"I and Thou" / "I and You" / "I and It" (10 Oct. 2013)

CAUTION 1: I'm going to steal from and then seriously over-simplify Martin Buber here, so if you're sophisticated, and strict, about philosophy or theology, you might want to stop reading right now or risk getting really pissed off.

CAUTION 2, and here I'll get into something I know about — There's a good chance even sophisticated English-speakers, for example many of my readers, have exactly the wrong understanding of the English word "thou."


            Most readers encounter "thee's" and "thou's" in old translations of the Bible or reading Shakespeare, and most, I suspect understand "thou" as a formal word: The way we wretched, finite, mortal sinners address God. That's wrong. "Thou" is the English cognate of the Germanic "du" and is like Spanish "tu" plus similar words in the Romance languages: it's the informal second person, used for addressing one's social inferiors, assuming one has social inferiors, or for addressing children or friends. "Thou" is for people and other beings with whom one can be informal, truly friendly.

            I'll modernize "thou" to "you-my-friend, or quite possible friend" and note that one of the nicer things about old Biblical translations is "Thou" for God: God not as Creator and Lord and King but as, at least potentially, friend or lover — or one's opponent in a wrestling match (Genesis 32.22-32).

            Jacob wrestling with the angel is a primitive dumb-ass story taken literally; as an image out of a healthy relationship with the divine, it's pretty profound.

            Anyway, an I-thou relationship is a personal one, as with a friend, including a friend with whom one wrestles or makes love: a relationship that's face-to-face, hand to hand: human-to-human, person-al.
            As I interpreted Buber for literary-critical purposes — it's a long story and irrelevant here — my "take-away" from Buber is that human relationship with God, the great and Eternal Thou, allows significant relationship with humans and other creatures, with the Others in our lived worlds. Whether through God or "immanent Being" or something totally mundane, there is always and necessarily a potential for human relationship with other humans, and that potential is of central importance.

            It's just a potential however, and that, too, is important.

            Look, last estimate I heard was that we humans can "maintain stable social relationships" with maybe 150 other people. Back when I was in a fraternity, our estimate was that a guy could associate fairly closely with maybe fifty other guys; so I think "Dunbar's number" of 150 is about right for a maximum. Obviously the great majority of us live and deal with far more than fifty to 150 other people, so the great majority of those relationships will not be "I-thou."

            Most will be I-it relationships — dealing with Others instrumentally, as if they were things — and that's okay.

            Here's a thought experiment. You go to a bank and deal with a clerk. You are polite to her — quite likely a "her" — and she back to you. Still, next time you go to the bank you may decide to use an ATM: an Automated Teller Machine, which we often redundantly, but usefully here, call "an ATM machine." In the colloquial sense of the word, the essence of your relationship with the teller was I-it: a machine clould replace her. Indeed, if she said to you, "Good morning! And how are you today?" And you said "Fine." And she said, "No, really: you look miserable. How are you?" and waited for a serious answer — if she switched to I-thou communication, it would be indecorous, improper, rather impolite.

            Similarly, back when I taught college, I saw my students as human beings, and at least on occasion I think they saw me that way as well. Still, they were to me primarily generators of papers to grade, and — given the limits of what they wanted to talk to me about — I think I appeared to them mostly as a generator of grades, eventually course credit, and, intermittently, of information that might prove useful, at least useful for getting a desired grade and course credit.  

            If one of my students walked into my office and said, "Hey, how are you?" and I didn't feel fine and gave an honest and detailed answer — I suspect I'd have gotten into trouble. Our relationship wasn't really "I-thou" and an "I-thou" answer wouldn't have been, as they say (often euphemistically), inappropriate.
            But sitting face-to-face in the office, our relationship wasn't exactly I-it. It was, or I think should have been, I-you: a relationship that might develop into friendship, in other contexts, and which might allow, in emergencies, intimate conversation, but was now more formal. It was an interaction not totally instrumental —our just using one another like things — but not quite personal either.

            I'll try to clarify that with three stories and a quotation, and then repeat my point. (Hey, I taught for a long time; trust me: repetition can get annoying, but it's useful.)

            Two of the stories are background, and all can be told quickly.

            On my first day of teaching at Miami University, Oxford, OH (my first job out of grad school), I had my students write writing samples, and for the rest of the week I had tutorials with them, and I graded and discussed with them what they had written. On my second day of teaching, the first day of the tutorials, the second student talked about the essay for a little bit and then started crying, telling me "This is about me!" and he told me how he'd knocked up his girlfriend … and wanted to know, in a sense, "What are you going to do about that?!"

            Uh, huh. Welcome to the Ed Biz, Rich; and welcome to a bit more I-thou than I was ready for, though I gave what advice I could. (And if in my writing I return to the subject of condoms fairly frequently, it's not only because I worked a summer in a public health lab and know the dangers of STDs.)

            On another occasion, I had become friendly with a former student — repeat: former student — and offered him a lift, and he asked if he could talk to me, and we talked, human to human, and his crying there in my car was not an imposition. He asked for advice, and I gave it, and he fairly quickly followed it: I advised him to get out of a relationship where he could not help a woman in great pain but was only hurting himself. Or, more exactly, allowing the woman and her friends to hurt him, repeatedly, systematically.

            And if I sometimes point out that survivors of horrors can move on to do damage themselves, it isn't only because I absorbed that lesson from Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker (1964), Art Spiegelman's Maus (1991), and, preeminently, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The woman hurting my former student and (now) apparently former friend survived a plane crash that killed her family. The main point of the story for this essay is that my conversation with the former student was an I-thou interaction that was decorous, appropriate. If you think my advice cruel, a secondary point is that a moment of truly human communication is just truly human communication: if you've dealt seriously with any humans, you know we often fuck up, sometimes in the form of giving bad advice. This advice I'll stand by, however; and if you're a woman reader who dislikes such insensitive advice, please imagine yourself with a woman friend in an abusive relationship with a guy who has suffered and/or is suffering horribly; now consider the question, Can she really help him, or is she mostly just getting hurt herself? I-thou, person-to-person, truly intimate human relationships — sometimes suck; and one should run, not walk, away from some of them.

            The last story leads to the quotation and back to my point.

            For a long time I was "Student Mediator" for the good-sized English Department at Miami U. Most of the time, I just shuffled paper in this job and helped students through a fairly complicated complaint process; every now and then, though, I actually mediated. In the relevant case, the student, teacher, and I got together, and I couldn't quite figure out at first what the issue was; and then it became clear, and I said something like, "Oh, you two dislike each other."

            Neither was comfortable with my observation. The teacher was far, far too professional to react emotionally to a student; and the student was much, much, much too good a good Catholic boy to dislike an authority figure.

            Right.

            I told them, "You don't have to like one another. You just have to get along for a few hours a week for the next ______ [whatever] weeks." And I explained to them one form of what I'm calling here an I-you relationship, with a "you" being "a 'somebody' but not somebody I like" — but in a neutral sense of not liking.

            And here I'll throw in the quotation.

            In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the highly-flawed protagonist, Brutus — yeah, he's the protagonist; like, are you going to pay money to see a play called Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger? — Brutus asks his messenger Lucilius how Lucilius had been received by Cassius, a main co-conspirator in the assassination of Caesar, and Brutus's current ally in the following civil war. Lucilius says he was treated "With courtesy and with respect enough" but without the little touches of easy-going friendship he was used to when dealing with Cassius. Ever the analyzing intellectual, if not good at it, Brutus tells Lucilius that Lucilius has described "A hot friend cooling" — i.e., a close friend growing more distant (and that's all; Brutus was a puritanical republican Roman, not an aristocrat from the Empire who'd hump most anything mammalian and breathing). "When love begins to sicken and decay," Brutus continues, "It useth an enforced ceremony" (4.2).

            If Brutus's attitude here is a good indication, and it is, cool correctness wasn't much appreciated in Shakespeare's time, and Shakespeare makes plausible that even ancient, aristocratic, republican Romans would feel the same way. We Americans, strongly into friendliness, have a problem with not liking someone — which is a big problem since there is no reason you should feel one way or another about the vast majority of human beings; there are very few you will actually like, actually know and like as individuals.

            I'm suggesting that a little "enforced ceremony" can be a damn good thing: cool correctness to people we actively dislike but must deal with, a warmer courtesy to those whom we might potentially like and where we can move beyond an I-it relationship to something a bit more personal and humane: I-you.

            As a practical matter, I'd eliminate the friendliness gestures of asking people, "And how are you this morning?" when we don't give a rat's ass and would barely hear an answer like, say, "Depressed, but not quite suicidal" (a great line I heard from the son of a friend). A generalized wish of "Good morning" is fine for now, although it'd be nice to go to something like aloha, or shalom or as-salam alaykum or "Peace, you-all" or "Hi; I'm _______" and state your name. As a practical matter I'd have us admit that the potential for intimate I-thou relationships is crucial — but that it's just a potential. We can have honest I-it relationships with people — coolly correct with enemies or those we just don't take to — and behave more warmly neutral to most.


            I-it, I-you, and, at least on occasion I-and-thou. "Love one another" when you can; rest of the time, let's try be polite and mildly cordial — and let it go at that.

Cynicism, Stoicism, and "The Prisoner's Dilemma" (Sort of) [25 February 2014]

            It was undoubtedly part of some program under the over-arching theory my friend Dan Prickett used to call "Cliché of the Month Management"; anyway, some time more or less in the late 1970s or early 1980's, I found myself in a faculty workshop where we played a very unscientific variation on the psychology-experiment/game-theory game, "The Prisoner's Dilemma."

            In our exercise, participants were paired off — I found myself (possibly significantly) with a guy from the Miami University business school — and told that we'd both been arrested and were held in the same cell and allowed to talk until we were figuratively separated and each told we'd better cooperate and testify against the other. If neither of the pair "defected" and cooperated with the arresting authorities, we'd both go free for lack of evidence. If Prisoner 1 defected and agreed to testify against Prisoner 2, he would go to jail for a brief time, and Prisoner 2 would be sentenced to prison for a significant hard time; and, necessarily, vice-versa. If both defected, both would go to jail for a medium-length sentence.

            The details in sentencing differed from the classical "Prisoner's Dilemma" (or "Prisoners' Dilemma"), and I may misremember the variation, although I'm sure that we played the "iterative" form — where we played a number of rounds — and had the tweak that the two prisoners could negotiate between "interrogations."

            When our workshop group was asked for questions, I asked the Game Masters to tell us the specifics of the charges. They refused. I asked if we'd be allowed to consult a lawyer. No. How long might we be held without formal charges? They wouldn't say. Were we actually guilty of the crime — or did the authorities at least think we were? No comment.

            We started the game, and I refused to defect, and my partner defected.

            When we talked over the round, I noted my questions of the Game Masters and that their answers indicated that we were obviously in some sort of Kafkaesque situation and should be faithful to one another since we obviously couldn't trust the authorities.

            Next round, he betrayed me.

            In our conversation following that round, I explained that if he trusted the authorities enough to cooperate, then he should trust them to free us if we both remained silent; hence it would be in his best interest to stay loyal.

            And he defected again.

            And again, and again, for all the iterations we played before getting on to whatever the hell the lesson was for college teachers, scientists, and scholars in late-20^th-century southwest Ohio.

            Now if I had had my wits about me and had watched more old prison movies as a kid, I would have stood up after the third round or so, and interrupted the game by calling out in a controlled but loud voice, "Hey, screws! Send over a medic. My cellmate just accidentally fell on a shank fifteen times!" (and let the other participants in the exercise laugh and tell the Game Masters what happens in prisons to narks, ratfinks, stool pigeons, or whatever slang was appropriate for their generation ["nark," surprisingly, goes back to at least 1859 or 1860, but was making a comeback].)

            I didn't have my wits about me and was prudent enough to keep quiet in the, let's say, "directed discussion" that followed the exercise. I'd already pissed off my seniors and betters by asking those questions outside the Game.

            Writing now, with the advantage of hindsight and absolutely nothing to lose, I'll tell why I didn't defect.

            It is not because I'm a nice person or because I liked the ratfucking nark — in the Game — from the business school.

            My most respectable reason is that among the traditions I grew up in there was a touch of the capital "C" Cynic and the Stoic (but without the masochistic bullshit of the small "s" kind of "stoicism" that was classically associated with the macho-militaristic, slave-exploiting, boy-exploiting noble-folk of Sparta). I believed with the Cynics that "Virtue is its own reward," 'cause it ain't reliably gonna get any other; and I respected the idea of the Stoics that the only thing over which human beings have real, significant control over is our own integrity.

            In a Kafkaesque trap in a holding cell under some sort of weird tyranny, about all one has is one's integrity, and this one was going to hold onto mine and not have my behavior controlled by the decisions of, say, some small-c cynical asshole from the B-school who'd betray me and probably his mother, at least in a game.

            Okay, maybe that position isn't all that respectable, ethics-wise, but it's probably more respectable than my willingness to be stubborn when I had nothing serious to lose: I was naïve enough to be confident I was going to get promoted because I deserved it, even if I disrupted some pet project workshop project of some administrator showing, "Hey, I read a book!" (for a complementary theory of management from Dan Prickett).
            Cheating a good deal and applying common sense and real-world experience to the world of the Prisoner's Dilemma Game — I wasn't going to trust the in-Game authorities, ca. 1980 and certainly wouldn't trust them now, not when a lawyer friend has pointed out that real-world cops and prosecutors feel free to lie to suspects.

            And ca. 1980 I certainly wouldn't have trusted the social psychologists who put together such games. This was before strong rules on "The Ethical Treatment of Subjects," and lying by experimenting psychologists et al. was accepted and habitual.

            So I was something of an outlier, as we say nowadays, for "The Prisoner's Dilemma" of three decades and more ago, and I wish I'd pushed the point then and more forcefully since then.
            Stoicism and Cynicism are pretty sterile in themselves, but there is much to be said for "inner-direction," or pure cussedness, as part of one's repertoire, and there's much to be said, in outrageous situations — especially when they're just part of a game — for maintaining integrity.

            Along with Hamlet himself, Shakespeare' Polonius is a good example of a man of much schooling who doesn't think all that well. "[T]o thine own self be true, / And it must follow […] / Thou canst not then be false to any man" is a glaring non sequitur: If you're truly a scoundrel being true to yourself requires being false to all sorts of people. Still, the deeper joke both in the play itself and more generally is that old fart Polonius is correct: "This above all: to thine own self be true" is good advice to his son Laertes and usually good advice, period.

            Job standing up to a God grown vicious toward him affirms, "Till I die I will not put away my integrity from me." The rest of us wimps can at least pretend to integrity in a game — or realize that central to real-world freedom is occasionally breaking out of the mandated games and setting up new rules. 

Frat Boys, Jocks, and Deprecation (23 Oct. 2014 [19 March 2015])

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            Fraternities are/were very much in the news with my reposting this blog — I was one of the bloggers "orphaned" when OpenSalon closed in mid-March 2015 — but the immediate occasion for the original post wasn't immediate at all, but an old memory coming back from early in my teaching career, a memory that sent me down a thread of others.
            I have no idea what we were discussing, but it was probably a class in College Composition (I taught a lot of classes in College Composition), and a student said something about jocks, and I picked up the term — and was interrupted by a student who usually didn't say much with, "That's 'student athletes'. The word 'jock' is usually preceded by 'dumb', and I don't like people just assuming I'm stupid." Or something like that: it was a comment that was articulate, to the point, and heartfelt, by a guy who was quiet but definitely not dumb.
            Seizing a teaching moment when it came along — and responding to a legitimate rebuke — I said that when and where I came from, we could use "jock" neutrally and talk about "math jocks" and "chem jocks" as well as "sports jocks."
            The class said that, nah, their usage usually implied "dumb" with "jock," and we went on from there. I think I had the sense to keep that discussion brief and on-task and end with repeating the basic lesson. "Okay, unless you intend an insult, use 'athletes', and if you do intend the insult, be prepared to defend it, and maybe yourself."
            I got thinking of the "jock" comment again when teaching Michael Moffatt's excellent, Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture (1989). Coming of Age is a popular report by a professional anthropologist about campus life at Rutgers in the 1970s and 1980s (minus use of illegal drugs and details on illegal use by minors of legal ethyl alcohol: Moffatt refused to narc out his subjects — and people he lived with). Even in a book for a general audience, Moffatt tries to be professional and admits to failure —explicitly admits to it — in noting that he just couldn't keep up anthropological cultural relativity in dealing with Rutgers's fraternities and the inhabitants thereof: he classified many fraternity members among the "Neanderthals" in sexual attitudes (apologizing to the literal hominid species of Neanderthals) and anti-intellectual.
            Systematic headhunting in New Guinea, and occasional headhunting elsewhere: "Different strokes / For different folks"; fraternity culture in New Jersey: too close to home, too atavistic among academics, and something anthropologist Moffatt was prepared to judge and condemn.
            Moffatt has some data and some indirect personal experience, but this is not always the case for his negative attitude.
            I recall one instance, if only one, when, as an undergraduate fraternity member, I kind of anticipated my student-athlete student by telling someone, "We prefer 'fraternity men' to 'frat boys'," maybe or maybe not knowing at the time to add, "'Boy' is an insult." I later learned that some guys in the dorms — "residence halls" hadn't come in as the PC usage (nor the term "PC") — I later learned that some of the guys in the dorms had strong feelings about fraternities, and negative ones.
            This was interesting.
            At the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in the early 1960s, a young bachelor underclassman had four possibilities for housing: (1) living with his parents and commuting, (2) living in a University men's dorm — it was perhaps 1970 before a private, luxury dorm got built — (3) living in "independent men's housing," or (4) living in a fraternity. And that was living in a fraternity for underclassmen: from pledge semester until senior year or so (when an upperclassman could move into an apartment), one lived in, and mostly at, "the house."
            UIUC was definitely a residential campus at the time, with few commuters, so that meant basically dorms, independent houses, and Greek life (fraternity houses and sorority houses).
            The tripartite division, though, got a little blurred, as I had to explain to this nice guy, poor schmuck of a Sociology grad student who couldn't get a study to work.
            The investigator was doing some sort of work on consensus-building in small groups and was looking at how you get consensus among opponents, with two locally-available ones frat-rats and indies.
            So he brought in guys from fraternities and guys from independent men's housing — University-approved private houses for maybe five to fifteen guys — broke us into groups, and set us some issue to find consensus on.
            Which we did, quickly and easily, undercutting his hopes of getting data to get the fucking dissertation done already and get the hell out!
            (I was to go on to write a dissertation, and I'm pretty certain of how he felt.)
            Pitying the grad student, a couple of us stayed after the session and asked, "You thought 'Indies' and 'Greeks' are opposed, didn't you?" And he said "Yeah," and we said he misunderstood.
            First, guys who lived in fraternities and independent houses agreed on most things, starting with not wanting to live in the dorms. Second, neither group thought all that much about classifying people by where they lived, with the frat rats' — initially a pejorative, but one we'd adopted — with frat rats' lack of interest possibly stemming from a bit of snobbery.
            At that time and place, the disagreement among males would be between dormies and frat rats, with the guys in independent housing usually seeing themselves as the true Independents and above such trivial oppositions.
            And the disagreement got emotional tinge mostly from the dorm side.
            Among those of us who thought about it at all, most frat rats wanted the social life and relative community of a fraternity over the impersonality of the University's dorm complexes. Among those of us who'd been raised political, there was also the issue of not wanting the Big U as our landlord. Even back then, the Big U was big and a pretty total institution, supplying not only education (for those interested in such things) and credentialing, but police, fire department, health services, many of the streets and much of the lighting — and, optionally, public housing. Especially since living in a fraternity could be cheaper than living in a dorm (if you "worked a meal job"), fraternity life could be attractive to a nice liberal, at the time, from a big city and — certainly, with what they called at Cornell ca. 1965, "the White houses" — to political Neanderthals.
            ("White" in that context meant WASP: no Jews, just maybe a Catholic or two. Blacks weren't an issue, since — outside of the chapter of my fraternity, at Cornell at the time — the fraternities were at least de facto segregated: all White, plus the one to three Black fraternities.)
            Anyway, to those who cared about such things at the U of IL in the mid-1960s, the key category was "frat rat," and it was not a friendly act of categorizing.
            This attitude has continued, and I think it colors and "inflects" a fair portion of current debates about campus life, in which there is an unhealthy degree of semi-prurient interest to start with. For example, it's significant that a respectable anthropologist like Mike Moffatt had just about nothing in Coming of Age on religion or sports — two areas usually of interest to students of culture — but two chapters on sex. Less sensationally, in MAD Magazine years before even Moffatt's research, Ricky Nelson (renamed something like "Rickety") came home from school and lamented all the extra parties and mixers and other social events he had to attend. A neighbor asks his mother about Ricky's classes, to which his mother, replies, "Oh, Ricky doesn't go to classes; he goes to college." As the sweatshirt on John "Bluto" Blutarsky implies: COLLEGE has been what has interested most people, not, say, college classes and the frequent failure thereof to mean much to products of US education K-12.
            Fraternities offer community, relative democracy, and a good deal of freedom from what Mike Moffatt called "adult authority" — which I saw as mostly advantages at 18, and still see as such; but these aspects are problematic to those suspicious (with some good reasons) of fairly traditional communities, and of democratic decision-making among those who will often choose wrong.
            The current complaints against fraternities center on sexual assaults, and here, as in many places, I'd like to see (1) the numbers, (2) larger contexts, and (3) fairer and more effective law enforcement across the board, emphatically including better dealing with sexual assault, but with less concentration on — occasionally near-obsession with — sex and safety on campuses: as places go, university campuses, like most schools, are safe places.
            On numbers, I'll note that the instances of rape and/or child molestation that have touched my life involved as perpetrators two Black men and a father from a family fairly new to the US, from a non-WASP background. One of the Black men was a student athlete, and serial rapist, and his choice of crime sites tended to apartments, not fraternity houses. The other Black man raped before I met her a woman I came to love; as she told me the story, the rape — a "stranger rape" — resulted in pregnancy and her attempting suicide. I have no direct evidence of the pregnancy, but her left wrist was scarred vertically, so I infer a serious suicide attempt. With the father, I have only the daughter's version, but assume it to be true, as her husband did, on more evidence; I never pressed for details, but I assume the father had emigrated to the US, or was first generation American-born.
            That background is going to "inflect," minimally, my view of rapists, and is a reason why I need the reality check of looking at the numbers. "A 'for instance' is no proof," as the saying goes, and N = 3 proves nothing. I need the numbers, and so — obviously — does everyone else who grew up in cultures and societies with deep currents of racism and xenophobia.
            And if we need the numbers and larger contexts for Black felons and football players and non-Nordic child abusers, we need the numbers and serious sociological discussion for incandescent White lacrosse players, and jocks and frat rats of all hues and levels of privilege.
            I can use the term "jock" as neutrally as I use "frat rat"; but I try to remember my student's objection and not use the term to reinforce a stereotype of "dumb jocks" as a kind of formula — even if we have the concept, as I do, and can contrast it with "serious student athlete."
            Some jocks are dumb, and there are colleges and universities where "student athlete" is a coincidence or a joke: where the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics brings in semi-pro jocks, for whom academic pursuits may be career-endangering distractions. And some jocks and frat rats are rats (with apologies to the admirably resilient rodent): macho assholes (with apologies to the anus).
            Athletics can be good for people, especially athletics that bring together fathers and daughters and those that give big quiet guys a place to assert themselves — especially those organized by participating athletes and not run top-down like a corporation or military unit. And fraternities can be good places to live, and certainly good given most of the alternatives.
            People can argue otherwise, and there are strong arguments to be made: but those should be fact-based arguments, not casual dismissals with "jock" or "frat boy." They should be rational arguments with sound comparative statistics and a sense of proportion: anthropologists who can be open-minded about headhunters can show a little more tolerance for frat rats and at least consider the possibility that intramural athletics may not be as big a part of life in a dorm as sex, but are there.

Fads, Flocks, and Fanaticism (1984) [21 Nov. 2014]

Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia.

Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.

There was, of course, no admission that any change

had taken place. Merely it became known, with

extreme suddenness and everywhere at once,

that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy.

* * *                                            

A Party member is required to have not only the right opinions,

but the right instincts. Many of the beliefs and attitudes

demanded of him are never plainly stated, and could not be […].

If he is a person naturally orthodox (in Newspeak a good-thinker),

he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought,

what is the true belief or the desirable emotion.

— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

 
            Somewhere in George Orwell's canon of works (I thought Nineteen Eighty-Four but couldn't find it there), there's an image of orthodox believers like a flock of starlings, changing direction all at once and all together, with a human observer unable to see which bird turns first or why they are changing course — in the case of "the True Believers," figurative changing course to follow the new Party line.
            Anyway, that's the image in my mind, and if I'm making it up, well, more power to me, but I'm pretty sure I'm stealing it, and from Orwell.
            I thought of that image when teaching College Composition at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and starting many terms with an exercise called just "Clothes," where the students would read some brief excerpts for John T. Molloy's Dress for Success (1975) and an even briefer excerpt on radically-sensible clothing customs in Sir Thomas More's Utopia (from Utopia, 1516).
            The standard advice in writing is "Write about what you know about; write about what you care about," and God knows my students knew about and cared about clothes. God knew, and the women in the class knew: it was often challenging to get the men in the class to recognized what they knew and admit how much they cared; but, then, that was a major point of the exercise. Consciousness is necessary to interesting writing, and seeing the weirdness of everyday life is useful for finding topics to write about. More important, "liberal education" is the education appropriate to free citizens, and the first step toward freedom is realizing how much our decisions are controlled and manipulated by outside forces, usually other people.
            And most of us are manipulated all the way down to decisions on clothes, with our decisions "conditioned" more subtly than the obvious point that just about everyone buys what's available in the stories.
            Well, none of my students made his or, far more likely, her clothes — or got them tailor-made — but one guy did order his clothes from a costumer in the San Francisco area, and another guy wore store-bought garments, but definitely upscale and so carefully coordinated they might as well have been tailor-made: there was a look he wanted, and with careful shopping, obsessively careful shopping by guy standards, he got that look.
            (In fact, his essay on clothes was so good I let him follow it up with an essay on how he decorated his dorm room: the guy was borderline pathological in his consciousness of his look — "presentation" is the current jargon —and/but those two essays were fascinating, in a case-study way, and, of course, written meticulously.)
            Anyway, a standard class dialog would start with students' saying they bought what was available, and then a stronger assertion from a male student, "I wear what I want." And then, ordinarily, a woman in the class would note the screamingly obvious that "It's a hell of a coincidence that you independently choose to wear what just about every other guy in this room is wearing."
            And this would move us on to why it is we want what we want, starting with how we get to want what we want in clothes.
            Okay, you want to be "comfortable," but for my generation the "comfortable" concept got brilliantly skewered in the Cathy Sunday cartoon in which Cathy tells her boyfriend Irving in the first panel that she's going to slip into something more comfortable, takes the rest of the panels save one to squeeze into her jeans, and then re-enters to Irving in the last panel saying that she's now more comfortable. Uh-huh. "Skinny jeans" are coming back, so the young-in's will know again what I'm talking about: there is nothing physically comfortable about jeans that are difficult for women to get into and potentially painful for men careless enough to bend over quickly or squat down to get something or, with the terminally fashionable, do much beyond stand against a wall making no sudden moves and hoping some sperm survive your body heat.
            Of course, between the eras of tight jeans, and continuing into the time I'm writing, the alternative fashion was loose pants: and I'm sure walking around like a toddler with a full load in his diaper is about as comfortable as, say, tight jeans or stiletto heals or — well, fill in the blank with your favorite dumb-ass and/or potentially dangerous fashion.
            "Comfortable" often means socially comfortable, which in turn usually means some combination of a bit of standing out with a lot more fitting in.
            Not just my students, but all of us follow rules for our clothing, and they are not enforced by the Fashion Police, let alone the Thought Police, but they are enforced (obviously: we usually obey them).
            One form of enforcement was checked out by one of my students.
            I'd pointed out that when backpacks came in among college students the rule soon became, "Thou shalt not wear thy backpack over both shoulders lest thou look like a Boy Scout."
            I had checked out that rule by doing a count of 100 backpackers, and 98 of 100 Miami University students I spotted on the Oxford campus wore their backpacks over one shoulder, even in the case of a guy on a high racing bike in a high wind near a dangerous highway: for high-risk behavior motivated as far as I can see only by his fashion sense. «On the one hand,» I inferred, he thought, «I might lose my balance and fall under a truck and die; on the other hand, with the backpack over both shoulders, for sure I'd look like a dork.»
            My student wanted to test enforcement, so he walked around campus with the backpack over both shoulders and got a look or two but no comments. He did get a comment when he buckled the straps at the base of the backpack: one of the undergrad "older guys" went up to him and told him the buckle part at least Was Not Done.
            Later, as men's styles juvenilized, so to speak, the rule became, "Thou shalt wear thy backpack over both shoulders, because —" well I think precisely because it made the wearer look like a Boy Scout.
            No matter.
            The point was the style had changed and it had changed more dramatically than, say, the pigmentation on moths in the north of England as the Industrial Revolution came in and tree trunks darkened with soot and other air gunk and once-numerous light-colored moths got spotted and eaten and once-rare dark-colored moths became dominant and we got to see Evolution in Action (sort of).
            But giant birds weren't picking off and eating guys carrying backpacks over one shoulder, and if now unfashionable guys were shunned by females for breeding purposes, that hadn't had time to have much effect.
            The biological analogy was closer to the starlings or a school of fish changing course, just sociological and slower and governed by much more complicated behavioral rules than birds in flight or fish in a school.
            The significant parallel is with Orwellian "good thinkers" — astute Party members — sensing the shift in the Party line.
            From shoaling and schooling fish to "murmurating" starlings to fashionable undergrads, one key element is recognizing those around us (usually "conspecifics": our people), sensing their behavior and changes therein, and reacting, ordinarily by conforming.
            Such reacting to others is necessary for social life, and too little reaction can make you a sociopath or psycho.
            With social animals like wolves and baboons and humans, this recognizing and sensing and reacting takes place in a conext of some individuality and usually strong social hierarchies: to apply another Orwellian rule, All baboons are equal, but some baboons are a whole lot more equal than others.
            With fashion, ranks can get complicated. Fashion is generally set by those who can stand out safely, which includes very high-ranking people, from whom much fashion proceeds, but fashions also come from underclass folk and those from the margins, people with little to lose: e.g., recent fashions from various ghettos, sailors, outlaws, prisoners, gays — etc.
            What happens with fashion, a student who'd studied these things told me, is that «the cool kids» — my formulation, not hers (hence those European quotation marks again) — the cool kids note that what they're currently up to has been picked up by the uncool, so the cool kids must move on. So, usually semi-consciously, the more daring of the cool look around to see if any of the out-groups are up to something interestingly outrageous and try out the style. Usually the "meme" goes nowhere — even as most mutations die out — but sometimes it catches on and the flock or shoal or herd changes directions.
            With a Party Line in a totalitarian State, the change is definitely top-down and rapid: there are established lines of communication to get the word out and serious consequences for not getting the word and falling into line with the new Party Line. Indeed if Orwell and Eric Hoffer are correct (The True Believer § XIII), the rapidity and frequent arbitrariness of changes in the Party Line are part of its function: To convince people rationally to modify a view is a sign of one's rhetorical competence; to force people to do a high-speed 180 from one absurdity to another: that is a demonstration of power, and a reinforcement of power.
            The US of A is not Orwell's Oceania (although it is Oceania in Orwell's novel), nor even Hitler's Reich or Stalin's Russian Empire; and, obviously we don't have a single Party Line or even "hegemonic" agreement on some important basic facts and principles. What we do have is half a dozen or a dozen figurative flocks or "shoals" or herds or whatever lemmings come in where semiconscious people semiconsciously watch one another for cues on proper behavior and sentiments and  beliefs.
            In its more innocent forms, this is just another area in which "High school never ends," and we're still imitating the cool kids or rebelling against them.
            ("If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let his step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away" — H.D. Thoreau. That ain't hearing the same music as everyone else and just stepping on the off beats.)
            In its less innocent forms, we have the human weakness to go with the crowds and follow the other figurative lemmings wherever they go, probably while chanting in unison on how we wear what we want and do what we want like all the other good, freedom-loving Americans or, if you're on the Left, peoples of the world.
            At its worst, we become small masses of people, but still crowds, small masses, with each little mass disagreeing with the other on this or that, but each composed of the "naturally orthodox" — good thinkers — who "will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is the true belief or the desirable emotion."