Chasing Rosebud

September 10, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Stories about what very rich men do with their money bring out my inner Freud. This week, it was Paul Allen

Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, is, of course, a billionaire. And with his billions, he does many of the things that very rich people do. He owns a 414-foot yacht plus a smaller yacht that’s only 100 yards long. He bought some sports teams (Seahawks, Trail Blazers). He has also supported medicine, science, and the arts. But his true love is aerospace..

His latest project is “Stratolaunch”– a dual-fuselage plane with a wingspan longer than a football field. It will carry a half-million pound rocket ship to its cruising altitude a mile or more above the earth, then drop the rocket, which will then blast off for space. An article about it in Wired  had the title “385 Feet of Crazy.”

Mark Palko at West Coast Stat Views, (here), my source for this story, pulls the quote that would have caught my attention too.

As a teenager, Paul Allen was a sci-fi and rocketry nerd. . . .His childhood bedroom was filled with science fiction and space books. . . . . As Allen tells it in his memoir, he was crushed when he visited his parents as an adult and went to his old room to reference a book. He discovered that his mother had sold his collection. (The sale price: $75.) Using a blowup of an old photo of the room, Allen dispatched scouts to painstakingly re-create his boyhood library. Allen never stopped thinking about space.

As Mark says, “You have here a fantastically wealthy man going to great lengths to recapture childhood dreams.”

Mark posts period images of Willy Ley Space Models and Galaxy magazine that might well have been part of Allen’s childhood. The current project, says Mark, is part of the culture of “Silicon Valley futurism . . . heavily (and I would argue not at all healthily) influenced and bounded by the tropes, rhetoric, and imagery of postwar science-fiction.”

My ideas run less to sci-fi and more to Freud and “Citizen Kane.” I’m not so much concerned with the specific type of fantasy. It could be sci-fi or winning the Superbowl; it could anything. What’s important is that the object of the chase is just that, a fantasy — an ideal that can never be realized. It’s a dream object that, if only it could be grasped, would bring total fulfillment. The trouble is that it can’t, and it wouldn’t.

But (and here comes the Freud*) the fantasy does have a basis in reality — the reality of the warmth, security, and fulfillment of early childhood.  That reality can never be fully recaptured — we’re adults after all, living in the adult world. Yet it remains in the unconscious as a motivating assumption — the idea that somewhere out there, something can bring that same level of gratification.

A man (it’s usually a man) driven by this kind of motivation converts that unconscious ideal into something more tangible; often that something is wealth or power or both. These goals have the added benefit of being infinite and therefore unattainable. No matter how much you have, you can always have more.**

“Citizen Kane” illustrates this idea in near-perfect form. From the very outset, the film makes it clear that Charles Foster Kane has spent his life trying to recapture the childhood he had with his mother.  In the opening scene, the dying Kane lets fall from his hand a snow globe, a perfectly contained snowy world of happiness and peace. Soon after, a flashback shows us Kane as a boy, playing in the snow, gliding downhill on his sled. But this is the day that Mr. Thatcher arrives to take him east. It’s his last day with his mother. Minutes earlier the sled had been a source of delight. Now he uses it, as a shield-like weapon against the man who is taking him away from this childhood..

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

“Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get or lost,” says Thompson, one of the investigative reporters who, according to the screenplay is “the personification of the search for the truth about Charles Foster Kane.” Thompson, in the next sentences,  hedges his hunch. “No, I don't think it explains anything. I don't think any word explains a man's life.”

But of course, it does. Rosebud symbolizes something Kane lost and then couldn’t get. And he couldn’t get it because he didn’t realize what it was that he really wanted – the human warmth and happiness of childhood. He displaced that goal onto the narcissistic goals of wealth and power.  Each victory in pursuit of those goals brings him no real or lasting pleasure because they are not really what he is seeking.
                               
Is Paul Allen a version of Kane with sci-fi memorabilia instead of snow? I have no idea. Wikipedia tells me only that “Allen has never married and has no children. He has been, at times, reclusive.” More important, in real life, motivation is not purely a matter of individual psychology. Movies are very good at showing us individual reactions, emotions, and ideas. But as I argued a while ago (here), motives, even motives like greed,  also reside in institutions and situations.

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* The ideas that follow also owe much to Philip Slater.

**  “A million dollars isn’t cool,” Sean Parker tells Mark Zuckerberg (or at least he does in Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay).  “You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” But people with a billion dollars several times over are rarely cool enough with that amount that they stop trying to make more.

Politics and Child’s Play

September 3, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the unit on bureaucracy and rationalization, I ask students to think about the differences between Little League baseball and pick-up games. It’s the same activity — kids playing baseball. But Little League runs on principles of bureaucracy as outlined by Weber. It has clear rules and authorities to enforce them. In pick-up games kids are free to adjust the rules according to the situation. With no umpires around, it’s the kids themselves who make the decisions. So the outcome on a close call, like whether a runner is safe or out, might depend on the current score (“OK, we’ll give it to you”), the decision on the previous close call, the individual involved (“Hey, it’s little Mason — give him a break”); or it might be decided by rock-paper-scissors. These are all reasonable ways of reaching an agreed-on resolution. And in Little League, they are all off limits. Kids are barred from participating in the decisions that affect their own game.

In Sunday’s Times (here), Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff make the same point about adult-organized activity compared with “free play,” but they go much farther. It’s not just that different structures (bureaucratic or informal) demand different ways of acting and thinking. They have long-term consequences. “Free play . . . matters not only for the health of our children but also for the health of our democracy.”  Clearly, Haidt-Lukianoff are swinging for the fences.

There’s good data to show that they are right about free play getting squeezed out — by school and homework, by adult-run activities (lessons, organized sports), and by solitary vices involving screens. But Haidt-Lukianoff claim that the change has led to anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, and suicide. They also argue that it makes for a more polarized society where those who disagree cannot work towards compromise solutions. Do we have any real evidence for these consequences?

The trouble is that Haidt-Lukianoff are talking about how free play affects individuals, but for evidence they rely on data about aggregates — rates of behavior now compared with the same rates in the past. The logic is tempting. Teens today, on average, spend less time in free play. Teens today, on average, report more symptoms of anxiety and depression.  But are those anxious and depressed kids the ones who have been spending less time in free play? We don’t know. It’s also possible that these psychological problems are increasing not just for teens but among the population generally. For example, it’s true that rates of teen suicide have increased in the last decade, but so have rates of suicide among all age groups, including those who grew up in the years when kids had more free-play time.

Then there’s Haidt-Lukianoff’s claim about “the health of our democracy.”

The second predictable consequence of play deprivation is a reduction in conflict management and negotiation skills.

It’s predictable, but has it actually occurred? Haidt-Lukianoff point to the increasing political polarization in the US. “Americans report feeling fear and loathing toward people on the other side and have become increasingly less willing to date or marry someone of a different party. Some restaurants won’t serve customers who work for — or even just support — the other team or its policies.”

But young people are not responsible for this polarization, as even Haidt-Lukianoff recognize. “Play is clearly not sufficient for political cooperation — today’s political elites had plenty of free play as children.” Those “conflict-management and negotiation skills” are part of a willingness to compromise rather than adhere rigidly to ideology in all situations.  So it might be helpful to see who prefers compromise and who prefers ideology. We might expect to find a greater preference for flexibility in what Sarah Palin called “the real America” —  small-town and rural, conservative in religion and politics, more in the South and Midwest than on the coasts.

In 2014, a Pew survey asked people whether elected officials should “make compromises with people they disagree with” or on the other hand whether they should “stick to their positions.” In most comparisons, “real Americans” were less likely to want compromise.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

If the decline of free play is related to the inability or unwillingness to engage with others, that suggests one other variable, one that Haidt-Lukianoff ignore — social class. I’m a little surprised that they don’t mention it since one of the most important and widely read books in sociology in the past 20 years, Annette Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods, focuses specifically on the question of who organizes children’s play — adults or the kids themselves. Lareau compares the “natural growth” parenting of working-class parents with the “concerted cultivation” of middle-class parents. The natural-growth approach lets children develop more on their own, with less parental direction and intervention. Middle-class parents, by contrast, cultivate. They organize and supervise. They pay great attention to what their kids are doing and worry about how that fits with long-term goals. They’re less willing to leave things to chance. . .  or to their children. Needless to say, middle-class kids have far less free-play time than their working-class counterparts, who are left to organize their own play. 

If Haidt-Lukianoff are right, the better-educated, more middle-class people should be less likely to want compromise. But it’s just the reverse. It’s the less educated who want their elected officials to be uncompromising when dealing with people who have conflicting ideas.

This  lack of convincing evidence is disappointing, for I don’t think that Haidt-Lukianoff are completely wrong. They’re making an imhttps://montclairsoci.blogspot.com/2018/09/politics-and-childs-play-ii-different.htmlportant point about play and about politics. But they see the problem as psychological; they focus on individual psychological traits and social skills. They miss the important point that when we are looking at political processes, and even when we are looking at personal reactions and problems, it makes more sense to think about structures and situations, as I will hope to explain in a subsequent post.

Monkey Business

August 30, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Is a “monkey” idiom used, however tangentially, in connection with a Black person always racism?

After he won the Republican primary for governor in Florida, Ron De Santis made a statement about the coming general election. His opponent, Democrat Andrew Gillum, is Black. Here’s what De Santis said.

Florida elections are always competitive, and this is a guy who, although he’s much too liberal for Florida, I think he’s got huge problems with how he’s governed Tallahassee, he is an articulate spokesman for those far-left views, and he’s a charismatic candidate. I watched those Democrat debates, and none of that is my cup of tea, but he performed better than those other people there. So we’ve got to work hard to make sure that we continue Florida going in a good direction, let’s build off the success we’ve had on Governor Scott, the last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state. That’s not going to work. [emphasis added]

People on the left accused De Santis of using a racial dog whistle to get Florida racists to the polls. Those on the right disagreed.

It’s understandable that Black people would be offended. But the issue here is De Santis’s intent. If “monkey this up” is a common idiom – like “going ape shit,” or “monkeying around” with something – then maybe there was no racist intent. For example, in his response to De Santis’s comment, Gillum said, “What we’re trying to offer in this race is a north star for where we want to go as a state. [emphasis added]” Was this a dog whistle to Northerners who had moved to Florida or to other Floridians who want the state to be less Southern?

Unlikely. I’ve heard people use “north star” in this way, though I think its synonym “pole star” is more frequent (but then, Gillum is running in Florida, not Buffalo). But I don’t recall ever hearing “monkey this up.” Why would De Santis come up with it, especially when so many other words come readily to mind – mess this up, screw this up, undermine this, spoil this, and so on?

Mark Kleiman, a liberal, had a similar reaction. Responding to conservatives David French and Ben Shapiro. Shapiro (here ) had called the dog whistle accusations “wildly dishonest stuff.”

Was it just liberals like Kleiman and me who’d never heard “monkey this up”? I checked Google nGrams to see how often the phrase appeared in books. Instead of the usual graph, Google returned this.

Apparently “monkey this up” was as unfamiliar to Google as it was to me. (NB: our president has assured us that Google is biased against conservatives, and perhaps Google’s book-search function is similarly slanted. Fake nGrams.)

But that is not the whole story. I tried again, leaving out the pronoun.

Turns out “monkey up” really is a phrase. Its use has been falling since 1920, but only since about 1960 has it been outpaced by “muck up.” Maybe De Santis is old fashioned. Or is there regional variation? Maybe “monkey up” is more common in the South, like “coke” as a general term for soft drinks.

Gillum took “monkey up” as racist, but he also said that the problem goes far beyond ambiguous metaphors. “In the handbook of Donald Trump they no longer do whistle calls – they’re now using full bullhorns.”

Trump has taken us beyond the subtleties of language.  And yet, it’s probably unwise for Democrats to make accusations of racism. Trump supporters, understandably, don’t like being called racists, and if you point out the racism in their policy preferences, they probably won’t vote for you. So race becomes the issue that is hugely important but that can’t be talked about – the 800-pound gorilla.

I’m Just a Girl Who Cain’t Say, “I’ll Have to Get Back to You on That.”

August 22, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sociolinguist Deborah Tannen was in a colleague’s office when the phone rang. It was a man in the department asking the colleague to serve on a committee. She ran through the list of things she was already burdened with — thesis supervision, an overloaded teaching schedule, other committees. “There’s no way I could responsibly join another committee. Of course, if you can’t find anyone else, I’ll do it, but honestly, I don’t see how I could add it to what’s already on my plate.”

When the conversation had ended and she had hung up the phone, she turned to Tannen. “I can’t believe it. I told him I couldn’t do it, but he put me on the committee anyway.”*

The problem, as Tannen sees it, is not that the man was inconsiderate but that the two people were speaking in different “conversational styles.” He was listening in a “direct” style; she was speaking in a more “indirect” style. The only “No” he would hear was a direct one – simple and without qualification or exception.

It’s as though they were speaking different languages. Language is a part of culture, and cultures have different ideas about directness. When I was in Japan long ago, people would sometimes comment on how “frank” Americans were. At the time I took it as a compliment. Only much later did I realize that what they meant was that Americans, including me, will just barge in and tell you what they think or what they want with not a thought to anyone else’s feelings or preferences. They are too obtuse to consider the harmony within the group.

Japanese culture and language are indirect. There are countless stories of Americans doing business in Japan thinking that they had been told “yes” when the Japanese had thought they had clearly told the Americans “no.” The Japanese, with their comment about frankness, were telling me to be more sensitive and circumspect. But they were saying it indirectly, and I just didn’t hear.

Even within our own frank culture, getting to No is hard. We all are reluctant to give an unequivocal No. “Not really,” is often as close as we get. But there’s a gender difference. Men are more comfortable with the direct style than are women, especially when it comes to accentuating the negative. Women are more indirect. Tannen’s overburdened colleague thought she was being direct, and maybe she was — for a woman. A better example comes from a McSweeney’s list last week.

Nelles-Sager’s list includes, in part:

1. “Hmm… maybe.”
2. “We should look that up.”
3. “Totally.”
7. “Yeah, for sure, I mean, actually, it’s [right answer], but you’re right that it could be [wrong answer] if it wasn’t [right answer].”
8. “It’s possible.”

In many situations, gender overlaps with another variable that affects directness — power. In saying  “no” to someone higher in power, it’s probably better to be less direct.  Alternatively, those in power may take care not to be too harshly direct to those below them. Nelles-Sager doesn’t mention it, but three years earlier, McSweeney’s had another list : “Ways Teachers Avoid Saying ‘No.’” At least one entry — “I suppose it’s possible” — is identical to one of Nelles-Sager’s. Others include “I see where you’re coming from” and “I guess that’s an interpretation.”

The general point may be that when we are thinking about the feelings of others, we use the indirect style. The reason may be based in culture, gender, or power. It may even be a matter of personality, as illustrated by the passage that I cribbed the title of this post from.

The truth was that Pinchuck had not felt comfortable in the shoes but he could never bring himself to say no to a salesman. “I want to be liked,” he admitted to Blanche. “Once I bought a live wildebeest because I couldn't say no.” (Note: O.F. Krumgold has written a brilliant paper about certain tribes in Borneo that do not have a word for “no” in their language and consequently turn down requests by nodding their heads and saying, “I'll get back to you.” This corroborates his earlier theories that the urge to be liked at any cost is not socially adaptive but genetic, much the same as the ability to sit through operetta.)  — Woody Allen, “By Destiny Denied”

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* This anecdote appears in Tannen’s recent book You’re the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships.