Lots of attention being devoted to the state of our democracy and the nation Poor, declining and heading to possible civil war seem to be common analyses.
I'm reading the new Jonathan Alter bio of Jimmy Carter, who cites the opinion of a British visitor in 1971. At that time, with the Vietnam war going and racial problems stark and the boomer generation not trusting anyone over 30, the outlook seemed grim. I remember it well.
Read, or skimmed, Julia Galef's book, The Scout Mindset. I'd recommend it. But what I want to write about is the mystery of "identity". The last part of the book covers how "motivated reasoning", or the "soldier" mindset as she calls it, is tied up with our sense of identity. Her repeated references to "identity" got me wondering when it became so important.
When I was young, I knew my identity was white, Scots-Irish/German, Protestant, farm boy from upstate New York. Child of John and Gertrude, sibling of Jean, with stories of ancestors immigrating to the US. But I don't recall feeling my identity was in question.
Is it possible that these older sources of identity have faded away as society has changed and market capitalism has evolved so Americans and Brits worry more about identity and start to find it elsewhere? Google Ngram viewer has been improved since I last used it; you can now search texts in languages other than American and British English. When I used it to search for use of "identity", it started to be used much more around 1960.
Tamar Haspel is one of the people I follow on Twitter. She and her husband raise oysters in Maine, and she writes on food and diet issues, usually with the refrain that diet panaceas are just that, panaceas not based on hard science. That's a position I can identify with.
She tweeted this about two new promising obesity drugs (more in the thread):
For all y'all dissing obesity drugs:
— Tamar Haspel (@TamarHaspel) September 16, 2021
EVERYONE would prefer it if we could all just eat healthful foods we enjoy to be the weight we want to be.
But we can't, and if you insist that's the only possible solution you're abandoning people, often desperate, who want to lose weight https://t.co/JuvPuut4b9
Her point is that we eat not because of hunger but because of temptation. It got me thinking. As I've written, I think, I'm a creature of habit. I'm also skinny. Are the two facts related? I think they are: for whatever reason I have the habit of regarding food as fuel, to be consumed as soon as possible without wasting any time or energy in savoring, or in deciding what to eat. So my meals, at least the ones I make or buy as opposed to those my wife prepares, tend to be the same from day to day.
So my decisions on what to eat don't allow much room for temptation by food. (Nor, since I eat regularly, does feeling hungry have much to do with it--by eating at the times and with the food I'm habituated to I avoid hungry.)
I'll jump from this analysis of me to extrapolate to human institutions--most institutions are based on habits. That's part of what upsets us about covid-19; the pandemic has upset our habits which means undermining the foundations of some of our institutions.
Remembering our childhoods with a relative this morning. Two things I thought of later:
images on a screen are much more powerful than news on radio, much more novel.
most of middle class America regularly went to the movies, so newsreels were the medium for people to see images of the world. I don't think there was much competition in providing newsreels.
Actually 31, according to a NYTimes article on the redoing of seats for orchestra halls--average US male has gone from 168 in the 60's to 199 now.
I've dipped my toe into reading about the current controversy on critical race theory, but haven't gotten into it in any depth.
One thing which did strike was a statement to the effect that "policy produced the 'hood'". To me that's a sequence like "Person A decided on policy B, policy B created C" with the implication that C was the intent of the person, the decider.
Compare that to a statement that "policy resulted in the 'hood'". To me that's a sequence like "Person A decided on policy B, a result of policy B was C" with the implication that C may or may not have been the intent of the decider.
As someone who likes Murphy's law the second version is more to my liking. I think there are a lot of cases where the decider focuses on the immediate situation and adopts a policy which she thinks will solve the problem, not realizing there are ramifications and unknown unknows also at play which will create unintended results.
The difference between intent and result.
"The Big Sort" is the idea that Americans are sorting themselves into two separate camps--based on politics, education, etc. factors., which can be seen geographically--the red and blue areas on the map.
Supposedly this is a new phenomenon. If so, I wonder why it started? It's easy enough to see why the sorting might continue, if people make decisions on where to live, where to buy, depending on economics and the importance of schools, etc. But why would it start?
It struck me yesterday that I should look at myself--why did I buy in Reston, in an area where today about 90 percent of my neighbors vote Democratic (per a NYTimes interactive feature)? The answer is relatively simple. When I decided to buy in the suburbs in late 1975 I focused on Reston. Why? Because Robert Simon, who initiated the project, sold it as an equal opportunity town back in 1964-5. That was when I first became aware of it, as I was stationed at Ft. Belvoir. I even visited during an early open house on a weekend.
Simon was in advance of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, LBJ/s final achievement, which mandated equal opportunity. I can't believe EEO was a big factor in decisions by many, but it might have been just enough for some to start the snowball rolling down the hill.
As I've mentioned, my paternal grandfather was a Presbyterian minister. Recently I've been doing a little research using the newspapers.com archive of old newspapers. Before that I'd done a handful of searches in the NYTimes archive.
There's a big contrast of course between newspapers in the 1890's through 1920's and now. One hundred years makes a big difference. In terms of religion, the daily newspapers in Wilkes Barre and West Pittston paid a lot more attention to religious events than they do today. As you might expect the Times paid less attention than the smaller cities, but still there was considerable coverage, particularly on a controversy within the Presbyterian church over whether a minister was too liberal. There was also coverage in the PA cities of significant events: the dedicating of a church after its debt was paid off, an address by a minister returned from a visit to the "Holy Land", the departure of a minister for a church in Minneapolis.
These days I can't think of much in religious affairs which is covered in the media, except for religious leaders joining one side or another in political controversies, or splits over issues like the place of homosexuality in the church or the role of women priests.
Times have changed.
The Times had a graphic 3 years ago showing the results of analyzing the earnings of black and white men and women. The top graphic compared the results for lifetime earnings of men who grew up in the top 20 percent considering parental wealth and neighborhoods. It showed that such black men were about half as likely to maintain their status.
"Black boys raised in America, even in the wealthiest families and living in some of the most well-to-do neighborhoods, still earn less in adulthood than white boys with similar backgrounds, according to a sweeping new study that traced the lives of millions of children."
What's strangely interesting is that black women maintain their status, doing as well as white women. That simple fact undermines explanations on both the left and right:
I got to this Reuters article on the growing Chinese market for milk and their lack of enough cows to produce it from the Illinois extension website. It sparked my curiosity, so I found this BBC article by Googling. It tries to explain the demand--maybe partially yoghurt, partially other products, partially prestige?
I'm reminded of a book I've blogged about before, Appiah's, The Honor Code. In it he discusses the end of footbinding in China. At roughly the time my aunt and uncle were in China working for the Y Chinese elites were dissing their culture and elevating Western culture as "modern". Foot binding became regarded as old-fashioned, retrograde thinking. I wonder if milk is benefiting by a similar logic.
From yesterday's conversation with my cousin--some idle speculation on the interrelated threads of suburbanization, car ownership, feminism, women working and inflation:
Made a discovery this morning talking with my cousin, who mentioned the deliverymen/vendors in her neighborhood in Berwyn heights in the 1930. The family had one car, so when her father was at work her mother was dependent on walking or public transportation. The area was affluent enough (many UMd college professors and researchers at USDA Beltsville) so that it was worthwhile for trucks to sell meat and cheese, fruits and vegetables, and bakery (3 different trucks--she didn't mention milk which was even available in our more rural area in the 1940's but I assume they had it). I'm visualizing these as mobile farmers markets, though the milkman model would allow for advance orders, so maybe not.
I assume this was an evolution from the older horse-drawn vendors as the suburbs evolved from close in to car-mobile. And I'm guessing that as women went to work and had their own cars, the deliveryman/vendor model was no longer effective or economical.
Makes me muse on today's model--it's probably more efficient energy wise for groceries to deliver than for people to drive to the store. But people like the power to inspect and choose. So will the effect of the pandemic be to somewhat increase the miles driven by grocery/vendor deliveries and decrease the miles driven by consumers to stores?
[Update: found this link, not very descriptive though.]
[Update: a more informative link about horse-drawn wagons. Note: my cousin remembers the trucks as markets, not as delivery. Unlike the milkman where you could leave an order in the empty milk bottle.]
I'm intrigued by the idea that some hidden factors account for economic gains:
Slate has a long interview with someone studying Black American accents, how they vary from place to place and in time.
Anyone who's seen My Fair Lady is likely to be interested in the subject. Apparently it's harder to nail American accents down to a locality than English English, or maybe the parties to the interview weren't Professor Higgins.
I remember telling an employee back in the 1970's that her occasional use of black English might limit her promotion opportunities. I think it was a true statement at the time, but over the years I've felt guilty about saying it.
Toward the end of the interview they get into a discussion of trials, like George Floyd, in which interpreting the language of the black victim was at issue. There's some skepticism over whether the defense attorneys were honest in their misinterpretation of what was recorded. Perhaps I'm insufficiently cynical but I can accept that in the instant a policeman could interpret what he/she heard as being white English words, rather than black English language. It's problematic, but just an instance of how difficult it is to bridge social and cultural issues.
This is a 2015 small book by Robert Paarlberg, subtitled "Gluttony and the Dark Side of American Exceptionalism.". Its thesis is that the US stands out for its obesity and its per capita greenhouse gas emissions, both of which are based in America's:
Yesterday I wrote on what I see as changes through our/my history of what is "canceled" and what is not.
I've a metaphor:
Think of society in history as being reduced to a map in some way. Then the boundaries of what's included and what's not can be represented by a low resolution magnifying glass help over the map, a glass which brings some aspects to the fore and doesn't recognize other aspects. But over time the glass moves around, adding and subtracting things to look at.
I'm taking "cancel culture" as a generic process of society expressing disapproval of certain things, putting things outside the bounds of what used to be called "polite society". There should be a term for the opposite phenomena; society changing boundaries to bring things inside--in other words inclusion versus exclusion.
In my youth, Carlin's seven words were excluded. Judging by the NYTimes some are excluded because obsolete, some are no longer excluded.
References to certain sex acts (or maybe all acts outside of "missionary position") were excluded. Now all are included, as are all sexual propensities.
Profanity in its original meaning, cursing, particularly when related to Christianity, was excluded. Profanity which might offend religious people of another faith was more borderline. These days offensive words are excluded, though the curses which relate to Christianity (i.e., "god damn" etc.) are included.
Calculated Risk reports:
Currently, almost 61 million people in the U.S. labor force have a Bachelor's degree or higher. This is almost 44% of the labor force, up from 26.2% in 1992.
When my father graduated from U of Minnesota in 1912 he was one of about 2 percent of the people in the US with a bachelor's degree.
My mother was death on drinking. She would be pleased by this post.
It's strange how things have changed. I clearly remember Mr. Youngstrom, our science teacher for one year in HS (unless he was a substitute--the school had problems keeping science teachers) being very emotional when telling the class never to smoke marijuana. I think the reason was it was a gateway to hard drugs, but it could have been because it was evil in and of itself.
60+ years later Virginia has legalized marijuana, and there's a push for decriminalizing hard drugs. It seems libertarian philosophy has conquered much of American life.
