Bedtime – Construct or Cruelty

July 13, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

One summer evening when I was a teenager, I drove with Don Bane, a guitar player, from our WASP suburb of Pittsburgh to the projects in the Hill District. Don was the only other kid in Mt. Lebanon High who wanted to play jazz. We could often find a bass player and drummer to jam with, but they weren’t really into jazz. Don was. In fact, it was the only thing he was interested in, and he would find connections outside our small world. That’s how we wound up in the public housing apartment of a Black kid our age, a bass player named Mickey Bass.*

It was probably about 9 p.m., maybe later, when we got there, and as Don and I walked to Mickey’s building, I was astonished to see so many kids still running around, playing  in the courtyard – kids as young as six or seven. Wasn’t it way past their bedtime?

I had led a sheltered life.

What reminded me of this moment was a piece in the FiveThirtyEight section “Science Question From a Toddler” (here). The questions are from kids; the answers are for grown-ups.  “Why is it bedtime if it’s still light outside?” asked a 5-year old.



The headline phrase “social construct” is what drew me to read the piece, but Maggie Koerth-Baker’s answer rambles through biology, circadian rhythms,“bedtime resistance behaviors,” daylight and darkness, etc. but never uses the term “social construction.” The closest she gets is this:

In 2005, Jenni published a paper in the Journal of Sleep Research critiquing an earlier paper that tried to . . . define childhood insomnia as occurring when a 7-year-old can’t fall asleep by 8:45 p.m. In his critique, Jenni pointed out that this definition ignored the fact that average bedtimes varied widely from country to country. For instance, out of six countries whose data Jenni reviewed, three had bedtime norms that would make a perfectly average 7-year-old a candidate for medication.

If you Google “What bedtime,” it auto-completes to discussions of age-appropriate times (plus a couple of other frequently asked questions not relevant here).


These bedtimes are social norms, of course, and they vary not just from culture to culture but from family to family. Even within families bedtime norms are often the subject of negotiation. Because “bedtime” involves just a few people in an informal setting, it does not become institutionalized like other time norms like university schedules,  (e.g., MW 10:00 - 11:15). I don’t have my copy of The Social Construction of Reality at hand, but I think that Berger and Luckman use “lunchtime” as an example of how a mere agreement between two people – let’s meet for lunch at 1:00 – can become a stone-like reality as it intersects with more and more people and activities. 

What most of these discussion of bedtime miss is not that it is socially constructed and therefore subject to variation but that it is constructed at all. We just assume that every society or family has it. It’s the way we used to think about religion. Beliefs and practices may differ, but everybody has a religion except for a tiny handful of atheists, and they’re weird and don’t really count.

But what if an entire society has not constructed “bedtime”?  What if a culture sees bedtime not as a comforting and necessary construct but as something alien to their basic values?

Tim Parks, an Englishman married to an Italian and living in Verona, came to this realization when he attended a get-together for apartment owners in his condo building. The host’s four-year old son is running through the apartment, crashing into lamps, and raiding the refrigerator. Someone asks Parks about his own son, age two and a half.

    When I reply that Michele is in bed, others at the table show a mixture of awe and concern.
    “You have left him alone in bed at only two and a half?”
    I point out that it’s late for a little boy, and I am just about to go on to say that his bedtime is seven o’clock, when I remember that there is no word or expression to translate “bedtime” into Italian. [emphasis added]

Parks makes his living as a translator. If there were an Italian word for “bedtime,” he would know it. This absence of the word isn’t a failure of the Italian language; instead, it suggests a completely different set of ideas about children. Parks explains:

There is something coercive about the notion of a bedtime. It suggests that there comes a moment when parents actually force their little children to go to bed and will not take no for an answer, something unthinkable in these more indulgent climes. In explanation, I have to say that Michele “habitually goes to bed at seven o’clock,” which gives quite a different impression, and Francesca in particular marvels at what a wonderful little boy my Michele must be, hurrying off to his bed so early, not realizing that I had to pin the chap down for half an hour and more while I sang to him and told stories and said that Mummy would be back very soon, until finally he got more bored than I was and tired of all the crying he’d done and fell asleep. On more than one occasion I have heard such behavior described by Italians as cruelty. [from An Italian Education, 1995]
           
There may have been a bedtime for Bonzo, but not for Renzo

---------------------
* Mickey Bass went on to become a professional jazz bassist.  In the early 1970s, he was with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers (maybe the Pittsburgh connection had something to with it). He has played with Sonny Rollins, Hank Mobley, Lee Morgan, and other jazz greats.

Flashback Friday — Plus Ça Change

July 7, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

 A new cohort of French 18-year olds took the baccalauréat last month, but the names at the top and bottom of the distribution are pretty much the same as last year.

In France, kids’ names are a pretty good indicator of how well they’ll do on le bac – the test that determines how good a university they can attend. As I blogged a year ago:

A little data ’bout Jacques and Diane
Two French kids taking the college entrance exam.
Over in France it’s known as
le bac
Diane often gets
très bien, not so much Jacques.

The baccalauréat exam taken by French students at the end of high school serves as qualification for university admissions and scholarships and for certain jobs. Those who pass at the highest level get très bien. The other levels are bièn, assez bièn, pass, and not pass. For some reason, the government publishes the results for each prénom. This year, 89 students named Jacques took the exam. Of these, 75 passed, but only 11 of them at the très bien level.


That was then. It’s also now. One of sociology’s crucial insights is that rates are remarkably stable even though the individuals who make up those rates change from year to year. The Dianes who took the bac in 2017 are not the Dianes who took it the year before, but their rate of très bien was again over 20%.  And as ever, the kids with Anglo names – Kevin, Jordan, Dylan, Anthony, Samantha, Melissa, Cindy, et al. – cluster at the low end. Less than one in twenty managed a très bien.

Baptiste Coulmont (here) created this graph of the 2017 results.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)


As in previous years, the highest scoring names are female. Of the fourteen names with more than 20% among the très bien, Joseph is the only male.

The chart shows only the more popular names. For more on some of the rarer names – Guillemette, Quitterie, and others – see last year’s post (here).

UPDATE: July 9. M. Coulmont now has an interactive chart (here) with data for the years since 2012. 

Peter Berger — 1929 - 2017

June 30, 2017 
Posted by Jay Livingston

Flashback Friday

Peter Berger died earlier this week. The Times obit is here. His field was religion, but his two most widely read books were Invitation to Sociology (1963), which you can probably still find on the intro syllabus at some schools, and The Social Construction of Reality, co-written with Thomas Luckman (1966). The book quickly became a staple in theory courses, but soon the phrase and concept “social construction” broke through and crossed over into general use. Here is the Google nGram chart of its appearance in books.


Five years ago, I blogged about Berger’s work for the tobacco industry and his more recent efforts on behalf of the soft-drink industry. That blog post is what I am flashing back to below. At about the same time, Andrew Gelman, who knew well of Berger’s work as a shill for Big Cig, also had this to say (here):

But what impresses me is that Berger is doing regular blogging at the age of 84, writing a long essay each week. That’s really amazing to me. Some of the blogging is a bit suspect, for example the bit where he claims that he personally could convert gays to heterosexual orientation (“A few stubborn individuals may resist the Berger conversion program. The majority will succumb”)—but, really, you gotta admire that he’s doing this. I hope I’m that active when (if) I reach my mid-80s. (As a nonsmoker, I should have a pretty good chance of reaching that point.)


July 26, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sociologist Peter Berger is hauling out the strategy he used when he hired himself out to Big Tobacco.  His role then in Tobacco’s fight against regulation and other anti-smoking measures wasn’t to defend smoking as virtuous or healthful.  Instead, he was paid to discredit anti-smoking sentiment and organizations.  Berger’s tactic for this purpose was basically name calling combined with accusations that even if true were irrelevant.

This time, in a longish (2400 word) article at The American Interest , he’s speaking up for the people who bring us sugar water.  Or to be scrupulously accurate, he’s trying to discredit the anti-obesity, anti-diabetes forces trying reduce the amount of the stuff that people drink.

As I said, it’s a page from the same playbook he used when he was working for the folks who bring us cigarettes. He refers to the “vehement passion” of the anti-smoking and anti-obesity campaigns, and he exaggerates their goals (while showing off his erudition):
I suggested that it was in an age-old tradition of the quest of immortality, first described in the ancient Mesopotamian Gilgamesh Epic.
He also accuses them or their supporters of venal motives.
Successful morally inspired movements typically ally themselves with powerful groups motivated by very hard material interests.
This from someone who was being paid by a multi-billion dollar industry to further their material interests. This irony is apparently lost on Berger, who, interestingly, does not even hint that he got penny from Tobacco. Maybe he forgot.

In going after the movement to improve public health, his number one target is Mayor Bloomberg and the proposed ban on the sale of huge-sized sugar-water drinks in theaters, restaurants, and other public places. 

Again, Berger is not arguing that obesity is good for you.  Instead, he dusts off the old “immortality” barb – equating a desire to reduce diabetes and other illnesses with the vain and impossible goal of immortality. Berger does not tell us how he managed to discover this immortality fantasy in the minds of others, a deep motivation the anti-obesity people are themselves are unaware of. He just makes it the title of his article  (“Mayor Bloomberg and the Quest of Immortality”) and asserts it a few times. We have to take it on faith.

Berger makes the same arguments he used against anti-smoking campaigns:
  • The anti-obesity forces will be moralistic (Berger refers to them with religion-based words like crusaders, litany, preaching).  
  • They are elitist. Not only do they see their own lifestyle choices as virtuous, but they try to impose these on the working class. 
  • They ally themselves with people whose material interests are served by anti-obesity or with (shudder) bureaucrats. 
  • They are European, un-American.
I cannot say whether Bloomberg’s quasi-European lifestyle has anything to do with his idea of New York City as a quasi-European welfare state.*
Then there is the “slippery slope” argument – the scare tactic of exaggeration and false equivalency.
There is also an equivalent of the Saudi Arabian police force dedicated to “the promotion of virtue and the suppression of vice”—an army of therapists, coaches, educators, advice columnists, dieticians, and other moral entrepreneurs. To date (still) they mainly rely on persuasion rather than coercion. Wait a little. [Emphasis by Berger.]
Yes, you read that correctly.  If you can’t buy a 30-oz. cup of sugar-water and instead have to buy two 15-ounce cups, the Saudi police are just around the corner. 

I wonder what Berger and libertarians in general were saying back when the good-health forces were trying to get lead removed from gasoline and paint. Could you pretty much do a find-and-replace for the current article, just as that article is a find-and-replace version of his tobacco work?**

UPDATE:  Baptiste Coulmont tweets a link to a 2006 article (here) by a French sociologist, Robert Castel, which uncannily echoes Berger’s arguments.  Castel uses the same vocabulary of religion in mocking the anti-smokers, and he attributes to them the same desire for immortality.
Le fumeur d’hier comme le fumeur d’aujourd’hui transgresse le seul sacré que nous soyons désormais capables de reconnaître, le culte du corps, de sa santé, de sa longévité, sur lequel s’est finalement rabattu le désir d’éternité[emphasis added]

[The smoker of yesterday like the smoker of today transgresses the one sacred thing that we now recognize, the cult of the body -- its health, its lengevity -- which finally comes down to the desire for eternal life.]

He likens anti-smoking policies to Islamic authoritarianism:
ce mélange d’autoritarisme bien-pensant, de suffisance pseudo-savante et de bonne conscience sécuritaire qui caractérise souvent les ayatollahs de la santé. [emphasis added]

[a mixture of well-meaning authoritarianism, pseudo-scientific self-importance, and safety-awareness that characteries these ayatollahs of healt.]

And he sees the same slippery slope.
L’interdit du tabac n’est pas la dernière des prohibitions que l’on nous prépare.

[The banning of cigarettes is not the last of these prohibitions that they are preparing.]

The major difference from Berger is that, as far as I know, Castel was not being paid by Gauloises.

-------------------
*By the way, if you’re looking for an example of paralipsis or apophasis, look no further than that sentence.

** For more on Berger and Tobacco, see Aaron Swartz’s article (here).  (HT: Andrew Gelman).  And yes, this is the same Peter Berger that sociologists of a certain age may remember as the author of that staple of Soc 101, Invitation to Sociology, and also as co-author of The Social Construction of Reality.

Ceci n’est pas trash-talking

June 29, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

The reference in the title is to this canvas by René Magritte.



There must be a word for this – the statement that is self-contradictory – but what is it? (Of course you could argue that Magritte is technically correct. It’s not a pipe; it’s a picture of a pipe.)

Paralipsis and apophasis come close – emphasizing something by saying you’re not emphasizing it. In politics, for example: “I’m not even going to mention the rumors that my opponent has deep ties to the Russian Mafia and hires prostitutes to pee on him.”

I’m thinking of something a shade more subtle – the statement or image that is itself the opposite of what it claims to be.  It came to mind a couple days ago when a right-winger I know who likes to bait me sent an e-mail with this.

why should anyone on our side want Obama to succeed in “transforming” America into a cesspool of political correctness, creeping socialism, leftist thugs on campus, and appeasement of Islamic extremism?). 

By the way, are you down with programs to “re-educate” Americans who don’t see things your way? That’s what the left wants — clearly and openly. So resistance to all that brainwashing was the mission of Republicans under Obama, true. But I don’t remember any assassination fantasies.

Current climate different: Not only no hope for reconciliation, but rumblings of violence. Already one Republican Congressmen nearly assassinated. More politically motivated violence to come, no doubt. (Madonna fantasy “blow up the white house” / Depp actor assassination fantasy / Kathy Griffin beheaded Trump imagery / Shakespeare in the Park Trump vicarious assassination to hoots of delight, etc. — you have great friends, Jay.)


I said that I could do a similar caricature of conservatives, but why bother? It’s just trash talk. The point is to taunt rather than to discuss. Maybe on the basketball court trash-talking enhances the game (my correspondent does have a beautiful jump shot), but it doesn’t do much for understanding, and I just wasn’t interested in talking trash right now.

He wrote back. “Not trash-talking - just reality, unpleasant as it is.”  It’s a perfect example of the thing I’m trying to find the word for – trash-talking by saying that not you’re not trash-talking.

The same day, an even better example from Page Six showed up in my Twitter feed.