Lawyers develop documents whereby people contract to meet what are now their obligations. This seems a very fair arrangement in that people have written down what they have agreed to do, for a consideration, and that social life could not proceed if those undertakings, such as to pay a debt or offer a service, were not promised in writing. Contracts are as old as when contracts were made about whose grain would be sold in the future when the crops in Babylon were reaped. But this well appreciated practice of everyday social life that is best noticed and freshly appreciated through the lens of sociology rather than through the law because law may generate those documents but without exploring the social activities associated with documents other than that they become obligatory. As in most cases with social life, sociology trumps law by dealing with what actually transpires rather than the way things are supposed to happen. To wit, informed consent agreements are, in fac,t neither informed nor agreements, only the products sustained and operated by other social processes.
Read MoreTish Harrison Warren and Gentle Christianity
I want to comment on Tish Harrison Warren, an op-ed columnist recently added to the New York Times, who covers religion and morality from an Anglican perspective. She seems like a nice woman who exemplifies the most decent and humane instincts not only about life but as a reflection of her Christianity. I consider her one of the many people I have met or read about who give Christianity a good name even while I diverge on the basic principles of Christianity, such as the Atonement, or Original Sin, or a Virgin Birth, or history unfolding a great plan for humanity despite the fact, as Christopher Hutchins pointed out, there was an awful long history of suffering that preceded Christianity two thousand years go and Christ did not do much about it before that and, indeed, since His appearance. Christianity has also created a great deal of suffering, including the idea that people should love their oppressor, yielding a regime that is much like North Korea. But however gifted Hutchins was as a polemicist, and whatever are the outlandish and implicitly cruel policies conveyed by Christian thought and feeling, I am a sociologist of religion and so I can recognize that Christians, despite their fundamental beliefs and emotions, can behave and feel themselves to be decent people with benevolent impulses, Tish Warren one of them, and so I want to understand what she is saying in her own words for the weight that carries, rather than for what the history of Christianity may carry with it. So I have no need to insult her, just understand what her own words say about particular matters and what, in general, her particular stance on Christianity conveys.
Read MoreJane's Aphorism
My deceased wife had an aphorism that seems to ring true and to which I regularly return. It says: “If you can’t explain what you mean, then you can’t know what you mean”. She arrived at this aphorism by trial and error by noticing people who got confused when they were asked to explain themselves. This insight had been formalized by Bertrand Russell's Theory of Definite Description which propounded the idea that a wrong statement was not just incorrect but made no sense. If a statement were properly propounded, it had to make sense. Jane applied this criterion to any number of people who got very annoyed at having failed to make themselves as clear as Jane required people to be. It was a standard that also applied in the mid Twentieth Century to what was then considered an age of ideology. I would have arguments with Marxists and Stalinists where each of us would try to pick out the crucial flaw in their logic, reducing one another to basic and irreducible axioms. I would argue that Weber’s idea of status and organization were independent of social class as the ways to create power and that was all that had to be said, and a Stalinist and I also came to agree to essentials, he thinking that something called the Communist Party would govern over the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its wisdom would lead us to the future, in whatever way the Party chose and saw fit, while I thought the evolution of society was subject to the constraints of social structure. I thought him quasi religious in he giving himself over to an ultimate authority, or to put it otherwise, to an almighty, but he was clear and consistent. He knew what he meant even if his basic stated principles did seem to me muddled because any leader could call himself a Communist and lord over everyone if there were no independent standards. That point of view is very different from the present one where people can, in effect, invoke the idea actors or feigning roles that “you know what I mean” as a way of providing a sufficient explanation for their meaning, having a sense of it that it would be rude to suggest needed further explanation, and people back in those days also though rude if Jane would persist and insist on people explaining themselves i f they were not to be thought of as engaging in gibberish. No longer insisting on narrowing down to basic principles but only a general sense of things to be respected.
Read MoreThe Legitimacy of the Supreme Court
The legitimacy of the United States Supreme Court may be deteriorating, whether because so many decisions are badly decided or because too many of them are so out of general public sentiment. Leaking of Justice Alito’s draft decision to override Roe v. Wade is just a fru-fru that doesn’t amount to much even if Sen. Cruz of Texas says he is sure, without evidence, that a Liberal had disclosed it, and that the perpetrator should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, though it is not clear that this is even a minor legal infraction. After all, this is not a national security matter, just a custom of privacy before everyone has had a chance to edit a decision. Moreover, it is the Conservative Supreme Court watchers who are the ones casting aspersions to the legitimacy of the Court in that they are the ones who seem to find every recent major decision since Brown v. Board of Education to have been flawed and requires being overturned. What validity should Supreme Courts hold if they get everything wrong? Indeed, most major decisions rest on flimsy grounds. Griswald discovered the penumbra of the Constitutional right to privacy and Roe invented legislative like stipulations about when the Court could allow when the government could intervene in privacy (the last trimester), something subject to change every few years when there are advances in neonatal care that move fetal viability to ever shorter terms in their pregnancies. It is a very different way to make decisions from on high as when the Vatican insists it never makes mistakes or apologizes for few papal decisions or even administrative matters where they have erred. If errors are frequent, then how is the Catholic Church to be infallible? If the Supreme Court is regularly erroneous, how are we to think that the Court is wise and thoughtful?
Read MoreThe Social and the Transcendental
When I take my daily constitutional half a mile to a convenience store and back, I am not alone even though I don’t know the names or remember the faces of people I pass. They know who I am: an elderly man with a cane who is getting his exercise, and perhaps returning with a beverage. Nobody is without their roles,some important ones of which are on display. What you see is what I am whether or not I disclose what I think are my deep thoughts. The question here is whether I can ever escape from my roles, is there some relaxation of all those roles, like tinker, would be spy or ex-professor, that cocoon me, everyone exhibiting any number of spikes that, like the coronavirus, allow identities to hang onto our projections and our awards, or ‘beings” as a particular entity. Yes there are, and among them is exhibited in that nearly daily walk, because I get so enmeshed in the walk itself, that it travels in distance, that I forget what my roles are, to the extent that such is possible. Nobody totally leaves hold of their identities, unless in an existentialist fantasy, as in Camus’ “The Stranger” and, in that case, such moments are horrendous rather than liberating.
Read MoreThe White House Press Conference
The White House Press Conference is a peculiar institution, one of long standing and going back to when FDR met a gaggle of reporters to crowd around his desk and throw out questions, knowing that FDR could handle any ones that came up, avoiding hot potatoes and providing answers both glib and persuasive if he wanted to say something. Steve Early, His press secretary, facilitated information traffic rather than made much news. Jen Psaki, the present press secretary, who meets in the press room to take questions most days of the work week, follows most predecessors in not trying to make much news. She refers questions to the State or Defense Departments or to agencies to get details, and works hard not to utter a striking phrase or otherwise outshine or anticipate whatever the President might have said about a matter or what the President might soon say. That was different from what happened in the Trump Administration when press secretaries vied to be as partisan as possible and so curry favor with Trump, there being an audience of one for the press room, while Psaki’s audience is to the public, to make the Administration as surefooted as possible and in line with the Administration’s point of view.
Read MoreAnarchic Democracy
Democrats are in the dumps. Poll numbers are cratering for Joe Biden. Paul Krugman says that the Republican field of Senatorial candidates are just spewing hate rather than offering policy alternatives. The Krugman analysis has credibility because Mitch McConnell has said that he is going to run the midterms on inflation, the border, and crime, though he just mentions the topics rather than offers alternative policies. McConnell is just carping, Republicans full of outrage rather than solutions, And why should that not be the case? The Democrats are on the defensive, many of them sure that they will lose both the House and the Senate even if Biden has managed Covid and the Russian Ukraine War quite well. What is the disconnect between governmental results and the electorate? That is the question I want to answer.
Read MoreProphesying From Fall, 1943
By the fall of 1943, World War II, for the United States, was half over and so the contours of what the war was like was well established and what would have to ensue was foreseen. It was two years since Pearl Harbor but it was clear that the Axis powers were in retreat. The Japanese were no longer expansive, the pivotal victory in Guadalcanal victorious, and the ever increasing American armada moving up the island chains in the Pacific to deal with the eventual defeat of Japan, however problematic whether that would need invasion rather than isolation, and not considering what would eventually happen, which was an atomic bomb. What was also forecast were very bloody campaigns, the United States having conquered what might seem the inconsequential island of Tarawa, which devastated the U. S. Marine Second Division, but was a stepping stone to the East. Iwo Jima and Okinawa would follow. And in Europe, it was also the case that Germany had spent its strength, sure to be defeated unless Hitler came up with new wonder weapons, such as sufficient numbers of jet planes and rockets, so as to make up the difference of ever growing American armament. Hitler had already by then failed at Stalingrad, and in a slow but definite retreat on the Italian boot, but everyone knew that a cross channel landing and progress to Berlin would neccesitate great casualties. The war was not over even if the Allies were clearly winning. The question is what was the state of the nation in the midst of the war and what did it foretell about what post-war America would be like, whether the war was transformative as it would show itself to be rather than to fall back into a pre-war mode, has happened in the South after the end of the Civil War, or destabilized, as happened to Germany after the First world War, or surprisingly having few consequences after the Vietnam War, and England, the victor of the First World War, not really changed until after the second World War when Labor created the nationalization of industry and social services, such as education and health. Can we see into the crystal ball of 1943 so as to predict its future?
Read MoreKonstan Theorizing About Sin
A social or a literary theory can be classified as a kind or type or genre of theory in that each type uses a particular way of theorizing whatever its subject matter or particular hypothesis. Theorizing is therefore akin to the premise of literature, which can be broken down to its tone, which are the conventions whereby individual works are recognized as tragedy, comedy, melodrama and so on, and also their textures, whereby works are recognized for the sets of assumptions that make them distinct worlds. But whereby there is a limited catalog of tones or genres, there are any number of textures, and literary and social theories are akin to tone in that there is also a limited catalog of them, a great number of theories fitting into a particular type.
Read MoreWartime Atrocities
Let us try to sort out the terms that are now being applied to the newly discovered wartime atrocities found north of Kiev, that term neutral in that it remains problematic whether these events of Russian troops killing civilians, executing them after they are tied behind their backs, is to be treated as a war crime or even a genocide which is what Zelensky says is the case because the Russians are out to eliminate Ukraine as a people. Biden regards them merely as war crimes and regards Putin as a butcher and a war criminal and wants independent authorities to put on trial those who are responsible. Those events of killing civilians are vile and horrendous and certainly to be condemned, but whether to try them is a good question. Today, we say that killing civilians is a war crime because it does not fulfill a military objective. In similar fashion, it is considered a violation of the rules of warfare not to execute prisoners of war and expect combattants to either be wearing a uniform or some insignia or, at the least, be enrolled in a military so that the person is not regarded as a terrorist. But these restrictions only apply to the defeated. Japanese commanders were executed for having mistreated prisoners of war and Germans for having used slave labor camps. But the victors get scot free. Gen. Curtis LeMay was not prosecuted for leveling Japanese cities, the bombing of civilians treated as collateral damage while artillery aimed at civilians is regarded, now as then, as culpable. You could argue that hurting the morale of civilian targets is a military goal, but in that case Russians are now engaged in hurting morale by killing people and so should not be regarded as a war crime.
Read MoreNon-Sexy Dreams
Like most people, I suppose, I dream about stories and issues other than lust and ambition. As a sociologist, perhaps, I also dream about social situations and problems, sometimes quite amusing, that provide insights I would not have arrived at when awake or, when dreaming,come up with half baked solutions because my mind has not thought of a better one, either asleep or awake. I dreamed, for some reason I can't readily assign to newspaper accounts or to general knowledge, that Israeli expatriates are infiltrating non profit organizations in New York City so as to familiarize themselves with what Jewish Americans and other Americans are thinking so as to know how to respond to America. So they go to the Met or Carnegie Hall as well as synagogues and churches to take the pulse of New York culture. Is Israel threatened? Is New York about to turn against Israeli sentiment? I don’t think so in my awakened life and the tone of the dream story does not have the tone of animosity or fear. Maybe it just shows that I have a lingering identification with Israel and my dream is a better indication of that fact than my protestations to that effect when awake might indicate. To use an overworked word correctly, dreams tell me that my feelings about Israel are authentic rather than affected.
Read MoreThe Oscars As An Extravaganza
Extravaganzas, to coin a term, are large collections of people which gather together to celebrate an entertainment or a memorialization, often on a regular basis, and that results in the event getting some historical significance. Extravaganzas include Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, where a troupe of entertainers thrilling crowds with what was then the passing of the West, sharpshooters mixed up with real life Indians. Other extravaganzas include NASCAR races that at one time brought more people to their tracks than the professional leagues of baseball and football, and also open air concerts, such as Simon and Garfinkle in Central Park and the folk gathering at Woodstock, New York, and the bicentennial event in 1976 whereby people stood near the Hudson River to see ships assemble, parade and disperse. I was reminded of extravaganzas as a kind of cultural phenomenon, one so different from novels and plays and most tv programs, by watching Oscar night a few nights ago, Hollywood trying to revive the vividness of that occasion when Oscar night, from the Thirties through recently, did seem to make these memorable occasions that had measured out the cultural moments of the year, movies a sign of the collective consciousness of the nation because of what Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer wrought. “The Best Years of Our Lives”, the Best Picture in 1947, showed the Second World War had ended because the film showed how veterans fared. The best Oscar years, to my mind, were those which hosted Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis and ended when Billy Crystal finished his run, though those Oscar extravaganzas have never done very well at presenting best song nominees. Those performances were always lame, perhaps because everyone was too keyed up to transport themselves into the tones offered by a song, while, on the other hand, those who design the sets generally do a good job, as happened this year where its booth like arrangements were similar to the Oscar dinners that preceded television, which adapted the theatrical venue for many years, with stars as the audience sitting in audience seats. What counted, really, on Oscar Night, were the monologue, the dresses, actors sort of being themselves and the thank you acknowledgments, people saying from the heart what they thought should be in their hearts even if, as Jean Hagan says in “Singing In the Rain” that what actors and actors do is bring a little excitement to the otherwise drab lives of those who watch film. The Oscars don’t seem as much of an extravaganza they used to be when films are not part of the general culture or have been fragmented so that highly thought of movies are not the ones who sell the popcorn.
Read MoreWar By The Book
Some wars are those of necessity in that a civilization is in danger of perishing even if the odds of persevering are slim. That was the case in the Second World War and with the War between the Greeks and the Persians in the Fifth Century B. C. and also, I think, with the Spanish Armada, which was out to destroy what the Protestant Reformation had created. Most wars are less so in that a negotiated peace could have gotten most war aims without the need for carnage. The colonies could have worked out a way to remain tied to Great Britain if Parliament had been willing to negotiate with Benjamin Franklin, the reluctant revolutionary. The North could have swallowed an independent Confederacy, leaving it to its cruelty and rural idiocy while it remained dependent on Northern capital and industry, which in fact is what happened for the hundred years that followed the end of the American Civil War. The Spanish American War was unnecessary for the United States to take over the declined Spanish Empire as part of its economic sphere of influence, sometimes deciding to keep territories, as in Puerto Rico, or give them up, as in Cuba, or hold them only for a half century, as was the case with the Philippines. The logic of the geo-political order trumps the need for war. The same is the case with Ukraine. What appears in newspapers in the past few days are limited Russian war aims--a Ukraine pledge not to join NATO and the annexation into Russia by some eastern Ukraine provinces--could have been agreed to by negotiation before the war started were Putin willing to give up or even defer trying to reconstitute the Russian Empire at the time of Catherine the Great. But some leaders are itching for a fight and we think that prudent leaders are the ones who are reluctant to wager the stakes of war, that you might lose your seat at the table and not just the stakes that had been anted up.
The war of Russia on Ukraine can be understood as a war to rectify the borders of what had happened when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, just like the border wars that occurred when Yugoslavia did in the 1990’s. But those were just ethnic conflicts that got out of hand because concentration camps and ethnic cleansing sullied the point by introducing these matters in Europe for the first time since the Second World War. Putin, on the other hand, was to rectify back to the Eighteenth Century and declared war to do so when that had not been necessary to achieve his major objectives. So Biden decided to take sides in the war very vigorously but without shedding American blood on the grounds that Putin had gone to war in the first place. The war itself was the casus belli for taking sides when Biden could have said that let Putin take Ukraine in that it was outside of the Western sphere of influence even though Ukraine was more culturally allied to Europe. But Biden did not let that pass and so has applied the measures available--arms shipments and economic warfare-- to counter Putin. It is clear that either Biden or Putin is the winner, never mind whatever happens to Zelensky and his people.
How do you keep up this war or any war in a way that is responsible and judicious, which means risking not too much to make sure as to command the resources that will allow a side to win. FDR managed he war wisely, by general accounts, because he did not panic but thought that time was on his side in that his ever increasing arms and mobilization would work to create overwhelming force and that the only danger was that the American people might lose heart and give up on the sacrifices, though the protection of two oceans meant that the domestic front was never seriously threatened. The domestic front was pretty normal, prosperous, in fact, even though casualties mounted. FDR made clear to his people that they should not be distracted from his war aims. It was not a war to protect the British Empire nor a war to rescue the Jews. It was an alliance against Fascism and not to repel Stalinism. FDR was, therefore, careful and circumspect, carefully marshaling his resources and avoiding disruptive matters.
Biden is following this circumspect manner. He is not overly ambitious, not suggesting that Putin will fall (until yesterday), even though many commentators were saying that Putin’s fall is now inevitable. Putin used assistance to overcome Ukraine as he could while not escalating the chips on the table by unlimbering the Western arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, that being the hole card that Putin may or may not keep in reserve. All in all, Biden is playing by the book in that he minimizes risk and consults his allies on every forward move. That is supposedly the right way to wage war, even though some exceptional politicians, like Lincoln, was dramatic in shaking things up to reshuffle the deck as when he announced the Emancipation Proclamation, but that was also a considered move to mobilize the war as one about freedom rather than just union, and only did so after a victory, so that the war was moving towards its endgame even though it really wasn’t yet there, tht waiting for the continued attrition of the Confederate forces. Similarly, D-Day knew that repulsing the invasion of Europe was Hitler’s last chance while a defeat for the Allies on June 6, 1944 meant only that Eisenhower would have to be replaced by a general who could do the trick the next spring-- providing that the Germans did not develop new weapons that could significantly change the war.
Who are the people who could master how to wield a war? It is difficult to say. Monarchists would say that the terms of office for President or Prime Minister are too short so that they have rough experience so as to master their own administrations much less international statecraft. The difference is that politicians who rise in a democracy often have had decades of experience before they achieve the highest rung and so have played many parts and have met enough foreign leaders that they are familiar with handling world events. And so Biden can be thought of as having been seasoned enough to know the playbook he is handling, having been in the Senate for more than thirty years and then as Vice President for eight. But experience is not the best preparation. Lincoln was not experienced. Kaiser Wilhem was experienced but insufficiently circumspect to see the awful nature of a new war. George H. W. Bush was experienced but still got himself into a quagmire where he had to enforce a no fly zone where he was thereby ever vulnerable to Saddam Hussein's missiles and the very experienced people around George W. Bush got themselves in a situation where everybody was firing on Americans. So experience is not the answer even if Biden rests on it but relies even more on judgment to determine how to read the invisible book from which he reads.
So if going by the book is just being careful and deliberate, Biden is measuring up. He has unified NATO so as to shore up his defenses and shipped arms to fight an offense and protected the home front by not putting Americans at risk. He has denounced aggression and it seems to be successful in getting the support of the American people. But none of these matters have been tested in that the Russians have not done something significantly stabilizing? Would Americans rally to the cause if there were serious cyber warfare attacks against the homeland or if Poland was required to answer the Russians for a bit of chemical warfare against Ukraine? It is hard to say, given how weak are the reasons for our war with Russia over Ukraine. After all, it is about just the fact that there was a war at all and that wars engender civilian casualties, which is perhaps not at all a cause for major escalation. The war between democracies and autocracies would seem a pretty thin reed on which to continue a war with damages to our side, especially since most of the war aims,by Putin, which is Ukraine not in NATO and eastern provinces of Ukraine ceded to russia matters that could have been accomplished by negotiation and still available, or so it seems to Zeelensky. Nothing to fight a major war over. So far, Biden playing by the book has been lucky.
Biden said yesterday that He thought Putin did not deserve to stay in power. That was backtracked as meaning that Biden was just responding to seeing the Ukraine refugees in Poland, just as when he said Putin was criminal because of the slaughter of civilians. But commend biden for saying to the American people what he means, which is that Putin is criminal whether or not there is a war crimes tribunal and that, so too, Putin does not deserve to remain as the head of russia given his misbehaviors, and that no one in the west will feel safe if Putin stays in office and so, sooner or not much later, there will be a reckoning about russian leadership. Biden confides to the American people the sense that the American people sense is the truth. But there may be something more hinted at, which is that we are in the end game in the war, that Putin is clearly losing the war, what with hunkering down around Kiev and not trying to defeat it, and bolstering mainly in Ukraine's east. That is why Biden, more aware than the rest of us about the real situation in the Russian armed forces, can be thinking about the future, or when Putin will leave office. He would not be talking about that if Putin’s worst was still ahead. My fear, however, is that Biden is wrong and the worst might be yet to come, however careful has been Biden’s management of this war.
Some wars are those of necessity in that a civilization is in danger of perishing even if the odds of persevering are slim. That was the case in the Second World War and with the War between the Greeks and the Persians in the Fifth Century B. C. and also, I think, with the Spanish Armada, which was out to destroy what the Protestant Reformation had created. Most wars are less so in that a negotiated peace could have gotten most war aims without the need for carnage. The colonies could have worked out a way to remain tied to Great Britain if Parliament had been willing to negotiate with Benjamin Franklin, the reluctant revolutionary. The North could have swallowed an independent Confederacy, leaving it to its cruelty and rural idiocy while it remained dependent on Northern capital and industry, which in fact is what happened for the hundred years that followed the end of the American Civil War. The Spanish American War was unnecessary for the United States to take over the declined Spanish Empire as part of its economic sphere of influence, sometimes deciding to keep territories, as in Puerto Rico, or give them up, as in Cuba, or hold them only for a half century, as was the case with the Philippines. The logic of the geo-political order trumps the need for war. The same is the case with Ukraine. What appears in newspapers in the past few days are limited Russian war aims--a Ukraine pledge not to join NATO and the annexation into Russia by some eastern Ukraine provinces--could have been agreed to by negotiation before the war started were Putin willing to give up or even defer trying to reconstitute the Russian Empire at the time of Catherine the Great. But some leaders are itching for a fight and we think that prudent leaders are the ones who are reluctant to wager the stakes of war, that you might lose your seat at the table and not just the stakes that had been anted up.
The war of Russia on Ukraine can be understood as a war to rectify the borders of what had happened when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, just like the border wars that occurred when Yugoslavia did in the 1990’s. But those were just ethnic conflicts that got out of hand because concentration camps and ethnic cleansing sullied the point by introducing these matters in Europe for the first time since the Second World War. Putin, on the other hand, was to rectify back to the Eighteenth Century and declared war to do so when that had not been necessary to achieve his major objectives. So Biden decided to take sides in the war very vigorously but without shedding American blood on the grounds that Putin had gone to war in the first place. The war itself was the casus belli for taking sides when Biden could have said that let Putin take Ukraine in that it was outside of the Western sphere of influence even though Ukraine was more culturally allied to Europe. But Biden did not let that pass and so has applied the measures available--arms shipments and economic warfare-- to counter Putin. It is clear that either Biden or Putin is the winner, never mind whatever happens to Zelensky and his people.
How do you keep up this war or any war in a way that is responsible and judicious, which means risking not too much to make sure as to command the resources that will allow a side to win. FDR managed he war wisely, by general accounts, because he did not panic but thought that time was on his side in that his ever increasing arms and mobilization would work to create overwhelming force and that the only danger was that the American people might lose heart and give up on the sacrifices, though the protection of two oceans meant that the domestic front was never seriously threatened. The domestic front was pretty normal, prosperous, in fact, even though casualties mounted. FDR made clear to his people that they should not be distracted from his war aims. It was not a war to protect the British Empire nor a war to rescue the Jews. It was an alliance against Fascism and not to repel Stalinism. FDR was, therefore, careful and circumspect, carefully marshaling his resources and avoiding disruptive matters.
Biden is following this circumspect manner. He is not overly ambitious, not suggesting that Putin will fall (until yesterday), even though many commentators were saying that Putin’s fall is now inevitable. Putin used assistance to overcome Ukraine as he could while not escalating the chips on the table by unlimbering the Western arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, that being the hole card that Putin may or may not keep in reserve. All in all, Biden is playing by the book in that he minimizes risk and consults his allies on every forward move. That is supposedly the right way to wage war, even though some exceptional politicians, like Lincoln, was dramatic in shaking things up to reshuffle the deck as when he announced the Emancipation Proclamation, but that was also a considered move to mobilize the war as one about freedom rather than just union, and only did so after a victory, so that the war was moving towards its endgame even though it really wasn’t yet there, tht waiting for the continued attrition of the Confederate forces. Similarly, D-Day knew that repulsing the invasion of Europe was Hitler’s last chance while a defeat for the Allies on June 6, 1944 meant only that Eisenhower would have to be replaced by a general who could do the trick the next spring-- providing that the Germans did not develop new weapons that could significantly change the war.
Who are the people who could master how to wield a war? It is difficult to say. Monarchists would say that the terms of office for President or Prime Minister are too short so that they have rough experience so as to master their own administrations much less international statecraft. The difference is that politicians who rise in a democracy often have had decades of experience before they achieve the highest rung and so have played many parts and have met enough foreign leaders that they are familiar with handling world events. And so Biden can be thought of as having been seasoned enough to know the playbook he is handling, having been in the Senate for more than thirty years and then as Vice President for eight. But experience is not the best preparation. Lincoln was not experienced. Kaiser Wilhem was experienced but insufficiently circumspect to see the awful nature of a new war. George H. W. Bush was experienced but still got himself into a quagmire where he had to enforce a no fly zone where he was thereby ever vulnerable to Saddam Hussein's missiles and the very experienced people around George W. Bush got themselves in a situation where everybody was firing on Americans. So experience is not the answer even if Biden rests on it but relies even more on judgment to determine how to read the invisible book from which he reads.
So if going by the book is just being careful and deliberate, Biden is measuring up. He has unified NATO so as to shore up his defenses and shipped arms to fight an offense and protected the home front by not putting Americans at risk. He has denounced aggression and it seems to be successful in getting the support of the American people. But none of these matters have been tested in that the Russians have not done something significantly stabilizing? Would Americans rally to the cause if there were serious cyber warfare attacks against the homeland or if Poland was required to answer the Russians for a bit of chemical warfare against Ukraine? It is hard to say, given how weak are the reasons for our war with Russia over Ukraine. After all, it is about just the fact that there was a war at all and that wars engender civilian casualties, which is perhaps not at all a cause for major escalation. The war between democracies and autocracies would seem a pretty thin reed on which to continue a war with damages to our side, especially since most of the war aims,by Putin, which is Ukraine not in NATO and eastern provinces of Ukraine ceded to russia matters that could have been accomplished by negotiation and still available, or so it seems to Zeelensky. Nothing to fight a major war over. So far, Biden playing by the book has been lucky.
Biden said yesterday that He thought Putin did not deserve to stay in power. That was backtracked as meaning that Biden was just responding to seeing the Ukraine refugees in Poland, just as when he said Putin was criminal because of the slaughter of civilians. But commend biden for saying to the American people what he means, which is that Putin is criminal whether or not there is a war crimes tribunal and that, so too, Putin does not deserve to remain as the head of russia given his misbehaviors, and that no one in the west will feel safe if Putin stays in office and so, sooner or not much later, there will be a reckoning about russian leadership. Biden confides to the American people the sense that the American people sense is the truth. But there may be something more hinted at, which is that we are in the end game in the war, that Putin is clearly losing the war, what with hunkering down around Kiev and not trying to defeat it, and bolstering mainly in Ukraine's east. That is why Biden, more aware than the rest of us about the real situation in the Russian armed forces, can be thinking about the future, or when Putin will leave office. He would not be talking about that if Putin’s worst was still ahead. My fear, however, is that Biden is wrong and the worst might be yet to come, however careful has been Biden’s management of this war.
James' "The Spoils of Poynton"
Henry James, I think, is an acquired taste that I never did acquire even though I was diligent in reading his major works when in graduate school. I didn’t like him because he was artful in the bad sense of the word. He arranged his stories so as to make a moral point after having clinched his case with an O’Henry twist so that James made sure you got the moral. The shorter works were better but had the same failing. “Washington Square” makes sure you know that it would have been kinder and more moral to allow the ugly duckling heiress to marry her male gold digger. In “The Beast in the Jungle” the young woman tells her friend in the end that he never actually committed to do something, which is to show he loved her, and the moral is that actions of omission are just as devastating and significant as acts of commission. The longer James novels, such as “The Golden Bowl”, are insufferable with their ambiguity and ambivalence strewn in every page, these clever people less clever than their inventor. Who cares to parse the characters because all it means is that they can reverse yet another time on the next page? That is different from Jane Austen, whose characters are set even if they are also ambivalent and rendered ambiguous because each one of them also has his or her own central spine, people just being that way. But I have recently come across James’ “The Spoils of Poynton”, another short novel, and it does have its virtues, even if overly contrived in that every outcome is preordained however much people are wills of the wisp.
Read MoreThe End Game for the War
History is unkind to the people who lose wars. Rather than go back to their corners and renew a war after having become refreshed, as happened for hundreds of years between France and England, regimes and monarchs are overthrown, something new happened after the English Civil War: the King was executed. That had not been the original war aim of Parliament. The French king was killed after the French Revolution and the French Emperor deposed after the Franco-Prussian War and a new republic was established. The Kaiser lost the First World War and he was deposed as well, and there was regime change in Germany, all unexpected, and Hitler was a suicide when the Allies were taking control of Germany even though Claus von Staufffenberg thought that if he had successfully assassinated Hitler a year before, Germany might still have retained some German conquests in a subsequent negotiation with the Allies. Not likely, given the carnage of the war. Some revenge was necessary. Germany had gotten off lightly after World War I with reparations as had the reparations paid by France to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War.
Read MoreThe Ethics of Bi-Polar Roles
People engage in ethical transgressions and there are ethical ways to deal with the existence of such transgressions. People behave badly to one another all the time without being thought to have either abandoned their role or their humanity, on the one hand, or to have simply made a mistake, as happens when they apply the wrong postage to an envelope. Indeed, much of ethical life consists of people finding ways of forgiving or excusing one another's behavior while continuing a relationship, or using lapses in ethical behavior as reasons for modifying a relationship or even letting go of or breaking a relationship. People regularly tell stories to one another about why they lost friends, why people drift apart, how their bosses betrayed them. People also tell themselves or their psychologists or their lovers why past relationships foundered and what sense they make of that in constructing their present lives and relationships.
One important area of ethical life, therefore, is dealing with the consequences of ethical judgments. How does one ethically respond to the recognition or the accusation of ethical lapses by oneself or others? This question is usually applied only to the person who has lapsed from proper ethical conduct. Can that person be trusted again? Does a person caught in an ethical lapse feel guilty, apologize, make amends, commit suicide? But it also applies to how to relate to the ethical lapses of people with whom one is associated. There are ethical considerations that fall on those who deal with the lapsed, such as whether a person is obligated to forgive another. Can a coach refuse to play an athlete who had flubbed his last chance? Moreover, there are ethical considerations that a person who has failed at ethical life must take into account other than the way to overcome the stigma of having ethically lapsed. The person must learn how ethical lapses are noticed and how blame for them is placed. In short, ethical life is not only a matter of individual or collective responses to transgressions, but provides multiple structures through which can be understood the inevitable ethical transgressions that take place in social life. People can be over amorous in courtship or insufficiently diligent at work or meek on those occasions when they might assert their rights.
Read MoreA New Kind of War
There is a revolution going on in how to fight wars. Putin is fighting the old way with tanks and troops while Biden is fighting the new way with economic pressure and weapons sent to his proxy war against Russia. That means Putin’s old war can occupy territory and even decapitate Ukraine’s government but at such a cost to the Russian economy that Russia will be either permanently enfeebled or require an internal revolution to make it right, and that might finally put an end to the schloratic Russian Empire, which would be an improvement on the geopolitical map. But first step back before rushing to the future.
Read MoreBlemishes On The Soul
When I taught an undergraduate course on the sociology of everyday life, I would assign essays, lead discussions and even give lectures on such topics as friendship, love, strangers and casual acquaintanceships, as well as parties and other kinds of gatherings. My point was to show how the circumstances of these situations constrained the lives of people and would make the students aware that invisible social structures had an impact on their lives. I think that by and large I failed because students did not make the leap from psychology to sociology. They looked at the motives that led them to behave in a way and to identify the feelings or emotions they might feel in that situation. So strangers were understood as lonely and in need of solace and companionship when what I was getting at was Georg Simmel’s insight that a stranger was a person who was only very partially understood by other people with whom they narrowly engaged and so, paradoxically, became, like bartenders and psychotherapists, the people with whom someone might confide.
It is very strange that students could not engage with that subject matter in that, after all, they could engage with a discussion in a course on social policy even though they had not previously thought that there might be four or five plans to structure a national medical insurance plan, a topic of popular concern at the time, and even though the students had not before the course that there were ways to objectively compare and analyze alternative plans, social design a way of thinking about government rather than saying just yea or nay, ardently in favor of or having contempt for a policy just because their party or favorite candidate said so. I pointed out that in the 2000 Democratic primary campaign Kerry's catastrophic health insurance plan would cover anyone who had a road accident but insurance would not cover medical checkups and so cover big bills but at low cost while Dick Gephardt wanted the equivalent of Medicare for All, which was comprehensive but very expensive and no one seemed to care about a policy’s assumptions and implications and when Obamacare was adopted people got to like it only when the citizens got the benefits. Very curious that social policy was readily on the agenda, somehow legitimated, even if it was arcane, but everyday life was not a topic, an object of contemplation, even briefly, remained obscure, even though everyone understood what it was to have a friend or a stranger in their midst .Social life is very perplexing if you bother to consider the obvious social things around you.
Read MoreSarah Palin's Free Speech
Free speech is usually understood as a right. That means that every person in the United States is entitled to whatever they want to say about politics and religion and literature whatever they care to say subject to limitations on slander, hate speech (a dubious proposition) and only self administered good taste, as when attacking the child or wife of a politician. The government has the obligation to protect people who engage in outrageous speech, as when the police allowed Nazi demonstrators to march on Skokie, Illinois in , prevented from doing so only because the demonstrators were bought off not to engage in their right to march with Nazi flags and placards. The trial of Peter Zenger in early Eighteenth Century New York established the right for the press to say critical things of the government and that has been established up to the present when Sarah Palin’s libel that associated her and her point of view was associated with the shooting of Gabby Gifford was dismissed because there was no malice in the New York Times, just a mistake quickly rectified.
Read MoreWhy Not Partition?
Partitioning a country into its parts because ethnic and social differences make it difficult for them to work together is a distasteful but not a bad resolution to the problem and so not a failure but a creative way to solve international relations. The partition of Poland in the late 18th century put up a bd precedent because Poland got nothing from it while Prussia, Russia and Austria gobbled up its pieces, the nation not restored for another hundred years when, by that time, Poland as a civilization had industrialized and developed a domestic, Polish, literary culture, whose roots went back to the time of the scientific revolution. Think instead of more successful partitions. Slovakia and thee Czech Republic separated more or less amicably in the nineties and the largest and historically most significant partition was between India and pakistan, however many people died during the separation, Both are better off following their independent entities, Pakistan as authoritarian and turned west so as to dominate Afghanistan, while India has flourished asa democratically oriented and industrious society with Hindu domination. You cannot say it would have been better off if Hindus and Muslims had tried to go it together rather than each alone in the years since independence in 1947.
In fact, the two great events that shaped the United States can best be understood as a successful and an unsuccessful partition. Unlike the French and English revolutions, where the opposing sides were not centered in regions, the American revolution was an attempt to partition its American colonies from the homeland because they were far away even though the two were similar in politics and culture. It did not have to be if British politicians were more accommodating to Ben Franklin, the de facto Secretary of State of the colonies. The other and unsuccessful partition was the attempt by the Southern states to separate from the Union. The Southern states were a contiguous area shared by geography, economic and social institutions although putatively also shared with the North in Republican principles. The failure to partition allowed the North to allow the South for a century more in its rural idiocy until the North intervened so as to make it again a single country though Southern politics persist in its long lasting tendency to subvert voting rights and allow police violence. Still a bit partitioned.
Consider now the current situation with Ukraine. After the western takeover of Ukraine in 2014, Obama said to Putin that there would need to set up a peace conference to regularize new borders. But Putin has been unwilling to do so because the West will pull a fast one or because Putin prefers to act unilaterally so as to establish that he is just acquiring what he always had, not on the sufferance of the West, and with some good reason, in that Ukraine had been part of the Russian Empire for hundreds of years, back to the twelfth century when Russians and Kievians founded it. So, when three days ago, Putin took over the two eastern regions of Ukraine as part of Russia, I thought this a masterstroke in that it meant he was avoiding sending two armies south to encircle Kiev and decapitate the Ukraine government and so set up a full scale war which Putin might quickly win and then sit tight to wait for everyone to calm down. But, instead, Putin was biting only what he could chew: only the part of Ukraine that is heavily backed by Russian speaking and Russian favorable residents, (Jen Psaki said yesterday that an invasion aimed at Kiev from the north has not been ruled out.)
Regarding that invasion from the south as a war rather than recognizing it as a de facto partition was a mistake on Biden’s part, excused only in that he had so clothed himself in the flag of sovereignty and was considering only events of a decade old. But, as usual, Biden has been cagey. He said yesterday the level of sanctions against Putin would depend on what Putin did, and how much further his troops went west. Alittle, fewer sanctions and more a lot of sanctions, knowing that the sanctions would not create severe pain to the Russian regime unless they were well extended. So, in effect, Biden is offering a peace treaty that will not be called that: an agreement on how far into Ukraine the Russians will go so as to partition the east from the rest of a more fully westernized area of Ukraine.
Nothing much happened today. The United States Defense Department insists that Putin is preparing for war but Putin has not invaded the two regions in eastern Ukraine it has declared as independent and so triggered Biden to say tha the invasion had begun and required American and European sanctions. The journalistic commentaries of all these events have been very poor, reduced to saying Putin must be a madman, the only exception Thomas Friedman who noted that here are false moves by the West, particularly the movement of NATO to Russia’s border in 1997, which I thought was wisee even if belligerent because it meant the eastern part of Europe would be second class citizens, subject to Russian influence, rather than part of the European enterprise. I still don;t know why everyone can’t calm down and then draw boundaries and mutual guarantees. That is what peacemaking is about.