Sociology And The Community

...but they are very significant in understanding the theory of Bohemias and some radical groups, which Stein treats inadequately...

...But is this proposition a believable explanation of the lack of war-resisters, of the paralysis of will and reason...

...I wish he would tell us...

...Being committed" requires more than "meeting expectations...

...For a person to be somebody— or for there to be a social change or the therapy of a neurosis— at some point there must be real tasks and real achievements...

...He apparently thinks so, for he draws heavily for illustration on the vulgar griping of Bill Mauldin...

...Are not achieved real goods, or the failures to achieve real goods, causally operative...

...What would be an insight into unconscious motives that did not alter character...

...Our sociologist mentions this as follows: "The continuous griping about officers and caste deflected attention from more fundamental sources of dissatisfaction potentially arising from the lack of ideological conviction...

...But again, what Stein omits is the other side: that a Bohemia at its best is profoundly conservative of nature, insisting on humanly meaningful work, progressive education, better community and sex, not because these are innovations, but because they are necessities...

...IN THIS STUDY, Urbanization, Industrialization, and Bureaucratization are the contexts of the eclipse of community...

...We have the result—of alienation and anomie— which transforms the human being into an object...

...I am, puzzled and would like to know, and I am jotting down the following random comments just in order to elicit a reply from the author...

...For instance, frequently in this book the factor of justice pops up in speaking of the South, of the Army, and so forth...

...And does he think that such harmonious working could indeed be achieved by devices of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and sociology, without politics, etc...

...Professor Stein cheerily says that "most of us" were in the armed forces, as though it were a matter clear as day...

...otherwise it is inexplicable how a Bohemia could ever produce worthwhile innovations, for nothing comes from nothing...

...there cannot...

...whereas (it seems to me) the real sociological problem is why there is, in Armies, the childish response of resentment rather than manly indignation and revolt...

...but what is (to me) astounding is that nowhere in the discussion does he mention food, feeding a family, the art of cooking, or anything like that, although surely these are the things that must finally make cooking meaningful...

...Drawing—much too heavily—on Erik Erikson, he says, "Ego-identity depends on the accessibility of roles in which acceptance by significant others is assured...

...Omitting them, how is the cook's identity ever to be realized...

...PAUL GOODMAN 310...

...He lays all his stress on Bohemia as "deviant," and he rightly approves of it as such, as a community laboratory for "innovations...

...Let me quote two passages...

...whereas to me it is far more obscure than the doings of Marduk or Tiamat...

...What I should like to point out here, however, is how through these changes a kind of "nature" seems to survive, almost like a return of the repressed, and pathetically displaced like any dream symbols...

...One of its great merits is how it implicitly tells the history of half a century by paraphrasing what the successive sociologists have tended to emphasize—from the urban dislocation in the Chicago studies, through the industrial and class conflicts of Middletown and Yankee City, to the suburbanism of Park Forest and Crestwood Heights...

...Another aspect of the same is the austere eschewing of underlying "natural" needs and powers as discussable factors, whether by "natural" we mean instinctual, or belonging to the human condition generally, or even culturally ingrained to a degree that they must persist through the arc of change in question...

...A LUDICROUS INSTANCE: in analyzing the anxiety of suburban women in a 307 commodity-centered society, he says, "Unfortunately the accumulation of appliances can never render cooking permanently meaningful as long as the woman is unsure of its relation to her feminine identity...

...What is the merely formal "identity" of a person...

...His trouble 309 is analogous to Riesman's naive notion of defining the "autonomous" man by a poll...

...They provide an adequate framework to bring us from discussions of the loneliness, ethnical strife, and delinquency of the twenties to the Organized affluence of our suburbs and exurbs (though there curiously remains plenty of loneliness, ethnical strife, and delinquency...

...As a pragmatist, I find this an amazing proposition...

...and the need for simple loyalty is travestied in being a Company Man...

...Are we to call such familiarity knowledge...

...Again, speaking of a recent study of a community whose motivations are unconscious, he says, " 'Urban dominance' would not be diminished if its existence were known, any more than familiarity with the 'rat race' helps the exurbanites to extract themselves from it...

...but the older ones were not really solved, so there is a deepening crisis...

...Yet he austerely will not talk about justice, the value of any of the products or of the culture, the happiness or virtue of any of the people, or the success and failure or effort and struggle of a society in nature and history...

...This is certainly true...

...If he restricts his methods to anthropology, psychology, and sociology, is he not himself making human society into an object, whose harmonious working would be an end in itself, apart from nature, history, God, or objective value...

...To answer the real question, we would have to begin at least with Freud's notion of 308 the charismatic father-Ieader in masspsychology...

...Now is this adequate to the meaning and causal power of justice...

...Certainly...

...The sociologist apparently wants to say that without acceptance and selfacceptance, there cannot be good eating, achieved sex, new science and art, and so forth...

...The book is always interesting and informative, and often lovely...

...but I am not familiar with what he would reply...

...Agreed...

...The narrowest kind of rural and small-town family mores revive in college towns like Berkeley...

...and I guess this is what Professor Stein means by his title...

...handicraft and mechanical skill come back comically as Do It Yourself...

...In suburbs, these survivals are trivial...

...though when he seems to imply that therefore we ought to invent Bohemias, one does not know whether to laugh or cry: it is just what Time and Life have been doing for the Beats...

...For some reason that I cannot fathom, these evaluations are eschewed by sociologists, although they do not avoid evaluating the social structures themselves, in terms of isolation, conflict, insecurity, fragmentation of the process of growing up, anomie...

...What a beautifully Veblenesque formulation, as if the student were going to go home and tell his father that teacher was a Red, and it was necessary to veil the idea in as thick a smokescreen as possible...

...But it is also true that good eating and spontaneous sex, original and disinterested thought, and so forth, are the things that materially constitute acceptance: they make one indispensable, they confirm one's selfappointment, they give courage and security, they are identity...

...As new problems emerge, older ones are paid less attention...

...There is a good deal of discussion of Identity in this book, but not much mention of the mission, task, justification, or achievement that could constitute an identity...

...Why must this be...

...In a recent essay on jobs, I argued that the workman's clinging to security comes from the facts that he does not use his particular capacities, and that the product is socially useless...

...therefore he is not fulfilled and proud, and he is not indispensable...

...but it does not help a merely formal symbol to multiply it in a hall of mirrors...

...My guess is that our present author is embarrassed in handling these topics, and in handling objective values in general, by restricting himself to formal "community studies," rather than drawing on the more concrete and causal analyses in the poets and novelists...

...But when the others have begun to question their own identities, [the result is] compulsive role-playing...

...This is called by Stein "the social-psychological conception of relative deprivation...

...Why do the sociologists never mention this kind of proposition...

...just as anarchists are traditional because they think that sun, space, and mutual aid are more basic than economic and social progress...

...And what on earth is the meaning of a truth that does not make a difference in practice...

...Without exploring stronger causes, is it possible to cast much light on the Army as a community...

...The eclipse concludes with three chapters that explain the contributions made to community theory by anthropology, psychoanalysis, and sociology...

...To repeat, I am convinced that everything I have said here is perfectly familiar to Professor Stein...

...For I am convinced that Maurice Stein understands quite well what bothers some of us with present-day sociology, and perhaps he can help us dig what sociologists are doing...

...On the contrary, Professor Stein not only probes but evaluates— the criteria are not always explicit— class relations, production and consumption attitudes, conformity and deviation, gaps in the rites of growing up, unconscious alienations and identifications...

...Surely some chapters are missing: Ethics, Theology, and Criticism...

...I ask it candidly...

...And soon we would have to go on to the more important problem of why human beings are so imprudent as to take part in modern war...

...but we must see also the side of stubborn resistance to alienation and anomie...

...it requires absorption in some object and world...

...The Eclipse of Community is a reasoned manual of important American community studies of the past fifty years...

...Demonstrably and even experimentally...

...The sociological diagnosis of approvable deviation is a sound and indispensable one...

...It is not that the sociologists try to be "scientific" and avoid evaluation...

...the appetites, virtues, vices, faculties, that an investigator has to take for granted...

...I think that the author underestimates the accumulation of unsolved problems...

...Then reading it, and especially finishing reading it, I am at a loss how (it seems to me) sociology makes itself stupid, by the limitations it sets to its inquiry...