Peter Berger — 1929 - 2017

June 30, 2017 
Posted by Jay Livingston

Flashback Friday

Peter Berger died earlier this week. The Times obit is here. His field was religion, but his two most widely read books were Invitation to Sociology (1963), which you can probably still find on the intro syllabus at some schools, and The Social Construction of Reality, co-written with Thomas Luckman (1966). The book quickly became a staple in theory courses, but soon the phrase and concept “social construction” broke through and crossed over into general use. Here is the Google nGram chart of its appearance in books.

Five years ago, I blogged about Berger’s work for the tobacco industry and his more recent efforts on behalf of the soft-drink industry. That blog post is what I am flashing back to below. At about the same time, Andrew Gelman, who knew well of Berger’s work as a shill for Big Cig, also had this to say (here):

But what impresses me is that Berger is doing regular blogging at the age of 84, writing a long essay each week. That’s really amazing to me. Some of the blogging is a bit suspect, for example the bit where he claims that he personally could convert gays to heterosexual orientation (“A few stubborn individuals may resist the Berger conversion program. The majority will succumb”)—but, really, you gotta admire that he’s doing this. I hope I’m that active when (if) I reach my mid-80s. (As a nonsmoker, I should have a pretty good chance of reaching that point.)

July 26, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sociologist Peter Berger is hauling out the strategy he used when he hired himself out to Big Tobacco.  His role then in Tobacco’s fight against regulation and other anti-smoking measures wasn’t to defend smoking as virtuous or healthful.  Instead, he was paid to discredit anti-smoking sentiment and organizations.  Berger’s tactic for this purpose was basically name calling combined with accusations that even if true were irrelevant.

This time, in a longish (2400 word) article at The American Interest , he’s speaking up for the people who bring us sugar water.  Or to be scrupulously accurate, he’s trying to discredit the anti-obesity, anti-diabetes forces trying reduce the amount of the stuff that people drink.

As I said, it’s a page from the same playbook he used when he was working for the folks who bring us cigarettes. He refers to the “vehement passion” of the anti-smoking and anti-obesity campaigns, and he exaggerates their goals (while showing off his erudition):

I suggested that it was in an age-old tradition of the quest of immortality, first described in the ancient Mesopotamian Gilgamesh Epic.

He also accuses them or their supporters of venal motives.

Successful morally inspired movements typically ally themselves with powerful groups motivated by very hard material interests.

This from someone who was being paid by a multi-billion dollar industry to further their material interests. This irony is apparently lost on Berger, who, interestingly, does not even hint that he got penny from Tobacco. Maybe he forgot.

In going after the movement to improve public health, his number one target is Mayor Bloomberg and the proposed ban on the sale of huge-sized sugar-water drinks in theaters, restaurants, and other public places. 

Again, Berger is not arguing that obesity is good for you.  Instead, he dusts off the old “immortality” barb – equating a desire to reduce diabetes and other illnesses with the vain and impossible goal of immortality. Berger does not tell us how he managed to discover this immortality fantasy in the minds of others, a deep motivation the anti-obesity people are themselves are unaware of. He just makes it the title of his article  (“Mayor Bloomberg and the Quest of Immortality”) and asserts it a few times. We have to take it on faith.

Berger makes the same arguments he used against anti-smoking campaigns:

• The anti-obesity forces will be moralistic (Berger refers to them with religion-based words like crusaders, litany, preaching).  
• They are elitist. Not only do they see their own lifestyle choices as virtuous, but they try to impose these on the working class. 
• They ally themselves with people whose material interests are served by anti-obesity or with (shudder) bureaucrats. 
• They are European, un-American.

I cannot say whether Bloomberg’s quasi-European lifestyle has anything to do with his idea of New York City as a quasi-European welfare state.*

Then there is the “slippery slope” argument – the scare tactic of exaggeration and false equivalency.

There is also an equivalent of the Saudi Arabian police force dedicated to “the promotion of virtue and the suppression of vice”—an army of therapists, coaches, educators, advice columnists, dieticians, and other moral entrepreneurs. To date (still) they mainly rely on persuasion rather than coercion. Wait a little. [Emphasis by Berger.]

Yes, you read that correctly.  If you can’t buy a 30-oz. cup of sugar-water and instead have to buy two 15-ounce cups, the Saudi police are just around the corner. 

I wonder what Berger and libertarians in general were saying back when the good-health forces were trying to get lead removed from gasoline and paint. Could you pretty much do a find-and-replace for the current article, just as that article is a find-and-replace version of his tobacco work?**

UPDATE:  Baptiste Coulmont tweets a link to a 2006 article (here) by a French sociologist, Robert Castel, which uncannily echoes Berger’s arguments.  Castel uses the same vocabulary of religion in mocking the anti-smokers, and he attributes to them the same desire for immortality.

Le fumeur d’hier comme le fumeur d’aujourd’hui transgresse le seul sacré que nous soyons désormais capables de reconnaître, le culte du corps, de sa santé, de sa longévité, sur lequel s’est finalement rabattu le désir d’éternité.  [emphasis added]

[The smoker of yesterday like the smoker of today transgresses the one sacred thing that we now recognize, the cult of the body -- its health, its lengevity -- which finally comes down to the desire for eternal life.]

He likens anti-smoking policies to Islamic authoritarianism:

ce mélange d’autoritarisme bien-pensant, de suffisance pseudo-savante et de bonne conscience sécuritaire qui caractérise souvent les ayatollahs de la santé. [emphasis added]

[a mixture of well-meaning authoritarianism, pseudo-scientific self-importance, and safety-awareness that characteries these ayatollahs of healt.]

And he sees the same slippery slope.

L’interdit du tabac n’est pas la dernière des prohibitions que l’on nous prépare.

[The banning of cigarettes is not the last of these prohibitions that they are preparing.]

The major difference from Berger is that, as far as I know, Castel was not being paid by Gauloises.

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*By the way, if you’re looking for an example of paralipsis or apophasis, look no further than that sentence.

** For more on Berger and Tobacco, see Aaron Swartz’s article (here).  (HT: Andrew Gelman).  And yes, this is the same Peter Berger that sociologists of a certain age may remember as the author of that staple of Soc 101, Invitation to Sociology, and also as co-author of The Social Construction of Reality.

Ceci n’est pas trash-talking

June 29, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

The reference in the title is to this canvas by René Magritte.

There must be a word for this – the statement that is self-contradictory – but what is it? (Of course you could argue that Magritte is technically correct. It’s not a pipe; it’s a picture of a pipe.)

Paralipsis and apophasis come close – emphasizing something by saying you’re not emphasizing it. In politics, for example: “I’m not even going to mention the rumors that my opponent has deep ties to the Russian Mafia and hires prostitutes to pee on him.”

I’m thinking of something a shade more subtle – the statement or image that is itself the opposite of what it claims to be.  It came to mind a couple days ago when a right-winger I know who likes to bait me sent an e-mail with this.

why should anyone on our side want Obama to succeed in “transforming” America into a cesspool of political correctness, creeping socialism, leftist thugs on campus, and appeasement of Islamic extremism?).  By the way, are you down with programs to “re-educate” Americans who don’t see things your way? That’s what the left wants — clearly and openly. So resistance to all that brainwashing was the mission of Republicans under Obama, true. But I don’t remember any assassination fantasies. Current climate different: Not only no hope for reconciliation, but rumblings of violence. Already one Republican Congressmen nearly assassinated. More politically motivated violence to come, no doubt. (Madonna fantasy “blow up the white house” / Depp actor assassination fantasy / Kathy Griffin beheaded Trump imagery / Shakespeare in the Park Trump vicarious assassination to hoots of delight, etc. — you have great friends, Jay.)

I said that I could do a similar caricature of conservatives, but why bother? It’s just trash talk. The point is to taunt rather than to discuss. Maybe on the basketball court trash-talking enhances the game (my correspondent does have a beautiful jump shot), but it doesn’t do much for understanding, and I just wasn’t interested in talking trash right now.

He wrote back. “Not trash-talking - just reality, unpleasant as it is.”  It’s a perfect example of the thing I’m trying to find the word for – trash-talking by saying that not you’re not trash-talking.

The same day, an even better example from Page Six showed up in my Twitter feed.

Fatherhood — Breadwinners and Losers

June 26, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here is my favorite PSA of all time.
   

If there were an award for best performance in a 30-second public service ad, this actor should have won. He shows not a flicker of irony – no wink, no smile, no deliberate misstep – nothing to show the “role distance” that you might expect of a father chanting cheers with his daughter.

The ad also epitomizes the change in the role of father to include more social-emotional involvement with children. Through the first part of the 20th century, being a “good father” required little more than providing for the family.  Compare the PSA with this “ad” for a different style of father, written by a man who grew up in the 1920s and 30s.

My father never did any of the things that, according to the “parenting” wisdom of today, are supposed to be so important. I don’t recall him ever hugging me, or kissing me, or telling me that he loved me. . . I don’t recall ever having an extended conversation with him. . .  He was, and remains in memory, a version of the good father. [from “Life Without Father” by Irving Kristol, (Wall Street Journal, 1994)]

Things began to change after World War II. Although breadwinner remained central to the role of father, post-War America saw a cultural shift that added a new element  – greater involvement with children. Family sitcoms of 1950 and 60s – shows like “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It to Beaver” – served as both instruction and justification for this version of fatherhood.

Like many cultural changes, the new fatherhood spread downward through the class system. As more wives at all levels entered the paid labor force, fathers had to share more of the household duties, including parenting,

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

The chart from Pew shows a big change from 1965 to 2015. The average number of hours that moms spent at work nearly tripled, and the hours they spent on housework were cut in half. But also nearly tripling was the time dads spent in child care.

We even got a new word to denote this gender-neutral focus on the child’s emotional and social development – parenting.

(Google nGrams showing the frequency of the word “parenting” in American books.)

But what about father-child relations among the poor. In a recent post (here), I cited Tally’s Corner, Elliot Liebow’s study of Black streetcorner men in 1963-64.  The jobs these men could get were sporadic and did not pay enough to allow a man to support a family. This failure not only led men to leave their marriages, it also freighted the father-child relationship with ambivalence. “To soften this failure, and to lessen the damage to his public and self-esteem, he pushes the children away from him.”

That was then. Today’s counterparts of these men, also left behind by a changing labor market, have seized on the social component of the father role. As Kathryn Edin and Timothy Jon Nelson say in their 2013 study Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City, “the new-father role emerged just in the nick of time to offer an alternative way to engage with their progeny.”

Time spent with children, whether skillfully fashioning a daughter’s hair or teaching one’s son to pee in the bushes, is viewed as priceless and a treasure any man would naturally want to claim. The opportunity to express love and have rich conversations with children is a gift — not just to the children but for the fathers as well. These are the moments, fathers say, that truly make life worth living. . .     It is almost as if engaging in the softer “relational aspects” of the role is a must-have for men trying to forge meaning and identity in an economic age that has left the unskilled worker behind. Relating to children — not hanging on the corner with peers — is the vital ingredient that adds zest to life.  And even in these challenging neighborhood environments, visiting family is what fathers often want to do with their free time.

   
The troubling part of the Edin-Nelson account is that for the men in their study, the relational aspect of fatherhood is not just a complement to being the breadwinner. It has become a replacement.

a seismic shift has occurred in lower-skilled men’s ability and willingness to shoulder the traditional breadwinning responsibilities of the family. According to our story, at the bottom end of the skills distribution we see not just a withdrawal but a headlong retreat — it is nearly a dead run — from the breadwinner role.

Word Association: I say Trump. . .?

June 22, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

A Quinnipiac poll done last month had an item that I hadn’t seen before. The poll had the usual Favorable/Unfavorable  questions about Trump, Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, and others. (Trump’s 35% Favorable / 58% Unfavorable was best in show.) But Quinnipiac then, in Item #9, asked for more specific reactions.

9. What is the first word that comes to mind when you think of Donald Trump? (Numbers are not percentages. Figures show the number of times each response was given. This table reports only words that were mentioned at least five times.)

Here the results. I have sorted them into Favorable and Unfavorable. (Some respondents may have used “president” as a neutral term. After all, even those who think unfavorably of Trump acknowledge that he is in fact the president, and that he is a rich businessman. But I’m going to assume that these all carry positive valences.)

(Click on the chart for a clearer view.)

The sheer numbers – 343 negative to 184 positive – reflect Trump’s unpopularity, of course. But what about the variety? Is this peculiar to Trump? Does he offer so many things to dislike? Or do we just generally have a richer vocabulary of negative adjectives? Is it harder to come up with different ways that we like someone?