Sociology versus Aesthetics, or, the Fallacy of Consensus

In all of my blog posts over the years my sole concern has been aesthetics, especially as distinct from sociology. I should also add that when I use the word aesthetic I contend for it to include what ordinarily  is considered "spiritual". Humans make works of art but they do not do so as they please and they do not simply get hit with so many objects that fall from the sky ready made. Such objects have to be built and it is often the most arduous job in the world. It is possible for humans to create essentially artificial objects set apart from what we ordinarily call the real world itself. The very fact that such an object is set apart - bracketed from reality - means that we should never treat it as the same as we would our daily life. A painting of the family next door is still never identical to the family next door. Neither is a photograph. For one thing it is an inanimate object. For another, the very act of making an object for the purposes of reflection should tell us that we are meant to reflect and not directly act.

The trouble of course is that art objects emerge from scenes comprised of a particular sociology. Though the sociology is essential to their creation it is always the least important part of that creation. To think otherwise is to commit to the fallacy of consensus. The assumption is that there is a single or singular reality to which a work must conform or pay allegiance. This is one of the ways we are in the grip of  the myth of consensus (actually fallacy is the better term since there is some deepest truth in all myth - along, of course, with some falsehood).

Consensus says that we have to somehow come together on a set of issues and if we fail to come together then we are doomed to some kind of tragic societal or existential death. One can be forgiven for buying into this fallacy in the case of climate change where how we act, or not act, in the world might involve that kind of destruction.

But it is sheer madness to have this desire for consensus in all  or even many areas of life. Humans are not chiefly consensual creatures for we happen to come in the form of singular embodied individuals.  We do cooperate in the interest of survival, but our cooperative impulses are (thankfully!) thwarted at every turn by the force of individual personalities, the presence of which is regretted by mystics suspicious of the human ego, but the absence of which would mean a dehumanization that would spell a death in life, even if sold as some kind of transcendence. In speaking against cooperation in this way I don't mean to sound terrible. And I realize the force of some individual personalities can be a force for evil. But I am saying we should at least honor that fact that we have individual personalities and are not as of yet simply carbon copies of one another.  Our choices are not between cooperation and competition. Our choices are between choosing a life in which our individuality is honored (which doesn't have to require competition) or a life in which only our identify as part of some larger group is what is honored.

Consensus is very bad for the arts. Every time a consensus has been enforced in the history of art, aside from the fact that the majority of the work in a single period has a sameness about it when viewed by future audiences, the result has been that superior work that doesn't exactly match the consensual style always gets ignored, if it is not destroyed outright. If it does survive, the formerly rejected work, upon reexamination many years later, now always seems to be reassigned the highest value. Upon such reconsideration people wonder aloud with an apparently sincere tone of regret how they could have been so wrong in the first place. The reason this happens is that in the sociological milieu of the work's original debut all anybody cared about was the work's correspondence to the consensus of the time. They did not care about more eternal values like curiosity, pleasure, or emotional and intellectual interest. The need for consensus will cause people to pan work that should have been praised and vice versa.  (The same phenomenon can also cause work to be praised merely because it is in the dominant style of a period, when, upon disinterested examination, the work can be found to be not particularly valuable).

This is the only explanation for why Friedkin's masterpiece Cruising, to name but one of a great many examples - Ishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtar_(film)htar is another, as is Zabriskie Point - could have suffered it's original fate.

What happened in the reception of Cruising is that the consensus that held sway was whatever the male gay community at the time felt about that particular movie, and they imposed this consensus not only on their own viewing of the picture, (if they bothered to view it), but ultimately on how the rest of the world had to view it. Worst of all, they attempted to disrupt the film production itself by protesting the shoot and creating loud noises intending to destroy takes, in hopes that it would never have the opportunity to become a final film. Before a proper evaluation was even possible the very idea of the thing was an affront to their consensus; proof or evidence was quite beside the point. Thus, a highly intelligent investigation into the nature of sex and violence and, yes, gender in the narrative, cinematic form of a police procedural was mistakenly viewed as some kind of homophobic, horror/slasher picture.


This can happen in any art medium. In my own field of music a good example of an oppressive consensus was the wholesale rejection of certain kinds of tonal harmony in composition. For music to be considered relevant and therefore good, it had to use non-tonal elements or at the very least elements sufficiently dissonant so that they defied any associations with tonal implications. The plethora of bad serial or row music was but one result of that consensus. Bust as you can see here in this moment from a Leonard Bernstein lecture, not all of the leading figures in an artistic "scene" will be certain to agree as Bernstein here makes a case for a a certain tonal sense. 


In a very real sense when it comes to how we evaluate any new work, we have all become like the detractors of Cruising when it originally came out. We are always vigilant and mindful of the threat that an artwork might challenge a consensus. We praise works that flatter the consensus in our heads and condemn works that inconvenience it, or even contradict it. What this means is, among other things, however exciting and relevant a work of art may be for us for today, it might lose such excitement and relevance for people in a certain future. This is a far greater sense of discontinuity than for a thing to be merely "dated." The reason for this is that we interpret aesthetic objects - that which is intended for aesthetic meaning and purposes - in moral/sociological ways. But to do this is to abandon the aesthetic sense altogether, an abandonment we will be the poorer for, whether we are consciously aware of this loss or not.

Thank YOU L.D. Burnett and S-USIH

This is photo of historian Norbert Elias.

My previous post was a profile of historian Bruce Schulman. It seems that history has been on my mind a lot lately. At another stage of my life, some twenty years ago, I was politically active. While I might have been as contrarian then as I am today I was not moderate by any measure of that word.

In the past fifteen years I have become politically inactive, almost quietist and contemplative, and in ways that it would be most inconvenient to describe in this post. Yet my intellectual interests have not only remained as strong as in the past but have only grown stronger which could be connected to my contemplative turn. (Ironically the world around me has become the most activistic in decades, with high profile, hot button issues all over the map; I am constantly reminded of my youth). It is not only my politics that have changed, but my priorities more generally.

What hasn't changed is my discomfort with technicalities. I am about the least technophile a person you could come across and still find on the internet. But one must live in one's world and so here we are and here I am.

One of the best sites I have come across on the net is S USIH. I suppose the point of view on the site would be described as Left/Liberal, I guess reflecting the political orientation of many historians. But what really interests me about the site is the high level of discourse. It seems so rare to find such discourse. It is both a joy and a challenge to read this blog. Joyous in that the highest level of engagement with humanity's course is exhibited on this blog. But also challenging in that I am reminded often of what I have left behind, where my current viewpoints might differ from those I held in the past, and challenging, above all, by how much more there is for me to learn. I suspect I will only be done when my mind dies, to say nothing about possible future lifetimes.

When I found out that one of its members, one L. D. Burnett, was a good writer and was working on an important PhD thesis I just knew that I had to give her some archival materials from the days of my political activities. I sense in Burnett's work something really special and brilliant. I saw a kinship between elements in her familial background and mine. In my particular case, my grandparents on my father's side were rural people, originally from Kentucky before they finally settled in Indiana. Some of them did foundry work. My father used to tell stories of Woody Guthrie coming over to the house to play labor songs during a particular strike in Kentucky.

Also like Burnett I have a deep love for literature and the English language, though unlike her I chose to go get a music degree rather than an English degree. And so I decided to send her some material that definitely connects to such issues, some of which she exhibits on her blog.

She then thanked me in a lovely post where you can see some copies of the material I sent her. The title of her  highly recommended blog is Saved By History and I like to think that it is meant sincerely: that somebody being saved by something like history is not unlike being saved by music or literature and I can relate.

Historian Bruce Schulman and the 1970s

Everybody who knows me and this peculiar blog knows that among my many aesthetic passions, alongside music and the many arts, can be found the decade of the 1970s.

When it comes to the 1970s, there was one person who was the first to take it seriously, to rescue the decade's boomer centric relegation to middle child status - or worse - the person who wrote the book on the seventies, indeed called it The Seventies: Bruce Schulman. Since then 1970s historiography has certainly expanded, even exploded. Not only is there a new book by Thomas Borstelmann, which blatantly recapitulates many of Schulman's original ideas, but in a turgid and humorless prose style, but there is also Jefferson Cowie's much better Staying Alive, and a few others. My own personal favorite after Schulman's is Thomas Hine's The Great Funk. Hine's book is unique in that it tries to make sense of the aesthetic exceptionalism of that decade - its flouting of decades old restraints in design and manners. Since Schulman's book  perhaps there have been many others too numerous to name. I've read practically all of them.

But Schulman was there first. This makes Schulman an original, an innovator in history, in my book. Time and again I see his original insight -s about the "Southernization" of American politics and culture or the shift to a local, self-help kind of culture after the loss of trust in or even existence of larger institutions and universalistic aims pop up all over the place. Daniel Rodgers took a rather theory oriented, more academic approach in his Age Of Fracture. Rodgers book is certainly deep intellectual history and it is mightily impressive and learned - indeed it was one of the most important non-fiction books of the past few years, but it is a different kind of book in its intention than Shculman's. Schulman's book is actually the kind of book that serves as the best popular history, not unlike some of Arthur Schlesinger's books from the fifties and sixties, say, or a Howard Zinn or Jill Lepore (whose new book on the history of Wonder Woman is a must read if I may add a plug) This makes Bruce Schulman, though not a household name, a public intellectual of sorts. He writes the kind of clear and entertaining prose that too many historians shy away from out of a mistaken belief that it is less valid or serious. Here he is giving his take on the meaning of Martin Luther King's famous speech.

In this all too brief sample of Schulman discussing the meaning of Martin Luther King, we see that Schulman's work on the 1970s is marked by a moral seriousness. When he talks about popular culture as he does at length in The Seventies, it always for some very good reasons, and not as an honorific to the popular status of the works he reviews.

Back in 2003 when I discovered his book I did a lengthy interview with him. It was interesting to revisit that article, a scanned excerpt of which is found below.

This is the only copy that exists of that. For a good twenty-five years I was a staff writer for a really decent periodical called Organica which is now sadly defunct. They gave me a lot of freedom, and used that freedom to spread the word about Schulman's new and exciting thesis about the centrality of the 1970s to subsequent decades. This is the shift to a "symbolic politics" and an increase in a decentralized ethic, and an abandonment of larger civic purpose and larger institutions.

Of course there is the "lighter" side of the decade, if that is the word for it.

Here is an excerpt from that page, if you cannot make it out from the picture.
"It seems ludicrous to us today but if you look at Gentleman's Quarterly or Esquire, all of top highest end designers were proud of the polyester. They wold say '100% Quiana. It was the chief selling point in ads, not just for the leisure suits. but especially for their most conservative and refined business suits."

If there is anything that perfectly illustrates this feature of the decade it is this ad I came across most recently. Now if there is any fabric that epitomizes the virtues of natural fibers it is tweed, specifically wool, yet here is Johnny Carson modeling his line of tweed and proud as a peacock of the fact that it is a synthetic tweed.

Of course after the obligatory design elements are scrutinized the decade resonate even today in all sorts of ways. Schulman teaches at Boston University and we had the opportunity to have a reunion of sorts at the close of 2014. The foremost matter on my mind was how his students have changed over the years.

"One of the new things is that what you used to be able to rely on (students knowing) you can no longer rely on. They can be very smart and sharp and analyze texts well but you can't assume knowledge."

"Sometimes I will show something with absolutely no introduction and no identifying information. For example the famous Stanley Forman busing photo from 1976. And the results are interesting."

To this day Schulman's text continues to regularly sell 1,500 to 2000 copies which is encouraging. One thing of which I am proud was giving Schulman the idea of using the overlooked, underrated comedy How To Beat The High Cost Of Living as an example of the economic situation of the 1970s in popular culture.


Another new insight I learned from Schulman is one concerning sensibility, a matter that should definitely interest the fine folks over at the Society For U. S. Intellectual History http://s-usih.org/.
 This concerns the emotional manic-depressive character of the 1970s. Too many films that are set in the those times are only manic and miss the depressive aspect. I think for Schulman Boogie Nights and The Ice Storm were exemplary in this regard and last year's hit, American Hustle only hit the manic mark. Manic depression is an interesting way of looking at a sensibility, not as a scientifically proven diagnosis but as a metaphor.

These days Schulman's research has him going back to even earlier periods of historical time the years from 1896 to 1929, his contribution to the Oxford History Of The United States. Schulman expresses great curiosity and even a sense of awe at what he is learning, things he did not already know.

That is the best thing about the life of the mind. It is a joy that it is never boring and never done, and there is always more to learn.

Above all I have Bruce Schulman to thank for introducing me to Richard Hofstadter way back in 2003. He was kind enough to lend me Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. That too is a book that never seems to be out of date.

My only regret is that the film Selma had been released when we had our early fall reunion, if only so I could get Bruce Schulman, an L.B.J. scholar and author of an important text on Johnson, to respond to that newsworthy current release.

Next time.

The Place of the Contrarian

It is not always a bad idea to be against things. A certain critical spirit, a skeptical spirit is needed in every time, especially in a time of social pressure to conform. (Though my use of "skeptic" is not to be confused with the way the so-called New Atheists and some humanists use the word Skeptic-as a kind of code for the privileging of their form of natural scientific inquiry over other kinds of inquiry). Since this blog continues to be titled "the moderate contrarian" I had thought it timely, considering my absence here of about three months, to revisit and rethink what it means to be in opposition or against something.

There are (relatively) few things in life that admit of requisite assent and conformity. That Hitler is evil and Shakespeare is good are verdicts with which only the ethically insane or aesthetically blind would wish or dare to argue against. Then there are scientific facts and laws which have an approximate correspondence with physical reality is something that anybody in air travel with a modicum of faith should be expected to hold, even if not entirely understand (as the pilot does).

In truth, such matters of universal consensus are far fewer than we would like or expect. One does not wish to oppose as a game or philosophic tic. This is not what is meant by contrarian. Being contrarian is not a spirit of wanting to lord it over one's fellows or to be in opposition for the psychological thrill of it. Rather, being contrarian has something to do with the fact that most matters of great and small importance are unsettled, inspire intractable and continual argument and the majority of people in any given time or place, once they reach a consensus. are usually wrong about the matters in question.

Being contrarian also has something to do with liberty and independence. It is simply part of being a human being of integrity. The highest figure in  modern history for speaking of the spirit I have in mind is, of course, Immanuel Kant, especially in his What Is Enlightenment.

He could not have put it more plainly. Dare to use your own reason (understanding). This has consequences that do not sit well in our current epoch. In our current epoch there is a love and preference for group identitiy. Community and neighborhood are seen as superior virtues or at least catchy buzzwords. Conversely, the individual is usually seen as vice: a sign of egotism or selfishness. This is a mere fashion, perhaps born of an overpopulated world where each individual is force to count for so little, or where humans are inculcated early on, vis a vis the complex ties of family obligation and loyalty, into the preference for the group.

But it is a fashion nevertheless and it is a fashion against which we should be armed. Though I use the word fashion it is a remnant of the very oldest human societies - traditional societies that are much more collective in spirit. Nevertheless I use the word fashion because our longing for some kind of return to such a state of affairs, an uncritical return, is a fashion masked as the normative. It is even more problematic and confusing that when the individual makes its appearance on the current stage it is in pathological and indeed sinister forms: the Ayn Rand cult of capitalist domination, to name but one example. When I praise the individual as golden I am thinking not of these deformed and quite contemporary examples. It is important to recognize that contemporary Libertarians, however much lip service they pay to individual liberty end up, however inadvertently, creating a bondage and slavish devotion to "great men and women" to heroic business entrepreneurs, for example, even to the point where society as a whole is forced to give over huge amounts of wealth and attention to such exalted figures, even if the result means poverty for a great many people.

 When I speak of the individual I mean the conscience and inner life of an individual, which is priceless and sacred: the individual as understood by the the Enlightenment Philosophers, by the early political theorists of Democracy and literary artists of Democracy such as Whitman and Emerson, and by the great Romantic thinkers such as Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche and by an attitude exhibited in Kant's great essay.

When Kant enjoins us to use our own reason who is the person in question? What can and does he mean? It is the individual human being. He is speaking to a single reader of his essay; he is not speaking, as would Marx a century later, to a group identity to be mobilized in the name of some progressivist cause. It is not the nation, or tribe/blood, or precious identity. It is not even one's own family, and, most controversially for traditional religionists, it is not even one's own experience with the the commandments of a personal God. The process of interiority for Kant must be so independent as to  ignore even that obligation to the highest authority, if that highest authority is in violation of moral law or aesthetic preference, if such authority  doesn't feel right or violates one's sense of autonomy in reasoning. If the vibes are bad. Daring to use your own reason is quite simply living out the fullest potential of being a self, in its independence. The independence to make up one's own mind. Yes, we live embedded in society and we come in a context, but Kant urges to be as free as is possible from such influences.

The question of how to honor both self and community is far from settled and George Kateb stands practically alone among contemporary philosophers is critiquing group conceptions.

An important caveat about freedom: freedom is really only one good among many. It is never the sole nor even primary good. Liberty must be tempered by many other social matters, especially safety; safety being a value that is under theorized and ill considered outside of criminological circles. Yes freedom is a necessity and a precondition but far from sufficient. Much of the evil in the world has been committed because someone had the freedom or was enabled to have the freedom to commit the evil. This is why, protestations of certain anti-government Anarchists notwithstanding, we need things like courts and police forces. This does not make freedom the problem as authoritarian conservatives might argue. Freedom as I use it here merely means the absence of forces preventing any person from acting. The problem here is an infantile or juvenile conception of freedom whereby freedom is the only value that matters. Lots of things matter, not any single thing.  We need freedom but we also need security and safety, for example, to name two often contrasting and conflicting value claims. And in large part, I think the debate between political Left and political Right is not a debate between good guys and bad guys but between those that perhaps overemphasize freedom (the economic Libertarians) versus those that overemphasize equality (the Marxists and Anarchists). Too much freedom, and you get the rapacity and savagery of our economic inequality of the U.S. over the past thirty years. Too little freedom and forced (though imperfect) equality, and you get the Soviet Union for its entire duration. I call my blog the moderate contrarian for a reason. I don't think that you can or should be a moderate in all things but moderation is a safe and good starting assumption with which to begin and, as Hegel remarked, we must after all eventually begin and start somewhere. Moderation is a better starting point than the alternatives. If needed we can rise in our passions and even become excessive, but in special cases and on rare occasions. I take moderation to be the antidote to and antonym of fanaticism.

Karl Popper noted that Kant, though a fan of revolutionary political activity, was concerned about fanaticism:

"It was Robespierre's rule of terror that taught Kant, who had welcomed the French Revolution, that the most heinous crimes can be committed in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity: crimes just as heinous as those committed in the name of Christianity during the Crusades, in various epochs of witch hunting, and during the Thirty Years' War. And with Kant we may learn a lesson from the terror of the French Revolution, a lesson that cannot be repeated too often: that fanaticism is always evil and incompatible with the aim of a pluralist society, and that it is our duty to oppose it in any form-even when its aims, though fanatically pursued, are themselves ethically unobjectionable, and still more so when its aims coincide with our personal aims".

Current social media makes independence of thought and spirit more endangered than it ever was in the conformist nineteen-fifties. One of the major reasons is that the internet is a project of the group mind or the hive: it is all group identity all the way down. Liberals talk to only other liberals and conservatives talk to only other conservatives. Groups of people ride waves of instantly felt and instantly shared enthusiasms as well as shared hates. Current social media is like mirror neurons on steroids. One of the results, if it is not already happening, is that all sorts of new politically correct consensuses will form on a variety of hot button and moral issues. The problem is, what if the consensus is actually wrong? Or what if an individual human being cannot feel or see his or herself in the new shared norm? Or what if the consensus is hysterically overwrought? Or reductionist? And last but not least, what if the facts are hard to find and without definitive authority?  In a sense and in short, without the contrarians, without those that dare to challenge  beloved and agreed upon norms and mores, we will be in great trouble.

Being a contrarian in my personal behavior might mean refusing current fashions in areas of speech as well. I refuse the current vernacular. For example you will never hear me say awesome about anything. I might call things good and bad or say I love something instead. Neither will I say "no worries" in an awkward moment. I want to resurrect the seventeenth century use of the word disinterestedness, not in its current (and, interestingly, original) form as a synonym for uninterested.

It is important to be suspicious of anything that is greatly popular however entertaining it may feel. Why? Well it is one way of maintaining individuality and independence; it is also a way of taking the longer and larger view. Yes Breaking Bad is perhaps well acted and written but to read people's responses to it you'd think it was as good as or better than a Chekhov play! Larry David (who does deserve the praise he has been given) called his show Curb Your Enthusiasm for a reason. It was his way, I think, of asking us all to be less credulous and more, well, contrarian.

That is all I have to say after my long absence, I revisited a larger theme and now it will be time to discuss what really matters: 1970s music and films, Jazz, jazz, and more jazz, funky music, European classical music, and Chantal Akerman's News From Home, and many other delights. For, my oppositional tendencies notwithstanding, I always prefer to praise than to blame and to celebrate and understand than to merely critique.

Still from Chantal Akerman, News From Home

Lessons from the 70s: the Bicentennial: A Seventies journey via youtube

For the past forty odd years since 1976 we have lived in the most dramatic of times. The other superpower and empire fell, we've had the rise (and takeover) of the internet (which I needn't remind the reader is as revolutionary as Gutenberg's printing press), the Reagan revolution, the terrorism of September 11, our current economic collapse with the housing and banking crises, and much more.

When we think of recent US presidents, though they are widely divergent in sensibilities and politics, one thing they have in common is that they do not generally arouse indifference. Reagan, Bush the Second, (Bush the First seems to me an anomaly-almost a throwback to the fifties and sixties), Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama are all people that tend towards the charismatic, arousing passions from all sides, the strongest hatred and love, a kind of celebrity consciousness, and all of them analyzed in millions of volumes, whether on paper or on line. Whatever you might think of that lot of men, they proclaim their own seriousness and that the times in which they reign as serious - as uniquely important and special in some way. Whether it is climate change or Al Queda, an air of heaviness weighs upon the shoulders of Americans, like the ghosts of so many wars past.

The seventies is in part so interesting to me because of its inability to be that serious.

Whatever you might think about these United States and world leaders none of them is anything like Jerry Ford who was the president in 1976:

Notice his dry, completely unexciting and anti-charismatic midwestern Michigan delivery. This is a man who was an accidental president, who did not want to be president, but was nevertheless forced to be president, dragged kicking and screaming into a thankless job. He was a national substitute teacher: all owing to the disgrace and failure of his predecessor.

I have often described the 1970s as a time of contradictions. In many respects it was an earnest, on the nose time. But in other ways it was a time that went out of its way to be undramatic and unexciting. It saw lack of pretensions as a badge of honor. I am only too happy that our nation was founded in 1776 and not, say 1756, or 1766. I get a real relish, perverse perhaps, when I think of our bicentennial, that it occurred during a time of rather mediocre synthetic clothing and a president who was neither left wing nor right wing, liked golf and football more than the arts and was accident prone.

How I long for Republicans like Jerry Ford. So anti-ideological. Our current Republicans are so extreme in their views, they make pronouncements against masturbation in public, have anti-liberal and anti- democratic (or hyper-democratic) beliefs, and peddle a cheap religiosity, or belong to dubious religious denominations.

I am currently reading Jimmy Carter's White House diaries. Two things that strike me about it are Carter's enormous sensitivity and intelligence, both in his distrust of extremism and fanaticism of all kinds, and the great difficulties he experienced with increasing dogmatic partisanship, in bringing diverse interest groups together. In these matters he is rather like our current president Obama. But many people hated Carter in his time, though Carter was very much a man of the moment, going out of his way to exalt casualness and relaxation. Though he had the Iran hostage crisis with which to deal in public, in private Carter had an oddly eccentric Southern family. His brother Billy had a mediocre beer named after him, after all.

I need not note that Carter was marked by a most extraordinary lack of chemistry and charisma, perhaps not as flat as Ford, but still charisma-proof nevertheless. I feel economic troubles and the Iranian crisis may have insured the election of Ronald Reagan. But Reagan begins the new age of earnestness. In his own way Ronald Reagan - that conservative and decidedly "old fashioned"and square opponent of all things that smacked of the counterculture - was more earnest than any anti-war folk singer from fifteen years earlier. Think of him exhorting to Gorbachev: "tear down that wall!" We have been suffering from a kind of hypertropic hyperbole ever since.

But maybe the earnestness really begins with Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter gave an address that is probably one of the wildest addresses any U.S. president has ever given. Obama is more of the eloquent poet and a noted intellect, really a Formalist but Carter was the wildest Romantic. That address by Carter has a truly seventies wildness to it that cannot be duplicated today. At once "touchy feely" and intellectual he sounds more like a psychotherapist at a couples retreat, and like a lecturer in ecology in philosophy department at a state college than an American president. At times he sounds like Werner Erhard!

Everything he says in that address applies more today than at the time it was delivered, with talk now of flooded cities in the future, polar ice caps melting, and above all, peak oil. Indeed Carter's was an address in which the content was and is all true. He said then that we had been putting off the environmental problems for too long. Yet that was thirty years ago. He was a wild Jeremiah, a prophet. Yet the scientific credentials were sound. I love how he talks about "the meaning of our lives" and lists the complaints and comments of regular folks in letters to the White House. This is a transitional speech, full of the enormous seriousness to come, but full of the risk-taking, playful adventuresome of that period.

(Some would argue that the pop cultural embrace of a cheapened irony - David Letterman - contradicts my charge of earnestness, but in fact the need to resort to such a mode of playfulness seems forced: an obvious reaction to having to live in such evidently self important times. By contrast, the 1970s took each day at a time and saw what would happen if we just winged it. The eighties was a counterfeit version of such casualness.)

Let us do a close reading of television coverage: notice this introduction to the coverage of our nation's bicentennial with Harry Reasoner.

Notice the visuals and music for the introduction. There is the use of a kind of funky blues riff, with unison string writing, and the patriotic drumbeats are made to sound like an approximation of music meant to represent Native Americans in a second rate Republic pictures Western. The singers chant "Happy Birthday Uncle Sam" in an unenthusiastic and sad monotone. The music is kind of astonishing, its net effect more like background arranging studio orchestra figures from a disco song, but maybe not as trippy as the long, vast streams of red white and blue stripes and Harry Reasoner's wide lapelled baby blue sports jacket and almost clownish, wide red necktie.

Reasoner's delivery is noticeably unexcited, a mode I have been emphasizing all along. He is a little wry but there is something unusually relaxed about all of it. Though he looks stiff because of the tightness of men's design in suiting and jacketing in that period, at the same time he appears relaxed, befitting a time dedicated to oxymoron.

You have to wonder about a world that would create something like that.

Here is a local news observation and report on July 4th 1976, in Miami. I need not comment on the raiment represented therein, to say nothing of the design of the news studio.

You have to wonder again about sartorial matters. What kind of world would create necktie knots that appear to be the size of some children's heads, and coat lapels that take up the entire space of the chest. The sheer outrage of such disproportionate design will tell you that this was no ordinary time indeed. There is air of the clown in it, stagflation and energy crisis or not.

Style is the of the essence. The manner is the matter. If you examine these modes over time as an artist might examine a great painting or poem, you will learn much more about what is going on in the fullness of time than you ever will by reading, say, some book by David Halberstam.

Happy Birthday "America".

Daniel Bell (1919-2011)

Daniel Bell died yesterday on January 26. A classic(al) New York intellectual, he was one of the few intellectuals to resist pigeonholing. Author of The End Of Ideology and The Cultural Contradictions Of Capitalism, he refused to fall into so many traps into which his peers were almost always thrown. I am most interested in one quote of his in particular which I will reproduce here in its entirety:

"When I had my Bar Mitzvah, I said to the Rabbi, ’ I’ve found the truth. I don’t believe in God… I’m joining the Young People’s Socialist League.’ So he looked at me and said … ‘Kid, you don’t believe in God. Tell me, do you think God cares’?

Actually that is not the quote I had in mind. Sorry. Here is the correct one:

"I am a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture."

He meant by this that in politics he started from the sovereign, inalienable, "individual and not the group", thus liberal in politics. And in economics he thought economic justice a priority, thus socialist though, "not statist". And he was conservative in culture because of respect for "tradition" and a belief that some works of art are better than others, though not that these works necessarily need be elite in status. By conservative he did NOT mean pro-capitalist, anti-abortion, or Republican.

The world will be a poorer place without Daniel Bell.