Louis Hartz, like Daniel Boorstin and Richard Hofstadter, was one of the mid-century historians who played so large a part in forming that view of America's past that so informed the centrist's consensus-oriented vision of America's social structure and political culture. Significant in this was its muddled attitude toward class, which reflected and reinforced a particular conception of economic individualism, what has been called "the American Dream."
Of course, this Dream has not been viewed uncritically, even by those historians, with Carol Nackenoff, seeing room to speak of Hartz's characterization of America's "atomistic individualism, wedded to Horatio Alger" as a matter of the Federalist-Whig conservatives of the day "selling" America's small farmers and working class "a bill of goods" in false visions of "equality of opportunity" as they won an extremely unequal race, which subsequently became an "ideological straitjacket."
Over the years many have challenged that vision again and again. Indeed, looking back at the early twentieth century, before postmodernism utterly buried the inclination to deal with social reality underneath a great mass of epistemological nihilism, self-satisfied irony, idiot self-absorption and other such dross, one may say that challenge to the American Dream was actually the great theme of American literature. Thus may it be said to have gone with Mark Twain's portions of The Gilded Age.* Thus did it go with such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, the works of Jack London, among others.**
By and large these works have been marginalized. Respectable critical opinion prefers to hail the "road story" and "Go West, young man" stuff of Huckleberry Finn as "the Great American Novel," rather than the novel that actually gave the era its name (!). They remember Jack London as a writer of stories about animals, not people, his works about the latter rather less likely to be acknowledged than, say, The Call of the Wild. So far as those critics are concerned, Theodore Dreiser, as David Walsh put it, is "in the doghouse." And even when the books get attention, the relevant parts of them are ignored--Fitzgerald remembered for style rather than substance, the more easily given the obliqueness of his prose in Gatsby's tale (as against what he presents in This Side of Paradise).
Far from being aloof from them, the politics of literature reflect the politics of society at large, the early nineteenth century conservatism enduring as the conventional wisdom of American life into the early twenty-first century, to the dismay of the left, and the satisfaction of the right, though that satisfaction can seem more qualified these days. Estimates of the extent to which the left's ideas may be finding a new popularity differ immensely--but a Red Scare-ish alarm is definitely there, all as, whether or not they are consciously political, a great many of the young show plenty of evidences of disbelieving in the old premises and seeking other ways to live.
* The portions of The Gilded Age about the Hawkins family, and Beriah Sellers--the really satirical (and actually interesting) parts of the book—are generally attributed to Twain, rather than his cowriter Charles Dudley Warner.
** One can also count under this heading such figures as Upton Sinclair, who depicts a very different experience in The Jungle; or Nathaniel West in his reimagining of Voltaire's Candide in Depression-era America; or what becomes of the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath; or Arthur Miller's The Death of a Salesman.
Monday, June 10, 2024
Remembering Six Days, Seven Nights
Looking back it can seem that Six Days, Seven Nights was very much a movie of the 1990s.
After all, it was a romantic comedy in a period when the form was doing well. When, in fact, at least one big romantic comedy was an expected part of the summer movie release slate.
When Ivan Reitman was still directing big comedies.
When Harrison Ford played off of an Indiana Jones image that was still a fairly fresh, fond, memory for many--certainly in comparison with what it was in 2023.
When Anne Heche was still being cast as a lead in major movies.
When the cast of Friends were still landing major film roles in those days when it looked as if they just might graduate from TV star to film star (Matt LeBlanc, in fact, making his bid for action hero stardom just a couple of months earlier in Lost in Space, another thoroughly '90s film).
Alas, if the film was very much of its time it was no great hit at that time, not quite living up to either the critical or the commercial expectations held for it, and I will not try to persuade you that it is some criminally underrated gem. Still, it has its good points--like appealing visuals, and a few memorable lines.
Of the latter one that has stuck in my memory was spoken when after Ford's plane crashed in a storm, stranding his and Heche's characters on a Pacific island, and Heche asked why he couldn't just fix the plane and get them back home again. After all, isn't he one of those "guy guys?" she asked. Who can go "into the wilderness with a pocket knife and a Q-tip and . . . build you a shopping mall." Can't he do that?
No, he says, he can't do that--but he can do this, he tells her, sticks a finger in the corner of his mouth and snaps it to make a popping noise.
It was, for a Hollywood film, a rare (and amusing) acknowledgment of the idiotically exaggerated notions people have of others' competence. It is an important plot point that after happening on a lucky break Ford's character is handy enough to (with a little help from Anne's) get the plane in the air again--but no, no one can go "into the wilderness with a pocket knife and a Q-tip and build a shopping mall," even as films and TV shows and stories written by and for the stupid ceaselessly make us think they can, partly out of the groveling elite worship to which the arts (and artists) have depressingly always tended, partly because of the ceaseless exhortations to and promulgation of fantasies of self-sufficient ultra-individualism summed up in the name "Robinson Crusoe," partly because of wildly outdated notions about how things get made and great things happen in the world--the last, of course, absolutely unhelped by that divide between the "two cultures" that so many would like to pretend does not exist.
After all, it was a romantic comedy in a period when the form was doing well. When, in fact, at least one big romantic comedy was an expected part of the summer movie release slate.
When Ivan Reitman was still directing big comedies.
When Harrison Ford played off of an Indiana Jones image that was still a fairly fresh, fond, memory for many--certainly in comparison with what it was in 2023.
When Anne Heche was still being cast as a lead in major movies.
When the cast of Friends were still landing major film roles in those days when it looked as if they just might graduate from TV star to film star (Matt LeBlanc, in fact, making his bid for action hero stardom just a couple of months earlier in Lost in Space, another thoroughly '90s film).
Alas, if the film was very much of its time it was no great hit at that time, not quite living up to either the critical or the commercial expectations held for it, and I will not try to persuade you that it is some criminally underrated gem. Still, it has its good points--like appealing visuals, and a few memorable lines.
Of the latter one that has stuck in my memory was spoken when after Ford's plane crashed in a storm, stranding his and Heche's characters on a Pacific island, and Heche asked why he couldn't just fix the plane and get them back home again. After all, isn't he one of those "guy guys?" she asked. Who can go "into the wilderness with a pocket knife and a Q-tip and . . . build you a shopping mall." Can't he do that?
No, he says, he can't do that--but he can do this, he tells her, sticks a finger in the corner of his mouth and snaps it to make a popping noise.
It was, for a Hollywood film, a rare (and amusing) acknowledgment of the idiotically exaggerated notions people have of others' competence. It is an important plot point that after happening on a lucky break Ford's character is handy enough to (with a little help from Anne's) get the plane in the air again--but no, no one can go "into the wilderness with a pocket knife and a Q-tip and build a shopping mall," even as films and TV shows and stories written by and for the stupid ceaselessly make us think they can, partly out of the groveling elite worship to which the arts (and artists) have depressingly always tended, partly because of the ceaseless exhortations to and promulgation of fantasies of self-sufficient ultra-individualism summed up in the name "Robinson Crusoe," partly because of wildly outdated notions about how things get made and great things happen in the world--the last, of course, absolutely unhelped by that divide between the "two cultures" that so many would like to pretend does not exist.
Remembering Half Moon Street--and David Rothkopf's Superclass
The 1986 film Half Moon Street was a commercial and critical flop when it came out, and seems to have been pretty well forgotten since, never being "rediscovered," acquiring a cult following, or enjoying renewed attention on any other basis. And I know of no reason why it should be otherwise. Still, I can say that a particular bit of dinner-party dialogue in the film did get my attention and has stayed with me since. Specifically a character named Hugo Van Arkady (so IMDB informs me) remarked that the actual population of the world, which had then been approaching five billion, was actually just five thousand. As his dining companions wondered at his reasoning he filled in the picture by giving the "real" populations of different countries. Billion-person China had only two people in it, Britain forty-five, Germany sixty.
Just what was the criteria to be a member of the "world's population" when it was counted in such a manner?
Well, years later I happened across David Rothkopf's book Superclass (2008) as I had Half Moon Street--in which he discusses the global "power elite," and suggests that it has six thousand members, out of a population then over six billion.
Just as Van Arkady had it, only one in a million count--not the "one percent" but the 0.0001 percent, with not even their immediate families making the cut, just them, only them, unless they take their own places in said club.
Anyone who reads Rothkopf, I think, will not strike anyone as particularly egalitarian in his values (as anyone who works for Henry Kissinger in such a capacity as managing director of Kissinger Associates seems unlikely to be), but he does not express Van Arkady's blatant contempt for the "starving millions" without whom the "superclass" would not have their wealth and power, would not exist as an elite at all. Still, there seems no question that that superclass' courtiers in the press and the arts constantly flatter their pretension that they are the only people who matter to such a degree that what Van Arkady said explicitly, they say implicitly, all the time. The courtiers do well out of such flattery for the most part, but among the less happy consequences of their extreme version of the Great Man Theory of Current Affairs is that it has had just as distorting effect on understanding of the world as the Great Man Theory of History.
Just what was the criteria to be a member of the "world's population" when it was counted in such a manner?
Well, years later I happened across David Rothkopf's book Superclass (2008) as I had Half Moon Street--in which he discusses the global "power elite," and suggests that it has six thousand members, out of a population then over six billion.
Just as Van Arkady had it, only one in a million count--not the "one percent" but the 0.0001 percent, with not even their immediate families making the cut, just them, only them, unless they take their own places in said club.
Anyone who reads Rothkopf, I think, will not strike anyone as particularly egalitarian in his values (as anyone who works for Henry Kissinger in such a capacity as managing director of Kissinger Associates seems unlikely to be), but he does not express Van Arkady's blatant contempt for the "starving millions" without whom the "superclass" would not have their wealth and power, would not exist as an elite at all. Still, there seems no question that that superclass' courtiers in the press and the arts constantly flatter their pretension that they are the only people who matter to such a degree that what Van Arkady said explicitly, they say implicitly, all the time. The courtiers do well out of such flattery for the most part, but among the less happy consequences of their extreme version of the Great Man Theory of Current Affairs is that it has had just as distorting effect on understanding of the world as the Great Man Theory of History.
Of "Conspicuous Callousness"
So far as I can tell "conspicuous callousness" is not a usage--but it should be.
Of course, that claim raises the question--just what do I mean by "conspicuous callousness?"
Let us take it one word at a time.
The term "conspicuous" is an adjective indicating that something stands out so as to draw attention, with its use in the term "conspicuous consumption" telling. Such consumption--like someone's driving a flashy sports car when a much cheaper, lower-maintenance car would be a far more practical way of getting around--is typically on some level intended to draw such notice.
"Callousness" denotes, in the words of Oxford Languages, "insensitive or cruel disregard."
Conspicuous callousness is a display of callousness in a conspicuous, meant-to-be seen way.
Consider, for example, a person who sees a homeless person holding out a cup for spare change--and, even though they have change with which they can well afford to part, pretends not to see them. One may say that they are behaving callously. But in pretending they do not see the homeless person are attempting to not make their callousness evident.
By contrast, someone who yells at the homeless person "Get a job!" is manifesting their callousness in a way calling attention to it. This is all the more in as there is no practical advantage in their doing so (just as there is none in that flashy sports car), only whatever psychological satisfaction they get from being seen inflicting verbal abuse on someone vulnerable to it, by the victim and perhaps others.
Given that satisfaction's being the motive it seems to warrant a word. At the very least in acting this way the person displaying this callousness revels in a sense of their power in relation to that other person. Conspicuous callousness says "I don't have to care what you think, because you simply cannot do anything to me," such that they can rub in the other person's face a complete lack of sympathy, empathy and respect for them--and are doing it simply because they can.
Conspicuous callousness is, of course, vile--and ever-present. Indeed, the Internet is awash in it--so much so that it can seem mainly a vehicle for expressing that one exceedingly mean sentiment, the web access-enjoying scum of the Earth using that access to scream their callousness at the heart of the world. And we are all the worse off for it.
Of course, that claim raises the question--just what do I mean by "conspicuous callousness?"
Let us take it one word at a time.
The term "conspicuous" is an adjective indicating that something stands out so as to draw attention, with its use in the term "conspicuous consumption" telling. Such consumption--like someone's driving a flashy sports car when a much cheaper, lower-maintenance car would be a far more practical way of getting around--is typically on some level intended to draw such notice.
"Callousness" denotes, in the words of Oxford Languages, "insensitive or cruel disregard."
Conspicuous callousness is a display of callousness in a conspicuous, meant-to-be seen way.
Consider, for example, a person who sees a homeless person holding out a cup for spare change--and, even though they have change with which they can well afford to part, pretends not to see them. One may say that they are behaving callously. But in pretending they do not see the homeless person are attempting to not make their callousness evident.
By contrast, someone who yells at the homeless person "Get a job!" is manifesting their callousness in a way calling attention to it. This is all the more in as there is no practical advantage in their doing so (just as there is none in that flashy sports car), only whatever psychological satisfaction they get from being seen inflicting verbal abuse on someone vulnerable to it, by the victim and perhaps others.
Given that satisfaction's being the motive it seems to warrant a word. At the very least in acting this way the person displaying this callousness revels in a sense of their power in relation to that other person. Conspicuous callousness says "I don't have to care what you think, because you simply cannot do anything to me," such that they can rub in the other person's face a complete lack of sympathy, empathy and respect for them--and are doing it simply because they can.
Conspicuous callousness is, of course, vile--and ever-present. Indeed, the Internet is awash in it--so much so that it can seem mainly a vehicle for expressing that one exceedingly mean sentiment, the web access-enjoying scum of the Earth using that access to scream their callousness at the heart of the world. And we are all the worse off for it.
Of the Public Faux Pas
Even the most intelligent, educated and articulate will misspeak sometimes. If they are speaking constantly they will do so that much more often--and if their words are accorded continual publicity they will publicly embarrass themselves again and again (the more in as so many out there will simply have it in for such a figure, and so put the worst possible spin on anything they say or do).
Most of those in public life cannot be described as among "the most intelligent, educated and articulate." Most of them can be described as the extreme opposite. And they especially make sure that their every utterance is highly public--because, on top of their aforementioned failings, the demands of publicity seem to them to require it; because privilege and power and acclaim bring the idiot out in people; because show business, whether the real kind or the kind for "ugly people", is a horrifying hellscape of unhinged narcissists.
I am sure someone warned them at some point. But because of all of the above the warning simply did not matter, helping produce the cultural cesspool we inhabit today.
Most of those in public life cannot be described as among "the most intelligent, educated and articulate." Most of them can be described as the extreme opposite. And they especially make sure that their every utterance is highly public--because, on top of their aforementioned failings, the demands of publicity seem to them to require it; because privilege and power and acclaim bring the idiot out in people; because show business, whether the real kind or the kind for "ugly people", is a horrifying hellscape of unhinged narcissists.
I am sure someone warned them at some point. But because of all of the above the warning simply did not matter, helping produce the cultural cesspool we inhabit today.
What Would Brecht's Worker Who Reads Make of the Received History of Science and Invention?
In Bertolt Brecht's famous poem "Questions From a Worker Who Reads" his worker wondered at what he read of the "great men" of the past and the way in which they seemed to be singlehandedly credited with enormous feats of military conquest and monumental construction. (Reading about Thebes of the seven gates, he wondered, "Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock" out of which it was built by themselves?) Suspecting others were involved he wondered at the completeness of their absence from the record, the way the most elementary things about them were simply unmentioned (like where the masons who actually built the Great Wall of China went after the job was done).
Of course, we all know that, however much elites are addicted to the theory that everything supposedly great and grand is due to the Great Men and these only--the Atlas who might one day decide to teach their ungrateful inferiors a lesson and shrug--the idea of the kings hauling up the lumps of rock themselves is of course an absurdity, that the feats the Worker reads of are the accomplishments of tens and hundreds of thousands, drawing on the resources of whole countries.
One might say something of the kind if one looks away from conquest and building to science and invention. The conventional thinking about such matters is, of course, exceedingly individualistic--but as a more nuanced view of the matter shows, as with Robert Merton's examination of the sociology of science, the reality is more complex. The scientific endeavor is cumulative, building on what came before, and cooperative, as even the scientist or inventor in their own lab is apt to have their helpers, enough of them to make one wonder just who contributed what, exactly. People can and do make individual contributions, of course, some minute, some not, but scientific and technological revolutions are far from being wholly attributable to single individual "geniuses" (even before one gets to the very hard detective work of actually apportioning credit).
A culture given over to an individualistic elitism, of course, tends to downplay this--but in the end it really is the case that much of the discussion of the history of science has traditionally been no less absurd in its explanations than a historian making it seem as if Caesar conquered Gaul without even having a cook with him.
Of course, we all know that, however much elites are addicted to the theory that everything supposedly great and grand is due to the Great Men and these only--the Atlas who might one day decide to teach their ungrateful inferiors a lesson and shrug--the idea of the kings hauling up the lumps of rock themselves is of course an absurdity, that the feats the Worker reads of are the accomplishments of tens and hundreds of thousands, drawing on the resources of whole countries.
One might say something of the kind if one looks away from conquest and building to science and invention. The conventional thinking about such matters is, of course, exceedingly individualistic--but as a more nuanced view of the matter shows, as with Robert Merton's examination of the sociology of science, the reality is more complex. The scientific endeavor is cumulative, building on what came before, and cooperative, as even the scientist or inventor in their own lab is apt to have their helpers, enough of them to make one wonder just who contributed what, exactly. People can and do make individual contributions, of course, some minute, some not, but scientific and technological revolutions are far from being wholly attributable to single individual "geniuses" (even before one gets to the very hard detective work of actually apportioning credit).
A culture given over to an individualistic elitism, of course, tends to downplay this--but in the end it really is the case that much of the discussion of the history of science has traditionally been no less absurd in its explanations than a historian making it seem as if Caesar conquered Gaul without even having a cook with him.
Friday, June 7, 2024
The May 2024 North American Box Office
We all expected the box office during May to be lackluster--but I think it worth considering just how very, very badly it went for Hollywood.
Simply put, ticket sales during that month came to $550 million. Far from being, as usual, the month in which a sluggish box office really took off this was actually over a quarter down from the March box office this year (when Dune, along with Ghostbusters and Godzilla, helped sell $750 million worth of tickets).
In real, inflation-adjusted terms the May 2024 box office was about a third (31 percent) down from the disappointing box office we had in May as Guardians of the Galaxy 3 opened below expectations, and Fast and Furious 10 and the live-action version of The Little Mermaid both underperformed.
With the comparison with the May 2023 box office so poor it is predictable that it, again, represents a really great drop from the 2015-2019 average--of 57 percent. That is to say that in May the box office, after inflation, took in only two-fifths as much as it did in those pre-pandemic years (when, in April 2024 prices, $1.27 billion was the average).
Even by the standard of the past year as a whole, and of 2024 thus far (the first four months of which were down just 21 percent from the same period in the prior year), this is bad.
In fairness, one can point out that this May suffered from an unusually weak release slate --that a lot of big movies were indeed bumped to later dates, and that business should pick up as soon as next week with Inside Out 2, etc.. Still, a month with Planet of the Apes and Mad Max would ordinarily have been expected to do better than this, while The Fall Guy's being shifted to the first weekend of the month made no sense in the absence of some expectation of the movie benefiting from it, and that indeed their failure had much to do with this weakness. (Certainly The Fall Guy and Mad Max performed below the not-very-high expectations set for them, while Planet of the Apes did only a little better than the low expectations box office-watchers had for it, as, a near-month into release, it crawls toward the $150 million mark it will not surpass by very much to be a low point for the new iteration of the franchise.)
No, there is no good news here--and those hoping for even the limited turnaround that is the best anyone can reasonably hope for in the circumstances is well-advised to look ahead rather than backward.
Simply put, ticket sales during that month came to $550 million. Far from being, as usual, the month in which a sluggish box office really took off this was actually over a quarter down from the March box office this year (when Dune, along with Ghostbusters and Godzilla, helped sell $750 million worth of tickets).
In real, inflation-adjusted terms the May 2024 box office was about a third (31 percent) down from the disappointing box office we had in May as Guardians of the Galaxy 3 opened below expectations, and Fast and Furious 10 and the live-action version of The Little Mermaid both underperformed.
With the comparison with the May 2023 box office so poor it is predictable that it, again, represents a really great drop from the 2015-2019 average--of 57 percent. That is to say that in May the box office, after inflation, took in only two-fifths as much as it did in those pre-pandemic years (when, in April 2024 prices, $1.27 billion was the average).
Even by the standard of the past year as a whole, and of 2024 thus far (the first four months of which were down just 21 percent from the same period in the prior year), this is bad.
In fairness, one can point out that this May suffered from an unusually weak release slate --that a lot of big movies were indeed bumped to later dates, and that business should pick up as soon as next week with Inside Out 2, etc.. Still, a month with Planet of the Apes and Mad Max would ordinarily have been expected to do better than this, while The Fall Guy's being shifted to the first weekend of the month made no sense in the absence of some expectation of the movie benefiting from it, and that indeed their failure had much to do with this weakness. (Certainly The Fall Guy and Mad Max performed below the not-very-high expectations set for them, while Planet of the Apes did only a little better than the low expectations box office-watchers had for it, as, a near-month into release, it crawls toward the $150 million mark it will not surpass by very much to be a low point for the new iteration of the franchise.)
No, there is no good news here--and those hoping for even the limited turnaround that is the best anyone can reasonably hope for in the circumstances is well-advised to look ahead rather than backward.
People Are Still Talking About That Stupid Slap (Some Thoughts About the Prospects of Bad Boys 4)
Remember when the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air slapped Cheap Pete?
Very likely you do, to go by how everyone discussing the box office prospects of Bad Boys 4 (out this weekend!) keeps bringing it up as a possible factor in the film's performance.
I suspect this is less because the incident is likely to make much difference to the film's actual box office prospects than because it still amuses them that Smith slapped Rock, and still amuses them to talk about it. Indeed, this is so much the case that if "the slap" has any effect at all, rather than putting people off of Smith and his movie, it would probably help the box office, especially given reports that the movie will play off of the incident in some way.
Indeed, a far bigger danger to the movie's performance than any ill feeling toward Will Smith's display of an idiocy too often overlooked in the past is what the courtiers of the film industry are not talking about--namely the pandemic's exacerbation of the long decline of filmgoing in North America and elsewhere, and what is connected with it, the declining salability of tired action-adventure franchises like the now three decade-old Bad Boys "saga." But there is a reason for that--entertainment journalists preferring to continue adhering to the narrative that the lousy grosses we have seen from 2023 on a matter of particular cinematic and franchise failures (the troubles of Marvel, resolvable with "better writers" and more "supervision" of directors), or particular bumps in the road for the business (the Hollywood strikes of 2023), rather than a matter of structural changes in the business with which people of the caliber of the executives running the studios are profoundly unequipped to cope, no matter how much their courtiers assure them they are all the "smartest guy in the room."
Very likely you do, to go by how everyone discussing the box office prospects of Bad Boys 4 (out this weekend!) keeps bringing it up as a possible factor in the film's performance.
I suspect this is less because the incident is likely to make much difference to the film's actual box office prospects than because it still amuses them that Smith slapped Rock, and still amuses them to talk about it. Indeed, this is so much the case that if "the slap" has any effect at all, rather than putting people off of Smith and his movie, it would probably help the box office, especially given reports that the movie will play off of the incident in some way.
Indeed, a far bigger danger to the movie's performance than any ill feeling toward Will Smith's display of an idiocy too often overlooked in the past is what the courtiers of the film industry are not talking about--namely the pandemic's exacerbation of the long decline of filmgoing in North America and elsewhere, and what is connected with it, the declining salability of tired action-adventure franchises like the now three decade-old Bad Boys "saga." But there is a reason for that--entertainment journalists preferring to continue adhering to the narrative that the lousy grosses we have seen from 2023 on a matter of particular cinematic and franchise failures (the troubles of Marvel, resolvable with "better writers" and more "supervision" of directors), or particular bumps in the road for the business (the Hollywood strikes of 2023), rather than a matter of structural changes in the business with which people of the caliber of the executives running the studios are profoundly unequipped to cope, no matter how much their courtiers assure them they are all the "smartest guy in the room."
"Show Business for Ugly People": A Few Thoughts on the Foolishness
It is these days something of a cliché that politics is "show business for ugly people."
Clichés do not always have much to do with the truth--but this one most certainly does, and indeed, giving it some consideration can lead to other insights, not least into contemporary journalism and its colossal failings.
One of those failings is the disproportion between the attentiveness to the stupid maneuverings and idle speculations that are politics, as against the attention accorded the ends of politics that are policy--recently given fresh empirical confirmation by a notable study in the Columbia Journalism Review.
This has long seemed to me to reflect various aspects of journalism. There is, for example, the tendency to think of the reporter as going after a "story," and writing it up as a "story" for the reader--with politics much easier to turn into a "story" than policy, the former being centered on "people," "characters," whereas the latter is often technical, in a way taxing the understanding of anyone too lazy to do their homework. And certainly centrist prejudice exacerbates all this, with its greater interest in the political process than in the real world and the solution of problems in it, and the elitism that has it revering professional politicians while despising the intelligence of a public to which it thinks explaining policy not worth the trouble anyway, even if they did not think it a thing best left to "the experts" (at least, so long as the experts remain on the right side of the powerful before whom centrists bow and scrape).
However, it may be that there is something of this too--that even if as "show business for ugly people" the doings of Washington are inferior to the glamour of "real" show business (one reflection of which is how Washington types never miss a chance to go Hollywood in the most ludicrous ways, while folks from Beverly Hills get drawn to Washington--then get drawn back to the movies), it still has just enough glitter to make the weak-minded sorts who tend to become journalists at this level go ga-ga over it. Unsurprisingly a very large part of the time what is written about D.C. is no more serious-minded than what is written about Hollywood.
Clichés do not always have much to do with the truth--but this one most certainly does, and indeed, giving it some consideration can lead to other insights, not least into contemporary journalism and its colossal failings.
One of those failings is the disproportion between the attentiveness to the stupid maneuverings and idle speculations that are politics, as against the attention accorded the ends of politics that are policy--recently given fresh empirical confirmation by a notable study in the Columbia Journalism Review.
This has long seemed to me to reflect various aspects of journalism. There is, for example, the tendency to think of the reporter as going after a "story," and writing it up as a "story" for the reader--with politics much easier to turn into a "story" than policy, the former being centered on "people," "characters," whereas the latter is often technical, in a way taxing the understanding of anyone too lazy to do their homework. And certainly centrist prejudice exacerbates all this, with its greater interest in the political process than in the real world and the solution of problems in it, and the elitism that has it revering professional politicians while despising the intelligence of a public to which it thinks explaining policy not worth the trouble anyway, even if they did not think it a thing best left to "the experts" (at least, so long as the experts remain on the right side of the powerful before whom centrists bow and scrape).
However, it may be that there is something of this too--that even if as "show business for ugly people" the doings of Washington are inferior to the glamour of "real" show business (one reflection of which is how Washington types never miss a chance to go Hollywood in the most ludicrous ways, while folks from Beverly Hills get drawn to Washington--then get drawn back to the movies), it still has just enough glitter to make the weak-minded sorts who tend to become journalists at this level go ga-ga over it. Unsurprisingly a very large part of the time what is written about D.C. is no more serious-minded than what is written about Hollywood.
Friday, May 31, 2024
What We Overlook When We Argue About C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures: Snow's "New International Economic Order"
As I remarked previously, when we discuss C.P. Snow's writing on The Two Cultures we get fixated on the argument about whether there are two cultures at all--and ignore the very large, last, part of the essay derived from the reality he acknowledged that industrialization had raised the standing of science and lowered that of letters, namely the demand of the developing nations that they too great to share in the world's progress by being helped in industrializing themselves.
Considering this it is, of course, significant that the West was in competition with the Soviet bloc--which Snow argued could, if the West refused to help, perform the task of facilitating that industrialization of the developing world by itself (transferring the required knowledge, etc.), to the West's great disadvantage. He then suggested that, for the benefit of all concerned, it would be best if what seemed to him the inevitable effort were a joint one.
Of course, looking back we know that no such effort ever occurred, that indeed outside of an important but still limited portion of East Asia the developing nations remain developing nations more than a half century on, with the gap between "First" World and "Third" grown bigger in many ways. Important to this would seem the fact that Snow overestimated the Soviet Union as a competitor--in line with the way it had been catching up the West in the 1950s, thinking that it was well on the way to success. Instead the Soviet Union was, a little while after that, showing evidences of slipping behind itself--and a long way from the kind of superabundance of techno-industrial strength that would have permitted it to be so open-handed with the developing world. Moreover, even if the Soviet Union had proven as dynamic as Snow thought, and thus brought to bear on the West more pressure to extend such aid to the poorer nations simply to keep itself from being cut out economically and politically, the 1970s, when there really were strong demands from developing nations for a "New International Economic Order," saw the West react very differently. Faced with the Group of Seventy-Seven one saw the emergence of the Group of Seven, and the neoliberal counter-offensive against such visions. Indeed, what really defined relations between the more and less developed nations were the interest rate spike of the "Volcker shock," the Third World debt crisis, the Washington Consensus that, even before the Soviet Union's economic failings left it less and less able to help itself, let alone anyone else, in the ways Snow anticipated, and relegated the '60s and '70s-era visions of a different economic order to the footnotes of history. The result is that his essay appears in this respect a relic not just of Cold War fears, but of the more rationalistic hopes of the mid-twentieth century over which the "zealots of pessimism" had not yet won out .
Considering this it is, of course, significant that the West was in competition with the Soviet bloc--which Snow argued could, if the West refused to help, perform the task of facilitating that industrialization of the developing world by itself (transferring the required knowledge, etc.), to the West's great disadvantage. He then suggested that, for the benefit of all concerned, it would be best if what seemed to him the inevitable effort were a joint one.
Of course, looking back we know that no such effort ever occurred, that indeed outside of an important but still limited portion of East Asia the developing nations remain developing nations more than a half century on, with the gap between "First" World and "Third" grown bigger in many ways. Important to this would seem the fact that Snow overestimated the Soviet Union as a competitor--in line with the way it had been catching up the West in the 1950s, thinking that it was well on the way to success. Instead the Soviet Union was, a little while after that, showing evidences of slipping behind itself--and a long way from the kind of superabundance of techno-industrial strength that would have permitted it to be so open-handed with the developing world. Moreover, even if the Soviet Union had proven as dynamic as Snow thought, and thus brought to bear on the West more pressure to extend such aid to the poorer nations simply to keep itself from being cut out economically and politically, the 1970s, when there really were strong demands from developing nations for a "New International Economic Order," saw the West react very differently. Faced with the Group of Seventy-Seven one saw the emergence of the Group of Seven, and the neoliberal counter-offensive against such visions. Indeed, what really defined relations between the more and less developed nations were the interest rate spike of the "Volcker shock," the Third World debt crisis, the Washington Consensus that, even before the Soviet Union's economic failings left it less and less able to help itself, let alone anyone else, in the ways Snow anticipated, and relegated the '60s and '70s-era visions of a different economic order to the footnotes of history. The result is that his essay appears in this respect a relic not just of Cold War fears, but of the more rationalistic hopes of the mid-twentieth century over which the "zealots of pessimism" had not yet won out .
What We Overlook When We Argue About C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures: Why Did the Split Happen in the First Place?
Writing about C.P. Snow I have tended to emphasize what it seemed to me that he had got right, in large part because so many are so vehement about denying it--specifically that there really is a great gap between the sciences and "letters" (literature, art, the humanities), and that the rift has been important in the life of modern society.
However, lately I find myself looking more and more to what Snow did not treat quite so well, like why the divide exists, a question that seems the greater when one considers just how much traffic there once was between science and letters in the past. As Ian Watt explains, the modern novel actually emerged as a quasi-scientific literary form, premised as it was on the objective existence of a physical world knowable through the coordinated use of observation and reason. In the years that followed the great French novelists of the nineteenth century quite consciously drew inspiration from science and scientists--like Balzac, and, acclaiming Balzac the first to have walked that path, the "experimental novelist" Emile Zola, whose naturalism not only made him an immortal of literature, but may be credited with inspiring almost all of the really great American writers of his day, like Frank Norris, and Jack London, and Upton Sinclair, and Theodore Dreiser, as in England H.G. Wells rose to the rank of literary giant precisely because of his own scientific inclinations and commitments.*
Snow offers no indication of any of this, instead rather hazily suggesting that the matter is in part the bitterness at the way letters has lost stature in modern times as less relevant in a scientific-technological world, exacerbated by the employment problems and lower incomes of its graduates and the way they sour their outlook; or the aesthete's distaste for the ugliness of so much of modernity, in comparison with what they may romantically recall of the past, equating past times with the most beautiful of their creations and only these, and so comparing today's housing blocks to the palaces of ancient times, while forgetting about the slums of those ancient cities. Snow does register that during the twentieth century letters, certainly as represented by Modernists like Eliot and Waugh, gravitated toward reaction, and frankly fascism--but not that this was part of a larger shift, the clearer as world war passed into Cold War, and Modernism into a postmodernism that became all-pervading.
As one may remember from looking at such turns in the past (as in the early nineteenth century, when a triumphant conservatism sought to excise the ghosts of Enlightenment, liberalism, revolution with Counter-Enlightenment, throne and altar, reaction), the supposed menace of Reason was met with weapons of Un-Reason and Anti-Reason. The result was that in the view of those who held power rational thinking had to be abided in the laboratory or the shop floor, but nowhere else, and absolutely not in social life, and the pictures literature paints about it. Indeed, thinking of how Snow presents the literature of "1914-1930" as dominated by Modernist reactionaries, and how this cuts out figures like the then-still very important Wells, I find myself thinking of how the Modernist and postmodernist turn, the way in which literature, led by critics given over body and soul to the Counter-Enlightenment, spoke of reason, progress and humanity only with a sneer, the literary record of the past was revised. Thus did a Balzac or a Zola became a good deal less fashionable, as American letters, certainly, marginalized a Norris or London or Sinclair or Dreiser, and, dispensing with Wells the rationalist social thinker and realist novelist remembered only Wells' science fiction tales, and the darkest and most pessimistic of them at that (knowing him by stories like The Island of Dr. Moreau), then strove to deprive him of whatever reputation remained left to him after. In his obliviousness here Snow is all too conventional--and his work is the poorer for it.
* Balzac was inspired by the naturalist Georges Cuvier, Zola by, besides Balzac, Claude Bernard among others.
However, lately I find myself looking more and more to what Snow did not treat quite so well, like why the divide exists, a question that seems the greater when one considers just how much traffic there once was between science and letters in the past. As Ian Watt explains, the modern novel actually emerged as a quasi-scientific literary form, premised as it was on the objective existence of a physical world knowable through the coordinated use of observation and reason. In the years that followed the great French novelists of the nineteenth century quite consciously drew inspiration from science and scientists--like Balzac, and, acclaiming Balzac the first to have walked that path, the "experimental novelist" Emile Zola, whose naturalism not only made him an immortal of literature, but may be credited with inspiring almost all of the really great American writers of his day, like Frank Norris, and Jack London, and Upton Sinclair, and Theodore Dreiser, as in England H.G. Wells rose to the rank of literary giant precisely because of his own scientific inclinations and commitments.*
Snow offers no indication of any of this, instead rather hazily suggesting that the matter is in part the bitterness at the way letters has lost stature in modern times as less relevant in a scientific-technological world, exacerbated by the employment problems and lower incomes of its graduates and the way they sour their outlook; or the aesthete's distaste for the ugliness of so much of modernity, in comparison with what they may romantically recall of the past, equating past times with the most beautiful of their creations and only these, and so comparing today's housing blocks to the palaces of ancient times, while forgetting about the slums of those ancient cities. Snow does register that during the twentieth century letters, certainly as represented by Modernists like Eliot and Waugh, gravitated toward reaction, and frankly fascism--but not that this was part of a larger shift, the clearer as world war passed into Cold War, and Modernism into a postmodernism that became all-pervading.
As one may remember from looking at such turns in the past (as in the early nineteenth century, when a triumphant conservatism sought to excise the ghosts of Enlightenment, liberalism, revolution with Counter-Enlightenment, throne and altar, reaction), the supposed menace of Reason was met with weapons of Un-Reason and Anti-Reason. The result was that in the view of those who held power rational thinking had to be abided in the laboratory or the shop floor, but nowhere else, and absolutely not in social life, and the pictures literature paints about it. Indeed, thinking of how Snow presents the literature of "1914-1930" as dominated by Modernist reactionaries, and how this cuts out figures like the then-still very important Wells, I find myself thinking of how the Modernist and postmodernist turn, the way in which literature, led by critics given over body and soul to the Counter-Enlightenment, spoke of reason, progress and humanity only with a sneer, the literary record of the past was revised. Thus did a Balzac or a Zola became a good deal less fashionable, as American letters, certainly, marginalized a Norris or London or Sinclair or Dreiser, and, dispensing with Wells the rationalist social thinker and realist novelist remembered only Wells' science fiction tales, and the darkest and most pessimistic of them at that (knowing him by stories like The Island of Dr. Moreau), then strove to deprive him of whatever reputation remained left to him after. In his obliviousness here Snow is all too conventional--and his work is the poorer for it.
* Balzac was inspired by the naturalist Georges Cuvier, Zola by, besides Balzac, Claude Bernard among others.
Taylor Swift and the Era of "Peak Pop Star"
Recently considering Taylor Swift's extraordinary present stature within pop culture even as celebrity as a whole seems to be in decline I suggested that she had an advantage in making a name for herself just a little while before the hyper-fragmentation of pop culture. This may be all the more the case for, if she is known to appeal more strongly to some demographics than others, her still managing to have a broad appeal in some degree, a point Erik Schreiber, recently reviewing Swift's new album, The Tortured Poets Department, made when remarking her popularity as likely having something to do with her work and her persona and her performances "offer[ing] something to everyone: a little bit acoustic and country, a little bit electric and urban, a soupçon of sexiness, a pinch of feminism, and a lot of spectacle."
Coming along in a time when a mass audience could still be won, she appealed for it, and won it.
This seems less plausible today--as we are reminded by every list of the "most popular" stars, and strain to spot anyone who came along after the Great Recession.
Coming along in a time when a mass audience could still be won, she appealed for it, and won it.
This seems less plausible today--as we are reminded by every list of the "most popular" stars, and strain to spot anyone who came along after the Great Recession.
What Will Inside Out 2 Make at the Box Office?
Ordinarily when I think about what a movie might make I look at comparable, prior, films. If the movie is part of a series I look at its predecessors in the same series. If movies not in the same series offer some point of comparison, I use that. (Thus did I, when thinking about Indiana Jones 5, consider what preceding Indiana Jones films made--but also how Solo did, which, alas, turned out to be far more relevant.) And so on.
It seems to me that Disney-Pixar's upcoming Inside Out 2 does not have many convenient points of comparison as the first sequel to a film put out way back in 2015. Certainly there have been other Pixar movies accorded wide theatrical releases since the pandemic's disruption of the business but the circumstances of their releases differed sufficiently to complicate the drawing of any analogy. In the summer of 2022 Lightyear appeared at a point at which there had been sufficient recovery of theatergoing for there to be reasonable hopes of a "normal" Pixar gross, but if the movie was connected with the hit Toy Story series, it was awkwardly so given its conception as a prequel about one of the characters (Lightyear a "Toy Story Story" as Solo was a "Star Wars Story"), the change of the actor voicing the lead character, the significant shift in tone--and the way in which it became an object of the culture war. Last summer's Elemental was an original film, and I think a bit "concept-heavy" in that way that works against such films being wide-audience hits, especially in the American market, so that again it has its limits as a point of comparison. Meanwhile, even looking beyond Pixar's releases to Disney's wider releases leaves us without much more given the movies it has put out (like Wish).
Still, I can think of at least one way of approaching the matter, which is to look at the closest thing to a recently productive brand like Pixar in the Disney media universe, namely the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Prior to the catastrophe that was Captain Marvel 2 the MCU movies were in real, inflation-adjusted terms making 50-80 percent of what the preceding film in the same series made (Thor 4 as against Thor 3, etc., all the way through last summer's Guardians of the Galaxy 3). Especially given the fact that North American moviegoing pretty much fell by half between 2015 and 2023-2024 this number can seem significant--and thus worth applying to Inside Out 2.
The starting point is then the gross of the first Inside Out. That movie made $356 million at the U.S. box office. Adjusted for inflation using the good old Consumer Price Index this comes to about $468 million. Some 50-80 percent of that would work out to $240-$370 million. Assuming, not unreasonably given that China was not too big a contributor to the first film, that the domestic/international balance for the sequel is the same as it was for the original this would work out to a box office range of $600-$900 million at the global level.
How does this compare with Boxoffice Pro's expectations for the opening? According to their last long-range forecast one might anticipate $80-$110 million for the debut. As it happened the first Inside Out managed to quadruple its opening over its longer run. Might this one do the same? As a brand-name sequel one can expect the run of Inside Out 2 to be more front-loaded than the first film, but at the same time it seems to me that, plausibly testifying to the moviegoing audience's greater hesitancy about the trip to the theater, on the whole film grosses may be becoming less front-loaded than before--a larger part of the public, perhaps, waiting to hear what the film is really like before checking it out for themselves.
Returning to the example of the MCU I remember how the Disney-backed "first big release" of last summer--Guardians of the Galaxy 3--did, tripling its opening weekend gross. That would give us $240-$330 million, a range with a bottom end precisely equal to the bottom end of the range I suggested above, with an upper end safely inside the range as well. The movie quadrupling its money as the first film did would work out to a gross of $320-$440 million--largely inside the range, if breaking past it at the high end. Together this comes to a domestic range of $240-$440 million at the extreme ends, and globally, $600 million to $1.1 billion.
That said I can easily see the movie making $600 million--that figure just a little better than Elemental (and the live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid) managed last summer, after all. However, the $1 billion+ gross, which far exceeds anything made by any movie since last July (when we got Barbie), would really be an achievement--more than I think plausible given the state of the market, and the strength of the preceding film, and the tripling of at least a decent open weekend rather than quadrupling it the more likely outcome. The result is that the $600-$850 million range seems to me the plausible territory for this movie--which, I am sure, would have the press crowing about a hit if the movie does indeed pull it off.
It seems to me that Disney-Pixar's upcoming Inside Out 2 does not have many convenient points of comparison as the first sequel to a film put out way back in 2015. Certainly there have been other Pixar movies accorded wide theatrical releases since the pandemic's disruption of the business but the circumstances of their releases differed sufficiently to complicate the drawing of any analogy. In the summer of 2022 Lightyear appeared at a point at which there had been sufficient recovery of theatergoing for there to be reasonable hopes of a "normal" Pixar gross, but if the movie was connected with the hit Toy Story series, it was awkwardly so given its conception as a prequel about one of the characters (Lightyear a "Toy Story Story" as Solo was a "Star Wars Story"), the change of the actor voicing the lead character, the significant shift in tone--and the way in which it became an object of the culture war. Last summer's Elemental was an original film, and I think a bit "concept-heavy" in that way that works against such films being wide-audience hits, especially in the American market, so that again it has its limits as a point of comparison. Meanwhile, even looking beyond Pixar's releases to Disney's wider releases leaves us without much more given the movies it has put out (like Wish).
Still, I can think of at least one way of approaching the matter, which is to look at the closest thing to a recently productive brand like Pixar in the Disney media universe, namely the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Prior to the catastrophe that was Captain Marvel 2 the MCU movies were in real, inflation-adjusted terms making 50-80 percent of what the preceding film in the same series made (Thor 4 as against Thor 3, etc., all the way through last summer's Guardians of the Galaxy 3). Especially given the fact that North American moviegoing pretty much fell by half between 2015 and 2023-2024 this number can seem significant--and thus worth applying to Inside Out 2.
The starting point is then the gross of the first Inside Out. That movie made $356 million at the U.S. box office. Adjusted for inflation using the good old Consumer Price Index this comes to about $468 million. Some 50-80 percent of that would work out to $240-$370 million. Assuming, not unreasonably given that China was not too big a contributor to the first film, that the domestic/international balance for the sequel is the same as it was for the original this would work out to a box office range of $600-$900 million at the global level.
How does this compare with Boxoffice Pro's expectations for the opening? According to their last long-range forecast one might anticipate $80-$110 million for the debut. As it happened the first Inside Out managed to quadruple its opening over its longer run. Might this one do the same? As a brand-name sequel one can expect the run of Inside Out 2 to be more front-loaded than the first film, but at the same time it seems to me that, plausibly testifying to the moviegoing audience's greater hesitancy about the trip to the theater, on the whole film grosses may be becoming less front-loaded than before--a larger part of the public, perhaps, waiting to hear what the film is really like before checking it out for themselves.
Returning to the example of the MCU I remember how the Disney-backed "first big release" of last summer--Guardians of the Galaxy 3--did, tripling its opening weekend gross. That would give us $240-$330 million, a range with a bottom end precisely equal to the bottom end of the range I suggested above, with an upper end safely inside the range as well. The movie quadrupling its money as the first film did would work out to a gross of $320-$440 million--largely inside the range, if breaking past it at the high end. Together this comes to a domestic range of $240-$440 million at the extreme ends, and globally, $600 million to $1.1 billion.
That said I can easily see the movie making $600 million--that figure just a little better than Elemental (and the live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid) managed last summer, after all. However, the $1 billion+ gross, which far exceeds anything made by any movie since last July (when we got Barbie), would really be an achievement--more than I think plausible given the state of the market, and the strength of the preceding film, and the tripling of at least a decent open weekend rather than quadrupling it the more likely outcome. The result is that the $600-$850 million range seems to me the plausible territory for this movie--which, I am sure, would have the press crowing about a hit if the movie does indeed pull it off.
Why Hollywood Needs Inside Out 2 to be a Hit
Back in 2015 Inside Out hit theaters, and grossed over $850 million globally--which in today's terms works out to over $1.1 billion.
This sounds colossal--but really it was just a respectable performance by the standards of Disney-Pixar at the time, a good number of other films that studio released over the decade actually doing considerably better (like Frozen, as well as the sequels to that movie, and to the well-loved Finding Nemo and The Incredibles).
Yet in 2024 it seems the entertainment press is looking to Inside Out 2 for salvation--understandably, as the film is supposed to be the first really big release of a summer box office season very slow to get going amid the near-year-long drought since Barbie and Oppenheimer did their bit to prop up the sagging box office.
However, there is also what is less likely to be spoken, namely that Hollywood, amid its present crisis, not only wants a hit, but a hit of the same old kind it was used to scoring--a hit with a sequel attached to an established brand name of the sort that proved so elusive last year, and so far this year. A hit that will confirm the studio bosses in what they so obviously want to believe, that they can keep cranking out such sequels to established franchises and getting the ticket-buyer's money in return. That indeed they only need to go on doing what they were doing before, if perhaps with "better writers" and more "adults in the room" supervision of those floopy-brained creatives. That it is even the case that Hollywood's franchises are "underexploited" and the studios can and should actually exploit them more vigorously.
Will Hollywood get what it is hoping for with Inside Out 2? It seems possible. But it is also the case that, in profound denial over a structural crisis of the American film business as its model of filmmaking fails and moviegoing collapses, it is inclined to grasp at straws; to make modest successes sound like hits, and disappointments sound delightful. The result is that I am expectant of a good deal of spin whatever the outcome as the Suits go on doing what they have been doing in spite of its losing money because, hey, that beats actually working for their obscenely inflated salaries by figuring out how to get their industry out of the corner into which they themselves have been pushing it for decades.
This sounds colossal--but really it was just a respectable performance by the standards of Disney-Pixar at the time, a good number of other films that studio released over the decade actually doing considerably better (like Frozen, as well as the sequels to that movie, and to the well-loved Finding Nemo and The Incredibles).
Yet in 2024 it seems the entertainment press is looking to Inside Out 2 for salvation--understandably, as the film is supposed to be the first really big release of a summer box office season very slow to get going amid the near-year-long drought since Barbie and Oppenheimer did their bit to prop up the sagging box office.
However, there is also what is less likely to be spoken, namely that Hollywood, amid its present crisis, not only wants a hit, but a hit of the same old kind it was used to scoring--a hit with a sequel attached to an established brand name of the sort that proved so elusive last year, and so far this year. A hit that will confirm the studio bosses in what they so obviously want to believe, that they can keep cranking out such sequels to established franchises and getting the ticket-buyer's money in return. That indeed they only need to go on doing what they were doing before, if perhaps with "better writers" and more "adults in the room" supervision of those floopy-brained creatives. That it is even the case that Hollywood's franchises are "underexploited" and the studios can and should actually exploit them more vigorously.
Will Hollywood get what it is hoping for with Inside Out 2? It seems possible. But it is also the case that, in profound denial over a structural crisis of the American film business as its model of filmmaking fails and moviegoing collapses, it is inclined to grasp at straws; to make modest successes sound like hits, and disappointments sound delightful. The result is that I am expectant of a good deal of spin whatever the outcome as the Suits go on doing what they have been doing in spite of its losing money because, hey, that beats actually working for their obscenely inflated salaries by figuring out how to get their industry out of the corner into which they themselves have been pushing it for decades.
Upton Sinclair's "Dead Hand" Series, and the Sometime Necessity of Self-Publishing
The student of sociology may recall having encountered the concept of "substructure-structure-superstructure."
In this conception society not only has a structure (the organization of a human group into sub-groups, like socioeconomic classes); but a substructure that is based on the nuts and bolts of how people actually produce the material essentials of life (the organization of work), on which the structure is based (for, as someone once said, "life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things"); and a superstructure, which one can think of as broadly the ideology of the society, rooted in the substructure and structure "below" it.
In his "Dead Hand" books (the name of which is, apparently, a play on Adam Smith's conception of market forces as an "invisible hand" that produces optimal economic results in a context of free exchange), Upton Sinclair, who had earlier written about the other levels of societal life (in fiction like The Jungle, or The Metropolis, but also nonfiction), turned his attention to that "superstructure" as it existed in American society in his day. Specifically in the six books to which that sequence eventually came he addressed the matters of religion (in 1917's The Profits of Religion), the education system (1923's The Goose-Step and 1924's The Goslings) , the news media (in 1919's The Brass Check) and the arts (1925's Mammonart and 1927's Money Writes!).
In those six books Sinclair presented a fiercely critical view of the state of all those aspects of American life, the thinking they promulgated, and the backward, venal and oppressive forces he saw lying behind them. Naturally the publisher which put them out took a risk--and the Dauriats of Sinclair's time had no more interest in such risk than they did in Balzac's time, or in ours. After their declining the first of Sinclair's books because of its subject matter (The Profits of Religion). The result was that Sinclair decided to publish the books himself, and continued in the practice with the books that followed.
As those who have experience of self-publishing can testify self-publishing, like any other sort of small business when we get away from the piety and outright romanticism about it standard in this society, is basically an affair of working harder, for less. And as if the ordinary obstacles in its way were not enough the very press that had treated Sinclair and all he stood for so abusively throughout his career, and which he criticized in his books, did not make this easier for him, in the main remaining silent about the books. However, that is no judgment on their quality--the books retaining interest a century on not only as works by a writer who had then been in the first rank, or as historical documents testifying to conditions in Sinclair's time, but for what they tell us about ideas and institutions that, contrary to Sinclair's hopes when he produced these books, remain dominant in our own day (and are today written about, for the most part, with rather less rigor, frankness, insight than Sinclair displayed).
Indeed, that the publishers and press of his time behaved as they did toward Sinclair's books can seem to be as much to the credit of Sinclair and his books as it is to the discredit of those publishers and press--while this seems to me something worth remembering in our time, with its ceaseless elite and elitist sneering at any democratization of publishing. The defenders of traditional publishing and the rest may claim to be upholding high standards, but in reality what they hate is losing control of what may be put before the public, even if it has only been in a much smaller degree than most appreciate, for what that means not just commercially, but politically.
In this conception society not only has a structure (the organization of a human group into sub-groups, like socioeconomic classes); but a substructure that is based on the nuts and bolts of how people actually produce the material essentials of life (the organization of work), on which the structure is based (for, as someone once said, "life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things"); and a superstructure, which one can think of as broadly the ideology of the society, rooted in the substructure and structure "below" it.
In his "Dead Hand" books (the name of which is, apparently, a play on Adam Smith's conception of market forces as an "invisible hand" that produces optimal economic results in a context of free exchange), Upton Sinclair, who had earlier written about the other levels of societal life (in fiction like The Jungle, or The Metropolis, but also nonfiction), turned his attention to that "superstructure" as it existed in American society in his day. Specifically in the six books to which that sequence eventually came he addressed the matters of religion (in 1917's The Profits of Religion), the education system (1923's The Goose-Step and 1924's The Goslings) , the news media (in 1919's The Brass Check) and the arts (1925's Mammonart and 1927's Money Writes!).
In those six books Sinclair presented a fiercely critical view of the state of all those aspects of American life, the thinking they promulgated, and the backward, venal and oppressive forces he saw lying behind them. Naturally the publisher which put them out took a risk--and the Dauriats of Sinclair's time had no more interest in such risk than they did in Balzac's time, or in ours. After their declining the first of Sinclair's books because of its subject matter (The Profits of Religion). The result was that Sinclair decided to publish the books himself, and continued in the practice with the books that followed.
As those who have experience of self-publishing can testify self-publishing, like any other sort of small business when we get away from the piety and outright romanticism about it standard in this society, is basically an affair of working harder, for less. And as if the ordinary obstacles in its way were not enough the very press that had treated Sinclair and all he stood for so abusively throughout his career, and which he criticized in his books, did not make this easier for him, in the main remaining silent about the books. However, that is no judgment on their quality--the books retaining interest a century on not only as works by a writer who had then been in the first rank, or as historical documents testifying to conditions in Sinclair's time, but for what they tell us about ideas and institutions that, contrary to Sinclair's hopes when he produced these books, remain dominant in our own day (and are today written about, for the most part, with rather less rigor, frankness, insight than Sinclair displayed).
Indeed, that the publishers and press of his time behaved as they did toward Sinclair's books can seem to be as much to the credit of Sinclair and his books as it is to the discredit of those publishers and press--while this seems to me something worth remembering in our time, with its ceaseless elite and elitist sneering at any democratization of publishing. The defenders of traditional publishing and the rest may claim to be upholding high standards, but in reality what they hate is losing control of what may be put before the public, even if it has only been in a much smaller degree than most appreciate, for what that means not just commercially, but politically.
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