiction problem, those of illegal drugs like cocaine and heroin. The soft approach to the very harsh reality of drugs which diminish the capacities of the users and plague the neighborhoods whereby drug financed gangs engage in drive by and random shootings and seem incapable of becoming resolved are programs that do not require Supreme Court decisions or major legislation, while the abortion debates seem never to end and environmental debates on air pollution and fossil feul emissions remain a quandary despite efforts of legislation to control them. The soft model is large scale reeducation of the population and making drug use simply inconvenient. Tobacco use was everywhere present in 1965 in that 42% of Americans used cigarettes and cigarette encouragement was everywhere in TV and print advertising. Cigarette companies had major lobbies so as to maintain their power. But by 2018, smokers were now down to 14% of the population and, even more, only 8% of those between the ages of 18 and 24, suggesting that the younger cohort of the population were using even fewer smokes, that defined as daily or every second day use, and so the habit was dying off. This happened, even though it took half a century to accomplish, because there was widespread publicity of the report of the Surgeon General’s Report of 1965 that smoking led to cancer, and lawsuits by state Attorneys General to sue tobacco companies for providing cancer killing products, and also, perhaps most important, restrictions by municipalities, one by one, to make cigarette smoking more difficult. Public buildings were barred from smoking, and so smokers congregated on their plazas during work breaks. Then universities and colleges barred students and teachers from smoking, and then restaurants. It just became just too difficult to manage. Rather than treating personality problems to be the cause of addiction, with studies showing how useful tobacco addiction is to well-being, there was the development of operational shortcuts to avoid smoking, such as tieing a box of cigarettes with rubber bands so that it took time and effort to get at a cigarette. People eliminated ashtrays, much less cigarette boxes, on their coffee tables and side tables. And so cigarettes are largely over. Solution accomplished. What next for a public outcry, this time against heroin and cocaine, that is beyond the political, that sidesteps the political?
Read MoreThe Top of the World
Heading west on Interstate 84 in eastern Oregon, the route passes through the Rockies in an unusual way. Rather than trails and roads finding their way through passes between the mountains so as to see the valleys between, which is what happens later on in our route to Seattle, when the lush valleys can be seen suddenly uncovered in their sunshine and shadows, idyllic places rather than the rough places of the peaks that are higher by far than where the roads go through it, Interstate 84 instead finds its way on top of the mountains, moving from high point to high point, these not apexes but extended ridges where the trees to both sides are of the same elevation as the road, no cliffs to see, nor the valleys either, because the trees are enough to prevent looking at a gap or offering a clearing. The result is that the passing cars offer a sense of being on top of the world, a continuous thing that goes for a long distance and so making the whole vistaless view seem miraculous, a deep insight into how there is nothing higher but nothing depressed and so offering a very little angle of vision. This experience is remarkably pleasurable partly because it is so unusual a vantage point, or rather the lack of a vantage point, and even more so because the whole scene seems to float without a top and a bottom, as if there were a natural equality in which people (or trees) were embedded, rather than a natural inequality whereby something is always either higher or lower, these the differences in geometry about something very fundamental about social life, which is that equality and inequality are the two natural states of social existence with inequality the predominant quality. We all float amidst the unusual sight of the equal society of trees surrounding one another and those who observe them rather than some more elevated than others, looking at other companion trees rather than in the distance. Isn't equality grand?
Read MoreThe Haitian Mess
There are three ways to approach the mess in Haiti, its failure as a society, which was best symbolized by the 15,000 Haitian refugees, now down to zero, that for a week or so crowded in an underpass near Del Rio, Texas. What was to be done about them and what to do with Haiti? The first proposal, propounded at the time by journalists, local politicians and the American diplomat who resigned over the issue, is to do the humane thing, regardless of what the law says, and grant asylum to the Haitians because there is no life to be found in Haiti given its earthquake, its political disruption and its failure to make a living for its people. After all, we allow any Cubans who get to the United States to remain there because of the remnants of a Cold War that ended 35 years ago. Haiti has about the same population as Cuba, about 11 million, even if Haiti is one third the size of Cuba and Haiti is the most densely concentrated population in the Western Hemisphere. Why not let in the ones who can manage to get to America, the failure of Haiti to thrive being sufficient reason? The Monroe Doctrine has been taken to mean that the United States takes responsibility for its hemisphere so as to preclude foreign control of the area, and so the United States cannot pawn off Haiti to France just because of their related language and history. Moreover, the United States has regularly intruded into Haiti. The U. S. Marines occupied the nation during the Twenties so as to pacify the nation and Bill Clinton both restored a legitimate Presidency to Haiti and then took up a major initiative to reconstruct the nation economically after one of its regular earthquakes. Why not now, after another earthquake and another period of political unrest? What was done before can be done again, never mind the debate about immigration policies having to do with any number of other peoples trying to make it into the United States. Think of immigration as a blessing rather than a problem. It shows that people want to come to the United States so as to achieve better lives. Would one prefer people not to want to get to the United States, legally or not? The pressure of immigration shows the U.S. is thriving. As one wag put it, take two billion dollars from Biden’s 3.5 trillion dollar reconciliation package, and then Haiti could be reconstructed into being a respectable nation.
Read MorePresent, Past, and Future
Here is an easy situation in which people can appreciate the experience of past, present and future rather than use time as something that is measured, as happens in a clock, where time is just something, whatever it is, that “moves” past. Think of a game of rummy. The cardplayer anticipates what card will come up to complete your rummy or to have a few enough cards so you can “knock”. Every time you are about to pick a card is an anticipation that is needed. Those successive picks until the one card you pick are the future. There are multiple possibilities and keep the cardplayer anxious about what the next card will be. People live in or for the future and it is not easy to describe which proposition “in” or “for” is to apply. When the card you need turns up is in the present. It is an event for the instant satisfaction that it lasts as a card player appreciates that a card has changed the situation advantageously. The memory of all of those times when an unsatisfactory card did not turn up is the past, the collection of failed opportunities, that lets a calculating cardplayer increase the chances of getting the card you want because of the failed opportunities of the cards that have been discarded. What applies to card playing as a way to emphasize the appreciation of past, present and future is the aesthetic or metaphysical pleasure of playing cards.
Read MoreThe French Submarines
The decision by the Biden Administration to declare that it would build nuclear submarines with Australia and the United Kingdom rather than conventional submarines with the French was significant and controversial and leads into some very complex matters even though that decision is only a very short blip on the political horizon and will have no impact on the midterms. First off, that decision would have seemed unnecessary. Ever since Henry Kissinger negotiated the Shanghai Communique in 1972, it might have seemed unnecessary to present a significant military force to confront the Chinese by having nuclear subs stay indefinitely on station between China and Formosa, something conventional submarines apparently can't do. The Kissinger plan was that China and the United States would become economically interdependent and so not likely to face up in a war. The two powers avoided the containment policy that relied on military power to keep the Soviet Union under control until it had matured enough as an economic nation and had put aside its totalitarian political and social system so that it would no longer be a belligerent party. Maybe all the submarine sabre-rattling is overdone because it only means that there has to be an additional force to help guide the two superpowers through the inevitable antagonism that results from the fact that the two are so powerful, but it is still unnerving in that the United States was in a Cold War in the Twentieth Century that lasted from 1949 until 1989 and that except for particularly adroit mutual management and a lot of luck, the two superpowers might have gone on to a nuclear war, and the fear of that shrouded two generations. We don’t want that again. I went through it the first time and the prospect of it by younger people may not appreciate its gravity.
Read MoreThe Secret of Education
Georg Simmel, one of the foundational theorists of sociology, never offered a theory of education, but he observed many strange or exotic social structures that are applicable to a variety of very usal events. One of these is the secret society, where people bind together with one another through oaths and rituals and signs known only to their other members and that accomplish and share between themselves a special illumination or purpose. Secret societies include the Ku Klux Klan, the Shriners, and the Masons, and so seem outlandish and different from the usual walks of life. That definition, however, includes some pretty pervasive and even largely inclusive parts of a population. Christianity is a secret society. Part of its genius is that membership is offered to anyone who sincerely agrees to be a follower of Jesus and there are numerous rituals, such as the Mass or declaring one to have been born again, which make you within the community rather than outside of it, the reward of which, for that belief, is that in some sense or other a participant or member is offered eternal life, whatever that may come to mean over time. Fellow members understand what they are up to so that Christians may think that an annulment is not much different from a divorce but for the sake of form the distinction is respected as the Catholic way of doing things, and Protestants will think themselves transformed or saved in that they have been financially successful. Those inside get one another or act as if they do, however much friction there may be between denominations or national churches, some theologians and pastors arguing the cut off point between membership and its reward and those outside of membership. Is a Mormon a Christian or is a Mormon not so, whatever their protestations, because Mormons do not believe in original sin while all other Christians do? Other secret societies may be more trivial but also pervasive. Children join clubs that have special jackets and thereby are entitled to friendship and loyalty, as do military organizations, where there is less emphasis on illumination than on duty and suffering.
Read MoreWhat's Next?
When dealing with politics or whatever is large enough as a social matter to be considered history, those of us who are viewers or observers or whatever is the audience to politics and history always await what will happen next, knowing that, except for people who are alarmists or very certain about how well off they may be when the world ends, there is no end of new things, just like in a soap opera, where characters emerge and reemerge if the audience likes them or pass from the scene to new figures and their problems. In politics, there is always a new campaign, a new Young Turk, a superannuated figure who lingers on to become President, and new configurations whereby Jews and Blacks and women and Gays can become part of the political elites as well as the political masses. There are new issues, like climate change, and older issues, like abortion or voting rights, that get revived with a slightly different spin. Politics is like going to a carnival where you pick out which game you wish to take part in. The only cost to the game is the willingness of time and attention to deal with it, everyone is a master strategist or a tout who predicts which horse will win. Consequently, the viewers or observers are always trying to construct the succession of events as comprising a story so as to make sense of those events. What candidate will peak too early (like Kamala Harris) or just hold on, like Joe Biden, when, in fact, Biden was always ahead in the popularity contest even if he did not make headway in the delegate votes until after the South Carolina Primary. Nixon thought a candidate should peak just right while Nixon thought you go full out all the time. So, at the moment, a viewer like me thinks politics is at a lull, the dust up over Afghanistan over, waiting for whether Biden can pull off his reconciliation and infrastructure bills, neither voting rights or police violence going to amount to much, Biden a hero if both of the major bills pass and a good chance for him to retain congressional control after the midterms, while losing both will make him regarded as a failed President, and the press uncertain what to make of it if Biden gets infrastructure but has to be very scaled down to get reconciliation of what has now been called social infrastructure, which means the extension of entitlements, which is always the goal of Liberal politics. My theory is that there are lulls and moments of high drama, as when John McCain sustained the Affordable Care Act over President Trump’s objection, partly out of policy and partly out of pique. Isn’t that usually the case?
Read MoreWhy Heaven and Hell
Bart Erdman is a Biblical scholar who is prolific and clear. He says that his job is not to say whether religious beliefs are true or not but to examine how the ideas and emotions associated with them develop. He does, however, offer hypotheses or explanations for why they develop, and so I can wander in as a mere sociologist of religion to offer alternative explanations. Erdman claims that the reason people venture into ideas of Heaven and Hell is because people are just about universally afraid of death, the afterlife portrayed, at best, as a dismal thing. Erdman thinks that people elaborate on Heaven and Hell so as to posit an afterlife. There has to be a just reward for the pains of life while one is living and so there has to be a way to mete out that justice by having both options. A lifetime is long enough by which a person can establish whether one is worthy of the better of the two alternatives-- or provide for a third possibility, which is to work off one’s liabilities after death through Purgatory.
I don’t think Erdman is correct because, among other things, it is necessary to contemplate why so much pain is involved in Hell and why people for most of Christian history have had relish of how awful are the conditions that prevail in Hell. Why does God require so much suffering? A modern Christian might say that there are no occupants in Hell, but certainly most of Christian history thought otherwise. Why the gore along with the glory? I want to offer two standard explanations for the punishment of the dead and then offer two fresh ones, one psychological and one sociological.
Read MoreThe Expanse of Landscapes
The essence of the visual arts is to show what things look like. The visual arts can also offer designs or illustrations of ideas, but those are not the main thing. Picasso’s “Guernica” shows the anguish of a gored bull and viewers read about it to learn that the painting was about the Spanish Civil War. The commentary, not the picture, told the viewer that. Lenze’s “Crossing of the Delaware” commemorates an important event in American history and so convey’s patriotism, but what the viewer sees is all these people jumbled together in a boat and wondering whether the boat will capsize. More important as for the aesthetics of the visual arts is that each of the major genres of the visual arts find the particular subject matter whereby what is to be shown. Still lifes show arrangements of articles so that the juxtaposition is quaint of vases and fruit or even rotten fruit so as to gather the experience of having all of those experiences put together for their textures or shapes or the different kinds of those things, some ceramic, some organic, some sleek, some mottled. Portraits, for another example of the genres of the visual arts, show faces for whatever it means for people to interpret what is to be made of faces, how faces reveal or cover up minds. You may look at Rembrandt’s “ The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild” as a presentation of how important people are meeting with one another, and so a record or a commemoration of that event, but the primary thing to notice is the faces, what particular people look like and how they are different and the same as people’s other faces.
Read MoreThe Drama of the A-Bomb
There are many accounts of those distinctive images and situations that are associated with the atomic bombing that ended the Pacific War in World War II. Very well told is Ian Toll’s “The Twilight of the Gods” in that he covers everything, including whether a diplomatic tweak on the part of the Americans might have ended the war without requiring the A-bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Toll does not provide anything new but he is well balanced. There is the Oppenheimer operation in Los Alamos, a city of young scientists doing with limited comforts. Then the first A blast in the New Mexico desert, the sun rising twice, as has often been said, and toll’s retelling of the green ferrous oxide that was all that was left at the original site of the blast.Then the shift to the politicians when the scientists turn their weapon to the decision makers. Then the hordes of B-29 fleets pulverizing the Japanese homeland and then delivering the bombs themselves, and then the stunned aftermath where the agonizing decision was made for the Japanese to surrender, and then the start of the occupation, Americans startled that the Japanese people who greeted them when they arrived as conquerors in their home territories were grateful and joyous rather than sullen or dejected.
Read MoreApartment Life
People outside of New York don’t get New York City apartments, or maybe it is that suburbanites don’t get what it means to be in a city. They complained to me when I lived in New York City that there was so much hustle and bustle on the streets that a person could never get any rest while normal places, those that developed in the suburbs after the Second World War, allowed the streets to empty out and go to sleep and so everyone could get restful. But that was not the case in cities where you could live in a residential neighborhood while a block away from a busy commercial area, such as happened to me a number of times, as when a child when two blocks away in one direction and three in another there was a bustling place where everything could be had, like restaurants and supermarkets and pharmacies and movie theatres and haberdasheries (remember those? What happened to them? Dress shops never closed up.) My parents’ apartment fronted on a park that received great sunlight and people sitting on their benches while their children made noise in the street, though that was not cacophonous, any more than children riding their tricycles in the suburban neighborhood in which I now live. Yes, my parents and I heard the El train just a block away, but it was the other side of it that was the other side of the tracks while my side was residential, just as living a block away from Broadway in an upper storey with a view of midtime Manhattan made you private and serene once you left the streets and followed a different pace of things, those of home life, rather than the ways of commerce and occupations.
Read MoreThe Art of Miracles
There are relatively few miracles in the Old Testament and they vary in quality in that some are artistically rendered and so provide lasting images, like the Burning Bush, or seem just a trick, like Daniel in the lion’s den, that simply occasioning surprise in that he simply survives rather than the miracle conveying meaning on its own, as happens when Lot’s wife turns to a pillar of salt when she looks back to see the destruction of Sodom, and so indicates that people ought not to turn back on their lives lest they become frozen or transfixed in that reverie rather than move on to new events. That particular miracle is deep, something more than a violation of physical nature. It is about the actuality of social and psychological nature. When Joshua stopped the sun so that his army had time to win the battle, it was a sense that a long and bloody afternoon kept on and on until this battle was done, as if it were that the sun had not been allowed to set. The Bible is replete with this imagery, only some of them considered miracles so as to make a point and also to show that God, one way or another, intervenes in things. It would have been not at all that surprising for a spark to set off a burning bush. Its significance was in that a voice was associated with it and so is in keeping with the very deep Hebraic insight that God appears in voices as a kind of event rather than in other events, like catastrophes or places that are holy in themselves.
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreMorals 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.
Read MoreFor The Duration
“For the duration” was a term coined, I believe, during the Second World War to describe the extraordinary measures that had to be taken until the war was over. That included rationing, blackout curtains, a military draft, men away from their homes in dangerous places and women who had to raise children among other women, and women who worked in factories and retail establishments and as government workers and all the women expected to give up their work and take up normal civilian life after the war, which meant getting married, having children and being homemakers. The idea was that things would get back to normal even though it rarely happens when a war ends. The chasm in America today is not only between blacks and whites and college educated and not but also because of the Vietnam War that separated the differences between those who trust the government and those who do not, even though what happened was that the Liberals and what became the Progressives are the more trusting of the government while the Conservatives are the ones who don’t trust to vaccines or elections.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreJello 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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