songlight for dawn

Frederick Soddy: The Role of Money

2011-05-12T11:04:00.000+01:00

Some selections from the early chapters of Frederick Soddy, The Role of Money: What it Should be, Contrasted with what it has Become (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1934). Read/download the rest of the book here.

Energy Theory of Wealth

One of the main contributions of these doctrines is a consistent energy theory of wealth and the sharp distinction that results between wealth and the ownership of a debt. This reveals much that is incontrovertible regarding the threatened collapse of the modern scientific civilization, to give it its proper name, though it is usually miscalled the capitalistic civilization. True, “Capital,” in its proper physical sense, is its most distinctive superficial feature. But in that sense Capital is the unconsumable product of the irrevocable consumption or expenditure of wealth necessary to prepare for and make possible the new methods of production. Owing to modern methods of power production, much more of it is necessary than with the old methods. Moreover, it may be exchangeable for fresh wealth, but it is not changeable into it. From the community’s standpoint capital appears as debt rather than wealth.

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Orthodox economics has never yet been anything but the class economics of the owners of debts. If its writers ever attempted any wider social applications, they made themselves simply ridiculous, as when one solemnly looked forward to the millennium arriving through the accumulation of so much capital that everyone would be well off and comfortable, presumably by living on the interest of their mutual indebtednesses. Whilst in the sphere of international trade, till long after the War, the dictum that a continued favourable balance of trade was essential for the existence of the strong nations implied the continuation of unfavourable balances for the weak. It was stated that this country was threatened with disaster unless it contrived to maintain the previous rate of foreign investments returning abroad all that it received in the way of interest and sinking funds in respect of past investments, and if possible more than this. These are good illustrations of the debt-view of wealth and the substitution of social and legal conventions for physical reality.

Ergosophy

It is convenient to give a name to the group of interconnected but more or less independent doctrines comprised under such terms as Cartesian, Physical or New Economics, Social Energetics, the Age of Plenty, and Technocracy, including the implications of these doctrines, in regard to the problems of distribution and the new philosophy of money, with which this book

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is more particularly concerned. A new word Ergosophy will be employed for this purpose. It means the wisdom of work, energy, or power, in the purely physical sense. Mental or intellectual activities, to which these three terms are often loosely applied, are better referred to, rather, as effort, diligence, or attention.

There are many reasons that render such a new word or term desirable. So far there has been no real social philosophy arising wholly out of the universally obeyed laws of the physical world. On the other hand, from the remotest times, technology has been too apt to be considered merely a sort of slave or menial servant to verbose, pretentious, and impressionistic humane philosophies and religions. Indeed it would hardly be a caricature of civilization, as it has evolved up to now, to describe it as having been attempting to compound for the injustice of ascribing unto God the things that are of Science by rendering unto Caesar the things that are of God. Technocracy, in one at least of its sources of inspiration, the suggestion of Thorstein Veblen for the establishment of a Soviet of technicians to take over the control of the world, is probably one of the first collective dawnings of this malversation. So long as we have simple folk displaying a pathetic acquiescence in the piety that renders thanks for all the good things of life and ascribes them to the bounty of Providence, along with anything but simple folk who

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totally disbelieve anything of the kind but nevertheless do still believe implicitly in practising much more forceful methods of obtaining them, so long will civilization be a happy hunting ground for the predatory and acquisitive and a wilderness for the original and creative. The new philosophy, by claiming for mechanical science its rightful position as an equal in the trinity of wisdom, should make it easier to render unto Caesar the things that are of Caesar and to God the things that are of God.

Wealth and Calories

In the first place ergosophy rehabilitates with a precise meaning that old-fashioned and indispensable word Wealth, which the orthodox economist, knowing even less of the alleged subject-matter of his studies than the original founders of the subject, the French Physiocrats, took too much for granted. Originating, to him, ultimately somehow through divine agency, he came to regard the acquisition of wealth as tantamount to its creation. He became obsessed with commerce and mercantile exchange to the neglect of the technical principles underlying all new production of wealth. To this day we are in the grip of a mercantile system that fritters away in distribution most of the advantage gained in lightening the labour of producing wealth.

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Marxism Obsolete

It ought never to be forgotten that Victorian economics was essentially class economics, in which only gradually and tardily the actual producers of wealth as distinct from employers and property owners were considered at all. But we find things worse and not better among the accepted doctrines of leftwing and revolutionary movements. With a clearer recognition of the social implications of energy our political controversies appear mainly as due to economic confusions. In an age when men are more and more being displaced from their function as physical labourers by purely inanimate sources of power, and are in danger of being largely by-passed out of the cycle of production and distribution by automatic mechanisms, it would be incredible, if it were not true, that so large a part of the world should be misrepresented as dominated by the doctrines of Karl Marx as to wealth originating in human

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labour. Every artisan must know that this is not now true. The views of Marx on money were even more out of date, relatively to his age, than his views on wealth, and it was significant in the evidence before the Macmillan Committee that Marxists seem to have been the last to abandon their primitive belief in gold as a currency medium and in the gold standard.

The Doctrine of Struggle

Unpleasant and shattering to many cherished illusions as this may seem, it is, nevertheless, the key that best fits our age, and none know it better than those who have tried to spread the new evangel. As an Australian writer recently well put it there are many who cling to (for others not themselves) poverty, insecurity, hard work, scanty living, wars, starvation, and disease, as blessings in disguise, necessary to goad and subdue this lazy

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and unruly animal, man, and to protect him from softness and decadence. This is the doctrine of existence for struggle, rather than of struggle for existence, and it is probably the oldest doctrine in the world. It stinks of the East not the West.

[...] Men, it is true, in those [past] ages may have been goaded on by starvation to successful robbery and theft of their neighbours, but, in this power-age, progress has been due to the conquest of nature and the by-passing of men. Whatever may be the ultimate genic effect of the Great War, it is generally admitted that the French

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Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars have perceptibly reduced the average physique of the French nation, and that now wars, since superior courage and valour are much more likely to lead to swift personal annihilation than ultimate survival, are definitely and necessarily dysgenic. While on the positive side, where courage and stamina are essential to survival, in exploration of land, sea, and sky, and in trying out and taming still imperfectly understood new processes and appliances to the use of men, science has provided and is providing both opportunities and unavoidable necessities for facing and overcoming dangers that would have blenched the cheek of the legendary heroes of olden time. [...]

Modern Wars and National Debts

In point of fact, again, are wars now merely for sustenance? Are they not waged to secure markets wherein to dispose of the surplus wealth arising from scientific production operating along with the old practical law of wages? (By “practical law of wages” is meant the system that ensures to the worker just sufficient to maintain him in a mental and physical condition to allow of his efficient conduct of his trade, craft, or vocation. This is, of course, a direct inheritance of the age

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of scarcity.) To put it quite bluntly, the purpose of wars is to compel weaker nations to take this surplus off the hands of the stronger, running up debts, if need be, in order to pay for it. Then, the threat of further war is necessary to ensure that the debts and the interest on them shall not be repudiated.

The Real Struggles

The struggle for existence is now revealed as fundamentally a struggle for physical energy, and the conquest of nature has made available supplies vastly exceeding what can be extracted from the unwilling bodies of draught cattle and slaves. It is not the struggle but the energy that is essential to human life. The doctrine of existence for struggle, on the other hand, is the oldest religion in the world.

It has never been anything but a religion of the ambitious, dominating, and unscrupulous, with either a race or a caste arrogation of superiority over the races without or the herd within, an assumption of licence to act treacherously and injuriously towards aliens and those it deems of inferior breed and to confine its standards of honour and decency to those of its own blood or order. It is a code that Christianity has actively and passively resisted for two thousand years. That fact is not unimportant. For between the progress that has culminated in ergosophy and the Christian religion there is an intimate connection. Indeed the former is in origin wholly the product of the Christian nations of the West.

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The Taboo on Scientific Economics

After the War, a cry went up for scientific men to cooperate with the financial, industrial, and political authorities in solving the social evils that brought on the War and which have since made Peace nothing but a misnomer. But the strange and unconventional conclusions of the few who had brought to social problems the same searching and original thought that they were accustomed to apply in their own inquiries, frightened, not the public, but those whose interest in such problems is to keep them reconciled with things as they are. Those who persisted in shedding light on social evils and anomalies were deemed impious, and the conclusions tabooed. [...] The public is expected to believe that the misfortunes that beset us are acts of God and that, though

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we have the science and the necessary equipment and organization to produce wealth in abundance, it is beyond the wit of man to learn how to distribute it. The problem, it is true, is new, and the approach to it obscured, often intentionally, by a mass of half-truths and once-truths. But its solution has not been rendered any nearer or clearer by the puerile effort of the post-War era to suppress free public discussion of the new doctrines, an issue that was fought out and won in physical science in the time of Galileo.

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Wars and Revolutions Result from Wealth

[I]n our day it is not the agitator fomenting class-hatred who can start, nor the airmen raining down bombs that

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can stop, a revolution. But empty milk into the Potomac; import pests to destroy the cotton crop; burn wheat and coffee as fuel; restrict the production of rubber; set up tariff-barriers; permit trusts, federations, cartels, and lock-outs; allow trade unions to develop ca’canny methods to reduce output; maintain in misery, insecurity, and idleness masses of unemployed who are not allowed to better their lot by making the very things of which they stand in need; and revolution in some form is not probable, but certain. The ideas that govern men are outraged. Instead of a few striking illustrations of incompetence or worse they begin to see universal chaos instead of order. Their institutions, so far from protecting them in their peaceful avocations on which they rely for their livelihood, appear leagued together to keep them in traditional and unnecessary servitude and dependence. The army begins to realize that it is officered by the enemy.

The Monetary System Impedes the Flow

Nor will any means avail to terminate or defeat such a revolution, whether it is sudden or long-drawn-out, violent or chronic, unless and until the barriers that oppose the free and full distribution of wealth from the producer to the ultimate user and consumer are broken down and the flow of wealth again fulfils the purpose for which men have striven to create it. Since, in all monetary civilizations, it is money that alone

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can effect the exchange of wealth and the continuous flow of goods and services throughout the nation, money has become the life-blood of the community, and for each individual a veritable licence to live at all. The monetary system is the distributory mechanism, and this reading of history therefore supports up to the hilt the conclusions of those who have made a special study of what our monetary system has become. It is the primary and infinitely most important source of all our present social and international unrest and for the failure, hitherto, of democracy.

A very slight knowledge of our actual existing monetary system makes it abundantly clear that, without democracy knowing or allowing it, and without the matter ever being before the electorate even as a secondary or minor political issue, the power of uttering money has been taken out of national hands and usurped as a perquisite by the moneylender. Practically every genuine monetary reformer is unanimous that the only hope of safety and peace lies in the nation instantly resuming its prerogative over the issue of all forms of money, which, legally, it has never surrendered at all.

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The Private Issue of Money

By allowing private mints to spring up Parliament has fundamentally and perhaps irretrievably betrayed democracy. Before the War shed a penetrating light into the nature of money systems in general it was customary even in the works of apparently respectable economists to find absolutely dishonest

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hair-splitting distinctions between the invisible money so created and paper notes. The latter were really money and the former was not! In fact, the reader can always tell in such standard works on the subject when he is approaching the fishy part of the business. The essential fact, the creation of new money, becomes obscured in a cloud of anticipatory justification and elaborate special pleading. This is no longer even possible, and one may be thankful to find nowadays some technical writers on this malodorous subject who are content to state the facts unequivocably and to leave the reader to draw his own conclusion.

True, the old credit system “based on gold” kept the currency from being progressively and permanently debased relatively to the exchange value of gold by forcibly bringing it back again after it had been debased by compounding for the robbing of Peter to pay Paul by the subsequent ruination of Paul to pay the bank. Simple, and in many ways good, as real gold and silver currencies are, they involve a vast amount of futile human effort in the search for the precious metals, which are then instantly rendered unavailing for any legitimate aesthetic or industrial application. But it is mere pretence to ascribe such solid advantages, as they may have, to modern systems pretending to be based on them, but really using them brutally to restore the value to money after it has been diluted, to the hurt of the innocent and profit of the guilty.

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Pot Calling White Kettle Black

2011-04-30T09:45:00.000+01:00

The first two paragraphs of the Introduction to Kathleen M. Blee, Women and the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s:

An elderly white Protestant woman from rural northern Indiana described her time in the Ku Klux Klan movement of the 1920s with remarkable nonchalance, as ‘just a celebration . . . a way of growing up.’ The Klan fit easily into her daily life, as it did for many white Protestants in Indiana. At most, it was an exceptional chapter in an otherwise ordinary life. Even in hindsight, she showed little remorse over the devastation left in the wake of the Klan’s crusade against Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and blacks. What she remembered with pride, not regret, was the social and cultural life of the Klan; the Klan as ‘a way to get together and enjoy.’

For thousands of native-born white Protestant women like this informant, the women’s Klan of the 1920s was not only a way to promote racist, intolerant, and xenophobic policies but also a social setting in which to enjoy their own racial and religious privileges. These women recall their membership in one of U.S. history’s most vicious campaigns of prejudice and hatred primarily as a time of friendship and solidarity among like-minded women.

Secrecy, esp. Religious: a Scholarly Definition

2011-04-19T12:54:00.001+01:00

In Kocku von Stuckrad (Ed.), The Brill Dictionary of Religion [Revised edition of Metzler Lexikon Religion edited by Christoph Auffarth, Jutta Bernard and Hubert Mohr, translated from the German by Robert R. Barr] (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006)

Secrecy
1. Secrecy as an Evolutionary Strategy
Secrecy is a strategy developed by evolution, in the case of beast and human alike within the biological food chain, that attains an elevated degree of individual opportunities and possibilities for survival and reproduction by way of the accumulation of various informational prospects. The person or animal with a successful disguise does not become prey, the one that hides his/her/its food survives times of want, the creature of restrained impulses and hidden intents can secretly dodge competitors for nourishment, sexual partners, and territory, and the one that protects progeny to the third generation ensures the safe transport of her/his/its genes. The greater the concealment and silence vis-à-vis the competing side (‘information reduction’), or the more that that side is deceived and ‘tricked’ (‘disinformation’), the greater the chances of reproduction on one’s own side. A shortcoming with regard to secrecy can mean death. Fear and triumph, therefore, are the constant companions of secrecy. The invisibility of one is the insecurity of the other.

2. Human Secrecy: Intelligence
Explicit pleasure in the generation of secrecy that can become a craving or addiction appears only with the human being. Discovery in a game of hide-and-seek arouses squeals of delight in a child, even a very young one, the dissolution of the state of tension between hiding and showing oneself is enjoyed in all merriment, stubborn silence out of spite signs a new stage of development, and re-interpreting reality with words is the lovely ruse of others, not only for Huckleberry Finn.

a) Double-Coded Secret Signs
The basis of all of these phenomena is that, through cultural evolution, the human brain has become specialized in the practice of signs, and in intelligent, secretive ways of dealing with reality. Signs stand for something that, in itself, is invisible, insensible, and inaudible. Olfactory, optical, and acoustical behavior, in the sense of positing markers, here forms the evolutionary basis, but is the prisoner of the materiality of things. Only the achievement of a transformation from the openly communicative marking to the exclusive secret sign sparks the evolutionary breakthrough. In order to introduce the sign durably and reliably, a practice of secrecy, by means of a positing of signs, must represent the absent, secret thing in the present sign in such wise that it is double-coded — coded as an ‘open secret sign.’ All see or hear the sign; however, only some recognize, know, and take charge of that which the sign indicates (wild game depicted on rocks, the early Christian fish symbol, the Zen garden).

b) Co-Evolution of Secrecy and Revelation
Simultaneous esoteric and exoteric secrecy arouses not only the curiosity and craving of the excluded, but also the temptation of a profitable betrayal. The dynamic co-evolution of secrecy and revelation, thus launched, has today produced several tamper-resistant strategies of secrecy:
• Semantic double-coding, in word and image, divides reality into a visible-and-real world and an invisible-and-virtual one. (→ masks, whizzing-sticks, bread and wine in cults of life-renewal; allegories and the narration of parables in speech and writing).
• Performative initiation and introduction that make the individual a member of a closed chain (years-long rites of initiation in men’s associations and brotherhoods; exclusive teacher-pupil and master-disciple relations; trials of courage).
• Unexaminable vehicles of information, such as ancestors, dreams, visions, divination, omens, oracles, miracles, and charms (→ Esotericism; Occultism).
• Unverifiable histories (narratives of → origin, ascensions to heaven, after-death reports and near-death experiences, eschatological histories and → apocalypses).
• Magical secret rituals that can be successful only when held without witnesses (→ Voodoo cults, spiritual alchemy, black → magic).
• Secret cults that render secrecy an immediate, ecstatic, and extraordinary experience of wholeness (ancient → mystery cults, Australian → Aborigines’ corroborees).
• Hierarchical structures, in which the organization’s secret can be known and used only by the invisible master-superior (certain Rosicrucian groups, the “Esoteric Section” of the → Theosophical Society, Opus Dei, → Scientology).
• Transformation of the—as yet—unknown or unknowable to the status of the ‘secret’ (mysteries of faith; promises of revelation; speculations on cosmology or on the theory of evolution; TV cult-series “The X-Files”).
• Self-reliance and independence, which keep nothing secret except this fact (traffic in secrets; esoteric mania for betraying secrets; many secret societies after the abandonment of their original purpose of their organization, e.g., German Masonic Lodges in the nineteenth century).

These forms of secrecy are characteristic of all religions. They function on the principle that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Only those in control of the whole are in charge of the secret. Individual participants in the secret, integrated but subordinate, cannot destroy the operational force of the secrecy. In the extreme case, the secret becomes a mystery of faith, and of self-bewitching imagination, impenetrable to all.

c) Secret Knowledge by Reflection
On the other hand, self-reflexive secrecy knows and understands what it does. It successfully shifts the dynamics of concealment and revelation to the level of reflexive knowledge in the area of individual cognition. A self-aware, self-controlled, attentive ability to remain silent is characteristic here. In creative play, and secret, confidential experiment with the possibilities of representing sign and signal, limits and boundaries fall from around the respective axiomatic conceptions of world and self (→ shamanism, scholarly → Daoism, → mysticism, alchemy).

3. Of such elements, religious acts build up a world invisible and out of reach, a world of the spiritual and believed, an ‘otherwise world,’ a ‘world behind,’ behind the world of outward facts and conditions. Secrecy protects and immunizes this second world, which determines life here and hereafter, together with the well-being of those who deal with the world of secrecy. The unequal chances for life and well-being, presented this way in gerontocracies, caste societies, patriarchates, or other forms of government has, as a rule, very stable credibility. It makes religions the connective tissue of human socialization. A self-reflexive piety of silence, and falling silent, can, on the contrary, become the catalyst and motor of cultural evolution, or make survival possible in an environment of deadly enemies (Jewish and Christian → gnosticism; Taquia and Sufi brotherhoods [→ Sufism]; ‘Marranos’).

4. The world’s retransformation into an enchanted garden of occultism and esotericism, parliamentarily uncontrollable bank secrets, and new enchantment at the hands of the media, is at full speed. In this situation, secrecy still deserves the self-reflexive elucidation of who it is who produces which secrets, in what situation and against whom, for what reason and to what end, and how and by means of what procedure or operation.

Telegraph quotes

2010-11-21T15:28:00.003Z

1980 vs. 2010:

Daily Telegraph, 10 September 1980. 17/7 : They are guilty of ethnocide: destruction of the Indians’ tribal identities and thus of their ability to live.

vs.

Daily Telegraph, 02 November 2010. online : White couples will be able to adopt black and Asian children more easily under Government plans, it has been disclosed. Tim Loughton, the Children's Minister, said that there was "no reason at all" why white couples should not adopt black, Asian, or mixed-race children. He said that "if there are no other issues, the couple offering a permanent home should be approved even if it is not a perfect match". The government's guidance is expected to say that "race should not be a barrier to adoption".

and

Daily Telegraph, 02 November 2010. online : A Gulf War veteran has been ordered to remove a "British by birth, English by the grace of God" slogan from his taxi after complaints from passengers. John Woodward, 38, emblazoned his black cab with the motto after seeing similar sentiments on a fleet of haulage vehicles. But council officials have now written to Mr Woodward saying that two passengers in his Renault Trafic vehicle were offended by the slogan's "racist overtones".'

The Meaning of 'Zero Hour for Universal Nationalism'

2010-10-05T09:58:00.007+01:00

Inspired by Leon Haller's call for an ethical program to reverse race-replacement, I got around to writing up my ideas on that score, hinted at here and stated in general terms here:

I agree we need an ethical model for restoration even though I think force will ultimately save us.

I think the proper basic distinction is between pre- and post-January 1919 peace conference when the ideal of universal nationalism can be shown to have become pretty well, ah, universal. Before that Might was Right and those who could invaded the living space of those who couldn’t. If your people happened to be on the receiving end of conquest before WW1, too bad, you’d probably have done it to the other guy if you could. But after the conference of 1919 it’s hard to make the claim that one’s colonising of another people’s living space had any moral legitimacy if known to be against the wishes of the native people. Popular opinion everywhere said it simply couldn’t be legitimate when so characterised. That remains the case and we can capitalise on that, Old and New World peoples equally, insofar as popular opinion is known to have opposed the colonisation.

Although the issue is more complex between states and populations that were involved in a formal colonial relationship post-1919, it can generally be settled quite easily by adding a second reference point: the date the colony achieved independence. For example, between Britain and India, you would make distinctions in today’s Britain between Indians whose first Indian ancestor or themselves came to Britain before 1919, Indians whose first Indian ancestor or themselves came between 1919 and August 15th 1947 when India gained independence, and Indians whose first Indian ancestor or themselves came to Britain after that date.

There would be no action taken against the pre-1919 ‘British’ Indians or their descendants, a handful of people anyway, except as should apply to all alien and minority ethnies: they would be prevented from organising collectively and lobbying politicians and businesses or having relations with the Indian government. Middle period Indians, again such as can be said to exist at all, would have those restrictions placed upon them, but also, to encourage their leaving, various financial penalties and limits on civil rights would be imposed. All who came after independence in 1947 - and their descendants - would be required to leave and all their assets would be seized. Minimal action would be taken against descendants of all three Indian classes who are part British ethnically, again a small number, perhaps they might both lose the vote and pay increased taxes in proportion to their adulteration. And of course every community would be empowered to prohibit or permit the settlement and employment of any remaining Indians, part-Indians (and other aliens) within its jurisdiction according to its own conscience.

Simple, clean, historically reciprocal. Ethical. I think...

Protection in Historical Perspective

2010-09-25T09:46:00.005+01:00

From A.P. Thirlwall and Penélope Pacheco-López, Trade Liberalisation and The Poverty of Nations Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008)

Protection in Historical Perspective

The best historical description of the role of protection in the early industrialisation phase of the now-developed countries is given by Ha-Joon Chang, the Cambridge economist, in three fascinating books: Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (2002); Why Developing Countries Need Tariffs? (2005); and Bad Samaritans: Rich Nations, Poor Policies and the Threat to the Developing World (2007). In this section we rely heavily on the evidence in these books.

The current developed countries of the world, including Britain, the United States and the countries of continental Europe and Scandinavia did not develop their economies on the basis of free trade. On the contrary, they heavily protected their domestic industries, and also did their utmost to prevent the countries that they colonised from competing with them. Britain started to protect and foster industries as early as the late 15th century when Henry VII took the deliberate decision to challenge the successful woollen manufacturing industry of Belgium and Holland, which was reliant on the export of British wool. He taxed the

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export of raw wool and banned export of some types of unfinished cloth in order to encourage processing at home. Henry VIII continued the protectionist policy, and by the middle of the reign of Elizabeth I, Britain had sufficient processing capacity to ban the export of wool entirely, which ruined the cloth industry of the Low Countries. Britain first became rich on its woollen industry nurtured by the State. Serious protection of new manufacturing industries started with Robert Walpole in 1721, using tariffs, subsidies, tariff rebates on imported inputs and other protective devices – all of which are deemed to be damaging to developing countries today. In the early 19th century, Britain imposed some of the highest tariff rates on manufactured goods in the world, averaging 45–55 per cent.

Britain also prevented its colonies from producing manufactured goods. William Pitt the Elder, the British Prime Minister from 1766 to 1768, is quoted by Friedrich List (1885) as saying that ‘the colonies should not be permitted to manufacture so much as a horsenail’. All sorts of devices were resorted to in the 18th century to keep the colonies as producers of primary commodities, giving subsidies to production, and reducing tariffs on raw material imports into Britain. A law passed in 1699 forbade the export of processed wool products from the English colonies, including Ireland. In 1700, all cotton goods from India were prohibited. In the 1720s, Walpole gave export subsidies and abolished import duties on raw materials produced in the American colonies so that their comparative

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advantage stayed in primary products. Some manufacturing activities were even prohibited, such as high value-added steel products in America. The use of tariffs by the colonies was either banned or, where used for revenue purposes, a tax was imposed on the industry concerned to neutralise its competitive advantage. In other countries not colonised by Britain, ‘unequal treaties’ were signed which took away the tariff autonomy of the countries and set ‘binding’ tariffs that countries could not exceed, typically about 5 per cent in countries such as Brazil, China, Japan, Siam (now Thailand) and Persia (now Iran). With regard to Europe, Britain also tried to protect itself against competition, although to less effect. The export of some types of machinery embodying new technology was banned, and for over sixty years from 1719 to 1782 there was a ban on the emigration of skilled labour from Britain. Those who defied the ban, and did not return within six months, had their possessions confiscated and citizenship withdrawn.

Britain’s industrial revolution gathered momentum in the mid-18th century, when protection still prevailed. It would be a rewriting of history, therefore, to argue that Britain started its development process on the basis of free trade. Britain did not start dismantling its structure of protection until the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, but by then it had already attained technological superiority over all other countries in the world. From then on, Britain preached free trade, but as List (1885) remarked, such preaching was like ‘kicking away

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the ladder’ up which one has climbed oneself so that no-one else can reach the top. List comments:

It is a very common clever device that where anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him. In this lies the secret of the cosmopolitan doctrine of Adam Smith, and the cosmopolitan tendencies of his great contemporary William Pitt, and of all his successors in the British Government administrations. Any nation which by means of protective duties and restrictions on navigation has raised her manufacturing power and her navigation to such a degree of development that no other nation can sustain free competition with her, can do nothing wiser than throw away these ladders of her greatness, to preach to other nations the benefits of free trade, and to declare in penitent tone that she has hitherto wandered in the paths of error, and has now for the first time succeeded in discovering the truth. (pp. 295–6)

The United States followed Britain’s protectionist route at the end of the 18th century, contrary to Adam Smith’s advice in the Wealth of Nations. Here is what Smith had to say:

Were the Americans, either by combination or by any other sort of violence to stop the importation of European manufactures, and, by thus giving a monopoly to such of their own countrymen as could manufacture the like goods, divert any considerable part of their capital into this employment, they would retard instead of accelerating the further increase in the value of their annual produce, and would obstruct instead of promoting the progress of their country towards real wealth and greatness. (pp. 347–8)

If the United States had followed Adam Smith’s advice, it would have remained an economic

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backwater for a long time, instead of becoming the richest industrialised country in the world. In the 19th century, the US economy was the fastest growing in the world, and also the most protectionist. Paul Bairoch (1993) has described the United States as ‘the mother country and bastion of modern protectionism’. It was the US Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton in 1791, who first coined the term ‘infant industry’, and who first argued the case for industrialisation by protection using tariffs, subsidies and other means, recognising that without protection it would be impossible for America to compete against more advanced countries, notably Britain. List, in his classic book The National System of Political Economy, first published in German in 1841, claims that he first learnt the infant industry argument for protection while in exile in the US in the 1820s. The US first imposed tariffs on industrial goods in 1789. Protection continued to increase in the 19th century and by 1870, import tariffs accounted for more than 50 per cent of the value of imports. Protection continued in the early 20th century, and was even strengthened in the 1930s with the ‘Smoot–Hawley’ tariff which raised the average tariff on manufactured goods to nearly 50 per cent. According to Bairoch (1993) no other country implemented a more protectionist policy to promote its industry than the United States. Only after the Second World War did it start to liberalise its trade, having already established industrial supremacy, and was able to ‘kick away the ladder’, as Britain had done a century earlier.

[p.42]

German industrial policy in the 19th century was heavily influenced by the views of List. He believed that import duties should not only be used to protect industry but also to promote it, supported by the State. Germany’s average tariff rate on industrial goods was not as high as in the US, but the German State actively promoted industry by ‘assigning monopoly rights, establishing industrial cartels, providing export subsidies, importing industrial experts and skilled labour, establishing large banks and making large investments in coal production and railway and road construction’ (Skarstein, 2007).

Japan was prevented from using tariffs up to 1911 because of the ‘unequal treaties’ signed, as referred to earlier. But after 1911, Japan embarked on a comprehensive development strategy, a major part of which included substantial tariff protection, combined with subsidies to key (infant) industries and State investment in infrastructure. Just before the First World War, Japan’s average tariff on manufactured imports was 30 per cent. The protectionist stance continued after the Second World War, with tariffs on car imports, for example, of nearly 40 per cent. Protectionism in the 1950s and 1960s was combined with the highest GDP growth rate of any country in the world. If Japan had listened to the free-traders, it would have no industrial base.

The average tariff rates on manufactured goods for selected developed countries in their early stages of development are shown in Table 1.1.

[p.43]

[p.44]

Notice the very high tariff rates for the UK and US in 1820, the continued high rates in the US up to 1950, and the relatively high rates in France, Germany and Italy too. These are much higher rates that the average nominal tariff on imports of manufactures into today’s developing countries.

Average tariff rates for developed countries fell dramatically after 1950, but it is interesting to note that five of the six fastest growing countries during the ‘golden age’ of growth 1950–73 were still the highest tariff countries: Japan (8.05 per cent), Italy (4.95 per cent), Austria (4.90 per cent), Finland (4.25 per cent) and France (4.05 per cent). Germany was the only fast growing country in this period with the lowest tariffs.

The historical record tells the same story. O’Rourke (2000) takes ten of today’s developed countries over the period 1875–1914 and shows a positive relation between tariff rates and GDP growth, controlling for other factors influencing growth. Clemens and Williamson (2001) examine 35 developed and developing countries over the period 1875–1908 and 1924–34 and also find a positive relation between the level of tariffs and growth. Vamvakidis (2002) takes the inter-war period 1920–40 and finds a positive relation between tariff rates and growth across 22 countries (although not for the period 1870–1910). Studies of more recent years show the same positive relation between levels of trade restrictions and growth, controlling for other variables. Yanikkaya (2003) takes more than 100 countries over the period

[p.45]

1970–97 and finds that both tariffs and export taxes seem to be associated with faster growth. He concludes: ‘these results . . . provide support for the infant industry case for protection and for strategic trade policy’. And Rodrik (2001) asserts: ‘cross national comparisons of the literature reveals no systematic relationship between a country’s average level of tariff and non-tariff restrictions and its subsequent economic growth rate. If anything the evidence for the 1990s indicates a positive (but statistically insignificant) relationship between tariffs and economic growth’ (italics in the original).

It can be said with some confidence that tariffs never harmed economic progress in the countries now developed. On the contrary, they ‘climbed the ladder’ on the back of tariffs and other protectionist devices. All we know is that as countries get richer they dismantle trade restrictions, not that they get richer because they liberalise trade. The issue for developing countries today is not whether to protect, but how to protect in order to ensure the dynamic efficiency of its nascent industrial activities.

[p.46]

References:

Bairoch, P. (1993), Economics and World History – Myths and Paradoxes (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf).
List, F. (1885), The National System of Political Economy, translated from the original German edition published in 1841 by Sampson Lloyd (London: Longmann, Green and Company).
O’Rourke, K. (2000), Tariffs and Growth in the Late 19th Century, Economic Journal, April.
Rodrik, D. (2001), The Global Governance of Trade: As If Development Really Mattered (New York: UNDP).
Skarstein, R. (2007), Free Trade: A Dead End for Underdeveloped Countries, Review of Political Economy, July.
Smith, A. (1776), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: George Routledge and Sons).
Vamvakidis, A. (2002), How Robust is the Growth – Openness Connection: Historical Evidence, Journal of Economic Growth, March.
Yanikkaya, H. (2003), Trade Openness and Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Empirical Investigation, Journal of Development Economics, October.

yamaguchy upload

2010-08-08T14:00:00.002+01:00

A great little website, yamaguchy.netfirms , seems down for good. The anonymous creator/s had compiled a library of works primarily devoted to the money question, with hard to find books and essays by Arthur Kitson, Christopher Hollis, June Grem, Robert McNair Wilson, A.N. Field, Charles Lindbergh (Sr.), Ezra Pound among many others.

It seems a great shame that this resource might be lost, so I am thankful that I downloaded the entire site to my hard drive some time ago. I have uploaded a zip file of the entire site to megaupload so that others may download it. Zipped the package is 50MB, unzipped about 95MB but better viewing. Navigate from the index page.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=UZ0HIM4T

Fahrenheit 451: Prescient on PC in 1953

2010-05-28T10:35:00.003+01:00

Only one line stands out as lacking integrity: "White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it." Doesn't ring true. Truffaut's film is more honest:

Ah, Robinson Crusoe. The negroes didn't
like that because of his man, Friday.

And Nietzsche. Ah, Nietzsche.
The Jews didn't like Nietzsche.

From Ray Bradbury's novel:

“You like bowling, don’t you, Montag?”

“Bowling, yes.”

“And golf?”

“Golf is a fine game.”

“Basketball?”

“A fine game.”.

“Billiards, pool? Football?”

“Fine games, all of them.”

“More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don’t have to think, eh? Organize and organize and super-organize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee. Towns turn into motels, people in nomadic surges from place to place, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept this noon and I the night before.”

Mildred went out of the room and slammed the door. The parlour “aunts” began to laugh at the parlour “uncles.”

“Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic-books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade-journals.”

“Yes, but what about the firemen, then?” asked Montag.

“Ah.” Beatty leaned forward in the faint mist of smoke from his pipe. “What more easily explained and natural? With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright,’ did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn’t it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won’t stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That’s you, Montag, and that’s me.”

The door to the parlour opened and Mildred stood there looking in at them, looking at Beatty and then at Montag. Behind her the walls of the room were flooded with green and yellow and orange fireworks sizzling and bursting to some music composed almost completely of trap-drums, tom-toms, and cymbals. Her mouth moved and she was saying something but the sound covered it.

Beatty knocked his pipe into the palm of his pink hand, studied the ashes as if they were a symbol to be diagnosed and searched for meaning.

“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.”

“Yes.”

Montag could lip-read what Mildred was saying in the doorway. He tried not to look at her mouth, because then Beatty might turn and read what was there, too.

“Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Bum the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead he’s on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country. Ten minutes after death a man’s a speck of black dust. Let’s not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn them all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.”

The fireworks died in the parlour behind Mildred. She had stopped talking at the same time; a miraculous coincidence. Montag held his breath.

“There was a girl next door,” he said, slowly. “She’s gone now, I think, dead. I can’t even remember her face. But she was different. How? How did she happen?”

Beatty smiled. “Here or there, that’s bound to occur. Clarisse McClellan? We’ve a record on her family. We’ve watched them carefully. Heredity and environment are funny things. You can’t rid yourselves of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That's why we’ve lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we’re almost snatching them from the cradle. We had some false alarms on the McClellans, when they lived in Chicago. Never found a book. Uncle had a mixed record; anti-social. The girl? She was a time bomb. The family had been feeding her subconscious, I’m sure, from what I saw of her school record. She didn’t want to know how a thing was done, but why. That can be embarrassing. You ask ‘Why’ to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl’s better off dead.”

“Yes, dead.”

“Luckily, queer ones like her don’t happen, often. We know how to nip most of them in the bud, early. You can’t build a house without nails and wood. If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the Government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won’t be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I’ve tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your dare-devils, jet cars, motor-cycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I’ll think I’m responding to the play, when it’s only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don’t care. I just like solid entertainment.”

Beatty got up. “I must be going. Lecture’s over. I hope I’ve clarified things. The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we’re the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers in the dyke. Hold steady. Don’t let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world. We depend on you. I don’t think you realize how important you are, to our happy world as it stands now.”

Zero Hour for Universal Nationalism

2010-05-28T10:27:00.002+01:00

From the introduction to Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007):

In the tumultuous months following the end of the First World War, Wilson was hailed around the world as the prophet of a new era in world affairs, one in which justice, rather than power, would be the central principle of international relations. [...]

The major leaders who convened for the peace conference in Paris in January 1919 were concerned mainly with fashioning a settlement in Europe. But Europeans were not the only ones who had high hopes for the conference. For colonized, marginalized, and stateless peoples from all over the world — Chinese and Koreans, Arabs and Jews, Armenians and Kurds, and many others — the conference appeared to present unprecedented opportunities to pursue the goal of self-determination. They could now take the struggle against imperialism to the international arena, and their representatives set out for Paris, invited or otherwise, to stake their claims in the new world order. A largely unintended but eager audience for Wilson’s wartime rhetoric, they often imagined the president as both an icon of their aspirations and a potential champion of their cause, a dominant figure in the world arena committed, he had himself declared, to the principle of self-determination for all peoples.

Based on these perceptions, groups aspiring to self-determination formed delegations, selected representatives, formulated demands, launched campaigns, and mobilized publics behind them. They composed and circulated a flood of declarations, petitions, and memoranda directed at the world leaders assembled in Paris and directed at public opinion across the world. Many of the petitioners adopted Wilson’s rhetoric of self-determination and the equality of nations to formulate their demands and justify their aspirations, both because they found his language appealing and, more importantly, because they believed it would be effective in advancing their cause. They quoted at length from the president’s Fourteen Points address and his other wartime speeches, praised his plan for a League of Nations, and aimed to attract his support for their struggles to attain self-determination.

Hundreds of such documents, many addressed to President Wilson himself, made their way to the Paris headquarters of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace at the Hotel Crillon, but most got no further than the president’s private secretary, Gilbert Close. The president read only a small fraction of them, and he acted on fewer still. The complex and contentious issues of the European settlement were foremost on his mind during his months in Paris, and relations with the major imperial powers — Britain, France, Japan—loomed larger in the scheme of U.S. interests as Wilson saw them than did the aspirations of colonized groups or weak states. Though the dispensation of territories that belonged to the defunct empires — German colonies in Africa and the Pacific, Ottoman possessions in the Arab Middle East — was an important topic in the peace negotiations, the leading peacemakers had no intention of entertaining the claims for self-determination of dependent peoples elsewhere, least of all those that ran against their own interests. To himself and to others, Wilson explained this lapse by asserting that the peace conference already had enough on its plate and that the League of Nations would take up such claims in due time.

Many in the colonial world who had followed Wilson’s increasingly dramatic proclamations in the final months of the war, however, came to expect a more immediate and radical transformation of their status in international society. As the outlines of the peace treaty began to emerge in the spring of 1919, it became clear that such expectations would be disappointed and that outside Europe the old imperial logic of international relations, which abridged or entirely obliterated the sovereignty of most non-European peoples, would remain largely in place. The disillusionment that followed the collapse of this ‘‘Wilsonian moment’’ fueled a series of popular protest movements across the Middle East and Asia, heralding the emergence of anticolonial nationalism as a major force in world affairs. Although the principle of self-determination was honored in Paris more in the breach, the events of 1919 established it at the center of the discourse of legitimacy in international relations. Thus, the Wilsonian moment began the process that Hedley Bull called ‘‘the expansion of international society’’ in the twentieth century. It launched the transformation of the norms and standards of international relations that established the self-determining nation-state as the only legitimate political form throughout the globe, as colonized and marginalized peoples demanded and eventually attained recognition as sovereign, independent actors in international society.

This book is an effort to reconstruct the story of the colonial world at the Wilsonian moment. Most historians have told the story of the Paris Peace Conference from the inside out, focusing on the views and actions of the leaders of the great powers of Europe and North America. This book aims to tell it from the outside in, from the perspectives of peoples who were on the margins of the peace conference and of international society more generally. The period on which the narrative centers opened with the U.S. entry into the war in April 1917, when it began to appear that Wilson would play a major role at the peace table, and ended with the conclusion of the Versailles Treaty in June 1919. During this time, Woodrow Wilson’s vision for the postwar world was disseminated to a growing global audience, and, when peace came, colonial peoples moved to claim their place in that world on the basis of Wilson’s proclamations. The crucial period — the Wilsonian moment itself — lasted from the autumn of 1918, when Allied victory appeared imminent and Wilson’s principles seemed destined to shape the coming new world order, until the spring of 1919, as the terms of the peace settlement began to emerge and the promise of a Wilsonian millennium was fast collapsing.

The use of the phrase the ‘‘Wilsonian moment’’ to describe this eventful time does not suggest that Wilson alone conceived or articulated the vision that became so intimately associated with him. Others, including the British prime minister David Lloyd George and, much more forcefully, the Russian Bolshevik leaders V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, had preceded Wilson in advocating a peace settlement based on the principle of self-determination. Nor does the term imply that rhetoric alone was responsible for creating the far-reaching expectations that so many entertained in the wake of the war. The experiences of the war itself, with its unprecedented decimation of human lives and the myriad political, social, and economic dislocations it caused, served as the crucial context for the articulation and dissemination of the Wilsonian message and shaped the perceptions and responses to it. Nevertheless, the term the ‘‘Wilsonian moment’’ captures the fact that, during this period, the American president became for millions worldwide the icon and most prominent exponent of the vision, which many others shared, of a just international society based on the principle of self-determination. His name, and in many cases also his image, came to symbolize and encapsulate those ideas, and Wilson appeared, for a brief but crucial moment, to be the herald of a new era in international affairs. [...]

Wilson’s promise of a new world order captured imaginations across the world. In the wake of a war whose consequences were widely felt, his words captured the attention not only of political elites but also of much broader publics, even if their meanings and implications varied considerably among different groups. Some, of course, remained skeptical, and they were soon joined by many others who grew disillusioned with their erstwhile hero as the developments in Paris and elsewhere failed to fulfill their expectations. But for a while, from mid-1918 to the early spring of 1919, the future of international society seemed to belong to Wilson’s vision and to depend on his influence as the leading figure in world affairs. The Wilsonian moment, therefore, should be examined and understood as an international phenomenon not because every individual on the face of the planet was aware of Wilson’s rhetoric, but because the scope of its dissemination and import transcended the usual geographic enclosures of historical narratives. [...]

The focus of this book is on the specific significance of the Wilsonian moment in the colonial world, defined broadly as the dependent or semidependent territories that encompassed at the time almost all of Asia and Africa. Even within these narrower geographical and conceptual bounds, however, an effort to cover the colonial world in its entirety would have yielded either a broad, general synthesis or else required a multivolume work of encyclopedic proportions. On the other hand, telling the story of the Wilsonian moment in only one region or within a single group would have failed to capture fully the international context of the experiences of colonial peoples at the time, and would have forgone the insights that a broad, integrated perspective can provide. In order to combine fine-grained detail with a broad perspective, therefore, the book focuses on the experiences of four groups: Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, and Koreans. It recounts the responses of these four emergent nations to the Wilsonian moment, probing their evolving perceptions of its challenges and opportunities and tracing its impact on their rhetoric, actions, and goals. It also reconstructs the sprawling international campaigns they launched, in which diasporic communities and unprecedented popular mobilizations both played important roles, and relates them to the broad, transformative protest movements that erupted in all four places in the spring of 1919. Nationalism, as an ideology and as a form of political practice, evolved conceptually and historically within an international context, and it cannot be fully understood outside that context.

There were, of course, many differences among these societies in their histories, structures, and relationships to imperialism. Still, Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, and Koreans shared important elements of historical condition and experience. All four societies had long histories as integrated socioeconomic and political entities and well-established elites imbued with consciousness of distinct cultural and historical identities. Moreover, in each of these four societies there had developed by 1914 influential groups of literate, socially mobile individuals, whose members were conversant in Western languages and ideas and had begun to develop and circulate notions of national identity articulated in modern idioms.8 The Wilsonian moment presented these elites with unprecedented opportunities to advance claims in the name of these emerging national identities and thus bolster and expand their legitimacy both at home and abroad. The language of self-determination and the international forum afforded by the peace conference prompted nationalist leaders to rethink their strategies, redefine their goals, and galvanize larger domestic constituencies than ever before behind campaigns for self-determination. In the spring of 1919, sweeping protest movements against imperialism erupted almost simultaneously in all four societies: the May Fourth movement in China, the launching of Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance movement in India, the 1919 Revolution in Egypt, and the March First movement in Korea.

In all four societies, and not only there, the period between 1917 and 1920 saw a sharp escalation of resistance to imperial penetration and control and the emergence or realignment of institutions and individuals that would play central roles in subsequent anticolonial struggles. In Egypt, Sa‘d Zaghlul, a veteran political figure who before the war had long worked within the British-controlled political system, now established a delegation that demanded the opportunity to put before the peace conference a claim for Egyptian independence. To lead this campaign, Zaghlul, who is remembered in Egypt as the ‘‘Father of the Nation,’’ established a new political party that came to dominate Egyptian politics in the interwar years. A similar shift from accommodation to confrontation occurred in India’s relationship with the empire during the same period, as the Indian National Congress, which before the war adhered to moderate positions toward the empire, became a vehicle for mobilizing resistance to it. By 1920, the Congress came under the control of Mahatma Gandhi, who had himself shifted in 1919 from a position of firm if critical support for Indian membership in the British empire to one of determined opposition to it. The newfound radicalism of the Gandhian Congress augured an era of nationalist struggle that culminated in the dissolution of British rule in 1947.

In China, the May Fourth protests that erupted in response to Chinese disillusion with the Wilsonian promise unleashed broad currents of change in the realms of thought, culture, literature, and politics. In the wake of May Fourth, protests against foreign influence in China broadened and intensified. Among the intellectual and political classes, the erstwhile admiration for the liberal ideals advanced by Wilson was widely replaced with a growing interest in other ideologies as models for building a strong Chinese nation and establishing its status and dignity internationally. And in Korea, too, the March First movement, which began as an effort to draw the attention of Wilson and the peace conference to Korean claims for independence, escalated and broadened the resistance to Japanese colonial rule. In the Korean case, even more than in the others, diasporic organizations played a crucial role in the movement, establishing a provisional government in exile headed by Syngman Rhee, a long-time independence activist and former acquaintance of Wilson at Princeton University. The provisional government survived, though barely, through the interwar years, and in 1948 the United States helped the tenacious Rhee actually attain the position he had claimed since 1919, the presidency of an independent Korean republic.

As this convergence of transformative events around the spring of 1919 suggests, one of the central features of the Wilsonian moment was its simultaneity across the boundaries of nations, regions, and empires within which the histories of the anticolonial movements of the period are usually enclosed. It was a brief but intense period in which people across the world directed attention and actions toward the drama unfolding in Paris, with the U.S. president as its leading protagonist. In part, the story of the Wilsonian moment is one of the articulation and circulation of ideas, most prominently the idea that all peoples had a right to self-determination and the related notion of a liberal international order structured around a league of nations in which all members would be equal in status if not in power. The emergence of Wilson’s ideas about the postwar international order, their gradual articulation and refinement in his wartime rhetoric, and their dissemination — both intentionally through the efforts of U.S. wartime propaganda, and circumstantially through the contemporary infrastructure of global communications, which was dominated by pro-Allied news agencies such as Reuters — are all important components of the story told here.

But this is not only, nor even primarily, an intellectual history, a history of the emergence, articulation, and circulation of ideas. To a greater degree, the story of the Wilsonian moment in the colonial world is one about the role of power, both real and perceived, in the dissemination, adoption, and operationalization — the conversion into purposeful political action — of the new norms of international legitimacy and practice that Wilson championed. For anticolonial nationalists, Wilson’s utterances were surely attractive as well as, to some extent, also innovative. The most crucial feature of his utterances, however, was that they came from a man widely viewed at the time as the most powerful leader in the world arena, whose influence on the shape of the postwar international order, it was assumed, would be decisive. Thus, the perception of the stature of the United States as a major world power and of Wilson’s commitment to his peace plan were just as important as the content of the president’s wartime proclamations in creating the impact of the Wilsonian moment in the colonial world. For a time in 1918 and early 1919, Wilson, who appeared to wield extraordinary leverage over the Allies and enjoy unprecedented popularity among their peoples, seemed to possess both the will and the power to implement his vision.

Wilson himself, it is true, had at best only a vague idea of how the principle of self-determination would be practically implemented even in Europe, and he devoted little attention to its implications elsewhere. Nevertheless, the president’s talk about the right to self-determination and his advocacy of the League of Nations implied a new and more equitable model of international relations, and they took on a life of their own, independent of Wilson and his intentions. For colonial nationalists, the acceptance of these principles as a basis for the armistice and their establishment as central tenets of the coming peace settlement were sufficient reasons to expect great changes in their own positions in international affairs. Wilson, in his wartime addresses, especially those that he delivered in the final months of the war, had couched his principles explicitly in sweeping, universal terms. Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Koreans, and other colonial nationalists saw little reason that they should not apply outside Europe as well as within it.

The Versailles peace is often seen as heralding the apex of imperial expansion, and indeed the empires of the victorious powers, especially the British, French, and Japanese, made significant territorial gains in the wake of the war. Empire, however, cannot survive on territorial control alone. It requires accommodation and legitimacy, at least among a portion of the populations in both the metropole and the periphery. The adoption of the language of self-determination by colonial nationalists, as well as by anti-imperialists in the metropole, weakened these underlying supports of the imperial edifice. It rendered the relationship between imperial powers and subject peoples, as Henri Grimal noted, ‘‘markedly different from the idea of timeless domination which had characterized the previous period’’ and presented a major challenge to the legitimacy and permanence of the imperial order in the international arena. As James Mayall has observed, at Versailles Lloyd George and the French premier, Georges Clemenceau, may have succeeded in the short run in outwitting Wilson in their efforts to protect the interests of their empires. But in an age of advancing popular democracy they could offer no substitute, either domestically or internationally, to the principle of self-determination ‘‘as an ordering principle for international society.’’ Rather than bolster or expand the imperial order, the events of 1919 in fact laid the groundwork for its demise. [...]

At the time of the armistice in November 1918, nationalists across the colonial world believed that the road to self-determination passed through Paris, and they launched broad campaigns to receive a hearing there. It was only in the spring of 1919, as it became clear that their efforts to claim these rights had failed, that upheaval erupted. Thus, the campaigns to advance demands for self-determination and international equality and the subsequent failure and disillusionment helped launch major anticolonial protest movements and mobilize widespread popular support behind them. [...]

In retrospect, it is easy to see that the expectations for a more inclusive international order that Wilson’s rhetoric and global stature raised among colonial nationalists went far beyond the president’s intentions and even further beyond what he would achieve. But at the time, most Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, and Korean nationalists, along with the millions who lined the streets in the capitals of Europe to cheer Wilson as he drove by in his carriage, believed that the peace conference would transform international order in ways that would help them gain the right to self-determination. They were neither naive victims of Wilson’s hypocrisy nor, outside a few exceptions, radicals intent on revolutionary transformation, but rather savvy political actors who, keenly aware of their weakness vis-a-vis the British and Japanese imperial projects, sought to harness Wilson’s power and rhetoric to the struggle to achieve international recognition and equality for their nations. They moved with dispatch and energy to seize the opportunities that the Wilsonian moment seemed to offer to reformulate, escalate, and broaden their campaigns against empire, and worked to mobilize publics both at home and abroad behind their movements. When it became clear that the postwar settlement would fall far short of these expectations and the visions of international equality that Wilson had evoked collapsed, these mobilized nationalists launched the simultaneous revolts that convulsed the colonial world in the spring of 1919. Despite the title of this book, it is they, and not Wilson, who are the main protagonists of the story that follows.

Shamanistic Rituals in Effective Schools

2010-04-22T09:46:00.004+01:00

Steve Sailer’s recent posting of an Onion spoof about naive, well meaning new teachers being destroyed by their experiences in inner city schools reminded me of a section in this little gem, that I found when it was re-published in Charlotte Iserbyt’s The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, about those occasional mass-hysteric episodes where someone claims to have the ‘cure’ for diversity-based differential outcomes in education. It seems the article is unavailable anywhere online for free, so here it is, as published in Iserbyt:

[Not a spoof!]

“Shamanistic Rituals in Effective Schools*”

“Shamanistic Rituals in Effective Schools*” by Brian Rowan, Senior Research Scientist, Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA, April, 1984. Asterisk in title is notation on bottom of title page which states, “Work on this paper was supported by the National Institute of Education, Department of Education, under Contract No. 400–83–003. The contents do not necessarily reflect the view or policies of the Department of Education or the National Institute of Education.” Brian Rowan was involved in Bill Spady’s Far West Lab grant to the Utah State Department of Education to “put OBE in all schools of the nation.”

This paper develops a theoretical perspective for analyzing the non-scientific uses of research in educational policy debates. A central focus is educational researchers’ use of shamanistic rituals to affect organizational health (cf., Miracle, 1982). A number of shamanistic rituals derived from research on “effective” schools are described here, and an analysis demonstrates the circumstances under which these rituals can be used to divine the unknown, cure ills, and control uncertain events.

Background

Miracle (1982) suggested that shamans and applied social scientists perform a number of similar functions in society. Shamans, the powerful medicine men of premodern societies, worked mainly to cure ills, divine the unknown, and control uncertain events, and they performed these functions by using a specialized craft obtained after a long period of formal initiation and training. Similarly, applied social scientists acquire a specialized craft after initiation and training, and they too are called upon to alleviate the vague ills of corporate groups, divine the unknown for organizational strategists, or bring order to the uncertain events that plague institutional affairs.

The analogy raises a number of important issues for applied social science. First and foremost, shamans practice magic, whereas applied social researchers are thought to practice “science.” To liken scientists to magicians raises interesting questions about the relationship of science to pragmatic action. An additional problem is that shamans are but one of the many practitioners of magic in societies, and they can be distinguished from others who employ magic in their rituals, for example, sorcerers, witches and wizards. This observation raises questions about the uses of research in modern policy analysis. If educational “science” functions as magic, who are the shamans, witches, and sorcerers of educational research?

Forms of Pragmatic Action

We begin with the problem of whether applied educational scientists practice magic. A number of anthropologists have observed that magic is used for pragmatic purposes in premodern societies, but that magic is not the only form of pragmatism available to premodern practitioners. For example, both Malinowski (1948) and Evans Pritchard (1965) argued that premodern societies possessed sound technical logics that practitioners could use to successfully accomplish most work tasks. In addition, premodern people were able to sharply distinguish between these working, practical logics and magic. In premodern societies, when tasks were going well, the technical logic of everyday work dominated action. But as uncertainties increased, or as conflict and stress became more problematic, premodern practitioners began to supplement technique with magic. Thus, Malinowski (1948) observed the fishing practices of Trobriand islanders and found that, in the safety of lagoons, practitioners made little use of magic and relied primarily on established technical routines to ensure good fishing. But as activities moved into the more dangerous open seas, magic was increasingly invoked as a supplemental technical aid.

Similar points can be made about the modern educational practitioner’s use of research. It seems clear that schools have an established series of technical routines (Goodlad, 1983). But these practices are not grounded in the highly stylized logics of modern science. Rather, they exist in the more subtle and largely unarticulated logic of teachers and administrators (Jackson, 1968). Although some educational observers have likened this unarticulated logic to magic (e.g., Lortie, 1975), Malinwoski’s (1948) [sic] discussion suggests that it is more appropriate to think of educational research as magic. The educational practitioner appears to make wide use of the subtle and unarticulated logic of schooling, and this logic appears to have the desired technical effect on a large number of students (Hyman, Wright and Reed, 1975). Practitioners make much less use of the stylized “scientific” knowledge of applied social scientists. Indeed, like Malinowski’s Trobrianders, they appear to reserve the use of “science” for those sectors of schooling which are problematic or in “crisis.”

Other arguments also suggest that educational “science” functions much like magic. As Miracle (1982) noted, both applied social scientists and shamans utilize a “force” that derives from an other world (Mauss and Hubert, 1961). Shamans, for example, often travel to other worlds to communicate with spirits or accompany the dead to their supernatural resting places. As a result, they are said to inhabit both the real world and a spirit or supernatural world. Similarly, applied scientists appear to inhabit two distinct worlds, one the “real” world, the other the proverbial “ivory tower.” It is widely recognized that knowledge gained in the ivory tower is not the same as that gained in the “real” world, an observation that endows “scientific” knowledge with a certain otherworldly nature. Thus, like shamans, applied educational scientists inhabit two worlds and practice a craft that has a special legitimacy in social affairs.

Types of Magic

If we perist [sic] in the analogy between educational “science” and magic, it becomes useful to classify various types of magic and magicians. In premodern societies, for example, there were numerous practitioners of magic, including not only shamans, but also various witches, wizards and sorcerers. Distinctions among these practitioners can be made on the basis of their actual magic practices. Wizards and witches often practiced forms of “black magic” that were used as weapons to defend interests or harm enemies, whereas the shaman’s magic was most often employed for benevolent purposes, including the curing of ills. There is also a need to look carefully at the rituals practiced by different groups. For example, shamans often engage in a common “spitting and sucking cure,” but they also use other rituals from their “bag of tricks.”

Educational researchers can also be classified by the types and functions of the rituals they perform. For example, policy analysts sometimes use the rituals of research to confound and weaken political or scientific opponents, a form of research that appears similar to the “black” magic of witches. But there are also research shamans who can be called upon by policy analysts to perform healing rituals. All types of research ritualists select from a common and well-known bag of research tricks, although in recent years there has been a rise of ritual specialists who exclusively work either qualitative or quantitative magic on policy audiences.

Shamanism and School Effectiveness Research

In this paper, we limit attention to a single type of research ritualist—the research shaman—and to a few related magic tricks used within a narrow policy domain. Our interest is in describing research rituals that heal and revitalize sectors of education and not in research that fans controversy, inflicts harm on ideological enemies, or demoralizes existing constituencies in a policy domain. Moreover, the analysis will be narrowed to a few research rituals used in one policy domain to better illustrate how research shamans operate.

Shamanism and Crisis

It is commonly observed that working practitioners in education remain detached from, even ignorant of, the findings and applications of applied research. Yet this observation is not entirely true. Educational policy makers and their research ritualists continue to generate research, and this research continues to play a role in certain sectors of educational practice. Thus, a question emerges: in what sectors of educational institutions are the rituals of research shamanism most utilized?

Anthropological studies suggest some answers to this question. It has been argued that magic assumes its highest importance in institutional sectors plagued by three conditions: (a) high levels of technical uncertainty; (b) structural cleavages that create great stress among social groups; and (c) social disorganization that creates problematic mood states among participants (Malinowski, 1925; Gluckman, 1952; Wallace, 1956). The argument here is that research shamanism is most valued in sectors of education that contain these characteristics. Thus, research in education is most numerous in areas where there is high technical uncertainty (do schools/programs/teachers make a difference to educational outcomes?). The rituals of research also take on great importance in areas where there is conflict among social groups (are new educational initiatives needed to redress past social inequities?). And finally, research is increasingly directed at problems related to disorganization and dissatisfaction in institutional sectors of education (are urban/high schools better or worse than in the past?).

Research on Effective Schools

Research on effective schools has its origins in these problems. The research deals with a sector of educational institutions—the instructional core—which has long been the subject of uncertainty, conflict, and pessimism, and where the use of myth and ritual has been common (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; 1978). What is distinctive about “effective schools” research, in contrast to much past scientific work, is that it has taken a shamanistic approach to the problems of schooling. It has not fanned the flames of discontent and uncertainty like previous scholarly work (e.g., Coleman et al., 1966; Averch et al., 1972; Jencks et al., 1972), but instead has held out hope that the pervasive ills of modern urban schooling can be cured.

Edmonds (1979a), the most powerful of all effective schools shamans before his untimely death, seemed accutely [sic] aware of the need for healing in modern educational institutions, and a careful reading of his works reveals his strategy for effecting a cure for the problems confronting urban education. He argued that research must be used to counter the pessimistic view that schools have weak effects on student outcomes, and that as this occurred, practitioners could attain new expectation states that facilitated, rather than hindered, the achievement of disadvantaged children (see, especially, Edmonds, 1978; 1979b). Thus, Edmonds saw that “science” could be used to confront the conflicts, uncertainties, and problematic mood states afflicting modern schooling.

That Edmonds’ [sic] approach possessed a special “force” in educational policy arenas is indisputable. Like the revitalization movements that swept the great plains during the period of indian [sic] decline (Wallace, 1966), the rituals of effective schools research diffused widely and rapidly. They were adopted by other shamans, who brought them to state departments of education and local school systems, and there these rituals were used as the cornerstone of ambitious revitalization ceremonials (see, e.g., Ogden et al., 1982; Shoemaker, 1982; Clark and McCarthy, 1983).

It is worth noting that the perspective being developed here does not necessarily imply that these shamanistic rituals are hoaxes. Indeed, just as many modern medical practitioners have come to recognize the wisdom and efficacy of shamans, there is at least some reason to think that the arguments of effective schools proponents possess some scientific merit (see, e.g., Rowan, Bossert and Dwyer, 1983). Nevertheless, for the moment, it is useful to suspend our empirical curiousity [sic] about whether these initiatives really “work,” [sic] and to examine instead some of the concrete ritual practices that characterize this new educational movement.

Important Shamanistic Rituals

It has already been suggested that shamanistic rituals are designed to cure ills, divine the unknown, and control uncertain events. In this section of the paper, three prominent effective schools rituals are discussed and their relationship to the central functions of magic are illustrated.

Curing Ills with Literature Reviews

We begin with one of the most common shamanistic rituals in the effective schools movement, the glowing literature review that promises relief from the currently pervasive sense that educational institutions are in poor organizational health. Miller’s (1983: 1) review illustrates the general form of this ritual: “Not so long ago the conventional wisdom regarding American schools was that ‘schools do not make a difference.’ ...Yet today... the message of... research is primarily postive [sic] and upbeat: schools can make a difference” (Miller, 1983: 1).

A closer look illustrates the consistent dramatic form used by reviewers to affect the promise of a cure. First, the authors contrast the dismal tradition of school effects research with “more recent” and more positive studies of effective schools. This is followed by the citation of a host of previously unpublished and obscure studies which are often nothing more than other positive literature reviews. The final step is a grandiose concluding statement, which most often calls on practitioners to adopt the new discoveries.

We speculate that these rituals have their most dramatic effect on naïve individuals who have little time or inclination to follow-up footnotes or read works cited in the text, or on those who have little tolerance for the ambiguity that marks true scientific debate. Lacking a systematic understanding of the scientific pros and cons of effective schools research, naïve individuals are left only with the powerful and appealing rhetoric of the reviewers. Thus it is that research on effective schools has come to be seen as a “cure” for educational ills the less it has been published in scholarly journals and the more it has been disseminated in practitioner magazines. The experiences shaman knows to avoid the scrutiny of scholars, for this can raise objections to the “scientific” basis of ritual claims and divert attention away from the appealing rhetoric. Instead, the shaman cultivates the practitioner who needs a simple and appealing formula.

Divining the Unknown Using Outliers

While the literature review ritual can be observed equally well by both qualitative and quantitative specialists, a second ritual, designed to divine the unknown, is the exclusive domain of quantitative ritualists. The ritual uses residuals from a regression analysis to identify “effective” schools and to contrast them with “ineffective” schools. The purpose is to divine an answer to two nagging questions in school effectiveness research: which are the effective schools in a system and what are these schools doing that makes them different?

The techniques involved in this ritual have been described before (see, Rowan et al., 1983). A regression equation predicting school achievement from school socioeconomic composition is tested, and errors of prediction are calculated. The errors (or residuals) are used to identify “effective” and “ineffective” schools and form samples for contrasted groups studies. The ritual almost always strongly supports the rhetorical posture of the ritual literature review. Since predictor variables never account for all of the variance in school-level achievement, an analysis of residuals will always demonstrate that schools differ in achievement even after controlling for socioeconomic composition. Thus any experienced shaman can find “effective” schools. Second, if a shaman asks a large number of questions, a number of structural and cultural differences between effective and ineffective schools can be found. Thus, the outliers ritual not only identifies the previously unrecognized “effective” schools, it also reveals for the first time why these schools attain effectiveness.

From a magician’s standpoint, this ritual’s power can be increased in a number of ways. First, the worse the specification of the initial regression model, the more persuasive the ritual. For example, by failing to include all measures of school socioeconomic composition, a shaman can increase the residual achievement differences between schools. This, in turn, enhances claims that “effective” schools make a difference to achievement. Moreover, to the extent that school characteristics are correlated to omitted socioeconomic predictors, misspecification [sic] enhances the liklihood [sic] that differences in school characteristics will be found between “effective” and “ineffective” groups of schools. Thus, the worse the initial regression model, the more powerful the shamanistic ritual.

A related tactic is to use aggregate models. By using schools rather than individuals as the unit of analysis, proportions of variance in achievement explained by school management and culture are increased. In between-school analyses, schools can be seen to account for nearly 30% of the variance in achievement. But in between-individual analyses, this is reduced to about 5%. Thus, effective schools ritualists have been able to inflate their claims of school effects through a simple aggregation trick (see Alexander and Griffin, 1976).

The experienced shaman also avoids certain practices. For example, it is wise not to repeat the residuals ritual in the same population, for this highlights the low correlation of residuals over time and raises questions about measurement reliability. It is much wiser to demonstrate reliability by using the conventional, and cross-sectional, “split/half” procedure of psychometricians (see, Forsythe, 1973). Similarly, after a few performances of the residuals ritual and the associated contrasted group study, it becomes possible to ignore problems of validation. Thus, as time moves on, the wise shaman avoids achievement data and the residuals ritual entirely, and instead assesses schools on the degree to which their structures match those of previously identified “effective” schools.

Controlling Uncertainty through Measurement

A final shamanistic ritual in the effective schools movement requires the shaman to have advanced training in the art of psychometrics. The ritual is particularly suited to application in urban or low performing school systems where successful instructional outcomes among disadvantaged students are highly uncertain but where mobilized publics demand immediate demonstrations of success. The uncertainties faced by practitioners in this situation can easily be alleviated by what scholars have begun to call “curriculum alignment.”

This ritual begins with an analysis of what is actually being taught in schools. The shaman conducting the ritual assembles a group of local practitioners and together they list instructional objectives for each grade level. The next step is to find achievement tests that ask questions related to these objectives. To the extent that test items matching local objectives are found, either in commerically [sic] prepared tests or in locally constructed ones, and to the extent that these items are used in achievement testing rather than the haphazard collection of items contained in most commerically [sic] prepared tests, the curriculum and testing systems of the local school are said to be “aligned.”

Since it is known that at least some variance in student achievement is a function of students [sic] opportunity to learn what is tested in criterion measures (Cooley and Leinhardt, 1980), the alignment ritual can have immediate effects on perceptions of effectiveness. For example, a school system moving from an unaligned commercially prepared achievement test to an aligned one can expect that it will score higher on national norms than before. But this increased “effectiveness” does not occur because students are learning more or different things. In the typical alignment ceremony, only test items—not instruction—are changed. Nevertheless, while student learning remains unchanged, alignment allows students to practice criterion measures and achieve higher test scores, thus giving them an advantage over comparable students in unaligned school systems.

An even more powerful demonstration of instructional effectiveness can be achieved if shamans avoid the standard psychometric practice of designing norm-referenced achievement tests and move instead toward criterion-referenced tests. As Popham and Husek (1969) discussed, the typical norm-referenced achievement test eliminates items that nearly all students in a population can answer correctly, since norm-referenced tests are designed to produce between-student variance in achievement scores. But if one neglects this practice and allows items that almost everyone can answer correctly to be included in achievement tests, a larger number of students will appear to be performing more successfully in their academics.

Thus, the art of measurement can be used as an aid to shamanism, espcially [sic] in urban schools plagued by the uncertainties of student performance. Student variability in performance can be reduced, and relative performance increased, not by changing instructional objectives or practices, but simply by changing tests and testing procedures.

Conclusion

The analysis of specific shamanistic rituals in the effective schools movement raises a number of important questions about the relationship of applied science to pragmatic action. Most importantly, it suggests that future studies of “science” as magic are needed. There is a need to begin to chart other rituals used by applied scientists to disarm enemies, cure ills, and divine the unknown. Moreover, there is a need to study the conditions under which these magical practices spread through practitioner populations. Using this perspective, much of the literature on organizational change and applied research can be rewritten from an institutional perspective (Meyer and Rowan, 1977).

At the same time, there is a need to carefully analyze the science of magic. There can be little doubt that Malinowski’s (1948: 50) observations about premodern magic will ring true for many observers of current applied research in education:
...when the sociologist approaches the study of magic... he finds to his disappointment an entirely sober, prosaic, even clumsy art, enacted for purely practical reasons, governed by crude and shallow beliefs, carried out in a simple and monotonous technique.

Yet this “clumsy” art sometimes achieves great effects in practitioner communities and may even have some empirical merit, and this raises the appealing promise that applied social scientists can someday develop shamanistic rituals that empirically “work.”

References
Alexander, K. and L. Griffin. School district effects on academic achievement: a reconsideration. American Sociological Review, 1976, 41, 144–151.
Averch, H.A. et al. How effective is schooling? A critical review of research. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Educational Technology Publications, 1972.
Coleman, J.S. et al. Equality of educational opportunity. Washington, D.C., U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1966.
Cooley, W.W. and G. Leinhardt. The instructional dimensions study. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 1980. 2, 1–26.
Clark, T.A. and D. McCarthy. School improvement in New York City: the evolution of a project. Educational Researcher, 1983, 12. 17–24.
Edmonds, R. A discussion of the literature and issues related to effective schooling. St. Louis: CEMREL, Inc., 1978 [sic].
Edmonds, R. Effective schools for the urban poor. Educational Leadership, 1979a, 37, 15–24.
Edmonds, R. A conversation with Ron Edmonds. Educational Leadership, 1979b, 37, 12–15.
Evans Pritchard, E. Theories of primitive religion. London: Cambridge Press, 1965.
Forsythe, R.A. Some empirical results related to the stability of performance indicators in Dyer’s student change model of an educational system. Journal of Educational Measurement, 1973, 10, 7–12.
Gluckman, M. Rituals of rebellion in S.E. Africa. London: Oxford Press, 1954.
Goodlad, J.I. A Place called school. New York: McGraw Hill, 1983.
Hyman, H.H., C. Wright and C. Reed. The enduring effects of education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
Jackson, P.W. Life in classrooms. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968.
Jencks, C.L. et al. Inequality: a reassessment of the effects of family and schooling in America. New York: Basic Books, 1972.
Lortie D. Schoolteacher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
Malinowski, B. Magic, science and religion. Glencoe: Free Press, 1948.
Mauss M. and H. Hubert. On magic and the unknown. In, Parsons, T. et al (eds.). Theories of society, II. Glencoe: Free Press, 1961.
Meyer, J. and B. Rowan. Formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 1977, 83, 340–363.
Meyer, J. and B. Rowan. The structure of educational organizations. In M. Meyer et al, Environments and organizations. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
Miller, S. A history of effective schools research: A critical review. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational research [sic] Association, Montreal, April, 1983.
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Ogden, E., W. Fowler and D. Kunz. A study of strategies to increase student achievement in low achieving schools. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New York, March, 1982.
Popham, W. and H. Husek. Implications of criterion referenced measurement. Journal of Educational Measurement, 1969, 6, 1–9.
Rowan, B., S. Bossert and D. Dwyer. Research on effective schools: a cautionary note. Educational Researcher, 1983, 12, 24–31.
Shoemaker, J. What are we learning? Evaluating the Connecticut school effectiveness project. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New York, March, 1982.
Wallace, A. Revitalization movements. American Anthropologist, 1956, 58, 264–281.

Otto Strasser: Nationalism the antithesis of Imperialism

2010-04-12T09:38:00.003+01:00

The resolute repudiation of any form of imperialism is a core feature of the volkisch idea. Without reservation it affirms the right of every nation to national independence, to its autonomous control of the forms taken by its political, economic and cultural life.

Quoted in Aufbau des Sozialismus [The Establishment of Socialism] Heinrich Grunov: Prague, 1936), 83.

Sam Francis: Nationalism, Old and New

2010-01-17T13:09:00.001Z

From Joseph Scotchie, The Paleoconservatives : New Voices of the Old Right (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishing, 1999)

In the course of American history, nationalism and republicanism have usually been enemies, not allies. From the days of Alexander Hamilton, nationalism has meant unification of the country under a centralized government, the supremacy of the executive over the legislative branch, the reduction of states' rights and local and sectional parochialism, governmental regulation of the economy and engineering of social institutions, and an activist foreign policy - expansionist, imperialist, or globalist - that costs money and requires at least occasional wars. Nationalism and its proponents have historically been Anglophiles, emulating the mercantilist dynastic state that flourished in Great Britain from the eighteenth century, and for all their claims of overcoming sectionalism and private interests, they have been identified with the North-eastern parts of the United States and its instititions - New England, New York City, the Ivy League, Big Banks and Big Business, Wall Street, and Washington. The national state the nationalists defended and constructed was born with the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, reached adolescence in the victory of the North in the Civil War, and grew to a corpulent adulthood in the twentieth-century managerial state of Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.

The principal opponents of nationalism in American history have been republicans, and it is one of the ironies of our history that the political party that claims the republican name has been the chief vehicle since the Civil War of anti-republican nationalism. The Anti-federalists who opposed ratification of the Constitution were men immersed in the political theory of classical republicanism, a school of thought that originated in modern times with Machiavelli, found ex-

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pression in the seventeenth-century British resistance to the powers of the monarchy, and in the eighteenth century influenced both radical Tories and radical Whigs. Deeply suspicious of centralized power of any kind and of the corruption it bred, the Anti-federalists opposed ratification, demanded a Bill of Rights to limit federal power, insisted on a strict reading of the constitutional text as the basis of law, defended the states against the federal government and the Congress against the Presidency, and were generally content with the limitations on wealth and national power that a small, restricted state imposed, in preference to what they condemned as the “luxury” and “empire” that national consolidation and an interventionist foreign policy would encourage. “The anti-federalists,” writes Professor Ralph Ketcham in his introduction to a popular edition of their writings:

quote:

[Looked] to the Classical idealization of the small, pastoral republic where virtuous, self-reliant citizens managed their own affairs and shunned the power and glory of empire. To them, the victory in the American Revolution meant not so much the big chance to become a wealthy world power, but rather the opportunity to achieve a genuinely republican polity, far from the greed, lust for power, and tyranny that had generally characterized human society.

endquote

Though the Anti-federalists lost, their ideas, far more than those of Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, have informed the long American tradition of resistance to the leviathan state of the nationalists, appearing in the thought and on the lips of John Randolph, John C. Calhoun, the leaders of the Confederacy, the Populists of the late nineteenth century and the Southern Agrarians of the early twentieth, and in the Old Right conservatism of the era between Charles Lindbergh and Jesse Helms.

In the eighteenth century, when the debate between these two sides of the American political coin still sparkled, it was possible for the American people and their leaders to choose republicanism and to institutionalize its ideals. Perhaps it was possible to do so as late as the early twentieth century, before the managerial state began to crystallize. Today it is no longer possible. The national state has long since triumphed, and with it, wedded to it like Siamese siblings, multinational corporations, giant labor unions, universities and foundations, and all the titanic labyrinth of modern bureaucratic organizations in both the "public" and the increasingly illusory "private" sectors have won as well. To establish republicanism in anything like its classical form would involve a massive rejection and dismantlement of the main features of the twentieth century - the physical and social technologies

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by which modern, centralized, bureaucratically managed mass organizations operate - and while the continued existence and dominance of such features are not inevitable in any Hegelian sense, no one save a few romantic reactionaries seriously contemplates doing away with them. Not only do technology and its organized applications entice us with “luxury” - what we today complacently call a “high standard of living” - but also they offer to those who understand how to manipulate them a degree of power unknown to the most imperious despots of the past. The elites that manage modern mass organizations and master the technical skills that allow these organizations to function cannot permit the decentralization and autonomy that characterize republican civic culture simply because their power would vanish, and these elites are lodged not only in the state but also in the dominant organizations of the economy and culture so that our incomes and our very thoughts, values, tastes, and emotions are conditioned and manipulated by them and their apologists. Short of a new Dark Age (or perhaps it would be a Golden Age), in which knowledge of scientific and organizational technology is lost, there is no prospect of reversing the trend toward mass organization and its absorption of local and decentralized institutions.

Moreover, as most students of classical republicanism understand, the distinctive principle of its theory is its concept of “virtue,” a quality that consists less in moralistic purity than in personal and social independence. Owning and operating his own farm or shop, usually producing his own food and clothing, governing his own family and his own community, and defending himself with his own arms in company with his own relatives and neighbors, the citizen of the classical republic neither needed nor wanted a leviathan state to fight wars across the globe in behalf of democracy nor to pretend to protect him and his home. Nor did he need or want a job in someone else’s company, or a pension plan or health benefits or paid vacations or five-hour workdays. He did not want to shop in vast shopping malls where nothing is worth buying and nothing bought will last the year. It did not occur to him to enroll himself or his children in therapy courses or in sensitivity and human-relations clinics in order to find out how to get along with his neighbors, and he sought no edification or instruction from the mass media to entertain him continuously or indoctrinate him with the current cliches and slogans of public discussion or trick him into buying even more junk for which he had no use and no desire. If the citizen succumbed to such temptations, then he had become dependent on someone or something other than himself and his extension in family and

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community. Men who become dependent on others cannot govern themselves, and if they cannot govern themselves, they cannot keep a republic.

Today, virtually everyone in the United States is habituated to a style of living that is wrapped up in dependency on mass organizations of one kind or another - supermarkets, hospitals, insurance companies, the bureaucratized police, local government, the mass media, the factories and office buildings where we work, the apartment complexes and suburban communities where we live, and the massive, remote, and mysterious national state that supervises almost every detail of our lives. Most Americans cannot even imagine life without such dependencies and would not want to live without them if they could imagine it. The classical republicans were right. Having become dependent on others for our livelihoods, our protection, our entertainment, and even our thoughts and tastes, we are corrupted. We neither want a republic nor could we keep it if we had one. We do not deserve to have one, and like the barbarians conquered and enslaved by the Greeks and Romans, we are suited only for servitude.

Classical republicanism, then, is defunct as a serious political alternative to the present regime, but this does not mean that Americans should either embrace the old, Hamiltonian nationalism or merely squat passively in their kennels waiting for the next whistle from their masters. Even though virtually no one today subscribes or adheres to the classical republican ideal of virtue and independence, even though most Americans are too “corrupt” (in republican terms) to support a republic, there remain a large number of Americans, perhaps a majority, whose material interests and most deeply held cultural codes are endangered by the national (and increasingly supranational) managerial regime. These “Middle Americans,” largely white and middle class, derive their income from their dependence on the mass structures of the managerial economy, and, because many of them have long since lost their habits of self-reliance, they also are dependent on the services of the government (at least indirectly) and the dominant culture. Yet despite their dependency, the regime does little for them and much to them. They find that their jobs are insecure, their savings stripped of value, their neighborhoods and schools and homes unsafe, their elected leaders indifferent and often crooked, their moral beliefs and religious professions and social codes under perpetual attack even from their own government, their children taught to despise what they believe, their very identity and heritage as a people threatened, and their future - politi-

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cal, economic, cultural, racial, national, and personal - uncertain. They find that no matter which party or candidate they support, no matter what the candidates and parties promise, nothing substantially changes, except for the worse. Although they do the labor that sustains the managerial system, pay the taxes that support it, fight the wars its leaders devise, raise the families and try to pass on the beliefs and habits that enable the regime and the country to exist and survive, what they receive from the regime is never commensurate with what they give it.

They are the Americans sneered at as the “Bubba vote,” mocked as Archie Bunkers, and denounced as the racists, sexists, xenophobes, and hate criminals who haunt the dark corners of the land, the “Dark Side” of America, even as their own energy, sacrifice, and commitment make possible the regime and the elite that despise them, exploit them, and dispossess them. They are at once the real victims of the regime and the core or nucleus of American civilization, the Real America, the American Nation.

Throughout this century, Middle Americans have gradually acquired a collective consciousness, an awareness of who they are and what their position is in the regime that exploits them. In economically prosperous periods, the radicalism of that consciousness is largely dormant, but in the Depression, the inflationary crunch of the 1970s, and the recessions of the early 1980s and the early 1990s, material insecurity has served as a trigger for a heightened consciousness, a radicalization, a sharper self-perception of their plight. Neither liberalism and the ideologies of the left nor mainstream conservatism, an entrepreneurial version of classical republicanism, adequately expresses their plight or their interests and values or offers much of a solution.

The left offers nothing but economic redistribution predicated on egalitarian and universalist dogmas, and in practice this means that liberal-left politics reflect the interests of the non-white underclass and the intelligentsia that designs the formulas and policies of the left. Hence, the left is incapable of defending the specific interests and concrete cultural norms of Middle Americans. The right, though it defends (in theory) Middle-American cultural norms and institutions, offers a vision of decentralism, strict constitutionalism, economic individualism, and a minimal state that fails to speak to Middle-American material interests and the challenges that they typically encounter. What Middle Americans need is a political formula and a public myth that synthesize the attention to material-economic interests offered by the left with the defense of concrete cultural and national identity offered by the

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right. The division of the American political spectrum into the categories of right and left makes the political expression of such a formula virtually impossible.

The appropriate formula for the expression of Middle-American material interests and cultural values is nationalism. The managerial state and its linked economic and cultural structures have succeeded in breaking down the regional variations, local and sectional autonomy, and institutional stability and independence of Middle Americans, and the regime now lurches happily toward a globalization that seeks to integrate all Americans (and all other peoples as well) into a planetary political, economic, demographic, and cultural order in which national identity will eventually disappear entirely. The homogenization of subnational social and regional differences through political centralization, urbanization and mobility, mass communications, and mass consumption and production means that the older, decentralized identities of particular social classes, sections, communities, and religious and ethnic groups no longer effectively mobilize Americans for political action. Identities as Southerners or Midwesterners, Catholics or Protestant, Anglo-Saxon Old Stock or European ethnic, small businessman or assembly-line worker, no longer seem to offer sufficient bonds or common interests for serious political cooperation for any goal beyond immediate special interests. The emerging identity of Middle America, however, appears to convey sufficient meaning to serve as the foundation of a politically and socially important force, and a nationalism that is politically and culturally based on Middle Americans, expresses their material interests, and affirms their cultural norms as the dominant public myth of American civilization is today the only possible vehicle for effective resistance to managerial globalism and the national and cultural extinction it threatens.

Moreover, only nationalism seems capable of organizing offensively on a collective scale. One reason for the failure of classical republicanism and similar decentralist movements was that they were capable of only defensive maneuvering and were never able to overcome divisions of particular and divergent interests and identities sufficiently to organize an effective offensive strategy aimed at dominance rather than mere survival and liberty. The defensive strategy mounted by the Confederacy during the Civil War was one of the main reasons for its military defeat, and similar defensiveness has crippled conservative tactics as well. Activated only by immediate threats to local or private interests, conservative forces have organized mainly around striking

[p.194]

personalities and “single issues” - tax revolts, religious and social issues of largely sectarian concern, anti-busing and educational movements, anti-communism, deregulations, term limits - and they tend to disband or wither when their favorite personality is elected or the threats to their immediate interests and pet causes seem to be pushed back. Nationalism, through its historically proven capacity to mobilize passions of mass solidarity and sacrifice and its aggressive invocation of collective identity, offers a practical instrument for overcoming the burden of a purely defensive conservatism and aspiring to enduring cultural and political power.

The old nationalism of the Hamiltonian tradition will not suffice for this purpose, however. It was the explicit mission of Hamiltonian nationalism to obliterate what Hamilton’s best and most recent biographer, Forrest McDonald, calls “the inertia of a social order whose pervasive attributes were provincalism and lassitude.” The means by which Hamilton determined to accomplish that “revolutionary change” was money - wealth, economic growth - aided and supported by the national state. “To transform the established order,” writes Professor McDonald,

quote:

[To] make society fluid and open to merit, to make industry both rewarding and necessary, all that needed to be done was to monetize the whole - to rig the rules of the game so that money would become the universal measure of the value of things. For money is oblivious to class, status, color, and inherited social position; money is the ultimate, neutral, impersonal arbiter. Infused into an oligarchical, agrarian social order, money would be the leaven, the fermenting yeast, that would stimulate growth, change, prosperity, and national strength.

endquote

But by making money “the universal measure of the value of things,” the defining principle of the national identity, and joining it to centralized power, Hamilton ultimately defeated his own purposes. In the first place, because his nationalism set itself against existing social institutions and habits, it was necessarily alienated from and adversarial toward the norms by which most Americans lived, and its alienation has persisted for two centuries to inform the cultural style and attitudes of the dominant elites of the managerial system toward the rest of the country. Secondly, because his nationalism was based on the abstraction of money, it was unable to win the support of any but economically ambitious Americans and unable to express or sustain a genuinely national or even any genuine social bond. Hence, Hamilton’s nationalism - rational, calculative, pragmatic - degenerated into a mask for individual, factional, and sectional acquisition. It was not and could not be an au-

[p.195]

thentic nationalism that controlled and disciplined the parts within the whole but only a pseudo-nationalism that allowed the parts to seize control of the whole and define the whole in terms of the parts and their interests. As another of Hamilton’s biographers, John C. Miller, writes, the failure of Hamilton’s nationalism probably “stemmed from the fact that he associated the national government with no great moral issue capable of capturing the popular imagination; he seemed to stand only for ‘the natural right of the great fishes to eat up the little ones whenever they can catch them.’”

American nationalism after Hamilton, especially through Abraham Lincoln, sought to rectify this flaw by defining the ideal of national unity in terms of (more accurately, masking it with) a “great moral issue.” Manifest Destiny was one such issue, and it quickly became a mask for territorial expansion, surviving in Wilsonian internationalism, the messianic anticommunism of Cold War liberalism, and the global democratism and “New World Order” of the post-Cold War neoconservatives. Equality was another such issue, and it too served as a mask for acquisitive individualism. Harry Jaffa is in a sense correct that the “principle of Equality” as he perceives it in the Declaration of Independence and in Lincoln’s thought “is the ground for the recognition of those human differences which arise naturally, but in civil society when human industry and acquisitiveness are emancipated,'” though he is wrong in claiming that equality is “far from enfranchising any leveling action of government.” This very process by which human acquisitiveness is “emancipated” involves the obliteration by the state of social barriers to acquisitiveness, and so it did in the attack on property and federalism that Lincoln unleashed in the Civil War. Hence, M.E. Bradford is also (and more importantly) correct when he writes that the depredations and corruptions of the Gilded Age, the “era of the Great Barbecue,” the original “vulture capitalism,” “began either under [Lincoln’s] direction or with his sponsorship” and that Lincoln’s administration laid “the cornerstone of this great alteration in the posture of the Federal government toward the sponsorship of business.” It was indeed the cornerstone of the modern corporate state on which the twin towers of managerial capitalism and managerial government are grounded. The “great moral issues” that the old nationalism eventually selected, therefore, were little more than fantastic and easily penetrated costumes in which even older human passions of greed and lust for power sallied forth to their orgy.

Precisely because the old nationalism assumed an adversarial rela-

[p.196]

tionship toward the norms and institutions to which most Americans adhered, it could locate few forces in American society with which it could join, and it therefore came to rely almost entirely on a centralized state as the only “nationalizing” instrument available for its mission. Hence, the old nationalism was intimately bound up with abstraction, alienation, the serving of special rather than authentically national interests, and the consolidation of state power against its own society.

What a new, Middle-American nationalism must seek is a redefinition of nationalism away from the terms of the old. Since a Middle-American nationalism bases itself on the actual interest and norms of a concrete social group, it will not display the same adversarial alienation that affected the pseudo-nationalism it seeks to replace, nor will it need to rely on the power of the national state to the same degree or in the same way. Nevertheless, the mission of the new nationalism must be not merely the winning of formal political power through elections and roll-call votes but also the acquisition of substantive social power and the displacement of the incumbent managerial elite of the regime by its own elite drawn from and representing Middle-American social stratum. No social group becomes an elite unless it makes use of the instruments of force that are at the heart of the state, and hence, a Middle-American nationalism cannot expect to achieve its goals unless it employs the state to reward its own socio-political base and exclude its rivals from access to rewards. A Middle-American nationalism must expect to redefine legal rules, political procedures, fiscal and budgetary mechanisms, and national policy generally in the interests of Middle Americans, and it must do so with no illusions about rejecting, decentralizing, or dismantling the national state or the power it affords. Middle-American interests are dependent on the national state through various educational, fiscal, trade, and economic instruments, and a Middle-American nationalism ought to announce an explicit agenda of consolidating and enhancing these instruments. At the same time, a new nationalism must recognize that many of the organs of the national state exist only to serve the interests of the incumbent elite and its underclass allies - the arts and humanities endowments, and most or all of the Departments of Education, Labor, Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services, and the civil rights enforcement agencies in various departments - and it should seek their outright abolition, as well as that of those agencies and departments in the national security bureaucracy that serve globalist and anti-nationalist agendas.

[p.197]

But power based merely on the state is insufficient for the reconstitution of American society under Middle-American dominance. State power indeed, though a prerequisite for the emergence of a new elite, is by itself a weak support, and it must be supplemented by cultural dominance. Under the incumbent elite and its regime, characteristic Middle-American norms of sacrifice for and solidarity with family, community, ethnicity, nation, religion, and morals, and their rules of taste and propriety, are under continuous attack, subversion, and delegitimization by the cultural and intellectual vanguards of the elite. In place of such norms, the elite offers an ethic of hedonism, immediate gratification, and cosmopolitan or universalist dispersion of concrete identities and loyalties, an ethic that serves the interests of the incumbent elite by encouraging a passive and homogenized (though fragmented) culture of continuous consumption, distraction, entertainment, self-indulgence, surrender of social responsibilities to mass organizations, and the erosion of the concrete social identities and intermediary institutions that restrain the centralized manipulative power of both political and corporate structures.

By far the most strategically important effort of an emerging Middle-America counter-elite would be a long counter-march through the institutions of the dominant elite - universities, think tanks and foundations, schools, the arts, journalism, organized religion, the professions, labor organizations, and corporations - not only to assert the legitimacy of Middle-American cultural and ethnic identity, norms, and institutions but also to define American society in terms of them. Instead of an ethic of acquisitive individualism, immediate and perpetual gratification, distraction, and dispersion, the new nationalism should assert an ethic of solidarity and sacrifice able to discipline and direct national energy and reinforce national, social, and ethnic bonds of identity. The pseudo-nationalist ethic of the old nationalism that served only as a mask for the pursuit of special interests will be replaced by the social ethic of an authentic nationalism that can summon and harness the genius of a people certain of its identity and its destiny. The myth of the managerial regime that America is merely a philosophical proposition about the equality of all mankind (and therefore includes all mankind) must be replaced by a new myth of the nation as a historically and culturally unique order that commands loyalty, solidarity, and discipline and excludes those who do not or cannot assimilate to its norms and interests. This is the real meaning of “America First”: America must be first not only among other nations but first also among the

[p.198]

other (individuals or class or sectional) interests of its people. Unless a Middle-American nationalism (or any other socio-political movement) can achieve such cultural hegemony through the formulation of an accepted public myth, its political power and economic resources will remain dependent on the cultural power of its adversaries and eventually will succumb to their manipulation as it takes it cues on goals and tactics from its opponents.

If a new Middle-American nationalism is in some respects a synthesis and a transcendence of the conventional poles of right and left, it is also in another sense a resolution of the popular conflict between the classical republicanism and the nationalism around which so much of American political history has swung. Like the nationalist tradition, it concerns itself with the pragmatic defense of national interests in foreign affairs, military security, and political economy, but unlike the old nationalism it perceives a national interest beyond this pragmatic dimension in the preservation of the distinctive cultural and ethnic foundations of nationality, recognizing that pragmatic, material, and economic considerations may and should defer to the more central norms without which pragmatism is merely a meaningless process. The affirmation of national and cultural identity as the core of the new nationalist ethic acquires special importance at a time when massive immigration, a totalitarian and anti-white multiculturalist fanaticism, concerted economic warfare by foreign competitors, and the forces of anti-national political globalism continue to jeopardize the cultural identity, demographic existence, economic autonomy, and national independence and sovereignty of the American nation.

Like the republican tradition, the new nationalism is essentially populist in tactics, locating the cultural and moral core of contemporary American society in a stratum that is the main victim of the regime that now prevails in the United States. Like republicanism also, it is less interested in the abstract pursuit of luxury and empire than in the defense of the characteristic norms and identity of the people it defines and represents, and like republicanism it calls that people to a duty higher than mere accumulation and aggrandizement, to a destiny of knowing who they are, where they came from, and what they can be. If they remain able to answer that call, they and their posterity may yet achieve both a virtue and a power that neither old republicans nor old nationalists were ever able to create.

[p.199]

2010-01-04T09:35:00.003Z

Over the last few months I've posted something like a post a day, more often than not a quote from a book not found anywhere else online, but points made by Alex Linder and Harold Covington in their recent interviews with Jim Giles and Greg Johnson, respectively, chimed with thoughts I've been having myself. Linder argued that we already have all the arguments and authorities we need, Covington warned of the dangers of online activity replacing more valuable and rewarding face-to-face and community activism. These thoughts, coupled with changing personal circumstances, mean I'm going to cut back the volume of posts to this blog, probably to one or two at each weekend. I hope the regular readers will keep dropping by, and, of course, that you all had a happy Christmas.

Yule

2009-12-21T14:56:00.000Z

From the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore:

Yule.
This word, in various spellings, means a loosely defined midwinter period (not a single day) in the early languages of most Germanic and Scandinavian countries. Bede, writing of pagan England, mentions two months, ‘early Yule’ and ‘later Yule’, corresponding to Roman December and January; after the Conversion, ‘Yule’ was narrowed to mean either the Nativity (25 December), or the twelve days of festivity beginning on this date. The word Christmas replaced ‘Yule’ in most of England in the 11th century, but not in north-eastern areas of Danish settlement, where it survived strongly till modern times as the normal dialect term for Christmas. Nineteenth-century writers took up the word as a way of denoting the ‘Christmas of olden times’, with its lavish food and secular jollity, situated in a largely invented ‘Merrie England’.

The medieval liking for pageantry and symbolism sometimes led to Yule being impersonated (cf. Father Christmas). In 1572 the Archbishop of York ordered the Mayor and Aldermen to suppress an annual parade on St Thomas’s Day (21 December) called ‘The Riding of Yule and his Wife’, because it drew ‘great concourses of people’ away from church-going, and involved disguising. The man representing Yule carried a shoulder of lamb and a large cake of fine bread; he was accompanied by his ‘wife’, carrying a distaff, and by attendants who threw nuts to the crowd.

The Yule Log (or Clog, or Christmas Block) is mentioned in folklore collections from most parts of England, but especially the West Country and the North. It would be the largest piece of wood which could fit on the family hearth, and was usually brought in on Christmas Eve with some ceremony, and put on the fire that evening; many writers, including Herrick, say it was kindled with a fragment kept from the previous year’s log. It was also generally believed that it would be very unlucky for the family if the log was allowed to go out on Christmas Day. It is not clear when the custom arose, since the first definite references are only from the 17th century, for example Aubrey’s “In the West-riding of Yorkshire on Christmas Eve at night they bring in a large Yule-log, or Christmas block, and set it on fire and lap their Christmas ale and sing ‘Yule, Yule, a pack of new cards and a Christmas stool’”.

Victorian illustrations of a medieval Christmas often show several men hauling huge trees or stumps in with ropes, but the antiquity of the word ‘Yule’ cannot prove the custom’s age. Less well known is the custom of lighting a Yule candle on Christmas Eve, first recorded by this name in 1817. These were taller than usual candles (‘half a yard in length’), and there was a tradition of chandlers and grocers giving them to their regular customers. The custom is reported chiefly from the north of the country, but its wider range is indicated by Parson Woodeforde’s diary entries, in Norfolk, such as: ‘I lighted my large wax-candle being Xmas day during tea-time this afternoon for abt. an hour’ (25 December 1790). The pre-Reformation Church made a particular feature of candles at Christmas, and strong connections between the season and candles persist to this day. It was thought unlucky to light the Yule candle before dusk on Christmas Eve, and once alight it was not moved. As with the log, a small piece was kept ‘for luck’ in the coming year.

A Christmas Reminder

2009-12-21T14:53:00.000Z

Kirsty MacColl

2009-12-18T15:06:00.001Z

10 October 1959 – 18 December 2000

Ezra Pound on Brooks Adams

2009-12-18T09:11:00.005Z

In the Greenwood Press Ezra Pound Encyclopedia:

Carta da Visita
Written in Italian, Carta da Visita was published in Rome in 1942 by Giambattista Vicari. A new edition was published in Milan in 1974 by Vanni Scheiwiller, and an English version, in a translation by John Drummond and titled A Visiting Card, was published in London in 1952. This translation was reprinted, with some revisions, in Impact (1960), pages 44–74, and without the revisions in Selected Prose 1909–1965 (1973), pages 306–335.

Carta da Visita consists of some thirty headwords, apparently disjointed but with a certain internal coherence, dealing with economics, politics, history, and culture. The concept of the nation, its control of the economy, its monetary system and policies (the right to coin and to lend money, the introduction of stamp script), and its falling under hostile forces such as international monopolism and usurocracy govern Pound’s choice for headwords. Characteristically Pound traces the history of his favorite conflict through positive and negative models: Monte dei Paschi di Siena and the monetary experiment of Wörgl versus Bank of England. He also points to the affinities between the American and the Fascist Revolutions. As regards culture, he advances his “canon” (Homer, Sappho, the Latin elegists, Troubadours, Cavalcanti, Dante, etc.) in a dense but imprecise language for whose renewal and reinvigoration he is hoping.
Stefano Maria Casella

One of the thirty joints as published in Impact:

Brooks Adams

This member of the Adams family, son of C. F. Adams, grandson of J. Q. Adams, and great-grandson of J. Adams, Father of the Nation, was, as far as I know, the first to formulate the idea of Kulturmorphologie in America. His cyclic vision of the West shows us a consecutive struggle against four great rackets, namely the exploitation of the fear of the unknown (black magic, etc.), the exploitation of violence, the exploitation or monopolization of cultivable land, and the exploitation of money.

But not even Adams himself seems to have realized that he fell for the nineteenth-century metaphysic with regard to this last. He distinguishes between the swindle of the usurers and that of the monopolists, but he slides into the concept, shared by Mill and Marx, of money as an accumulator of energy.

Mill defined capital “as the accumulated stock of human labour.”

And Marx, or his Italian translator: “commodities, in so far as they are values, are materialized labour,”
so denying both God and nature.
With the falsification of the word everything else is betrayed.

Commodities (considered as values, surplus values, food, clothes, or whatever) are manufactured raw materials.

Only spoken poetry and unwritten music are composed without any material basis, nor do they become “materialized.”

The usurers, in their obscene and pitch-dark century, created this satanic transubstantiation, their Black Mass of money, and in so doing deceived Brooks Adams himself, who was fighting for the peasant and humanity against the monopolists.

“ ... money alone is capable of being transmuted immediately into any form of activity.” -- This is the idiom of the black myth!

One sees well enough what he was trying to say, as one understands what Mill and Marx were trying to say. But the betrayal of the word begins with the use of words that do not fit the truth, that do not say what the author wants them to say.

Money does not contain energy. The half-lira piece cannot create the platform ticket, the cigarettes, or piece of chocolate that issues from the slot-machine.

But it is by this piece of legerdemain that humanity has been thoroughly trussed up, and it has not yet got free.

Without history one is lost in the dark, and the essential data of modern history cannot enlighten us unless they are traced back at least to the foundation of the Sienese bank, the Monte dei Paschi; in other words to the perception of the true basis of credit, viz., “the abundance of nature and the responsibility of the whole people.”

The difference between money and credit is one of time.

Credit is the future tense of money. Without the definition of words knowledge cannot be transmitted from one man to another. One can base one’s discourse on definitions, or on the recounting of historical events (the philosophical method, or the literary or historical method, respectively).

Without a narrative prelude, perhaps, no one would have the patience to consider so called “dry” definitions.

The war in which brave men are being killed and wounded, our own war here and now, began - or rather the phase we are now fighting began - in 1694, with the foundation of the Bank of England.

Said Paterson in his manifesto addressed to prospective shareholders, “the bank hath benefit of the interest of an moneys which it creates out of nothing.”

This swindle, calculated to yield interest at the usurious rate of sixty percent, was impartial. It hit friends and enemies alike.

In the past the quantity of money in circulation was regulated, as Lord Overstone (Samuel Lloyd) has said, “to meet the real wants of commerce, and to discount all commercial bills arising out of legitimate transactions.”

But after Waterloo Brooks Adams saw that “nature herself was favouring the usurers.”

For more than a century after Waterloo, no force stood up to the monopoly of money. The relevant passage from Brooks Adams is as follows:
“Perhaps no financier has ever lived abler than Samuel Lloyd. Certainly he understood as few men, even of later generations, have understood, the mighty engine of the single standard. He comprehended that, with expanding trade, an inelastic currency must rise in value; he saw that, with sufficient resources at command, his class might be able to establish such a rise, almost at pleasure; certainly that they could manipulate it when it came, by taking advantage of foreign exchange. He perceived moreover that, once established, a contraction of the currency might be forced to an extreme, and that when money rose beyond price, as in 1825, debtors would have to surrender their property on such terms as creditors might dictate.” *
I’m sorry if this passage should seem obscure to the average man of letters, but one cannot understand history in twenty minutes. Our culture lies shattered in fragments, and with the monetology of the usurocracy our economic culture has become a closed book to the aesthetes.

The peasant feeds us and the gombeen-man strangles us - if he cannot suck our blood by degrees.

History is written with a knowledge of the despatches of the ambassador Barbon Morosini (particularly one dated from Paris, 28 January, 1723 (Venetian style), describing the Law affair), together with a knowledge of the documents leading up to the foundation of the Monte dei Paschi, and the scandalous pages of Antonio Lobero, archivist of the Banco di San Giorgio of Genoa.

We are still in the same darkness which John Adams, Father of the Nation, described as “downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.”

* Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay

From ‘Cider with Rosie’

2009-12-18T09:08:00.002Z

by Laurie Lee:

The week before Christmas, when snow seemed to lie thickest, was the moment for carol-singing; and when I think back to those nights it is to the crunch of snow and to the lights of the lanterns on it. Carol-singing in my village was a special tithe for the boys, the girls had little to do with it. Like hay-making, blackberrying, stone-clearing, and wishing-people-a-happy-Easter, it was one of our seasonal perks.

By instinct we knew just when to begin; a day too soon and we should have been unwelcome, a day too late and we should have received lean looks from people whose bounty was already exhausted. When the true moment came, exactly balanced, we recognized it and were ready.

So as soon as the wood had been stacked in the oven to dry for the morning fire, we put on our scarves and went out through the streets, calling loudly between our hands, till the various boys who knew the signal ran out from their houses to join us.

One by one they came stumbling over the snow, swinging their lanterns’ around their heads, shouting and coughing horribly.

‘Come carol-barking then?’

We were the Church Choir, so no answer was necessary. For a year we had praised the Lord out of key, and as a reward for this service - on top of the Outing - we now had the right to visit all the big houses, to sing our carols and collect our tribute.

To work them all in meant a five-mile foot journey over wild and generally snowed-up country. So the first thing we did was to plan our route; a formality, as the route never changed. All the same, we blew on our fingers and argued; and then we chose our Leader. This was not binding, for we all fancied ourselves as Leaders, and he who started the night in that position usually trailed home with a bloody nose.

Eight of us set out that night. There was Sixpence the Tanner, who had never sung in his life (he just worked his mouth in church); the brothers Horace and Boney, who were always fighting everybody and always getting the worst of it; Clergy Green, the preaching maniac; Wait the bully, and my two brothers. As we went down the lane other boys, from other villages, were already about the hills, bawling ‘Kingwenslush’, and shouting through keyholes ‘Knock on the knocker! Ring at the Bell! Give us a penny for singing so well!’ They weren’t an approved charity as we were, the Choir; but competition was in the air.

Our first call as usual was the house of the Squire, and we trouped nervously down his drive. For light we had candles in marmalade-jars suspended on loops of string, an d they threw pale gleams on the towering snowdrifts that stood on each side of the drive. A blizzard was blowing, but we were well wrapped up, with Army puttees on our legs, woollen hats on our heads, and several scarves around our ears.

As we approached the Big House across its white silent lawns, we too grew respectfully silent. The lake near by was stiff and black, the waterfall frozen and still. We arranged ourselves shuffling around the big front door, then knocked and announced the Choir.

A maid bore the tidings of our arrival away into the echoing distances of the house, and while we waited we cleared our throats noisily. Then she came back, and the door was left ajar for us, and we were bidden to begin. We brought no music, the carols were in our heads. ‘Let’s give ’em “Wild Shepherds”,’ said Jack. We began in confusion, plunging into a wreckage of keys, of different words and tempo; but we gathered our strength; he who sang loudest took the rest of us with him, and the carol took shape if not sweetness.

This huge stone house, with its ivied walls, was always a mystery to us. What were those gables, those rooms and attics, those narrow windows veiled by the cedar trees. As we sang Wild Shepherds’ we craned our necks, gaping into that lamplit hall which we had never entered; staring at the muskets and untenanted chairs, the great tapestries furred by dust - until suddenly, on the stairs, we saw the old Squire himself standing and listening with his head on one side.

He didn’t move until we’d finished; then slowly he tottered towards us, dropped two coins in our box with a trembling hand, scratched his name in the book we carried, gave us each a long look with his moist blind eyes, then turned away in silence.

As though released from a spell, we took a few sedate steps, then broke into a run for the gate. We didn’t stop till we were out of the grounds. Impatient, at last, to discover the extent of his bounty, we squatted by the cowsheds, held our lanterns over the book, and saw that he had written ‘Two Shillings’. This was quite a good start. No one of any worth in the district would dare to give us less than the Squire.

Steadily we worked through the length of the valley, going from house to house, visiting the lesser and the greater gentry - the farmers, the doctors, the merchants, the majors, and other exalted persons. It was freezing hard and blowing too; yet not for a moment did we feel the cold. The snow blew into our faces, into our eyes and mouths, soaked through our puttees, got into our boots, and dripped from our woollen caps. But we did not care. The collecting-box grew heavier, and the list of names in the book longer and more extravagant, each trying to outdo the other.

Mile after mile we went, fighting against the wind, falling into snowdrifts, and navigating by the lights of the houses. And yet we never saw our audience. We called at house after house; we sang in courtyards and porches, outside windows, or in the damp gloom of hallways; we heard voices from hidden rooms; we smelt rich clothes and strange hot food; we saw maids bearing in dishes or carrying away coffee-cups; we received nuts, cakes, figs, preserved ginger, dates, cough-drops, and money; but we never once saw our patrons. We sang as it were at the castle walls, and apart from the Squire, who had shown himself to prove that he was still alive, we never expected it otherwise.

We approached our last house high up on the hill, the place of Joseph the farmer. For him we had chosen a special carol. which was about the other Joseph, so that we always felt that singing it added a spicy cheek to the night. The last stretch of country to reach his farm was perhaps the most difficult of all. In these rough bare lanes, open to all winds, sheep were buried and wagons lost. Huddled together, we tramped in one another’s footsteps, powdered snow blew into our screwed-up eyes, the candles burnt low, some blew out altogether, and we talked loudly above the gale.

Crossing, at last, the frozen mill-stream - whose wheel in summer still turned a barren mechanism - we climbed up to Joseph’s farm. Sheltered by trees, warm on its bed of snow, it seemed always to be like this. As always it was late; as always this was our final call. The snow had a fine crust upon it, and the old trees sparkled like tinsel.

We grouped ourselves round the farmhouse porch. The sky cleared, and broad streams of stars ran down over the valley and away to Wales. On Slad’s white slopes, seen through the black sticks of its woods, some red lamps still burned in the windows.

Everything was quiet; everywhere there was the faint crackling silence of the winter night. We started singing, and we were all moved by the words and the sudden trueness of our voices. Pure, very dear, and breathless we sang:

As Joseph was a walking
He heard an angel sing;
‘This night shall be the birth-time
Of Christ the Heavenly King.
He neither shall be bornèd
In Housen nor in hall,
Nor in a place of paradise
But in an ox’s stall …’

And two thousand Christmases became real to us then; the houses, the halls, the places of paradise had all been visited; the stars were bright to guide the Kings through the snow; and across the farmyard we could hear the beasts in their stalls. We were given roast apples and hot mince-pies, in our nostrils were spices like myrrh, and in our wooden box, as we headed back for the village, there were golden gifts for all.

Christmas in America: European Inheritances

2009-12-17T09:39:00.005Z

From Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America: A History (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996):

"Shall we have Christmas?" was the way one Pennsylvanian asked the question in 1810. Throughout their colonial history and well into nationhood, not only the matter of "shall" but of "how shall" Christmas be celebrated challenged Americans. Their search for answers to these two difficult and sometimes divisive issues can be found in a chronicle of evolving customs, cultural discord, and striking invention. It begins with the first European emigres, who brought to America an ambiguous legacy concerning the holiday that was almost as old as the Christian Church itself.

Christians had wrestled for centuries with questions of if, when, and how to celebrate Jesus' birth. As a commemoration of the miracle that established the Godly paternity of Jesus, Christmas was a celebration of the event upon which the existence of Christianity depended. At the same time, the festival functioned from its inception as an end-of-year substitute for pagan rites and quickly absorbed many profane elements, ones that remain among its most attractive features. As the observance of Christmas spread, the details of its celebration became as varied as the cultures that kept it and as changeable as the history of those cultures. But the radically paradoxical mix of both the sacred and the profane remained.

The earliest Christians gave little attention to Jesus' birth. They expected the Second Coming any day, and in any case viewed birthday celebrations as heathen. As the possibility of his imminent return faded, the faithful

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took a more historical perspective and began to search for evidence of the day or even season of Jesus' birth. They found no clues in the Gospels. Nor could they locate any other reliable sources to pinpoint his nativity. Undeterred, some placed his birth on May 20 and others on April 19 or 20. Clement, Bishop of Alexandria (died c. 215), nominated November 18. Hippolytus (died c. 236) calculated that Christ must have been born on Wednesday, the same day God created the sun. The De Pascba Computus, written anonymously in North Africa about 243, posited that the first day of creation coincided with the first day of spring, on March 25, and contended that Jesus' birthday fell four days later, on March 28.

Sometime in the fourth century of the Common Era, the Roman Church began to celebrate a Feast of the Nativity and to do so on December 25. A variety of issues influenced the decision. Internally, heresies plagued Church authority. Arianism, one of the most threatening, regarded Jesus as a solely human agent of God. The Church insisted on his divinity. By assigning him one human quality -- a birthday -- it appropriated some of Arianism's appeal, but sustained Jesus' place in the Holy Trinity.

The Church had also grown concerned about the increasing popularity of pagan religions and mystery cults in Rome. Each year beginning on December 17, the first day of Saturnalia, and continuing through Kalends, the first day of January, most Romans feasted, gamed, reveled, paraded, and joined in other festivities as they paid homage to their deities. The Church's alarm deepened when Emperor Aurelian, noticing that the pagan rituals had begun to converge around Mithras, the solar god, decreed in 274 C.E. that December 25, the winter solstice on the Julian Calendar, be kept as a public festival in honor of the Invincible Sun. Rome's Christians challenged paganism directly by specifying December 25, rather than some other date, as the day for their Nativity Feast.

Exactly when the Church of Rome began to keep Christmas, however, is not known. The first extant reference to the Feast of the Nativity may be as old as 336, in the earliest list of martyrs of the Roman Church. Perhaps Christmas was celebrated even earlier. Some scholars believe that Emperor Constantine (ruled 312-337 C.E.), who had converted to Christianity and built the Vatican atop the hill where the Mithras cult worshipped the sun, may have instituted the festival.

In any case, by the middle of the fourth century, the Church had boldly declared its Nativity holy day to be observed on the same day as the winter solstice. The concurrence of the two celebrations gave the Church an opportunity to turn elements of the Saturnalia itself to Christian ends. For

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example, it used the creation of the sun, the center of the Saturnalia, to reinforce and symbolize frequent scriptural and doctrinal imagery of God as the sun, and of Jesus' role as Son of God. The creation of Christmas was thus a measure of Christianity's growing power, challenging the crowds enjoying Saturnalian revelry to join the once secretive Christians in a celebration not of the birth of the sun, but rather the birth of Jesus, the Son of God.

The overlapping of Saturnalia and the Feast of the Nativity set the terms of all future debate over the Christmas festival. Its Christian aspects, at least in their most intense form, emphasized heavenly afterlife. The heathen elements absorbed into the festival affirmed life and exalted its annual renewal. The Church made no clear separations between the two perspectives. Instead, it layered profane activities with sacred ends to answer the needs, spiritual and physical, of the total person. This combination of sacred and profane made some religious leaders uncomfortable. For example, Gregory of Nazianzen (died 389) urged that "the celebration of the [Christmas] festival [be conducted] after an heavenly and not after an earthly manner" and cautioned against "feasting to excess, dancing and crowning the doors." Indeed, the paradox of purpose forged an enduring Christmas reality. As one historian succinctly characterized it: "The pagan Romans became Christians -- but the Saturnalia remained."

The custom of honoring Jesus' birth on December 25 quickly spread to the Eastern Church. By 380, Christians in Constantinople honored it as "Theophany or the Birthday." These Christians had once observed Epiphany, January 6, as a joint Feast of the Nativity and Baptism. This was the same date that popular legends held pagan gods made themselves known to humans. "Deep in the tradition of the Church's spirituality," writes John Gunstone, "was the idea that Christ's appearance in flesh was the consummation of all epiphanies." During the Christological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries, the celebration of Epiphany spread westward, but the Roman Church, with its celebration of the Nativity set in late December and its emphasis on Jesus' incarnation and divinity, recast it to commemorate the adoration of the Magi. In Constantinople, Epiphany continued to consecrate Jesus' baptism, but the Eastern Church began to mark December 25 as the day of his birth. The dual celebration, that of birth and baptism, that had defined the old holy day ceased to exist.

Over the next thousand years, the observance of Christmas followed the expanding community of Christianity. By 432, Egyptians kept it. By the end of the sixth century, Christianity had taken the holiday far northward

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and into England. During the next two hundred years in Scandinavia it became fused with the pagan Norse feast season known as Yule, the time of year also known as the Teutonic "Midwinter." Sometime around the Norman incursion in 1050, the Old English word Christes maesse (festival of Christ) entered the English language, and as early as the twelfth century "Xmas" had come into use. From the thirteenth century on, nearly all Europe kept Jesus' birth.

The tension between the folk and ecclesiastical qualities of the holy day did not ease with the advance of Christmas-keeping. Documents of the Middle Ages, Tristram Coffin has noted, were "fat with decrees against the abuses of Christmas merriment," an indication "that people at large [were] doing just what they ha[d] always done and paying little attention to the debates of the moralists." Some clergy stressed that fallen humankind needed a season of abandon and excess, as long as it was carried on under the umbrella of Christian supervision. Others argued that all vestiges of paganism must be removed from the holiday. Less fervent Christians complained about the unreasonableness of Church law and its attempts to change custom. Yet the Church sustained the hope that sacred would eventually overtake profane as pagans gave up their revels and turned to Christianity.

These conflicts continued during the Protestant Reformation, but with little promise of resolution. In England, the Anglican Church repeatedly, but with little success, tried to gain control over the day. Its custom had been to begin Christmas on December 16 (known as "O Sapientia") and celebrate for nine days. But during King Alfred's reign (871-899 C.E.), a law passed extending the celebration to twelve days, ending on Epiphany.

Celebrants devoted much of the season to pagan pleasures that were discouraged during the remainder of the year. The annual indulgence in eating, dancing, singing, sporting, card playing, and gambling escalated to magnificent proportions. By the seventeenth century, under the reigns of the Tudors and Stuarts, the Christmas season featured elaborate masques, mummeries, and pageants. In 1607, King James I insisted that a play be acted on Christmas night and that the court indulge in games. One account of an evening's "moderate dinner" noted a first course of sixteen dishes. In 1626, the Duke of Buckingham found that the captains, masters, boatswains, gunners, and carpenters of three ships had abandoned their service in favor of Christmas revels, leaving their vessels prey to any enemy. In

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1633, the four Inns of Court presented a masque, The Triumph of Peace," at a cost of £20,000.

It fell to Puritan reformers to put a stop to the unholy merriment and to bend arguments over the proper keeping of Christmas into an older and more basic one -- whether there should even be an observance of the day. Defying the decision of the Anglican Convocation of 1562 to maintain the church calendar, the Puritans struck Christmas, along with all saints' days, from their own list of holy days. The Bible, they held, expressly commanded keeping only the Sabbath. That would be their practice as well.

In taking the offensive against Christmas-keeping, Puritans distributed colorful diatribes against the excesses of the holiday. Philip Stubbes's Anatomy of Abuses (1583) condemned revelous celebrants as "hel hounds" in a "Deville's daunce" of merriment. William Prynne's Histriomastix (1633) inveighed against plays, masques, balls, and the decking of houses with greens. "Into what a stupendous height of more than pagan impiety. . . have we not now degenerated!" he lamented. Christmas, he thought, ought to be "rather a day of mourning than rejoicing," not a time spent in "amorous mixt, voluptuous, unchristian, that I say not pagan, dancing, to God's, to Christ's dishonour, religion's scandal, chastities' shipwracke and sinne's advantage."

Even as Puritan condemnation of Christmas intensified, the economic and social upheaval of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century had begun to alter English life. The standing social order, along with the paternalism of its manor system, was crumbling. Christmas, in its role as a part of the old structure, could not escape unscathed. In some years, the lavish celebrations lapsed. In many cases, the emphases of the holiday changed. It transformed, in the words of J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue, into "a symbol for hospitality towards the poor, an understanding between the different levels of society, and happier and more prosperous times in now neglected villages." King Charles I (1625-1649) went so far as to direct his noblemen and gentry to return to their landed estates in midwinter in order to keep up their old style of Christmas generosity.

The rise of Oliver Cromwell's Puritan Commonwealth dealt another staggering blow to England's Christmas celebrations. Parliament outlawed seasonal plays in 1642. It ordered that the monthly fast, which coincidentally fell on Christmas in 1644, be kept. Parliament purposely met on every Christmas from 1644 to 1652. In 1647, it declared Christmas a day of penance, not feasting, and in 1652 "strongly prohibited" its observance.

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Ministers who preached on the Nativity risked imprisonment. Churchwardens faced fines for decorating their churches. By law, shops stayed open on Christmas as if it were any regular business day.

Yet resistance was not uncommon. One year, protesting Londoners decorated churches and shops with swags of bay, rosemary, box, holly, privit, and ivy, only to watch the Lord Mayor and City Marshal ride about setting fire to their handiwork. The populace "so roughly used" the merchants who ventured to open shop in 1646 that the shopkeepers petitioned Parliament for protection. In Canterbury, when the Lord Mayor ordered that the markets be kept open that Christmas, a "serious disturbance ensued . . . wherein many were severly hurt."

It was within this particularly turbulent era that English Christmas customs entered early Virginia and New England. Most settlers and adventurers arriving in the New World welcomed Christmas as a day of respite from the routines of work and hardship. Some observed it, at least in part, as a holy day. Others attempted to feast. On Christmas, 1608, Captain John Smith and his men, having endured for "six or seven dayes the extreame winde, rayne, frost and snow" as they traveled among the Indians of Virginia colony, "were never more merry, nor fed on more plentie of good Oysters, Fish, Flesh, Wild-foule, and good bread; nor never had better fires in England." Maryland-bound passengers aboard the Ark in 1633 "so immoderately" drank wine on Christmas that "the next day 30 sickened of feve[r]s and whereof about a dozen died afterward."

Only Dissenters tried to ignore the holiday. The Mayflower Pilgrims, who arrived at Plymouth in December 1620, spent Christmas building "the first house for commone use to receive them and their goods." Within a year, however, the Pilgrims themselves had to face dissent. On the morning of December 25, 1621, less reform-minded newcomers to the colony "excused them selves and said it wente against their consciences to work on that day." Governor William Bradford allowed the "lusty yonge" Englishmen to rest, saying he "would spare them till they were better informed." But at noon he found them playing games in the street. Angered, Bradford told the frolickers that it ran against bis conscience that they should play while others worked. If they desired to keep Christmas as a matter of devotion they should stay in their houses, he said, "but ther should be no gameing or revelling in the streets." Nor did the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony observe Christmas. Governor John Winthrop

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entered nothing in his diary on his first Christmas in America in 1630, and in succeeding years he attempted to suppress the holiday.

In the early non-English settlements, sparse evidence points to a more traditional attitude toward the holiday. In 1604, for instance, French settlers of St. Croix Island, off the coast of Maine, held religious services and spent the remainder of Christmas Day playing games. In 1686 LaSalle's French colony on Garcita Creek celebrated what was probably the first Christmas in Texas. "[W]e first kept the Christmas Holy-Days. The Midnight Mass was sung, and on Twelve-Day, we cry'd The king drinks . . . tho' we had only Water...."

As the first settlements grew into more established communities, patterns of Christmas celebration peculiar to the colonies began to appear. Geographic separation from European homelands, the proximity of disparate religious and ethnic groups to each other, and the hardship of new beginnings disrupted old habits and holidays. In Dutch New Amsterdam, early in the seventeenth century, eighteen languages could be heard among the 500 or so inhabitants. Numerous Christmases abounded, persisting as an expression of individual heritages. In large towns, where various groups lived close together, the common ground for celebration could often be found in public and secular rather than in potentially divisive religious areas. Thus, Christmas, although widely celebrated, retained little importance in society as a whole precisely because of religious and cultural diversity.

Particularly in the middle colonies, a wide range of ethnicities and religions prevented a shared ecclesiastic and religious holiday. Pennsylvania Quakers scorned Christmas as adamantly as Puritans did. Huguenots, Moravians, Dutch Reformed, and Anglicans, who also lived in the colony, all kept Christmas in their own way. Shortly after Americans had won their independence, Elizabeth Drinker, a Quaker herself, divided Philadelphians into three categories. There were Quakers, who "make no more account of it [Christmas] than another day," those who were religious, and the rest who "spend it in riot and dissipation."

"Frolicking," the name many gave to this sort of boisterous Christmas and New Year's fun, could be found throughout the colonies. In the New England countryside, revelous intruders entered houses with a speech and swords at Christmas time. Far into the eighteenth century, masked merrymakers roved Pennsylvania's Delaware Valley "making sport for everyone." Southerners shot guns, a custom similar to one practiced in northern England.

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The antecedents to this seasonal phenomenon have been traced to Roman times, when early Christians, seeking to ridicule pagan superstition and the Roman custom of masquerading, masked themselves on New Year's Day. Many, however, flagged in their intent and joined in the heathens' frolics. Church officials attempted to persuade members to desist, but failed. In time, even clergy could be found in full disguise, taking part in miracle and mystery plays performed during the Christmas season.

The convention of disguising, or mumming, and performing plays and skits dispersed throughout nearly all European countries. In England, beginning under the reign of Edward III (1327-1377), it became a form of royal entertainment. It peaked in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when elaborate dress and formal presentations, such as Ben Johnson's Masque of Christmas and that in Shakespeare's Henry VIII, were the order of the season. Enthusiasm for court masques diminished thereafter, dampened by the Puritan Directory. But the tradition of masquerading and mumming continued to thrive in more rustic forms. In parts of England, householders, family, guests, and servants donned masks and painted their faces or darkened them with soot to become "guisers," "geese-dancers," or "morris dancers." Often they dressed as animals. Sometimes men and women exchanged clothes with each other. Disguised, they played crude tricks on one another, or went from house to house and entered without permission. There they might dance, sing, feast, and act "a rude drama," mocking propriety and challenging the social order.

American colonists engaged in similar antics, though usually without the performance of even a rudimentary play. They concentrated instead on disguises, noisy good humor, and chaotic peregrinations through neighborhoods. Across the land, revelers, almost always males, gathered to shoot off firecrackers and guns, paraded with musical instruments, call from house to house in garish disguise, and beg for food and drink on December 25 and, in some places, on New Year's.

Such frolics, drawn from the custom of English Anglicans, as well as those of Swedish, German, and other settlers, were especially prominent in New York and Pennsylvania. Samuel Breck remembered maskers from his Pennsylvania childhood in the late eighteenth century. "They were a set of the lowest blackguards," he wrote, "who, disguised in filthy clothes and ofttimes with masked faces, went from house to house in large companies, . . . obtruding themselves everywhere, particularly into the rooms that were occupied by parties of ladies and gentlemen, [and] would demean themselves with great insolence." As the elder Breck and his friends

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played cards, Samuel had watched the mummers "take possession of a table, seat themselves on rich furniture and proceed to handle the cards, to the great annoyance of the company." He could only get rid of them by "giv[ing] them money, and listening) patiently to a foolish dialogue between two or more of them . . ."

Usually an informal code regulated the mummers' reception. According to one set of rules, "the proper custom" had been to ask the uninvited guests "into the house and regale them with mulled cider, or small beer, and home-made cakes," or "give the leading mummers a few pence as a dole, which . . . they would 'pool,' and buy cakes and beer." One never "address[ed] or otherwise recognize[d] the mummer by any other name than the name of the character he was assuming.

In New York, the calling ritual varied slightly. Men had gone from house to house, firing their guns, on New Year's Day since "time immemorial." At each place, after being invited in for food and drink, the men of the household joined them. "[T]hus they went on increasing their numbers until the whole neighborhood had been saluted and visited. . . . " The remainder of the day the shooters engaged in contests of marksmanship and other sports. At least one, the "very barbarous amusement" of "Shooting Turkeys," required a keen eye and sharp betting skills.

The southern colonies, largely rural and unhampered by Quaker and Puritan dissenters and whose white population was comparatively less diverse, cultivated Christmases of a very different sort. Decentralized living, a dearth of women, and a high death rate kept the holiday at bay during the first decades of settlement. As social and political conditions stabilized, southerners began to look to England for models of dress, manner, and social behavior. Their Christmas, like that of the English manor, evolved as an interval of leisure rather than a set of rituals assigned to one particular day. During the season, Virginians, Carolinians, and Marylanders especially enjoyed dancing, but also engaged in card playing, cock fighting, nine-pins, and horse racing. Anglicanism, the established religion in most of the planting colonies, did not pressure its members into sacred observance.

While southerners may have aspired to recreate a sense of the English Christmas, its authentic reproduction eluded them. No pre-Revolutionary account mentions boars' heads or wassail bowls, mummers or waits. In England those traditions had been on the wane when John Smith first ventured through Virginia, and by the 1650s had been mortally threatened

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by Cromwell's Parliament. A French traveler, who along with his entourage of nearly twenty stopped unannounced at the Virginia home of Colonel William Fitzhugh in 1680, left one of the few accounts from the seventeenth century. "[T]here was good wine and all kinds of beverages, so there was a great deal of carousing," the visitor wrote. For entertainment, Fitzhugh provided "three fiddlers, a jester, a tight-rope walker, and an acrobat who tumbled around." When the travelers left the next day, Fitzhugh sent wine and punch to the river's edge for them and then lent them his boat.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, tales of Virginia Christmases had spread back to England and began to create an aura of romance around the South. "All over the Colony, a universal Hospitality reigns," London Magazine reported in 1746; "full Tables and open Doors, the kind salute, the generous Detention, speak somewhat like the old Roast-beef Ages of our Fore-fathers. ... Strangers are fought after with Greediness, as they pass the Country, to be invited."

Evidence of eighteenth-century Christmas celebrations is nearly as scarce as for the seventeenth. Best known is the Christmas chronicled by Philip Vickers Fithian, a Presbyterian tutor from New Jersey. Fithian spent a single Christmas season, in 1773, at Nomini Hall, a plantation owned by Robert Carter, one of the wealthiest Tidewater planters. The first sign of the season he recorded occurred on Monday, December 18; students barred one of Fithian's colleagues from teaching school until "twelfth-day" (January 6), a custom known throughout the British Commonwealth. However, Fithian continued to teach, noting proudly that his "scholars are a more quiet nature, and have consented to have four or five Days now, and to have their full Holiday in May next. . . . "

Excitement built as the holiday approached. "Nothing is now to be heard of in conversation, but the Balls, the Fox-hunts, the fine entertainments, and the good fellowship . . . ," Fithian wrote on the 18th. His entry for Christmas Day began, "Guns fired all round the House," after which the various "Servants" who regularly attended him greeted him with "Joyful Christmas." He rewarded them with the expected small change and a donation to a "Christmas Box." As for Christmas dinner, Fithian noted that it "was no otherwise than common yet as elegant" as any he had ever attended. Not until the following Sunday, December 26, did he and the Carters go to church. The minister "preach'd from Isaiah 9.6 For unto us a child is Born &c. his sermon was fifteen Minutes long! very fashion-

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able—," but few attended. Fithian reopened his school the following Wednesday, December 29. The holidays at Nomini Hall had ended.

Not all southerners partook of the sumptuous Christmases reported in London or witnessed by Fithian. Neither ritually exacting nor regularly held, the holiday on each plantation seemed to have its own style of celebration. In 1709, William Byrd began Christmas by attending church, where he "received the sacrament with great devoutness." Afterward, he dined on roast beef with friends and "in the evening we were merry with nonsense and so were my servants. . . . " The following year he spent Christmas quite differently, reading a sermon and dining alone. Thomas Jefferson rarely mentioned Christmas. George Washington frequently spent his holiday hunting and settling such year-end financial matters as renewing the terms of indenture for his servants, and attending church.

Perhaps, as Julian Boyd has suggested, the Enlightenment, which uprooted superstitions and redefined social classes, prevented a precise duplication of an English Christmas. Indeed, there may even have been some attempt to rationalize the Christmas festival. In December 1739, the Virginia Gazette briefly recounted a history of the holiday, noting that some Christians "celebrate this Season in a Mixture of Piety and Licentiousness," others "in a pious Way only," others "behave themselves profusely and extravagantly alone." The last category was comprised of the many who "pass over the Holy Time, without paying any Regard to it at all." The writer concluded that "On the whole, they who will be over-religious at this Time, must be pardoned and pitied; they who are falsely religious, censured; they who are downright criminal, condemned; and the Little Liberties of the old Roman December, which are taken by the Multitude, ought to be overlooked and excused, for an Hundred Reasons. . . . "

This broadly permissive approach to Christmas contrasted sharply with prevailing attitudes in New England. Like their forebears in England, the Puritan leaders of New England sought to expunge the holiday altogether. Their struggle betokened a broader battle against growing numbers of non-Puritans in the region and periodic intervention in religious affairs on the part of the Crown.

The entry of non-Puritans began at the founding of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, and increasingly presented a problem as displaced English workers, many of them Anglican, bolstered the labor-short economies. At first, Puritans relied on what one historian called the "infor-

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mal pressure of like minded co-religionists" to quell the observance of Jesus' birth. But this strategy proved inadequate. In 1659, in an atmosphere of tension over Anglicanism, other heresies, new trade, and general disarray, the Massachusetts Bay General Court banned the keeping of Christmas by "forebearing of labour, feasting, or any other way." The law aimed to prevent the recurrence of further, unspecified "disorders" which had apparently arisen in "seurerall places ... by reason of some still observing such Festiualls," and provided that "whosoeuer shall be found observing any such day as Xmas or the like . . . " would be fined.

Pressure from England contributed to the troubled atmosphere. All of the once forbidden holiday rites had begun to be practiced once again during the Restoration in Britain, in forms more extreme than before. As early as 1665, Charles II demanded that Massachusetts rescind its anti-Christmas law to reflect these changes. Finally in 1681, Massachusetts issued a repeal, citing as a reason that a ban on Christmas would be a derogation of the King's honor. Still, in 1686, Puritan militants barred newly appointed English Governor Andros from holding his Christmas services in their meeting house and forced him to move to the Boston Town Hall.

The renewed English fervor for the raucous excesses of Christmas began to wane almost as rapidly as it had revived, while New England's Puritan leadership gave little indication that it had gained much tolerance for the holiday. "[M]en dishonour Christ more in the 12 days of Christmas than in all the 12 months besides," wrote Increase Mather in his diary. He reiterated the case against Christmas in A Testimony Against Several Profane and Superstitious Customs Now Practiced by Some in New England, a tract published in England in 1687. "In the Apostolical times," Mather wrote, "the Feast of the Nativity was not observed. ... It can never be proved that Christ was born on December 25. ... The New Testament allows of no stated Holy-Day but the Lords-day. ... It was in compliance with the Pagan saturnalia that Christmas Holy-dayes were first invented. The manner of Christmas-keeping, as generally observed, is highly dishonourable to the Name of Christ."

Increase's son Cotton escalated the rhetoric against the holiday by making more explicit the fearful connection between Christmas and sin. He even linked it to Salem's witchcraft. "On the twenty-fifth of December it was," he wrote, "that Mercy [Short] said, They were going to have a Dance; and immediately those that were attending her, most plainly Heard and Felt a Dance, as of Barefooted People, upon the Floor. . . . " Mather

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later denounced the holiday in more general terms. "I hear a Number of people of both Sexes, belonging, many of them to my Flock, who have had on Christmas-night, this last Week, a Frolick, a revelling Feast, and Ball, which discovers their Corruption, and has a Tendency to corrupt them yett more, and provoke the Holy One to give them up into eternal Hardness of Heart."

Despite his strong tone, Cotton Mather did not forthrightly condemn Christmas itself. Like Bradford, who in 1621 had stopped the newcomers' street revelry, he expressed more concern for the liberties taken during the celebration of Christmas than for the fact of celebration. Calling the merrymaking an "affront unto the grace of God," he tacitly turned the question of "should" to one of "how" to hallow Jesus' birth. "Can you in your consciences think that our holy saviour is honored by mirth, by long eating, by hard drinking, by lewd gaming, by rude revelling, by a mass fit for none but a Saturn or a Bacchus, or the light of Mahametan Romandon?" he asked. "Shall it be said that at the birth of our Saviour ... we take the time to please the hellish legions and to do actions that have much more of hell than of heaven in them?"

In all, Christmas became a point at which Puritan piety and autonomy grated against English custom, British authority, and Anglican influence. Bostonians, for example, openly repudiated Anglicanism by refusing to close their businesses on Christmas. "Carts come to Town and Shops open as is usual," Judge Samuel Sewall noted on December 24, 1685 (and nearly every year after). That same year Sewall smugly noted that he thought the British colonial officials were "vexed . . . that the Body of the People profane it [Christmas]," and thanked God that there was "no Authority yet to compell them [i.e. Puritans] to keep it." The Crown-appointed governor twice took Sewall aside in 1722 to discuss recessing the General Court on Christmas. Sewall opposed adjournment, but suggested (after a discussion with Cotton Mather) that the matter be voted on by the Council and Representatives. The governor took the opposite side, arguing that "All kept Christmas" except the Puritans. Provoked, Sewall responded: "the Dissenters came a great way for their/Liberties and now the [Anglican] Church had theirs, yet they could not be contented, except they might Tread all others down." Ultimately, the governor ignored Sewall's entreaty and closed the court on Saturday until the following Wednesday, December 26.

Others besides the British government challenged the Puritans on Christmas. Holiday rituals in observing churches attracted a fair number of

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putative Calvinists at Christmastide. Ebenezer Miller, graduate of Harvard but recently ordained an Anglican, Sewall noted in 1727, "keeps the day in his New church at Braintrey: people flock thither." On another occasion he spoke to a Mr. Newman "about his partaking with the French church on the 25th of December, on account of its being Christmas, as they abusively call it." Congregational ministers countered by ordering fasts on Christmas Day and tried in other ways to show their disregard for the festival. One spent the Sunday preceding Christmas outlining his proof that the celebration of Jesus' birth was "Popery and prelatic tyranny, a destroyer of consciences."

In the end, whether slowly in New England or more rapidly in the middle colonies and the South, the forces of pluralism and the need for social harmony shaped and encouraged Christmas celebration. Yet its status as a holiday remained haphazard and varied widely. Like the colonies in general on the eve of the Revolution, regions and communities were as notable for their different approaches to the holiday as for their commonalities. It would take the project of nation-building in the wake of the Revolution to begin to define an American conception of Christmas.

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Invisible Victims: Elites, the Steamroller, and the Spiral of Silence

2009-12-17T09:14:00.006Z

Excerpts from chapters 8, 9 & 10:‘The Spiral of Silence and the New McCarthyism,’ ‘Affirmative Action, the University, and Sociology,’ & ‘Elite Accommodation and the Flaws of Affirmative Action.’

Prior posts from this book: 1, 2, 3. Bibliography for all excerpts here.

From Frederick R. Lynch, Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action (Westport, CT: Praeger Paperback, 1991):

Chapter 8: The Spiral of Silence and the New McCarthyism

In the winter of 1982, a student whom I shall call "Bill" informed me after class that another faculty member, Professor X, was being called "racist" by a small clique of minority students. The charges had been voiced in a class taught by another faculty member and in various informal student gatherings.

"I respect Professor X," said Bill, "and I think what they're saying is bullshit. But I think he should know what's going on before it hits the fan. If he doesn't know, you should tell him."

A couple of days later, behind closed doors, I informed Professor X of the problem. He was stunned, saddened, and, not least of all, afraid. Professor X had received tenure the year before. But tenure was a thin shield against charges of racism and we both knew it. Initially, Professor X had absolutely no idea how such charges could have come his way. We were both aware of the irony of my informing him of such accusations, for I had voiced fears to him and to others that I might be called "racist" because of my research on affirmative action. (See "Doing Affirmative Action Research in California" at the end of Chapter 9.)

There was no formal complaint, no hearing before the dean or anything else. Just name-calling, which faded away. But the effects lingered on.

In 1988, I asked Professor X to re-assess the matter. He had no trouble recalling the event. He ascribed the incident to four minority students' misperceptions of his lectures on family structure and mobility. He had cited research in class which indicated that having large numbers of children at an early age -- especially out of wedlock -- was likely to inhibit upward social mobility. The four minority students, schooled in other classes against

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"blaming the victim," thought Professor X was doing just that and attacking their way of life. Not coincidentally, Professor X remarked, the accusing students had received low grades in previous courses they had taken from him.

This behind-the-scenes name-calling heightened Professor X's sensitivity. Already shy about mentioning matters of race to student audiences, he now rarely, if ever, mentions race as a variable in social research in his classroom. In spite of the fact that race and ethnicity often appear in the statistical data of his subject matter, Professor X prefers to "leave such matters to the text." When it comes to race, Professor X censors himself. Professor X is hardly alone. Most other social scientists and university faculty have felt the chill.

Self-censoring, "chilled" faculty reflect the power of ideological taboos that have dominated American intellectual discourse for nearly twenty years. Yet "chilled" and "taboos" are not quite sufficiently precise terms to understand how intellectual thought in America has been self-censored. The steamroller metaphor set forth in the first chapter comes somewhat closer to the process of what has happened. But there are more precise concepts to understand how people have perceived what they can and cannot discuss, regardless of public opinion.

Attempts to ignore or suppress Stanley Greenberg's research by politicians and the mass media suggest some degree of formal censorship. Far more powerful than formal censorship has been massive, informal censorship, which German sociologist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann has aptly termed the "spiral of silence." The spiral of silence, in turn, must be linked with another reinforcing concept, cognitive dissonance. The operation of both of these processes has produced what is best described as a New McCarthyism.

THE SPIRAL OF SILENCE

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's spiral of silence theory attempts to explain how people may misperceive public opinion because one faction feels much freer than others to speak out in support of its views. The more vocal group's views, in fact, may not be the majority; nevertheless, they may become the majority, or considerably increase their numbers, because the populace perceives such openly expressed views as the majority and wishes to conform to the supposed majority view (1974; 1977; 1984).

Noelle-Neumann maintains that human beings are strongly attuned to the opinions of others. This sensitivity to public opinion is like a "social skin." Public opinion can be a potent source of social control in that most people find it more comfortable to conform to majority opinion. A long history of scholarship, coupled with more recent social psychological experiments, strongly suggests that people prefer to change their views rather than differ from majority opinion. Since we are social beings, humans fear isolation.

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Noelle-Neumann acknowledged her indebtedness to Alexis de Tocqueville's concept of the "tyranny of the majority." But Noelle-Neumann wished to see how a majority opinion may arise out of a minority viewpoint. The process may build in a spiral, that is, the perceived majority group becomes even more emboldened to speak out while those not so perceived progressively go mute. Hence the spiral of silence.

Noelle-Neumann's initial interest in the spiral of silence occurred in the context of German elections in the late 1960s. Public opinion polls showed public support evenly divided between the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats. Yet a student of Noelle-Neumann quickly removed a "Social Democrat" button from her coat because she had encountered too much hostility. The student had falsely perceived that she was being labeled as a proponent of an unpopular cause. Though she had the support of at least half the public, the student was made to feel quite otherwise. Those who supported the opposition were vociferous in their support and behaved as if public opinion were with them. In describing the political confrontation between the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats in Germany at the end of the 1960s, Noelle-Neumann noted that originally there was an even split between the two parties.

Those who were convinced the new Ospolitik was right thought their beliefs eventually would be adopted by everyone. So these people expressed themselves openly, and self-confidently defended their views. Those who rejected the Ospolitik felt themselves left out; they withdrew, and fell silent.

This very restraint made the view that was receiving vocal support appear to be stronger than it really was and the other view weaker. Observations made in one context spread to another and encouraged people either to proclaim their views or to swallow them and keep quiet until, in a spiraling process, the one view dominated the public scene and the other disappeared from public awareness as its adherents became mute. This is the process that can be called a "spiral of silence." (1984: 5)

I shall not and cannot statistically test Noelle-Neumann's spiral of silence concept as it applies to public opinion on affirmative action. Nevertheless, the concept fits much of the data contained in this book and is a useful, sensitizing tool in understanding public opinion on affirmative action.

Data on public opinion cited in Chapter 2 decisively demonstrate that the majority of Americans have been overwhelmingly opposed to affirmative action as quotas or preferential treatment. Yet interview data gathered here and elsewhere show that people perceive the pro-quota viewpoint as the majority viewpoint. Why? The spiral of silence suggests an answer.

It became obvious to the student interviewers and to me that we were cutting in on the spiral of silence simply by interviewing the thirty-two white males. It was sometimes even more obvious in background conversations with corporate officials or other corporate or government insiders. People were surprised to be asked about "the other side" of affirmative action.

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The vast majority of views they had heard or read were either pro-affirmative action or held that it was a non-debatable issue, which had already been decided. As Noelle-Neumann had described, they had detected what they thought was the predominant opinion on the issue and acted accordingly. Thus, those interviewed for this study (and those quoted in secondary sources as well) were guarded and hesitant in stating anti-quota views even to friends and co-workers. They did not know that anti-quota views have been the majority.

Affirmative action proponents have been able to accelerate the spiral of silence because they have been able to invoke collective guilt over past treatment of blacks in the United States. They have been able to target opponents as racists. The mass media were largely silent on affirmative action or took a pro-affirmative action stance. No wonder, then, most of those interviewed for this book felt their critical views of affirmative action were not held by a majority of Americans. Indeed, only two knew of public opinion polls on the issue at all, and only one of the two had an accurate idea of the results.

To compare a hypothetical contemporary situation with that which inspired Noelle-Neumann's interest in the spiral of silence: imagine an American college student wearing a button which stated "Get Rid of Affirmative Action Quotas" The results would be at least as provocative as those encountered by the German student who wore the "wrong" political button.

THE ROLE OF COGNITIVE DSSONANCE

Cognitive dissonance has reinforced the spiral of silence on affirmative action. Cognitive dissonance occurs when two cognitive elements clash: two opposing attitudes, or an attitude and a contradictory situation, (Zajonic, 1968). In the case of affirmative action, cognitive dissonance can easily arise when the values of equality are juxtaposed with the history of unequal treatment of blacks. The ideal of equality and the legacy of slavery and discrimination contradict each other. This conflict generates tension, embarrassment, and guilt in the minds of most Americans.

People have a tendency to try to assuage guilt and resolve dissonance. Therefore, egalitarian or compensatory programs aimed at redressing past discrimination have a natural appeal in restoring cognitive balance: the imbalance and guilt caused by discrimination against blacks in the face of American commitments to equality can be eased by efforts to make up for past discrimination. Obviously, cognitive dissonance has been a powerful tool for proponents of affirmative action of all types. This is one reason affirmative action debates almost always focus upon blacks rather than the other minority groups (Hispanics, Filipinos, Pacific Islanders, Asian/Indians, and so forth) who have quietly been included in many race-conscious programs.

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Cognitive dissonance over past treatment of blacks is woven into nearly every argument for and against affirmative action from settings of private discourse to the professional literature. Evidence of this same tension and guilt surfaced in varying degrees with nearly all interviews with white males conducted for this book. Manning Greene specifically used the term "cognitive dissonance" in explaining the awkward and embarrassed response of his friends. Other subjects mentioned past discrimination against blacks but protested that they were not responsible for this and that the current generation of white males should not suffer for the sins of the past. And, as mentioned in previous chapters, there were the obligatory neutralizations: "I'm not a racist, but. . . ."

This climate of intimidation and guilt cannot be overstated with regard to the expression of critical views on affirmative action. As was seen in the previous chapter, this social psychological setting was fostered by the neglect of affirmative action as an issue by the mass media.

Noelle-Neumann maintained that the role of the mass media in fostering a spiral of silence is complex and crucial. The previous chapter demonstrated that the mass media ignored and avoided affirmative action as an issue and avoided or sought to neutralize the policies' impact on white males. Public opinion polls on the issue were not well publicized. Instead, the media have highlighted the contradiction between past treatment of blacks and the ideal of equality.

THE OLD AND THE NEW McCARTHYISM: PARALLELS

The post-World War Two phenomenon known as McCarthyism would seem to be a good illustration of the spiral of silence. Though Joseph McCarthy and anti-communist movements spawned by him never obtained the support of a majority of Americans, vocal anti-communist minorities nevertheless had enormous impact. Anti-McCarthyism opinion was chilled by individual fears of being labeled "communist."

The social forces suppressing criticism of affirmative action for the past twenty years have been strikingly similar to processes underpinning 1950s McCarthyism. First and foremost is the climate of fear and intimidation generated by both McCarthyism and affirmative action. The steamroller metaphor fits both phenomena well. Name-calling and guilt-by-accusation were employed with deadly effects by both anti-communist groups in the 1950s and by pro-affirmative action people in the 1970s and 1980s. In the heyday of McCarthyism, people feared being labeled "communist" or "fellow-traveler." As we have seen in previous chapters, affirmative action critics have been fearful of being called racist for so much as raising questions about such policies. […]

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A conflict perspective on both affirmative action and McCarthyism is that both phenomena were manipulated by political and economic elites. Michael Rogin has argued that elites also capitalized upon McCarthyism (Rogin, 1967). Rogin contended that McCarthyism was not an irrational, agrarian, populist, anti-elitist movement produced by "structural strain." It was not a revolt against the elite, for some elites backed McCarthy. McCarthy did have "real support at the grass roots," with Catholic Democratic workers and southerners. But McCarthyism drew much of its power from conservative business elites and conservative Southern senators. McCarthy and his supporters were countenanced by moderate Republicans and even supported to some extent by liberal Democratic elites.

Fred Cook also concluded that elites either backed McCarthyism or simply withered in the face of it:

On the highest levels of intellect and leadership, the abdication of responsibility was all but complete. The Democratic-liberal establishment, which should have provided a rallying point, virtually disintegrated before the first onslaught and sought to camouflage itself by riding to the hounds with the foe. (Cook, 1971: 18)

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The virulent fanaticisms of the past were truly fringe movements; they did not have behind them the power and prestige of the respectable and influential in American society. McCarthyism was different. It had the all-out support of ultraconservative big business interests in rebellion against the twentieth century." (1971: 570)

If one substitutes "Republican-business establishment" for "liberal-Democratic establishment" in Cook's first paragraph, the paragraph aptly depicts the non-response to affirmative action. In the second paragraph, "affirmative action" can be substituted for "McCarthyism" and "ultraliberal political, academic, and mass media interests" for "ultraconservative big business interests." In chapter 10, it will be seen that a small number of institutional elites (notably in civil rights, the media, and government) promoted affirmative action, while other major elites acquiesced.

Whatever the role of elites in affirmative action and McCarthyism, the general parallels are strong. There is no denying the official bullying, the baiting and labeling, the manipulation of guilt and fear, the complicity of the media and institutional paralyses produced by both McCarthyism and affirmative action. Both were personnel screening practices designed with honorable intentions, though the means were less than honorable. Both processes could dissolve into crazes with lasting results: even today, employees of state universities in California must sign a "loyalty oath," a holdover from McCarthyist fervor. And both movements could run over victims who were too startled and disheartened to raise a protest while co-workers and friends looked the other way.

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Chapter 9: Affirmative Action, the University, and Sociology

"It is an unlovely spectacle," columnist George Will has written.

White lawyers and editorial writers telling blue-collar whites that promotions or jobs or seniority systems must be sacrificed in the name of racial reparations. It calls to mind Artemus Ward's jest during the Civil War: "I have already given two cousins to the war, and I stand prepared to sacrifice my wife's brother rather than the rebellion be not crushed." (1985: 96)

Will might have added sociologists to the list of those instructing white males on the goodness of self-sacrifice on the altar of group equality. White males caught in the web of affirmative action are likely to receive scorn from sociologists and like-minded academicians.

Sociologists' antagonism towards the established middle classes comes somewhat naturally. In part, this antagonism toward the middle classes stems from the clash of collectivist assumptions of sociology with the individualist values of American society. But there are other inherent reasons as well. Peter Berger (1967) has pointed out that sociologists tend to be inherently distrustful; their studies may debunk respectable middle-class views of the world. Furthermore, sociologists value cultural relativism, a cosmopolitan view in which no culture is seen as inherently better than another. Since Berger's analysis, anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois sentiments among sociologists have intensified.

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In analyses of affirmative action, anti-middle-class biases slide easily into anti-white bias and rationalization of whites' individual injuries.

Sociologists are ill-disposed to see any genuine grievances among whites caused by affirmative action. Indeed, some sociologists have begun to posit a "new racism" amongst whites. With this newer, more sophisticated racism, white males excuse their economic and occupational failures by scape-goating blacks. Whites who express hostility to affirmative action quotas or minorities are dismissed as believers in antiquated individualism who do not understand the collective realities of stratification and the need for collective remedies.

James R. Kluegel proclaimed this view in the title of his article, "If There Isn't a Problem, You Don't Need a Solution: The Bases of Contemporary Affirmative Action Attitudes" (1985). Stanley Greenberg suggested the "new racism" explanation for white males' opposition to affirmative action in his comments for a Los Angeles Times article on "Racism Runs Deep" (March 8, 1987). Having described Greenberg's findings as showing that "dozens of white blue-collar workers around Detroit . . . blame their own hard times on blacks," the reporters quoted Greenberg as stating, "They [white males] feel the government that was supposed to protect them has instead given everything away to the blacks: Blacks get the jobs, blacks get the welfare; blacks get the loans. . . . They have no historical memory of racism, no tolerance for present efforts to offset it."

The reporters and Greenberg conveniently forgot to add: "present efforts" at whose expense?

Even Marxist-oriented, conflict theorists cannot see the class and age lines of cleavage inherent in affirmative action. They see no legitimacy in the complaints of white males toward such policies. (When I discussed the interviewing for this study, a Midwestern sociologist sniffed with disgust that the reverse discrimination reports of white males might have any merit: "Of course, you realize they'll probably be alibiing." And when a famous Marxist criminologist visited the campus where I taught, he asked about the nature of my current research. When I informed him about my studies of white males and affirmative action, he dismissed the results of the study in advance with a one-liner: "I'll bet your white males were angry." He then changed the subject.)

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Chapter 10: Elite Accommodation and the Flaws of Affirmative Action

How did controversial social policy that lacked public support nonetheless become institutionalized? That has been a central question of this book. Chapter by chapter, a number of contributing factors have emerged: the individual and collective silence of the victims; the influence of sex-role behavior upon silence; the collective guilt and individual fear of being labeled racist; the elusive and capricious implementation of affirmative action policies; the ideological bias and self-censorship among the mass media and the social sciences; the spiral of silence; the New McMarthyism; and the craze-like behavior.

Affirmative action has evolved as a set of programs imposed from the top down, over and against public opinion. In this chapter, I wish to focus upon the question of how and why those in positions of power and influence -- the elites -- formulated or at least went along with affirmative action and other race-preference programs.

A standard starting point in examining the role of elites in American life is C. Wright Mills classic study, The Power Elite (1956). Mills's framework, augmented by a recent attitude survey of elites by Verba and Orren (1985), provides a useful portrait of the role of elites in affirmative action policy.

In Mills's view, by the 1950s, a century of economic and political centralization produced three major institutional hierarchies in American society: the large corporations, the executive branch of government, and the military. By the term power elite, Mills meant "those political, economic, and military circles which as an intricate set of overlapping cliques share decisions having at least national consequences. In so far as national events

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are decided, the power elite are those who decide them" (1956: 18). Legislative bodies such as the Congress, Mills maintained, had been reduced to the "middle levels of power."

Mills made clear that he saw no well-organized, coherent, unified ruling class. His was a structural analysis of power, not conspiracy theory. What unity existed amongst the elite was due to two factors. First, the elite was ''composed of men of similar origin and education. . . . There were psychological and social bases for their unity, resting upon the fact that they were of similar social type and leading to the fact of their easy intermingling" (1956: 19). Second, the corporate, government, and military sectors were brought together by similar economic and structural interests, most notably, "the development of a permanent war establishment by a privately incorporated economy inside a political vacuum" (1956: 19).

Mills's analysis is useful for this study in that Mills emphasized that: (1) elites are structurally interrelated, and (2) power lies in decision-making. Those who are in the top "command posts" of the major institutional hierarchies can make decisions of enormous consequence with few, if any, democratic checks on such powers. Mills was one of the first social scientists to discern the emergence of centralized, administrative power and rule in society.

Indeed, administrative law is the fastest-growing body of law in the land. The powers wielded by top corporate and government administrators have expanded greatly since Mills wrote The Power Elite. So vast are these powers that Allan Bloom has stated that an "administrative state" has replaced politics (1987: 85). Were he alive today, I suspect Mills would concur. (On the importance of administrative law, see Vago, 1988.)

Mills's emphasis on the giant administrative power wielded by the heads of major corporate and government institutions can be supplemented by a more recent study of elites by Verba and Orren (1985). Fortunately, for purposes of this study, Verba and Orren were specifically concerned with the attitudes of elites towards equality. They collected data on attitudes toward equality from 2,762 institutional leaders in nine elite sectors: business, organized labor, farming, civil rights organizations, feminist groups, political parties, intellectuals, the mass media, and a sample of college seniors at ten elite colleges (1985). Unfortunately, Verba and Orren ignored elites in the executive branch and military, two of Mills's three major organizational hierarchies. However, it can be reasonably assumed that the elites in the military have remained conservative. As for elites in the federal bureaucracy, it has already been seen that they have tended to be quite liberal and activist on matters of affirmative action.

On the other hand, Verba and Orren's addition of elites in the mass media and the intellectuals as well as the "challenging elites" in civil rights and feminist organizations is overdue. (Verba and Orren also included labor leaders in their survey of elites. Mills contended that the labor elites' powers

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were derived from legitimation and protection by elites in government. In the case of affirmative action, we shall see that unions usually went along with corporate or government administrators. Only rarely did unions take action on behalf of white males.)

Verba and Orren confirmed Mills's views on the social backgrounds of elites. The elites were mostly white, male, and college educated. Leaders of civil rights organizations, however, were nearly all black and the feminist elites were mostly female. Yet homogeneity of background did not produce a unified outlook on equality or programs to remedy inequality. Verba and Orren found persistent polarities of attitudes between those elites aligned with the Democrats, on the one hand, and Republicans, on the other. Democrats saw poverty and racism as a result of "the system," while Republicans saw such inequalities in individual terms. Democrat-aligned elites favored more government intervention to assist the poor, but few wished to impose equality of results through the use of quotas. In choosing between more traditional equality of opportunity versus the newer and more radical equality of results, Verba and Orren found that the majority of leaders opted for the former:

American leaders on both the left and the right share the basic view that individuals may in fact deserve to be unequal in results, because of their own failures. The equality debate in America, therefore, is not over whether anyone really deserves to be at the bottom or whether the losers are always worthy of help from the government, but over whether those currently at the bottom are the ones who deserve to be there, and thus whether the government should assist them. (1985: 83)

Quotas for blacks and women in jobs and education were overwhelmingly rejected by all elites except those of civil rights organizations and feminists. Three out of four black leaders and a majority of feminist leaders supported the use of quotas for blacks in jobs and education. On quotas for women, blacks approved, but feminist leaders split down the middle. As for other liberal groups: "Democrats, youth, labor, and intellectuals, who blame the system for black poverty almost as much as black and feminist leaders do, nevertheless deplore the use of quotas" (1985: 84).

In addition, Verba and Orren found that the elites ranked national priorities differently, and most put race and gender equality towards the bottom of the list.

American leaders give different priorities to equality as a national goal, particularly to equality for women and for blacks. . . . Gender equality appears at or near the bottom of the ratings more often than any other goal. Half of the groups place it last, and everyone but feminist leaders, who rank it first, and youth place it among the three lowest categories. Equality for blacks does not fare much better. . . . Only blacks rate it near the top. (1985: 120)

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ATTITUDES VERSUS BEHAVIOR ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

Based upon Verba and Orren's work, affirmative action quotas can hardly be seen as the product of a consensus agreed upon by national leaders. On the contrary, most elite members opposed quotas, and the elites were split on a variety of related issues.

Yet there is no question of the imposed-from-above nature of affirmative action. Capaldi (1985) even likens the process to fascist-imposed "reform." What, then, was the role of elites in the affirmative action revolution?

Verba and Orren's study contains a major flaw common to attitude studies: the gap between attitudes and actual behavior.

Did elites behave in a manner consistent with anti-quota attitudes? The data presented in Chapter 3 strongly suggest that they did not. Especially in the years since Verba and Orren's survey (1976-77), corporate and political elites appear to have yielded with minimal resistance to quotas imposed by judges or federal agencies. More than that: corporations and government agencies have initiated their own affirmative action quota procedures. Representatives of the corporate and business communities have been filing friends-of-the-court briefs exclusively on the side of pro-affirmative action forces in the Supreme Court.

Why?

A CONVERGENCE OF ORGANIZATIONAL INTERESTS ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

A fusion of economic and bureaucratic interests can be seen in the contemporary acceptance of affirmative action procedures.

The desire to "do something" about the minority poor gained initial impetus in the wake of searing urban disturbances -- Watts, Detroit, Newark -- in the 1960s. There was a sense of crisis and fears of economic and racial polarization (Jencks, 1985b). Hiring more blacks at General Motors and in government agencies in Detroit, for example, could clearly be seen by elites as a tactic for cooling urban unrest and bringing members of the underclass into the system.

Once affirmative action rules were formulated, organizations subject to equal opportunity regulations expediently accepted such plans and procedures as routine overhead expenses. Simply in terms of risk management, it has been easier to put up with affirmative action paperwork than to risk harrassment by government agencies, lawsuits, and bad press. A given number of affirmative action hires, who do not perform on a par with non-affirmative action hires, can be tolerated (Jencks, 1985b; Murray, 1984a).

A case that illustrates all of this was Sears, Roebuck and Co.'s victory in a protracted struggle with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Sears prevailed largely because the corporation had implemented its

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own vigorous quota plan in the 1970s.

Business and government entities have learned to live with, even embrace, affirmative action. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose 1,800,000 members include thousands of small businesses typically hostile to government regulation, took no position in the Santa Clara case. Many business organizations filed amicus curiae briefs supporting the program and praised the Supreme Court ruling.

The reason for the business support is simple: a tough affirmative action program now can stave off expensive discrimination suits later. Sears, Roebuck and Co. has spent 15 years fighting charges by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, first in administrative proceedings, then in court. The trial alone lasted 10 months in 1984-85. The 806-store retailer refuses even to reveal how much it spent on lawyers, though it gives a hint. Expenses, including hiring statisticians, sociologists and other expert witnesses, came to $6.8 million and one can guess fees to attorneys were probably at least twice that much.

Sears finally won at trial -- the judgement is on appeal -- against a charge that its female employees tend to be concentrated in lower-paying sales jobs than men because of discrimination. The company's chief litigator in the case . . . specifically credits the court victory to a race-and-sex-conscious hiring program Sears started in 1968 for its work force, now at 300,000. "They have the best," declares Morgan. "Out of every two job openings at Sears they filled one with a black or a woman."

Governments, especially in large cities, similarly view affirmative action plans as a small price to pay for political harmony. (Insight, April 27, 1987: 9)

Yet Sears's victory was a long and costly one: twelve years and $20 million. "The transcript of the 10-month trial in the last case alone is 15 feet high. At one point, Sears employed 250 people full time to compile information, some of it dating back to 1960, to meet EEOC investigatory demands" (Weiner, 1986).

Many other corporations simply capitulated to EEOC rather than drag out negotiations and court contests. When EEOC won a landmark 1973 discrimination settlement with American Telephone and Telegraph, EEOC tried to run up the score with charges against General Electric Co., Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp. and the United Auto Workers. GE settled in 1978 for $32 million for training programs, payments to employees and other steps. Ford's 1980 settlement cost $23 million, and GM's pact in 1983, with the UAW as co-signatory, is about $42.5 million. (Weiner, 1986)

Therefore, it makes economic sense to maintain in-house quota programs, even if a corporation must tolerate a number of unqualified or incompetent workers.

In 1985, the National Association of Manufacturers voted a fresh endorsement of affirmative action. Monsanto and DuPont also have strong affirmative action plans in place and like it that way. Personnel executive

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David Buchanan of the Ford Motor Company has stated, "Business decided that affirmative action is the right thing to do. It has become a way of life" (U.S. News and World Report, June 17, 1985: 67).

The use of race-and-gender quotas to ward off legal action by government agencies or lawsuits by members of minority groups had a catch until 1987: the counter-threats of reverse-discrimination lawsuits by white employees. However, in 1987, by a 6-3 decision in Johnson v. Transportation Agency of Santa Clara, the Supreme Court upheld preferential treatment for women based upon numerical under-representation. That decision seemingly released employers from the threat of reverse discrimination lawsuits. But the court's most recent decision in Richmond v. Croson (1989), again opened the door to legal redress by whites. In its Richmond decision, the 6-3 majority held that even the use of "benign quotas" likely violates the rights of white males. The court also cast doubt upon the use of any preferences where there was no evidence of intentional, past discrimination against specific minorities.

Nevertheless, as emphasized in the opening chapter of this book, white males very rarely win reverse discrimination lawsuits; the Bakke and Johnson cases have been the exceptions, not the rule. Reports in this study and in press reports suggest that the EEOC takes a skeptical view of reverse discrimination claims. Employers and educational institutions have undoubtedly become aware of this. It will take several more decisions similar to Richmond before the legal odds change. In the meantime, elites and their institutions clearly have the upper hand. And they know it.

ELITES, THE STEAMROLLER, AND THE SPIRAL OF SILENCE

Though most of those interviewed in the Verba and Orren survey rejected quotas and equality of results, there was a split in views on whether the system or the individual was to blame for poverty situations. Verba and Orren found that a "system-is-to-blame" belief concerning black and female inequality was shared by majorities of Democrat-inclined elites and amongst smaller factions in other elites.

Verba and Orren's finding of a split in the system-is-to-blame philosophy only partially confirms Charles Murray's more sweeping description of a transformation of elite wisdom in the 1960s. Murray argued that the shift moved elite thinking from blaming the victim to blaming the system (1984b). Verba and Orren's findings indicate that a blaming-the-system outlook gained a sufficient number of vocal, elite adherents who intimidated opponents of race-conscious remedies and inhibited organized opposition: the spiral of silence.

To draw a parallel between the behavior of elites and white males interviewed for this study: it is probable that elites have been ignorant of -- or have misperceived -- the consensus in public opinion opposing the use of

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quotas. This is especially likely since, according to Verba and Orren, most of the elites ranked equality for blacks and women as a low-priority issue. Issues of low importance typically do not merit much attention and analysis. Since elites did not devote much attention to equality issues, it is reasonable to posit that, when they did, they assumed the vociferous minority and women's groups -- through a quietly sympathetic mass media -- were articulating popular views. Thus, it is likely that Elisabeth Noelle-Neuman's concept of the "spiral of silence" applies equally well to attitudes amongst elites as to attitudes amongst the public at large.

The twin forces of the spiral of silence and the New McCarthyism would have much greater impact among the elites more than among rank-and-file citizens. A major corporate or government leader obviously has a great deal to lose from being tagged as a "racist." Not only might the stigma become attached to the person, but also to the corporation. (One personnel officer interviewed as a background source for this study admitted that he did not discuss affirmative action outside the corporation because he feared that a slip might get not only him but his corporation in trouble.)

In his discussion of Congress's behavior toward affirmative action, sociologist Nathan Glazer implied a spiral-of-silence situation. "In Congress a point of view that may well reflect the opinions of a minority holds sway. The protection of affirmative action is in the hands of Congressmen who care, reflecting the views of civil rights organizations; most others stay away from the issue" (1988: 107).

In his discussion of Congress's behavior toward affirmative action, sociologist Nathan Glazer implied a spiral-of-silence situation. "In Congress a point of view that may well reflect the opinions of a minority holds sway. The protection of affirmative action is in the hands of Congressmen who care, reflecting the views of civil rights organizations; most others stay away from the issue" (1988: 107).

To be exposed to charges of "racism" is terrible public relations for a corporation or government agency. There is little doubt that corporate and government elites remain wary of such labels and judge that going along with affirmative action, whatever the attendant costs, is less costly in terms of the public's goodwill than being labeled racist or sexist.

Elite accommodation to affirmative action preferences, then, can be explained in terms of good public relations, coupled with a desire for stability and "industrial peace" with government agencies and minority/women's groups. Elites are also aware that the odds for legal action by individual white males are small and that the chances for a white male winning a reverse discrimination lawsuit are even smaller. There has been no organized recognition of white males' grievances by major political groups. Following affirmative action preferences directives, then, has been the line of least resistance.

Omitted from this equation was the damage done to white workers and the continued oversight of serious legal and sociological flaws in affirmative action.

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IMMIGRATION-WITH-PREFERENCE PARADOX

Most affirmative action debate has been centered on the black/white dimension, far less often on the male/female dimension. The increasing list of preferred non-black minorities also has been ignored by the social sciences and the print and television media. A strategic reason for focus upon blacks has been the obvious history of discrimination and deep sense of national guilt. The black/white issue is thus the strongest possible case for affirmative action advocates. Even affirmative action critics wind up fighting proponents on this emotionally charged turf (see, for example, Glazer, 1975; Murray, 1984a, 1984b; Capaldi, 1985; Bloom, 1987). High-visibility debate concerning affirmative action for non-black minorities is next to nonexistent.

Contrary to Nathan Glazer's recent reappraisal of affirmative action (Glazer, 1988), many non-black minorities have been, and continue to be, included in affirmative action programs: the numerous Hispanic groups (Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Central Americans, and so forth), Pacific Islanders, American Indians, Asian/Indians, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and homosexuals.

Why have so few people asked directly: on what basis do these groups ground their claims for redress through quotas, preferential treatment, or proportional representation? On what basis do we include some groups and exclude others? Especially when many, if not most, of these groups have only recently arrived in significant numbers in the United States?

The omission of non-black minorities from discussion of affirmative action becomes even more extraordinary in view of recent immigration history: by including non-black minorities, one obtains a curious immigration-with-preference paradox.

Most of the government-preferred non-black minorities were present in the United States only in relatively small numbers before 1970. Historical measurement of the Hispanic population is plagued with definitional problems in census procedures, especially prior to 1970. But the numbers of

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Hispanics in this nation have been relatively small until the recent large-scale and sustained immigration from Mexico and other Hispanic nations (Moore and Pachon, 1985: 24). […]

Aside from those of Chinese and Japanese ancestry, most Asians in this nation are foreign-born: of the 2,539,800 persons living in the United States who were born in Asia, 47 percent immigrated here in the period from 1975 to 1980; 22.4 percent from 1970 to 1974; 12.0 percent from 1965 to 1969, and 6 percent from . 1960 to 1964. The remaining 12.5 percent immigrated here before 1960.

Another example: for U.S. citizens born in India, 43.7 percent migrated here during 1975 to 1980, and another 33.1 percent from 1970 to 1974.

The point of all this is obvious: why should recent immigrants be given preference over native-born American citizens? What does the United States owe these newly arrived immigrants?

This curious immigration-with-preference paradox, in fact, becomes more astonishing when one realizes that the situation can operate -- and probably has operated -- on a same-day basis: a non-citizen, either legally or with forged credentials, can cross the border and immediately become eligible for affirmative action preference. Incredibly, the immigration-with-preference paradox rarely, if ever, surfaced in the public debates surrounding recent immigration reforms.

Employers have recently discovered that the new immigration act has placed them in something of a dual dilemma: they may be fined for hiring illegal aliens but sued for discrimination if they refuse to hire a worker with dark skin. On the other hand, especially when immigrants may work for lower pay than citizens, affirmative action might provide a useful device to

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give preference to legal or illegal immigrants and, thereby, fulfill affirmative action quotas at the expense of citizens. Only rarely has this phenomenon been examined. […]

This emperor-has-no-clothes quality regarding group preferences for non-black ethnics leads one to wonder just how social scientists have avoided the issue. […] Most social scientists and policy makers have ignored the multiplication of "protected groups" in the United States.

Thomas Sowell has wryly observed that the number of "protected groups" in the United States has multiplied to the extent that 70 percent of the population is covered by some form of affirmative action (1985: 14).

None of the white males interviewed for this study nor any of the personnel or affirmative action officers with whom I conducted background discussions had even thought of the immigration-with-preference dilemma. No one knew quite what to say when I raised the issue.

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Christmas in England: Another View

2009-12-17T09:08:00.004Z

Also see this history by John Storey.

From A Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2000):

Christmas has a complex and much debated history. There is no scriptural clue to the date of Christ’s birth; the Early Church celebrated it (if at all) on 6 January, and the first document setting it on 25 December is a Roman calendar of AD 354. Possibly it was a conscious takeover of a Roman festival, ‘The Birthday of the Unconquered Sun’, honouring Mithras and other sun-gods. This dating had become standard throughout Western Europe well before Augustine’s mission to England; it was not devised to match Anglo-Saxon midwinter festivals. The Council of Tours (AD 567) ruled that the twelve days from the Nativity to the Epiphany would be a work-free period of religious celebration, and this became English law in AD 877. The word ‘Christmas’ itself only appears in 1038; previously the festival period had been called Yule, a native word for the midwinter season.

Medieval manorial records show villeins were not required to work during the Twelve Days; the lord of the manor provided a communal feast, and his tenants and subjects gave him gifts, normally farm produce. The pattern was varied; some wealthy landowners apparently kept open house, feeding and entertaining all comers, while others concentrated on their own local people. By Tudor times, Christmas at court and on the estates of the nobility was characterized by increasingly splendid banquets, balls, plays, masques, and mummings, often co-ordinated by a ‘Lord of Misrule’.

This official (also found at Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, the Inns of Court, and some civic corporations, such as the City of London) combined the roles of planning committee, master of ceremonies, jester, and mock king; sometimes he was accompanied (or replaced) by an Abbot of Unreason, who parodied the Church in the same way as the Lord parodied the court. They are first mentioned (under various titles) in the 15th century, and were conspicuous at the courts of Henry VIII and Edward VI; at the accession of Mary (1553) they vanished from the court, and rapidly went out of fashion elsewhere, except among young men at the universities and Inns of Court. A far less expensive domestic equivalent, the ‘King of the Bean’ chosen by lot on Twelfth Night, remained popular. To Victorians, the Lord of Misrule, despite his relatively brief and socially exclusive existence, came to symbolize a jovial role-reversal for which there is little or no evidence.

Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries Puritans waged a well-documented campaign against saints’ days and other religious festivals, as unscriptural and as encouraging gluttony, drunkenness, sexual licence, and public disorder. In the 1640s Christmas became a major target; in June 1647 Parliament finally banned Easter, Whitsun, and Christmas, but each successive year of the Puritan reign saw major disturbances in various parts of the country, and increasingly draconian enforcement. John Evelyn’s Diary for 25 December 1657 records his own arrest for attending a Communion service in London: ‘. . . the Chapell was surrounded with souldiers; all the communicants and assembly surpriz’d & kept prisoners by them . . . These wretched miscreants held their muskets against us as we came up to receive the Sacred Elements, as if they would have shot us at the altar . . .’ This policy proved counter-productive; the fate of Christmas became a rallying-point for anti-Puritan feeling, and a symbol of lost freedoms. After the Restoration most aspects of the celebration were revived, though with wide variations in the degree of lavishness even by the wealthy. As the festival was now no longer a bone of contention, documentary sources become fewer.

The diaries of 18th- and early 19th-century rural clergy take little notice of Christmas, though regularly noting money distributed to the poor around this time. Bell-ringing is sometimes mentioned, and drunkenness complained of. The tradition of charitable hospitality was still strong; thus William Holland, a Somerset parson, on 25 December 1799, had:
dinner by myself on spratts and fine woodcock. The kitchen was tolerably well lined with my poor neighbours, workmen, &c. Many of them staid till past ten o’clock and sang very melodiously. Sent half-a-crown to our Church Musicians who had serenaded the family this cold morning at five o’clock. (Holland, ed. Jack Ayres, 1984)
Many traditional visiting customs occurred at this season: mumming of various kinds, sword dancing, Hooden Horses, Old Tup, Plough Stots, wassailing, and waits. This concentration may reflect the importance of midwinter festivals in the remote past, but practical factors were important too; there was a lull in farmwork, potential audiences had gathered in gentry households, and the tradition of Christmas hospitality and generosity ensured a good welcome for performers. At least one custom, thomasing, was specifically aimed at soliciting alms.

What is regarded as the archetypal Christmas was forged in the second half of the 19th century by popular writers such as Charles Dickens and Washington Irving, using a combination of indigenous elements, imported ones, and new ones, in response to a widespread opinion that Christmas was no longer what it had once been, and something should be done. Their reinvention harked back to a romantic ideal of the lost golden age of ‘Merrie England’ -- perhaps specifically to Walter Scott’s description of a medieval baron’s Christmas in his best-selling poem Marmion (1808). Key elements in their vision were the Lord of Misrule, Boar’s Head, Yule Log, and the squire’s lavish display of hospitality in his ‘baronial hall’. Models for more homely celebration were sometimes sought abroad. As early as 1821 a correspondent in the Gentleman’s Magazine (pp. 505–8) praised a Christmas custom in the north of Germany ‘which cannot be too strongly recommended and encouraged in our own country’: children make or buy little presents for their parents and each other, which they lay out on Christmas Eve under ‘a great yew bough’ in the parlour, decked with tapers and streamers; next day the parents bring presents for the children. Written twelve years before Victoria married Albert, this shows court influence was not the only route by which German models impinged on English customs.

This ‘new’ Christmas evolved gradually by an astute combination of existing elements (e.g. carols, mince-pies, holly and mistletoe, candles, ample food and drink, hospitality to neighbours) with recent importations and inventions (presents, crackers, turkey, greetings cards, the tree, Father Christmas/Santa Claus as gift-bringer), each of which has its own history. [...] But many of these took a long time to filter down to the poorer sections of society; it can be argued that the ‘Victorian’ Christmas only became truly the norm after the Second World War.

Some commentators describe this reinvention as if it had been consciously aimed at taming the working classes and imposing ‘respectability’ on their boisterous and drunken traditions. Concern for public morals was certainly one factor, but commercialism was powerful too; cheap illustrated periodicals spread the fashion, and industry was eager to supply cards, toys, and other presents. It is significant that the new elements are conspicuously secular; the stress on charity was the only one with real religious underpinnings.

The Abolition of Britain: The Telescreen Triumphs

2009-12-16T09:49:00.002Z

From Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain (San Francicso: Encounter Books, 2000)

For once, we were told exactly what to be afraid of. But it made no difference. Eliot's letter predicting the dangers of television must rank as one of the wisest and most prophetic ever published by The Times, and it was also in time to prevent the danger of which it warned. At Christmas 1950, most British households did not have a television set, and did not hope to obtain one. Britain had one television channel, which was transmitted for only a few hours each day. Radio, the cinema and a huge national variety of newspapers and magazines satisfied the wants of a literate, educated population for information and entertainment. Eliot himself was a highly influential cultural figure, publisher, playwright, poet and religious writer, who could claim to understand the USA better than most Englishmen, since he was American by birth. His letter was measured and cautious, and so important that even today, to read it is to experience a pang of loss, a feeling of a great opportunity missed.

Sir, in your issue of 17 December you announce that the BBC proposes to spend over £4 million during the next three years on the development of television. I have just returned from a visit to the United States, where television (though

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not, I believe, more developed technically) has become an habitual form of entertainment in many more households than here. I find only anxiety and apprehension about the social effects of this pastime and especially about its effect (mentally, morally and physically) upon small children.

Before we endeavour to popularize it still further in this country, might it not be as well if we investigated its consequences for American society and took counsel with informed American opinion about possible safeguards and limitations? The fears expressed by my American friends were not such as could be allayed by the provision of only superior and harmless programmes. They were concerned with the television habit, whatever the programme might be.

Your obedient servant,

T. S. Eliot,

24 Russell Square, London WC1

Eliot had already foreseen all the arguments about 'superb nature programmes' and 'dramas which lead children on to the classics' and the rest of the excuses which have been put forth by the broadcasting industry for the damage which they do to young minds. Eliot could see that television was something quite different from any previous medium. Probably instinctively rather than rationally, he sensed from the worried faces of his American friends that a revolution was in progress, a revolution that would damage and weaken millions of young minds.

Now we know what Eliot only foresaw through a glass darkly. It would be many years before British children were exposed to television on such a scale and at such an early stage in their lives that the damage would be too obvious to ignore. But by the mid-1990s, it was plain that something was going seriously wrong, with more and more reports of young children from affluent homes who could not behave or read or grasp simple concepts of behaviour and manners. In January

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1996, I interviewed Dr Sally Ward, an expert on the speech development of young children. Dr Ward was perturbed by the number of children unable to speak normally at ages when they should have learned to do so without any trouble. At that time, she was certain that two things had greatly increased the problem—the launch of daytime television in Britain, and the increasing number of special videotapes aimed directly at young children.

These things arrived just as the number of women going out to work was rising sharply. (At Christmas 1997, the female workforce in Britain would outnumber the male workforce for the first time in recorded history, a development with such huge consequences that it has, of course, never been debated, directly legislated for in Parliament or discussed in a general election campaign). Thanks to these developments, the television screen had become, along with schools, a kind of national childminding service. Parents could use the television as they might once have used a nanny or a grandparent. They could no longer afford the nanny, and the grandparent probably lived hundreds of miles away, but the plastic box performed the same function, cheaply and apparently harmlessly. The extent of this use of television as third parent became clear on the morning after the death of Princess Diana, when millions of adults learned the news from children deprived of their Sunday morning cartoons by special news broadcasts. But it was not just older children who were dumped in front of the flickering tube. Infants as young as six months old were being abandoned to the output of broadcasters and commercial-makers.

What is the effect of this? Dr Ward says, 'I have seen children of two-and-a-half with virtually no ability to understand words'. Often they cannot even speak, and are capable only of animal, gulping noises, boundlessly horrible and depressing. In our early months, we can learn an enormous number of things: taking turns in conversation, telling when the other person has finished, reading facial expressions, the general

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rules which make civilized conversation possible. Planted in front of cartoons, or the TeleTubbies, we do not discover these things at all. This is because television's communication is all one way, encouraging people to be passive receptors rather than active partakers. The television carries on with what it is doing regardless of what they do, so they learn to do the same. And since they cannot understand what they are seeing and hearing, it does not matter if they are watching a high-level debate on Newsnight or violent rubbish such as Power Rangers. The effect is just as bad. Nor is the damage limited to conversation. Early exposure to television can mean a failure to understand how to behave as a social being, turning watchers into mere individuals unable to realize that they are connected by duty, affection or even fear to others.

Dr Ward describes a typical victim of this early exposure: 'He comes into the room and ploughs right past you. If you put a box of toys on the floor, he ploughs through that too, wandering rather aimlessly around and looking at nobody and nothing.'

'There's a lack of social awareness, a lack of knowledge of how to function in society. They aren't picking up vital clues about how others feel, or how to respond to them.'

Some form a sort of bond of love with the video player. 'They went berserk when it was turned off. They simply couldn't do without it, and when it was taken away they reacted as if their mother had disappeared.'

These, by the way, were not just the abandoned victims of single parenthood in collapsing tower blocks. The same problems afflicted the well-dressed products of wealthy, well-educated middle-class parents living in pleasant detached houses. At around the same time, researchers for the GMTV company discovered that children aged two and three were watching as much as eighteen hours of television a week, 80 per cent of it without an adult present in the room. These children, abandoned in a way only the late twentieth century could

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invent, are still climbing their way towards their teens, when they will be big and strong. It is frightening to think what kind of adolescents, what kind of adults they will become, and almost unbearable to imagine what kind of parents they will be. They are only the most developed cases of a disease which has been quietly spreading up the age range since Britain ignored T. S. Eliot in 1950.

Far from restricting television, the authorities encouraged it. Winston Churchill insisted that television cameras should record the Queen's coronation in 1953, giving the new medium its greatest fillip. A Tory government then went on to destroy the BBC monopoly, brushing aside traditional Conservatives who feared the moral effects and listening only to those for whom the free market was sacred above all. Lord Reith, the founding genius of the BBC, had warned that it was only the brute force of monopoly which allowed his corporation to take a conservative moral position. He was rapidly proved right, as competition for ratings became the unanswerable argument for laxer and laxer standards of taste and language, and bolder and bolder excursions into pornography and violence. The struggle for ratings also, quite predictably, forced religious programmes into a smaller and smaller corner, along with all unfashionable minority views.

An enormous power had been released into the land, and even if its controllers had wanted it to, it was not using its strength to keep things as they were, let alone to turn back the clock. It was also taking a stronger hold on the national mind with each generation, as children came to it younger and younger and were exposed to it for longer and longer.

But why is television so unique, and why is colour television so much more potent than black-and-white? Compare it first of all with the cinema, a medium which is at first sight so very similar. Cinema is a concentrated experience, available only for two or three hours at a special time and place. It is surrounded by ceremony -- even now many theatres still use

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curtains to signal the start of a programme, and there is a ritual to the order of trailers, advertisements, censor's certificate, sale of food and so on. Until thirty years ago, performances ended with the national anthem, incredible as this now seems even to me. It is also usually done in company of around the same age, with children still excluded by law from the most violent or sexually blatant films. The cinema-goer usually prefers to go with a companion, and is in any case watching with all the other people in the audience. Films, even nowadays, are often applauded. There can also be genuine infectious laughter.

Television is available without ceremony, without a special journey and without companionship. Its pleasures are increasingly solitary, especially in the millions of homes where it is on most of the time and where there is a set in each child's bedroom. It is also available in great quantity. If a viewer chooses, he can watch the television almost without interruption from the moment he gets up, or comes home. There is almost always something to watch, provided you are willing to be passive. Anyone trained from his earliest years in the television habit is likely to be extremely passive, because his ability to imagine, to hold conversations, to think without prompting, has already been weakened and withered. He does not need them.

In the 1950s, children simply could not do this in Britain. There were long periods when nothing was shown except something called the 'test card', a series of geometric patterns designed to allow engineers to tune the signal properly, sometimes accompanied by music, but now a fond memory. There was also an event known as the 'closedown', usually well before midnight, after which an announcer would remind viewers to switch off their sets. The screen would then actually go blank, emitting a high-pitched signal to wake those who might have fallen asleep in front of it. In the 1960s, there were still sizeable gaps during which nothing was transmitted at all. Parental

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authority also still existed in many homes, enforced by a mother who was there all the time. Perhaps most important of all, the programmes were in black and white, or, to be truthful, pale grey, medium grey and dark grey.

Colour came slowly, launched with Wimbledon tennis coverage in 1967, a tiny minority interest in 1968 with just over 20,000 licences, and not reaching a million homes until 1972. As late as 1974, there were still twice as many black-and-white sets as colour ones in British homes -- 11,766,424 to 5,558,146. But where colour came, even the bad programmes looked good, and by the late 1980s a new generation was growing up, to whom the bright, noisy plastic box in the corner was the most seductive, the cleverest, the most articulate, the most beguiling thing they had ever seen. Even the most brilliant storyteller, the most inspirational teacher, the most companionable parent or older brother, could not compete with colour television's virtuosity and variety. Sports, especially, were instantly transformed and far easier to follow. Even such things as snooker and darts suddenly became 'good television'. The pictures on the screen in the corner of the room were for the first time brighter, cleaner, sharper and more exciting than the room itself. It was harder and harder to take your eyes away from the screen. Even news bulletins became a sort of treat for the eyes, with the great capitals and landscapes of the world suddenly seen for the first time in their full, rich reality. There was no longer any need to imagine for ourselves, and the thing was so seductive that almost nobody could resist it for long. George Melly, that hopeless progressive, wrongly forecast in 1969 that there would be a 'small resistance movement of middle-class intellectuals, the children of those who in the early fifties wouldn't have the telly at all'. He thought they would equate black-and-white with high seriousness, but in fact such people either surrendered to the new and bought colour TVs, or continued to resist by refusing to have televisions in their houses at all. The only people who continued to watch in black-and-

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white were the elderly poor, who could not afford the new sets or the higher TV licence fee charged for colour. Resistance to television was probably thanks to the miraculous survival of intelligent, national speech radio, kept alive by the BBC's continued accidental monopoly, and unknown almost anywhere else on earth.

The periodic battles over the two middle-class BBC radio channels - Radios Three and Four - are incomprehensible to most outsiders. They are defended, furiously and bitterly, by their small number of listeners precisely because they cater for the last serious section of the population who have not surrendered their imaginations to the television. They actually prefer to listen to the morning news on the radio than to watch it on the colour television. They are generally in young middle age, dating from the era when middle-class parents at least rationed the television. They are genuinely unhappy with television's short attention-span and its obsession with pictures above all things. Until recently, they had very little idea what the presenters of their favourite programmes looked like, a happy state brought to an end by the increasing use of radio figures on television. They are, while politically and socially liberal, puzzlingly conservative (from the BBC point of view) about the use of language, accent and grammar. Because of their backgrounds, they are present in large numbers among politicians, journalists, civil servants, churchmen and in university senior common rooms. They can write powerful letters to the editors of major newspapers. But they give a completely false impression of the state of public opinion or the broadcasting audience in Britain. They are, sadly, like the last people to escape the pods in Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, or like the refugees in the forest in Fahrenheit 451, each of whom has remembered one great book to preserve it from the televisual culture which burns all books on sight. Attempts to rejuvenate the Radio Four audience have all failed, and will continue to fail, because the rising generation, even at the very

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top end of the education and career range, mostly lack the concentration, curiosity, individuality and imagination required of a serious radio listener. It is unwise nowadays to assume that even intelligent young journalists have listened to Radio Four in the previous week.

This shows just how differently radio and television affect their audiences. Both become a kind of club, sharing a common knowledge of certain people, voices and serials with thousands or millions of others. But radio listeners do not pool their imaginations with anyone else, or lend their imaginative powers to others. At all times, they retain the ability to decide if a fictional character or even a real person is tall or short, dark or fair, sinister or engaging, good or bad. Television viewers have all this decided for them.

Come to television as an adult, literate and independent, and it may make you lazy and passive, but it cannot leech away the thoughts, memories and imagination you already possess. But what if you come to it as a tiny child, your memory undeveloped, your imagination a blank space, your social and conversational abilities as yet non-existent. Is it possible you will then be a different kind of person from your parents?

The American commentator Neil Postman certainly thinks so. In his book The Disappearance of Childhood: How Television Is Changing Children's Lives, Postman points out that 'even the idea of a children's game seems to be slipping from our grasp'. He noted, more than fifteen years ago, that games such as hide-and-seek had almost completely vanished. Television, he argues, requires 'perception, not conception'. How could it be otherwise when the average length of a single camera shot is now three to four seconds in programmes, two to three seconds in commercials? Its skills in delivering its message straight to the brain 'make the rigours of a literate education irrelevant'. He quotes Reginald Damerall's frightening observation that 'No child or adult becomes better at watching television by doing more of it. You have yet to hear of

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television-viewing disability.' This, of course, is the opposite of reading, where greater skills allow the growing child to read more deeply, more widely and with more taste, and a growing mind builds up the mental muscle needed to tackle the great works of literature and history.

Postman believes this matters enormously, because 'children are a group of people who do not know certain things which adults know'. At least, they used to be before they were seduced by television and its brothers, the video player and the virtual-reality computer game. By destroying this superior adult knowledge, and handing children the fruit of the tree of knowledge unmediated by adult wisdom, we have abandoned our young to powers and influences which we cannot control, and whose strength we do not know. To leave a child unsupervised in front of a television set is no less dangerous than giving it neat gin, or putting it within reach of narcotics.

One sign that this may be true is the way in which the old restraints on sexuality and aggressive violence are collapsing so quickly among the young, many of whom simply cannot understand what their parents are worrying about. Postman argues, 'Shame gives power and authority to adulthood. For adults know, whereas children do not, what words are shameful to use, what subjects are shameful to discuss, what acts are deemed necessary to privatize.' But 'shame cannot exert any influence as a means of social control or role differentiation in a society that cannot keep secrets' -- i.e., a society which hands children over to the cathode-ray tube. This has great consequences for attitudes towards sex. Without shame and mystery, the system of taboos 'loses its dark and figurative character, as well as most of its moral force ... what was once shameful may become a "social problem" or a "political issue".

'In revealing the secrets of sex, television has come close to eliminating the concept of sexual aberration altogether'. This is vastly more important than the issue of sex alone. Postman quotes G. K. Chesterton's warning that 'All healthy men,

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ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, know that there is a certain fury in sex that we cannot afford to inflame, and that a certain mystery and awe must ever surround it if we are to remain sane.'

So the loss of parental control over the sex taboo is a far deeper danger than the mere destruction of the idea of right and wrong sexual conduct, catastrophic though this is. It has snapped some of the most important of the invisible chains which keep our society from satisfying its passions without restraint.

If that were all, it would be bad enough. But a generation brought up by Chris Evans and the other skilled performers of youth television has not just been robbed of the moral subtleties of four hundred years of literate civilization. It has become easily manipulated because it has learned first to expect to be manipulated, second to enjoy being manipulated, and third not to care when it happens. Anyone who can control a major television channel can use it to pour out propaganda, but it is only this new generation which does not know how to resist it, provided it uses the right sort of codes, language and symbols. None of these codes, languages or symbols are conservative, or can be used by a conservative, because they are 'subversive' of the imagined 'authority' of a mythical 'establishment', which of course includes the Tories and poor old Mrs Whitehouse, along with the long-dead malcontent colonels who were the originals of 'Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells'. A conservative message, in this medium, will always look as foolish as Mr William Hague in a baseball cap.

Postman returned to the assault in Amusing Ourselves to Death, where he warned that we should not be complacent just because we had avoided George Orwell's nightmare totalitarian society, which he had predicted for 1984. What was actually coming true, he suggested, was Aldous Huxley's alternative nightmare in Brave New World, where nobody even realized that they were being oppressed.

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What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture.

Huxley, in fact, warned directly of 'man's almost infinite capacity for distractions.' Postman believes that capacity has been fully engaged in the last twenty years.

His words could almost have been written to describe the cynical, puerile, bubblegum election campaigns fought by Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, and by Tony Blair in 1997, when he proclaimed himself a modern man. 'When serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when people become an audience ... a nation finds itself at risk. Culture-death is a clear possibility.' One thinks of 'Things can only get better', 'For the many, not the few' and, of course, 'Education, education, education', or of any of Mr Blair's much-praised but largely vacuous speeches.

This atmosphere of jaunty, funky emptiness is very hard to combat because, as Postman asks, 'Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? What is the antidote to a culture's being drowned by laughter?'

Echoing Eliot's dismissal of 'quality' television, he argues that 'we would be better off if television got worse, not better.... The A-Team and Cheers are no threat to our public health. Sixty Minutes, Eyewitness News and Sesame Street are.' Spiritual devastation, he predicts 'is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate.'

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But his central point in all these warnings remains that television robs adults of one of their most important tasks, as passers-on of culture to the young, mediating, explaining, sometimes hiding things until later when they will be less dangerous. Once, children became adults first by learning to speak and then by learning to read. Now we are travelling back to the primitive times before literacy, when adults could keep less from their young, when adulthood came far earlier, and the culture of the tribe was cruder and more immature as a result. If he is even half right, the implications for all settled cultures are large. For a culture such as Britain's, shaken and broken and bent and under reconstruction, the implications are immense.

Of course, other forces have marched alongside television, though it is hard to believe that they could have been half so successful without its aid. Modern popular music, with its strangely bisexual appeal and its carnal beat -- part war-dance, part fertility ritual -- would not have spread so fast unless pubescent boys and girls had been able to see the often androgynous faces of the stars, first on television and then on the videos which are now rock's most powerful marketing device. It is for others to explain why twelve-year-old girls screamed most wildly whenever the Beatles began to sing falsetto, or why the most enduring images of Mick Jagger are those of him cross-dressing and in full make-up in the rarely shown movie Performance. The appeal of rock musicians is a peculiar thing, though if Neil Postman is right it has much to do with the sexual awakening of children who until recently would have been thought too young for such things, and who are most easily seduced by ambiguous, half-and-half figures, partly themselves and partly the other, unknown sex. But all these things suggest that people brought up as Tony Blair says he was, are different. They do not just look different, but are different, in some deep way, from the twenty or so generations which went before them, and likely to respond in different ways to different stimuli.

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One of those stimuli, and one Mr Blair has been keen to bring into every classroom and home in the country, is the computer. There may be a good political reason for this. Anyone who has spent any time with computers, even at their most crude and basic level, knows the way in which the screen can draw a person into it, making him forget normal time and place, even forget or ignore bodily desires such as hunger and thirst. Once again, a computer user with obligations, with an imagination, with other forms of literacy, may be able to fight off this influence. But someone who comes to the computer without these bonds and safeguards does not even want to fight them off. He can become more fully himself, more fully a self-indulgent individual and master of his own world, by plunging as deep as he can go into the electronic pool of wonders. When John Donne wrote that no man was an island, entire of himself, he could not have foreseen the way in which such devices make solitude not just bearable, but desirable above all things. Yet that solitude is not a proper loneliness. The computer-games player becomes even more of a receiver than his friends who are watching MTV in the next room. As he wrestles with his control pad, he is actually tuning his body and mind to patterns decided by the computer programmer, making himself even more of a robot than a normal couch potato.

His moral sense, and his ability to cope with the less brightly-coloured reality of life, are also reduced. Many of these games are morally neutral, but others teach that destruction and violence come with no consequences. In the 1950s, teenage boys may have loved the sound of breaking glass, but they feared the approach of the policeman or the angry householder too. Now they can enjoy the same sound, together with the screech of tortured metal, the screams of their victims as they rip out their brainstems in Mortal Kombat or crush their cars to tinfoil in Carmageddon, and be sure that there can be no consequences, for there are no policemen or householders

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out there in cyberland. Who can wonder if, when they wander into real life, they drop bricks or breezeblocks through the windscreens of passing cars, or place small corpses on railway lines, or seek to speed up the dull cold world with fast-acting drugs which make the whole of life feel like a computer game?

But if they are the masters of their own tiny worlds, are they in control of anything else, or has their self-absorption left them at the mercy of those who make the programmes, create the rock bands, design the games and sell the narcotics? Plainly, we do not yet have a nation entirely made up of blank-eyed zombies dividing their time between violent computer games and the crack-house. But we do have a disturbing amount of violent crime in which the attackers are reported as being heavily drugged, and we do have a younger generation much of which seems closed to any non-conformist arguments. A survey of the so-called 'millennium generation' in November 1998 showed that Conservative support among the young has dropped to historically low levels, quite possibly a real change in consciousness which will affect them all their lives.

This does not record a mere change in political loyalty, which is not specially important in itself. It shows that, for the first time this century, the young are not inheriting prejudices, opinions, values, morals and habits from their parents. The continuity, which once ensured that most people followed their families in such things, has been broken. The post-revolutionary generation, whose families have often disintegrated and are usually weak, whose schools do not uphold authority or tradition, whose religious experience and understanding often do not exist, has also grown up with several immensely strong outside influences, all of them radical enemies of existing culture. The same generation has had little chance to develop its own critical, personal imagination through reading, and so has been a blank page on which the revolutionaries have been able to scrawl their own slogans.

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They will grow up to be modern men and women, quite like Mr Blair, but even more so. For they will not have, as he did, any 'safeguards and limitations'. They did not have Durham chorister school, a devoted and strong family, Fettes College, Oxford University and the Inns of Court to keep them from being too modern.

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‘The Invention of the English Christmas’

2009-12-16T09:30:00.002Z

From John Storey, ‘The Invention of the English Christmas’ in Sheila Whiteley (ed.) Christmas, Ideology and Popular Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), notes on request:

The ‘traditional’ English Christmas was invented between the 1830s and 1880s. Its invention was directly connected to the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation and only indirectly connected to religion. To claim that the English Christmas was invented in the nineteenth century is to raise the objection that the Nativity was then almost two thousand years old. Although the Nativity may well have been two thousand years old, it and Christmas are not really the same thing.

Constantine the Great, who was Roman Emperor between AD 285 and 337, established Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire in AD 325. In AD 336 the new Christian Church of Rome established 25 December as the date of the Nativity, the central event in the developing Christian calendar. There is absolutely no scriptural evidence for this date. Moreover, ‘historical’ evidence suggested other dates, including 1 January, 6 January, 21, 28 and 29 March, 9, 19 and 20 April, 20 May, 29 September and 18 November (Harrison 1951: 15; Restad 1995: 4). So why 25 December? The answer is a rival religion called Mithraism. At the centre of this religion is Mithras, the god of light, whose birthday, the Day of the Birth of the Unconquered Sun (Dies Solis Invicti Nati), is 25 December. Mithraism, like Christianity, spread throughout the Roman Empire in the ﬁrst three centuries AD and competed with Christianity as a potential state religion. As Payam Nabarz explains:

The Roman Mithraic practice was one of the greatest rivals to early Christianity for many reasons. As well as being a popular pagan religion practised by the Roman Army, it had many similarities to Christianity. These similarities frightened the Christian forefathers, as it meant that years before the arrival of Christ, all the Christian mysteries were already known. To combat

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this, certain Christian writers said that the Devil, knowing of the coming of Christ in advance, had imitated them before they existed in order to denigrate them. As Christianity gained in strength and became the formal religion of the Roman Empire, the cult of Mithras was one of the first pagan cults to come under attack. (2005: 12–13)

The attack on Mithraism launched by the Christian Church consisted of three strategies. First, Christians should separate themselves from the rival religion. When this strategy did not work, they adopted a second. As Manfred Clauss observes, ‘When such evasions seemed impossible, they effected a take-over, as in the case of the observance of Sunday and the festival of the god’s birth on 25 December’ (2000: 169). An account from the fourth century makes clear the reason for the fixing of the Nativity as 25 December: ‘But when the teachers of the Church realised that Christians were allowing themselves to take part [in the celebrations of the Day of the Birth of the Unconquered Sun], they decided to observe the Feast of the true Birth on the same day’ (quoted in Clauss 2000: 66). Therefore, it seems quite clear that the intention of the Christian Church was to overlay Mithraic rituals and ceremonies with Christian significance. This became a common strategy. In the sixth century Augustine was sent as a missionary to Britain. During the course of his work he received a letter from Pope Gregory advising him to ‘accommodate the ceremonies of the Christian worship as much as possible to those of the heathen, that the people might not be much startled at the change’ (quoted in Harrison 1951: 28). The third strategy was bloody persecution: what Clauss calls ‘the Christians’ fanatical intolerance’ (2000: 170). As Nabarz points out, ‘In the fifth century of the Common Era, temples of Mithras – like most other pagan temples – were destroyed, and in some places churches were built on top of them’ (2005: 13). A letter written around the year 400 provides an example: ‘Did not your kinsman Gracchus . . . destroy a cave of Mithras a few years ago when he was prefect of Rome? Did he not break up and burn all the monstrous images there? . . . Did he not send them before him as hostages, and gain for himself a baptism in Christ?’ (quoted in Clauss 2000: 170).

Although it is clear that 25 December is not the actual date of the Nativity, it is possible to acknowledge this and to claim that it does not matter, as the date was chosen to celebrate the Nativity without any corresponding claim that this is the factual date of Christ’s birth. In other words, we do not know when he was born but we have chosen a date to celebrate his birth. Whatever the argument, the fact remains that the fixing of the Nativity by the Roman state was as much a political act as a theological one.

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The circumstances of its origins have made it a problematic festival for some Christians. The Puritans, for example, the ideological engine behind the defeat of the army of Charles I, were literal readers of the Bible. Finding no evidence there for Christmas Day, they argued for its removal from the Christian calendar. Following the conclusion of the English Civil War, which established the Commonwealth or English Republic, Christmas was banned by Act of Parliament on 3 July 1647. On 24 December 1652 Parliament proclaimed, perhaps in the face of some ongoing resistance, that ‘no observance shall be had of the five and twentieth of December, commonly called Christmas day; nor any solemnity used or exercised in churches upon that day in respect thereof ’ (quoted in Hearn 2004: 15). The ban remained in place until 1660. Parliament sat on Christmas Day, churches remained closed and soldiers were instructed to ensure that shops were open. Christmas was decriminalised as a religious holiday with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 but it did not return as popular festival. As Michael Harrison observes:

Christmas came back . . . but he came back wearing something of the sober manner of the men who had temporarily driven him out. Old Christmas, in the twenty years [sic] that he had been officially outlawed, had lost much of his former jauntiness. It was a quieter Christmas who came back. (1951: 146)

By the first decades of the nineteenth century, what is now our major annual festival had almost disappeared. As J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue point out:
Christmas, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, was neither a major event in the Christian calendar nor a popular festival. Few magazines or newspapers referred to the festal day in any detail and many ignored it completely. In 1790 the leader writer in The Times had asserted that, ‘within the half century this annual time of festivity has lost much of its original mirth and hospitality’ and that newspaper’s attention to the festival over the next half century bears witness to its general decline; in twenty of the years between 1790 and 1835 The Times did not mention Christmas at all, and for the remaining years its reports were extremely brief and uninformative. (2000: 40)

On 26 December 1826 The Times carried the following report: ‘The due observance of Christmas-day was strictly enforced in the City yesterday, the Lord Mayor having given positive orders to the city officers, not to permit any shops to be open for the transaction of business . . . The order was strictly complied with in general.’ The fact that the Lord Mayor of London felt obliged to enforce due observance clearly suggests that

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Christmas was not really being observed. Further evidence of its decline is provided by responses to the Factory Act of 1833, which granted workers 8.5 days’ holiday a year, plus Good Friday and Christmas Day. More enlightened factory owners allowed their workers to vote on which days they might have as holidays. Here is an example of the outcome of one such vote in 1833:
[T]hey put it to the vote who were for Good Friday and who were for Easter Monday . . . the same with regard to Christmas-Day; in our part of the country Christmas-Day is not esteemed a workman’s holiday, but New Year’s day is, and the same process has been gone through of informing them that they were entitled to a holiday on Christmas-Day, and they have uniformly expressed a desire to take New Year’s day in lieu of it. (Quoted in Cunningham 1980: 61–2)

The Bolton Chronicle reports a very similar attitude almost twenty years later in 1851:
Not long ago the natal day of the Redeemer was pretty generally disregarded in this town, and a holiday was generally observed on New Year’s Day. Now, though a holiday takes place on Christmas Day, the beginning of the New Year is looked upon as the Christmas season, and the inhabitants betake themselves to their festivities accordingly. (Quoted in Hudson 1997: 115)

In some rural areas it took even longer for the new invention to take hold. As late as 1867, a book on Lancashire folklore observed: ‘In some rural parts of Lancashire it [Christmas Day] is now little regarded, and many of its customs are observed a week later – on the eve and day of the New Year’ (quoted in Golby and Purdue 1981: 16).

Inventing Christmas

Commerce

Christmas was invented first and foremost as a commercial event. Everything that was revived or invented – decorations, cards, crackers, collections of carols, going to a pantomime, visiting Santa Claus and buying presents – all had one thing in common: they could be sold for profit. Therefore, it does not make historical sense to bemoan the fact that Christmas is too commercial; it was invented as a commercial festival. It was commercial from the very start. Part of what was being celebrated was the achievements of industrial capitalism – conspicuous consumption in a market economy.

Carol singing, for example, has a long history but it is only in the 1830s and 1840s that collections began to be made of old songs and new songs written with a specific focus on Christmas. Significant collections include William Sandys’s Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern (1833) and H. R. Bramley and John Stainer’s Christmas Carols Old and New (1871). In these and other collections, recently composed carols easily outnumber the ancient or the old. Although the Christmas tree had been introduced into England by German migrants in the late eighteenth century, it is generally accepted that it was the London Illustrated News’s depiction of Queen Victoria’s tree in December 1848 which popularised the practice. The first Christmas card was produced in 1843. Within forty years, helped by the introduction of the 1⁄2d postage stamp, Christmas cards were in mass circulation. As The Times made clear in 1883 and applicable to the invention as a whole:

This wholesome custom has been . . . frequently the happy means of ending strifes, cementing broken friendships and strengthening family and neighbourhood ties in all conditions of life. In this respect the Christmas card undoubtedly fulfils a high end, for cheap postage has constituted it almost exclusively the modern method of conveying Christmas wishes, and the increasing popularity of the custom is for this reason, if no other, a matter for congratulations. (Quoted in Golby and Purdue 2000: 70)

By the 1890s the Post Office was already finding it difficult to deal with the annual increase in mail. Significantly, like the first Christmas card, most cards ignored the Nativity and depicted instead evergreens, snowscapes, children playing, Father Christmas and robin redbreasts, providing further evidence of the decentred position of Christianity in the new Christmas celebrations.

Christmas crackers were invented by Tom Smith in 1846. Around the same period the pantomime first became associated with Christmas, its content becoming based on nursery tales. By the 1870s music hall stars were beginning to play the leading roles, anticipating the practice of contemporary pantomimes featuring pop and soap stars. Again, it is in the 1840s that Christmas presents first begin to be given at Christmas rather than at New Year. It is also at around this time that giving Christmas presents begins to lose its links to patronage: that is, giving as a confirmation of social status, giving without expectation of reciprocation. What is gradually established instead is an economy of giving amongst equals.

Father Christmas/Santa Claus is a latecomer to the new festivities. Significantly, he does not feature in the key ideological text of the new invention, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). He gradually

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emerges, mostly from the USA, between the 1860s and 1930s, most significantly in the drawings of Thomas Nast and the illustrations of Haddon H. Sundblom. The evolution of his image finally stops with Sundblom’s Coca-Cola advertisements, which first appeared in 1931. Before then he might appear dressed in green, purple, blue or white. Moreover, he may appear human or as an elf. Although Coca-Cola did not invent Father Christmas/Santa Claus, it can claim to have finally fixed his identity. By the 1880s his presence is an important addition to the new department stores, where it is now possible to buy Christmas decorations.

By this time Christmas shopping, undoubtedly the central event in the new invention, is taking place a month or six weeks before Christmas Day. Two accounts from 1885 make this very clear:

The presentation of ‘boxes’ and souvenirs is the same in America as in England . . . everybody expects to give and receive. A month before the event the fancy stores are crowded all day long with old and young in search of suitable presents, and every object is purchased . . . If the weather is fine, the principal streets are thronged. (Quoted in Miall 1978: 11)

The note of preparation for the great festival . . . was sounded early in November when the windows of the stationers, the bookshops, and the railway stalls became suddenly gay with the coloured plates of Christmas numbers innumerable, has increased in volume as time went on. Now, on the eve of the great day, there is not a street in the capital containing a shop, from its broadest thoroughfare to its narrowest by-way, that has not decked its windows for the Christmas market. (11–12)

What the new urban middle class invented was a Christmas with a firm emphasis on commercialism. Its central organising figure was Santa Claus/Father Christmas and not Jesus Christ. If a nativity was being celebrated, it was the birth of a market economy underpinned by the new power of industrialisation. The profoundly commercial-secular nature of the invention has made possible its incredible international success. Even an officially atheist society like the People’s Republic of China has no difficulty in embracing the festival.

‘God Bless Us, Every One’: The Politics of Charity

Charity is central to the Christmas invented by the new urban middle class. If what was invented was commercial out of instinct, it was charitable out of a sense of fear and guilt. The 1840s in England were known as the ‘hungry forties’, a period of economic slump, political unrest and

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intense suffering and misery among the working class (Cole and Postgate 1976).

The first Christmas card, commissioned by Sir Henry Cole and designed by J. C. Horsley, has at its centre not the Nativity but a representation of a typical middle-class family sitting down to Christmas dinner. On one side of the card we see the poor being given food, while on the other side they are being given clothes. The implication is quite clear; the celebration of the middle-class Christmas must include a consideration of the less fortunate. This argument is even more explicit in the text which is at the very heart of the invention of Christmas as an event organised around charity, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, first published on 19 December 1843. The enormous popularity of the story of Scrooge’s social redemption, not just as a novel (in its tenth edition by December 1844) but

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in theatre productions and public readings, made this the central text in the invention of Christmas. But to be clear, A Christmas Carol did not invent Christmas, as has been claimed by the Sunday Telegraph (18 December 1988), when it described Dickens as ‘the man who invented Christmas’. His most recent biographer has made the same claim in slightly more guarded phrasing: ‘Dickens can be said to have almost singlehandedly created the modern idea of Christmas’ (Ackroyd 1990: 34). But what Dickens did do was to popularise what was being invented; in particular, he made material its organising ideology of charity. As Golby and Purdue say of Dickens’s novel: ‘in it Christmas becomes a bridge between the world as it is and the world as it should be’ (2000: 45). The novel points ‘to the social problems of the present and anxieties about the future’ (45). When Dickens gave a reading of the novel in Boston on Christmas Eve 1867, it produced among his American audience what we might call the novel’s ideal reader:

Among the multitude that surged out of the building came a Mr and Mrs Fairbanks (the former was the head of a large-scale factory), who had journeyed from Johnsburg, Vermont, for the occasion. Returning to their apartments in Boston, Mrs Fairbanks observed that her husband was particularly silent and absorbed in thought, while his face bore an expression of unusual seriousness. She ventured some remark which he did not appear to notice. Later, as he continued to gaze into the fire, she inquired the cause of his

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reverie, to which he replied: ‘I feel that after listening to Mr Dickens’s reading of A Christmas Carol tonight I should break the custom we have hitherto observed of opening the works on Christmas Day’. Upon the morrow they were closed. The following year a further custom was established, when not only were the works closed on Christmas Day, but each and every factory hand received the gift of a turkey. (Quoted in Golby and Purdue 2000: 48)

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[...] Scrooge has to learn what his former partner Marley had learned too late: ‘The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!’ (Dickens 1985: 62). Scrooge is, to use a phrase from Matthew Arnold, ‘drugged with business’ (quoted in Storey 1985: 224). As if speaking directly to Scrooge, Arnold argued: ‘Money-making is not enough by itself. Industry is not enough by itself . . . The need in man for intellect and knowledge, his desire for beauty, his instinct for society, and for pleasurable and graceful forms of society, require to have their stimulus felt also, felt and satisfied’ (ibid.).

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Invisible Victims: Affirmative Action and the Mass Media

2009-12-16T09:09:00.003Z

Prior posts from this book here and here.

From Frederick R. Lynch, Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action (Westport, CT: Praeger Paperback, 1991):

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND THE MASS MEDIA

The television in the average American home is now on more than seven hours each day. More than 60 percent of Americans indicate that television is their primary source of news. This suggests that both commercial programming and television journalism have enormous power to shape perceptions of reality. As Ralph Turner and Lewis Killian have pointed out, the mass media authenticate the facts and determine which issues are important (1987: 191-202).

In determining which issues are important and real, the media determine which topics will be debated and which points of view can be legitimately expressed. The media thus influence the formation and life of "publics," groups crucial to Western capitalist democracies. Publics are groups interested in, but divided about, an issue (Turner and Killian, 1987). According to Alvin Gouldner (1976), the free and rational debate of issues in publics has been a keystone of the dynamic character of capitalist societies. The bane of such freedom, of course, is censorship. Publics thrive only with free discussion and open debate.

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann has emphasized that the mass media provide people with the very words they use in debating an issue: "If the media fail to provide them, then there will be no words. . . . The media provide people with the words and phrases they can use to defend a point of view. If people find no current, frequently repeated expression for their point of view, they lapse into silence" (1984: 172-173).

David Altheide has suggested a strong connection between television news and perceptions of everyday reality. Citing data to support this contention, Altheide holds that there is a "relationship between what people see

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on the nightly news and what they regard as problems and issues -- people 'watch the news' because that is where newsworthy events are presented" (1976: 25-26; see also Gans, 1978).

Noelle-Neumann holds that the mass media structure individual perceptions at the unconscious level. The individual unconsciously incorporates the media information and perceptions into his or her own views: "The individual adopts the eyes of the media and acts accordingly" (1984: 169).

There is no question that the mass media pervasively affect both how people think and about what they think. Social life is increasingly structured around the mass media. Everyday conversation is full of references to what is seen or read. Forecaster Faith Popcorn has suggested that Americans are increasingly "cocooning" themselves in their homes via video equipment (Newsweek, June 15, 1987:46-47).

In this chapter, I shall be assuming a very close relationship between what transpires on television and the major news media and the contents of American consciousness. Specifically, I shall argue that throughout most of the 1970s and well into the 1980s, the mass media have ignored affirmative action as a major issue. By so doing, they have effectively banished the topic from individual consciousness and widespread face-to-face conversation in publics.

By the term "mass media," I shall be referring to the major television networks, the major news magazines (especially Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report), and, to a lesser extent, major newspapers of national stature such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. I shall also examine how affirmative action was portrayed -- as little as it was -- on commercial programming.

As is the case throughout this study, I am concerned with affirmative action primarily in the form of preferential treatment for race and minority groups. I am less concerned with gender preferences.

My efforts here represent a combination of the traditional "count-and-prove" sociological approach and a more interpretive, qualitative, historical perspective. The sociology of silence is a somewhat peculiar area: how does one measure what was not (but, at times, logically might have been) discussed? Who does or should determine what is or should be "news" (Gans, 1978; Lichter, et al. 1986)?

I will try to measure with some degree of quantification the frequency of reporting on affirmative action in the periodical literature included in The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. When dealing with the most popular news and entertainment medium -- television -- I shall make use of the Vanderbilt University Television News Index and Abstracts. However, as the abstracts director has admitted in personal correspondence, the data provide only a partial account of the television record during this period.

I shall become somewhat more qualitative and interpretive when I turn to commercial television's treatment of affirmative action. I shall also employ

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a more qualitative or historical method of focusing on significant events that may have served to center the viewing and reading public's attention on affirmative action: The U.S. Supreme Court decision on Bakke in 1978, the Weber decision made the following year, the so-called conservative revolution (marked by California's Proposition 13 and the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980), the Pulitzer Prize scandal involving Janet Cooke, the contentious confirmation hearings on Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, and the 1988 Presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson.

I shall then briefly compare media coverage of affirmative action to media treatment of a highly related issue: busing. The chapter will conclude with an overview of the implications of this data and other studies on media ideologies and perceptions. […]

Affirmative Action in the Print Media: What Was Mentioned

Data from The Reader's Guide covering the period from March 1967 through February 1980 are presented in Table 5. These data indicate that there was never a total silence in the print media regarding affirmative action. However, it is important to remember that the Guide covers periodicals, most with highly limited circulations. Most of the articles on affirmative action were in a wide range of print media, from various business, labor, and ethnic journals to such intellectual outlets as Commentary and The New Republic.

Behind the numbers is the finding that the three major news weeklies -- Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report -- printed only about one article each per year on affirmative action. Most of those yearly articles (usually short ones) covered the same event or story. For example, in the

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late 1960s, the news magazines' affirmative action news accounts dealt with attempts to integrate the labor unions by the "Philadelphia Plan." In the 1972-73 period, Newsweek and U.S. News carried stories on colleges' and universities' efforts to implement affirmative action; Time did not. The recession of 1975 produced a new focus of conflict: affirmative action demands versus seniority in layoffs. Many of the forty-two affirmative action-related pieces for that year concerned this conflict.

In March 1976, U.S. News became the first of the major news weeklies to run a cover story on affirmative action. The magazine thus anticipated the rush of other articles that would be written as the Bakke case advanced to a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1977-78. Indeed, for the March 1977-February 1978 volume of The Reader's Guide, there were twenty-eight articles listed under the new heading: "Bakke". In the post-Bakke era, other new race/ethnic/sex-related headings began to appear in the Guide.

In addition to the fact that, especially prior to Bakke, the major news magazines paid relatively scant attention to affirmative action, the reporting that was done was usually after-the-fact accounting of various administrative and judicial faits accomplis in the realm of affirmative action implementation and enforcement. That is, the magazine reports and commentaries usually concerned court challenges, judicial decisions, and administrative conflicts that took place after affirmative action policies had been formulated "backstage" by government and corporate authorities. The media have undoubtedly missed much of the action in affirmative action due to the way such schemes have been imposed, as the previous chapters indicate (Mansfield, 1984).

A study of "East Coast Bias" in the news media by the Los Angeles Times (November 17-18, 1988) suggests that most major news organizations have long followed the leadership of The New York Times in deciding which issues merit press attention. Thus, it is likely that the major

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news weeklies contained in the survey of The Reader's Guide were following the Times' lead on this topic. Barry Gross's count of editorials and letters on affirmative action in The New York Times through 1977 reflects patterns found in my survey of The Reader's Guide (Gross, 1978: 163). I do not think one would find a different pattern of coverage on affirmative action in the daily print media.

Affirmative Action as "The Other Shoe That Doesn't Drop"

Instances of intentional or unintentional avoidance of affirmative action in logically related contexts pose a nearly unsolvable methodological problem. That said, there were clearly some areas of news coverage in which affirmative action could have or should have been raised, but was not.

As items in the "Sampler" chapter indicate, the press did eventually begin to grapple with the seemingly inverse relationship between affirmative action and standards of quality via standardized tests, grades, and other meritocratic criteria. However, there were earlier rumblings on the quality of education in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but the issue of affirmative action in such problems was largely ignored.

For example, in April 1978, in a New Times article entitled "What's the Opposite of Education"? reporter Rob Fleder described the hiring of hundreds of incompetent or illiterate teachers in the New York City public schools. That affirmative action might have provided some of the rationale for bureaucratic shortcuts in the hiring process was not mentioned, even though most of the problem teachers were Spanish-speaking. (A year later, in a 60 Minutes segment, the iconoclastic Mike Wallace was less charitable about bringing up affirmative action and its bearing on this same scandal.)

In the 1980s, all three major news weeklies ran cover stories on the crisis in teacher competence. All three reports ignored or quickly dismissed affirmative action's role in this. In the Time cover story entitled "Help! Teacher Can't Teach"! (June 16, 1980: 54-63) the magazine's writers immediately dismissed the "usual suspects" of affirmative action and busing in explaining declining standards in the teaching profession. Throughout the article, the reporters dodged the issue of affirmative action, including the obvious implications of their account of a teacher-testing program in Florida's Pinellas County: "Though all had their B.A. in hand, about one-third of the applicants (25% of the whites, 79% of the blacks) flunked Pinellas' test the first time they took it in 1979" (p. 58, emphasis mine). Only in the next-to-last paragraph of the eight-page article did the writers hint at the issue of affirmative action when they mentioned the fear in some circles that competency testing for teachers might discriminate against minorities.

Avoidance of linking affirmative action with declining competency in teaching was also obvious in the March 14, 1983, cover story on the subject by U.S. News and World Report (Pp. 37-42). The cover featured a white

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female teacher wearing a dunce cap. No mention was made of the low minority scores on teacher competency tests throughout the country until the final column of the final page of the story, and then the information was confined to two sentences. A similar cover story on the teaching competency crisis in Newsweek (September 24, 1984: 64-70) made no mention of affirmative action, race, or ethnicity, whatsoever.

TELEVISION COVERAGE OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

The Evening Newscasts

A review of affirmative action-related items in the Vanderbilt Television News Index and Abstracts from the first year of its publication in 1972 through 1980 reveals a pattern remarkably similar to that in the print media.

From 1972 to 1976, few reports dealing with affirmative action appeared on the nightly half-hour news broadcasts of the three major television networks. During these years, the three major networks combined devoted approximately twelve to fifteen minutes broadcast time per year to affirmative action-related reports. As with the print media, most of these reports were basically reports of faits accomplis, decisions by courts, for the most part, but also of actions or reports of other government agencies such as the Justice Department or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Television journalists, however, appear to have been slightly ahead of their colleagues in the print realm in recognizing the implications and importance of the U.S. Supreme Court's willingness to hear the Bakke case. Whereas Newsweek did not print its first cover story on affirmative action until 1977, NBC News devoted four and a half minutes of its nightly newscast on November 19, 1976, to a special segment on "reverse discrimination" and the Bakke case. CBS followed suit with a four-minute special on the same topic on December 14, 1976. The year 1977 saw an increasing number of reports on affirmative action, including a five-minute installment on ABC's nightly newscast on "discrimination, minority preference, school and housing desegregation" on August 24, 1977. Shortly afterward, CBS devoted nearly three and a half minutes to a clash over affirmative action politics at a steel mill.

When the Bakke case was argued before the Supreme Court on October 22, 1977, NBC devoted a full six minutes of its nightly newscast to the event, while CBS and ABC each gave the story about three minutes. There was very little reporting on affirmative action during the first half of 1978. By mid-June, however, the nightly newscasts were anticipating a decision on the Bakke case. When the decision arrived on June 28, 1978, it marked the high-water mark in television news coverage of affirmative action. ABC turned over most of its evening newscast to discussion of the decision. NBC

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stayed with the story for sixteen minutes; CBS, for fifteen minutes. In the following two days, NBC and CBS each took four to five minutes covering the aftermath of the decision.

During the remainder of 1978, ABC focused for more than three minutes on a Supreme Court decision sanctioning use of race in hiring and promotions. NBC later devoted four minutes to a story on the court-ordered imposition of a quota system for the Bridgeport, Connecticut, Fire Department. Each of the networks devoted at least ninety seconds to scenes of Bakke enrolling at the UC Davis Medical School. And each network devoted somewhat more than two minutes to the Supreme Court's decision in late 1978 to hear the case of the "blue-collar Bakke," Brian Weber.

But neither the Weber case, nor any other issue regarding affirmative action, ever again caught the interest of television journalists the way Bakke did. The decision in the Weber case, handed down on June 27, 1979, received nearly six minutes on NBC (the same as Bakke) but only about three minutes on both ABC and CBS. Television reporting on affirmative action fell off precipitously after that. Television was beginning to focus on another matter; just above the topic heading of "integration" in the Vanderbilt Television Abstracts, the number of entries under the topic of "Inflation" began to grow rapidly.

Other Television Coverage of Affirmative Action

There have been very few national news specials or public affairs programs of any consequence on the topic of affirmative action. The issue was twice debated on the PBS series The Advocates in the early 1970s, but the audience for these programs was minuscule. On the other hand, the normally intrepid reporters for the popular news show 60 Minutes dealt only once with affirmative action prior to Bakke. This was a rather timid segment entitled "Why Me"? concerning an affirmative action program in a security guard company. In the post-Bakke era, 60 Minutes has dealt more critically with affirmative action issues at least twice.

The first major (hour-long) network news special on affirmative action per se was broadcast by ABC on August 27, 1977. The Equality Debate opened with the Bakke case but moved on to explore other areas of affirmative action, such as quota programs in hiring and promotions among California correctional officers and in the Atlanta police and fire departments. The program was given a half-page "Close-Up" in T. V. Guide. Unfortunately, the program aired opposite a football game featuring the popular Dallas Cowboys, so few people tuned in.

In the mid- 1980s, affirmative action was debated on a PBS series, The Constitution, The Delicate Balance. On June 16, 1985, a Satellite Town Meeting anchored by Ted Koppol on the topic "Racism: New Times, New Questions" aired on many, though not all, ABC affiliates. A second special appeared one year later on June 20, 1986, a PBS-sponsored Frontline: "Assault on Affirmative Action". The ABC and Frontline programs were well-balanced, though both tended to focus heavily upon effects of affirmative action upon public

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sector workers, notably fire department personnel and school teachers. The ABC special included a specially commissioned public opinion poll, which found the usual results: though most of those polled still thought discrimination was a problem, 82 percent rejected quotas for hiring and promotion.

Until the mid- 1980s, affirmative action was not a popular topic on television talk shows and appears to have been actively avoided. Whether there were systematic efforts to suppress the affirmative action issue is difficult to determine. However, sporadic censorship of affirmative action was suggested by social critic and satirist Mort Sahl as he was discussing his own radio talk show on the NBC Tomorrow show. Asked by host Tom Snyder if he had ever received pressure from network executives concerning the contents of the radio show, Saul mentioned that he had received pressure on only one topic: affirmative action. Snyder did not pursue the point and the issue was never raised on Tomorrow until the Janet Cooke scandal (discussed below). The reconstitution of the civil rights commission and the appearance of welfare-state critiques, such as Charles Murray Losing Ground (1984b), led to raising the issue of affirmative action on some talk shows such as Donahue, in the mid-1980s. Omission rather than comment remained the rule.

For example, in 1983 NBC broadcast a one-hour special on America in Search of Itself, based upon Theodore White's book of the same name. White's book contained a long section in which he critiqued the ideology of race and sex quotas. That section of the book had been heavily attacked in major reviews. But there was no mention of affirmative action or even race and ethnicity in the NBC program. In fact, there was only one black face in the entire broadcast: a quick shot of a black woman beaming at Senator Kennedy as he made a speech. Also typical of this pattern was a 1983 edition of The David Susskind Show devoted to a discussion of the relations between blacks and Jews. Though the four main guests tried to bring up the divisive issue of race and sex quotas, Susskind kept the focus largely on foreign affairs. Eventually, five minutes of the ninety-minute program were permitted for a quick airing of the issue.

Affirmative Action on Commercial Television

I have already described in the previous chapter the 1975 All in the Family episode that dealt with affirmative action. There have been few other portrayals of affirmative action in other television programs. An episode of the series Paper Chase showed the struggle and ultimate success of a female law-school student who had been admitted under a quota. The only hint of problems with affirmative action came in an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati, when a black disc jockey discovered that he had been offered a posh job with a corporation mainly because he was black.

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Well into the mid- 1980s, then, commercial television writers and producers avoided the issue of affirmative action. On those few occasions when such policies were acknowledged, the message was either openly sympathetic or that affirmative action was a non-controversial reality that should simply be accepted.

To my knowledge, there has never been a major television program in which a white male's life was considerably damaged because of affirmative action barriers. Indeed, those familiar with television fare would probably find the mere possibility of such a script unthinkable. Affirmative action has received satiric treatment in a 1987 film, Soul Man. The movie portrays a young white male who gains an affirmative action scholarship to Harvard Law School by chemically darkening the color of his skin. Some critics denounced the film as "racist." […]

EVENTS AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

In news and commercial programming, then, affirmative action has been ignored. Thus, the mass media have, to some extent, created a reality in which this issue and its attendant problems do not exist.

Yet the media do mediate. Events occur, whether the media are predisposed to cover them or not.

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[…] In 1981, however, journalists had to focus on an affirmative action-tinged scandal in their own profession. In that year, a young, black, female Washington Post reporter, Janet Cooke, had to return the Pulitzer Prize because it was discovered that she had fabricated the story for which she had been honored. The Pulitzer governing board had overridden the recommendation of its own committees in granting Cooke the award.

Several prominent journalists immediately raised the issue of preferential treatment by both the Pulitzer governing board and by the Post in initially hiring Cooke. Asked by a nervous Tom Snyder ("People may accuse me of being racist for asking this") if the Pulitzer board members had bypassed their own award committees in order to give the award to a black female, Pulitzer committeewoman Judith Crist responded, "Of course they were. That's exactly what they were doing." They were overly anxious to hire Cooke in the first place because she would have qualified as a "twofer" for affirmative action purposes: She was both black and female. Indeed, in a special essay on the scandal for U. S. News and World Report (May 4, 1981: 80-81), author James Michener charged that this could have been the only reason for the Post's failure to check out Cooke's fraudulent credentials. ABC reporter Ted Koppel pointedly criticized Post ombudsman Hugh Green for ignoring affirmative action implications in his (Greene's) sixteen thousand-word analysis of the scandal.

The Cooke case is an excellent example of an event from which the media really could not turn away, even though it was apparent that the reporters and commentators did not relish discussing the obvious affirmative action implications of the scandal.

By way of contrast, most of the news media, and the academic community as well, could and did ignore a 1982 National Academy of Sciences'

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Research Council report that strongly discounted "cultural bias" in standardized testing (Los Angeles Times, February 3, 1982). The report was clearly relevant to the debate on merit-based criteria versus affirmative action. It has rarely been cited since.

[…] The Jesse Jackson presidential campaign obviously raised many issues with regard to race in American society. Initially, both journalists and rival politicians were timid in their treatment of Jackson. Eventually, press and politicians grew somewhat less cautious. Nevertheless, journalists and political opponents refused to question Jackson about affirmative action. Typical of press coverage was a Newsweek (March 21, 1988: 18-23) cover story on Jackson that did not once mention affirmative action; nor was the topic raised when Jackson was the sole guest on a Donahue show (May 29, 1987). When Jackson mentioned affirmative action by name or used the broader term "social justice," he was rarely, if ever, challenged by journalists or other politicians to explain how such policies might affect middle-class whites.

Jackson's color undoubtedly linked his candidacy to racial policies (busing and affirmative action) in the minds of white voters -- whether they were "racist" or not. Furthermore, Jackson had led, or had threatened to lead, boycotts against major corporations, such as Coca-Cola, Burger King, and MacDonald's, unless they signed "fair share" agreements (i.e., quotas) to give blacks a "fair share" proportion of jobs or franchises (see The New Republic, May 9, 1988: 10-13). By 1988, Democratic party leaders already

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knew that whites were decoding the Democratic campaign theme for "justice" and "fairness" as having anti-white or reverse-discrimination overtones (see Greenberg, 1985; also, Newsweek, December 9, 1985: 38). There can be little doubt that sizable segments of whites viewed Jackson's use of these terms with the same mistrust.

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AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND THE MASS MEDIA: LIBERAL BIAS?

Members of the mass media, especially print and television journalists, are defensive about continuing accusations of liberal bias. Nevertheless, such accusations have been confirmed in an increasing amount of scholarship and data. The evidence has become so obvious that even press insider columnist David Broder (1987) admits that the press in general shares "reformist values" with regard to civil rights, civil liberties, political reform and social legislation (Broder, 1987: 334). He refuses to acknowledge this as an ideology and maintains that it does not affect reporting of the news.

A press outsider, sociologist Herbert Gans (1978), also delineated what he termed a "paraideology" amongst the press. Like Broder, Gans identified this paraideology as reformist; he argued that the news selected by the media has tended to affirm many key reformist values in the American polity. One of those values has been "altruistic democracy," a value that incorporates the sanctity of racial integration.

If what Broder and Gans both indicate is true, then reporters and editors would surely shy away from stories or potential stories that are dissonant with the values of altruistic democracy and racial integration. Injuries sustained by white males under affirmative action is precisely such a topic.

Lichter, Rothman, and Lichter have published a detailed study of a systematic sample of the 238 "men and women who put together the news at America's most important media outlets -- the media elite" (1986: 21). The Lichters and Rothman found that 54 percent identified themselves as liberal, while only 17 percent were conservative. The predominantly white, college-educated males heavily favored liberal sources over business or conservative sources in obtaining data on controversial issues. Compared to a

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sample of businessmen given the same social science perception tests, the journalists were far more liberal.

With specific regard to the affirmative action issue, Lichter et al. offered little new data. They briefly compared the responses of their samples of journalists and businessmen to a report on the Bakke case. They found that the majority of both groups summarized the article in a straightfoward or neutral manner. But "among those remembering only a pro-affirmative action side, journalists outnumbered businessmen by 62 to 38 percent" (1986: 65). Lichter et al. cited another survey of 3,000 reporters and editors, in which 81 percent of the journalists voiced approval of affirmative action for minorities versus 57 percent of the public.

The findings of Lichter et al. with regard to coverage of busing by Time, The New York Times, the CBS evening news, and The Washington Post during 1970-79 suggest a positive portrayal of affirmative action. The authors found "a slight but consistent tilt in favor of pro-busing arguments. At all four media outlets, the majority of arguments coded presented busing in a favorable light" (1986: 233). Furthermore, "the anti-busing arguments were somewhat more likely to be criticized when they did appear" (1986: 234).

The liberal paraideology (to use Gan's term) of the press does not necessarily bias treatment of a given story or issue. More insidiously, the ideology and its taboos can deflect coverage and analysis of an issue or event altogether. As shall see in the following chapter, when a spiral-of-silence situation is developing around an issue, neglect or censorship by the mass media can have enormous impact. Lack of a conservative counterforce in the media and considerable evidence of regional bias centered around New York (and The New York Times in particular) compound and reinforce such processes.

Preview of the New McCarthyism

Joseph Sobran (1987) takes a darker, more critical view of contemporary journalism's liberal/progressive underpinnings. Sobran argues that this ideology has become deeply embedded in the thought, language and everyday etiquette of journalists and intellectual elites. A tiny violation of this ideology/protocol can be devastating, getting one labeled as racist, among other things. The elements of Sobran's analysis are intriguing:

The progressives' own value judgements don't have to be stated. They're built into the form of the stories themselves. The forces of the Past come equipped with a discernible set of traits: bigotry, greed, hate, selfishness, ignorance, zealotry, extremism -- terms that by now all have a "right-wing" whiff about them. Ever hear of a liberal or a left-wing bigot or hate-group?

By the same token, the forces of the Future can be discerned by their compassion, idealism, hope, intelligence, openness to new ideas. . . .

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The mythology also generates an etiquette, a set of progressive proprieties, breach of which can mean embarrassment and even political ruin. . . . The media carefully observe the progressive etiquette, beginning with diction: "black," "gay," "spokesperson." One of liberalism's great coups has been to transmute ideology into etiquette: A code of behavior in minutiae is awkward to argue with. The wrong opinion, the wrong word, can be a headline-making "gaffe," a social blunder, disclosing lack of compassion, unraised consciousness, "insensitivity."

And "Racism." What's that?

It used to mean something definable: a belief in the superiority of one race. . . . The word now has no definition and would lose most of its utility if it did. It's a piece of liberal billingsgate, a name without a thing, though liberal social philosophers discuss it as if it were a real substance. . . . It's not up to anyone to decide whether he himself is a "racist." It's not a matter of squaring things with meanings anymore. We're in ideological wonderland now. If the relevant opinion cartel declares you "racist," you're racist. . . .

Think of all the energy expended nowadays avoiding being declared "racist" (or "sexist" or "homophobic"). The charges emanate from amorphous clouds of attitude and amount to cues to others of like attitude to look, note, smear, ostracize, boycott, denounce, deplore, or bomb, as time and means afford. An informal defamation league takes care of these matters. (1987: 33-34)

The implications of Sobran's analysis regarding the mass media's treatment of affirmative action are clear: speaking or writing incorrectly about the issue can get even the most well-meaning person labeled racist.

In his saga of busing in Boston, Common Ground, J. Anthony Lukas found that the press in Boston cooperated in a well-intentioned conspiracy, engaging in pro-busing, anti-Irish self-censorship to, in the words of an operations manager at the NBC outlet, "'use television to create an atmosphere of compliance with Judge Garrity's order. . . (1985: 501). Lukas quoted a key reporter for the Boston Globe as stating, "'If they [white Boston Irish] don't like integration, we'll shove it down their throats . . . (1985: 504).

Sobran's and Lukas's observations suggest more than the operation of a mere paraideology. Such descriptions suggest a more insidious form of censorship and thought control, which, in the next chapter, I shall describe as the New McCarthyism.

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Tin Can Band / Rough Musicking

2009-12-14T17:08:00.009Z

The Northants Evening Telegraph, 11 December 2009, gave a decidedly minimalist account of the tradition:

Residents in Broughton will take to the streets banging saucepan lids and blowing whistles this weekend to keep up a 200-year-old tradition.

Villagers meet at Broughton Parish Church at midnight on the second Sunday of December to be part of the Tin Can Band, a group of people who march through the village making as much noise as possible.

The origins of the ancient tradition are unknown, but many think it began as a way of warding off evil spirits.

John Stamper, of Broughton, who has taken part many times, said: "There is no organiser, no secretary, it is simply a case that people know the date and will amble up to the church to take part."

The Tin Can Band will march along Church Street, Gate Lane, High Street, Wellingborough Road and Glebe Avenue and back to the church.

The following from the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000):

Tin Can Band.
Young people in Broughton, Northamptonshire, gather at midnight on the second Sunday in December for an hour’s worth of procession round the village making as much raucous noise as possible. To this end they bring tins with stones in, dustbin lids, old metal containers with sticks to bang them, and so on. They do not know why, or for how long the custom has existed, but the villagers have successfully fought off attempts to suppress it. There are one or two stories to explain the custom — it was done to frighten off Gypsies, or it was done to express disapproval of the birth of an illegitimate baby, and the latter is possible because of the similarity between the Tin Can Band and rough musicking. However, most writers point to the fact that this is the eve of the town’s feast day (Old St Andrew’s Day) and may simply be a way of starting the festivities attached to that celebration.

rough music.
Under a variety of local names and differing methods, rough music was the main customary way in which members of a community expressed displeasure at transgressions of societal norms, usually, but not exclusively, concerned with sexual and marital matters such as wife- or husband-beating, adultery, co-habitation, and so on. The term ‘rough music’ and other local names such as ‘ran-tanning’, reflect the almost universal element of noise—participants would bang on old kettles, saucepans, or shovels, blow on whistles, cow-horns, wave rattles, shout and bawl—anything to make a loud and discordant noise. Other names, such as ‘Riding the Stang’ and ‘Skimmington Riding’ encapsulate the other regular feature—the parading of effigies of the guilty parties, or sometimes neighbours impersonating them. The effigies would be mounted on a pole, a cart, or a donkey—often with the man placed backwards facing the tail. After processing the neighbourhood, these effigies would usually be burnt in front of the victims’ house.

Examples are recorded regularly from the 16th century onwards, including Henry Machyn’s Diary (22 Feb. 1562/3), Stow (1598/1994: 200), Samuel Pepys, Diary (10 June 1667), the engraving (above -- fellist) by William Hogarth entitled Hudibras Encounters the Skimmington (1726), and a well-known literary example is in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1884), chapters 36, 39. The proceedings were ‘regulated’ by locally understood rules and expectations. In earlier examples, it seems to be accepted that the next-door neighbour of the offending party should take the place of the effigy, and the occasion would provide the opportunity for much ribald humour. As with all such vigilante behaviour, these proceedings could be seen as great fun or highly frightening mob behaviour, depending on whether you were on the performing side or receiving end. It is clear that the authorities, such as the local police, whilst not condoning such behaviour, would often make sure to be ‘out of the way’ while it was going on and nobody would be willing to testify even if charges were brought. The victims would usually move away, or at least keep a low profile and appear to mend their ways, but in extreme cases the stress or shame could lead to suicide. Rough music is clearly related to continental customs, of which the French Charivari is probably the best known.

Explains the minimalism.

Google turns up no news or blog reports from this weekend. Perhaps someone involved might see this and give us a report?

Russell Kirk on John Randolph

2009-12-14T16:53:00.003Z

From Russell Kirk, Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in Conservative Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951)

A gloomy statesman generally has been an anomaly in these United States. Pessimism and statecraft commonly are mutually exclusive, indeed. Similarly, truly conservative statesmen -- leaders whose chief desire is the preservation of the ancient values of society -- have been rare here; often men called conservatives have been eager for alteration of a nature calculated to encourage a very different kind of society -- Hamilton most conspicuous among them. Professed devotion to the cause of undefined progress and innovation has been virtually a prerequisite for political advancement in this land of territorial and economic expansion. Clay, with his American System; Webster, with his sonorous nationalism -such names have lived. Calhoun, true enough, was both conservative and somber, but most men of a brooding character who obtained a temporary success in their day are almost forgotten now -- witness Fisher Ames. John Randolph is one of the few conservative leaders this age has remembered, but he survives in the popular mind more for his eccentricities than for his statesmanship.

The idea of progress has so permeated modern American thought that one sometimes has difficulty convincing professors of history and politics that Randolph was a statesman at all. They ask, perhaps, that you give them an instance of some great constitutional change or social innovation which Ran-

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dolph promoted; for, in their consciousness, "statesmanship" has come to imply political surgery, cutting at the organic structure of society. But Edmund Burke describes the statesman as possessing "a disposition to preserve and an ability to reform": the former talent takes precedence of the latter. This disposition to preserve was the ruling passion of Randolph's character. And his attempted reforms, his attacks upon political corruption, legislation for special interests, and the new industrial power, were all calculated to defend old ways against an ugly new order. Many a speech and phrase of Randolph's have a modern ring -- not only by reason of the acuteness of his thought but for the clarity of his language, since he despised the floridity which even then was engulfing American oratory. But nothing of his has greater meaning for us than his remarks upon permanence and innovation, old against new. The concept of progress was absent from Randolph's political thought; he stood fast against change in federal and state constitutions, dreaded the West, and lamented the decay of the times and the men. Could he see our age, he would think his warnings vindicated.

Randolph said at the Virginia Convention, "This is a cardinal principle, that should govern all statesmen -- never, without the strongest necessity, to disturb that which is at rest." Probably no man ever has expressed more succinctly the conservative instinct. He spoke thus at the end of his life, but since the inception of his political career, almost his every action had found its motive in that thought. His most thorough and eloquent exposition of this idea came in 1829.

Such opinions as Randolph held never have been popular in this nation; but possibly they may be true. The origins of Randolph's conservatism can no more be determined precisely than can the prejudices of most men. His congenital antipathy toward cant had a part; the accident of birth which made him a great landholder had a part; but most important, probably, was Randolph's love for the life of old Virginia -- the Virginia

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which had begun to fade away in Randolph's youth. That life must be protected and preserved, he declared; it was the best state of society he could see possible for Virginia and the nation, and he scoffed at striving for impossible perfection. His poetic imagination, which overleaped the obstacles ordinary politicians encountered, saw clearly the relation between political cause and social consequence: he knew that the life for which he struggled could not endure in an industrial civilization or in an equalitarian political system.

Yet Jefferson, too, was one of the planter-statesmen; and the liberalism of his mind contrasts most remarkably with the conservatism of Randolph's, the optimism of Monticello with the gloom of Roanoke. To Jefferson, John Adams wrote: "Your taste is judicious in liking better the dreams of the future than the history of the past." For Randolph, the future was gray and the past resplendent. What accounts for this divergence of opinion? The difference between their ideals of the agricultural life had its share; Randolph's admiration of Burke contrasted with Jefferson's allegiance to the tradition of Locke; and, besides, perhaps Randolph, defeated, had not Jefferson's illusions. That persistent hopefulness of Jefferson's, that reluctance to adhere to any rigid standard, that very liberalism -- willingness to experiment -- of the author of the Declaration, made it difficult for him to accept the logic which Randolph expounded. Acceptance would have meant a partial sacrifice of the democratic principle, and that Jefferson could not have endured. Jefferson may have been the wiser in that he changed with times and saved at least a part of his American dream; but Randolph saw the issue bitterly clear, and he, who had expressed his wish to die like a gamecock in the pit, would yield to no man and no force.

Randolph the conservative statesman has three aspects: as a critic of men and manners; as an opponent of expansion; and

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as a foe of constitutional change. Randolph's significant observation as early as 1800, "I have a respect for all that is antique with a few important exceptions)," hinted that what was for most Americans the age of public infancy was for Randolph the age of public decay; the "few exceptions" soon vanished from his system. America had no harsher critic of her failings.

Some may ascribe Randolph's despair to the irritations of his mental and physical constitution; but the matter seems to go far deeper than that, for he was joined in many of his complaints by men whose health was uninjured and whose minds always were lucid -- Nathaniel Macon, for one, John Brockenbrough for another. Randolph spoke of the decline of morality in public affairs; and there was such decadence, perhaps inevitable as the enthusiasms of the Revolutionary era faded and as an expanding economy offered prizes to the unscrupulous. He described the decay of old Virginia -- his country, he said -- and he was accurate, for socially and economically Virginia did decay from the inception of the Jeffersonian embargo onward, and the Revolution had seriously weakened the planter of the old sort. Perhaps it is with Randolph that we discern the beginning of that tendency, later so general in the South even before the Civil War, to look back to a happier past.

The tongue of the Southside orator was terrible to malefactors, particularly to the Yazoo men; it could prevent, for a space, the rewarding of guilt; but it could not change the time. Randolph might be called St. Michael, but, though he possessed the archangel's wrath, he lacked his sword.

One observes in Randolph's reflections a deep discontent with the nation even during the first administration of Jefferson; and after he had broken with Jefferson's party upon the decency of the Yazoo affair, the morality of the abortive purchase of Florida, and the costly embargo -- all, in part, questions of political conservatism against the spirit of the age -- his disgust became despair. To George Hay he wrote, early in 1806: "The old Republican party is already ruined, past redemption. New men and new passions are the order of the day -- except such of

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the first as have sunk into time servers, usurers, and money changers."

And the country, too, was declining, said Randolph; his pathetic observations upon the decline of his Virginia commenced with the adoption of the embargo and were intensified by the ruinous effects of the War of 1812. To Josiah Quincy he wrote in March, 1814, that Tidewater Virginia was one desolate expanse of dismantled houses, ruinous churches, abandoned fields, mournful evergreens replacing the prosperous old countryside. The old families were gone, too, and their place taken by "the rich vulgar," sprung up from commerce and war profits. "These fellows will 'never get rid of Blackfriars'; and they make up in ostentation for their other deficiencies, of which they are always unconscious and sometimes ashamed."

Here was the old Virginia planter with a vengeance, in high disdain for trade. An even more melancholy letter was sent to Quincy on July 1. Whatever prosperity remained in Virginia, Randolph observed, had retreated west of Petersburg, Richmond, and Alexandria and east of the mountains; the West was a wilderness, the Tidewater nearly deserted, though so well situated for commerce. Deer and wild turkeys had become more plentiful near Williamsburg than in Kentucky; bears and panthers had reappeared in the neighborhood of the Dragon and Dismal swamps. He looked back with regret to the Old Dominion:

Before the Revolution the lower country of Virginia, pierced for more than a hundred miles from the seaboard by numerous bold and navigable rivers, was inhabited by a race of planters, of English descent, who dwelt on their principal estates on the borders of those noble streams. The proprietors were generally well educated, -- some of them at the best schools of the mother country, the rest at William and Mary, then a seminary of learning, under able classical masters. Their habitations and establishments, for the most part spacious and costly, in some instances displayed taste and elegance. They were the seats of hospitality. The possessors were gentlemen, -- better-bred men were not to be found in the British dominions. As yet party spirit was not. This fruitful source of mischief had not

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then poisoned society. Every door was open to those who maintained the appearance of gentlemen. Each planter might be said, almost without exaggeration, to have a harbor at his door. . . .

Free living, the war, docking entails (by one sweeping act of Assembly), but chiefly the statute of distributions, undermined these old establishments. Bad agriculture, too, contributed its share. The soil of the country in question, except on the margin of the rivers, where it was excellent, is originally) a light, generous loam upon a sand; once exhausted, it is dead. . . . The tide swamps -- a mine of wealth in South Carolina -- here produce only miasma. You will find some good thoughts on this head, and on the decay of our agriculture generally, in our friend J. T.'s whimsical but sensible work "Arator."

Unlike you, we had a church to pull down, and its destruction contributed to swell the general ruin. The temples of the living God were abandoned, the glebe sold, the University pillaged. The old mansions, where they have been spared by fire (the consequence of the poverty and carelessness of their present tenants), are fast falling to decay; the families, with a few exceptions, dispersed from St. Mary's to St. Louis; such as remain here sunk into obscurity. They whose fathers rode in coaches and drank the choicest wines now ride on saddlebags, and drink grog, when they can get it. What enterprise or capital there was in the country retired westward. . . .

For Randolph, the forces behind this decay were in part the irresistible strength of time and nature, in part the failure of the men of his day, and in part the result of restrictive commercial policies enacted by Congress. He fought hard against all three. The next year, Randolph admitted gloomily of Virginia: "We are not only centuries behind our Northern neighbors, but at least 40 years behind ourselves."

The nation was censured even more severely by Randolph. Of his frequent railings against the degeneracy of the time, perhaps the best is contained in his speech against the Bank bill, in 1816. "We deceive ourselves; we are almost in the day of Sylla and Marius; yes, we have almost got down to the times of Jugurtha." The spirit of avarice was corrupting the whole American people, so that "a man might as well go to Constantinople to preach against Christianity, as to get up here and preach against the Banks." He lamented that restless covetous-

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ness which Tocqueville found so strong a decade and a half later:

The evil of the times is a spirit engendered in this republic, fatal to the republican principles -- fatal to republican virtue: a spirit to live by any means but those of honest industry; a spirit of profusion: in other words, the spirit of Catiline himself -- alieni avidus sui profusus -- a spirit of expediency, not only in public but in private life; the system of Didler in the farce -- living any way and well; wearing an expensive coat, and drinking the finest wines, at any body's expense. . . . If we mean to transmit our institutions unimpaired to posterity; if some, now living, wish to continue to live under the same institutions by which they are now ruled -- and with all its evils, real or imaginary, I presume no man will question that we live under the easiest government on the globe -- we must put bounds to the spirit which seeks wealth by every path but the plain and regular path of honest industry and honest fame.

In this vein Randolph steadily denounced the deterioration of American character, especially in congressmen. Both the House and the Senate, he wrote to Gilmer, in 1821, "abound in men not merely without cultivation, (that was to be looked for), but in men of mean understandings, and meaner principles and manners." These were not merely the complaints of a dreamer of ideal political purity, for even in his hopeful youth Randolph had recognized the limitations of men and governments. Party and faction, for instance, cannot be eliminated in any society, as he wrote to Monroe in 1803: "We rail at faction without reflecting that the remedy which, alone, can remove her, is worse than the disease. I speak of forms; -- for madmen alone can expect to see a whole nation deterred from intrigue & calumny by mere moral considerations. Let us not, then, be so childish as to expect from government effects utterly inconsistent with it." And the next year he told Tazewell that "cabal is the necessary effect of freedom. Where men are left free to act, we must calculate on their being governed by their interests and passions." This is very like Burke. Character, said Randolph, was giving way because the simple society which had produced the grand old Virginian and American character was

[p.140]

undermined by economic alteration and governmental tinkering. "But I am becoming censorious-and how can I help it, in this canting and speaking age, where the very children are made to cry or laugh as a well-drilled recruit shoulders or grounds his firelock.

The white population of Virginia, the old amusements and holidays, the very inns, were sinking into a listless decrepitude. Randolph wrote to Brockenbrough, near the end of his life:

On my road to Buckingham, I passed a night in Farmville, in an apartment which in England they would not have thought fit for my servant; nor on the continent did he ever occupy so mean a one. Wherever I stop, it is the same -- walls black and filthy -- bed and furniture sordid -furniture scanty and mean, generally broken -- no mirror -- no fire-irons -in short, dirt and discomfort universally prevail, and in most private houses the matter is not mended. . . . The old gentry are gone and the nouveaux riche, where they have the inclination, do not know how to live. . . . Poverty stalking through the land, while we are engaged in political metaphysics, and, amidst our filth and vermin, like the Spaniard and Portugese, look down with contempt on other nations, England and France especially. We hug our lousy cloaks around us, take another chaw of tubbacker, float the room with nastiness, or ruin the grate and fireirons, where they happen not to be rusty, and try conclusions upon constitutional points.

Neglecting the pleasures of simplicity and the satisfactions which honest work brings, the Americans were corrupted by a passion for tinkering with politics and the taxing power, Randolph often repeated. "It won't do for a man, who wishes to indulge in dreams of human dignity and worth, to pass thirty years in public life. . . . The country is ruined past redemption; it is ruined in the spirit and character of the people." He told Jackson that he much preferred the permanence of English institutions to those of America, "where all is ceaseless and senseless change." "In truth, we are a fussical and fudgical people. We do stand in need of 'Internal Improvement' -- beginning in our own bosoms, extending to our families and plantations, or whatever our occupation may be; and the man that stays at

[p.141]

home and minds his own business, is the one that is doing all that can be done (rebus existentibus) to mitigate the evils of the times."

So much for Randolph's verdict upon American instability. He was one of the few statesmen who have been hostile critics of their whole society and yet have managed to retain a considerable political influence. Very probably John Randolph of Roanoke would have been a critic of any society in which he found himself; but the bedraggled equalitarianism of early nineteenth-century America drove him close to fury. He perceived in his day that corruption and perversion of republican institutions to private advantage which ever since have been so lamentably conspicuous a feature in our governmental system. He saw, clearly, the doom of his Virginia, and the causes of that doom. Perhaps he was wiser than Jefferson in his view of the laws of descent; for if Jefferson expected the abolition of entail to bring about the predominance of prosperous yeoman farmers in Virginia, he was disappointed; and Randolph discerned in that act, with truth, the ruin of many an old Virginian family. Randolph's analysis of the consequences of the American laws of inheritance is strikingly similar to that made by the political sagacity of Tocqueville. Of men and morals in his age, Randolph held an opinion thoroughly contemptuous; probably the sight of humanity in industrialized and standardized America, a century and a quarter later, would have left even Randolph speechless. Toward the end, he felt sure that what Tocqueville was to call "democratic despotism," the triumph of dull and intolerant mediocrity, could hardly be averted; one could not bind future generations, and he told Brockenbrough:

Of all the follies that man is prone to, that of thinking he can regulate the conduct of others, is the most inveterate and preposterous. . . . What has become of all the countless generations that have preceded us? Just what will become of us, and of our successors. Each will follow the devices and desires of its own heart, and very reasonably expect that its

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descendants will not, but will do, like good boys and girls, as they are bid. . . . If ever I undertake to educate, or regulate any matter, it shall be a thing that cannot talk. I have been a Quixotte in this matter, and well have I been rewarded -- as well as the woful Knight among the galley slaves in the Brown mountain.

[p.143]

Invisible Victims: Institutional Responses

2009-12-10T12:44:00.006Z

Prior post from this book here. [Further posts here and here.]

From Frederick R. Lynch, Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action (Westport, CT: Praeger Paperback, 1991):

INVISIBLE VICTIMS: INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSES

We have seen that nearly all of the men in this study either explicitly or implicitly indicated that they feared being thought unmanly if they complained about a reverse discrimination situation. No one wanted to be perceived as a crybaby. And, as we shall see, if they failed to act out this gender-prescribed behavior, the mass media and other institutions were quick to remind them. Sex-role behavior has had a decisive impact upon how men responded to reverse discrimination and upon how others responded as well.

Traditional sex-role norms have long denigrated male expressions of weakness, powerlessness, or individual failure. Traditional inhibitions against viewing males as powerless have been reinforced today by what Warren Farrell terms a "new sexism," a product of women's liberation. The new sexism, with its emphasis on women's victimization by society, refuses to acknowledge men's vulnerability to pain and injury produced by the same social constraints. Contemporary "male bashing" in popular culture furthers a dehumanized, insensitive image of males. Under both old and new sexism, men cannot be seen as victims.

We have seen this victim-denial process illustrated in the previous chapter. Interestingly, the data indicated that this denial process was strongest among men; wives were often the most sympathetic source of support. We must examine further the social and cultural sources of silence or self-blame among men who have encountered affirmative action obstacles.

[p.83]

AMERICAN MEN AND FRIENDSHIP

During the past ten years, an increasing number of scholars have begun to focus on "men's studies." Amongst the most significant findings have been that males in contemporary America have few close friends and have problems with emotional bonding outside of marriage (Goldberg, 1976; Stearns, 1979; Pleck, 1981; Doyle, 1983; Miller, 1983; McGill, 1985). Miller writes:

The differences in the intimate behavior of men and women are never more apparent than in the area of friendship. . . . Even the most intimate of male friendships (of which there are very few) rarely approach the depth of disclosure a woman commonly has with many other women. We know that very few men reveal anything of their private and personal selves even to their spouses; fewer still make these intimate disclosures to other men.

One man in ten has a friend with whom he discusses work, money, marriage; only one in more than twenty has a friendship where he discloses his feelings about himself or his sexual feelings. (1983: 157)

Elliott Engel observed that "the typical male friendship, unfortunately, comes in one climate only: fair weather." In American culture, he argues, "we've been raised with positive male images that only sanction either standing alone or standing together as a team." Competition, not closeness, is nearly always dominant in the male bond and "the very stuff that intensifies an acquaintanceship into a devoted friendship seems reserved in our society for women only. . . . Men nurture their feelings only inwardly and later harvest ulcers or heart attacks" (1982: 13).

A pioneer in men's studies, Herb Goldberg, observed, "Many men I interviewed admitted to not having one intimate male friend whom they totally trusted and confided in. However, most of them seemed to accept this as being a normal and acceptable condition" (1976: 127).

A decade later, Lillian Rubin stated the same findings in almost identical words. She noted that in survey data, "In sharp contrast to the women, over two-thirds of the single men could not name a best friend. Equally interesting, this was not something that seemed troubling to most of them" (Rubin, 1985: 63). Rubin found it was much the same for married men. She echoed Engel's above remarks on competitiveness and lack of feeling.

But given the wariness with which men approach each other, given their fear of displaying vulnerability or dependency to another man, there's not much incentive to find time for friends. . . Men who claimed years of close friendship failed to confide to each other their distress at any number of conflicts, especially those that touched their personal or work lives in ways they feared would diminish their stature. (P. 66; italics added)

[p.84]

Friendship and Response to Reverse Discrimination

The above findings on men and friendship were vividly illustrated time and again during the interviewing for this study. Though most interviews went smoothly, there was sometimes a sense of "drawing out" buried feelings and emotions. "God, I'd forgot about so much of this," groaned Fred Goldberg in mid-sentence. "Maybe this interview wasn't such a good idea after all." On the other hand, approximately one-third of the subjects seemed glad to air feelings they had never discussed, with the possible exceptions of talking to wives. Some were surprised that anyone was doing a study on this topic.

Whether or not the men eventually obtained any measure of social support, there were deep inhibitions about saying anything at all.

"Why didn't I say anything about it [reverse discrimination incident]? Gee, I hadn't thought about it," mused Dan Elliott. "Pride, I guess. I didn't want to make excuses."

"When it hits you," said Lloyd McCall, "you don't want to admit it at first. Instead, you think it must be something in you. You doubt yourself. Your repress it, try to forget it."

The interviewers and I stumbled into this aspect of male behavior when at least half of the subjects paused or hesitated when asked about how friends responded to accounts of reverse discrimination.

"What do you mean by 'friends'?" was often the response.

What we were encountering was the relative absence of close, personal friendships amongst American males. Most married men's best friends were their wives. Most married or single men had few or no really close friends with whom they could or would confide deep, personal feelings, especially disappointment over a career setback. What friends many respondents had were also co-workers. The overlap between these two categories made responses difficult to classify in some instances. (At least four of the sixteen friends who indicated support in Table 2 were also co-workers.)

Therefore, the seemingly positive data contained in Table 2 of the previous chapter must be read with some caution. To judge by Table 2 alone, half of the men interviewed received support from friends. On the surface, that appears fairly positive. But the "support" was often token or transitory. Correctional officers indicated a cynical, tough solidarity with their colleagues. Community-college teacher Samuel Gray reported the most intense level of solidarity in his court battle against the administration. But these were the exceptions. Most "supportive" friends and relatives simply and briefly acknowledged the problem, then went on their way. Deep or lasting commiseration simply wasn't there.

"People have their own problems," Fred Goldberg dryly concluded.

These men, typical of males in contemporary America, have been conditioned against the communication of deep feelings, especially such taboo

[p.85]

areas as failure on the job. Thus, American males neither individually nor collectively can cope very well with systematic discrimination directed against them.

Karl Marx insisted that for an any sort of class consciousness to arise, there must be communication of a common sense of oppression. But imbued with the doctrines of individual achievement, individual responsibility, competitiveness, "silent but strong," and "take it like a man," there has been no chance of collective awareness, much less organized action by class-conscious white males. Hence, most lawsuits are lonely struggles.

In more traditional settings where more stereotypical thinking still prevails (see Greenberg, 1985), the loss of a job to a minority or female may be doubly damning. Without widespread, collective awareness of affirmative action barriers, a man who loses a job to a minority or female might be opened to double scorn, first, for having lost the job in the first place and, second, for having lost it to a minority or female -- who is presumably less qualified. (Indeed, such stereotypical thought styles may have been reinforced, in some instances, by the promotion of less-qualified -- or unqualified -- persons under the more aggressive forms of affirmative action -- see Chapter 12.)

With the mass media and the social sciences rarely recognizing the phenomenon, much less portraying it sympathetically, white males have been easily and silently victimized one by one. Many men have been quick to blame themselves for their own failure. However, if they have recognized affirmative action problems, they have felt constrained about complaining at all or "carrying on" because this would be a violation of the masculine code of "strong and silent." Thus, white males have been prevented from linking personal problems with public issues, the core of sociological understanding of self and society (Mills, 1959).

The lack of ability to link private problems with public issues was strikingly confirmed with regard to a question on what the subject knew about public-opinion polls on affirmative action. Only two subjects were at all aware that the public had been polled on the issue of affirmative action. Only one subject knew that polls showed massive public opposition to affirmative action as preference. In fact, the subjects' views were very much in line with public opinion. Nearly all of the white males interviewed opposed outright preferential treatment and group-based quotas. Some favored "affirmative action" of some sort, though they did not know how to define it. Many favored some sort of remedial training or education.

BLAMING THE VICTIM: CORPORATIONS

The "silent-but-strong" norms of American male sex roles were reinforced by corporations, the mass media, and other institutions. Blaming the victim fused with "take it like a man" in both small group and larger organization settings.

[p.86]

A Wall Street Journal report on corporate attempts to neutralize white male anger over reverse discrimination illuminates management's approach to white male resentment of affirmative action policies.

A special supplement to the regular March 24, 1986, edition of the paper was devoted to a report on Corporate Women. One story was entitled "The Last Angry Men: Some Companies Begin Confronting Men's Resentment of Successful Women" (p. 18 D).

According to reporter David Wessel, a consequence of white males' competing with women and minorities is an "inevitable backlash." Corporate managers have allowed men to blame affirmative action barriers for their own failures and have permitted resentment to "smolder unchecked." Therefore, "now a few big employers are trying the only remedy they can think of. They're attempting to bring the anger out of the closet on the theory that resentment that's exposed can be defused." The rest of the report and some others like it (see the Newsweek item below) make clear that "defused" means "neutralized," if not "brainwashed."

Merck & Co. of Rahway, N.J., was one of the first companies to require large number of employees to attend carefully structured discussions of affirmative action. The all-day sessions included a video of a white male executive warning a white male middle manager about his persistent failure to meet company affirmative action goals. The subordinate responded with a diatribe on affirmative action that was supposed to ignite a discussion among the viewers.

And it did, says Lawrence Branch, Merck's director of equal employment affairs. . . . Of the 17,000 company employees who participated, 69% said they had a more positive attitude toward affirmative action. An additional 28% said they hadn't changed their minds. . . .

Mead Corp. sent all 6,000 of its salaried workers to half-day affirmative action seminars between November 1983 and last July. "In the event a position I want is offered to a woman, I may be somewhat more understanding about the company's need to be progressive," says Jerry Josselyn, 27, a financial analyst who attended a Mead seminar. (1986: 180)

To grasp what is going on here one might ask, would corporations sponsor similar sessions for women and minorities to help rationalize discrimination against them? Of course not.

The entire article reeks of the assumption that white males lose out only in "fair competition" to women and minorities. At times, perhaps, they do. Other times, however, the game has been rigged and white males have lost opportunities to less qualified minorities or women. Reporter Wessel ignored that possibility and the legitimacy of frustration which must accompany such setbacks.

What we have here is a kind of play-within-a-play: an article describing how corporations rationalize preferential treatment and blame the victims for being angry while the article itself implicitly does the same thing. Both the reporter and those he reports upon blame the victim.

[p.87]

Similar strategies have been employed by corporate management to deal with more general racial tensions. Newsweek (March 7, 1988) carried an article on a racial "awareness" seminar utilized by corporations such as Bell Laboratories, AT&T and Mead Corp. on white racism. Using confrontational techniques, seminar leader Charles King tries to create an "atmosphere of oppression" that will convince participants that white institutions are inherently racist.

Los Angeles Times reporters Lee May and Paul Houston claimed that "affirmative action has won grudging acceptance in the work place" and that "despite continued sharp criticism from the Reagan administration, the anxieties created when minorities and women first received preferential treatment in hiring have begun to fade away" (1985: 1).

Yet the data in their report indicate a clear management-worker split in the "acceptance" of affirmative action. Many white and black corporate managers do appear to accept such programs. Female and minority persons quoted in May and Houston's article also accept affirmative action.

Virtually none of the white male workers quoted in the May and Houston article accept affirmative action. On the contrary, the white workers expressed anger, bitterness, or grim resignation about quotas in both hiring and promotion. The reporters describe one person whose wounds have obviously not healed: a Boston policeman who was thrice injured.

To white officer William McCarthy, the special advantage given blacks on Boston's new sergeant's exam is grossly unfair and demoralizing. McCarthy, who like Eversley holds a college degree in criminal justice, already considers himself a twotime "victim" of affirmative action. His hiring was delayed for five years and he was laid off once despite having more seniority than blacks who were kept on the job. (1985: 15)

May and Houston also indicate a differential acceptance of affirmative action in the private sector as opposed to the public sector: "If affirmative action has proceeded smoothly at private employers such as Monsanto -- it continues to generate ill will elsewhere" (p. 15 ).

The headline and initial positive thrust of May and Houston's article sought to reinforce the corporate management party line of "everything's fine" on affirmative action. But the data in their article indicated otherwise. Indeed, problems in reporting on the story -- related by Houston in a telephone conversation -- suggest this possibility. In some settings, notably police and fire departments, workers were instructed not to talk to outsiders about affirmative action operations. But May and Houston found white workers nonetheless cooperative, even eager, to discuss affirmative action. Houston mentioned that he and his co-reporter were "shooed away" from employees in a company cafeteria. Therefore, they interviewed many workers off-premises or off-duty.

[p.88]

BLAMING THE VICTIMS: THE MASS MEDIA

I am, perhaps, getting ahead of the plan of the book in discussing the media in this chapter when more detailed examination is in the next. However, the media are crucial in molding people's perceptions of reality, especially with regard to social issues. Therefore, what sort of response was offered by the media to white males who had encountered reverse discrimination? The same response provided by some co-workers, friends, and corporations: denial or blaming-the-victim.

The mass media basically ignored affirmative action. When they did portray a reverse discrimination situation, the message was that white males should simply "take it like a man." In 1975, an "All in the Family" episode was the first commercial situation comedy to broach the issue. Archie Bunker's "meathead" son-in-law was competing with a slightly less qualified black student for a graduate fellowship. The black student got the award, and the dean explained to Mike that "we sometimes have to tip the scales a little bit to make up for past discrimination." Mike was still somewhat frustrated but took the black student and his wife out to dinner in a gesture of reconciliation. No real harm was done and Mike later in the series obtained a position at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

A textbook model of blaming the victim was offered white males by Newsweek magazine's "My Turn" column. Frank Lovelock had been reduced to day labor because of a glutted job market for Ph.D.s and by quotas. Lovelock commented on his attempts to commiserate with a fellow daylaborer, a black male named Charlie:

I didn't tell him [ Charlie] how cheated I felt for spending so much time pursuing a Ph.D., only to enjoy a permanent sabbatical without pay. I didn't tell him about the rage I'd known when a female friend confided that I was wasting my time applying for a position at a local college because word was out that the department had to hire a woman. I didn't tell him that I had begun to buy into the ideas that reverse discrimination and hiring quotas were evils that worked against the principles of fair play. And I didn't tell him that I wanted some organization -- the National Association for the Advancement of White Protestant Males Who've Never Made It -- to carry my banner, to speak out in my defense, to give me rationales for coping with personal failure.

I'm glad I didn't serve this mush to Charlie. It was stinky stuff. Cooked up in a caldron of self-pity, it wasn't fit for human consumption. Unfortunately, I had started to become addicted to it. I hope to goodness that it's out of my system now.

There were good reasons that Charlie and I had been habitually unemployed. But these reasons had more to do with us as individuals, I think, than they did with any conspiracy to keep us out of the mainstream. Neither of us had really taken control of our lives. . . . Strange, I don't hear Lee Iacoca, Jesse Jackson, or Barbara Walters advancing this doctrine. (September 16, 1985: 8)

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Would Newsweek have printed such a column if it had been written by a black man for other blacks? To ask the question is to know the answer. The import of Lovelock's public self-flagellation was clear enough for white males: blame yourself, not the system, and especially do not criticize affirmative action. If you do, you're making excuses. Anyone can make it to the top in America if they try! Stop whining and get on with it!

Lovelock and Newsweek were articulating the values that reinforce blaming the victim and that underpin the American male, sex-role behavior: individualism, responsibility for self, and self-blame. Admittedly, these values have been a powerful motivating mechanism for many American males. And this sex-role orientation has also made white males vulnerable to the steamroller of affirmative action.

BLAMING THE VICTIMS: THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

No institution has more vigorously suppressed white males' claims of injury under affirmative action than has the Democratic party and its liberal allies in the mass media and the university. I shall have much more to say concerning the possible political impact of affirmative action quotas in Chapter 12. Suffice it to say here that, after twenty years of pushing race and gender preferences, the Democratic party has begun to search for a way to stem the flight of white, male voters to the Republican presidential candidate. According to Newsweek (November 18, 1984: 58), 73 percent of the white, male vote nationwide went to Ronald Reagan in 1984, and in some regions the figure was close to 90 percent. Similar patterns prevailed in the 1988 presidential election.

Walter Mondale's landslide loss of the 1984 awakened the concerns that led to Stanley Greenberg's embarrassing research findings of anti-quota anger in Report on Democratic Defection in Michigan. I have already discussed in Chapters 1 and 5 the acrid denunciations of preferential treatment programs that Greenberg and his associates obtained in their 1985 and 1987 studies. Again, the strength of the outbursts surprised Greenberg and his colleagues -- and his sponsors, as well.

What is of interest here is the reception accorded Greenberg's findings by his sponsors. Greenberg presented these and other similar data to a convention of state Democratic party chairpersons. He reported that "they were not pleased." The next day, the Democratic party's national committee met and, according to scattered reports in the press, attempted to suppress Greenberg's reports -- which nonetheless got some play in Michigan newspapers. Yet the findings had such profound implications that another study was commissioned in 1987. Initially, the findings were kept under tight wraps, though Greenberg admitted the findings on affirmative action were much the same.

The Democratic party has fought to render invisible the issue of affirmative action. It also has denied white males the right to legitimate complaint

[p.90]

under such treatment -- it has tried to deny the victims altogether. At least one prominent Democrat, former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph Califano, has directly stated that Democratic support of affirmative action, coupled with failure to understand the legitimate objections of whites to such policies, is a major reason the Democrats have not carried a majority of white voters in presidential elections since Harry Truman's election in 1948 -- with the sole exception of Lyndon Johnson in 1964 (Califano, 1988).

INSTITUTIONS, WHITE MALES, AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

There is little question that institutional responses to white males' encounters with affirmative action barriers has generated alienation and tension. More research needs to be conducted on how both white males and the institutions have dealt with these feelings. Also, what have been the human costs in terms of time, energy, and commitment lost to both the victims of reverse discrimination and the perpetrators?

The mass media might have studied such questions. But they have not.

[p.91]

Mike Whitney: The Audacity of Ethnic Cleansing: Obama’s Plan for Afghanistan

2009-12-10T12:36:00.003Z

By Mike Whitney
Information Clearing House

"Today, we Afghans remain trapped between two enemies: the Taliban on one side and US/NATO forces and their warlord hirelings on the other."
Malalai Joya "A Woman Among the Warlords" Scribner Publishing, New York

December 04, 2009 -- The Bush administration never had any intention of liberating Afghanistan or establishing democracy. The real aim was to remove the politically-intractable Taliban and replace them with a puppet regime run by a former-CIA asset. The rest of Afghanistan would be parceled-off to the warlords who assisted in the invasion and who had agreed to do much of the United States dirty-work on the ground. In the eight years of military occupation which followed, that basic strategy has never changed. The U.S. is just as committed now as it was at the war's inception to establish a beachhead in Central Asia to oversee the growth of China, to execute disruptive/covert operations against Russia, to control vital pipeline routes from the Caspian Basin, and to maintain a heavy military presence in the most critical geopolitical area in the world today.

The objectives were briefly stated in a recent counterpunch article by Tariq Ali:

"It’s now obvious to everyone that this is not a ‘good’ war designed to eliminate the opium trade, discrimination against women and everything bad – apart from poverty, of course. So what is Nato doing in Afghanistan? Has this become a war to save Nato as an institution? Or is it more strategic, as was suggested in the spring 2005 issue of Nato Review:

The centre of gravity of power on this planet is moving inexorably eastward … The Asia-Pacific region brings much that is dynamic and positive to this world, but as yet the rapid change therein is neither stable nor embedded in stable institutions. Until this is achieved, it is the strategic responsibility of Europeans and North Americans, and the institutions they have built, to lead the way … security effectiveness in such a world is impossible without both legitimacy and capability." ("Short Cuts in Afghanistan", Tariq Ali, counterpunch)

President Barak Obama's speech at West Point was merely a reiteration of US original commitment to strengthen the loose confederation of warlords--many of who are either in the Afghan Parliament or hold high political office--to pacify nationalist elements, and to expand the war into Pakistan. Obama is just a cog in a much larger imperial wheel which moves forward with or without his impressive oratory skills. So far, he has been much more successful in concealing the real motives behind military escalation than his predecessor George W. Bush. It's doubtful that Obama could stop current operations even if he wanted to, and there is no evidence that he wants to.

The Pentagon has settled on a new counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) which it intends to implement in Afghanistan. The program will integrate psyops, special forces, NGOs, psychologists, media, anthropologists, humanitarian agencies, public relations, reconstruction, and conventional forces to rout the Taliban, assert control over the South and the tribal areas, and to quash any indigenous resistance. Clandestine activity and unmanned drone attacks will increase, while a "civilian surge" will be launched to try to win hearts and minds in the densely populated areas. Militarily, the goal is to pit one ethnicity against the other, to incite civil war, and to split the country in smaller units that can be controlled by warlords working with Washington. Where agricultural specialists, educators, engineers, lawyers, relief agencies and NGOs can be used, they will be. Where results depend on the application of extreme violence; it will also be...unsparingly. This is the plan going forward, a plan designed for conquest, subjugation and resource-stripping. Here is an excerpt from Zoltan Grossman's article in counterpunch "Afghanistan: The Roach Motel of Empires" which details the balkenization strategy:

"We are arming and financing the same vicious men (the Northern Alliance) who brought fundamentalism to Kabul in the first place....Like the Soviets, the Americans do not understand that the insurgency is driven not only by Islamist fundamentalism, but also by ethnic nationalism. In the case of the Taliban, they are representing the grievances of the Pashtuns who have seen the artificial colonial “Durand Line” divide their homeland between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The best way to defuse the Taliban is to recognize the legitimacy of this historical grievance, and incorporate Pashtun civil society into both governments.

But instead of unifying the different ethnic regions of Afghanistan, the NATO occupation seems headed more toward a de facto partition of these regions. The foreign policy team that President Obama has assembled includes some of the same figures who advocated the ethnic-sectarian partition of Yugoslavia and Iraq. Obama’s Special Envoy to Af-Pak, Richard Holbrooke, authored the agreement that partioned Bosnia into Serb and Muslim-Croat republics in 1995, in effect rubberstamping the ethnic cleansing that had forcibly removed populations during a three-year civil war. He also turned a blind eye when Serb civilians were expelled from Croatia the same year, and from Kosovo in 1999.

President Karzai recently instituted a series of laws on women in Shia communities, causing an outcry from women’s rights groups. Hardly unnoticed was his application of different legal standards to different sectarian territories—a sign of de facto (informal) partition. Various “peace” proposals have advocated ceding control of some Pashtun provinces to the Taliban. Far from bringing peace, such an ethnic-sectarian partition would exacerbate the violent “cleansing” of mixed territories to drive out those civilians who are not of the dominant group—the process that brought the “peace of the graveyard” to Bosnia, Kosovo, and much of Iraq." ( Zoltan Grossman, "Afghanistan: The Roach Motel of Empires" counterpunch)

If Grossman is correct, than Obama's professed commitment to Afghan liberation merely masks a vicious counterinsurgency strategy that will ethnically cleanse areas in the south while driving tens of thousands of innocent people from their homes. This is essentially what took place in Baghdad during the so-called "surge"; over a million Sunnis were forced from the city by death squads and Shia militia under the watchful eye of US troops. US counterinsurgency wunderkind Gen Stanley McChrystal played a pivotal role in pacifying Iraq, which is why he was chosen by Obama to oversee military operations in Afghanistan. Here's a clip from an article by Ulrich Rippert "Europe backs Afghanistan strategy aimed at “regionalization”' on the World Socialist Web Site which provides more details on the plan to Balkenize Afghanistan:

"During his inaugural visit to Washington, new German defense secretary, Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg said it was necessary to put aside “the romantic idea of democratization of the whole country along the lines of the western model” and instead “transfer control of individual provinces step by step to the Afghan security forces.”

The new strategy of “regionalization” is aimed at dividing Afghanistan into individual cantons—in a similar manner to what took place in Lebanon and the former Yugoslavia. Up to now the US-NATO occupation supported the government of Hamid Karzai and sold the process to the public as “democratization”. However, occupation forces are moving increasingly to hand over power directly to regional warlords and their militias—on the assumption that such regional forces will follow the orders of their imperial masters. As soon as there is no more danger in a specific province, Guttenberg declared, then the international troops should be withdrawn from that area." (Ulrich Rippert "Europe backs Afghanistan strategy aimed at “regionalization”', World Socialist Web Site)

Obama's escalation is not aimed at strengthening democracy, liberating women or bringing an end to the brutal, misogynist rule of religious fanatics. It is pure, unalloyed imperial politics, the rearranging of the map and its people to serve Washington's interests. As journalist Alex Lantier notes on the World Socialist Web Site, the plan does not end with Afghanistan, but stretches across the globe. The hard-right policymakers behind Obama, still have not abandoned their dream of global rule. Here's an excerpt:

"As Obama indicated elsewhere in his speech, this escalation is one step in plans for even broader wars. “The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly,” he said, “and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Mentioning Somalia and Yemen as potential targets, he added, “our effort will involve disorderly regions and diffuse enemies.”

The inclusion of this passage made clear that Obama was basing his Afghan policy on a report issued last month by Anthony Cordesman of the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Cordesman wrote: “The President must be frank about the fact that any form of victory in Afghanistan and Pakistan will be part of a much wider and longer struggle. He must make it clear that the ideological, demographic, governance, economic, and other pressures that divide the Islamic world mean the world will face threats in many other nations that will endure indefinitely into the future. He should mention the risks in Yemen and Somalia, make it clear that the Iraq war is not over, and warn that we will still face both a domestic threat and a combination of insurgency and terrorism that will continue to extend from Morocco to the Philippines, and from Central Asia deep into Africa, regardless of how well we do in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

He added: “…the present level of US, allied, Afghan and Pakistani casualties will almost certainly double and probably more than triple before something approaching victory is won.” (Alex Lantier "Obama’s speech on Afghanistan: A compendium of lies" World Socialist web Site)

In the years ahead, we can expect to see relief and reconstruction efforts stepped up to provide security in the heavily-populated areas while the war in the south is expanded and intensified. Tajiks and Uzbeks, in the Afghan military will be enlisted to fight or expel their Pashtun countrymen, while warlords, druglords and human rights abusers are handed over large swathes of the countryside. 30,000 more troops is not enough to lock-down all of Afghanistan, but it may be enough to force hundreds of thousands of people into regional bantustans where they can be controlled by bloodthirsty chieftains, the very same men who leveled Kabul on April 28, 1992, killing 80,000 Afghan civilians. This is Obama's plan for Afghanistan, a carbon-copy of George Bush's.

Ezra Pound, ‘Murder by Capital’

2009-12-08T14:52:00.002Z

This essay first appeared in ‘Criterion’ magazine, July 1933; the text below is scanned from the Pound collection Impact (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1960):

I

TWENTY-FIVE years ago ‘one’ came to England to escape Ersatz; that is to say, whenever a British half-wit expressed an opinion, some American quarter-wit rehashed it in one of the ‘respectable’ American organs. Disease is more contagious than health. England may be growing American in the worst sense of that term. The flagrant example is that of receiving Spengler instead of Frobenius. I can’t conceive of Spengler’s being the faintest possible use in any constructive endeavour. Frobenius is a bitter pill for the Anglo-Saxon. He believes that when a thing exists it probably has a cause.

His most annoying tendency is to believe that bad art indicates something more than just bad art.

Twenty years ago, before ‘one,’ ‘we,’ ‘the present writer’ or his acquaintances had begun to think about ‘cold subjects like economics’ one began to notice that the social order hated any art of maximum intensity and preferred dilutations. The best artists were unemployed, they were unemployed long before, or at any rate appreciably before, the unemployment crises began to make the front page in the newspapers.

Capitalist society, or whatever you choose to call the social organization of 1905 to 1915 was not getting the most out of its available artistic ‘plant.’

‘I give myself Work,’ said Epstein when he was asked if he had any.

The best writers of my generation got into print or into

[p.83]

books mainly via small organizations initiated for that purpose and in defiance of the established publishing business of their time. This is true of Joyce, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and of the present writer, from the moment his intention of break with the immediate past was apparent. My one modern volume issued by Mathews was sent to the ineffable printer before dear old Elkin had read it. He wanted a ‘book by’ me. In the case of Quia Pauper Amavi, he again wanted a book by me, and suggested that I omit the Propertius and the Moeurs Contemporaines.

The story of getting Lustra into print is beyond the scope of this essay, it belongs to stage comedy not even to memoirs. If a new England or a new generation is being born, it can only know the wholly incredible island of those years if some genius who remembers them can be persuaded to devote himself wholly and exclusively to developing a comic technique.

You might put the question in the following form: What drives, or what can drive a man interested almost exclusively in the arts, into social theory or into a study of the ‘gross material aspects’ videlicet economic aspects of the present? What causes the ferocity and bad manners of revolutionaries?

We know that Lenin was annoyed by the execution of his older, admired brother. We mostly do not know or remember that George Washington greatly admired an elder brother who was, roughly speaking, sacrificed to official imbecility and ultimately died of it, i.e., after-affects of the ‘war of Jenkins’s ear.’

Why should a peace-loving writer of Quaker descent be quite ready to shoot certain persons whom he never laid eyes on? I mean to say, if it ever should come to the barricades in America (as England is not my specific business).

What specific wrong has the present order done to writers and artists as such, not as an economic class or category, but

[p.84]

specifically as artists? And why should some of them be ‘driven’ to all sorts of excessive opinion, or ‘into the arms of’ groups who are highly unlikely to be of use to them? If Frobenius saw the inside of Schonbrunn he was not surprised by the fall of the Habsburgs.

I do not believe that any oligarchy can indefinitely survive continuous sin against the best art of its time. I certainly did not look forward to the Russian Revolution when I wrote my monograph on Gaudier-Brzeska, but I pointed out that the best conversation was to be found, 1912 to 1914, in quadriviis et angiportis, under a railway arch out by Putney, in cheap restaurants and not in official circles or in the offices of rich periodicals. The cleverness and quickness ‘in society’ was probably even then limited to the small segment actually concerned in governing. I mean to say that those who govern, govern on condition of being a beau monde of one sort or another. Their rule cannot indefinitely survive their abrogation of ‘culture’ in the decent sense of that word, if any decent sense still remain in it.

II

Hatred can be bred in the mind, it need not of necessity rise from the ‘heart.’ Head-born hate is possibly the most virulent. Leaving aside my present belief that economic order is possible and that the way to a commonly decent economic order is known. What has capital done that I should hate Andy Mellon as a symbol or a reality?

This article is per far ridere i polli among our Bolshevik friends. Many of them are, alas, as far from understanding as are the decadents.

I have grown, if not fat under the existing order, at least dangerously near it. I have no personal grievance. They tried

[p.85]

to break me and didn’t or couldn’t or, at any rate, chance and destiny, etc., gave me ‘a fairly good break.’ I was tough enough to escape or to stand the pressure. Personally. Why then have I blood lust?

I have blood lust because of what I have seen done to, and attempted against, the arts in my time.

A publishing system existed and was tolerated almost without a murmur, and its effect, whether due to conscious aim or blind muddling fear, was to erect barriers against the best writing. Concurrently, there rose barriers against the best sculpture, painting and music. Toward the end of my sojourn in London even an outcast editor of a rebellious paper, Mr. Orage of the New Age, as it then was, had to limit me to criticism of music as no other topic was safe. Contrary to general belief I did not arrive hastily at conclusions, but I observed facts with a patience that I can now regard as little short of miraculous. As a music critic I saw the best performers gradually driven off the platform. I saw a few desperate attempts and a still smaller number of successful attempts to put over something a bit better than was ‘wanted.’ A few years later the French musicians were parading the streets wanting work. This is not due to radio, and it was still less due to radio a decade and more ago.

It is perhaps only now that all these disagreeable phenomena can be traced to maladministration of credit. Artists are the race’s antennae. The effects of social evil show first in the arts. Most social evils are at root economic. I, personally, know of no social evil that cannot be cured, or very largely cured, economically.

The lack of printed and exchangeable slips of paper corresponding to extant goods is at the root of bad taste, it is at the root not of bad musical composition, but at the root of the non-performance of the best music, ancient, modern

[p.86]

and contemporary; it is at the root of the difficulty in printing good books when written.

The fear of change is very possibly a contributing cause. I don’t mean an honest and perspicacious fear of change, but a love of lolling and a cerebral fixation. But with a decent fiscal system the few hundred people who want work of first intensity could at any rate have it, whether it were supposed to leaven the mass or not.

The Unemployment Problem

Mussolini is the first head of state in our time to perceive and to proclaim quality as a dimension in national production. He is the first man in power to publish any such recognition since, since whom? - since Sigismond Malatesta, since Cosimo, since what’s-his-name, the Elector of Hanover or wherever it was, who was friendly with Leibnitz?

The unemployment problem that I have been faced with, for a quarter of a century, is not or has not been the unemployment of nine million or five million, or whatever I might be supposed to contemplate as a problem for those in authority or those responsible, etc., it has been the problem of the unemployment of Gaudier-Brzeska, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis the painter, E. P. the present writer, and of twenty or thirty musicians, and fifty or more other makers in stone, in paint, in verbal composition.

If there was (and I admit that there was) a time when I thought this problem could be solved without regard to the common man, humanity in general, the man in the street, the average citizen, etc., I retract, I sing palinode, I apologize.

One intelligent millionaire might have done a good deal - several people of moderate means have done ‘something’; i.e., a poultice or two and bit of plaster hither or yon.

[p.87]

The stupidity of great and much-advertised efforts and donations and endowments is now blatant and visible to anyone who has the patience to look at the facts. The ‘patron’ must be a live and knowledgeable patron, the entrusting of patronage to a group of bone-headed professors ignorant of art and writing, is and has been a most manifest failure. There is no reason to pity anyone. Millions of American dollars have been entrusted to incompetent persons, whose crime may not be incompetence but consists, definitely, in their failure to recognize their incompetence. I suppose no pig has ever felt the circumscription of pig-ness and that even the career of an Aydelotte cannot be ascribed to other than natural causes.

This is what American capitalism has offered us, and by its works stands condemned. The British parallel is probably that lord and publisher, X, who objected to colloquial language.

For the purpose of, and the duration of, this essay, I am trying to dissociate an objection or a hate based on specific effects of a system on a specific and limited area - i.e., I am examining the effects on art, in its social aspect; i.e., the opportunity given the artist to exist and practice his artistry in a given social order, as distinct from all questions of general social justice, economic justice, etc.

Autobiography if you like. Slovinsky looked at me in 1912: ‘Boundt, haff you gno bolidigal basshuntz?’ Whatever economic passions I now have, began ab initio from having crimes against living art thrust under my perceptions.

It is no answer to say that ‘my’ programme in art and letters has gradually been forced through, has, to some extent, grabbed its place in the sun. For one thing, I don’t care about ‘minority culture.’ I have never cared a damn about snobbisms or for writing ultimately for the few. Perhaps that is an

[p.88]

exaggeration. Perhaps I was a worse young man than I think I was.

Serious art is unpopular at its birth. But it ultimately forms the mass culture. Not perhaps at full strength? Perhaps at full strength. Yatter about art does not become a part of mass culture. Mass culture insists on the fundamental virtues which are common to Edgar Wallace and to Homer. It insists on the part of technique which is germane to both these authors. I believe that mass culture does not ultimately resist a great deal that Mr. Wallace omitted. I think it ultimately sifts out and consigns to the ash-can a great deal that the generation of accepted authors of Mr. Arnold Bennett’s period put in. I do not believe that mass culture makes any such specific and tenacious attack on good art as that which has been maintained during the last forty years of ‘capitalist, or whatever you call it,’ ci--or whatever you call it--vilization.

Mass culture probably contains an element present also in Christianity, I mean the demand for that which is hidden. This sometimes pans out as demand for colloquial; i.e., living language as distinct from the ridiculous dialect of the present Cambridge school of ‘critics’ who believe that their books about books about writing will breed a ‘better taste’ than would familiarity with the great poets.

You can probably do nothing for a man who has arrived at the cardboard cerebration of supposing that you read Homer and Villon in order to ‘collect a bag of tricks,’ or that you ‘train a sensibility’ by reading a book about Villon rather than by reading Villon himself. And when such men write criticism and tell you to read other critics we are carried back to the scarcity economist Mr. Smith, who remarked that men of the same trade never gather together without a conspiracy against the general public.

The bureaucracy of letters is no better than any other bu-

[p.89]

reaucracy, it injects its poison nearer to the vital nerves of the State.

Mr. Yeats’s criticism is so mixed up with his Celticism that it may be more confusing to cite it than not, but he gave a better reason for reading great poets.

When you read Homer you do not read him for tricks, but if you are engaged in the secondary activity of building up a critical faculty you might read him in order not to be fooled by tricks, by second-hand sleight of hand derivations.

To Recapitulate

The effects of capitalism on art and letters, apart from all questions of the relations of either capitalism, art, or letters, to the general public or the mass, have been: (1) the nonemployment of the best artists and writers; (2) the erection of an enormous and horrible bureaucracy of letters, supposed to act as curators, etc., which bureaucracy has almost uninterruptedly sabotaged intellectual life, obscuring the memory of the best work of the past and doing its villainous utmost to impede the work of contemporary creators.

As for proposed remedies, C. H. Douglas is the first economist to include creative art and writing in an economic scheme, and the first to give the painter or sculptor or poet a definite reason for being interested in economics; namely, that a better economic system would release more energy for invention and design.

[p.90]

Quigley: The Destruction of the Middle-Class Outlook

2009-12-07T15:43:00.004Z

From Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan, 1966):

The chief external factor in the destruction of the middle-class out-

[p.1249]

look has been the relentless attack upon it in literature and drama through most of the twentieth century. In fact, it is difficult to find works that defended this outlook or even assumed it to be true, as was frequent in the nineteenth century. Not that such works did not exist in recent years; they have existed in great numbers, and have been avidly welcomed by the petty bourgeoisie and by some middle-class housewives. Lending libraries and women's magazines of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s were full of them, but, by the 1950s they were largely restricted to television soap dramas. Even those writers who explicitly accepted the middle-class ideology, like Booth Tarkington, Ben Ames Williams, Sloan Wilson, or John O’Hara, tended to portray middle-class life as a horror of false values, hypocrisy, meaningless effort, and insecurity. In Alice Adams, for example, Tarkington portrayed a lower-middle-class girl, filled with hypocrisy and materialistic values, desperately seeking a husband who would provide her with the higher social status for which she yearned.

In the earlier period, even down to 1940, literature’s attack on the middle-class outlook was direct and brutal, from such works as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or Frank Norris’s The Pit, both dealing with the total corruption of personal integrity in the meat-packing and wheat markets. These early assaults were aimed at the commercialization of life under bourgeois influence and were fundamentally reformist in outlook because they assumed that the evils of the system could somehow be removed, perhaps by state intervention. By the 1920s the attack was much more total, and saw the problem in moral terms so fundamental that no remedial action was possible. Only complete rejection of middle-class values could remove the corruption of human life seen by Sinclair Lewis in Babbitt or Main Street.

After 1940, writers tended less and less to attack the bourgeois way of life; that job had been done. Instead they described situations, characters, and actions that were simply non-bourgeois: violence, social irresponsibility, sexual laxity and perversion, miscegenation, human weakness in relation to alcohol, narcotics, or sex, or domestic and business relationships conducted along completely non-bourgeois lines. Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, John Dos Passos, and a host of lesser writers, many of them embracing the cult of violence, showed the trend. A very popular work like The Lost Weekend could represent the whole group. A few, like Hemingway, found a new moral outlook to replace the middle-class ideology they had abandoned. In Hemingway’s case he shook the dust of upper-middle-class Oak Park, Illinois, off his feet and immersed himself in the tragic sense of life of Spain with its constant demand upon men to demonstrate their virility by incidental activity with women and unflinching courage in facing death. To Hemingway this could be achieved in the bullring, in African big-game hunting, in war or, in a more symbolic way, in prizefighting or crime. The significant point here

[p.1250]

is that Hemingway’s embrace of the outlook of the Pakistani-Peruvian axis as a token of his rejection of his middle-class background was always recognized by him as a pretense, and, when his virility, in the crudest sense, was gone, he blew out his brains.

The literary assault on the bourgeois outlook was directed at all the aspects of it that we have mentioned, at future preference, at self-discipline, at the emphasis on materialistic acquisition, at status symbols. The attack on future preference appeared as a demonstration that the future is never reached. Its argument was that the individual who constantly postpones living from the present (with living taken to mean real personal relationships with individuals) to a hypothetical future eventually finds that the years have gone by, death is approaching, he has not yet lived, and is, in most cases, no longer able to do so. If the central figure in such a work has achieved his materialist ambitions, the implication is that these achievements, which looked so attractive from a distance, are but encumbrances to the real values of personal living when achieved. This theme, which goes back at least to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol or to George Eliot’s Silas Marner, continued to be presented into the twentieth century. It often took the form, in more recent times, of a rejection of a man’s whole life achievement by his sons, his wife, or himself.

The more recent form of this attack on future preference has appeared in the existentialist novel and the theater of the absurd. Existentialism, by its belief that reality and life consist only of the specific, concrete personal experience of a given place and moment, ignores the context of each event and thus isolates it. But an event without context has no cause, meaning, or consequence; it is absurd, as anything is which has no relationship to any context. And such an event, with neither past nor future, can have no connection with tradition or with future preference. This point of view came to saturate twentieth-century literature so that the original rejection of future preference was expanded into total rejection of time, which was portrayed as simply a mechanism for enslaving man and depriving him of the opportunity to experience life. The writings of Thomas Wolfe and, on a higher level, of the early Dos Passos, were devoted to this theme. The bourgeois time clock became a tomb or prison that alienated man from life and left him a cipher, like the appropriately named Mr. Zero in Elmer Rice’s play The Adding Machine (1923).

A similar attack was made on self-discipline. The philosophic basis for this attack was found in an oversimplified Freudianism that regarded all suppression of human impulse as leading to frustration and psychic distortions that made subsequent life unattainable. Thus novel after novel or play after play portrayed the wickedness of the suppression of good, healthy, natural impulse and the salutary consequences of self-indulgence, especially in sex. Adultery and other manifestations of undisciplined

[p.1251]

sexuality were described in increasingly clinical detail and were generally associated with excessive drinking or other evasions of personal responsibility, as in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises or in John Steinbeck’s love affair with personal irresponsibility in Cannery Row or Tortilla Flat. The total rejection of middle-class values, including time, self-discipline, and material achievement, in favor of a cult of personal violence was to be found in a multitude of literary works from James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler to the more recent antics of James Bond. The result has been a total reversal of middle-class values by presenting as interesting or admirable simple negation of these values by aimless, shiftless, and totally irresponsible people.

A similar reversal of values has flooded the market with novels filled with pointless clinical descriptions, presented in obscene language and in fictional form, of swamps of perversions ranging from homosexuality, incest, sadism, and masochism, to cannibalism, necrophilia, and coprophagia. These performances, as the critic Edmund Fuller has said, represent not so much a loss of values as a loss of any conception of the nature of man. Instead of seeing man the way the tradition of the Greeks and of the West regarded him, as a creature midway between animal and God, ‘a little lower than the angels?’ and thus capable of an infinite variety of experience, these twentieth-century writers have completed the revolt against the middle classes by moving downward from the late nineteenth century’s view of man as simply a higher animal to their own view of man as lower than any animal would naturally descend. From this has emerged the Puritan view of man (but without the Puritan view of God) as a creature of total depravity in a deterministic universe without hope of any redemption.

[p.1252]

The Bell Curve: Affirmative Action in Higher Education

2009-12-07T15:27:00.009Z

Continuing a mini-series on USAA.

From Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1996):

Affirmative action began to be woven into American employment and educational practices in the 1960s as universities and employers intensified their recruiting of blacks - initially on their own, then in compliance with a widening body of court decisions and laws. By the early 1970s, affirmative action had been expanded beyond blacks to include women, Latinos, and the disabled. It also became more aggressive. Targets, guidelines, and de facto quotas evolved as universities and employers discovered that the equality of outcome that people sought was not to he had from traditional recruiting methods. As it became more aggressive, affirmative action became correspondingly more controversial.

[p.448]

[…] Affirmative action is part of this book because it has been based on the explicit assumption that ethnic groups do not differ in the abilities that contribute to success in school and the workplace-or, at any rate, there are no differences that cannot be made up with a few remedial courses or a few months on the job. Much of this book has been given over to the many ways in which that assumption is wrong. The implications have to be discussed, and that is the purpose of this chapter and the next, augmented by an appendix on the evolution of affirmative action regulations (Appendix 7). Together, these materials constitute a longer discussion than we devote to any other policy issue, for two reasons. First, we are making a case that contradicts a received wisdom embedded in an intellectual consensus, federal legislation, and Supreme Court jurisprudence. If the task is to be attempted at all, it must be done thoroughly. Second, we believe affirmative action to be one of the most far-reaching domestic issues of our time-not measured in its immediate effects, but in its deep and pervasive impact on America's understanding of what is just and unjust, how a pluralist society should be organized, and what America is supposed to stand for. […]

THE ‘EDGE’ IN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

People may agree that they want affirmative action in higher education until they say more precisely what they mean by it. Then they may disagree. But whatever the argument, it would help to have some data about how colleges and universities have translated the universal desire for greater fairness in university education into affirmative action programs. Our first goal is to inform the debate with such data.

At first glance, ours may seem an odd objective, for certain kinds of data about affirmative action are abundant. Universities and businesses keep detailed numbers about the numbers of minorities who apply and are accepted. But data about the core mechanism of affirmative action -

[p.449]

the magnitudes of the values assigned to group membership - are not part of the public debate.

This ignorance about practice was revealed in 1991 by a law student at Georgetown University, Timothy Maguire, who had been hired to file student records. He surreptitiously compiled the entrance statistics for a sample of applicants to Georgetown’s law school and then published the results of his research in the law school’s student newspaper. He revealed that the mean on the Law School Aptitude Test (LSAT) differed by a large margin for accepted black and white students.

In the storm that ensued, the dean of the law school ordered copies of the newspaper to be confiscated and black student groups called for Maguire’s expulsion. Hardly anyone would acknowledge that Maguire’s numbers even raised a legitimate issue. ‘Incomplete and distorted information about minority qualifications for admission into the Law Center renew the long-standing and intellectually dishonest myth that they are less qualified than their white counterparts to compete in school, perform on the job or receive a promotion,’ wrote the authors of an op-ed article in the Washington Post, and that seemed to be the prevailing attitude. The numerical magnitude of the edge given to members of certain groups - the value assigned to the state of being black, Latino, female, or physically disabled-was not considered relevant.

Such edges are inherent in the process. In as neutral and precise language as we can devise: Perfectly practiced, the traditional American ideal of equal opportunity means using exclusively individual measures, applied uniformly, to choose some people over others. Perfectly practiced, affirmative action means assigning a premium, an edge, to group membership in addition to the individual measures before making a final assessment that chooses some people over others.

The size of the premium assigned to group membership - an ethnic premium when it is applied to affirmative action for favored ethnic groups - is important in trying to judge whether affirmative action in principle is working. This knowledge should be useful not only (or even primarily) for deciding whether one is ‘for’ or ‘against’ affirmative action in the abstract. It should be especially useful for the proponents of affirmative action. Given that one is in favor of affirmative action, how may it be practiced in a way that conforms with one’s overall notions of what is fair and appropriate? If one opposes affirmative action in principle, how much is it deforming behavior in practice?

[p.450]

[…] We first examine evidence on the magnitude of the ethnic premium from individual colleges and universities, then from professional schools. We then recast the NLSY data in terms of the rationale underlying affirmative action. We conclude that the size of the premium is unreasonably large, producing differences in academic talent across campus ethnic groups so gaping that they are in no one’s best interest. We further argue that the current practice is out of keeping with the rationale for affirmative action.

The Magnitude of the Edge in Undergraduate Schools

We have obtained SAT data on classes entering twenty-six of the nation’s top colleges and universities. In 1975, most of the nation’s elite private colleges and universities formed the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE), which, among other things, compiles and shares information on the students at member institutions, including their SAT scores. We have obtained these data for the classes entering in 1991 and 1992. They include sixteen out of the twenty top-rated private universities and five of the top ten private colleges, as ranked in U.S. News and World Report for 1993. The figure below shows the difference in the sum of the average Verbal and Math SAT scores between whites and two minorities, blacks and Asians, for the classes in the COFHE schools that matriculated in the fall of 1992. In addition, the figure includes data on the University of Virginia and the University of California at Berkeley in 1988.

The difference between black and white scores was less than 100 points at only one school, Harvard. It exceeded 200 points at nine schools, reaching its highest at Berkeley (288 points). Overall, the median difference between the white mean and the black mean was 180 SAT points, or, conservatively estimated, about 1.3 standard deviations. This would put the average black at about the 10th percentile of white students. In all but four schools, Asians were within 6 points of the white mean or above it, with a median SAT 30 points above the local white average, working out to about .2 standard deviations. Or in other words, the average Asian was at about the 60th percentile of the white distribution. This combination means that blacks and Asians have even less overlap than blacks and whites at most schools, with the

[p.451]

median black at the 5th to 7th percentile of the distribution of Asian students. Data for Latinos (not shown in the figure) put them between blacks and whites, with a median of 129 points below the white mean, or about .9 standard deviation below the white mean in the typical case. The average Latino is therefore at about the 20th percentile of the distribution of white students.

[p.452]

The ordering of black, Latino, white, and Asian is similar to that reported for IQ and SAT scores in Chapter 13. In other words, elite universities are race norming (though it is doubtful they think of it that way), carrying with them into their student populations the ethnic differences in cognitive distributions observed in the population at large.

We would prefer to have a sample of non-elite state universities represented in our data, but such numbers are closely guarded. The
only data we have obtained come from the University of California at Davis, for 1979. The black-white difference then was 271 SAT points, and the Latino-white difference 211 points. The Asian mean at Davis was, atypically, 54 points below the white mean, the largest such difference we have found.

The data from the University of Virginia and the two University of California campuses suggest that the gap between minorities and whites among freshmen at state universities may be larger than at the elite private schools. It is only a suggestion, given the limited data, but it also

[p.453]

makes sense: Places like Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and MIT get first pick.

Because the raw numbers of high scoring black and Latino students are so small, the top schools dig deep into the thin layer of minority students at the top of the SAT distribution. In 1993, for example, only 129 blacks and 234 Latinos nationwide had SAT Verbal scores in the 700s - and these represented all-time highs - compared to 7,114 whites. Even highly rated state institutions such as the University of California’s Berkeley campus and the University of Virginia lose many of these most talented minority students to the elite private schools while continuing to get many of the top scorers in the larger white pool. Such are the mathematics of competition for a scarce good, borne out by the limited university data available, which show the three state universities with three of the four largest black-white gaps in SATS.

The differences do not seem to have changed a great deal between the 1970s and the 1990s. The best longitudinal data from Berkeley illustrate a perverse effect of a strong affirmative action policy: The more aggressive the recruitment of minorities, the higher the average ability of the non-minority students. From 1978 to 1988, the combined SATs of blacks at Berkeley rose by 101 points, a major improvement in the academic quality of black students at Berkeley. But the competition for the allotment of white slots became ever more intense. The result was that

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the SAT scores for Berkeley whites rose too, and the gap between black and white students at Berkeley did not close but widened. Meanwhile, the unprotected minority, Asians, also were competing for a restricted allotment of slots. Their mean scores rose more than any other group’s, and by a large margin, going from far below the white mean to slightly above it. In just eleven years, the Asian mean at Berkeley soared by 189 points.

The summary statement about affirmative action in undergraduate institutions is that being either a black or a Latino is worth a great deal in the admissions process at every undergraduate school for which we have data. Even the smallest known black-white difference (95 points at Harvard) represents close to a standard deviation for Harvard undergraduates. The gap in most colleges is so large that the black and white student bodies have little overlap. The situation is less extreme for Latino students but still severe. Asian students appear to suffer a penalty for being Asian, albeit a small one on the average. We have seen no data that would dispute this picture. If such data exist, perhaps this presentation will encourage their publication.

The Magnitude of the Edge in Graduate Schools

LAW SCHOOLS. Timothy Maguire’s findings about the Georgetown Law Center were consistent with more systematic evidence. The table below shows the national Law School Aptitude Test (LSAT) results for 1992 for registered first-year law students. For blacks, overlap with the white incoming law students was small; only 7 percent had scores above the white mean. The overall Latino-white difference was 1 standard deviation. It was markedly larger for Puerto Ricans (-2.0 SDs) than for

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Mexican-Americans (-.8) or ‘other’ Latinos (-.7). The overall Asian mean corresponds to the 38th percentile on the white distribution, evidence of modest affirmative action on behalf of Asian applicants in the law schools.

The table above is for the national population of first-year law students. To assess the effects of affirmative action, it would be preferable to have data from individual law schools. At upper reaches of the LSAT distribution, from which the elite law schools drew most of their students, there was even less overlap between whites and blacks than in the SAT pool. More than 1,100 registered white law students had scores of 170 or higher on a scale going from 120 to 180, compared to three blacks. At ten highly selective law schools for which individual data were reported in a 1977 report by the Law School Admissions Council, the smallest black-white difference in LSAT scores (expressed in terms of the white distribution) at any of the ten schools was 2.4 standard deviations, the largest was 3.6 standard deviations, and the average difference for the ten schools was 2.9 standard deviations, meaning that the average black was in the bottom 1 percent of the white distribution.

MEDICAL SCHOOLS. Medical students repeat the familiar pattern, as shown for the national population of matriculated first-year students in 1992 in the table below. In the national pool, the black-white gap is

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about the same as in the law schools, with the average entering black medical student at the 8th to 10th percentile of the white distribution, depending on which subtest of the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) we consider. The gap between whites and ‘other underrepresented minorities’ is a bit smaller than the Latino-white gap in law school, with the average student in this group standing at the 20th to 23d percentile of the white distribution. The ‘other’ category - mostly Asian - had higher scores than whites on the physical sciences and (fractionally) on biological sciences, standing, respectively, at the 56th and 52d percentiles of the white distribution, while scoring lower in verbal reasoning (32d percentile).

As in the case of law schools, the black medical student pool is even more severely depleted at the top end of the range than it is in undergraduate schools, with important implications for the gap in the elite schools. In none of the three subtests did more than 19 blacks score in the 12 to 15 range (on a scale that goes from 1 to 15), compared to 1,146, 1,469, and 853 whites (for the biological sciences, physical sciences, and verbal reasoning tests, respectively). In practical terms, several of the elite schools can fill their entire class with white students in the top range, but only the one or two most elite schools can hope to have a significant number of black students without producing extremely large black-white differences, comparable to those reported for elite law schools.

Other studies have published data on medical school admissions, expressed in terms of the odds of being accepted to medical school for different minorities. All tell similar stories to ours.

GRADUATE SCHOOLS IN THE ARTS AND SCIENCES. Applicants to graduate schools other than law and medicine typically take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), comprising verbal, quantitative, and analytical subtests. The reports of GRE scores do not distinguish between persons who take the test and persons who actually register in a graduate school, so they are less useful than the LSAT or MCAT in trying to understand the scope and magnitude of affirmative action in those schools. Nonetheless, the results, in the table below, look familiar. The magnitudes of the ethnic differences on the individual subtests of the GRE (in 1987-1988, the most recent year for which we were given data) were somewhat smaller than for the professional schools, putting blacks

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at the 10th to 12th percentile of the white distribution, depending on the subtest. Asians were (as usual) higher than whites on the
quantitative and lower on the verbal. Adding up all three subtest means, Asians were a few points higher than whites.

The summary statement is that the ethnic gaps in objective test scores observed in undergraduate institutions are matched, and perhaps exceeded, in graduate and professional schools. If data become available from individual schools, this question can be answered definitively.

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