I wonder what other Voles will be up to on New Year’s Eve and wish everyone here a happy, healthy, productive and prosperous 2012.

Towards the end, we were asked to choose characters from history. We were asked to learn about the character and see the world from his/her eyes. I chose Adolf Hitler because I really wanted to understand how such a human being could leave such a remark. After all the massacres he lead, I found it more than interesting to discuss it. After each classmate chose a character, three random characters were chosen every time and a random topic such as freedom, power, authority, etc. were chosen for the characters to discuss. If you notice my first few journals, I mentioned the difficulty I faced thinking things through other people’s eyes. This activity has successfully opened my eyes and made me develop a second brain that can easily get isolated and put my feet in other people’s shoes.

I love the idea of a second brain. Maybe some people empathize more directly, but a virtual subroutine is a great way to start for those who don’t. This particular assignment is hard to grade and devolves easily into ignorant posturing by students who won’t or can’t get into the spirit of it, but when it works this is what happens.

Is it alcohol poisoning? It’s bonenkai (forget the year party, i.e., office-party season in Japan). Excess encouraged by open bars does have consequences.

Is it frustration because my research and writing have hit a wall? OK, there was the chorus trip to Geneva followed by a nasty bout of flu. Ruth is probably right that I’m being too hard on myself. I will likely bounce back.

Is it aging? This is the scary one. Am I going to turn out like my dad, more prone to anger the older he got?

Whatever, getting really, really angry, in a black Irish way that my ancestors are notorious for, is something that has always terrified me. I mean real terror, so much I tend to go passive and change the subject in most social situations and channel my nastiness into academic snide on the net. When I blow up, I feel physically sick for hours.

Exercise helps. Yoga helps. Then come those moments when everything, alcohol, exhaustion, frustration, changing brain chemistry come together and I lose it.

Do you have this problem? How do you cope?

All animals of a certain level of complexity, Bellah explains, engage in forms of “useful uselessness,” the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik’s term for behaviors that do not contribute to short-term survival yet do ensure long-term flourishing. In the play of animals, we can see a number of interesting elements: The action of play has limited immediate function; it is done for its own sake; it seems to alter existing social hierarchies; it is done again and again; and it is done within a “relaxed field,” during periods of calm and safety. Put another way: Play is time within time. It suggests to its participants the existence of multiple realities—one in which survival is the only measure of success, and another in which a different logic seems to apply.

‘Useful uselessness’ is how I’ve been framing history, so I’ll need to track down Gopnik. Other links: Gramsci’s advocacy of ‘dead languages’, Hegel’s remark about history being too different than the present to offer useful lessons, Watzlawick et. al.’s critique of Freudian psychology to the effect that knowing the causal origins of a complex in one’s developmental history is of no use in resolving it since we cannot go back in time and change them.

Aren’t all of the humanities, at least as taught in Gen Ed to people who will not be following them into serious scholarship, this kind of useful uselessness? Wouldn’t it be good to be clear about this fact and be appropriately playful about them?

Brown elegantly shows how the whole notion that the national debt has to be paid down or paid off is a red herring, a fundamental misunderstanding of how the system works (money is debt; the national debt is, essentially, the national money; it is therefore constantly both paying itself off and recreating itself in the normal course). But she also shows how leaving the creation of the debt/money supply in private hands, as it is now, keeps interest from circulating back into the economy where it can be earned back by debtors and used ongoingly to pay their debts, making the system unsustainable. Essentially this creates toxic debt sinks that eventually have to fill up, so that the deficit fretters end up being right albeit for the wrong reasons. She recommends public banking as the solution, which as she describes the problem does seem sensible, albeit further infuriating for the Ron Pauls (warning: balky script at this link) of the world.

The essay clarifies some things nicely and I recommend it. At the same time I’m suspicious of this kind of clarity, which feels a lot like the sort of self-help advice where everything will be cool if you exercise, eat right and get plenty of fiber. I have this intuition, maybe small-minded and self-serving, maybe I can get some Dao cred, or maybe it’s the same thing, that problems on a global scale are fundamentally unfathomable, indeed that to treat facts at that scale as problems is a kind of existential category error. Of course I know better from Marx, but then again we’re still waiting for Marx to pay off on the solution side.

Even with this to put in the syllabus as a resource going forward, I think I’ll still do the lecture, because I can illustrate with examples to give wet flesh to the dry bones of the handout. For instance, I tell a story about walking past a used car lot and being accosted by a guy in a bad toupee and loud plaid jacket who says “Hey buddy, how ya doin’? Can I offer you a cup of coffee?” I suggest that the ‘text’ of this utterance is unlikely to be the whole story, then assert an ‘obvious’ homosexual subtext. At this point the students generally discover the interpretive joys of context all on their own.

To get at countertext this time I used the trivial example of the strange intertextual prevalence of the term ‘denigrate’ in the Critical Race Theory genre. Without being racists, these good progressives have somehow stumbled upon unironic use of the one term among many possible synonyms for degradation that contains within it the same linguistic root as the notorious ‘n-word’. Having thus used controversy already to focus the students’ minds I went all in and further offered the example of early Black football quarterbacks being commonly referred to as ‘instinctual’ rather than ‘intelligent’, and how every current mention of a Black quarterback’s intelligence, however favorable, inevitably takes part in this history; participating in a discursive history of racism without necessarily saying much about the racist intentions or not of particular speakers.

This is a rightly celebrated book (there’s also a movie). Tyson tells tales like someone raised in a rich oral tradition, which as the son and grandson of preachers he was. He’s at his best when he uses multiple narrative strands to frame each other, patiently weaving together stories and perspectives to create a densely layered reconstruction of a surprisingly complex situation. Tyson is not at his best when he gets impatient and steps outside the narrative to attempt more formal analysis. He has the genre’s understandable but unhelpful tendency to substitute moral preening for rigorous investigation, and like any ideology his liberalism and religiosity default to pat answers too quickly and easily.

I’m currently stuck on a section exemplary of both tendencies (I’m about 2/3 through the book, which I picked up in a thrift store and am reading as an homage to my colleague Peter Murray), so I’m kind of live-blogging here a little bit. Starting about p. 180 in the paperback Tyson sets up a lovely narrative contrast between three men, Robert Teel and two Tysons: Tim’s own father Vernon, Methodist pastor of Oxford, and his notorious second cousin Elias, aka ‘the Gator’. It turns out Teel and Vernon grew up a short distance from each other in virtually identical material circumstances; the same could be said for Gator. Yet they turned out very differently. Tim ponders this:

I have often contemplated the differences between my father and Gerald’s father, and how they shaped our lives. Daddy and Teel were within a year of each other in school and grew up only a few miles apart. Neither of them liked school worth a damn. They wore overalls, ate cornbread and beans, drank their iced tea heavily sweetened, and knew what it was to work hard in the tobacco fields from sunup to sundown. Each of them left eastern North Carolina wanting something better, something more.

Here we have one of those grails of explanatory analysis, the divergent effect from seemingly identical causes. Why, given all the common antecedents, did Robert become an angry, violent racist while Vernon became a decent, humane social activist? Here’s Tim:

The difference between them couldn’t be boiled down to socioeconomic class; neither of their families had a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, as the saying went. In fact, while Teel had his G.I. Bill educational benefits to pay his way through any school, my father had to borrow and scrounge. But Daddy went to a liberal arts college founded by the Quakers, where he met pacifists, liberals, radicals of various descriptions, and black people far more educated than himself. More important, he had Reverend Jack Tyson for a father. At the heart of our differences, I think, stand the many-sided visions of Jesus that haunt the South. Although eastern North Carolina was awash in Baptist fundamentalism, the Teel clan did not seem to have had the softening influence of the gospel in their lives, at least not the same gospel that Jack Tyson preached.

Hm. I’m sure this is right, and I like the image of ghostly kaleidoscopic Jesus. But among other things we might like to know why Vernon pursued school even without liking it, why he picked the Quaker one and stuck it out despite all the cognitive dissonance, how the family got entrained on the ‘right’ version of the gospel, and so on. Here as usual Tim’s storytelling steps up to do the much heavier lifting.

The first thing that stands out is a rather different home life. Coming after dozens of smoothly flowing pages of the Tysons’ wholesome, affectionate, mutually respecting loviness, Teel’s broken home puts a squeal in the brakes. The missing father, the hardscrabble, woman-centered plan B, and eventually the worshipped stepfather and underage army enlistment all invite armchair psychologizing: arrested development, thwarted masculinity, status anxiety, joining issues. Tim wisely declines the invitation, spraying facts like aerosol and letting them settle into their own pattern. The account of his own father’s upbringing is occasion for some more gratuitous (albeit snarktastic) moral coup-taking, but in the process we find ol’ Grampa Jack actually reading the Bible and thinking about what it says, against rather than with received wisdom, a striking fact that clicks into the matrix of the Tysons’ multi-generational orneriness and disregard for common sense — supported by tale after tale of quixotic deeds — to suggest that bucking the tide is a Tyson thang, of dubious larger significance until conditions align for the greater enablement of such dispositional change agents. We can well imagine the same people becoming Communists or Anabaptists or Lutherans under different ideological conditions, but in the rural American South at mid-century the friendly reading of the gospels was the available conceptual framework for that contrary disposition.

In short, the Tysons are the kind of holy hemorrhoids who are doomed to frustrating irrelevance during normal times, but come into their glory when the poo hits the fan. Another cat who refused to be herded was cousin Gator, the cautionary tale, whose charismatic orneriness did not get channeled into oppositional intellectuality, perhaps slipping through the cracks as the beautiful baby of the family, and who therefore drifted into a highly successful but ultimately self-destructive amoral dissipation of boozing, fighting, gambling and womanizing. Tyson uses Gator to deliver a little homily about original sin. Much more of a herd animal but with no herd of his own or developed sense of how to function in one, Teel had ambition and saw that the main line of acceptance, success and influence ran through material accumulation and status conformity, not intellectual pursuit. He may have shared a dislike of school with Vernon and Gator, but unlike the former he had no positive models of deep thinking and also didn’t see the use of it; and in terms of the locally-dominant aspirational discourse, he was right. No doubt he was religious in the way Weber suggests lots of Protestants are religious, as a networking tool and symbolic guarantee of his trustworthiness in business. And no doubt his racism, clearly a subset of a more generalized anger and violence as stories of his various scrapes show, was motivated directly by the status anxiety of a climber needing backs to climb on, but it also has all the overcooked theatricality of an arriviste trying way too hard without any sense of nuance. It contrasts markedly with the more serene and subtle racism of the town’s old guard, who quietly shut down all the public parks rather than integrate them — probably as much as anything to avoid ugly scenes.

It’s not that Tyson’s religious explanation for the differences among these men is wrong; as Weber told us long ago in rising to the challenge of Marx’s materialism, ideas may often act as ‘switchmen’ among materially possible tracks. But we also want to know how elective affinities, as he called them, are established between particular circumstances, concepts and ideals, and how the particularities of disposition, experience, conditions and possibilities come together to produce actual life courses. I think Tim’s book does that, and it’s interesting for someone as tracked into complex formal analysis as I am to see it happening not in the analysis, but in the stories.

For real-time analysis, my favorite figure so far in the book is Goldie Frinks, who apart from the awesome name was a civil rights activist and former nightclub owner who shows up on p. 150. A shrewd Wittgensteinian, Frinks specialized in seeing situations from multiple perspectives and changing the game to dissolve problems and create opportunities.

As he explained to [Tim] at his home in Edenton two decades later, Frinks understood that Southern whites could hardly present a united front. Few whites truly backed the movement, especially in their own communities, but there were many shades of weak support, moral queasiness, deep misgivings, and reluctant opposition, in addition to the fire-eating racists. “You couldn’t forget that you had some good white folks, and even the other ones wasn’t necessarily all bad…. They were cramped because of the age-old mores of time,” Frinks asserted…. Dr. King, in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” argued that such people were often worse than outright opponents. But Frinks saw them as an opportunity. “A lot of the good whites couldn’t just come down here and speak. ‘You’re wrong, Mr. Teel,’ they couldn’t say that, but they had what you might call a silence that I could hear. If you forgot that, you wouldn’t be nowhere. A man like Teel, getting his badge of honor from the murder of a man who had no cause to be put to death, that man was somewhat out of place.”

Somewhat out of place is a beautiful way to think about a guy like Teel, perceptive and without moral patness. Nor does it make Teel any less destructive or any less the queasifying instrument of a system of domination, which Frinks actively fought. But it’s a lovely reminder that giving people a sense of place is an important tactic and purpose of humanist activism, just like rudely displacing people and requiring heroic saintliness of them is not a promising strategy for positive change.

Ryssdal: All right, well let me ask you this, then: Is it not possible that knowing what’s coming creates more volatility, [that] a rising VIX creates a rising VIX?

Whaley: Oh, can you frame that question a little differently?

Ryssdal: Sure. Is it possible that this thing, knowing how nervous people are, makes people more nervous?

Whaley: Um, that would a behavioral type of interpretation. What makes me more nervous, actually, is sort of the movements that we’re seeing in the stock market on a daily basis. This VIX is just telling you that they suspect those types of movements to persist. But yes, I mean, you’re seeing that the price of insurance is going up, and so it makes you wonder, if you’re seeing the price rise, whether people smarter that know there’s going to be an event, so you might jump in too.

The question just doesn’t track at first for Whaley, who clearly hasn’t thought of the matter that way and whose strength is therefore clearly not ‘behavioral types of interpretation’ — that is, what people actually do and why.

Does fiscal consolidation lead to social unrest? From the end of the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1930s to anti-government demonstrations in Greece in 2010-11, austerity has tended to go hand in hand with politically motivated violence and social instability. In this paper, we assemble cross country evidence for the period 1919 to the present, and examine the extent to which societies become unstable after budget cuts. The results show a clear positive correlation between fiscal retrenchment and instability. We test if the relationship simply reflects economic downturns, and conclude that this is not the key factor. We also analyse interactions with various economic and political variables. While autocracies and democracies show a broadly similar responses to budget cuts, countries with more constraints on the executive are less likely to see unrest as a result of austerity measures. Growing media penetration does not lead to a stronger effect of cut-backs on the level of unrest.

That’s the abstract of a long Centre for Economic Policy Research working paper (pdf), “Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe, 1919-2009″ by Jacopo Ponticelli, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Hans-Joachim Voth, UPF-ICREA, CREI and CEPR. Thanks to Duncan Law.

The dynamic is long familiar in social movement theory, often referred to as the ‘relative immiseration’ effect. It’s also familiar to people with more than one child. Basically, when you give folks stuff and then take it away, or give them relatively less stuff than reference groups, they get way more pissed off than if they never had anything to start with or deprivation is evenly distributed.

Relative immiseration is an important corrective to vulgarizations of Marxism in which capitalism is supposed to precipitate its own demise only if it reduces the working class to absolute abjection. Not so – just as all needs beyond mere subsistence are relative to particular social formations, revolutionary immiseration is relative to the general standard of well-being of particular social formations. Nowadays the poor in Western societies mostly have indoor plumbing that was not available even to kings just a few centuries ago. (They have fridges and microwaves, yes.) But that’s not the relevant measure of degradation – it’s where the poor stand in relation to the rich now. And as is well-known, that gap has been widening. The borrowing powers of governments have been filling the gap for the past several decades, but that compensatory regime seems to be hitting its unsustainability threshold. We live in interesting times.

Of course there’s nothing that says capitalists have to keep driving relative immiseration toward the brink. At least since Bismarck and the Gilded Age smart elites have recognized the need to spread the wealth to some degree to purchase social peace and secure the conditions for continued profit. All it takes is withdrawing some capital from speculative ‘investment’ and using it instead, directly or through government transfers, to build the consumption side of the economy – namely by hiring people and paying them well, whether they ‘earn’ it or not – compensating according to need, not productivity, as Marx argued and Jim Livingston keeps arguing.

If paying people to be consumers out of scale with their productivity seems immoral, it’s worth remembering that while credit default swaps may be called ‘products’ in the ‘industry’, they’re not actually making anything but wealth either. Aren’t (relative) need and general prosperity enough to ground public morals?

UPDATE: Dave Mazella at The Long Eighteenth has been rereading E.P. Thompson on “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” and finds rioters “trying to restore traditional understandings of collective rights and reciprocities, traditions that elites disrupted or ignored at their peril.” This is consistent with both the analysis here and JohnM’s disambiguating comment below, but adding another layer: I often have to resist the activist reflex to see in every little upheaval a foretaste of revolution, and Thompson reminds us of the complex dynamic robustness of existing arrangements.

The opening case study will be late 19th-early 20th century southern Italy. The one book I’ve ordered is Gramsci’s short, pithy The Southern Question, which I’ll use to prime the analysis pump. We’ll find some primary sources online and work on critical reading, in the process discovering that language skills can be pretty important…. Then we’ll look at visual sources, in which the ‘language’ issues are more subtle, and quickly start watching movies. The ones I have in mind so far are “Padre Padrone” (Taviani brothers’ gritty collaborative adaptation of linguist Gavino Ledda’s autobiography of growing up as an illiterate Sardinian shepherd); “Kaos” (Taviani brothers’ anthology adaptation of several Pirandello stories); “The Leopard” (Burt Lancaster in classic film adaptation of Lampedusa’s great novel on the decline of the old Southern nobility); and maybe “Christ Stopped at Eboli” (from Carlo Levi’s account of his internal exile in Basilicata). I also thought of showing a spaghetti western (maybe “Fistful of Dollars”) for the fun of it, because of how steeped those are in Italian social history reimagined in the American West, but I doubt we’ll have time and it would probably just confuse the students even more than they’ll already be without a lecture/textbook master narrative to tell them what to think.

I’m open, even eager for other suggestions. I’m also eager for suggestions about films from other parts of Europe to provide the impressionistic comparisons. Do you have any favorites I should look at? Any other thoughts about how to make this class cool for a mixed group of majors and gen ed tourists?