Back to Basics #17 

            I recently praised traditional-style conservatism, of the sort that nowadays puts its adherents — e.g., me — on the Left. Here, however, I'll start by admitting that I was born and raised liberal and accept the label "progressive"; or, as Alexander Cockburn of the oldish Left might want me to put it, "Hi; my name is 'Rich,' and I'm a 'pwog.'"

            In my lifetime, there really has been progress.

            I was too young to remember, but my family told the story about how the cleaning woman took me to a movie in Terre Haute, Indiana, ca. 1947, and we had to sit in the balcony because she was Black. Terre Haute — in Indiana, for God's sake! — was segregated. My father told us one of the first things he did when becoming manager of the KB Store in Terre Haute — toys and clothes and such at the time — the first thing he did was take out and burn the Ku Klux Klan paraphernalia cached there. Indiana was a major center for the 20^th-c. KKK.

            When I was 18, I saw neo-Nazis marching in downtown Chicago; in my late 20s, I had my life threatened by the Minutemen; and when I was 30-something I could have gone to "Uptown" Oxford, Ohio, and watched a pathetic march by the dying Klan.

            There has been progress in race relations and women's rights, and progress away from "Compulsory Heterosexuality."

            And cars nowadays are much better made, and automobile and bike tires — and light bulbs — don't regularly blow out.

            Etc. — But ….

            But, on the other hand, the 20^th-century witnessed two world wars, producing the highest body counts in human history, and the Cold War resulted in the stockpiling of enough nuclear weapons to destroy the human species.

            And outside of automobiles and tires and some other products, there has been a strong trend toward shoddiness.

            So a basic principle of great importance is the obvious point that "Change is not necessarily progress."

            And one of the reasons for this is "The Iron Law of Fashion" which often worked as The Great Wheel of Fashion, in which New! Improved!! would often be a recycling of the old.

            Shakespeare joked about fashion, and Mark Twain wrote on it profoundly (and in a way that powerfully influenced my thinking); but you may not believe in the strength of fashion, let alone its Iron Laws.

            My students at Miami University generally didn't believe, which I found fascinating, since almost all of them seemed to have a keen sense of fashion, and to obey fashion loyally. But many of them — most of the guys — insisted that they dressed (etc.) as they pleased.

            I pointed out that they might dress as they pleased, but what pleased them seemed to fall in a very narrow range, so that they mostly dressed similarly.

            When I mentioned the wide range of styles worldwide currently and over time, they countered that they bought what was available. I noted that I had had one student who really did follow "a different drummer," but, yeah, he told me he had to order his clothes from a costume shop in, I think, the San Francisco area — which wouldn't be convenient where we were, in Oxford, OH.

            So I did some informal research.

            E.g., the rule at Miami University (and most places) had once been, "Thou shalt not wear thy backpack over both thy shoulders lest" (as one of my students noted) "thou shouldst look like a bloody Boy Scout." During the time of this one-shoulder rule, I observed a male undergraduate, on a high, 10-speed racing bike, exiting a parking lot, going onto a dangerous road, in a strong wind — and riding precariously with his bookbag backpack over one shoulder.

            The risks: on the one hand, death, maiming, or dismemberment in a car-bike accident; on the other hand, looking like a dork. So he risked the accident.

            For a follow-up exercise, one of my students wore his backpack over both shoulders and said he felt uncomfortable — but no one commented. More exactly, no one commented until he buckled the bottom strap around his waist. A stranger came up to him on campus and told him, more or less, "Dude, that looks stupid."

            It wasn't necessary — his internal cop was on duty — but he got ticketed, sort of, by the Fashion Police.

            A little later, the fashion flipped, and I did a count of 100 backpackers on Miami's Oxford campus: 98 with backpacks over both shoulders, 2 with backpacks over one (and one of those might have had an early version of the pack that goes at an angle only over one shoulder).

            Then there was the custom among guys — I'll pick on my own sex, mostly — to wear basketball shoes unlaced. And so a number of my students did, even during The Times of the Great Blizzards in the 1970s. And so they trudged into class, fashionable high-tops filled high with snow and ice, and I could watch them as the glop melted and feeling came back into their feet.

            By the third or fourth day, even the most macho idiot was wearing winter footwear, but a fair number of guys had toughed it out for a couple of days, in fairly serious pain.

            "The reader," as math textbook authors use to say, "can provide further examples on his own" — and if he can't, she can, if, say, she actually thought seriously for a moment of buying a pair of stiletto-heal platform shoes.

            Fashion is very powerful, and it has rules.

            A woman who'd had course in such things explained to one of my classes, and me, the most basic rules.

            First, many of us, some of the time, want to Stand out!!! Simultaneously, almost all of us, most of the time, want to fit in (or blend in and pretty much disappear). The tension between these impulses means that few of us will be fashion leaders. Leadership in fashions comes from those with little to lose: people at the top of the social system or at the bottom or coming in from the margins — which is why gays, lesbians, celebrities, the new rich, various outlaws, and teenagers are the source of many fashions.

            The second great principle is that where options are limited — skirt length, width of men's ties, tightness or bagginess of blue jeans — styles are recycled, but always spaced.

            A straightforward example is granny glasses: Hippy rebels couldn't wear glasses such as Mom and Dad wore, but Grandma's style was OK. If your parents and older siblings now wear rimless glasses that Granny finds a little old-fashioned, you can go over to horn-rims and a Buddy Holly look.

            With clothes, fashion matters greatly for commerce, but its Iron Laws are mildly ridiculous. Mark Twain thought the issue funny but also highly serious. He wrote in "Corn-Pone Opinions" (1901/1923), "I am persuaded that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of our notice and interest, is a most rare thing--if it has indeed ever existed."

            That's a broad, and scary, statement, pointing at an important truth.

            There is progress in the sciences, but even there we can find cycles of fashions: particles vs. waves, geometry vs. particles, catastrophism vs. uniformitarianism. In the sciences we have to look hard, however, whereas I think old experts in less rigorous academic fields will have no problems finding fads and fashions.

            I try to avoid arguments with academic philosophers (especially amateurs and semi-pro philosophers in, say, English departments), but I'll tentatively suggest the hypothesis that it is no coincidence that mid-20^th century stress upon authenticity, freedom, and humans' defining ourselves through choices was followed by the 1970s with theories denying autonomy, choice, and (eventually) even the existence of some sort of self to be free and make choices.

            Over in the LitCrit departments, ideas about the "organic unity" of works produced by artists making choices were replaced by "death of the author" theories.

            Hey — you ain't gonna make a name for yourself agreeing with older scholars; if you don't want to be a disciple, you have to figuratively kill off the old farts and their ideas. And then the next generation of rebels can rehabilitate the grand-parental figures while shoving aside the new old farts. Or if not rehabilitate, maybe just ignore the dead and steal some ideas, or reinvent them (the ideas, that is).

            Academic studies can indeed make progress, and, at the same time, academic politics often involve fashions.

            If Twain is right, so do politics politics.

            Twain saw and despised "The Gilded Age"; we have also lived through a "Gilded Age" and may still be in one; and in our Gilded Age we may be seeing a speeding up of cycles in political fashions. Alternatively viewed, we may be seeing changes in academic fashions having tragic results in the real world.

            After the US Vietnam debacle, there was a period of modesty in US foreign policy. About a decade of modesty — and then theories of "the end of history" in "a Monopolar World" of American "Empire": i.e., we cycled from a bit of humility back to American exceptionalism. Add to this triumphalism some New! Improved! theories like "The Revolution in Military Affairs" and "Deficits don't matter" and ta-dum!, the US goes into Iraq and deeper debt. Add to that, fashionable deregulation, and we were well on our way to where we are today.

            Most literate Americans know Twain, if at all, from Tom Sawyer and depoliticized readings of Huckleberry Finn. We need more 20th-century Twain, the despairing comic philosopher who wrote, "We are creatures of outside influences; as a rule we do not think, we only imitate. We cannot invent standards that will stick; what we mistake for standards are only fashions, and perishable."

            And what we unthinkingly "think" is progress, is often just return of a fashion that perished, it seemed, before our time.