Others — Specific and General

May 13, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

When it comes to the standard sociological view about the self and socialization, as I said in a post nearly ten years ago (here) ,  I’ve lost my faith.

I realize how wrong I’ve been about some basic ideas. Taking the role of other, seeing ourselves as other see us, the looking-glass self – what a crock. In fact, people don’t see themselves as others see them, and I’m not just talking about people who are clearly delusional.

But an interview I heard recently now has me both reaffirming my skepticism and also thinking that Mead and Cooley – the guys from a century ago that intro textbooks haul out in the section on social psych – had a point. It may come down to the difference between the “generalized other” and a “specific other.” The interview, oddly enough, was about loss of faith.

Linda Curtis was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness. Even as child, she went door to door, handing out the literature, trying to convert people. I would imagine that her mother and others taught her what to say and how to respond to the curiosity, indifference, hostility, etc of others. After all, the reactions that people have to Jehovah’s Witness door-knockers fall into a few limited categories, and proselytizers learn the scenarios for each of these. Her elders would probably also have taught her a set of ways for thinking about these people and their responses, ways of thinking that provide a defense for the tenets of the religion. They would also have taught her ways of thinking that defend the self, that allow her, regardless of the reactions of others, to think about herself in a positive way. A sort of Witness protection program.

In the language of social psychology, the Witnesses were her reference group. It was with their lens, not that of the non-Witness world, that she saw herself.

But Curtis lost her faith. Her memoir is called Shunned: How I lost My Religion and Found Myself.  The turning point comes when for a moment she glimpses herself from another perspective — like what happens when you turn your head as you are walking past a mirror, maybe a three-way mirror, that you hadn’t known was there, and you see, for an instant, a person that you don’t completely recognize but who is inescapably you. At the time, Curtis was an adult, living in Portland, Oregon, married to another Jehovah’s Witness, and well along on a corporate career. She and another Witness had been assigned a territory in an affluent suburb. The man who answered the door turned out to be someone in her company, a man she knew and admired.



Here is a transcript:

Here comes a guy who I’ve known for years and that I know to be a very kind, capable, high-integrity person who I really, really like, and here I jump into this spiel that I’ve said a million times before because I’ve been knocking on doors since I was nine, and this was like, I’m thirty. So I start speaking and I have this experience of hearing myself for the first time — like I’m an observer, over here, listening to my words. And I heard them as if for the first time. And it was self-righteous, and there was a kind of reproach and a judgment. You don’t actually say this in literal terms, but what I was saying to this guy was, “You’re not on the right team, and if you don’t get on the right team – Jehovah’s team – you could potentially be destroyed in this coming Armageddon. When I said that, it really freaked me out. And I got out of there as fast as I could. (He was very gracious.) And that just opened a slight window for me. That discomfort didn’t go away. And I allowed myself over the next year to revisit that discomfort — like, whoa, maybe there’s another way to look at this. Could it really be that Jehovah God is that exacting — that he would wipe out this person who I know to be a really great person? That’s where it started, and I allowed myself to build on that.

The vague, generalized other had been replaced by a very specific other, one whose views she cared deeply about.* The Linda Curtis she saw now from this new perspective was different from the Linda Curtis she had, with the help of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, constructed in her own mind. It was this new uncertainty about the self that ultimately led to her uncertainty about her religion.

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* Mead distinguished between the “generalized other” and “significant others.” Poor George. He had no idea how people a half-century later would start redefining the term he coined. I imagine him pacing about in the social psych afterworld, listening in on people today talking about “significant others.”  “No, no, no,” he shouts, “That’s not what it means.”

Such Bloody Good Cameras

May 7, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston


Ronan Farrow was on the political podcast “Left, Right, and Center” recently, talking mostly about the decimation of the State Department under Rex Tillerson. But Farrow had just been awarded the Pulitzer for his reporting on Harvey Weinstein, and the host asked him, “What have you made of stories we’ve seen — not just Harvey Weinstein — [about men]  trying to find ways to restart their careers, figuring out how they can re-enter the industry?”

“I get asked that question a lot.” Farrow said.

My first reaction was that most of the people who ask that question are probably men, and it seems like misplaced sympathy. Oh, how can these poor fellows regain their former stature in show biz? My second thought was that whatever the concerns of the askers, the question is sociologically interesting.

My next thought had far less to do with the predators and their careers and much more to do with us, the audience. What are we to do about all those movies and TV shows? Does the moral taint spill from the person onto the work itself? Ironically, Weinstein is the worst offender, but since is role is that of producer, he’s also the one most easily bracketed off from the work. Do we even know who the executive producers of our favorite films were?

It’s more of a problem when predators are on screen and playing characters that seem very much like themselves. We’ll never again view Cosby as America’s dad. That one’s easy and besides his career was over anyway. But what will we do if Louis CK develops new material and puts it up on YouTube. . . and it’s good material?

Back in November, Claire Dederer writing in The Paris Review put it this way.

“Here’s how to have some complicated emotions: watch Manhattan.” It’s a very good movie, but the Woody Allen character’s affair with a high school girl now seems even creepier.

It’s the same dilemma in “Dr. Strnagelove.” Col. Jack Ripper asks Captain Mandrake (Peter Sellers) if the Japanese had tortured him when he was a P.O.W.

   

Here’s the transcript, but you should really listen to Sellers deliver the line.

COL. RIPPER No, I mean, when they tortured you, did you talk?     MANDRAKE No, I ... Well, I don't think they wanted me to talk, really, or say anything. It was their way of having a bit of fun, the swines. The strange thing is they make such bloody good cameras.

Ambivalent About Technology

May 4, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston


In “The Magnificent Ambersons” the film by Orson Welles set in the early 20th century, the college-aged George is skeptical about these new “horseless carriages.” George is not a character that you take to. He’s something of a young fogey, and the film seems to be setting us up to reject his curmudgeonly attitude towards progress.

Yet Jack — Joseph Cotten as the voice of wisdom —  has this to say:

I’m not sure George is wrong about automobiles. With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization. May be that they won’t add to the beauty of the world or the life of the men’s souls, I’m not sure. But automobiles have come and almost all outwards things will be different because of what they bring. They’re going to alter war and they’re going to alter peace.

Of course, this kind of prediction is much easier when you’re doing it in a 1942 film, but the line is taken directly from Booth Tarkington’s novel written in 1918. Then Jack adds

May be that in ten to twenty years from now that if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn’t be able to defend the gasoline engine but agree with George — that automobiles had no business to be invented.

Here’s a clip of more of the conversation.

I saw this film at the Harvard Square Theater many decades ago, and when the audience heard this “no business to be invented” line, they burst into applause. The same thing probably happens when the film is shown today.

Which is all to say that our ambivalence about technology goes back at least a century. We’ve made our peace with the automobile. We know where we stand. For the Georges and Jacks of today, the focus of uncertainty and anxiety is the computer-Internet complex and all its offspring – Facebook and Twitter, Tinder and OK Cupid, League of Legends and Grand Theft Auto, etc.  On podcasts and TV, in op-eds and books, critics are wringing their hands about the epidemic of, variously, depression, loneliness, sexism, racism, terrorism, and other ills that this technology has brought.

Yet I keep imagining that these same people also have deep discussions about which apps to download or which new smartphone to buy, comparing the iPhone and Pixel in the same way that some people in that movie audience might later have been scoffing that the Ford Mustang was really just a dumpy old Falcon with a smarter-looking body (I told you this was a long time ago), and you’d be better off with a Camaro. Nor does anyone, then or now, notice the seeming contradiction. In part, it’s the “elsewhere effect.” Those evils that technology has caused are happening somewhere else — to other people, to “society,” not to me and my friends. In part, that’s because we think of “society” as other people, as though we ourselves are not a part of it. We like to maintain the illusion of our own autonomy, an autonomy we are less willing to grant others. And in part, it’s because we just don’t know why we do what we do. Or to put it more charitably, we are unaware of many of the causes that affect our behavior, thoughts, and feelings.

For the individual, technology is seductive – it’s so convenient, and being among the first in your circle to master the latest gizmo is so cool. So even people who are uneasy about technology and social change at the general level may still, as individuals, want to be in the tech vanguard.

This is basically the point that Philip Slater, in The Pursuit of Loneliness, was offering at around the same time that the audience in Cambridge was applauding Joseph Cotten’s reservations about the automobile in “The Magnificent Ambersons.”

While we think of ourselves as people of change and progress, masters of our environment and our fate, we are no more so than the most superstitious savage, for our relation to change is entirely passive. We poke our noses out the door each day and wonder breathlessly what new disruptions technology has in store for us. We talk of technology as the servant of humanity, but it is a servant that now dominates the household, too powerful to fire, and upon whom everyone is helplessly dependent. We tiptoe about and speculate on his mood. What will be the effects of such-and-such an invention. How will it change our daily lives? We never ask, “Do we want this, is it worth it?”  [snip] We laugh at the old lady who holds off the highway bulldozers with a shotgun, but we laugh because we’re Uncle Toms. We try to outdo each other in singing the praises of the oppressor, although the value of technology in increasing human satisfaction remains at best undemonstrated.

This is brilliant, but Slater omits something. He writes here about technology as though it were a few stand-alone gadgets —  a car, an iPhone, a drone — or else some incomprehensible monolithic force.  But along with the gadgets come powerful economic institutions, the bulldozers in Slater’s analogy, and the people who have become dependent on their success —  the bulldozer driver and manufacturer, the road construction crews and companies, and of course Ford and GM.

Flashback Wednesday — Little Miley, All Grown Up

May 2, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Miley Cyrus was on Jimmy Kimmel last night defending her tweet of two days earlier. The tweet retracted an apology of ten years earlier. I mean, I guess saying “fuck you” constitutes a retraction.

I had blogged about the controversy at the time (here), noting that the photo did not deliver on what the tabloid headlines promised – “Racy,” “Topless,” “Half-naked,” etc., and that the salaciousness seemed to be in the mind of the beholders.*

It wasn’t what Miley Cyrus was showing – a beach photo of her in a scoop-back, one-piece bathing suit would have shown more skin – it was what she wasn’t showing but that the viewers knew was there. “Seemingly bare breasted,” was how the Daily Record put it (just under the headline “It’s not Art – It’s Porn.”). What made the photo “racy,” at least to these observers, was not the sight of her bare breasts but the thought that she either had just bared them or might be about to.

Honi soit qui mal y pense. Which is basically what Miley told Jimmy last night.

“It was everyone else’s poisonous thoughts and minds that ended up turning this into something it wasn’t meant to be so I actually shouldn’t be ashamed, they should be.”

The title of my post was “Good Girl, Naughty Picture” and if there was any sociological content, it was the cultural context that went beyond mere Miley and her employer at the time.

The problem for Disney seems to be how to have their teen-age girl stars be attractive without being sexual. That was hard enough in the 1950s, when Annette was prima inter pares among the Mouseketeers, and as Dave Barry put it, some of the letters on her jersey were closer to the screen than others. Still, like a good Disney kid, she acted happily unaware of the changes puberty had brought. Not till she left Mouseworld did she go on to make all those beach films. (“Hi, I’m Annette, and these are my breasts,” cooed Gilda Radner in the SNL parody.)

As if to prove me and Miley right, for years after that, my post would still get visits from people who had Googled strings like “naughty pictures of 15-year olds.” I hadn’t intended the title as clickbait (did that term even exist in 2008?), but in checking back now, I see that the post has gotten three times more action than others from around then. Oh well, come for the porn, stay for the sociology.**

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* The headline writers room at most tabloids seems to be staffed exclusively by middle-school boys giggling over their double-entendres.

** Google, in a sop to the privacy concerns of its users, has mostly stopped providing bloggers with information about which search-strings brought people to their blog . . .  or at least, I can’t find it any more.

Will No One Rid Me of This Sociological Priest?

May 2, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Poor Rev. Conroy. It was the sociology that got him fired.

Since 2011 and up until two weeks ago, he had been the chaplain for the House of Representatives. Then House speaker Paul Ryan fired him.

By most accounts, what triggered Ryan was the prayer Rev. Conroy offered during deliberations on the tax bill.

As legislation on taxes continues to be debated this week and next, may all Members be mindful that the institutions and structures of our great Nation guarantee the opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle. May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.

Ryan believes in God. He does not believe in social structure, though in some ways they are similar. They are both very hard to see, visible mostly in their effects, so that non-believers can remain unaware of how they alter and influence the paths we take.

Institutions and structures are at the core of sociological thinking and research. If the gap between rich and poor is much greater in the US than in other wealthy countries, there must be something going on beyond mere individual choices. But Conservatives like Ryan don’t buy that idea. For them, whether a person succeeds or struggles is purely a matter of individual virtue. As Margaret Thatcher famously put it, “There's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”

The tax bill that Ryan was trying to pass would increase the wealth of the wealthy. Or as Donald Trump told his rich friends at Mar-a-Lago when the bill passed, “You all just got a lot richer.” Ryan also planned to use the inevitable deficits from the tax cuts to justify reductions in government aid to the poor and elderly.

It’s pretty obvious that the tax code and food stamps change the structure of economic distribution. But when Rev. Conroy spoke of structures and then went on to suggest that maybe the government should not further comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted, well, it got Ryan’s Irish up, and he gave the Jesuit the boot. Those fifty words of Rev. Conroy – the micro-est of microaggressions against conservatives – were apparently too much for Snowflake Ryan to bear.

I wonder if leftists have gotten anyone fired – from a university or anywhere else – for a ten-second sermon preaching the Thatcher gospel of purely individual causation.

Freestylin’

April 27, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

These poems
all very recent —
To me at least, I mean
I hear the influence
of, oh I don’t know,
Robert Creeley,
and perhaps
William Carlos Williams.
The style is infectious.

Little Boats

And all they do is scream ‘death to America, death to America.’
And by the way,
they’re not screaming it so much
anymore.
They were screaming it with him.¹
They don’t scream it with me. We haven’t seen
their little boats
circling our ships in the ocean lately,
because they know if they do circle the ships,
they’re not going to be there very longer.

 Businessman

Let me just tell you that Michael² is in business.
He's really a businessman
at fairly big businesses, I understand. And
I don’t know
his business,
but this doesn’t have to do with me. Michael
is a businessman. He’s got a business.
He also practices law.
I would say probably the big thing is
his business,
and they're looking at something having to do with
his business.
I have nothing to do with
his business.
I can tell you
he’s a good guy.

    I’ll Tell You What               

Well, I better not get into that,
because I may get in trouble.
Maybe I didn’t get her³
so much.
I’ll tell you what.
She has done
I got her a beautiful card. You know, I’m very busy
to be running out looking for presents, okay?
But I got her a beautiful card
and some beautiful flowers.
And she did a fantastic job with France.
I’ll tell you what,
the people of France are just
were spellbound by what happened with their great president,
who just left, Emmanuel,
and he is a wonderful guy
and with a wonderful wife.
they are both terrific people.
And, Brigitte
and we had a fantastic time.

1.  Barack Obama

2.  Michael Cohen

3.  Melania

Bob Dorough (1923 - 2018)

April 25, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Phil Woods was a top jazz man, but his best known solo was as the unnamed sax player on Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.” Bud Shank, another jazz reed man, did the anonymous flute solo on The Mamas and the Papas’s huge hit “California Dreamin.’” But the winner in the “widely heard but uncredited performances by jazz musicians” competition goes to Bob Dorough, who died Monday at age 94. He wrote and sang many of the numbers on Schoolhouse Rock – numbers like 8.

This performance is by jazz singer and pianist Blossom Dearie, but Dorough can be heard on other numbers like 3 and the bluesy 9 as well as “Conjunction Junction,” a title I couldn’t help borrowing for my skeptical post on Twersky and Kahneman’s “conjunction fallacy” (here).

His best-known song in the jazz world is “I’m Hip,” probably because of Dave Frishberg’s lyric, which includes the line, “When it was hip to hep I was hep.” Frishberg himself noted how hip the song was – nearly all the main notes in the melody are not in the underlying chord. (You can hear the songwriters performing it here.)

Another unusual but fine Dorough tune is “Nothing Like You,” with lyrics by Fran Landesman. Bassist Esperanza Spalding sings it here, and prefaces it by saying it’s “really fun and really hard.”

Vulture, as a sort of eulogy, has posted this list  of his best  “Schoolhouse Rock” songs, all more melodically conventional than his jazz tunes.

Earth Day — A Non-Environmental Recollection

April 22, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Today is Julian Koenig’s birthday. He would have been 97. It’s also Earth Day.

Earth Day / Birthday. The rhyme is not a coincidence.

Koenig was an ad-man. The word “creative” gets tossed around pretty loosely in the ad world, but Koenig truly was. When environmentalists were planning their first big national event in 1970, Koenig offered to help. Surely he could come up with something better than the name they already had – “Environmental Teach-in.” The day of the event just happened to be his birthday, and the rhyme was a natural.  As the national director recalls,

He offered a bunch of possible names — Earth Day, Ecology Day, Environment Day, E Day — but he made it quite clear that we would be idiots if we didn’t choose Earth Day.

It worked for them. It worked for him.
   
Our paths — Koenig’s and mine —crossed a few years later, in the early seventies. How that happened is a story I told in brief in this blog years ago (here).    

Then, in 2013, the American Sociological Association gave its Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues Award to Ira Glass and the staff of “This American Life.”  The awards ceremony was a panel discussion. Ira was there with three producers from the show. One of them was Sarah Koenig, Julian’s daughter. David Newman, one of the sociologists on the panel, said that what he liked best about the show was that he could use it to give his students the larger picture of social issues.

But Ira Glass, when it was his turn to speak, said that what the show thrived on was not issues but people. “Don’t pitch us a story about some issue; you have to have a character – a character who has an interesting story . . . and who comes across on tape.” (Not an exact quote, but that was the idea.)

After the panel ended and people were still milling about, I went up to Sarah Koenig, still sitting on the podium. “I have a character,” I said. “It’s an advertising guy I met when we worked together on this project in Florida. He had retired but he was just getting back into the business.” I looked at her to see if she was catching on. I couldn’t tell.

“We discovered that we both liked the track. But he really liked it. He’d buy the Racing Form every day, even days he didn’t go to the track.” I thought I detected a hint of interest in her expression.

“And he didn’t throw them out,” I continued.  “He had the back issues stacked up in the closets of his house.”

“I think I know this man,” she said smiling.

She said she’d ask her father if he’d remember me. She was sure he would. I was sure he wouldn’t. In any case, I never heard from her. But then, I never pitched any stories, and she got busy with other projects, like “Serial.”