Obituary

Her story will almost certainly be unfamiliar to non-Irish readers, but “it’s an important one”:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2008/0911/1221039067831.html?via=mr.

The death has taken place of Wexford school teacher Eileen Flynn, who became an important figure in the history of the separation between the Catholic Church and the State. In August 1982 Ms Flynn was dismissed from her job as an English and history teacher at the Holy Faith Convent in New Ross, Co Wexford. At the time she was sacked, Ms Flynn was unmarried with a baby son and was living with the baby’s father, a separated man, Richie Roche. Two months after Ms Flynn gave birth she received a letter from the school manager informing her that following her decision not to resign from the school her position was being terminated. The letter referred to complaints from parents about her lifestyle and of her open rejection of the “norms of behaviour” and the ideals the school existed to promote. It also reminded her of the “scandal” already caused. Ms Flynn sought to be reinstated in her post but lost her unfair dismissal case at the Employment Appeals Tribunal and at the Circuit Court. She finally lost her appeal to the High Court on March 8th, 1985.

A key piece of background information here is that she was sacked from what was, effectively, a state school. The Irish state had farmed out the larger part of the education system to the Catholic Church (albeit with separate schools for the Protestant minority), so that while the state paid teachers, the parish priest was typically the local school manager. This wasn’t all bad, but stories like Eileen Flynn’s remind me why I don’t particularly like efforts by some US religious groups to push the boundaries between church and state. The ability to deprive people who don’t conform to local mores of their livelihood is likely to become a dangerous and pernicious form of social control, as it did in Ireland for most of the last century.

I didn’t know him, although I did know and love his novels – Patrick Nielsen Hayden knew man and work both, and has “more of substance”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010413.html#010413 to say than I ever could. John Clute “reviewed”:http://www.scifi.com/sfw/books/column/sfw18985.html his most recent book a couple of weeks ago, and quoted a poem that he published in the _Paris Review,_ “The Moon on the Crest of the New-Fallen Snow.” I liked it a lot.

Pain

Has its place—and pity, too—but it is not here.
Here all is calm and cold and luminous.
The snow has smoothed over the tracks of the deer.

Just ten days or so ago Henry wrote that Chuck Tilly had won the SSRC’s Hirschman Prize, and linked to a classic paper of his. Tilly died this morning. He had been battling cancer for several years.

Tilly was a comparative and historical sociologist, an analyst of social movements, a social theorist, a political sociologist, a methodological innovator — none of these labels quite capture the scope of his work. I think of him as someone who was interested in the general problem of understanding social change, and he attacked it with tremendous, unflagging energy. Here is one of his own self-descriptions:

Among Tilly’s negative distinctions he prizes 1) never having held office in a professional association, 2) never having chaired a university department or served as a dean, 3) never having been an associate professor, 4) rejection every single time he has been screened as a prospective juror. He had also hoped never to publish a book with a subtitle, but subtitles somehow slipped into two of his co-authored books.

I saw him speak on several occasions and met him a few times, too. I particularly remember him giving the Mel Tumin lecture at Princeton, and a great chat I had with him in his office at Columbia. He was a small, wiry man who always seemed to be smiling and, like a true Weberian charismatic figure, he seemed able to transmit some of his own brio to you as he talked.

Humphrey Lyttelton has died. The Guardian has an obituary written by George Melly, who also happens to be dead.

I first came across Lyttelton not on Radio 4, but in Peter Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, of all places. He pops up there in an anecdote showing why some kinds of social practice are in principle not amenable to precise predictions derived from some (putative) social physics. Lyttelton was once asked if he knew where jazz was going, and replied “If I knew where jazz was going, I’d be there already.”

For our many George Formby fans, the first of a two part bio of George Formbys Sr and Jr. Less mournful than the bio of Kenneth Williams, and more hard-hitting than the one on the SWP (though that’s not saying much!). Here’s George jr, with his greatest hit of all.

This NYT article, The Decline of the $20 Wage”, on the vanishing blue-collar worker with a middle-class income is both depressing and…confusing. Adjusting the numbers for inflation is at least alluded to initially:

Leaving aside for a moment those who have lost their jobs, what of those who still have them? Once upon a time, a large number earned at least $20 an hour, or its inflation-adjusted equivalent, and now so many of them don’t.

However, from this point on the article seems to talk about wages which were $20-an-hour or above in the past–even as far back as the 70s–and are now less than $20 in nominal terms.

The $20 hourly wage, introduced on a huge scale in the middle of the last century, allowed masses of Americans with no more than a high school education to rise to the middle class. It was a marker, of sorts. And it is on its way to extinction….

Hourly workers had come a long way from the days when employers and unions negotiated a way for them to earn the prizes of the middle class — houses, cars, college educations for their children, comfortable retirements. Even now a residual of that golden age remains, notably in the auto industry. But here, too, wages are falling below the $20-an-hour threshold — $41,600 annually — that many experts consider the minimum income necessary to put a family of four into the middle class….

Since [the 1970s] the percentage of people earning at least $20 an hour has eroded in every sector of the economy, falling last year to 18 percent of all hourly workers from 23 percent in 1979 — a gradual unwinding of the post-World War II gains.

The decline is greatest in manufacturing, where only 1.9 million hourly workers still earn that much. That’s down nearly 60 percent since 1979, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

The shrinkage is sometimes quite open. The Big Three automakers are currently buying out more than 25,000 employees who earn above $20 an hour, replacing many with new hires tied to a “second tier” wage scale that never quite reaches $20. A similar buyout last year removed 80,000 auto workers. Many were not replaced, but many were, with the new hires paid today at the non-middle-class scale, and with fewer benefits.

Surely $20 an hour in the 70s would be $60 or so an hour now, adjusted for inflation? It makes a big difference to this article and the author has totally failed to explain the issue. ‘Fewer people of this class make even 1/3 as much per hour as they did 30 years ago’ is a very different message from ‘fewer people of this class make this inflation-adjusted wage.’ It seems clear the article implies the former but muddies the waters with the nominal wage, ironically further masking the dramatic decline of the blue-collar middle class.

The “NYT obituary”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/business/media/27cnd-buckley.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin is here.

Update: “Rick Perlstein”:http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/why-william-f-buckley-was-my-role-model writes that William F. Buckley was his ‘role-model.’ It’s an interesting piece.

I’m hard on conservatives. I get harder on them just about every day. I call them “con men.” I do so without apology. And I cannot deny that William F. Buckley said and did many things over the course of his career that were disgusting as well. I’ve written about some of them. But this is not the time to go into all that. My friend just passed away at the age of 82. He was a good and decent man. He knew exactly what my politics were about—he knew I was an implacable ideological adversary—yet he offered his friendship to me nonetheless. …

Then came a very nice column. The passage from my book he reproduced quoted a “liberal” reporter on Goldwater: “What could such a nice guy think that way?”

Why did I love WFB? Because he never would have asked such a silly question. The game of politics is to win over American institutions to our way of seeing things using whatever coalition, necessarily temporary, that we can muster to win our majority, however contingent—and if we lose, and we are again in the minority, live to fight another day, even ruthlessly, while respecting our adversaries’ legitimacy to govern in the meantime, while never pulling back in offering our strong opinions about their failures, in the meantime. This was Buckleyism—even more so than any particular doctrines about “conservatism.”

Nice people, friends, can disagree about the most fundamental questions about the organization of society. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We must not fantasize about destroying our political adversaries, nor fantasize about magically converting them. We must honor that some humans are conservative and some humans are liberal, and that it will always be thus. …

Buckleyism to the end: friendship, and adversarialism, coinciding. All of us who write about politics, may that be our role model.

Update 2: See “Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/02/a-historical-re.html and “Patrick Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009999.html#009999 for different perspectives.

California representative Tom Lantos died earlier today. I’ll take this opportunity to mention the Oscar-winning film The Last Days (I’ve blogged about it before here). It’s a very powerful documentary in which Lantos is one of the five people featured. My one critique of The Last Days movie was that it ignored the plight of people like my grandmother (who died twenty years ago last week, at almost 80) and father who went back to Hungary after their time in a camp instead of emigrating. That doesn’t detract from the value of The Last Days. But I think it’s important to recognize that there is a sufficiently different outcome from very similar circumstances depending on where one went after those horrors. In any case, I learned about many things from watching that film, including details about Tom Lantos that may be lesser known. I thought this was a good occasion to mention the documentary again.

I don’t imagine many readers will be shedding tears at the death of former Indonesian dictator Suharto, and certainly I won’t be. The bloody massacres in which he rode to power amid the collapse of the Sukarno regime, and the brutal invasion and occupation of East Timor, not to mention his spectacular corruption, mark him down among the worst political criminals of a terrible century. Like some other dictators, he managed some significant successes in economic management, but overreached himself in the period leading up to the Asian economic crisis if 1997, which brought his downfall from power. Unfortunately, hostility to the Suharto regime has coloured attitudes to Indonesia in the decade since his fall from power, certainly in Australia and I suspect elsewhere.

In fact, Indonesia has been remarkably successful in dealing with what was, in many respects, a poisonous legacy from the Suharto era.
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Via Chris Brooke comes the sad news that Andrew Glyn has died, apparently from a brain tumour that was diagnosed only recently, and was inoperable. The only obit I can find so far is at Socialist Unity blog. I realise that a good number of our readers must have known him, so I’m sorry to be the one who brings the news. I didn’t know him, but our circles intersected a good bit, and mutual friends and acquaintances always spoke very warmly of him. So I always imagined I would meet, and enjoy chatting with, him someday.

Telegraph obituary here. No consolation at all, but if, despite my unbelief, there’s a heaven and hell, I just hope he and Linda Smith got to the same place.

UPDATE: a delicious memoir from Michael Bywater here. From it here is Coren on adultery:

“I would never have an affair,” he said, “because I wouldn’t want my children to have for their mother the sort of woman who would be married to a man who would cheat on her.”

“A report in last Sunday’s Observer”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2185461,00.html carries the news of the death of André Gorz and his wife Dorine in a suicide pact. Gorz was a kind of Cassandra of the left: in the 1968 _Socialist Register_ he published a piece telling us that the great era of revolutions was over. Just a few months later he was ridiculed as May 68 unfolded. But he was right. In the early eighties he published _Farewell to the Working Class_. Absurd! we all thought, as the striking British miners seemed to reaffirm the transformative power of the industrial proletariat. He was righter than we were. And he started thinking about green issues when the rest of the left thought of all that as a petty-bourgeois indulgence. Again, he saw more clearly than most of us did.

My colleague Susan Hurley died last Thursday night. She had been ill for some time, but many of us still held on to the hope that someone as energetic and determined as Susan was would survive. Susan had only joined us at Bristol fairly recently, but she had had a tremendous impact on the Department of Philosophy. She was a great inspiration for graduate students and a formidable interlocutor for her colleagues. Susan is well known to the wider philosophical community for her books _Natural Reasons_ and _Justice, Luck and Knowledge_ as well as for an impressive array of “papers”:http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~plslh/ . Her interests were very broad, ranging from decision theory and political philosophy, through philosophy of mind, psychology and neuroscience. Lately it had been neuroscience that had engaged her, and she was keen to articulate a distinctively naturalistic view of what philosophy is that makes it very much continuous with the natural sciences. Many of us didn’t agree with Susan about that, but she was pretty good at forcing us to reexamine our own lazy assumptions in thinking through why. She’s a real loss to the profession and to the academic community more widely: someone who was committed to the discipline, who was generous with her time and person, and whom many students at Bristol, Warwick, Oxford and elsewhere will remember for having got them really excited about philosophy. We will all miss her.

Just this morning I was contemplating how horrible it must be for the people who suddenly lost their homes in the fire around Lake Tahoe. By the afternoon I was watching firefighters from my office window battle flames on Stanford’s hills.

I was sitting at my desk already unable to work having just received word about the death of Peter Marris, Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at UCLA, dear husband of Dolores Hayden who was a fellow Fellow at CASBS this year. The two of them had to end their year at the Center early, because Peter was sick, but I don’t think any of us expected things to escalate so quickly.

Unable to concentrate on work, I turned around to look at the beautiful view from my office. I spotted some big red flames. Soon I realized that a large area around it was completely black with smoke and flames on the periphery. Eventually sirens and helicopters appeared, as did firefighters. Some of the smoke was now white not just black, apparently a good sign. But not all the black smoke disappeared and an hour later there was still much activity. I went to an event and by the time I got back to my office, another hillside was completely black (see the difference in the left area of the two photos above).

How quickly things can change.