Jokes and Humor Among the People.

And then there is the everyday laughter.

Roll call every morning in the Army: Wake up, fall out in platoon formation along side the barracks. Sergeant calls every name  alphabetically. “Here, here, here,” the soldiers answer. Some say “yoh”.  Very rarely someone will offer the more formal “present”. For some reason when you hear it in the dark before dawn it is funny. The public refusal of an imposed uniformity.

One member of the unit is still in his bunk by the door overlooking the formation, catching a few extra winks. He answers “here” from the wrong direction. Here but not exactly here. Sergeant does the famous double-take with slow burn.

A serious misdemeanor, the culprit will be punished–extra duty,  restricted to camp– but a local, ordinary humorous event has happened.

It has the social order of the comic incident.  The man in bed is A, the instigator. The Sergeant is B, the responding other, the second banana. The platoon is the audience. There is the change in mood expressed in the laughter and a general agreement that it occurred spontaneously during a rule breaking act   No professional comic or troupe of actors. No music. Just everyday life, a people’s joke.

We don’t have a measure. Each of us participates in and witnesses these local comic events but we hardly ever note and file what happened. Unreported, rarely recalled, the action and the mood merely a bit of inconsequential smoke.  But suppose each of us kept a diary of comic incidents and  sent them to a specialized web site where they could be classified and analyzed.  Weekly reports could be issued on the comic moods of the people.  Another item for the news announcer: stock market quotes, weather forecasts, war casualties, lurid crimes, and comic mood.  We are in Joe Gould’s territory–history from the bottom up.

We don’t have a measure but we do have patterns.  Ordinary comic incidents can be sorted by  topic, content, and internal order.  The moment for each is unique and singular but on reflection similarities emerge.  They are not exactly the same but they fall into distinctive classes and sometimes they are strikingly alike.

It is a case of pattern from pattern. We inherit pattern, perpetuate pattern, and pass pattern to others.   We duplicate endlessly. I’ll list a few of the obvious ways.

(1) Imitation.  A case of hear and then say.  A joke can pass from local setting to local setting this way like rumor or a commercial craze like the hulla hoop.  It can be as a narrative, a play on words, a physical act. You witness an incident and then later initiate a replication in another setting.   The experience of repetition is so repetitive that some preface a joke by asking, “Have you heard this one?” Maybe not, but I recognize the pattern. (I am avoiding mention of patterns of physical aggressions so familiar that they are named but so mean spirited that I refuse to perpetuate them.  You can all remember these for yourselves.)

(2) The social order itself is repetitious.  For example the sameness of education:  the formal school and classroom, the teachers and students and  principals and superintendents,  the curriculum and teaching methods–all have minor  variations at most on a universal way.  Say classroom and presume that everyone will recall a similar image. The local groups are acting out of a near  uniform social order.  The roll call story  is  an institutional  pattern. Imitation not needed. We simply react to a similar stimulus which in  large part is the same institutional order.

(3)  Sharing culture sets another series of patterns of comic incidents and jokes.  Misunderstandings between the genders might reside here.  The inarticulate and clumsy man trying to seduce the dim witted woman for example.  The masculine interest in sports versus the feminine interest in romance.  The woman window shopping leisurely while the man is  focused on the walk itself. The man who refuses to admit that he is lost lest he have to ask another for directions and his exasperated mate. If the cultural norm is there the comic pattern will follow.

(4) A sharing of knowledge of  prior events.  Remember the story of the three daffy dodgers on third base and the next day the similar comic comments about it.  The dodgers have three men on. Oh yea, which base?  Calling up a shared memory can be the joke.

(5)  Language, the double meaning of a word.  Lay, pink, ginger, screw, French, come,  clap,  pile, dump, bang.   I’m laughing.  If these don’t ring your bell, try scratching your own list. We can find a mutual comic mood if we all recognize the anomaly.

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Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel, famous movie comic team of the 1930s, are carrying a grand piano across a flimsy rope bridge that hangs over a deep chasm. A wild eyed concert pianist is sitting atop the piano fingering the keys from the wrong direction. Half way across (with the dizzying sway accelerating, the rope unraveling and pulling away from its moorings, the roaring of the distant rock strewn rapids below  mingling with a jazz rendition of Clair de Lune) we look over Stan’s shoulder and see an angry 500 pound great ape approaching from the opposite direction. Stan stops to consider their predicament. “Is the toll on this bridge refundable if you don’t make it across?”

(If I recall correctly, Laurel and Hardy did a piano moving skit. The rope bridge and the ape comes from someone explaining what a topper is.  I added the piano player and the  toll refund.  Add the links to two versions of Clair de Lune and the picture of Laurel and Hardy in retirement and this post wins at least five stars.)

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Impossible nightmarish  situations aside, mood is no joke. There seems to be lots of mood patterns  going in different directions, but no overall summing up. Think of all the concurrent moods of all the people. How can you possibly describe it? The joint mood of  the assembled audience sharing stimulus and context might be the maximum sharing of mood that we can expect. Yet on occasion, we all sense a unified mood field across the entire society.  It is never a perfect moment,  but we sense intuitively that what we are feeling  is part of a larger welling mood among the mass of us in our society.  In the audience and among the actors and staff at the theater this perception is stark and obvious. It can be described as a group mood. But for the larger groupings like the community, the city, the society this concrete immediacy of perception is missing.The measure is missing.  Statements about this large dispersed group’s mood may simply be projections  of one person’s imagination.

Yet we can site some facts that suggest mass mood.  The shock and mourning visible on the death of a president in office or of a revered public figure. People paying their respects along the tracks where the train carrying the body passes, people lining up to pass by the coffin on display, people along the parade route of the funeral procession.  The tears, the somber looks. Still we can’t say everyone is caught only some portion.

 Certainly leadership elements are aware of the possibility of a popular mood and some of the cadre work is directed toward exerting  influence over it. Sometimes the emphasis on excessive optimism, everything copacetic, goes against an obvious reality and is caught out.  This seems to have happened during and after the Katrina Hurricane where the happy talk dissolved in the waters of inundated New Orleans.

To the extent that we suspect that the mass mood may exist most of the time it is in default mode–sort of a normal mix. But with a striking happening conveyed via the mass media this mass mood can take a very definite and distinctive form–acts of war, natural catastrophes, famous personalities acting out, iconic crimes, investigations and court cases. These can generate uniform stimuli and a shared  mood.

At this level mood is similar to, but in content separate from,  opinion.  Compare the mass to the local to the individual mood.  I would guess that the quality of the mood goes from crude to nuanced, from persistent to volatile, from less governable to self-governable. It is as though the mass society is something like a herd of cattle on the move.  The cadre cowboys are ever alert to mood–keep the gang from stampeding but at the same time keep them moving in an orderly manner in the same  cadre decided direction.

I am convinced that a human (and, each in its own way, animal) ability to read the other and the situation  is a biological given.  This sensing ability, admittedly distorted and blocked and sometimes exaggerated by the culture and the social order, is always at work but only occasionally does it crest and become unified and apparent.

I saw this process clearly while working in a small civil service office of 40 to 50 workers who interacted day by day over time and reached crudely uniform readings of each one’s character and capabilities in the process.  The presented persona, the public face, is pierced and a version of the actual functioning person reached.  You can’t fool all the people all the time. I know that they were reading me with more accuracy than  I was reading myself.  A form of the magical mirror.

So part of the mass mood is located in the shared readings of the participants, part is in the manipulation  and distortions and corrections introduced by the active cadres.

The comic at this inflated level is another question.  It is more likely to be generated by mass media instead of bubbling up from the bottom.  Perhaps on mass holidays like New Years Eve or Mardi Gras in Brazil, a platform for the comic might facilitate a wide-spread comic mood.

But this is a special topic of its own. Very iffy. We will step back from this precipice and maybe follow it up in a later post.

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The complex of the comic incident established–intent, action, mood–what might be its consequences? How does the comic fit into the larger scheme of the ongoing social order? The answer varies with unit of action and analysis  (individual, local group, mass)  and by type of initiator (professional or ordinary), and by degree of intention.  Another vast topic.

First the comic mood is part of a larger biological cycle to which we are committed by our very nature.  We die and we live, we wake and we sleep, we hunger and are sated. we laugh and we cry, are happy and sad.  Our capacity for persistence in one direction is limited. A dialectic is in operation.  Out of this we have the notion that the task oriented group, under discipline and focused, will eventually break for tension relief with horse play, comic incident, relaxation and pleasure. So one function is comic relief itself.

Second. In Pittsburgh I fell in with a group of young professionals who met every Saturday evening for a few hours of sociability. Group made up of couples and associates.  Influenced by a persistent member who was an architect and city planner, the group began telling off-color stories, mainly involving incest and would continue along the same line for up to two hours.  Invariably we would become bored and even exhausted and  despondent and  the session would break up like a brittle sheet of ice under a sledge hammer.  Suddenly all go home.

The formal, fixed narrative joke became a block to any hope for friendship and intimacy.  We didn’t talk about ourselves and listen to the hopes and fears and projects of others–all thwarted by a wall of jokes. The outcome, a barrage of jokes that prevented the development of the group and its members. The joke can be a poor substitute for friendship and intimacy. The group can freeze up.

Third.  Another class of comic incidents take the opposite turn and by breaking the ice allow the group to move toward greater closeness.  Spontaneous banter, playfulness, sharing in the development of the comic action convert the group to an accepting circle.

Four. Wit, double meaning, exaggeration, irony, analogy permit the comic to elude the censorship, especially under a police state and dictatorial regime. The joke  expresses a resistant solidarity among those present and alert.  The comic can be a political act.  In a freer environment the negation and attack on the other and his ideology can be more direct.  The limit is the sensibilities of the other–democratic contention occurs within a larger agreement and unity and this sets a limit, conventional and self imposed. Some part of the comic action is always involved with censorship–informal or official.  At its most benign it is called good taste–going over the line is the act of a barbarian and a cad. The comic as heavy aggression.

Five.  Then there is the direct satisfaction of the search for diversion.  We go to a place decorated to suggest opulence–the old movie palaces, the casino, the house of pleasure, the various forms of theater–and are transported to pink cloud dream and given respite from the daily grind.  The professional comic world under the supervision of  owners and employers provides a conventional way.  Dream, sleep and entertainment.

Six.  Gallows humor. British army officer is being tortured by members of a satanic terrorist cult. Hanging by his heels, head down, he fears that his loose change will fall out of his pockets. The stoic made comic. A movie theme. I got this example from the British movie “The Four Feathers.” Another scene from an American movie, “Arise My Love”– a captured American volunteer in Spain during their civil war awaiting his turn before the firing squad plays cards and jokes with a Spanish priest who is trying in vain to prepare him for his after-life.

Humor gets us ready for the anticipated rough patches.  It is also the humor of an elite sensibility, a cultural attitude directed by training and social position.

And then there is the case of Arnold Rothstein, a gambler at his peak who draws a royal flush in a high stakes poker game just at the moment that an assassin shoots him.   A final joke at the expense of the victim. The last illusion. A hot hand but it comes from a cold,  fixed deck.  Rothstein was involved in syndicate crime, rumored to be  behind the Chicago Black Sox scandal.  The story has a mythic quality (the Wikipedia biography doesn’t mention it). Like the Brit losing his change it expresses a wish for a graceful style under trying circumstances.  If one has to go out this is probably one of the better  doors to open.

It’s a Joke, Son. The Comic Mood. Part II

Its a joke, son. A woman goes to a party and meets a famous artist who she finds inordinately attractive. After several drinks she goes with him to his studio and spends a night of deliriously passionate lovemaking. In the morning she awakes to find that she has been with a notorious look-alike no-talent guy. No sign of big time artist. The woman’s happiness and sense of victorious achievement immediately changes to anger and shame. The lover in the night had been a starkly concrete illusion.

A confusion of identity joke–one man substitutes  inappropriately for another.  A persistent and fruitful plot –Oscar Wilde’s play (made into at least two movies) “The Importance of Being Earnest” enlarges on this idea.  Also note theme of sexual relationship, where one of the pair claims a higher social status than the other, as a form of social mobility. The joke being in the diverting way  this ambition is thwarted.  Upward social mobility is pushed as an economic motive in conservative sociology.  The usual route is through promotion on the job, with increase in salary and respect, but the step up with intimate association and possible marriage with a higher ranking other is not unknown.  In the 1930s people with this kind of ambition were called gold diggers.  The term has fallen into disuse since.  The American ideology emphasizes equality of person regardless of status.  All American marriages are presumed to be based on love and affection.  An extreme form of mobility through sexual favor is dramatized in the French film “Priceless. Hors de Prix”  (2006).The heroine lives with a succession of much older wealthy men hoping for the eventual security of a loveless marriage until she is lured back to ordinary life through her conventional love of a young hotel worker.  In American films where passion and mobility intertwine the prostitute or hotel maid fall for and are won by youthful and handsome millionaires. They can’t help themselves, money be damned. This rescue motif takes its pure form in the folk tale “Cinderella”.

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The joke or comic incident is an act that induces a pleasurable mood whose measure is the laugh. This funny event is embedded in an interaction sequence. In its simplest form only two people are involved. The identification of the comic incident is directional.

(1) Prospective, forward looking: the person initiating the action intends it to be comic, and he  signals this  in some way, sometimes subtle. But whenever intention precedes the joke, all present get some warning about the nature of the act upcoming–a wink, a giggle, a flat statement. By the time the joke begins we are all usually alert to what is happening.

Another requirement for the comic incident is the laugh or some similar index of a developing pleasurable mood within one or more of those participating.  The intentional act without the expected response is a failed joke.

A question of intention then. Person A might signal an upcoming action is supposed to be comic.  But if there is no sign or if the sign is not clear or if  A  pretends retroactively that it was intended to be funny just because B laughed, we have a borderline joke.  Some  concrete incidents can not be precisely categorized.

(2) Retrospective, backward looking: the action occurs spontaneously, it emerges from the ongoing scene, and some of the people involved laugh. Agreement or consensus appears (however marked)  that the act had been funny.  Person A dribbles his ice cream over his new shirt and some of those present fall-down laughing.  Not intended but still leading on to the happy mood.  Both A and B try to catch a ball and become entangled as the ball eludes them. Either or both of them laugh. There is no intention but there is an immediate  recognition that something funny has occurred.

Another possibility. a person may laugh and have a pleasurable feeling but if there is no comic action, purposeful or not, antecedent or simultaneous,  there is no joke.  Best way to go. Feel good, babe, we’re all with you.

Summarizing: The identification of a comic incident is a matter of decision after evaluation of three elements:: (1) intention, (2) the act, and (3) the pleasurable mood change.  Five possible outcomes: (1) no joke–none of the elements present. A free laugh possible for no identifiable reason. (2) failed joke–intention and act are there but no mood change. (3) borderline joke–intention and act can not be clearly established and no spontaneous comic act is identified but there is a change toward a pleasurable mood. It is not a free laugh since we suspect something funny happened but we don’t know what. (4) spontaneous joke–the incident arises from the on-going interaction. Not intended yet the pleasurable mood change occurs and the comic action is immediately recognized. (5) Intended joke, all elements in place–intention, comic act, laugh. Bingo!

The players in an interaction sequence are not limited to two. But exactly how many there are and what their contributions may be in each concrete case is a matter of observation.  Sometimes it is fixed by formal rules but may also vary with time, place, and state of culture.  The contributions of each will also vary during the rolling out of the interaction sequence. Who is doing what may shift among those present.  What we want to describe is the kinds of people and the kinds of acts that we might have in particular kinds of comic presentations.  I am presuming that the order of the interaction might have some consequence for the kind of comic event that is generated and vice versa.  Not all of these elements have to be present, and those that are can be assigned to different people or can be collapsed down to the essential dyad.  We have: (1) the joker ego, called A here. He solely, or with any or all others present, constructs the comic incident.  (2) the alter ego as responder, called B here. He is the interlocutor, the one who  helps set up the situation for the joke. He also responds once the joke is out or  he joins with A to produce the funny action.   (3) the on-looker, a third-party, sometimes called the kibitzer.  The spectators are amassed here as a separate part.  They magnify the effect achieved by A and B.  Commentary and critique usually are found here.  (4) the butt, a lot of comic action is aggressive and even destructive.  It may involve  criticism, attacks on the social status of the other or on the social order itself. There might be bullying. Hatred may be expressed. Humiliation, embarrassment, abuse, threat may be heaped on a specific person or on an ethnic group or some other category.  The object is the butt. This dark element in the supposed comic event  is not universally comic. Not everyone will be laughing.  (5) the moral authority, the censor who is present within most participants as a self-imposed limit and a sharing in the cultural definition. In psychology it is called the super-ego, but in society it may be  located in a formal authority like the political administrator and the police and the judiciary.  Sometimes the moral authority is imposed by parts of the audience organized within informal voluntary groups.  This censoring process blocks out sectors of tabooed comic action.   (6) the research/observer. Another hovering eye. Supposedly objective elements like research sociologists who also intervene in the field of action often by their non-comic statements.  In a sense the stand-back-and-look-objectively-person includes us (me and you as we share this narrative about the comic). We cool ones who think we can objectify the others.  We are actually part of the mix. (7) the non-laugher.  as we have been saying this refusal of the joke suggests lines of demarcation within the society or group.  The distinction of those in the mood (and those not) suggests political and socio-cultural differences.  This rejectionist pattern is another way into the analysis of the joke’s meaning.

Even more player types may turn up and the model can be stretched to accommodate them–like the (8) alien/stranger who will have great difficulty getting the joke unless it is purely physical. or  (9) the heckler, who unexpectedly intervenes and twists the interaction in a new direction.  There is nothing sacred about a model. Its purpose is to abstract a unity of order and process found in a class of real events.  The model can adjust to accommodate the real events selected.

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A note on Lenny Bruce.   I saw him in a small  Near North side  club in Chicago. Just walked in, sat at the bar with a view of the dance floor, ordered a beer for–I don’t remember, only it was a reasonable price–say two dollars. Bruce came out and talked for an hour.  He showed a great deal of concern for his audience–he kept adjusting his act, was charming, modest. One joke: Man insures his mother’s life and then puts her on a plane with a time bomb that explodes and kills everyone aboard. (Actual news event of the time.)  “Guy like that can’t be all bad.” says Bruce.  A wry indirect comment on  bleeding heart liberals who transform even the most despicable evil into misguided error.  Another joke: the story  begins with a warning to the women and girls present about masculine sexuality–all the women present now categorized as innocent virgins.  You can’t be shocked at the guys (I am paraphrasing him)  have to realize they can’t help themselves.  Talked about the case of the severely injured man in the ambulance, dying, who makes an erotic grab for the  attending nurse. A back handed slap at the fearful sexual repression of some of the moral hardliners. (This narrative is a gloss on the the Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf folk tale. It  exaggerates a small part of the male-female relationship into a massive  and overpowering threat. The part is made to stand for the whole. The humor is in the unique use of language to paint a surreal image.    Meanwhile the audience entertained, the narratives comic. No wild eyed ranting the night I saw him. Nothing to fear but fear itself. Bruce died after shooting up heroin. An inglorious way to go. You get some idea of Bruce’s skill (in part based on an approximation of free association) from a five minute You-Tube video. He starts blandly but very quickly begins developing a theory of why the police are harassing him.  Turns out (more or less) that the governing authorities want to get a full night’s sleep but are kept awake by the noise of comics and night club  people who want to party into the wee hours of the morning.  The police are the confused intermediaries.  Everyone is simply following his own reasonable path into unreasonable confrontation. Of course the actual process is a selective censorship that is targeting one comic for his ideas on religion and for his occasional common language. He exaggerates by minimizing. Wanting a good night’s sleep is a better motive for suppression of the other (more understandable) than the uptight moralist denouncing an obscenity that in the regular course of events he won’t ever actually hear. While Bruce is using his nasty words, old man moral authority is supposed to be fast asleep.

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Note. Turns out that that the injured man in the ambulance joke is famous in its own right. Some commentators offer differing interpretations. A British comic advanced the theory in 1999 that the the man in the ambulance was Lenny Bruce and that he  made advances on the nurse because he was turned on by her uniform. OK, friend, you’re entitled to your opinion but let me ask you this: What was the nurse doing in the ambulance when she is supposed to be back at the hospital? Furthermore couldn’t the injured man have been so drugged up that he only hallucinated the attack. Also since he was in a weakened condition wouldn’t it be more logical that the nurse turned on by his high status as an internationally renowned comic have made a sexual pass at him. In a sense the nurse stands on her head.  Its not that unusual, sex starved nurses mooning over totally zonked and helpless male patients in ambulances. There has got to be an explanation.

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A story about a small businessman during  a slump, an economic downturn. He needs money for payroll and for stock. Can’t get a loan from his usual sources. Starts traveling to other cities hoping to find a open-minded and courageous investor. Winds up  in Detroit, a city he has never visited before. Despondent. Passes a local movie house, enters for shelter never noticing what film is featured. Turns out to be a horror film.  He is totally frightened and disgusted by what he is witnessing. But riveted. He stays through to the awful end and leaving the theater he notices that he feels better. He realizes that business might be bad but nowhere close to being as miserable as the oppressed  spectator at  a horror movie. The movie showed him a pit deeper and hotter than the one he was actually in.  Jauntily and with a smile he walked off into the late Detroit night.   There has been a change of mood. There had been a prior act. Now we are left with the essential question assigned us by our own analysis: Do we have to call  that horror film (title unknown) a comedy? Tentative answer: it’s borderline.

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Starting with the idea of the comic incident we are pushed toward the much larger topic of the sociology of mood and finally to the necessary analysis of the  institution of entertainment. (I hear the music welling up, first slowly and lightly and then with increasing volume and force. “That’s En-ter-tain-ment” the up energy voice shouts, enunciating each syllable)  And that’s where this comic stuff is ultimately cataloged. (There are two versions of this song–the old Milton Berle theme song (sentimental recounting of backstage theater life) and a more recent revision by The Jam. Both rousing and mood changing.) 

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Famous musician gets religion and studies medicine and starts a clinic for poor villagers in the most inaccessible jungle recesses of Africa. He is saintly. A gross, culturally limited woman visits his clinic from the West and intrudes herself into his life for a week. Misunderstanding what she sees, making impossible demands, distracting the saint from his work and his contemplation of the ineffable   She is a pain in the ass. Saint orders her from the compound and tells guard to kill her if she turns up again. (Adapted  Elaine May & Mike Nichols skit.)

Moral goodness has its limits.  The intrusion of an alien into an ongoing moral and social order is experienced as aggression and leads to conflict.  Another form of invasion.  Ironically it is the do-good imperialist who himself is invading Africa (even with good intentions) who is in turn invaded.  The painfully intrusive visitor challenges the norms of hospitality.  Movie “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” (1942) is an example of the genre. The stranger enters your space and you find that following the rules of hospitality you can’t contain him. You are beyond the normal set by your culture and have to figure out what to do next.  You are forced to invent your next action. Always a comic situation and worth a laugh so long as you are neither the host or the intruder.

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A Sociology of the Comic—Jokes to You Buster and Don’t You Forget It.

A Saturday night gathering of neighborhood families to play pinochle.  After three hours of play the gang spirals down from the competitive high with coffee and cake and casual socializing.  Charlie F, the master machinist, finds a cloth measuring tape lying around and his pixie side suddenly alert he begins to measure his body the way a tailor would to fit a suit. Conversation stops and all watch.

He measures his thigh and announces the number, then his waist, chest, neck. Each time reading the exact number. Finally he circles his head with the tape and holding the mark with his finger reads it off.

“Zero.” he laughs.

A physical-conceptual joke. The flourishing of the tape and then the number. The image of the tailor measuring himself. Itself a parody.  Then the circumference of the head suddenly becomes a measure of the brain, of intelligence. An incongruity—confounding body and mind. Zero. Nothing there, a dope. Self-referral. The actor is commenting on himself. Ironic. He obviously is not dumb since he has the wit to enact this joke. He, in good humor, disparages himself and elevates all the auditors a notch. You are no longer the feared and negated dim-wit, he assures the others, since I have assumed that crown. Spontaneous, out of the blue, whether invented in the enactment or called up from an established repertory. For those few present a moment of grace,  pulling the rabbit from the hat, not there-there. A healing act.

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Start with the joke. Either a narrative or a physical act or a quip that has some probability of comic effect. It is part of the larger category of actions evoking a pleasurable mood—feeling good and happy. A mood whose external sign is the laugh, smile or grin.

The opposite mood is the sad, the down, the discouraged. In theater the drama is characterized as comic or tragic depending on ending. The desire/plan of the actor/protagonist is achieved or thwarted and the audience responds with the conventionally parallel feeling of happy or sad. The sharing of the feeling either way is the additional meta outcome.

But there is a much larger range of moods—pensive, focused, determined, frightened, relaxed, romantic, angry, shy, curious and so on. They are established and defined in language. We all know that moods can change quickly or slowly or be persistent and continuing, or can be intermixed. Moods can be described by analogy, like feeling light as a feather, or feeling blue (depressed), red (angry), green (envious). In the same way we recognize that moods can be responsive to events like parades, music, cheers, sports actions, news reports. Mood is altered by lectures, reading, quiet talks with friends and family, partying, athletics. We have mood altering nostrums—alcoholic beverages, psychotropic drugs.

While mood is physically located within the individual and in detail might be as unique as a fingerprint it also can be shared by group members. In theater, sports field, class room, work station, wherever people congregate as audience, the events and enactments and incidents they witness together have a uniform effect upon them. This unity is the group mood. It can feed back and enhance the individual feeling into an ascending or descending spiral. There can be a multiplier effect. The group shifts mood together in response to a shared stimulus as with a rousing speech, a melodramatic opera, or witnessing the fall of an attacked building. The sharing is transparently obvious to all. The emergent reality of the group, the plural, can be sensed directly and starkly.

Mood isn’t everything. The sociologist hardly attends it because he is so busy tracking interaction, institutions, culture, methods and so on. Yet it is there, a biological capacity that is implicated in social action. A physiological process that can be culturally the same for those present. It has a definable social dimension. The socio-cultural side of the comic has at least three parts: one is this meta element of shared mood, two is the social order through which the comic nexus of act and consequence is expressed, and three is the socio-cultural order and its evaluation that is embedded within the joke itself.

In classical sociology, mood is called affect. Parsons contrasted it with affective neutrality. Feelings are permitted in some cases and rejected in others. It implies that mood can be socially turned on and off like an electric light. I would suggest that mood is a constant process within each individual (like our capacity for invention) Some may have a greater depth and range of feeling but we are all constantly in feeling mode. The socio-cultural pattern calls it out or suppresses it, turns it in one direction or another, molds it. And in turn the pattern is shaped by the surge of feeling. But there is always the possibility of the unique way or the sub-socio-cultural way. You, and we, do not have to laugh on cue.

We are into a complex notion here. Suppose you have a feeling that is so unique that none of the concepts in your language describes it. How do you tell another about it? Or even how do you conceptualize it for yourself? You take the poetic step of precisely using our  available words to paint/describe a new image of the new mood. There are other ways I am sure. We spot the new in the other or in the situation or the process. We make-up a neologism The human experience of mood, feeling, affect is universal. Through it there is a constant building of culture and, in the opposite direction, a destroying or forgetting and  a cultural loss. Entertainment ain’t all canned tuna fish.

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The comic, the joke, has a professional, specialist order in our society. We have stand-up comedians who earn their livings by telling jokes. We have commercial media that are mood enhancing, titillating, manipulating. It reaches us through books, theater, television, Internet. People hire out as comic writers, cartoonists, and so on. At the same time there are the comic incidents in ordinary life where the sense of humor is engaged and those present share in the comic perception and the shared sway of mood.

A unified sociology of the comic has to gather together, and make sense of, all of these comic mood generating patterns and then has to follow this material as it  pushes outward through the entire social order.  An encyclopedic task.

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Story
Baseball game, Two men on base and batter hits ball on ground to furthermost precincts of the field. Lead runner rounds third base and heads home but ball is thrown to catcher and to elude a tag the runner retreats toward third base. Second runner meanwhile reaches third base and stands on bag. The hitter, who is very fleet afoot, at that moment slides into third base. Three men on third and the  third baseman gets the ball and tags two of them out. The third runner, dazed and confused, steps off bag and is also tagged. Triple play. (An actual variation of this play happened to the old Brooklyn Dodgers with Babe Herman as the hitter and last man into third base.)

But this is an impossible situation. Only one runner can park safely on a base. It is an incongruous event, surreal and therefore comic. It has not been planned or scripted. By each runner only paying attention egocentrically and either not attending the coaches or the coaches momentarily abstracted, the players fall into this embarrassing tableau.

For the cognoscente spectator to witness such an unusual and unexpected event is a moment of treasure. But sometimes the fall into the unexpected is on the tragic side. The injury, the bean ball. The separation of comic-tragic is a fine line.

I traveled the Staten Island Ferry for seven long years, out and back every work day. The ferry leaves its Manhattan slip and consistently turns right to round Governor’s Island  day and night, day by day. Twice during my transit it deviated. Once another boat suddenly blocked the way to the right and the Captain steered left and went through the Buttermilk Channel between Brooklyn and Governor’s Island. I caught that and had a frisson (shiver) something like the fans at Ebbets Field nust have felt seeing three men on third base. Not much laughing but an up,  a comic absurdity, a nearly impossible breaking of the normal way. In a second incident the Captain had to change the orientation of the ship, the front should have been back and vice versa, so he left the Manhattan slip and turned hard right and started up the Hudson River like you would back up your car to get out of a tight spot. Then he switched steering to the new front or bow and on we went to Staten island taking a very unusual route. I only caught the final second of this maneuver being so immersed in the stories of the New York Times that I almost missed this gem of the unexpected. These moments are out there reaching us, it would seem, randomly and depending upon our knowledge and our active senses and our ability to appraise and appreciate. If you live in a dry country you hate to miss a rainy day.

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There is a paradigm, a model, that at a very general level scoops up a very large class of comic incidents and jokes. The situation starts with an on-going classical interaction sequence now expanded to five elements (at last count.) These can be thought of as the processes encasing and carrying the joke or comic incident. There is…

(1) the joke teller/actor/the governing sensibility. The action starts with him (either individual or group).  He could be the one telling the story or starting the action. He should be obvious, but even if we don’t see him clearly we can’t go far wrong by staying close to the interaction sequence.

(2) the other/alter, the second banana, the interlocutor. Without this responder, real or imaginary, there is no interaction.As the sequence rolls out he might emerge as top banana. Expect a lot of shifting around .

(3) the third party/audience. The on-looker. This element can be passive or take some part in the action, usually in the form of commentary and critique.  In addition to the extent that ego and alter are aware of third-person and have some orientation toward him (or the third  party group), he can affect the rolling out of the action. The mood that comes out resonates and gains volume here. Ego and alter are the sticks, the third-party is the drum.

(4) the subject or object of the action sometimes called the butt is a fourth element. The aggressive side of the joke, humor as a weapon, becomes visible here. The put-down, the humiliation, the bullying, demeaning of the other is not necessary in the comic situation but we have to recognized that the possibility and the fact that overt or veiled aggression is present. As in the Charlie story, ego can be the butt, the aggression is absorbed by the self.

(5) the moral authority or the censor is another possible presence. This is the imperious overview that tests the act and either prevents or distorts the rolling out.  Censor can make the joke disappear.  It prevents (or struggles against) the expression, at least in polite society, of the lewd for example.  It may also demand that certain acts occur as in prejudice and hatred.  It finds its locus of expression as an intervening. Some or all of the actors present might be the carriers, pro or contra, of a moral attitude. Freud’s super ego can be the censor of the self as well.

These parts can compress down to one, the writer or idle muser imaging or visualizing the joke. The social order becoming a fantasy or a plan. Those present can shift the elements they represent over  time and as the interaction rolls out.  As noted, the comic ego and the alter interlocutor can exchange places.  The moral element can be diffused through all. So the actual incident may look different while concealing in plain sight the same pattern.  The model  provides a standardized series of issues that should be attended  in the description of any comic incident.

This model is not carved in stone.  Revise it or replace it as reality and mood require.

 This is a vast topic. Many miles yet to travel

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A Foundering Research Project. Revisiting Three Posts

This sequence of three posts tells how the failure to communicate among researchers and their failure to see clearly and quickly their local reality had disastrous consequences for their research project.

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The original posts can be found at

(1) Sociological Research Project—Organization of Medical Services in a Neighborhood. Part I (August 28, 2007)

(2) Research Project in Social Organization Part II (August 31, 2007)

(3)  Research Confusion. Interorganized Medical Units Part III (September 3, 2007)

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A government agency gives a research grant to Professor X who does not have time to do the work himself so he hires  as principal investigator a drop-out graduate student  Y with a growing family who needs a steady job. The grant money gives X the chance to start a research organization attached to the university. If successful X’s power and influence will increase. X is very generous and gives investigator Y an appointment to the graduate school as well as a regular salary and health insurance. Y is back on track to complete his doctoral work. Things are looking good all around.

But the relationship between X and Y is flawed. Neither is forthcoming. Hopes are hidden. X is not a skillful researcher. He is most comfortable with a thinly veiled centrist political vision. While he has received some attention in the field, mainly for his quick wit, he has reached a limit. Developing an active research organization will earn him a credibility he otherwise lacks. His repudiation for intelligence and energy will receive a necessary fillip. The department within which they work has a history of emphasis on research .

Y’s research strength is hands-on. In graduate school he studied with a man steeped in the Chicago School method and tradition. A close-in talking to and watching the actors in a setting. Allowing the story, the pattern, the insight to come to him from the inside. It combines conceptual sophistication with the journalist’s way with a story.

From the beginning there is a confusion over what the research question actually is. The starting premise is that over time neighboring agencies and organizations in the same field will develop relationships and these will take a systemic and cooperative form. The research job: to describe these interconnects and indicate how they work.

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In the original posts I used stories and songs and associated ideas to describe the experience. The theme is of partnerships that do not work.

It was a. research project whose first mystery was in the false trail laid by its sponsor. Y thought he had to find a natural association among the several medical agencies of a neighborhood. A growth toward an integrated system was expected to occur either without or in spite of any intervention from the outside.

But this is a classic case of misplaced concreteness. In a conceptual model a situation is described that may not exist in a particular concrete case. It is possible that a cooperative relationship is not there. But even if it is there, it may not be sourced in the voluntary inventions of locals but be imposed by external overarching controls. In the organization of medical agencies the imposed order comes from funding groups formed by religious communities and governmental agencies. The patterns of relationship found come from outside.

Local voluntarism in the form of  networks of friends and colleagues in different agencies keeping in contact is informal.and episodic.  The most significant of these nets might be at the upper reaches of administration and finance and law.  They are not readily accessible to the outsider and are usually not consciously exploited within the formal system. This is a concrete question. Y did not have the direct method to test for its presence or its extent. Anecdotal evidence from informants suggested that it was not significant.

In the research Y found a medical organizer (let us call him Z), a young public health doctor, a Harvard graduate, who with an appointment at the local hospital, over a few years, gathered government grants and organized satellite medical agencies through the neighborhood and in the doing ballooned the medical order significantly. Through administration and finance these were anchored upon Z in his own person. He also organized seminars for local general practitioners in the neighborhood who had no hospital affiliations (were otherwise unconnected) and began to give them access and support. Z interventions were from the outside. He was a classic cadre mediator of funds and plans from government to local people. He had a more radical purpose than most but worked for the same old boss. The failure of his initiative should have been the central issue of the X-Y research project. In a perfect world X,Y, and Z should have combined to present the entire story.

The falling out of X and Y was unfortunate. They were holding the two ends of the same stick. The dilemma of cadre versus ordinaries. The question of the relative weight of a local democratic self-governing order versus an imposed external order however benevolent.

Y should have been more assertive. Demanded that X give the project more personal attention. They should have continued adjusting toward a more realistic model, blocking out issues and the methods needed for their their resolution. The research program and the work had to be flexible and yield and adjust to the emerging facts and ideas. Y had to confront X early on, make him part of the process. In the event X and Z were not aware that the other existed.

Looking back the study required a quick blocking out of the three major issues: (1) the formal system of order imposed by the power and financial centers, (2) the role of Z, the public health entrepreneur, and the resistance (as well as the support) he encountered among the people of the neighborhood and the various overriding authorities, (3) the issue of the impact of the informal orders at the several social levels—executive, line, clients.

X, Y, and Z with a little openness and cooperation could have produced a hell-of-a-study, including (1) Z’s initiative and his eventual defeat. (2)  The role of the funding agency and the doubling back on Z with the seemingly blind research project assigned to X. (3) The political agitation of students and local groups (one agency was occupied by a local group protesting some policy or other while the research was on-going) set the background for the research attention that had been mobilized. And, (4) of course, Z’s exile to Hong Kong, X’s transfer to the basement of the White House, and Y losing his job and his last chance at a conventional career. In sum:  the dispersion of the gang that never really existed.

C’est la vie.

Notes and out-takes possibly leading toward a sociology of research.

Social research is a conscious encounter where one attempts to mark the event and evaluate its content and outcome. It starts with a question, specific or implied. An unknown is converted to a knowing whose specific content is only revealed as it occurs.

The going out. The Buddha as child and youth had been protected by his parents from seeing the down side. They used political power and wealth to keep him in the light fantastic just this side of paradise. But behind the facade and the illusion were poverty, illness, corruption, indifference, pain, death. Sensing this other side of reality the Buddha decided to investigate and abandoning the pleasure dome he began a second life of research. Peripatetic, travel and wandering, engaging the other in all of its numbers and variety. But also a retreat into contemplation. Eventually he found and expounded the shared unity of the whole in the passing though that is our fate.

The act of research. A transient, open eye, rejection of deception, gloss, misinformation. Sensing what is and is not.. Using a reasoned method to know it. Intrinsically it is not a trivial pursuit. The first step is finding a mystery, an anomaly, an I-don’t-know-what. A lot of adventurers, those of the closed mind, lose their way at this door. Some seem to ask but then only accept a foreordained answer. One can predict, but to insist or ordain is not research. Research is like gambling. If the outcome is known the game has been fixed.

From American Indian lore another way to encounter reality. The way of the warrior, the body and the tools, the myths providing a history and a connection to the environment–the hunt, the raid, searching for a vision alone in the forest through starvation, drugs, dreams

This generalized research act centers on a carrying group with a culture, a history, and a social organization. These centering groups find mutually contradictory and alien answers, Disagreement is within the socio-cultural difference.   Some mutual tolerance has developed through a dimly seem unity but among them there is also a mutual incomprehensibility. The method and way of the other makes no sense, is madness, error, even willful evil. A long history of persecutions and holy wars.

Pluralism has always been among us. It is a side-bar, an added proviso. My way is the right way but it is not your way and I accept that and permit that and continue on my way and wish you luck, comrade. We can be different and still in solidarity. Yet deep rejection persists..

So this act of research. This embrace of the encounter is an act of faith in itself. One always starts with the methods and concepts of his reference group but in the experience of the contact with the other one may be jarred lose, find the anomaly, the unexpected, the mystery inside of his own received way. And find his own line, word, identity. The wisdom gained will be here.

The study of this struggle with reality, this generalized notion of research as similar acts in different traditions belongs to the sociology of knowledge.

Observations On and Around Jobs

Distinguishing the job from the person filling it is a conceptual leap we all make. What is to be done, what the job requires, is known by those most intimately involved. On the position of salesperson, for example, though dealing with vastly varied products and services the job at bottom is to assist and encourage a potential buyer to make a decision. Each particular job will have its central pattern around which are additions, subtractions, and variations.

The actual person filling a job, even while adhering to the required form, will infuse the  work with own style and personality. What is actually done is both uniform and unique. This outcome varies extremely over types of work and situations. The central elements may be fuzzy, inexact, involve different interpretations. The pattern may not be clear. Variations among the concrete instances may be wildly wide. The light bulb might be replaced by a candle or a spot-light.

Still, as one who served in the old U.S. draft army can witness, the table of organization, the rules of engagement, the uniform dress and training, and actual practice in the field suggest that for certain jobs there is an official indifference to who takes it. Private soldiers are light bulbs, all standard issue and immediately replaceable.

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The degree of fidelity to the model varies considerably. In religious ritual or magical incantation exact matching of form is required. In engineering and scientific work precision is essential. Otherwise there is room for variation and initiative.

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Focus can fall on the individual or the group. Both can direct their actions toward a goal which is one element in the definition of job. An organization can be the unit of analysis. The group can even be ad hoc, assembled for the job and maintained only for the duration of the work. Movies for commercial distribution tend to be made this way. The actors and associated workers list in their biographies transient companies to which they belonged. Careers involving such episodes of work are suspenseful. There is no guarantee that one will be called again. But workers with reputations of success and skill and a popular following can have rich careers spanning years and decades. Unskilled illegals who shape-up outside of hardware stores in hopes of being picked for a private job for the day are also into episodic work as were (in the old days) shaping-up longshoremen, musicians, seamen, construction workers.

Most jobs are integrated into large conglomerations of interlocked and coordinated positions. All the actions of participants contribute toward the group’s goal. The product or service made is exchanged for money. The wage for each worker connects him to the larger exchange system of trading goods and services for money. Work and get money then turn and buy something produced by another. The money theoretically always in play, always on its merry way. Overall a giant operational and not entirely rationalized division of labor.

Those who work  independently must also make arrangements with others for the exchange of product and service for money. Without money the individual has no access to needed and desired values.

There is co-ordination  through the linked market transactions. A field of producers, each centering between its suppliers and customers who in turn are similarly centered. Hale, hale the gang’s all here. The circulation of goods, actions, services and money endless and no one can see beyond his own patch.

(There are other ways to get money. There’s the rub.)

But we have to recognize that job and work can take place under parallel ordering systems–like purely voluntary work, like the giving work of religious and ethical communities, like work in family, kin and friendship circles, like egoistic and private jobs and work with limited outreach. One could analyze each possibility in an attempt to get a more inclusive sociology of the job.

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A major distinction among jobs, in fact, is found in the measure of job security, Tenure for college professors and for judges just about guarantee employment for life. It assures the worker that the directions his work may lead him, even if unpopular, will not endanger his livelihood. It permits creative freedom. It presumes a high degree of autonomy and energy and originality that is not always met.

There are occasions when the job and the person seem the same, a unique unity of who one is and what one does. Robert Moses in New York City constructed a modern road system for his city by gathering funds and political permissions when conventional politicians had been unable to act because any and every decision was controversial. He lost his touch eventually just before he paved over the entire city and was never replaced. J. Edgar Hoover became the indispensable head of the federal criminal investigative agency (FBI) and transformed it into a professional elite force where before his appointment it had been limited and weakened by political influences. After his death he became a target for derision and criticism Those who have followed him have shrunk the model to the size of an ordinary lawyer. Or maybe a lock of sorts is still there, now less publicized

This tight connection of person with job is not the same as tenure nor as the charismatic inventor of the new religion who draws loyal followers and organizes them as an expression of his own personality and energetic. Yet they are not entirely the products of the organized life in which they find themselves.  In a sense the Hooveresque person manipulates the existing organizational and cultural options to lock himself into his job. Dictators, trade union officials, elected politicians, managers at leadership levels and even long-time workers at a variety of line and staff jobs seem to have a key to this lock. Persistence in place suggests some kind of unique success.  The key is the immunity to, or ability to ward off, challenge. Doing the job gracefully with care and craft might be all it takes. Old-timers are not all Machiavellian.

Certain blocks to the presumption of a lock-like ownership over a position can break-up this informal power of possession. Things like term limits, recall elections, public criticism. In theory and myth solid and open competition keep everyone unlocked, bags packed, ready to move on.

In the other direction is the vulnerability of the light bulbs. People are subject to dismissal without personal cause. A worker does his job well, is disciplined, loyal, cooperative, does his fair share, walks the extra mile and still loses his job because of a situation beyond his control. Down-turn in the economy, employer’s rational search for lower costs, a line of products discontinued. And out the fellow goes, sometimes after years of service.

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The stability of the person-position connect has this continuing iffy quality. There are situations and moments when the two approximate a unity. But the tendency toward split is more usual. Off the cuff examples: the temp office workers who sweep in and out of jobs regularly—easily called up and easily laid-off. They are used as a cheap alternative to permanent staff. At the university and college there is a similar stratified system—the tenured staff versus the auxiliaries, the assistants, the lecturers, the instructors with far less pay and just about no rights.

Part-time, junior, temporary, substitute, reserve, auxiliary, trainee,  replacement–a tenuous lock on one’s job is not rare. The teetering between job and unemployment, in fact, has a normal quality. For some which side of this line one is on, on any given day, is an open and continuing mystery. This class of immediately vulnerable jobs and workers expands upward during hard times.  It is a way to define hard times.  But the threat exists for a significant portion of us all the time.

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I am back to the full-employment concept which I have been thinking might be the more appropriate social objective for our society in or out of economic crisis. But this is a political question. It does highlight a presumption about work, jobs, unemployment accepted in our society—that work is a consequence of the state of a particular type of economic order where unemployment and underemployment are not rejected outcomes. One could argue that full-employment should be one of the purposes of this order instead.

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A little more to say about jobs, we’ll revisit. 

P.S. A few out-takes…..The social order for some jobs is similar to the social order of games.  There is the formal expression of rule and pattern and its associated class of concrete expressions.  The examples below from music and dance are simplified but point in the right direction.

The job of the symphony orchestra is to replicate in a display of sounds the invented musical piece written prior to the exhibition. The symphony is the given ideal, the model, that is repeated by organized gatherings of skilled musicians. Over time we have the model and the class of associated concrete events. In this job the central order of sound (model) is concretely reproduced.

So with the dance. Swan Lake, a sequence of established coordinated movements by a troupe of dancers replicates the ideal held in a special notation and in memory that had previously been constructed by the original composers. There is the ideal Swan Lake model that is associated with the class of concrete performances.

But then we have either the spontaneous or the slowly evolving invention of the dance where the form of the dance and the dancer seem inseparable—where we can’t tell the dancer from the dance–the creation of the thing itself. If noted and recorded or remembered it may be rendered into a model and followed with a sequence of concrete enactments based on it. The same in music where improvisation around a theme, as with jazz, can be accumulating and almost endless.

It is like a photograph of a group of people. The initial tableau frozen in the image that can later be replicated by actors with imitation clothes and physical positioning.

A central distinction of sociology—(1) the spontaneous action, the response in and to a situation, the newly created act (2) as against the recalled or imitated disciplined re-enactment.

The Obviously Missed. The Blind Spot Revisited.

In August of 2007 I posted “Blind Spot Spotted–Finally Visible in the Social Order of Sports.”  I started with an exact moment of illumination. It was intensely personal  yet it concerned a test of a sociological concept against the larger reality. I suddenly realized that the variety of the organizational forms of professional sports were traceable to human choice, that there was a constant element of discovery (finding) and invention (making-up) in the social field.  Whether episodic or continuous, whether encouraged or repressed by the people and their cadres, this process was a significant part of the social order.  I knew this in my ordinary, everyday life but had managed to not allow it into my formal sociological understanding.  I had treated a normal social process as though it did not exist.

I start with blind spot but I mean to include the entire human sensory capability.  A fact that is normally available to the senses is missed.  This missing can take many forms. It is not known–subjectively not there. It is known but its significance is not caught. It is, rightly or wrongly, treated as trivial.  It is rejected as grotesque, immoral, dangerous or even on a whim. The ah ha moment is in the sudden appreciation. There it is, where it had always been, in plain sight.

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One of the trends in early sociology was to  continue the much  longer history of speculation about origins and development of the world and our social orders. It is now based on a  careful and precise and methodical archaeology and history but many of the old studies were decidedly not scientific and were based on facts deemed too inaccessible to be made scientific.

A movement of rejection lead, for me, by British anthropologists active in the 1920 to 1940 decades, advanced an alternative way called functionalism. The social scene was limited to the exact moment of observation (with a little wiggle room of just before and just after) It was like pulling a frame out of a film clip.  The influences of the elements on each other were then traced. For example, the progressive success of organized crime, where the acts of petty thieves (fraud, extortion, bribery, black markets) intervene in commercial markets and in trade union activities and more and more  suborn  the police and government officials.  It can progress, as apparently it has in Mexico now, until  the criminal gangs become  parallel ordering institutions. The description of these functions and the  system which they form becomes the primary tasks for sociologists.

The social system, the social order and its functions, was thought of as like the human body and sociology as the analogue of anatomy and physiology. The garden plot in plant and animal ecology was another model. Isolated as a system, the consequences of each element for all the others (the functions) could be tracked and the system described as a unit.

These systems have a naturalistic quality–no human design nor intervention is permitted. And this expectation was carried over to the human order.  So even though the social order of organized crime is a human construct very like that of professional sports and all our other social orders– something that specific  human decision and choice has imposed–it was erroneously considered natural. The questions of finding and making-up were ignored within the observed social field.  They were reserved for the supposed scientific observer and his/her sponsor.

In accepting, or perhaps misinterpreting this received wisdom, I had been lead up the garden path. I had a received blind spot  that only dissipated on the sudden shock of the sports page newspaper stories where I finally confronted the contradiction between the totally established social system and man’s capacity for discovery and invention.

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For me this sudden shock of recognition was eventually decisive.  I gave up the idea of sociology as a hard science. I gave up the idea of the naturalistic social system. I finally understood the importance of a general creative capacity among members of our species and I realized that part of the investigation of any social order or situation had to search out this element, the form it was taking and the struggles pro and contra for each initiative.

Finding and making-up lead to social forms, that as long as they are permitted to exist can be analyzed formally as models.  There is no test for such a model or form.  It exists conceptually like a tool on a shelf.  The decisive question is in the comparison of the model with  actual concrete cases.So the analysis of  a social order, setting, or event will require notice of the changing decisions and influences of participants as well as the presence of internally selected formal social forms.

For didactic purposes my experience suggests that the sociological description of a professional sport–rules of play, history of innovations, executive actions, the formal order of the teams and the management of play, the spectators, the journalists, the law, and so on to as much detail as energy and time will allow–is a fine entree to the less fixed institutions and social orders and situations that make up our social life.

One more point.  The uncovering of socially shared sensory deprivations (of significant facts not noted or appreciated among people in their social lives )   is one of the tasks of the sociological project.  .

Unemployment

Define employment as goal oriented actions for pay. It involves accepting the directives and discipline of the other. Work has a psychic return: the pleasure or discomfort in the doing, the breaking of  isolation in the co-operating work group, the emotional high in confronting a challenge, and the like. But even more basically the wage  is a constant element in the free labor contract. With it the worker makes an essential connect with the society-wide exchange system. This is a fundamental step for all of us—to find a way to make a living, a way to get money.

We have to be very clear about something we all know–our animal nature which permeates and impels all of our activities. We have to satisfy our subsistence needs first and continuously.

Through technology and science and the evolved and constructed social order that provides the means for using them, we exploit the natural world using only a small percentage of our work force for fundamental production while the majority of us work at more abstract and derived culturally defined tasks.

The shift in the way we organize our societies and work groups from the smaller and simpler forms of all of our ancestors is startling. They were, we suspect, in hunting and gathering bands like the one Richard A. Gould and his wife lived with in the Australian outback some forty years ago (“Yiwara. Foragers of the Australian Desert” Scribner’s, 1969). The distinction between employer and employee does not exist. Everyone who can, works. The connect between work and sustaining of life is direct. The idea of the involuntary unemployment of a healthy adult  is still to be discovered.

Involuntary unemployment is only a reasonable concept in an economy based on a complex division of labor. We risk it, individually and as a society, when we enter the  world  of the ethos of the free market and the free worker.

If one working for another for a wage loses his job he stops earning money and can no longer demand the basics he needs. If he is in an urban place alternative subsistence work is not available. He can not revert to a garden plot or to hunting and fishing. Loss of the urban job implies a loss of absolutely necessary and essential resources.

There are other alternatives in practice. Hustle—part-time jobs, assistance from kin and friends, debt through borrowing, selling off possessions, return to a rural setting, illegal trades and actions, and historically the development of a welfare apparatus of unemployment payments and alms.There are other forms of security based on extra-employment ways of getting money—like savings and investments, entitlements from government, insurance, trade union support, sinecures. Any of these values is a cushion against the final reality of the unemployment experience. A pocket full of independent income improves one’s chances of riding out the down side of the economic cycle.

Moments of large scale unemployment associated with distress in the financial markets define special crises called recessions and depressions. But there is a continuing unemployment through the entire economic cycle. In part it is normal turn-over in a free market. Workers are fired for cause. Companies and even industries expire from lack of consumer support or from the inept or criminal acts of managers and workers, factories desert their local workers  and the communities who had grown to depend upon them and move to cheap wage foreign lands

The unemployment crisis and the attention generated is a consequence of a larger  scale. Our society appears to tolerate around five percent (one in twenty) turn-over unemployment overall. Geographic sections, communities and individuals face these mini-crises with only local attention. Large parts of our industrial and even our service sectors have migrated overseas—shoes, clothes, ships, steel, computers, customer service–and we seem to hardly notice. The noise of the jobs leaving is not so much a whoosh as a small hardly noticed but constantly sounding whistle. Left behind, the rust belt, and empty factory buildings in the local landscape.

Full-employment where the workers come into their own–for them it feels like good times with higher wages and benefits–is another type of crisis for business executives and the cadres in charge of patching the system. The rising coasts of labor cut into the profit margins. So paradoxically the managers do not want everyone  employed. The concept of full-employment is almost taboo unless accompanied with imprecations and warnings. Still most recognize that involuntary unemployment is also a communal loss of the productivity of capable citizens. All the useful goods and services (the real wealth) they could have produced are lost forever.

There is a tension between the economic definition of labor as a factor of production (like raw materials and machinery) and the moral equivalence of worker, executive and academic theorist.  The plight of the displaced is recognized.  See full employment as a shared  social purpose and the economic equation changes.

Near total mobilization for war around 1940 coming after the vast and persistent unemployment of the prior decade was a startling though slowly revving up change.  The traditional work force first back to work, then parts of the society that had been excluded because considered unemployable by custom and prejudice—women, minorities, the unskilled, the disabled and such were searched out and recruited. The fact that more than ten million men had been drafted into the military set the mark. It was backed by a managed economy with rationing, fixed wages, pressure for people to save with government bonds. The patriotic motive supporting the discipline required was prominent and accepted by the vast majority.

At the center is the large scale productive enterprises of our era which can not be replicated by independent, self-employed workers no matter how skilled and energetic. The problem of the involuntarily unemployed worker who wants to turn to independent work for self turns on this initial moment in the social order—the development of the coordinated productive enterprise itself. The job only makes sense in the context of the organization.

For example take space cadets—workers who train for and travel to tasks and projects in outer space. These are very prepared workers with recognized skills and talents yet if they are laid-off  they lose the specific quality of the job as well as the wage.  Without the space agency and its equipment and resources the job does not exist. Cadets can only convert their skills  by gliding over to associated work and into a newly invented working self. The same kind of  difficulty in shifting  job skills can occur for all workers unless they find a parallel work setting.  The unemployed journalist needs another newspaper if he is to reproduce fully his original situation or else he has to change and adapt. Searching out the new job can be an act of discovery and invention.

I am trying to establish here why the involuntarily unemployed workers do not become independent, free lance, autonomous and aggressively for self.  The key is the difficulty in improvising the tool—the necessary machinery and social organization. And beyond that to meaningfully connect with the society’s on-going division of labor. This includes the external relations with suppliers and customers, credit from banks and so on. For the line worker and his mates it seems a case of you can’t get there from here.

This situation is even more complex when we consider the stratified and sectored and specialized order of the work force as a whole. This is C. Wright Mills territory. Let’s sum it up this way: The job niches below the mass of skilled and semi-skilled blue and white collar jobs (we think of us as a vital part of the middle class) are already filled by arising sectors of newly mobile workers (made up of newly entrant youths, illegals, and what have been called the lumpenproletariat—family lines of the economically and culturally undeveloped). The cascading down  unemployed middle class meets the bubbling up declasse. To make things worse this bottom grouping also is being squeezed into idleness. People are laid-off and their alternate options are limited and contracting. There is no place to go. The up escalator is going down.

The contracting economic pace of production and consumption is seem as the context and the cause.  Turmoil is muted, confined to stock market floor, the reports to investors of declining deposits, the discharge slips issued to workers, the statements of politicians and bankers.  A lot of facing the troubles privately. The unemployed pondering the mysterious option of the second job.

Revisit of Blogs Past. Looking for a Pebble on the Beach

We offer a new commentary on the blog titled “A Pebble on the Beach. Answering the Critique”  posted August 21, 2007.

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The critique of hard science sociology was like a heavy wave hitting a beach. Everything gone except perhaps a pebble. I experienced it as a loss of faith, even though faith seems a contradiction of the scientific attitude. An incorrect presumption is a familiar scientific event. That the requirements of hard science can not be met should just be another fact. There it is. Soldier on.

But the impulse toward sociology includes a desire to make things better in the by and by. Choosing the positivist way is a turning from other paths. A directional decision now revealed to be a serious wrong turn

Two of the responses to a failed ideology: (1) In “When Prophesy Fails” (1956. Leon Festinger and others) the sect members expecting the end of the world shrugged when it didn’t and kept on believing. (2) But in “The God That Failed” (1949, Richard Crossman, Editor) intellectuals committed to the communist revolution finally saw its flaws in action and turned away. The choice: to stay or to go?

But go where? After the fall a large party of sociologists consciously opted for pure faith. The were identified as the politically correct. Since pure social objectivity was impossible why not organize the subject into sectors of preferred ideologies. The teaching now recognized as an act of indoctrination. This had been the submerged way before. What had been denied now became grossly obvious.

But this was not a change. The issue supposedly solved by the method of hard science—the determination of the universal social fact or at the least the conditional social fact—remained. Ideology, consensus, faith, culture, law, social organization are all part of the necessary understanding. And these all carry inextricable values

My motive is salvage. Look for me wandering the beach, searching for the saving pebble. That value and social fact are paired is a difficult limit to accept. The hope of resolution of social conflict by an accepted scientific fact is admittedly lost. I may be on a Don Quixote mission.

But it may be possible to follow the hard science line as best we can, always alert to the necessary bias and blindness that we can not help but introduce. An impossible task but worth the effort. Like the poet strives to say exactly what he/she means, we should strive to report exactly what we sense. That is to describe the game (the governing order), the actions and interactions including the patterns that have an unofficial quality–the short cuts, the edges, the sly and the sneaky, the fix in the situation. But in your scan avoid tampering—keep your own fix out.

Not easy. More. It is impossible. That is the wave. Sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious. Situations where your income and style of life are threatened, where the futures of your children may be in the balance, where the other in the scene poses an active physical and moral threat even at the biological level– these sentence you to a necessary bias.

Hard science confers an honorific. The lab coat, the clip board, glasses, a serious pensive look, absentmindedness—reassure that the result will be valid. The scientific workers–the best and brightest. The science cachet gone the work becomes another form of journalism and history—the method catch-can, partial, non-cumulative, popular. The rain coat supersedes the lab coat but still this is an honorable way in good company. The sociologist in addition has the extra fillip of his clear focus on the plural and brings over a scholarly tradition and a unique conceptual kit. The theories and data lose their connect with the scientific absolute but are still in the relative and continuing cultural life where, in actual practice, they have always been.

A lot of useful, even if imperfect work to do. A contribution still to be made.

One. Deep and continuing studies of special topics. I would include commercial worlds like diamonds, coal, manufacture of shoes, clothing. Illegal trade and actions as with psychotropic drugs, immigration. Collection of studies and books, news articles, visits to sites, interviews with participants and so on—an encyclopedic coverage with emphasis on social organization and order, and change trends. The emphasis has to shift from a pure law and order perspective to what is and has been happening. Critically useful work. Gives a base for policy decisions for anyone interested.

Two. Treating conceptual and theoretical models as events in themselves—not subject to test but treated as abstract objects that exist. These models must always be associated with classes of real events and situations that resemble the model. This is not unfamiliar. The nuclear family, the city, the second-hand market, the game, the crew in transportation, Utopian communities. And so on. Some models may have null cases—no consequences in practice yet–or might have a history of practice now finished, like ancient empires. The model is another kind of analogy. The constructing of models and the search for incidents does not require the scientific method. Yet it is can be very useful work in the study of the plural experience.

Three. Biographies of life and works of significant past workers in the field. An activity analogous to that of the literary critic. Very important work making the past more accessible to the present.

Four. Methods. Everyone working in the field has to constantly test flaws in logic, in the evaluation of ways of observing, acts of analysis, ways of describing. If we are to catch the unconscious bias this is where it might turn up. Some sociologists specialize in this kind of work. It is an important topic among philosophers.

Five. The study of negative spaces. The incomplete, the excluded, the unattended, the hidden. This again is where the biases reside. They are not always obvious. Important work but sometimes involves overkill and error in itself.

Are we downhearted?

Jury Duty Three. A Service for Amateurs.

The jury is a part of a larger social order whose purpose is to determine the fate of persons accused of acts contrary to established law. Anyone caught up and charged passes through a linked sequence of encounters with police, courts, and prisons. The people operating in  these spaces split between professional and amateur types.  In court trials professionals  predominate except for three categories: the jurors and the witnesses, the accused and victims.  The jurors, especially those called up for the first time, are overwhelmingly amateurs.

By professionals I mean specialist workers who are careerists. Their knowledge of what is going on and how it works is deep.  Their jobs are the primary source of their incomes. Their reputations for competence are constantly on the line. They have a built-in self-interest in the institution of courts and law that is an independent element in their official acts.

The amateurs are temporary. The case before them is a large part of their judicial experience. (The popular culture gives everyone expectations of the process). Their primary employment lies elsewhere. For them the case in which they participate is a relief as well as a distraction from  ordinary life. Their knowledge of the process and its possibilities is relatively limited

The witnesses match the jurors as amateurs except for the experts who tend to be repeat performers   All witnesses have either direct access to the original reality of the crime or have technical knowledge that claims priority in interpretation of these facts. They together provide the information out of which the lawyers fashion images of the truth.

The two sides of the criminal act, unless professional criminals, are also amateurs in the court setting, If forced to a trial they represent the key task of the participants–the question of what actually happened at the scene of the crime.

In a democracy the state works for the people through its agents.  The professionals are agents. The jurors are the people–a sampling drawn directly from the whole. Unlike the agents who prepare through study and experience and then apply for jobs and receive regular salaries or wages and pursue careers in the courts and its agencies, the jurors are drafted for their period of service and then return to the people. Their wage received is nominal at best. There is no career aspiration here nor opportunity to become cadre–to find a full-time career through their service.  You can’t get there from here. They have no choice but to express the public opinion and the common sense  since these cultural moments reside in them. By being themselves they are everybody. This is not a perfect voice. It always takes the form of a probability distribution.

There is a paradox: the sovereign people assembled as jurors in court are subject  to the supervision and instruction of the people’s agents. There is a circularity here–the people appoint the state and its agents who then draft people into juries and then supervise them. And around she goes.

The situation is simple. An event, the crime, occurs involving specific people in a sequence of acts. This is the immediate reality. At some later time we suppose that what happened can be reconstructed to an approximation–not perfectly but with enough precision so that who did what to whom can be retrieved. We believe we can know the truth of the incident. When we say that someone is guilty we presume that we have the correct recollection of what happened. It is also presumed that we can compare two models of the same event and identify the one closer to the reality past.

More generally this need to describe what happened at some past time is an accepted research task. Vide history and archaeology. In law, the judge seems to be the perfect witness. Any crime committed in his court in his presence can be adjudicated summarily and punishment imposed at once. The judge seeing the illegal act requires no further trial nor the assistance of the jury or anyone else.

Otherwise how to discover the most correct narrative here-and-now of what happened there-and-then requires a method—an error free way to find out—the rules of evidence. The trial judge pays close attention to the evidence presented, as do the contesting attorneys, to avoid obvious error. But identifying hearsay, not permitting a leading question, requiring the assurance of a creditable witness concerning the source of material evidence and similar tests are not enough. In addition the prosecutor’s evidence of guilt is subject to the critique of the defense and as a trial progresses the two sides can present inconsistent images of the meaning of the facts. That the narrative now reflects the reality of the actual event is not considered conclusively established until there is a confession or a guilty plea or a jury finding. That judge and lawyers are not considered competent enough or honorable enough to reach this conclusion for themselves is the mystery of the process. Why would the amateur jury be more competent to decide than the pros?

Arguments for and against can be advanced. (1) Danger of a cultural bias and the self (group) interest of an elite group of professionals, (2) Small numbers involved (one judge, two lawyers) increases chance of an ego-centric reading beyond common sense, (3) Public positions subject these authorities to subtle lobbying. And (4) over time and through political contention and philosophical argument the protection of the individual and his rights and liberties against arbitrary judgments of unreliable and ideologically biased courts has become more acceptable.

The rationales are unending and a choice has to be made. We have examples of the seeking for truth by alternate ways–the research project, the legislative investigation. There have been theological tests—withstanding a physical ordeal proves innocence by divine intervention or champions fight and the winner claims right by might.  Test by signs (and their interpretation). Test by rhetorical argument–the manipulation of sentimental symbols– (the lawyer’s summing up fits here.). Decision by the toss of a coin. If the perfect witness is not present we have a problem. The jury is another possible method. .

With the jury trial there is a division of function. The so-called investigation leads to a conflict of purpose. The prosecution argues for guilt which the defense parries.  The decision is linked to an outcome that is critically important to real individuals. These people do not want to know what happened (the defendant knows better than anyone else.) They want a particular outcome. So what is enacted is part research data, part rhetorical speech, part fabrication, part manipulation of method.

The jury is passive during the trial. Members ask no questions, suggest no additional lines of investigation, offer no alternate theories to explain evidence. They receive the jumble of facts and counters, of instruction on the law and on the meaning of terms and are asked to make a choice among limited options. The people are boxed by the cadre/agents.

But even more, the pressure of the problematic decision by the jury is used by the agents to force a plea. No one can be sure which way the jury will jump. The prosecution and defense engage in informal negotiation toward what is knows as a plea bargain. This dialogue in itself implies a recognition that a contravention of the law has occurred in which the defendant has been involved. What the crime is and what the penalty will be is what is traded.  An admission of guilt for some mythical act that imposes the agreed punishment. The. drift away from the reality of the incident is transparent The only issue is the finally accepted punishment.The judge is party to the fiction, he is kept informed and has final approval of the consummated bargain. The jury doesn’t act but with its presence threatens to act.

Contrast this with the compulsive concern to keep the jury focused on the pure and valid facts.. The judge gives a lot of time and attention to instructing the jury on the applicable law, on the meaning of terms, on appropriate procedures. They are held to a higher duty, to the actual reality of the incident. They have no room for compromise (though in our last post we found that such bargains can be struck).

My impression is that the judge and the lawyers in the majority of cases have informally decided on the nature of the reality (what happened) and the actual degree of involvement by the defendant. This is an open secret. If the prosecuting attorney and the judge were to officially conclude that the defendant is not guilty or that the charges should be amended they are morally and legally required to act to prevent an injustice. But some are so eager to win a reputation of being a tiger for law and order and for their activism against crime that they are either blind to the reality or have a criminal character themselves and commit a criminal injustice with the power of their offices. On the other hand the defense attorney hides his knowledge of the actual involvement of his client. He has no concern for the justice due to the victims or to the larger community. Meanwhile the guilty defendant struggles to maintain his innocence. And in his defense sounds exactly the same as the truly not guilty.

This is a very formal institutionalized system with ritual elements (the oaths, the costume for the judge–and in some societies for the lawyers as well–the architecture of the courtroom and the courthouse, the rising of all present on the entrance of the judge.) The form emerges from the traditions of our civilization. Our current way is highly professionalized and specialized. The use of the jury is an archaic anomaly. It is a throwback to the mobilization of the entire community (or parts determined by age, gender and social identity). The active citizens are called together to make a decision. With the mass society this calling together is physically impossible and it is replaced by either elected or appointed or randomly called segments—the legislatures are elected or appointed, the military are volunteers  or drafted, the jury called to judicial duty by lottery or rotation. (We’ll write about mobilization in a future post.)

So the attempt to describe the trial jury leads to Parsonian-like dilemmas which are built into the action system (These dilemmas can also be viewed as the two poles that define a social dimension)…

*The two kinds of mobilization—the professional and the amateur. Called by training and ambition and employment versus called by lottery. The trend definitely is away from the self-governing group toward the rule of the specialist cadre.  The jury is a remnant of the long past.

*The two kinds of history—the true and the fictional. In the service of maintaining a particular social order the search for truth gives way to the bargain based on fiction. The expediency of  assuring punishment versus the purity of the search for, and abiding with, the true fact.

Jury Duty–Two. A Case of a Negotiated Verdict

A few decades back a detective charged with accepting a bribe went on trial. The State’s Attorney had a very tight case built around a tape recording of the actual felony which took place in a popular local restaurant-bar.

This was the first case of a new judge who as a successful defense lawyer had made frequent appearances on local television talk-shows. He seemed a reasonable and rational man. Not vindictive. Not a hanging judge.  The trial was held during spring break for the local universities and colleges so a disproportionate number of academics were on the jury including, to everyone’s shock and delight, two iconic world famous men—one a hugely successful film director, the other a top-flight literary critic.and creative writer Otherwise the jury contained eleven men and one woman, nine Euros and three Afros. The defendant was Afro.

The defendant, who didn’t take the stand in his own defense, was asked by the judge to stand and answer a simple question to give the jury a measure of his voice for comparison to the voice on the tape. He was a sympathetic figure in appearance and demeanor. The judge assured the jury that the determination of the nature and degree of any punishment was his responsibility. The jury was only to consider the question of guilt. Period.

In presentation of the facts the jury saw that the technician who wired the setup for the recording had been turned by the police and the prosecuting attorneys. There was a hint of entrapment of the charged detective but neither element was developed or explained.

On the facts there was no doubt, reasonable or otherwise. The detective had not carried out his duty  for a monetary consideration. He was guilty. There were four counts—one each for specific statements he made as recorded on the tape—four counts but actually a single act.

The jury retired to its assigned room for discussion. A long table, five chairs to each side, and two chairs at head and foot. A high ceiling, airy room with tall windows on two sides. The clear sky and trees and bushes visible; the bustle of the city distanced. The initial vote was nine to three for guilty on all charges. Two of the negatives were advanced to assure that the panel would have a round of opinion and analysis to get a general sense of the rationals offered for the vote. And after this review a second ballot saw the the  vote on the guilty side rise to eleven. There was one hold-out.

The hold-out: a young Afro man, who worked a pressing machine at a tailor shop, was adamant in his opinion and over several hours the combined logic of the academics could not budge him from his view of the case. His refutations were no stronger than those of the defense attorney and after another period of give and take it became obvious to the majority that his intransigence could not be swayed by reason and logic. His motive for holding out was somewhere else.

The jury process takes two general forms–(1) A unity in opinion. All members quickly, or after at most a short period of discussion, agree on a verdict (no matter whether up or down).  (2) A disunity in opinion. Members split in their opinions. They disagree and can find no easy way to resolve their differences.  The numbers on each side (or even the number of sides) while important to the dynamic of the process are not the critical point—just the disagreement itself.is the measure.

This inability to reach a decision frustrates the presumption that a rational decision can be made. The hung jury actually is as valid an outcome as any other, but the logic of the order pushes for a pure unanimity. And in fact when a hung jury seems to be developing the judge applies pressure—keeping jury in session, answering questions of law and providing transcripts and items of evidence, encouraging members to be reasonable and to listen to each other. The jury is pressed to reach a unified conclusion. Their feet are held to the fire.

The jury becomes more emotional, suffers an increase in tension. The contention of the sides in the trial is now replicated in the jury room. As the hours pass with no progress, with all the logic and issues recycled endlessly, the group recognizes that it is at an impasse. Words no longer work. There is no more to say. The jury is hung, can’t reach a decision. If the judge doesn’t relent, if he insists that they continue, the heat inside the jury room continues upward. Their lives in abeyance, the task futile, the power of the judge to limit their freedom transparent and working.

If you go back a step and consider again the situation of the lawyers and the judge who are all trained and talented and experienced far beyond any jury panel you would wonder why they themselves can not reach a unified decision. Actually they are designated to not reach a decision. They, in a sense, can not allow themselves to be overwhelmed by the facts. So they ask the jury to complete their jobs for them

The judge sequestered the jury—that is he limited the movement of its members radically. His guards took them to a local restaurant for a late dinner and then to a midtown hotel where they occupied a closed off wing  with guards present at all times in the hall. Members needed permission to telephone their families and a guard had to be present. An unexpected outcome: the trial, a limbo of no decision, and now the jurors in jail.

The next day the group was assembled again in their special room, around their  special table and again put to the repetitive grind—members were losing hope, all their arguments without effect and the hold-out standing finally not on reason but on willfulness. Sort of a they-shall-not-pass mind set. Tempers heated as the day wore on, emotions of anger and frustration toward a high pitch, The possibility of a second night locked in the hotel looming—their regular lives on hold and receding into the tunnel where no daylight peeps from the far end.

A high point. One man otherwise sensible and quiet spoken shouting that he could not stand any more of the impossibility of the task stood and suddenly  raced toward the nearest window obviously aiming to jump—it involved at most a ten foot drop. But the others grabbed him and calmed him down. Another juror had a  beatific experience earlier at breakfast at the hotel when he announced that he was Jesus reincarnated—at that moment his appearance changed—long, reddish straight hair, pale skin, soulful look, head slightly back eyes raised toward the heavens. The group wasn’t sure whether he was frivolous or serious. Maybe he didn’t know either. It seemed another expression of the tension the group was experiencing.

The foreman and the intransigent juror #2, sitting side by side through the trial and at the table had become friendly and finding themselves  a private moment during a break engaged in a frank  and informal talk. Juror #2 admitted that he actually agreed with the conclusion of the rest that the detective was guilty but he did not want his vote to lead to what he felt might be an unjustified punishment. He was reluctant to vote guilty because of the possible consequences for the defendant. The faith that the judge could be relied on to be fair and just was lacking.

This was also a concern for the foreman  but he and the others had accepted the judge’s claim that it was his problem alone.  The question of whether to trust the judge’s discretion had been buried.   So the two men found a common ground here. And they reached a compromise—guilty on one count and not on the other three. This would send a message for  leniency and hopefully  limit the judge’s own option. It would also free the jury of its burden and get them out of another night  away from home.

The deal: guilty on the first count and a hung jury on the other charges. The foreman promised to vote with #2 on these extra charges and to assure the judge that there was no hope of reaching a unified decision beyond the one charge.

The strategy worked. The judge accepted the verdict, thanked the jury and sent them home. Case closed.

The foreman talked to a few other members about the deal and they expressed ambivalence to downright rejection. The idea of negotiating a fact was not welcome. Yet with the plea bargain the lawyers and the judge play with two realities–the fact of the crime and the fact of the confession. In the case at hand it was either bargain or have a guilty man walk free (even if only until a possible retrial).  Admittedly no jury is ever encouraged to bargain. In fact, a real fact negotiated becomes something else, an I-don’t-know-what.