School Structure and Superficial Friendships — Russia and the US

February 16, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

American schools teach kids the ideal of universalism. Treating everyone equally without favoritism squares perfectly with our value on equality. But then what about unique personal relationships? If you treat everyone alike, no one can be special. That was the gist of the previous post about the superficiality of American friendships, at least as non-Americans perceive them, and the rules of Valentine’s Day in American classrooms.

Two days after posting that, I happened to listen to a conversation from last August between American economist Tyler Cowen and Masha Gessen, a journalist who came to the US from Russia at age 14, lived here for ten years and then returned to Russia. In 2013, she moved back to the US because of the threat that the government might take her adopted son from her because she is gay. (The full podcast is here.)

Cowen asks two questions, one right after the other, the first about friendships, the second about schools. He doesn’t explicitly say that one affects the other. Neither does Gessen. Maybe they don’t see the connection.

Cowen asks, “Why do Russians purge their own friends so often?” He  Cowen refers to “loyalty cycles.” Gessen is puzzled, maybe because of the words purge and loyalty. Cowen explains that Russian friendships end in total breaks “whereas Americans will drift apart.”   

Gessen answer that if Cowen is right (and she seems not totally convinced that he is), it’s because friendships between Russians are much more profound.   




Here is slightly edited transcript: 

Russian friendships are much more emotional and intense than American friendships. When I moved back to this country five and a half years ago, it was like a sense of whiplash, because I had friend here, I had lived her for twenty years. And I would get together with my friends, and then two hours later the get-together would be over. And [I would think]What was the point of that? Was that just to let each other know that we still exist? Because you don’t really get into a conversation till about four hours in, right?, and a number of bottles of alcohol. If you’re going to really get down, it’s a 3 a.m., 4 a.m. proposition. You can’t just have dinner and go home.   Maybe you’re just referring to the intensity of Russian friendship. It’s like lovers, even in this country, don’t drift apart usually. You have to break up. You can’t really just stop calling. You can’t go from talking every day to talking every few weeks and then forget about each other’s existence.

Cowen’s next question is about the way Russian schools group children.

COWEN: Russian grade school – you sit in the same seats and next to the same people year after year after year. Is that a good system or a bad system? GESSEN: My older kids were educated partly in Russia and partly here, and my youngest son is now in elementary school here. I find it disorienting that every year Americans shuffle their classes and put kids in a new social situation.  There’s something amazing to having gone through life from the time you’re six or seven with the same people. I think it can foster really incredible friendships. It can also foster awful dynamics obviously.

Gessen’s answers suggest a strong relation between the personal (friendships) and the structural (classroom groupings). Oddly, neither Gessen nor Cowen mentions the possible link between the two. But even if they did see that sociological connection, they would see it from different sides of the table. Cowen is saying, in effect, “Russia takes away a kid’s choice over who to associate with. As a result, they wind up with these screwed-up friendships so that the Russian word for “friend” is “future enemy.”

From Gessen’s point of view, it’s not that America our way of friendship is the right and normal way. Instead she sees American friendships as superficial (What’s the point?). After all, when the group of kids a child sees everyday lasts only nine or ten months, when kids are forced to form new relationships every year, you really can’t expect them to develop deep and long-lasting friendships when they’re older.The Russian system can produce friendships that are “incredible” and “amazing.”

Valentine’s Day the American Way

February 14, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

Foreigners often comment that while Americans are generally very friendly and open, friendships are often superficial, especially compared with friendships in their home countries. In class, I would use the example of the elementary school version of Valentine’s Day. (The picture below turned up in my Twitter feed today. I have edited out the personal information.)

In the US, universalism rules. A Valentine’s card denotes affection and friendship, but American kids  have to treat all their classmates alike — no special preferences lest any kid feel left out. You have to extend this token of friendship to every kid in the class.

I’ve never been near a French primary school on February 14^th, but I doubt that they follow this custom. I would imagine that if French kids give Valentine cards, they do so on the basis of particularism. It matters very much who the other person is, and for each kid, the number of those special friendships is small.


Happy Valentine’s Day to all readers of the SocioBlog.

(A follow-up about Russian and US schools and friendships is here.)

Ya Got Trouble, My Friends

February 11, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Attorney General of the US, when he isn’t using his office to make sure Trump remains in power, tells us that the country is going to hell in a handbasket. In a speech at Notre Dame last year, he claimed that  “Virtually every measure of social pathology continues to gain ground.”

He’s wrong, of course. Most of those measures show that things are getting better, though there are some troubling numbers (suicide, drug addiction and overdose).  Claude Fischer has the data  at his Made In America blog. He also looks at Barr’s explanation for the nonexistent downward trend — “the steady erosion of our traditional Judeo-Christian moral system.” That trend too, says Fischer, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  We’re not losing our religion, and certainly not our religiousness; we’re losing our church affiliations.

Barr might also be wrong about the effects of religion or its absence. Fischer’s data seems to suggest that when it comes to social pathology, losing our religion might not be such a bad thing. States with higher levels of “religiosity” also tend to have higher levels of pathologies — things like violence and sexually transmitted disease. Even drug overdoses, historically the province of more urbanized and less religious states, have now become a big problem in the religious heartland.

(Click for a larger view.)

Of the variables in the graph, the one that stands out is Incarceration. Tell me what proportion of a state’s population is in jail, and I can make a very good guess as to how religious it is. But that doesn’t mean that religious states have more crime and criminals. It does mean that their laws and policies are more punitive. They favor harsh punishment for people who have broken the law. Not all laws and not all people, just those who by their actions and personal characteristics can be judged as outside the society — as not one of Us.

This preference for punishment is especially popular among fundamentalists and other religiously conservative Protestants. It is that same kind of fundamentalism that underlies Barr’s view of social problems. His speech reads like a sermon from a fire-and-brimstone revival preacher. (Barr’s actual delivery from the podium may have been different in style.) The odd thing is that Barr himself is a Catholic and he was speaking at Catholic university. This seeming contradiction puzzled Fischer too.

The speech sounds much more like one of the jeremiads Puritan ministers unleashed on their congregants centuries ago than it does like a Catholicism traditionally more tolerant of human failing. The underlying individualism in Barr’s account is also very Puritan Protestant. Social ills emerge from individual willfulness. The role of the community is to instill fear of God to check that willfulness

In this way, Barr is one more data point in a historical narrowing of differences between Protestants and Catholics. As Catholics became more similar to Protestant, as the social, economic, and geographic spaces they occupied grew more diverse, their views on social and political issues also became more varied. So it’s not surprising that in the 21st century we have a Catholic attorney general channeling Cotton Mather.*

-------------------------
* In the 1980s, another Catholic cabinet member, Education Secretary William Bennett, made similar noises. Like Prof. Harold Hill in “The Music Man” (and like Barr), Bennett told us, “Ya Got Trouble.” Hill blamed the pool table, Barr blamed secularism, and Bennett blamed the decline of virtue. That was convenient since he then went on to sell his Book of Virtues for parents to read to their kids just as Harold Hill sold trombones. Right now the only thing Barr seems to be selling is Donald Trump.

UPDATE: As I said in the fourth paragraph above, moralizers like Barr are especially fond of punishment when the offender is one of The Others. When the offender is One of Us, their sternness melts into compassion. Later in the day I wrote this, Mr. Barr’s justice department recommended a lighter sentence for Roger Stone, a friend of Trump, who had been convicted on a variety of charges. In doing so, DOJ was tearing up the recommendations of longer sentence from the prosecutors who worked on the case.

Uncut Gems Gamblers

February 6, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

As I sat through the movie “Uncut Gems,” (see the previous post) I kept thinking of the compulsive gamblers I studied hung around with decades ago. I had gone to the movie thinking that it would provide an inside view of the 47th St. diamond district, a business world that is probably not much different from what it was a century ago.  It has not been taken over by  private equity and MBAs with spreadsheets. If you’re looking for modern, rationalized corporate structures and procedures, go elsewhere. Here, personal relationships count for much; deals are sealed with a handshake, not a contract

That was the movie I wanted to see. After all, the Safdie brothers, who made the film, had grown up hearing diamond district stories from their father, who worked there. But intead of showing us that world, the film focuses relentlessly on a single figure, Howard Ratner played by Adam Sandler. And although Ratner may not be typical of jewelry merchants, he is typical of gamblers, especially compulsive gamblers, though with Ratner the more appropriate adjective would be impulsive gambler..

Ratner and the gamblers I knew had two important things in common.. First, their lives are centered around the problem of getting money — a lot of it and quickly. And second, their relationships with family are thin and brittle. That’s not surprising. Since their money problems crowd out other matters, close relationships are at best a distraction or an interference, at worst a threat. And yet, Ratner, like many of the gamblers I knew, still thinks of himself as a good husband and father, and he remains blissfully unaware of how he is seen by the people whose needs he is slighting.

He even thinks that his wife, who is divorcing him, might reconsider.She clarifies her position (“If I  had my way, I would never see you again”), and Ratner still doesn’t get it.



(She actually does convincingly fake a punch, hence the noise and laughter in the final seconds of this clip.)

There’s an old gamblers’ joke, about the horseplayer who, like Sandler lives on Long Island. That’s great for horseplayers, because Aqueduct and Belmont are not far. But in August, New York racing moves up to Saratoga.

The horseplayer complains to a friend. “It’s terrible. I have to get up before six to get the train in to Grand Central, get over to Penn Station to get the bus by nine so I can get to the track in time for the daily double. The races end at 5:30 or 6, and then I gotta do the same thing in reverse. I don’t get back to the house around eleven and get right to bed so I can get up the next morning.”

“You know what you should do,” says the friend, “Rent a room in Saratoga Springs. You’ll be near the track, you can sleep late. . . .”

“What?” says the horseplayer, “And neglect my family??”

OK. Jokes are not evidence. But blogposts are not journal articles. And the joke does capture the gambler’s distorted picture of domestic tranquility.