American Library Association most challenged books of 2025(NPR) lists several books of which I do not know the author or the work. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess is the only book I have read, and although I know the name of Malinda Lo, I have read none of her books. They mostly seem to be Young Adults books about sexual orientation. Considering all the emotional turmoil of adolescence and the suicide rates of those with doubts about their sexual orientation, positive examples of gay life seem like a good idea. Which may be why they are banned - better to torment the tormented. As for A Clockwork Orange, I can't recall exactly when I did read that novel, but I am certain I was under 22, and it was a book I bought at a used bookstore (I may have had it for years before reading).
We’ve just seen an example in the administration’s propaganda about the murder of Renee Good. “Don’t believe your lying eyes”– believe the “revised” reality we offer instead. But that example is a small part of a sustained assault.
Join MPL and the BSU Art education students for a step by step lesson in watercolor painting. A fun watercolor workshop in the Maring-Hunt Gardens. At the end you will have a one of a kind watercolor painting to take home!
I put together this post on February 3, meaning to do more with what I had found on these sites. Work, illness, recuperation kept me from doing more. I added some brief notes today.
Want to write a movie and want to see real scripts. Rian Johnson has posted his at rcjohnso / scripts.
“Murder Most Foul” is, first, the story of a killing, which Dylan
depicts as an execution, and, then, a catalog of the plangent
reverberations for a nation—as he later sings—in “slow decay.” Dallas
strictly speaking was dark when Kennedy arrived, rainy and
gray, and from the outset Dylan embeds the assassination inside prior
American cataclysmic cruxes: Native American ethnocide (referencing the
Oglala Lakota saying, “a good day to die”) and Pearl Harbor, via
Franklin Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech. But 1941 was also the year
Dylan was born, and his song is just as cannily personal as it is
historical. His memoir Chronicles recounts his mother’s avid
response to a Kennedy campaign visit to Hibbing, Minnesota, six months
after Dylan left for Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota. “He
gave a heroic speech, my mom said, and brought people a lot of hope,”
Dylan wrote. “I wish I could have seen him.” Kennedy also figured into
one of Dylan’s first public controversies when, on December 13, 1963, he
ruffled his Emergency Civil Liberties Committee hosts in New York after
they bestowed upon him their annual Tom Paine Award—for civil rights
efforts—by remarking that “I saw some of myself” in Lee Harvey Oswald.
More recently, Dylan included paintings of Oswald and Jack Ruby in his
“Revisionist Art” series (2011-2012), both modeled after reconfigured Life magazine covers. On his twenty-first-century albums, “Love And Theft” (2001), Modern Times (2006), and Tempest,
Dylan circulated several conspicuously political songs, among them
“High Water (For Charley Patton),” “Cry a While,” “Sugar Baby,” “When
the Deal Goes Down,” “Workingman’s Blues #2,” “Ain’t Talkin’,” “Scarlet
Town,” “Tin Angel,” and “Tempest.” During an interview with novelist
Jonathan Lethem, he might jest, “You know, everybody makes a big deal
about the sixties. The sixties, it’s like the Civil War days. But, I
mean, you’re talking to a person who owns the sixties. Did I ever want
to acquire the sixties? No. But I own the sixties—who’s going to argue
with me?” Still, on “Murder Most Foul” Dylan thwarts readymade
nostalgia, an easy revisiting of the storybook sixties and his golden
“spokesman” moment. Instead, mixing and juxtaposing voices, lingos, and
tones, he traces the decline of America over the trajectory of his own
lifetime through the kaleidoscope of the Kennedy assassination.
Hoodox is a nonprofit organization on a mission to support and share stories that connect Hoosiers, spark conversations, and inspire positive change in Indiana.
We believe Indiana’s future can be bright, and that amplifying true stories told by and for Hoosiers is one of the most powerful ways to help us get there.
The Musical Family Tree archive was started in 2004 and serves as a crowd sourced archive of the Indiana music scene with a focus on the late 1970s through the 2010s. The MFT archive contains 1,720 musical artists and 22,311 recordings, almost none of which are found on traditional streaming services. Please explore the archive and contact us at team@musicalfamilytree.org with any questions.
(Muncie bands - most of whose names I do not recognize, but Faith Band goes unmentioned. Indianapolis bands - too many to look through - but looking through the listing by name, I found my favorite Indy band from the early Eighties: The Future! No entries for Anderson. No Pedlar?)
Now, Hoodox has created a new opportunity for Indiana filmmakers, in partnership with Indiana Humanities, Free Press Indiana and Heartland Film. LIFT will give five filmmakers $5,000 awards to help them create short nonfiction films “to raise the spirit of Indiana,” Walls said. The films will premiere at the 2026 Indy Shorts International Film Festival in July.
“But a big part of this program is also the mentorship opportunities. We don’t want to just throw out an application and then give five filmmakers $5,000 and hope that it all works out,” Walls said. “We want the entire process, starting with the application, to be an opportunity for filmmakers to learn and grow.”
Social media encourages us to experience our lives not as they happen, but as they will be presented. Moments are filtered through the lens of potential content. Emotions are evaluated for shareability. Experiences are edited into arcs: struggle → insight → growth. In this environment, the self becomes a story rather than a state. And stories demand consistency.
The problem is that real people are not consistent. We contradict ourselves. We regress. We behave badly for reasons that aren’t flattering. We want things we’re not proud of. But social media trains us to hide these fractures, to smooth them over, to rewrite ourselves in real time.
Over time, this produces a subtle psychological shift. We don’t just lie to others—we start editing our own memory. We remember the version of events that performed best. We forget the parts that didn’t fit the narrative. Like classic unreliable narrators, we come to believe our own omissions.
LOA:The short story emerged as a distinctive
American art form in the nineteenth century. What factors propelled its
rise and development?
JS: The nineteenth century was marked by tremendous
change and innovation in American writing, and the short story was at
the center of that creative and intellectual ferment, fueled by the
evolution of new printing technologies, the rapid growth of periodical
literature, and rising literacy rates. Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
(1819), a collection of essays and short stories, became the United
States’s first literary bestseller, offering a rebuttal to British
critics who had long laughed at the paucity of US cultural achievement.
Looking backward at the accomplishment of the American short story in The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story
(1962), the celebrated Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor
remarked, “Americans have handled the short story so wonderfully that
one can say that it is a national art form.”
Yesterday, it was to the dentist and Walmart, and then the remainder was trying to stop hurting.
I think I got about 4 hours of sleep all told.
Today was moving slowly in the morning; it was gloomy and cold, and the group session, and then back here, where I started revving after 5 pm. Submissions were made, and a revision started. I put off other blog posts.
I meant to have photos, but I cannot figure out how to get them from the camera to the computer.
Today's big post was inspired by Do Liberals Want a Beautiful World? from The Point Magazine. It impinges on many ideas I have had about my writing, about constitutional law, and politics. A grab bag, I know.
I generally dislike writing inspired by interviews, and this piece was like an interview, being a symposium. I have quoted what caught my attention, what made me think, and what showed me something I did not know. Please bear with these selections and read the original in full.
The topic is defined, always a good place to start.
I’m going to begin by summarizing the arguments of the piece, and I’m going to conclude by raising a few questions that I’ve been brooding over since it came out, and there will be another Trilling quote. But before I get into the weeds, it’s important to begin with a terminological note. What we on this panel mean by “liberalism” is not what is meant by, say, political commentators in the Opinion section of the New York Times. We do not mean the Democrats. We are referring to a political philosophy that arose in the seventeenth century as an outgrowth of Enlightenment moral philosophy and various Enlightenment-era conceptions of the nature of the self. Its hallmarks are an enthusiasm for autonomy, a propensity for diversity and a commitment to egalitarianism. I’ve offered a vague characterization of liberalism rather than a more concrete definition because the specifics are very much up for debate, and there are as many accounts of liberalism as there are liberal theorists. What matters for our purposes is that what we are talking about here is very much not the historically particular political orientation of the Democratic Party, much less in 2026 when it is peak listless; rather, a much broader political philosophy that has developed over the course of at least two centuries.
When the Republicans railed against liberals, they omitted that in the fuller world of political sides, they were also liberals. Now, it seems that with Trump, they have decided they oppose the ideas of equality of all persons and their inalienable rights.
I never knew of the distinction between perfectionist and non-perfectionist thinkers.
An important divide among liberal thinkers is this: Some of them are perfectionist—that is to say, they think there is a substantive liberal conception of the good life, of the way that we ought to live. Their aim is to construct a political formation that reflects, protects and gives rise to this privileged form of life. Some liberal thinkers, however, are non-perfectionist. That is to say, in their view, it is the job of a liberal state to enable citizens to devise and realize their own conceptions of the good life. This doctrine, according to which the liberal state should not favor or disfavor a particular conception of the good is called the “doctrine of neutrality.” Here is an example of what I mean. Christianity takes a controversial and substantive stance about the nature of the good life. Christianity asks its adherents to believe certain contentious things about the world, for instance, that Jesus is the son of God, and thus asks his adherents to believe certain controversial things about how humans ought to live. For instance, that we ought to worship Jesus or emulate him. A non-perfectionist liberalism permits its citizenry to be Christian, but it remains neutral only insofar as it does not compel them to be Christian. The most prominent liberal thinker of the past century is my other patron saint, John Rawls, who embraced a non-perfectionist liberalism, as do I.
I side with the non-perfectionist. Work and life left Rawls mostly undread by me. Where I got the most food for thought that made me anon-perfectionist liberal came from studying Article I, Section One of the Indiana Bill of Rights:
WE DECLARE, That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their CREATOR with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that all power is inherent in the PEOPLE; and that all free governments are, and of right ought to be, founded on their authority, and instituted for their peace, safety, and well being. For the advancement of these ends, the PEOPLE have, at all times, an indefeasible right to alter and reform their government
What I saw was a space for people to operate as they wanted to fulfill themselves without government interference, so long as their fulfillment did not injure other people.
Which I think applies to aesthetics. The symposium worried that fascism expresses politics through aesthetics, and with liberalism's laissez-faire attitude toward what people do with their freedom, it was losing to fascism.
To come back to the question of what the good life has to do with aesthetics, one of the things I’ve been asking myself is: What creates a powerful aesthetic? It comes from a very convincing way of seeing the world, a very convicted way of seeing the world. I don’t think it necessarily needs to come from a vision of the good life. It could come out of a vision of how bad life is. We certainly know artists that have had aesthetics that arose from either side. But I think there is a question whether liberalism can provide something like this at all. Even in some of the higher points of what I might call “liberal art,” what you tend to find is a portrayal of society as good enough—not exactly beautiful or deeply meaningful in the sense that we often think of when we think of a strong aesthetic. And this problem is particularly acute at a time when liberalism is challenged by actually possible alternatives. So I think one of the things to discuss is whether we might need to reconnect with the imagination, even if it makes us uncomfortable, at a moment when liberals are being challenged politically.
***
This goes to what Becca just discussed, with regard to the Sontag and Trilling quotes about the great works of liberal society often being illiberal. This was one of the lessons of the 2010s, when progressivism did try to extend into the culture and make liberal art, in a sense: I don’t think the results were impressive. And so I don’t think the answer can be that liberals need to politicize art, but rather to make sure that we provide institutional structures and social arrangements that allow for the free development of art and ideas as much as possible. Another way of putting it would be to say that it is especially important for a society that does not offer a fully substantive vision of the good life politically, to create a public culture where we can work out our ideals and values for ourselves, including through art.
***
There’s one answer, let’s call it the “head’s answer” to Becca’s challenge, which is that liberalism allows for and realizes the aesthetics of freedom, pluralism, separation of powers, democracy and the rule of law. But in the end, the liberal commitments aren’t aesthetic commitments. They say, Everyone in this room, go for it. Whatever your conception of the aesthetic is, liberalism says, that’s yours. Make it yours. Exercise your agency. That’s the head’s answer.
The heart’s answer is that liberalism’s peak aesthetic is when Bob Dylan went electric—do you know this reference, even? This was like the most important moment ever, in the world. He played “Maggie’s Farm”: “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more”—a song of liberty and pluralism. And he also sang “Like a Rolling Stone,” converting the state of rootlessness and of separation and exclusion into a song of freedom, a new national anthem. “How does it feel to be on your own / With no direction home, like a complete unknown? / Like a rolling stone”—sung with joy and celebration. When he was booed in England for not doing folk music, he said to his band, and it’s recorded on tape, “Play It Fucking Loud.” That’s a liberal aesthetic. That’s liberalism’s Riefenstahl.
I can go along with those ideas. I would add The Clash's Complete Control. But what of the effects of capitalism in centralizing the arts? Maggie's Farm may have had that in mind, too. We have more people creating, more things being written than ever before, but they are all subjected to the rule of the algorithm.
But the essential idea feels too right. Pluralism need not mean tribalism. In The Rebel, Albert Camus distinguished between unity (good) and totality (bad). Tribalism that communicates between tribes creates a pluralism; tribes that do not communicate lead to a social/political Manicheanism. The former promotes growth, the other dies shivering in a dark bunker.
I disagree with mandating beauty. Where I prefer Shakespeare, someone else might prefer Edward Albee. If I mandate Shakespeare, have I not imposed upon the Albee fans? Or vice versa.
But mandating beauty seems too much like mandating religion. Nothing has crippled religion more than mandating a state faith. A legal standard of beauty would be stultifying; I can imagine it dulling any sense of beauty in people.
Becca Rothfeld: I guess the original way you were posing the question made me think that it’s about the relationship between the content of policy and the aesthetic results of policy. And I think that the right-wing has no problem answering, Yeah, we should mandate beauty. We should mandate, like, neocolonial architecture and bad lip filler or whatever. I have strong disagreements with them about what they think is beautiful, but they don’t have a problem with that. A liberal obviously would have a problem with that. You can’t mandate beauty for various reasons, even if justice permitted it, it doesn’t seem like it would be effective. But what I think you can do is have policies that at least permit the pursuit of beauty. Another thing that you can do that Trilling gestures at in various ways, is have policies that are founded on an anthropology that, in turn, is the basis of good art production. What I mean by this is that one of Trilling’s criticisms of what he calls bureaucratic liberalism—what we would call technocratic liberalism—is that it has a really impoverished account of what people are like. He really likes Freud, not necessarily because he thinks that Freud is even correct, but because he thinks that Freud provides us with the resources to create better novels and such. And so I think that you could at least be careful to sort of write policy in a way that doesn’t assume an impoverished anthropology.
I find the thousand-flowers-bloom metaphor congruent with my ideas. It fits within my ideas of pluralism.
So what can be done? One Battle After Another is a liberal cri de coeur. It wasn’t produced by politicians. If politicians tried to produce a movie like that, it would be didactic and wouldn’t be very human. If you look at texts, either literary texts or not, that are part of our culture, they’re frequently liberal in character, and they gave rise to, you know, the civil rights movement, the movement for same sex marriage—a thousand things like that. What I’m saying now has a thousand-flowers-bloom quality, but we find that not exciting only because we’ve heard it so many times. And the challenge, I think, for this generation, is to find a conception of liberalism that celebrates and doesn’t nod bored at the relevant commitments and makes them new and real. Making something new and real is going to make them different.
There is much I found needing unpacked and considered in this paragraph:
To attribute social terribleness to liberalism is reckless. Liberalism isn’t a force in history. It’s not Voldemort. It’s not whispering behind married couples saying, sleep with your neighbor. It’s not telling fathers don’t pay attention to your kids. It’s not saying to people of faith, you should stop believing in God. This is recklessness. And I’d say exactly the same thing, if I may, about capitalism. Capitalism means people get to own things. So you get to own that green shirt and those blue jeans. Some of you probably own laptops; they can’t be taken from you because there’s private property. To believe in capitalism is to believe in something which is an engine of freedom from fear, which is a defining liberal ideal. The idea of post-liberalism, at least in some forms, is a recipe for subjection to fear, because freedom of speech starts to get smaller, and freedom of religion might get smaller too.
Unlike Marxism, liberalism does not think it is ordained by history. It turned out that Marxism was not, either. I consider liberalism to be an environment within which we get to figure out our purposes in this life.
Inducing fear and hate has been the mark of Trumpism. I have a sister who fears the coming of Sharia law. She has not explained to me how this is to occur in a country where Muslims are a distinct minority. The tech bros also seem ready to propagate fear. Musk, with his pro-white supremacy talk, comes to mind here.
Ignorance breeds fear. I did not see anywhere in this article any mention of education. Political education seems to me the balance to ill-liberal thinking. If we are looking for a liberal aesthetic, then education is the tool for its advancement.
The closest approach I found to education was in this paragaraph:
Becca Rothfeld: Can I answer more tyrannically? So I was just thinking like when Jon was talking about how liberalism and criticism have some natural affinity. Actually, I could not disagree more. The greatest tension in my life is that, as a critic, I am constantly making judgments of taste, and it’s a presumption of my vocation that other people should agree with me; I’m inegalitarian. I think that there’s a hierarchy of taste, and I presume to have a kind of authoritarian status when I’m writing a book review. I’m trying to persuade you; I’m trying to get you to agree with me. But I also think that you should think what I think. So, this is only a limited answer about what the good life looks like—I’m not taking a stance about what you should eat or whether you should stay married. (I don’t think you should stay married if your marriage is unhappy.) But my positive view is: beauty is good. The pursuit of beauty is something that you should spend your life doing. You should devote at least some part of your life to the consumption of difficult and important works of art. That’s a substantive commitment about the good life that I have and that I am willing to express.
Finally, it is up to us to fight for our freedom. Here is one way to fight: create art that springs not from political mandate but from the anarchy of real life.
Last night, I ran across View of Native Fascism: Evansville’s 1948 Wallace Riot by Denise Lynn (Indiana Magazine of History; Vol. 119 No. 3 (2023): September 2023). It might want to give us pause in our thinking.
I read some political writers saying that the consensus formed during the Cold War has ended, that we are returning the fragmentation predating December 7, 1941, and this explains Trumpism as the resurgence of an older type of American politics.
No asks how we reached the Cold War consensus, the actual mechanics in reaching that consensus. View of Native Fascism exposes an ugliness I was never aware of.
What happened in Evansville on April 6, 1948, was reminiscent of the populist fascist actions in the interwar years, and it served to solidify the fascist commitment to silencing dissent and to criminalizing demands for equality and advocacy of progressive political change. While history has often conflated anti-communist legal harassment with Mccarthyism and national politics, populist fascism—characterized by red-baiting cam-paigns, harassment, and vigilante violence—was often deployed by local organizations and individuals encouraged by anti-communist hysteria. The Evansville riot demonstrates that anti-communism operated on the local level to suppress political expression and that local veterans’ groups engaged in populist fascism to prevent progressive organization, undermine progressive gains, and, in the process, violate the rights of fellow citizens.
***
...The Progressive Party’s showing was abysmal. At least one historian, Thomas Devine, argues that it was not just anti-communism that doomed the Wallace campaign, but racism within unions, particularly in the South, which lost the labor vote. Many black voters and union voters turned to Truman as the safe vote, allowing him to pull off an upset against Republican Thomas Dewey. More troubling for progressives was that Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats, running on a commitment to segregation, won four states in the electoral college. The Wallace campaign was an early casualty of cold War red-baiting; more than that, the Progressive Party’s message of the dangers to peace from the wedding of the war and civilian economies went unheeded, as the nation continued its march toward a state of permanent war, a path it continues to follow today.
Out of those Dixiecrats came George Wallace, and from George Wallace came the Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon and the rise of white supremacy that has permeated the Republican Party for generations.
I cannot recall when I first learned of Henry Wallace's run for president in 1948. I may have been in my forties, and it may have come from a Gore Vidal essay. Wallace presents a large question for alternate history. I think this article taught me more of what Wallace and the Progressive Party was about:
Yes, they allowed Communist fellow travelers and even CP members to attach themselves.
A little more than a decade later, and Eisenhower would warn the country of the military-industrial complex. No one (except maybe the John Birchers?) accused him of being a Communist. It seems Wallace was making the same argument in 1948.
I find in what is described below, Wallace made arguments justified by Eisenhower, by the Vietnam War, by Nixon's policy of detente, of the failure of trickle down economics, by Trump rejecting alternate energy in favor of oil and coal (which advocacy has always made me wonder in what century is he living). I also see the failure of the peace dividend from the Cold War and the subsizing of Big Tech that has led us into the deserts of disunion and AI.
Wallace told his Evansville supporters that to ensure freedom and justice, defense industries had to be prevented from profiteering. He noted that the oil industry, to ensure their profits, supported reaction-ary leaders in other countries “under the wings of US Army bombers.” The aircraft industry depended on government contracts for profit, and thus it was no wonder, Wallace claimed, that it was helping to “foment the war hysteria” during the cold War. Aircraft companies had profited handsomely during World War II: the Republic Aviation corporation that operated out of Evansville producing the Thunderbolt had seen a 150 percent increase in profit during the war because, Wallace noted, Americans had subsidized the company through “war bonds and taxes.” but the civilian aviation industry was nowhere near as profitable in post-war 1948—Republic Aviation had ceased producing civilian aircraft—and thus industry leaders were some of the loudest in calling for war. None were concerned that “air bombardment” led to the “murder of millions of civilians” nor that their profits depended on “capital supplied by the American taxpayer.” Even those who supported an increased budget for military air power, Wallace continued, admitted that there were no weapons in existence that would make the United States vulnerable to attack. The cold War “policy of militarization” was not a good defense but instead a “provocation to war.”42
Wallace argued that few cities had given as much to the war effort as Evansville and thus Evansville had a right to enjoy the peace. He noted that the facilities that had built the Thunderbolt were now refitted for refrigerator manufacturing. What Evansville needed was a federal housing program to help deal with the housing crisis; more houses meant greater need for refrigerators. The people of Evansville wanted, and deserved, higher wages and lower prices. Another war would threaten all of this. Wallace advocated a “peace program”: the U.S. would conclude all of its interventionist policies and programs and instead create an “international aid program through the UN.” but, he added, to ensure peace “we must draw the fangs of the warmakers” and stop subsidizing war profiteers with taxpayer funds. Wallace advocated government ownership of war-time aircraft plants that would be turned over to civilian production, estimated to provide millions of new jobs as part of a full-employment program. The cost, he argued, would be minimal given the cost of war. The veterans’ groups clamoring outside the coliseum were, as Minton had divined, too caught up in anti-communist hysteria to be interested in Wallace’s message of peace. At the end of the candidate’s speech, Parker returned to the stage and “dismissed the audience.” by this point the mob had dispersed.43
But more chilling to me came from Evansville but up the Ohio River in Pittsburgh:
That same year, historian and Pittsburgh Courier columnist Joel Augustus Rogers wrote an editorial arguing that the “spirit of the American people” was more inclined toward fascism than communism. After a handful of years watching anti-communist hysteria grow, Rogers noted that while there might be 70,000 communists in the United States, there were potentially 70,000,000 fascists, and observed that the South was already “largely fascistic.” Anti-communist purges, he wrote, were just a “smoke screen for fascism.” Rogers concluded that, while he did not align with communists and would reject communism as a way of life, if the American communist Party were simply an “anti-negro” group it would have been left alone.57Rogers articulated a point that others were expressing more quietly at the height of American anti-communism. The U.S. showed definite fascist tendencies, especially in its silencing of progressive voices. Its anti-com-munist foreign policy preferred right-wing dictatorships that shored up corporate profits and secured American military expansion. Long after Wallace left Evansville and lost in that year’s election, populist fascism continued, as veterans’ groups and mainstream conservative unions ousted radicals and supported the larger censure of progressives. In Indiana, the American Legion made headlines again in 1953 when it denied the AcLU the right to use its Indianapolis War Memorial as a meeting place. The Legion’s state commander, Roy Amos, argued that the organization was communist and he did not want to provide it “sanctuary.” Historian Erin Kemper has demonstrated that in Indiana, fears about communist conspiracy would continue well into the late twentieth century. The American Legion and other veterans’ groups continued to work with far-right reactionaries, including ProAmerica and the John birch Society, which was founded in Indianapolis. As Kemper argues, in Indiana change is “evolutionary not revolutionary.”
What was clear in 1949 was consternation when Trump won in 2016 and 2024.
I think fascists are cowards. This has been a long-standing opinion of mine. Today, I have another, that there are those who prefer slavery to freedom. That this country has always had a population of cowards who would want to be slaves.
Alex Nowrasteh's The Culture Crutch (Laissez-Faire, Laissez-Passer w/ Alex Nowrasteh & David Bier Substack) felt important enough to pass along.
Culture and the problem defined:
Culture is human behavior that is socially learned and transmitted rather than genetically inherited or individually discovered. In Substack and online debates, culture means whatever the person invoking it needs it to mean. Values. Beliefs. Norms. Attitudes. Customs. Work ethic. Family structure. Trust. Time preference. Cuisine. Music. When someone says “culture explains X,” they’re gesturing at a black box the size of human civilization and calling the gesture a theory.
Keep that definition of culture in mind as I explain how unsatisfying using the word “culture” is as an explanation. You notice a spike in unemployment. Curious what could be causing it, you ask your economist friend why unemployment is rising. He says it’s because of “the economy” and then sits back as if he’s explained something when he has done nothing of the sort. That’s how everybody sounds to me when they say that culture explains a behavior or outcome.
I do not claim to be well read in economics, so this problem is new to me. However, it makes me wonder about the other social sciences.
If you’re going to claim that culture has an effect, you should be able to do four things. First, pinpoint exactly what cultural characteristic you mean. Don’t be vague, be specific by describing the type of behavior. Second, prove that cultural behavior actually exists as a measurable trait. Don’t rely on stereotypes, do the hard work. Third, demonstrate that the cultural behavior differs meaningfully across the groups being compared. Wow, that culture likes food a lot. Which culture doesn’t? Fourth, rule out that the real cultural trait isn’t caused by an exogenous economic force like high real estate prices, rising wages, or different institutions that incentivize behavior. Almost nobody who invokes culture does any of these four things. Culture is endogenous to everything. That’s why you have to do the work to isolate it. That’s also why almost nobody bothers.
The fourth step is the hardest because culture is endogenous to everything. It doesn’t exist outside the institutional, economic, and geographic environment that produces it. The corruption norms in Egypt didn’t fall from the sky. They emerged from decades or centuries of weak rule of law, chaos, and institutional dysfunction. Japanese cooperative norms didn’t spring from the soil of Honshu or grow from their bodies like an appendage. Claiming culture causes an outcome without first ruling out that the outcome’s causes also produced the culture is not an explanation. It is circular reasoning with a dedicated vocabulary.
I never did anything with my BS in Political Science besides as a springboard to law school. What sticks in my head is more than methods than substance. Maybe anthropology avoids the problem outlined above by keeping cultures sealed off from one another.
But what of Political Science? It might be saved by its reliance on surveys and empirical data, right? Supposedly, data fuels Economics.
Sociology becomes problematic to me for what it extracts from data is related to culture.
I think of Economics as a form of history - it looks backward and tries to project forward. Economics' reliance on numbers seemed to put its ability to project forward on a more stable foundation than history. However, history has for a long time recognized that human behavior has its consistencies but that the expression of human nature escapes predictability.
Not I can let History off the hook here. I recall reading about the German idea of Kultur. Not that I can recall enough to give a detailed explanation; apart from that, it was a generalized explanation. Perhaps Economics imported the concept without understanding what they were doing.
Bottom line, generalized explanations do not really explain everything; we need to be skeptical of culture as explaining everything.
