Miles Davis, b. May 26, 1926

May 26, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

In May of 1964, I was staying at a small hotel in Akasaka, Tokyo’s entertainment district. The other guests were mostly secondary acts at the local night clubs — a husband-wife dance team from Australia, three young African American who were the back-up trio for a singer named Damita Jo (Ms. Jo herself was staying at the Hilton), an Indian who did hand-shadow pictures, some acrobats who spoke a language nobody understood.

There was small bar off the front lounge. One night I came in to find the three Americans sitting at a table listening to a reel-to-reel Wollensak tape recorder they had lugged from the States. Electricity in Japan was 50-cycle, not the 60-cycle American machines were built for, so the music was slower in tempo and lower in pitch, but I recognized it instantly. “On Green Dolphin Street,” the first track on Side B of the Miles Davis album Jazz Track.* Sixty-one years later. It’s still a great recording.

We listened silently — Bill Evans playing the first chorus unaccompanied, Miles soloing not far from the melody, followed by Coltrane’s incredible “sheets of sound” solo, impressive even with the 17% reduction in pitch and pace. We, the four of us at the table, nodded in approval. Then guy sitting across from me, the piano player, looked up and said. “Now Cannonball comes in and spoils the whole thing.”

I was stunned. Cannonball regularly won Downbeat polls, both critics and readers. Yet here was this unknown piano player contradicting received opinion and doing so with complete confidence. I said nothing. But in later years, I came to understand.

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* Miles had done the soundtrack for a Louis Malle film “Ascenseur pour l'échafaud,” Those cuts were the A side, and the idea of a movie soundtrack consisting of nothing but Miles improvising with four Paris-based jazzmen was the supposed selling point, hence the album title “Jazz Track.” There wasn’t enough music for a full LP, so Columbia added three tracks by Miles’s working sextet. The music from the Paris session was quickly forgotten. The three tunes recorded became legendary and later appeared on other albums.

Transference — Structures and Crushes

May 24, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

If sex between professors and students weren’t still a problem, we wouldn’t still be talking about it. But it is, and we are.

(Click for a larger, more legible view.)

The Inside Higher Ed article and discussion (here) circle around terms like “harassment,” “supervisory relationship,” “power differential,” “adult,” “infantilizing,” and “consensual.”

The word that first came to my mind was “transference.”

Yes, I know that Freud has been shooed out of the conversation these days. But the lesson from psychoanalytic practice is still valid. Patients often transfer feelings about others in their lives onto the therapist — simply put, crushing on your shrink. Or more accurately, falling in love with who or what you imagine your shrink to be.

The therapist can use the transference to help the patient gain insight. It would also be easy for him to use it to get laid. But even though the patient in that situation might technically be a consenting adult, it is considered highly unethical for a therapist to have sex with a patient. In most states it’s also illegal.

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Social Relations 120 (Analysis of Interpersonal Behavior) was not structured like a regular Harvard course. The instructor gave no instruction. Instead, on the first day, after distributing the syllabus and laying down a few ground rules, he would fall silent, leaving the twenty-five students sitting around the oval table to generate the interpersonal behavior that would become the data for analysis. Occasionally, the instructor would offer a comment. “I wonder if what we’re really talking about is . . . .”

It sounds like a therapy group, but the content was different. The instructor did not encourage students to reveal intimate facts or to work on personal problems. When the discussion seemed to be going in that direction, the instructor would try to steer it back towards what was going on in the room – the interactions among the members of the group.

But structurally, the course was very much like a therapy group, especially the role of the instructor — non-directive, mostly listening, analytic rather than engaged.

All this was a long time ago. The Social Relations department itself was dissolved in the 1970s. But the Inside Higher Ed headline reminded me of something one of the instructors in the course told me. He would never try to date a student, he said.  But then he quoted a colleague who also taught the course and who did have affairs with undergraduates. “You can’t do it when they’re in your group, But then the next semester, you can have them sign up for an Independent Study, and  . . . .”

The Inside Higher Ed “fair game” headline a half-century later could have been about him — the predatory professor, ethics determined only by the academic calendar.

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Crushes are essentially transference, based more on who we imagine someone to be than on the reality of that person, and yes, they can happen anywhere. But certain structures for how people interact are more crushogenic than others. A Dynamics class like SocRel 120 is not a course of psychotherapeutic treatment, and the instructor is not a therapist. But that structure — the central, powerful, older, and seemingly all-knowing figure — is similar, and the difference is one of degree rather than kind. In the same way, American History 101 is not SocRel 120, and the history prof is not a group leader/facilitator. But we shouldn’t be surprised when a student becomes infatuated with a professor.  Obviously, not all  professors deflect those feelings.

Umpires and Allegories

May 22, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

Michael Stewart’s podcast “Against the Rules” is about “what’s happened to fairness — in financial markets, newsrooms, basketball games, courts of law, and much more” (according to the Website blurb). What happens to legitimacy, to faith in the rule of law, if everyone is screaming, “Ref, you suck,” (the title of the first episode)?

Lewis talked about this question at the 92nd Street Y with fellow journalist and podcasater Malcolm Gladwell.  Lewis says that one inspiration for the series was what happened after a close play at home in a softball game played by nine-year old girls. It happened ten years earlier. But it can easily be an allegory for tactics and a tactician of the present moment.

 (If Blogger has deleted this audio clip, you can go here and listen. It's about 2:20.)

The story continues (to hear the rest of it, get the entire episode and push the slider to about 12:40), but the excerpt here is sufficient. It shows a winning-obsessed and angry man using his position of power to bully an impartial judge. I chose to end the clip at the point where the angry bully says, “You’re fired.” (We’re not long on subtlety here at the Socioblog. For a recent “Ref, you suck” moment from the leader of the free world, see this post from two weeks ago.)

Lewis has another anecdote turned allegory about another man on the far right becoming enraged at impartial judges who threaten his privilege. This time, it’s Curt Schilling.

 Lewis is worried about what happens when influential people (the stars of sports, media, and politics) encourage people to dismiss the refs as partisan agents helping out their own side. In sports, says Lewis, as the calls have gotten more accurate, fans and players have become even more outraged at the refs. I’m not sure he’s right, and even if he is right today, attitudes and behavior may soon change towards a greater acceptance of the refs’ calls. It’s hard to imagine John McEnroe yelling “You cannot be serious!” and other verbal abuse at the Hawk-Eye replay system.*

But that’s sports, and sports are a convenient metaphor.  Chief Justice Roberts famously said that what he does as a judge is to “call balls and strikes.” But the courts have no pitch-track machine, no Hawk-Eye, no hi-def, slo-mo replay. So Lewis is right to worry that if the independence and authority of courts and other referees dwindles, the biggest bullies will be the winners even more than they already are.

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* In this anecdote about Schilling v. Pitch-Track, Lewis says parenthetically, “Why they even keep the umpires there is another question, ’cause the machine could just do it.”

Today (May 23), Kendall Baker of Axios sports brings this news:

An electronic radar system called TrackMan will soon be calling balls and strikes in the Atlantic League, an independent East Coast league that has emerged as MLB's testing ground for new rules and equipment initiatives.  In a simple test to make sure that TrackMan data could be successfully transmitted and understood, home plate umpires were fitted with earpieces that relayed calls to them one-tenth of a second after the ball crossed the plate.

What Do Women Want?

May 21, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

Brad Wilcox thinks he knows what makes a woman happy in her marriage — a helpful husband. He also thinks that progressives are wrong to assume that conservative ideology —  religious and political — tells men not to be helpful. His New York Times op-ed  on Sunday has the defensive title, “Religious Dads Can Put Kids to Bed, Too.” As Wilcox puts it, “Both feminism and faith give family men a clear code: They are supposed to play a big role in their kids’ lives.”

Wilcox likes religion, especially Christianity, and he likes conservatism, so he is happy to report that in his survey of wives, religious conservatives are the most likely to say that the quality of their marriage is “above average.” Score one for conservatives, or as Wilcox calls them “traditional.”

(Click for a larger view.)

But among the non-religious, women in marriages with traditional gender roles are much less likely to be happy, and by a lot (33% vs. 55% for secular women). How to explain these unhappy conservative women?  Wilcox has a hunch. It’s the men they married.

We also suspect that these groups are less likely to have husbands who have made the transition to the “new father” ideal that’s gained currency in modern America — and they’re not happy with their partner’s disengagement.

Yet even though traditional husbands have become more evolved as fathers, there’s one area where they may differ from progressive dads — housework. The progressive egalitarian man doesn’t just take care of the kids; he also does housework, an activity Wilcox does not mention at all. I downloaded the pdf of his report (linked to in the online version of the NYT piece) and searched for “housework,” “cleaning,” and “cooking.” Nothing.

The conservative/religious dad may be involved with the kids, but the marriage is hardly egalitarian. Wilcox’s epitome of the traditional wife is Anna, a stay-at-home mom he interviewed for a book on marriage.

I feel so blessed to have Greg as a husband. His involvement as a father and leadership in the family only adds to my level of happiness.”

Father, breadwinner, leader. From his niche in TV history, Ward Cleaver smiles approvingly.

As for those women married to traditional but non-religious husbands, they may be less happy for another reason, says Wilcox. They don’t have a church.

We suspect that part of their relative unhappiness, compared with religiously conservative women, is that they don’t enjoy the social, emotional and practical support for family life provided by a church, mosque or synagogue.

Note that even Wilcox won’t say that the benefits of religion have anything to do with belief, faith, prayer or anything else explicitly religious. What nonreligious “traditional” wives aren’t getting is “support for family life.”

I confess that I don’t know much about what churches, mosques, and synagogues provide in the way of support for family life.  Wilcox doesn’t mention anything specific. His phrase “we suspect,” here and in the previous quote, is another way of saying, “We have no evidence for this but we hope it’s true.” So I’ll offer my own guess.

I suspect that for the woman in the traditional gender-role-segregated marriage, church makes a difference because it offers her escape from the home.  Her family roles — wife, mother, housekeeper — are solo numbers, performed in isolation and with little moment-to-moment confirmation from others that she is performing these roles and performing them well.  But at church she finds others who will give that confirmation — the “social, emotional support for family life” Wilcox may be referring to.  But church also offers her other roles — friend or member of some church subgroup or committee — that take her outside of the house. “Traditional” women who do not belong to a church miss out on the support for their housewifely roles; nor are they valued in non-housewife roles. That lack of validation is a likely source of unhappiness.

Since the 1950s, sociologists have worried about women in traditional marriages, isolated in their homes all day, while their breadwinner/leader husbands are in constant interaction with a variety of other people in the world of work. Betty Draper in the first season of Mad Men is an extreme if fictional example. I’m sure she has her counterparts in far less wealthy households. I just can’t think of an example right now. What church provides is not so much support for those isolated roles but friendship, even community.

At least, that’s what I suspect.