One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

December 2, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sesame Street has a segment intended to teach kids to think in categories. The screen shows four objects, and the song goes:

One of these things is not like the others
One of these things just doesn’t belong
Can you tell me which one is not like the others
By the time I finish my song.

I thought of this song when I saw this item, chock full of boldface names, from Page Six (the gossip page) in the New York Post:

Lindsay Lohan . . .at the GQ Men of the Year dinner, . . . joining the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore, Jay-Z . . . and Magic Johnson - she “flipped out” upon seeing Jessica Biel . . . there with her assistant.

Why is Al Gore here among the entertainers and superstars?
Over a century ago, Wilfredo Pareto wrote about the “circulation of elites,” and a half-century ago C. Wright Mills, in The Power Elite wrote about the connections between people at the top in the worlds of Business, Military, and Government. Generals retire to work for military contractors; politicians become lobbyists for corporations; business biggies become politicians (Bloomberg, Corzine).

Now celebrities are in the loop, and can circulate from one realm to the other. Magic Johnson is a “motivational speaker” for businesses. And Al Gore, a man we might kindly call charismatically challenged, sits at the GQ table with Jay-Z.

Of course, Al Gore did make a movie, produced by Larry David’s wife. But mostly Gore is remembered for losing an election despite getting the most votes (representing infinities with non-presidencies).

But today, he’s in boldface with the stars on Page Six.

The War on Drugs

December 1, 2006Posted by Jay Livingston

“Whatever happened to the war on drugs?” a friend asked, “Did we win?”

We were having lunch at a Greek restaurant a few weeks ago, and she was being facetious. This is someone who knows a lot about crime, law-enforcement, and sociology. She also knows that drugs haven’t exactly disappeared from American society. Her point was that without any big decrease in actual drug use, the “war on drugs,” so important for so long, is now something we rarely hear about.

From the perspective of 2006, that war now looks more and more like part of a “moral panic,” a change in public consciousness when real events, like the crack boom of the late 1980s, evoke an apparently hysterical response. The moral panic and the officially declared war that went with it saddled the US with policies that seemed more designed to make us feel that we were taking a strong stand against evil than to reduce drug use. These policies were also very expensive and wasteful. After all, when you are conducting a morality-based war against Evil, you cannot compromise. You cannot drive out the devil with treatment; it takes harsh punishment, and damn the cost. At least that seemed to be the logic behind much of the legislation and enforcement. The war on drugs also fell most heavily on minorities, and it shrunk the usual protections that the Bill of Rights afforded to all citizens.

When 9/11 gave us a new enemy, a new source of Evil, the war on drugs just couldn’t compete. The moral troops of our collective consciousness had to be moved to a new front.

It’s not that actual drug enforcement has faded. Thanks to laws passed in those decades, we’re still locking up inordinate numbers of people. But the urgency, the moral panic, seems to have subsided.

I remembered this question — whatever happened to the war on drugs?— when I was watching “House” on TV this week. Besides the usual medical problems that come up each week, “House” now has a continuing plot thread that involves a drug-fighting cop who does everything in his power to convict drug-law violators. The interesting thing is that he’s the bad guy. His zeal is portrayed as harmful, and he himself has no redeeming qualities (at least not yet). Dr. House, the drug violator, and his fellow doctors who try to shield him are portrayed as virtuous victims of the cop’s doggedness. Would a major network have aired such a story in the 1980s or 90s?

Over a century ago, Durkheim maintained that a society needs a certain level of deviance. By reacting against deviance, we strengthen social solidarity. So when the level of deviance falls, we will either expand our definition of what’s deviant, or we will find a new threat that requires us to reinforce our moral boundaries.

It seems unlikely that the moral panic about drugs, only recently subsided, can be quickly revived. The war on terror — at least as it has been carried out in Iraq— now looms as a very costly mistake. If there are no new terrorist attacks, the US may need to find a new moral threat on the home front. My friend predicts that it will be gangs. (Keep tuned to your local media and politicians to see if she’s right.)

Calling All Sociologists

November 29, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston

Anthony Giddens is a prolific British sociologist (you might have come across him in your sociological theory course). On Sunday, the Guardian, a leftish British newspaper, published a “call to arms” by Giddens. (It’s interesting in itself that a major newspaper would publish a 1000-word piece about sociology. I wonder if any of the major US papers would do so.) Sociology is the challenger in this bout. The champion is “market fundamentalism,” which has worn the crown for the last quarter-century.

Giddens begins by calling out the troops.
All you sociologists out there! All you ex-students of sociology! All of you (if there are such people) who are simply interested in sociology and its future!

He sets up the challenge.
Why isn't sociology again right at the forefront of intellectual life and public debate? In universities, sociology used to be much more popular than psychology; today it is the other way around. [Giddens has some answers to his own question.]

And he predicts a victory.
The world is moving in a propitious way for a recovery of the sociological imagination. Market fundamentalism is disappearing from the scene.

The entire article (it's not that long) is worth a look. An economics blog has the article and much response from readers.

Durkheim at the Parade

November 22, 2006

Posted by Jay Livingston

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade will have a new “balloonicle” (described in press-releases as “a balloon and self-powered vehicle”) — the Energizer Bunny.

Durkheim, author of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, would love it. To understand why, look at this excerpt from a British observer, Jonathan Raban, who watched the parade twenty years ago from a window on Central Park West. The parade was . . .

. . the secular, American descendant of the European Catholic Easter procession in which all the icons and saints’ bones are removed from the churches and carried ceremonially around the town. The baseball hero, the gaseous, rubbery Mickey Mouse, the Mayflower pilgrims were the totems and treasure relics of a culture, as the New Orleans jazz and Sousa marches were its solemn music.

Had a serious-minded Martian been standing at the window, he would have learned a good deal by studying the parade’s idyllic version of American history. [guns, refugees, rebels]. . . The imaginative life of children was honored to a degree unknown on Mars— which was, perhaps, why matters of fact and matters of fiction were so confusingly jumbled up here, with Santa Claus and George Washington and Superman and Abraham Lincoln all stirred into the same pot.

He would be struck by the extraordinarily mythopoeic character of life in this strange country. People made myths and lived by them with an ease and fertility that would have been the envy of any tribe of Pacific islanders. Sometimes there were big myths that took possession of the whole society, sometimes little ones, casually manufactured, then trusted absolutely.

from Jonathan Raban, Hunting Mr. Heartbreak: a Discovery of America, 1998.

In my class, when we read about religion, Durkheim mostly, I have students write a paper about a secular ritual. One goal of the assignment is to get them to see that from a functional perspective, a ritual is a way to generate and distribute the energy for binding the members of a society together, and it doesn’t matter whether the ritual is officially secular or religious. In fact, if you're a complete stranger to the culture, you probably couldn’t tell the difference.

No student has ever chosen the Macy’s parade. I wonder why not. Raban, who is from England, not Mars, senses the religious aura of the parade with its many gods. Had there been a Macy’s in ancient Greece, the parade would no doubt have had balloon representations of Demeter (god of the harvest), Poseidon (god of the sea— or would he have a float?), Aphrodite (god of beauty), Hermes (god of silk scarves), and of course in the US, Hebe (goddess of youth). And all the rest. We’re not Athenians. Instead, we throng the streets for icons like Snoopy and Spiderman, Pikachu, Bullwinkle, and Spongebob, but the idea is the same. They are our totems, our gods.

I imagine Durkheim on Central Park West, watching the children and grown-ups that have come together here to look up to these huge embodiments of our cultural ideals. Durkheim feels a frisson, a shiver of recognition. He sees the newest addition coming along. The Energizer Bunny. What better way to symbolize the idea about the binding power of ritual social energy?

Durkheim smiles.