Living in the Past/Future

July 30, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Last night, I saw Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris.” This morning I read Gabriel Rossman’s cold critique of an ABC poll that Robin Hanson recently discussed. It was about cryonics. Not so different, really.

Nostalgia is a longing for the past. From that feeling grows a set of ideas and beliefs – that the past was better than the present, more comfortable and comforting. Cryonics feels the same way, but about the future. We are frozen in the present and thawed in some warm, ideal future. (Is there’s a word for this future-nostalgia?)

“Midnight in Paris” is all about nostalgia. It is nostalgia. The main character Gil (Woody Allen in Owen Wilson’s body) is a writer on vacation in Paris with his fiancee. At the stroke of midnight, he is magically transported back to Paris in the 20s. He hangs out with Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein reads a draft of Gil’s novel-in-progress, he wins the heart of a beauty who has been posing for (and sleeping with) Picasso.

The scenes of Paris of the present are filmed in the very harsh light of day. Paris of the past is Paris at night, dark with romantic lighting. That’s where we want to be.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Cryonics plays on the same idea, but it reverses the time line and replaces romanticism with science. The fantasy is the same – being transported to a much better world – but that world is in the future. There’s a group version of this fantasy – the dream of society setting up shop on some other planet or space station, starting a whole new civilization free from the frustrations of the world we actually live in.

In the end, “Midnight in Paris” suggests that the nostalgia it has been promoting is not only futile but false and impossible even on its own terms. The beautiful model, who lives in the 20s feels nostalgic about the Belle Epoque, and when she manages to travel back to that period – Toulouse, Gauguin, Degas – she find those artists to be nostalgic for the Renaissance.

Come to think of it, Woody Allen gave us a critique of the future-nostalgia fantasy as well – “Sleeper.”

It's the Demand, Stupid

July 25, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s nice to have one’s ideas supported in unexpected places.

Last month, I speculated (here) on the reasons job growth has been so dismal. The Republicans explanation is that employers are reluctant to hire because they are “uncertain” about government regulation. My explanation was simpler: “If companies aren’t hiring, the real problem, I suspect, is not lack of certainty but lack of customers.”

The Wall Street Journal, under the capable ownership of Rupert Murdoch, is not widely known as a lefty rag. But last week, they ran an article about this same question. Here’s the lede:

The main reason U.S. companies are reluctant to step up hiring is scant demand, rather than uncertainty over government policies, according to a majority of economists in a new Wall Street Journal survey. . . .

It continues:

In the survey, conducted July 8-13 and released Monday, 53 economists—not all of whom answer every question—were asked the main reason employers aren't hiring more readily. Of the 51 who responded to the question, 31 cited lack of demand (65%) and 14 (27%) cited uncertainty about government policy. The others said hiring overseas was more appealing.

Mr. Weber Goes to Washington

July 24, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

George Packer in The New Yorker (here):

The sociologist Max Weber, in his 1919 essay “Politics as a Vocation,” drew a distinction between “the ethic of responsibility” and “the ethic of ultimate ends”—between those who act from a sense of practical consequence and those who act from higher conviction, regardless of consequences. . .
.

Weber’s terms perfectly capture the toxic dynamic between the President, who takes responsibility as an end in itself, and the Republicans in Congress, who are destructively consumed with their own dogma. Neither side can be said to possess what Weber calls a “leader’s personality.” Responsibility without conviction is weak, but it is sane. Conviction without responsibility, in the current incarnation of the Republican Party, is raving mad

.
The image of Obama as weak, or at least too willing to give in to the Republicans, seems accurate to me. The Republicans appear not so much as “raving mad” but as intransigent and single-minded – less spending, no tax increases, no matter what.

I suspect that they are not as inflexible on this as they claim. They had no objection to very large spending increases when they were in the White House. Reagan, with the support of Republicans in Congress, increased Social Security taxes, and his closing of some tax loopholes and shelters was designed to raise the effective income tax on those who has used them. What the Republicans seem single-minded about is gaining power, as their Senate leader has said.

Read Packer’s article. It’s short, and its context for Weber is the story of a man trying to cope with problems of unemployment and health care.

For an earlier SocioBlog allusion to Weber's essay go here.

Apostrophes

July 22, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross posted at Sociological Images)


Changes in language seem to just happen. Nobody sets out to introduce a change, but suddenly people are saying “groovy” or “my bad.” And then they’re not. Even written language changes, though the evolution is slower.

Last weekend, I saw this sign at a goat farm on Long Island.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

WER'E ??

I used to care about the apostrophe, but after years of reading student papers about “different society’s,” I have long accepted that the tide is against me. It’s like spelling a few hundred years ago – you can pretty much make up your own rules.

Sometimes the rule is fairly clear: use an apostrophe in plurals when leaving it out makes the word look like a different word rather than a plural form of the original. Change the “y” in “society” to “ies” and it looks too different. “Of all the cafe’s, I like the one with lime martini’s.”

Or these:


Technically, it should be "ON DVDS." But DVDS looks like it's some government agency (“I gotta go down to the DVDS tomorrow”) or maybe a disease.

It’s not always easy to figure out what rule or logic the writer is following. The little apostrophe seems to be plunked in almost at random. Not random, really. It’s usually before an “s.” But why does Old Navy say, “Nobody get’s hurt”?


There’s a prescriptivist Website, ApostropheAbuse.com, that collects these (that’s where I found the DVDS and Old Navy pictures). They’re fighting a losing battle.

Technology matters – I guess that’s the sociological point here. The invention of print and then the widespread dissemination of identical texts herded us towards standardization. Printers became a separate professional group (not part of the church or state), and most of them were in the same place (London). They had a stranglehold on published spelling.

Starting a few decades ago, anyone could be a printer. The page you are now reading might harbor countless errors in punctuation and spelling (though spell-checkers greatly reduce misspellings), but it looks just as good as an article in the Times online, and it’s published in a similar way (and to potentially as many readers – right)  .

And now there’s texting. It’s already pushing upper case letters off the screen, and the apostrophe forecast doesn’t look so good either. But what will still be interesting is not the missing apostrophe but the apostrophe added where, by traditional rules, it doesn’t belong.

I still can’t figure out WER’E.