What You Mean, “We”?*

January 20, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

What do we mean when we say “we”? Or more to the point, what does the president mean when he uses that word? 

The Atlantic has an interactive graphic (here) showing the relative frequencies of words in State of the Union addresses. (“Addresses” because I’m choosing my words carefully. These were not “speeches” until Wilson. Before that, it was written text only.) Here “we” is.

(Click on thechart for a larger view.)

The rise of “we” seems to parallel the rise of big government, starting with Wilson and our entry into a world war, followed by a brief (10-year) decline. Then FDR changes everything.  “We,” i.e., the people as represented by the government, are doing a lot more. 

Sorting the data by frequency shows that even in the big-We era, big-government Democrats use it more than do Republicans.  (JFK used We less frequently than did the GOP presidents immediately before and after him. But then, it was JFK who said not to ask what the government could do for us.)

Other words are less puzzling. Freedom is a core American value, but of late (the last five or six presidents), it’s the Republicans who really let it ring. 

As with We, Freedom gets a big boost with FDR, but Freedom for Reagan and the Bushes is not exactly FDR’s four freedoms – Freedom of speech, Freedom of religion, Freedom from want, Freedom from fear – especially the last two. Nor is it the kind of freedom LBJ might have spoken of in the civil rights era, a freedom that depended greatly on the actions of the federal government.  Instead, for conservatives since Reagan, freedom means the freedom to do what you want, especially to make as much money as you can, unbothered by government rules, and to pay less in taxes. 

Freedom in this sense is what Robert Bellah** calls “utilitarian individualism.”  As the word count shows, freedom was not such a central concern in the first 150 years of the Republic. Perhaps it became a concern for conservatives in recent years because they see it threatened by big government.  In any case, for much of our history, that tradition of individualism was, according to Bellah, tempered by another tradition – “civic republicanism,” the assumption that a citizen has an interest not just in individual pursuits but in public issues of the common good as well. 

That sense of a public seems to have declined. Even the “collectivist” Democrats of recent years use the term only about one-tenth as much as did the Founding Fathers. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison – their SOTUs had more than ten publics for every freedom.

I checked one other word because of its relevance to the argument that the US is “a Christian nation,” founded on religious principles by religious people, and that God has always been an essential part of our nation.

God, at least in State of the Union addresses, is something of an Almighty-come-lately. Like We, He gets a big boost with the advent of big government. FDR out-Godded everybody before or since, except of course, the Bushes and Reagan.

That is the end of this post. Thank you for reading. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.***

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* For those who are very young or have led sheltered lives, this title is the punch line spoken by Tonto in an old joke, which you can Google.

** See his Habits of Heart, written with Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven M. Tipton.  Or get a brief version in this lecture.

*** Update: I just noticed that the two “Gods” in that sentence work out to a rate of 200-300 per million. If tag lines like that are included as part of the text, that accounts for the higher rate since FDR. It’s not about big government, it’s about radio. Prior to radio, the audience for the SOTU was Congress. Starting with FDR, the audience was the American people.  Unfortunately, I don’t know whether these closing lines, which have now become standard, are included in the database. If they are included, the differences among presidents in the radio-TV era, may be more a matter of the denominator of the rate (length of speeches) than of the numerator (God).  FDR averaged about 3500 per SOTU. Reagan and the Bushes are in the 4000-6000 range. Clinton and Obama average about 7000. So it’s possible that the difference that looks large on the graph is merely a matter of a one God-bless or a two God-bless at the end of the speech.
 
This  audience factor might account for some of the increase in the use of we. A president addressing the nation rather than reporting to Congress might use we far more often.

Dissed Again

January 18, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sociology is the Rodney Dangerfied of social science. The latest insult comes from economist Noah Smith. On his Noahpinion blog, he posted two pictures of faux zoo animals: a dog that a Chinese zoo tried to pass off as a lion; and a “panda” in an Italian circus that was really a chow painted black and white.

But why did Smith say that his post was “a blaze of amateur sociology”?*

Smith does not mention sociology in the post, nor does he use any sociological terms, as if to suggest that the amateur sociology dig is so obvious that it needs no explanation.  But I’m confused.  Is he saying that these clumsy attempts to pass domestic dogs off as exotic animals are amateur sociology? Or is he saying that his pointing out frauds that are this obvious is amateur sociology? Or is he saying that amateur sociology (if not all sociology) is tries to pass off the commonplace as something of real interest.

Either way, we don’t get no respect.

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* Smith changed the title, but the original still shows up in blog aggregtors like my G2Reader and in the URLfor the post: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/lion-dog-panda-dog-blaze-of-amateur.html.

Gifted and Talented – Academics and Athletes

January 16, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Can women be brilliant?  Apparently, academics don’t think so, at least not according to some research reported in The Chronicle (here). 

New research has found that women tend to be underrepresented in disciplines whose practitioners think innate talent or "brilliance" is required to succeed.

Women might be successful in those fields, but while the top men in those fields will be seen as having some ineffable je ne sais quoi – in the words of the survey questionnaire, “a special aptitude that just can’t be taught” – women achieve their place the old fashioned way– hard work.  The Chronicle interviewed Sarah-Jane Leslie, one of the authors of the study.

It’s easy to find portrayals of men with a “special spark of innate, unschooled genius,” like various incarnations of Sherlock Holmes or television’s House, M.D. But accomplished and smart women—think Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series—are typically depicted as simply hard-working.

That reminded me immediately of a similar issue in sports, where the key variable is not gender but race. (See this HuffPo piece.) The observation has become almost a cliche. Blacks are perceived to have natural talent while Whites achieve a place on the All-Star team through diligence and perseverance. Or to paraphrase Ms. Leslie and The Chronicle:

It’s easy to find portrayals of Blacks with a “special spark of innate, unschooled genius,” like Michael Jackson or Magic (note that name) Johnson. But accomplished Whites – Larry Bird or Steve Nash – are typically depicted as simply hard-working.

Oops, We Did It Again

January 16, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

How many times can you lose your innocence?

I was listening to a podcast of an old (June, 2000) episode of the BBC’s “In Our Time.”  It was about America, and on the panel was Christopher Hitchens, the British journalist who had relocated to Washington, DC.  The moderator’s first question was about American idealism, and this is what Hitchens had to say:



Here is a transcript, but you should really listen to the audio clip, if only to catch Hitchens’s tone and to hear him spin out long, perfect sentences with the ease that most of us have for answering questions like “What time is it?”

The one that amuses me the most is the reference that you get about once a year to the American loss of innocence, as if this giant, enormous, powerful, slightly vulgar society ever had any innocence to lose, let alone could regain it and lose it again. I’ve heard the loss of innocence attributed to: the Spanish-American War, the assassination of President Kennedy, the assassination of President Kennedy’s brother, the war in Vietnam, the disclosures made at Watergate, through the discovery, which is in Robert Redford’s movie “Quiz Show,” that the quiz shows in the fifties were fixed – that was apparently a great American loss of innocence – and on the front page of the New York Times, when he died, in the obituary of Frank Sinatra, the idea that Frank Sinatra’s songs represented the loss of innocence for America. . . There is . . . a danger of self-regard, of narcissism in that.

That was in 2000, so you could add 9/11, the Iraq war, Abu Ghraib, the torture report.

If we keep losing our innocence so often, we never really lose it.  We might be temporarily careless with it, but we find it again very quickly and forget that we’d ever lost it. We return to an idealized view of ourselves as a nation whose motives are 100% pure.  As Randy Newman puts it in his song “Political Science,

No one loves
I don’t know why
We may not be perfect,
But Heaven knows we try.

With such a view of ourselves, each revelation of anything that departs from the ideal is a new shock. One immediate reaction is denial.  And when the facts become undeniable, we react wtih something like the disbelief and regret of the morning-after drunk who had blacked out.* “I really did that? Oh, gee, I’m sorry. Killing millions of indigenous people and taking their land? I really did that?  Slavery? Atomic bombs?** We really did that?”  Why not face it: we’re not that innocent.

Forgetting (in Freudian terms, repression) and denial allow us to retain our innocence, at least in our own minds, but with the result that we’re less likely to change. For example, many White Southerners today want to enshrine the Confederate flag, the flag of a country that was based on the enslavement of Blacks and that waged a war that killed a greater proportion of the United States population than did any other war.** “We really did that?”

 As James Baldwin once said, “Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart.”


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* I think Philip Slater may have made this same analogy. If so, maybe his inspiration was the same as mine – Shelly Berman.

**When my brother taught world history in high school, he included this question on a test:

Which is the only country that dropped an atomic bomb on another country?
a.  Russia
b. Germany
c.  Japan
d.  the United States

Only about half the students got it right.

*** In absolute numbers, more US soldiers died in World War II.