A blog by Jay Livingston -- what I've been thinking, reading, seeing, or doing. Although I am a member of the Montclair State University department of sociology, this blog has no official connection to Montclair State University. “Montclair State University does not endorse the views or opinions expressed therein. The content provided is that of the author and does not express the view of Montclair State University.”
Can We Talk?
Posted by Jay Livingston
The news today is that North Korea has agreed to sit down in talks about their nuclear bomb. North Korea leader Kim Jong-il (son of former leader Kim Il Sung) had previously demanded that the US talk with North Korea one-to-one, but US leader George W. Bush (son of former leader George Bush) had refused. Lil’ Bush refused direct talks and insisted that four other countries had to be there. Lil’ Kim eventually caved, probably because China was threatening to cut off his oil.
North Korea isn’t the only country we won’t talk to directly. Syria, Iran, maybe others. As with North Korea, if we’re going to communicate with them at all, we need other countries as intermediaries to relay the messages.
When I was a kid, I would sometimes have a dispute with one of my brothers, and we’d get so angry, we’d refuse to talk to each other. At the dinner table, I’d say something like, “Tell Skip that if he doesn’t give back my racer, I’m not going tell him where I hid his airplane.” My mother would dutifully turn to her right and repeat the message, as though my brother hadn’t been right there to hear it. Then she’d do the same with his answer. You see similar scenes in sitcoms and movies. Maybe it happened in your family too.
In real life, at least in my house, it never lasted long. Everyone would see how stupid it was, how impossible to sustain, and usually we’d wind up dissolving in laughter at how ridiculous we were.
I imagine our ambassador turning to the Chinese representative and saying, “You tell North Korea that we aren’t going to give it any food unless they stop making bombs.” China turns to North Korea, just as my mother turned to my brother, and repeats the same message. Then North Korea says to China, “Yeah, well you tell the US . . . .” and so on. That’s pretty much what these countries have been doing anyway, though without actually sitting down in the same room.
When people insist on this “I’m not talking to him” charade, we call it childish and silly. When nations do it, we call it foreign policy.
(Full disclosure: I think I may be borrowing — i.e., stealing— this observation from something I heard Philip Slater say many years ago.)
Halloween
I like to think of holiday celebrations as islands of community, where things are personal, created and controlled by the group of people involved. But Halloween (and perhaps other holidays) is becoming standardized, controlled by the costume industry. It has become McDonaldized.
Twenty years ago, sociologist Joel Best investigated all the reported incidents of “Halloween sadism” that he could find in the press, and he concluded that Halloween sadism is best seen as an urban legend. He’s updated his research and found nothing to change his original view. Yet parents still go out of their way to guard against unknown, sinister evildoers who would harm their kids. No doubt, many of these are the same parents who buy their kids a skateboard or put a swimming pool in the back yard.
Mendacity
Posted by Jay Livingston
The few Tennessee Williams plays I’ve seen all follow the same pattern: the principle characters, usually a family, are all hiding important facts about themselves; they have agreed not to see the obvious truths and to let one another live these lies. Then something happens — an outsider not in on the game arrives or some event blows someone’s cover — and the whole fabric starts to unravel. Pathetically or viciously, they begin to reveal one another’s secrets, and the characters must face what they had tried so long to avoid. Big Daddy’s cancer, Blanche’s promiscuous past, what really happened on that fateful day long ago, etc. The plays leave you wondering how these characters will go on with their shattered lives now that they no longer have the fictions— the lies and mendacity— which kept them afloat for so long.
The real-life play of the White House and Iraq seems to be following a similar dramatic arc. A majority of Americans have long since concluded that the war was a terrible mistake, a mistake based at best on faulty intelligence and at worst on outright mendacity. Now, the Administration itself can no longer maintain the false facade. Generals have been giving grim assessments, and these have made it into the news. Even the president admits that things are going badly, that we can no longer “stay the course,” and that some kind of change is required. If the Democrats win control of Congress, they will be in a position to investigate and reveal even further unpleasant truths that the Republicans have suppressed. The folks in Washington have begun to resemble the characters in a Tennessee Williams play.
The troubling difference is that when the play is over, you leave the theater, and you don’t really have to worry about what will become of these characters. They have no existence beyond the end of the last act. But while the voters may ring down the curtain on the characters who brought us this war, the disaster that they created in Iraq will remain.
Maybe Tennessee-Williams-style plot is typical of American culture, maybe not. But many observers have noted out characteristically American preference for not thinking so much about the past but rather looking optimistically to the future. We also tend to view the world as a story, and we don’t like difficult or unhappy endings.
Who's to Blame, Who's in Control, Who Is the Accused?
If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat. The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.There’s a history to the story. In 2000, several Muslim men were convicted for a series of gang rapes of white women. They received very harsh sentences. Whites were angered by the rapes; some Muslims, like Sheik Al Hilaly, were angered by the sentences:
She is the one who takes her clothes off, cuts them short, acts flirtatious, puts on makeup, shows off, and goes on the streets acting silly. She is the one wearing a short dress, lifting it up, lowering it down, then a look, then a smile, then a word, then a greeting, then a word, then a date, then a meeting, then a crime, then Long Bay Jail, then comes a merciless judge who gives you 65 years.The story reminded me of the 1983 gang rape in New Bedford, Massachusetts — the incident that became the basis for the 1988 film “The Accused,” with Jodie Foster as the victim— and not just because it raises the question of who is being accused. In New Bedford, as in Sydney, the rapists were from an ethnic minority. They were first-generation Portuguese. But the Portuguese are a fairly large ethnic minority in that area, and many turned out at organized marches in support of the rapists.
One woman was quoted in the paper as saying, “I am Portuguese and proud of it. I’m also a woman, but you don’t see me getting raped. If you throw a dog a bone, he’s gonna take it — if you walk around naked, men are just going to go for you.” Nearly identical to the Sheik’s cat analogy 23 years later. And a Catholic priest, foreshadowing today's Muslim priest, said, “The girl is to blame. She led them on.”
There’s much to be said about the element of ethnic relations—dominant culture and minority group— but it’s the “blame the victim” idea that interests me. To put the blame and responsibility on the women you have to assume that men just cannot control themselves. They act purely on the basis of instinct, like animals.
For people with less internalized controls, it must seem incredible that people can live in a world filled with so much sexual stimulation and opportunity and yet not take action. So they fight sexuality wherever in becomes publicly visible, as when John Ashcroft, US attorney general in the first years of the Bush administration, had a cloth draped over the exposed breast of a statue in the Justice Department. The slightest hint of sex might cause men to lose control.
But the conservatives, Muslim and Christian, are fighting a losing, rear-guard action. They are right that sexual mores are becoming more liberal. There’s more sex in the media, especially with the Internet. Clothes are more revealing than ever. (Two summers ago, the Times had an article on back-to-school shopping— mothers and their teenage daughters in the liberal New York suburbs. The fashions preferred by the girls ran towards what their mothers referred to as “hookerwear.”)
The change, as with so many other fashions, seems to have filtered downward through the social class system, starting near the top. Co-ed dormitories, for example, appeared first at elite schools in the early 1970s; now it’s hard to find a campus that doesn’t have them. And along with the liberalization, the reliance on internal controls seems to have followed the same paths of diffusion through the society. How else to explain the decline in rape over the last fifteen years?
In the short run, the sexual conservatives may win a few rounds, passing a law here or there. But younger people do not share their attitudes, and over time, the rigid external sexual controls will become sort like Buicks, heavy and bulky mechanisms possessed by fewer and fewer people all getting grayer and grayer.
Starbucks as the Habermasian Public Sphere?
Posted by: Yasemin Besen
This weekend New York Times had an interesting article on the new marketing of Starbucks coffee chains as coffeehouses. The stores are marketed not as uniform, standardized assembly lines of coffee, but as local and community based cultural spaces, where books, movies and music are discussed. Recently, they have sponsored the “Salon events”, where community based, not so mainstream authors, musicians and artists read their books, sang and talked while sipping coffee (I can’t deny enjoying Jonathan Lethem’s book reading). This new positioning of Starbucks as a local, cultural space, where intellectual rational conversation takes place reminds me of Habermas.
A student of Frankfurt school and a critique of capitalism and its discontents, Jurgen Habermas, he developed the concept of public sphere in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), where he explores the role of individuals in the practice of democracy and social change. He defines public sphere as "made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state." People conglomerating in pockets of society, through dialogue and discussion, have the power through discussion, to critique, mainly the discontents of capitalism and voice their opinion. This rational, critical discourse is the very essence of democracy. Public sphere, in the Habermasian sense, started to emerge in the 18th century with voluntary associations, literary groups and organization and most importantly coffeehouses.
Now we see a very different form of the coffeehouse: a national chain of “coffeehouses” that market the public sphere as a consumption item to be enjoyed with a tall, skim, no foam latte. I wonder if Habermas could predict the public sphere of cool discussion would itself be commodified, packaged and sold along with the music, books and the coffee that makes the public sphere possible.
My Ethnocentrism
October 22, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston
What you’re reading on your screen right now probably got there via a broadband connection. Nobody uses phone modems anymore; everybody’s got DSL or cable broadband, right? And the US is way ahead of other countries on this score, right?
Wrong. A former chair of the FCC, William Kennard, noted in a Times op-ed piece yesterday, “Since 2000, the United States has slipped from second to 19th in the world in broadband penetration, with Slovenia threatening to push us into 20th.”
I must admit that I was surprised . . . not this time, since I'd heard this before. But I was surprised when I first read about this a few months ago, when the US had just fallen out of the top ten. I had just assumed that the US had more technology than any other country.
I guess the lesson here is that even social scientists can fall prey to ethnocentrism — the “we’re number one” mentality. (When Bush, in one of the 2004 Presidential debates, said, “America’s health care system is the envy of the world,” nobody challenged him on it.) Or was I falling victim to the sampling error of personal experience. After all, I have high-speed access —at home, at work, at Starbuck’s— and so does everybody I know.
Or maybe my assumption was that Capitalism, the Market, the Invisible Hand, would work best; companies smelling profits would all be intent on bringing the latest technology to as many people as possible.
So why has the US fallen so far down on the list from its earlier high rank? Kennard gives us a pretty good clue: “Studies by the federal government conclude that our rural and low-income areas trail urban and high-income areas in the rate of broadband use. Indeed, this year the Government Accountability Office found that 42 percent of households have either no computer or a computer with no Internet connection.”
Most of the countries that have higher percentages of their populations with broadband are more urbanized than is the US. Iceland, probably not the country that pops into your mind when you think of high-tech and the Internet, ranks third. But it’s over 90% urban. Sweden, Belgium, the UK, and others — all are more urbanized than the US. And broadband providers can reach more people when those people live closer together in cities and not on farms.
But income also matters. Canada’s percent urban is the same as that of the US, but it’s in the top ten on broadband. The same is true for Norway and Japan. But in these countries, the people at the lower ends of the income distribution are not as far away from middle and upper incomes as are the poor in the US. On income inequality, we're number one.
Maybe I was only half right about US capitalism (and capitalism generally). Yes, it’s a very good system for producing more and better stuff. But when it comes to distributing that stuff, the invisible hand deals the good cards to the players with the large chip stacks and is content to ignore others.
Narrowband is all right for text, but that's not where the Internet is going. For things like music and video — roadhogs of the information highway — you need broadband. So when you’re creating that video to upload to YouTube, you might think about adding a soundtrack in Slovenian.
Asking About Housework
The New York Walk
Posted by Jay Livingston
The New York Walk last Saturday. Here we are, some of us, after lunch, sitting on a bench in Tomkins Square Park in the East Village.
(Left to right: Yasemin, George, Tracy, Marisella, Nila, Laura, Jay)
Some of the people on that bench have been doing this walk for thirty years; others were first-timers. That difference became a theme running through my mind for much of the afternoon, for I realized that a lot of the time, even when our eyes were focused on the same sights, we weren’t really seeing the same thing.
My first inkling of this came soon after we left Port Authority. Our first stop was a flea market on a closed-to-traffic block of 39th St. One of the booths was selling old magazines, and two of our younger walkers and I were leafing through them looking at ads and photos from the 1950s and 60s. For the twenty-year-olds, this was history. Even though these girls pointed out the style elements that had come back into fashion, they might as well have been looking at pictures of Marie Antoinette. But for me it was memory, not history. I knew those clothes, those news stories, those celebrities. They were part of my biography. C. Wright Mills says that sociology is about the intersection of history and biography, and here it all was on W. 39th St.
The same was true of New York geography. If you see Times Square for the first time, it’s very impressive— the buildings, the lights, the tourists. But I wasn’t seeing just those things. I was also remembering what it used to look like ten or twenty or thirty years ago. I wished that I could have shown these kids pictures so that they too could understand the transformation and think about how it had happened.
Sometimes the historical juxtapositions are there for all to see. The New York Public Library at 42nd and Fifth, one hundred years old—broad steps and stone lions outside, and inside the feeling of something vast and solid. You can’t help feeling that you’ve walked into another century. In the reading room upstairs (what library today would have such high ceilings on an upper floor?), on the long, oak tables, you don’t see many books, just flat-screen computer monitors.
Grand Central, too, is nearly a hundred years old. The main room looks and feels largely unchanged, but downstairs, the old walls house a food court with several interesting fast-food restaurants.
(Officially it’s called the “dining concourse” so as to distinguish it from the food court at a suburban mall.) The most fascinating thing for sociology walkers seemed to be the “whispering gallery.”
From Grand Central, we took a very crowded subway down to Astor Square. Tower Records nearby is going out of business. The name says it all: they are a victim of technological change. The change from records (LPs) to CDs was minor; you still have to buy some physical object in a store. But with CDs giving way to MP3 downloads online, it's game over.
The East Village is a study in urban transformation. Here are Laura and Nila at Pommes Frites, a hole-in-the-wall on Second Ave at 8th St. that sells nothing but French fries. Lots of them. As much as 1000 pounds a day.
It’s Nila’s first time here, but Laura grew up just a couple of blocks away long before gentrification came to the East Village. Back in the day, Pommes Frites would have been unthinkable here. And the trendy and pricey restaurants you see now at every corner down here — fuggedaboudit.
Death, Statistics, and Politics
October 13, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston
It’s hard to wrap your mind around large numbers, especially when they refer to things you’re not familiar with. I remember when my son was learning about dinosaurs in kindergarten (when did dinosaurs became such an important part of the early curriculum anyway, and why?). I couldn’t really grasp the difference between “165 million years ago” and “65 million years ago,” even though a difference of 100 million years is a long time and even though it made quite a difference for the dinosaurs— a difference between being dominant and being extinct.
A couple of days ago, the British journal The Lancet published a study estimating that 600,00 Iraqis had died from violence since the U.S. invasion three and a half years ago. That works out to 470 deaths a day, every day. The confidence interval was broad, so the low-end estimate was “only” 420,000, a number which still sounds incredibly large. (That confidence interval also means that the upper-limit of 790,000 was as likely as the low-end figure.)
Obviously there are political implications in the Iraqi death rate. Arguments in favor of the war would seem a bit weaker if the blessings of liberty which the US invasion brought to Iraq also included far more violent death than Iraqis suffered under Saddam. Here’s President Bush at a press conference the same day. QUESTION: A group of American and Iraqi health officials today released a report saying that 655,000 Iraqis have died since the Iraq war. That figure is 20 times the figure that you cited in December at 30,000. Do you care to amend or update your figure? And do you consider this a credible report?
BUSH: “No, I don’t consider it a credible report. Neither does General Casey and neither do Iraqi officials. . . .But this report is one -- they put it out before. It was pretty well -- the methodology is pretty well discredited.
QUESTION: So the figure's 30,000, Mr. President? Do you stand by your figure, 30,000?
BUSH: I, you know, I stand by the figure a lot of innocent people have lost their life.
Bush is, of course, wrong. The methodology (“cluster sampling”) has not been discredited. Even so, many people find it hard to imagine the 470-a-day figure. Yes, the news carries reports of violent death every day, but the numbers are smaller. Today’s news reports eleven killed at a satellite TV station. Sometimes the numbers are as high as 50. But 470 every day —is that plausible?
Yes. The news rarely reports on the killings outside of Baghdad, and it rarely reports on isolated killings of smaller numbers of people. Baghdad (about violent 100 deaths a day) is the largest city, and it holds 10% of the Iraqi population. But there are many, many other cities; some of them even make the news reports occasionally — Fallujah, Baquba, Ramadi. Blogger Juan Cole notes that the authorities in Basra admitted last may that people there were being assassinated at the rate of one an hour, 24 a day. And none of those deaths was reported in the US news (or any other Western press).
You can’t use news stories to arrive at statistical estimates. That’s why you need science-based techniques like cluster sampling. The results may at first seem hard to imagine —science always has a hard time when it comes up against “common sense”— but it’s also hard to imagine such a thing as “165 million years ago.” Which may be part of the reason that most Americans don't believe in evolution either.
AK-47s -- "Not uncommon"
October 9, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston
Another school shooting, this one in Joplin, Missouri. The shooter was a thirteen-year-old Columbine wannabe. Fortunately, the gun jammed after the first shot, which was fired at the ceiling, so the only damage was a burst water pipe.
Living in the Northeast, I sometimes forget what the rest of the country is like. What really struck me was not that it was another school shooting— like most other good Americans, I’ve gotten used to these. It was these sentences from the AP story The student left, and officers arrested him behind a nearby building. Police described his weapon as a Mac-90, a replica of an AK-47 assault rifle. . . . .
Not uncommon! Lots of folks have them. I wonder what they use these military assault rifles for.
Jones said the gun belonged to the boy's parents. Farmer said it is not uncommon for people in the area to own assault weapons.
It’s also interesting that these latest school shootings have not brought any calls for stricter gun laws. Polls consistently show a majority of Americans in favor of stricter gun controls. But gun laws, especially in the last 15-20 years, have basically been written by the NRA, even though these policies reflect a minority view. Most of the country has come to accept these laws as inevitable and therefore not worth talking about. In the latest spate of shootings, very few, if any, of the news reports on these shootings asked the NRA to defend its position. It’s as though the issue, for better or worse, has been settled and that the availability of very deadly weapons is sort of like the weather, a condition nobody can do anything about.
The CBS news website has a nice interactive map — click on a state and see a brief description of its rules on gun licences, sales, etc., and its rate of firearms deaths. New York and New Jersey have about 5 gun deaths for every 100,000 residents. States in the West and South, with more guns and fewer gun laws, have gun death rates double or in some cases triple that.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/04/17/eveningnews/main185126.shtml
Small Town Life
It was no "art": I found Friday Night Lights pretty formulaic. However, what I liked about the show was the depiction of small town life. The show takes place in a small Texas town, where high school football is the main activity: not professional, not college: high school football.
Football is a central activity that creates social cohesion in a small community. It's also the source of pride and town identity in a deprived town. Football is the way to relate to others in town, but it's also the way out of it. In small towns, where economic opportunities are limited, the only way for social mobility is through football. While not many benefit from it, it's the ideal that keeps many from questioning the existing economic structure. Focusing on themes like social cohesion, inequality, small town life, rather than following a formula, would have made it much more interesting.
Friday Night Lite
My own list includes movies about everything from airplane dogfights to chess. Some are classics (“The Hustler,” which ends in a pool match, or “On the Waterfront,” which ends in a fistfight between a worker and a union boss), and many are best forgotten (“The Cincinnati Kid,” which ends in a poker game, or “The Karate Kid” and many, many, others).
The Magic of Plagiarism; the Plagiarism of Magic
Posted by Jay Livingston
Jules Fisher, the Tony Award-winning lighting designer, who is also an amateur magician . . . .sent an e-mail message to Mr. Walton saying the presentation of the Knight's Tour “so closely approaches its inspiration as to border on plagiarism.”This was of some interest to me because many years ago, I was hanging around with magicians, thinking that there might be something interesting and sociological there. In survey research, you start with an idea, then you get data to support it. But I was doing ethnographic research, where you often begin with the “data,” usually a group of people in some setting, not sure exactly what you’re looking for but with the sense that, as I once heard William H. Whyte say, “If I look at something long enough, eventually I’ll see something nobody else has seen.”
“Does performing an existing effect, or variation thereof, confer upon the performer of it ownership of that effect, or the exclusive and perpetual right to all subsequent interpretations of it?” Mr. Walton asked in his message. “On this point you and I are obviously in disagreement.”
Hug a Thug
Posted by Jay Livingston
September 28, 2006
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an article on a strategy used successfully against drug dealers in High Point, North Carolina and presumably elsewhere. Much of the strategy was familiar — undercover buys, videotapes, informants. The new twist was that the police did all they could to keep the dealers from going to prison.
The police sent out word to dealers who had more or less taken over one particular area turning it into a drug market: come to a meeting. The police got to know dealer’s mothers, grandmothers, and others who might be influential and asked them to pressure the dealers to come. A dozen were invited, with a promise of no arrests that night; nine showed up. In room one, clergy and community leaders talked to the dealers about all the harm they were doing the community. The dealers seemed bored. Then they moved to room two, where law enforcement people showed them all the evidence they had right up to arrest warrants filled out completely save for a judge’s signature.
The West End street drug market closed "overnight" and hasn't reopened in more than two years, says Chief Fealy, who was "shocked" at the success. High Point police say they have since shut down the city's two other major street drug markets, using the same strategy.
Not prosecuting people and not housing them in prison for years and years is obviously a lot cheaper than doing so. Yet something about the strategy, despite its success and savings, doesn’t quite sit right with some people. “Hug-a-thug,” some called it, and an Indiana prosecutor quoted in the article said, “Why not slam 'em from the beginning and forget this foolishness?”
The trouble with the program is that it doesn’t perform the symbolic function of clearly marking moral boundaries, and for some reason, that function is very important to a lot of Americans. Our typical way of thinking about a problem is to label it as evil and then declare war on it. The war on drugs is a good example. If you are fighting a war on some absolute evil, you can’t compromise, and you have to be punitive, even if your strategy, at least in terms or rational goal-attainment, is costly and ineffective. At least it makes you feel morally righteous. The moralistic orientation also explains why the war on drugs was (and continues to be) big on enforcement and light on treatment, despite much research showing that treatment is far more cost-effective. If someone is a “thug,” he should be punished, not hugged. To do otherwise would threaten our own moral purity.
Framing a policy as a war against evil does one more important thing. It justifies any means. If what you are fighting is an absolute evil, then it’s all right to violate the usual rules. As many others have pointed out, judges have been very willing to allow police and prosecutors in drug cases to do things that in previous criminal cases would have been unconstitutional if not unthinkable. I recall an article called “This Is Your Bill of Rights on Drugs” detailing some of these judicially approved violations of constitutional rights. (Obviously the war in Iraq and the War on Terror fall into the war-on-evil category.)
Over fifty years ago, sociologist Robin Williams listed a “moralistic” orientation as one of the characteristics of American culture. Basing policy on principles of moral purity may make us feel righteous, but we may be doing so at the cost of actually getting something done. But cultures are not monolithic, and in addition to our American moralism, we also have long history of pragmatism, which in the some cases may be our salvation. At least it saved the West End of High Point, NC.
Covers and Culture
September 27, 2006
Newsweek’s website shows the covers for their international editions. One of these things is not like the others. Can you tell me which one is not like the others? And why?
Is this just a “one-off” (as the British say), a unique occurrence? OK, here are the covers from the previous week (thanks to sociologist-blogger Kieran Healy).
Does Newsweek’s choice tell us something about American culture — that we prefer “lifestyle stories” to real news, especially when the news is bad? Annie Liebowitz, a very successful photographer who does portraits of the famous, here with her children; but spare us “losing Afghanistan.” Successful women— young, pretty, and smiling— but not China or Russia.
I’m reminded of a line from “The House of Sand and Fog.” Ben Kingsley as Behrani, an Iranian immigrant, a man who has worked hard and lived according to principle to achieve some moderate success, speaks to his son: “Americans, they do not deserve what they have. They have the eyes of small children who are forever looking for the next source of distraction, entertainment, sweet taste in the mouth.”
Small Worlds
Six degrees of separation. Stanley Milgram (yes, he of the obedience experiments) didn’t coin the phrase, but he may have been the one to come up with the concept. The “small-world” hypothesis, he called it.
I was reminded of it twice yesterday.