"Americans are always talking about the American Dream."

"They refer to it in all their books and the concept has become a symbol of American culture. This is what made me want to read more about it. Can we apply its principles in Saudi Arabia and how can we achieve a better way of life?"

I was already in the middle of blogging this Saudi Gazette opinion piece by Samar Fatany, when I got about 2/3 of the way into it and saw:

Since the 1920s, several authors, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, have ridiculed the chase for the American Dream. In his book "The Great Gatsby", Fitzgerald, reflects upon the American Dream’s demise, and the pessimism of contemporary Americans.

Gatsby! He's everywhere!

Cass Sunstein reviews "Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism."

That's a book by Sarah Conly, published by Cambridge University Press. 206 pages, $95. $95! Fortunately, we cannot be coerced to buy that. I will exercise my autonomy and refrain from buying it. I'll just read Sunstein, for free, here.

[A] significant strand in American culture appears to endorse the central argument of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty....

the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or mental, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.

Sunstein refers to social science research that shows people actually aren't very good at making decisions for themselves. We have "present bias" (and don't pay enough attention to the future), we're bad at assessing probability, and we're "unrealistically optimistic."

Until now, we have lacked a serious philosophical discussion of whether and how recent behavioral findings undermine Mill’s harm principle and thus open the way toward paternalism. Sarah Conly’s illuminating book Against Autonomy provides such a discussion....

To Mill’s claim that individuals are uniquely well situated to know what is best for them, Conly objects that Mill failed to make a critical distinction between means and ends. True, people may know what their ends are, but sometimes they go wrong when they choose how to get them....

If the benefits justify the costs, she is willing to eliminate freedom of choice, not to prevent people from obtaining their own goals but to ensure that they do so....

A natural objection is that autonomy is an end in itself and not merely a means. On this view, people should be entitled to choose as they like, even if they end up choosing poorly. In a free society, people must be allowed to make their own mistakes, and to the extent possible learn from them, rather than facing correction and punishment from bureaucratic meddlers. Conly responds that when government makes (some) decisions for us, we gain not only in personal welfare but also in autonomy, if only because our time is freed up to deal with what most concerns us....

 As for Sunstein himself, he prefers a softer form of government manipulation, described in the article and in his book "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness."

"The other night, when [redacted] asked me why I switched from computer science to sociology, I said..."

"... it was because Computer Science was hard and I wasn’t really good at it, which really isn’t true at all... The real reason is because I want to save the world," wrote Aaron Swartz, quoted in a long article titled "The Idealist: Aaron Swartz wanted to save the world. Why couldn’t he save himself?"

The Sandy Hook massacre should "force us to confront yet again the ways in which ever more of our lives are lived on a screen, in the cloud, via our computers and phones and tablets...."

Says Michael S. Rosenwald, noting that:

Except for using the bathroom and eating his meals, getting a haircut was just about the only thing Lanza couldn’t do online.

Adam Lanza got haircuts, went to the bathroom, and ate food. Are we not forced to confront yet again our eating of food, getting of haircuts, and going to the bathroom?

[Lanza] seems to have found “an illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship”.... Lanza didn’t need to trek out into his town....

Shop owners in tightknit Newtown didn’t know him, I think, because he had no reason to know them. Amazon could deliver anything he wanted to his door by the next day.

The time we spend shopping is in decline.... The local stores we once loved visiting have been replaced by UPS drivers we rarely see....

Now, it's a problem that we don't spend enough time schlepping around at the mall? The cashiers at The Gap and Banana Republic were supposedly keeping us minimally socialized? Or is it that "tightknit Newtown" had shop owners who reinforced the social structure of the picture-book town — kinda like Mr. Gower, the drugstore man, in "It's a Wonderful Life"...

"[N]ot only reading the collective oeuvre of the leading luminaries in Black, Women’s, Gender, Queer, Fat, and Chicano Studies..."

"... but also traveling America to attend their conferences."

At a gathering of the Cultural Studies Association at the University of California, Berkeley, for instance, Bawer encounters the young Michele, who’s “like, a grad student at UC Davis?” She’s “sort of reviving a Gramschian-style Marxism,” involving the idea that global warming is “sort of, like, a crisis, in the human relationship to nature?” Bawer claims that his heart goes out to her. (His heart is bigger than mine.)

From a review — via A&L Daily — of "The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind," by Bruce Bawer.

How do you get the position of "social liaison" in the U.S. military?

Well, it's just not actually a position.

It seems that Jill Kelley, the other other woman in the unfolding Petraeus scandal, acquired the honorific via media reports struggling to describe her ambiguous volunteer role as a popular hostess to Central Command’s military elite....

“There’s no such thing,” one officer told us. The made-up title appears to be a polite way of saying “rich Tampa socialite who likes to hang with four-star generals.”

I thought of some other things it would be a polite way of saying, but I won't mention them. I'll just suggest that the officer is only portraying the women in a negative light. What about the generals? The women couldn't have made any progress in the role of "social liaison" if the generals didn't want to be liaised. What the hell are these men doing appropriating the power and prestige of the United States military for the purpose of liaising with women-of-a-certain-type? These are the men who send enlistees into battle, who demand sacrifice from idealistic young Americans. They should not be flaunting whatever pleasures they pursue.

And by the way, how does one get the position called "socialite"? It's not as though that's anything more than a characterization of what someone appears to be doing. Wikipedia says:

A socialite is a slightly pejorative term for a member of a social elite, or someone aspiring to be a member.... A socialite participates in social activities and spends a significant amount of time entertaining and being entertained at fashionable events....

American Members of The Establishment, or an American "Society" based on birth, breeding, education, and economic standing, were originally listed in the Social Register.... Members of true "society" were distinguishable from members of post World-War I "cafe society," from whom are further distanced "socialites," who are considered aspirational members of true "society," but with no substantive social credentials or personal achievements.

You never hear about true "society" anymore. Only the pretenders get any attention now. But what are they pretenders to? To nothing!

I've got another question: Do identical twins tilt their head sideways the same way at the same time? Because that photograph is driving me nuts.

"We're so used to seeing people act under a system of government rules that it's easy to assume that without the rules..."

"... everything would descend into chaos. But perhaps free people are generally capable of acting decently on their own. Of course, that's never going to be universal; but then, people break the law too. In fact, a dense set of rules tempts people to see how close to (or how far across) the borderline of legality they can go without being penalized. In the absence of governmental laws, people might focus more on other kinds of laws: social norms and ethics."

Writes my son John, one of the many people who live south of 25th Street in Manhattan.

Repeating the old marshmallow test — the one about kids' capacity for delaying gratification.

And changing the results by exposing the kids — pre-temptation — to untrustworthy/trustworthy adults.

“Being able to delay gratification — in this case to wait 15 difficult minutes to earn a second marshmallow — not only reflects a child’s capacity for self-control, it also reflects their belief about the practicality of waiting,” says Celeste Kidd, a doctoral candidate in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester and lead author on the study.” Delaying gratification is only the rational choice if the child believes a second marshmallow is likely to be delivered after a reasonably short delay.”

You can imagine the social policy the researchers would like to support. The ability to delay gratification is tied to future economic success (according to the old study), and if the capacity for delaying gratification is purely a matter of character, it seems to justify different economic results. One can feel good about being a big old conservative, who favors equal opportunity and scoffs at equalizing the results. You want differential outcomes, because they are deserved and they are incentives.

But if we find out that a child raised around unreliable adults will adapt by taking the rewards that are available in the present and that this child has shown good aptitude in refraining from delaying gratification, our conservatism won't feel so comfortable anymore and we're amenable to arguments about equalizing outcomes.

Biden "will surely take it to Ryan on... his statement yesterday that inner-city kids need to be taught 'good discipline' and 'character.'"

Writes John Cassidy, in The New Yorker, observing that tonight's VP debate is high stakes.

Cassidy doesn't link to the Ryan statement, which — I found on my own — is part of the video that made the rounds the other day, the one that supposedly showed Ryan being "testy." (We talked about it here.) Anyway, let me put the "good discipline" and "character" remark in context. Ryan was asked the question "Does the country have a gun problem?" Ryan took the position that the problem is crime, not guns, and that we already have enough "good, strong gun laws," which we ought to enforce better.

But the best thing to help prevent violent crime in the inner cities is to bring opportunity to the inner cities, is to help people get out of poverty in the inner cities, is to help teach people good discipline, good character. That is civil society, that's what charities and civic groups and churches do to help one another, make sure they realize the value in one another.

Let's try to understand why people like Cassidy think that's outrageous (as opposed to platitudinous).  Here's Tommy Christopher at Mediaite:

What you don’t often hear spoken (out loud, anyway) is that the real problem with gun violence in America is the “character” and “discipline” of people in the “inner cities,” a very specific delineation from other city folk...

Apparently, crime in our cities has nothing to do with poverty, and systemic failures, fueled by generations of institutionalized racism, but with the character of those people. So says Paul Ryan, and so says Mitt Romney. If you’re poor, it’s because your culture is inferior.

Ryan’s assessment of “inner city” people is of a piece with the not-at-all subtle (and even out-and-proud overt) attitudes of the leading lights in the Republican Party, best exemplified by racism decoder-ring Newt Gingrich, who helpfully singled out black people as the Food Stamp-satisfied people we already knew they were talking about, and who echoed Ryan’s chatter about the low character of the inner city denizens who “have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal.”

We already knew who the “those people” Romney and Ryan were talking about were, but thanks for the hint, all the same.

In this frame of mind, Ryan was talking down to black people — to use a phrase once aimed at Barack Obama himself. And let's take another look at Obama's 2007 speech to a predominately black audience:

We can’t expect them to have all the skills they need to work. They may need help with basic skills, how to shop, how to show up for work on time, how to wear the right clothes, how to act appropriately in an office. We have to help them get there.

Unlike Ryan, who looked to "civil society... what charities and civic groups and churches do to help one another," Obama thought there should be federal government programs to teach poor (black?) people to "act appropriately." The difference between conservatives and liberals is about how to solve what they are perceiving as a problem. Pointing out that there's a problem is a sensitive matter, so sensitive it might be better not to point it out at all, as Jesse Jackson's famous open-mike pushback showed.

Will Biden "surely take it to Ryan" on this issue? He might, but it's treacherous. Ryan should be prepared with something elegant to say, but I predict it won't come up because Biden's the one who's gaffe prone, and you don't want to make a gaffe about race.

"Ban all performative weddings, ban all crazy expenditures... Ban the marriage pages in The New York Times."

"Ban those things that turn otherwise sensible people to start buying into that fantasy," says Virginia Rutter — great name — a professor of — take a guess — sociology, quoted in a NYT "Fashion and Style" piece, written by Matt Richtel, who's mostly airing his own "whimsical" notion that marriage could be a 20-year renewable contract.

Richtel quotes another a professor of — take a guess — sociology, Pepper Schwartz — great name — saying, “We’re remarkably not innovative about marriage even though almost all the environmental conditions, writ large, have changed... We haven’t scrutinized it. We’ve been picking at it like a scab, and it’s not going to heal that way.”

But wouldn't being innovative be picking at it? What's Pepper planning to do to this scab? Sociology professors... can we just pick at them?

As to Professor Rutter and her objection to "performative weddings"... well, I'm more concerned about her attraction to the word "ban"... she decries emotionality while sounding utterly emotional. And who are these "otherwise sensible people"? Human beings get involved in all sorts of ideas and practices entailing love and beauty and religion and hope and sex and money. There's no stripping away of all that. It is humanity itself, not a fantasy (or a scab!).

What standard of living should others feel moved to lift you up to? Question 1: What's your "social context"?

We saw in that NYT article about the "FUCK! I'm in my twenties" girl Emma Koenig that her mother had to do some analysis before deciding to help pay for her $1,200-a-month East Village apartment. The key line was: "It made me see that Emma’s social context was such that our helping with her rent was legitimate..."

It made me think about the refugees of Hurricane Katrina, housed in the Houston Astrodome, about whom presidential wife and mother Barbara Bush famously said:

"And so many of the people in the arenas here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."

What's your social context? Is that the right question?

"A sociologist whose data find fault with same-sex relationships is savaged by the progressive orthodoxy."

"Many sociologists view higher education as the perfect gig, a way to be paid to engage in 'consciousness raising' through teaching, research, and publishing—at the expense of taxpayers, donors, and tuition-paying parents, many of whom thoughtfully believe that what those sociologists are pushing is wrong...."

It is also easy for some sociologists to lose perspective on the minority status of their own views, to take for granted much that is still worth arguing about, and to fall into a kind of groupthink. The culture in such circles can be parochial and mean. I have seen colleagues ignore, stereotype, and belittle people and perspectives they do not like, rather than respectfully provide good arguments against those they do not agree with and for their own views.

Married and unmarried.

The real class distinction in America.

Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns — as opposed to changes in individual earnings — may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.

“It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University....

Married couples are having children later than they used to, divorcing less and investing heavily in parenting time. By contrast, a growing share of single mothers have never married, and many have children with more than one man.

“The people with more education tend to have stable family structures with committed, involved fathers,” Ms. McLanahan said. “The people with less education are more likely to have complex, unstable situations involving men who come and go.”

She said, “I think this process is creating greater gaps in these children’s life chances.”

It's hard to see how this is going to get any better over time.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paco Wové said:

The Gods of the Copybook Headings have come calling for the lower middle class.

"We Built Way Too Many Cultural Institutions During the Good Years."

Did we? And who are "we"? "We" are all those cities across America who think we can be Bilbao, that if we build it, they will come.

Per capita, the biggest total spenders on cultural projects during this period were Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the San Francisco/Oakland/Fremont region of California, Appleton and Madison, Wisconsin, and Lawrence, Kansas....

We seemed to buy into that Richard Florida/"Rise of the Creative Class" theory "that if we have cultural amenities, we’ll have better, more creative populations."

The biggest arts building boom in fact occurred in the South, a potential sign of cities there trying to catch up with the rest of the country. 

Look! We're not as backward as you think!

"These projects are very much emotional, they’re projects that have a lot of passion in them.... A lot of the rationality that goes into running a business sometimes doesn’t go into these projects."

Hey! That's a nice summary of the problem of letting government do anything.

"If Madi­son was such a Cre­ative Class hotbed over­flow­ing with inde­pen­dent, post-industrial work­ers like myself, we should have fit in."

"Yet our pres­ence didn’t seem to mat­ter to any­one, cre­atively or oth­er­wise. And any­way, Madison’s economy was hum­ming along with unem­ploy­ment around four per­cent, while back in fun, cre­ative Port­land, it was more than twice that, at eight and a half per­cent. This was not how the world accord­ing to Florida was sup­posed to work. I started to won­der if I’d mis­read him. Around town I encoun­tered a few other trans­plants who also found them­selves scratch­ing their heads over what the fuss had been about. Within a cou­ple years, most of them would be gone."

From "The Fall of the Creative Class," by Frank Bures. "Florida" is Richard Florida, author of "The Rise of the Cre­ative Class," who theorized that artists (and gay people and immigrants) cause economic growth, so a city that wants economic expansion ought to adopt a strategy of attracting artists.

Via Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

"For boys who never question the boy code, it slowly turns into the 'bro code' or the man-box as they enter adulthood."

"When men stop questioning their own gender conditioning, it keeps them stuck in an immature stage of development that Sociologist Michael Kimmel calls 'guyland.' Guyland is when a man refuses to grow up and then behaves in ways so as to not be seen as unmanly, gay, or feminine. The way out of the man-box is straightforward and yet, will require more 'work.'"

Are you suffering out there in your "man-box"?

"Why America Keeps Getting More Conservative."

Despite that article title, Richard Florida — Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management — stresses that he's only identifying correlations to "the deep cleavages of income, education, and class that divide America."

Why is it, for example, that working class correlates to conservatism?

Conservative political affiliation is strongly positively correlated with the percentage of a state's workforce in blue-collar occupations (.73), and highly negatively correlated with the proportion of the workforce engaged in knowledge-based professional and creative work (-.61). Both are also associated with the tilt toward conservatism in the past year.

All these liberal, knowledge-based professionals ought to be able to apply their big brains to the puzzle of why the working class folk they'd like to think they champion.

The ongoing economic crisis only appears to have deepened America's conservative drift - a trend which is most pronounced in its least well off, least educated, most blue collar, most economically hard-hit states.

A deep drift, in the deep cleavage of America.

"He’s not excusing Loughner, just describing what an isolated lifestyle in Arizona can do to people."

"The state ranks 48th among places where 'people trade favors with neighbors' and 45th among places where people eat dinner with their families.... The murders make Arizonans wonder if they’re leading mean, unexamined lives.... Isolation is slowly ruining Arizona, and ruining the rest of the country at a slower pace."

Link.

"I like to play chess. I moved to a small town and nobody played chess there..."

"... but one guy challenged me to checkers. I always thought it was kind of a simple game, but I accepted. And he beat me nine or ten games in a row. That’s sort of like living in a small town. It’s a simple game, but it’s played at a higher level."

Quoted here. Worth contemplating. Seems like a metaphor for all kinds of things.

I like to write scholarly dissertations. I moved to the internet and nobody wrote scholarly dissertations there, but one blogger fisked one of my paragraphs. I always thought blogging was kind of a simple game, but I started a blog to defend myself. And that blogger shredded my first nine or ten posts. That’s sort of like living on the internet. It’s a simple game, but it’s played at a higher level.

What emotion does your youth culture valorize and what social form does it envision?

William Deresiewicz takes inventory.

For the hippies, the emotion was love: love-ins, free love, the Summer of Love, all you need is love. The social form was utopia, understood in collective terms: the commune, the music festival, the liberation movement.

The beatniks aimed at ecstasy, embodied as a social form in individual transcendence. Theirs was a culture of jazz, with its spontaneity; of marijuana, arresting time and flooding the soul with pleasure (this was before the substance became the background drug of every youth culture); of flight, on the road, to the West; of the quest for the perfect moment.

The punks were all about rage, their social program nihilistic anarchy. “Get pissed,” Johnny Rotten sang. “Destroy.” Hip-hop, punk’s younger brother, was all about rage and nihilism, too, at least until it turned to a vision of individual aggrandizement.

As for the slackers of the late ’80s and early ’90s (Generation X, grunge music, the fiction of David Foster Wallace), their affect ran to apathy and angst, a sense of aimlessness and pointlessness. Whatever. That they had no social vision was precisely what their social vision was: a defensive withdrawal from all commitment as inherently phony.

And what of these kids today? Are we going to call them the "hipsters?" Deresiewicz prefers "millennials." He diagnoses the emotion as niceness, which doesn't seem hip at all. (Not that hippies were hip.) Is niceness an emotion? Deresiewicz toys with "post-emotional," then comes up with "the affect of the salesman." And that's not very nice at all. What "social form" do these little jerks get? Deresiewicz assigns them: small business. 

Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur. (Think of Steve Jobs, our new deity.) Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.

See how that goes with "the affect of the salesman"?

Today’s polite, pleasant personality is, above all, a commercial personality. It is the salesman’s smile and hearty handshake, because the customer is always right and you should always keep the customer happy. If you want to get ahead, said Benjamin Franklin, the original business guru, make yourself pleasing to others.

This is not meant as a compliment. Deresiewicz is not a fan of "the bland, inoffensive, smile-and-a-shoeshine personality — the stay-positive, other-directed, I’ll-be-whoever-you-want-me-to-be personality — that everybody has today."

ADDED: I like Deresiewicz's writing style and he has a lot of nice observations, but something's obviously missing — something expressed by the "these kids today" tag I just added. In every generation, there's a mix of conventional and rebellious type individuals. The millennials he describes sound very similar to the people beatniks, hippies, and slackers rebelled against. There are rebels among the millennial generation too. Look at all the protests these days! Look at all the young people who are looking to the government to deal with the joblessness. How cheerfully entrepreneurial are they?