Norman Cohen > Norman's Quotes

“knowing something about the deep origins of humanity only adds to the remarkable fact of our existence: all of our extraordinary capabilities arose from basic components that evolved in ancient fish and other creatures.”
― Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

“41 percent of all Americans believe the Second Coming “probably” or “definitely” will happen by the year 2050. Images of the rapture that believers have posted on the Internet suggest a growing gulf between those who rise to Heaven and those who stay on earth. In one image, svelte, well-dressed adults rise to a blue sky. Perhaps the rapture speaks to shared and understandable anxieties about an earthly economy, it occurs to me. For many congregants, well-paid, union-protected jobs through which a man could support a stay-at-home wife are gone for all but a small elite. Given automation and corporate offshoring, real wages of high school–educated American men have fallen 40 percent since 1970. For the whole bottom 90 percent of workers, average wages have flattened since 1980. Many older white men are in despair. Indeed, such men suffer a higher than average death rate due to alcohol, drugs, and even suicide. Although life expectancy for nearly every other group is rising, between 1990 and 2008 the life expectancy of older white men without high school diplomas has been shortened by three years—and truly, it seems, by despair. In their tough secular lives, life may well feel like “end times.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“As I reviewed the social terrain of the right-leaning people I had come to know—the companies, the state government, the church, Fox News—I reflected on my keyhole issue. Everyone I was talking to was enduring a great deal of pollution and despite the silence from companies, politicians, and state officials, nearly everyone clearly knew it. To some, such as Lee Sherman and Harold and Annette Areno, exposure had become the defining experience of their lives. To others, it was a passing matter. While many, like Madonna Massey, spoke of their love of capitalism, the dominant industry in their economy presented a decidedly mixed story. Oil was highly automated and accounted for some 15 percent of jobs—and even some of those were going to foreign workers at lower pay. The state had made huge cuts to local jobs and social services in order to bring in companies and, instead of money trickling down, a third of it was leaking out. To some degree, the community had become the site of local production without being the site of local producers. They were victims without a language of victimhood.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“The right seeks release from liberal notions of what they should feel—happy for the gay newlywed, sad at the plight of the Syrian refugee, unresentful about paying taxes. The left sees prejudice. Such rules challenge the emotional core of right-wing belief. And it is to this core that a free-wheeling candidate such as the billionaire entrepreneur Donald Trump, Republican candidate for president in 2016, can appeal, saying, as he gazes upon throngs of supporters, “See all the passion.” We can approach that core, I came to see, through what I call a “deep story,” a story that feels as if it were true. As though I were seeing through Alice’s looking glass, the deep story was to lead me to focus on a site of long-simmering social conflict, one ignored by both the “Occupy Wall Street” left—who were looking to the 1 and the 99 percent within the private realm as a site of class conflict—and by the anti-government right, who think of differences of class and race as matters of personal character. The deep story was to take me to the shoulds and shouldn’ts of feeling, to the management of feeling, and to the core feelings stirred by charismatic leaders.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“Today, although many such strikes continue—the Walmart strike of 2012, for example—many industrial work sites have been moved offshore to Mexico, China, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Other forms of social conflict have arisen in different theaters. One theater animates the politics of the left. It focuses on conflict in the private sector between the very richest 1 percent and the rest of America. Occupy Wall Street has such a focus. It is not between owner and worker over a higher wage or shorter hours of work. It is between haves and have-nots, the ever-more-wealthy 1 percent and the other 99 percent of Americans. What feels unfair to Occupy activists is not simply unfair recompense for work (the multi-million dollar bonuses to hedge fund managers alongside the $8.25 hourly rate for Walmart clerks) but the absence of tax policies that could help restore America as a middle-class society. For the right today, the main theater of conflict is neither the factory floor nor an Occupy protest. The theater of conflict—at the heart of the deep story—is the local welfare office and the mailbox where undeserved disability checks and SNAP stamps arrive. Government checks for the listless and idle—this seems most unfair. If unfairness in Occupy is expressed in the moral vocabulary of a “fair share” of resources and a properly proportioned society, unfairness in the right’s deep story is found in the language of “makers” and “takers.” For the left, the flashpoint is up the class ladder (between the very top and the rest); for the right, it is down between the middle class and the poor. For the left, the flashpoint is centered in the private sector; for the right, in the public sector. Ironically, both call for an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“In the undeclared class war, expressed through the weary, aggravating, and ultimately enraging wait for the American Dream, those I came to know developed a visceral hate for the ally of the “enemy” cutters in line—the federal government. They hated other people for needing it. They rejected their own need of it—even to help clean up the pollution in their backyard.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“Jackie was a Worshipper. She had developed a worshipful attitude and a capacity for meaningful renunciation. Instead of overcoming her aversion to regulation, Jackie spoke of learning to live without it. In this way, she echoed Team Loyalists like Janice Areno. You accommodate. Clean air and water; those were good. She wanted them, just as she wanted a beautiful home. But sometimes you had to do without what you wanted. You couldn’t have both the oil industry and clean lakes, she thought, and if you had to choose, you had to choose oil.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“To Donny, the Cowboy expressed high moral virtue. Equating creativity with daring—the stuff of great explorers, inventors, generals, winners—Donny honored the capacity to take risk and face fear. He could take hard knocks like a man. He could endure. Janice Areno had accommodated environmental pollution through loyalty to job-providing industries and the party she identified with them. Jackie Tabor had accommodated it because it was “the sacrifice we make for capitalism.” Donny accommodated out of respect for bravery. Each expressed a deep story self.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“Putting the 1860s and the 1960s together, white men of the South seemed to have lived through one long deep story of being shoved back in line. If in the nineteenth century the big planters had reduced the lot of the poor white farmer, twenty-first-century corporations had gone global, automated, moved plants to cheaper workers or moved cheaper workers in, and deftly remained out of sight over the brow of the hill. Some 280 of the most profitable American companies had dodged taxes on half of their profits, according to a 2011 study, but in the history-soaked deep story, you couldn’t see that. You were left to imagine it, to feel you couldn’t do anything about it. And to make matters worse, it was your sector, the free market, that was letting you down. Meanwhile, white wages leveled or sank and welfare expenditures rose.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“What seemed like a problem to liberals—the fact that conservatives identify “up,” with the 1 percent, the planter class—was actually a source of pride to the Tea Party people I came to know. It showed you were optimistic, hopeful, a trier. It wasn’t a problem that you seldom looked behind you in line. Why would you want to blame a guy if he got all the way to the top? they wondered. That gaze forward, even when matters seemed hopeless, was a feature of the brave deep story self. But such a self was less and less a source of honor, it seemed. Rising to the fore was another kind of self, a more upper-middle-class cosmopolitan self, with its more dispersed and looser friendship networks, its preparation to compete for entrance to big-name colleges and tough careers that might take a person far from home. Such cosmopolitan selves were directed to the task of cracking into the global elite. They made do with living farther away from their roots. They were ready to go when opportunity knocked. They took great pride in liberal causes—human rights, racial equality, and the fight against global warming. Many upper-middle-class liberals, white and black, didn’t notice what, emotionally speaking, their kind of self was displacing. For along with blue-collar jobs, a blue-collar way of life was going out of fashion, and with it, the honor attached to a rooted self and pride in endurance—the deep story self. The liberal upper-middle class saw community as insularity and closed-mindedness rather than as a source of belonging and honor. And they didn’t see that, given trends “behind the brow of the hill,” their turn to be displaced might be next. For the Tea Party around the country, the shifting moral qualifications for the American Dream had turned them into strangers in their own land, afraid, resentful, displaced, and dismissed by the very people who were, they felt, cutting in line. The undeclared class war transpiring on a different stage, with different actors, and evoking a different notion of fairness was leading those engaged in it to blame the “supplier” of the imposters—the federal government.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“Looking back at my previous research, I see that the scene had been set for Trump’s rise, like kindling before a match is lit. Three elements had come together. Since 1980, virtually all those I talked with felt on shaky economic ground, a fact that made them brace at the very idea of “redistribution.” They also felt culturally marginalized: their views about abortion, gay marriage, gender roles, race, guns, and the Confederate flag all were held up to ridicule in the national media as backward. And they felt part of a demographic decline; “there are fewer and fewer white Christians like us,” Madonna had told me. They’d begun to feel like a besieged minority. And to these feelings they added the cultural tendency—described by W.J. Cash in The Mind of the South, though shared in milder form outside the South—to identify “up” the social ladder with the planter, the oil magnate, and to feel detached from those further down the ladder. All this was part of the “deep story.” In that story, strangers step ahead of you in line, making you anxious, resentful, and afraid. A president allies with the line cutters, making you feel distrustful, betrayed. A person ahead of you in line insults you as an ignorant redneck, making you feel humiliated and mad. Economically, culturally, demographically, politically, you are suddenly a stranger in your own land. The whole context of Louisiana—its companies, its government, its church and media—reinforces that deep story. So this—the deep story—was in place before the match was struck.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“Those on the far right I came to know felt two things. First, they felt the deep story was true. Second, they felt that liberals were saying it was not true, and that they themselves were not feeling the right feelings. Blacks and women who were beneficiaries of affirmative action, immigrants, refugees, and public employees were not really stealing their place in line, liberals said. So don’t feel resentful. Obama’s help to these groups was not really a betrayal, liberals said. The success of those who cut ahead was not really at the expense of white men and their wives. In other words, the far right felt that the deep story was their real story and that there was a false PC cover-up of that story. They felt scorned. “People think we’re not good people if we don’t feel sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees,” one man told me. “But I am a good person and I don’t feel sorry for them.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“It was them and not them, maybe the ones they’d never been. I could almost see those others standing in the garden where the pea plants were, feet planted between the rows. They stood without moving, their faces glowing with some shine a long time gone. A time before I lived. Their arms hung at their sides.

They’d always been there, I thought blearily, and they’d always wanted to be more than they were. They should always be thought of as invalids, I saw. Each person, fully grown, was sick or sad, with problems attached to them like broken limbs. Each one had special needs.

If you could remember that, it made you less angry.

They’d been carried along on their hopes, held up by the chance of a windfall. But instead of a windfall there was only time passing. And all they ever were was themselves.

Still they had wanted to be different. I would assume that from now on, I told myself, wandering back into the barn. What people wanted to be, but never could, traveled along beside them. Company.”
― Lydia Millet, A Children's Bible

“In his impatience, the fact that the colonized subject brandishes the threat of violence proves that he is aware of the exceptional nature of the current situation and that he intends to make the most of it. But also on a more immediate personal level, as he sees the modern world penetrate the remotest corners of the interior, he becomes acutely aware of everything he does not possess. The masses, by a kind of (infantile) reasoning, are convinced they have been robbed. In certain developing countries, therefore, they are quick to catch on and realize two or three years after independence their hopes have been dashed: "What was the point of fighting" if nothing was really destined to change? In 1789, after the bourgeois French Revolution, the humblest French peasant gained substantially from the upheaval. But it is common knowledge that for 95 percent of the population in developing countries, independence has not brought any immediate change.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“For Arendt, Fanon's violence leads to the death of politics; for Sartre, it draws the fiery, first breath of human freedom. I propose a different reading. Fanonian violence, in my view, is part of a struggle for psycho-affective survival and a search for human agency in the midst of the agony of oppression. It does not offer a clear choice between life and death or slavery and freedom, because it confronts the colonial condition of life-in-death. Fanon's phenomenology of violence conceives of the colonized — body, soul, culture, community, history—in a process of "continued agony [rather] than a total disappearance.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“You do not disorganize a society, however primitive it may be, with such an agenda if you are not determined from the very start to smash every obstacle encountered. The colonized, who have made up their mind to make such an agenda into a driving force, have been prepared for violence from time immemorial. As soon as they are born it is obvious to them that their cramped world, riddled with taboos, can only be challenged by out and out violence.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“This threatening atmosphere of violence and missiles in no way frightens or disorients the colonized. We have seen that their entire recent history has prepared them to "understand" the situation. Between colonial violence and the insidious violence in which the modern world is steeped, there is a kind of complicit correlation, a homogeneity. The colonized have adapted to this atmosphere. For once they are in tune with their time. People are sometimes surprised that, instead of buying a dress for their wife, the colonized buy a transistor radio. They shouldn't be. The colonized are convinced their fate is in the balance. They live in a doomsday atmosphere and nothing must elude them. This is why they fully understand Phouma and Phoumi, Lumumba and Tschombe, Ahidjo and Moumié, Kenyatta and those introduced from time to time to replace him. They fully understand all these men because they are able to unmask the forces behind them. The colonized, underdeveloped man is today a political creature in the most global sense of the term.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“From Senegalese chauvinism to Wolof tribalism, there is but one small step. And consequently, wherever the petty-mindedness of the national bourgeoisie and the haziness of its ideological positions have been incapable of enlightening the people as a whole or have been unable to put the people first, wherever this national bourgeoisie has proven to be incapable of expanding its vision of the world, there is a return to tribalism, and we watch with a raging heart as ethnic tensions triumph. Since the only slogan of the bourgeoisie is "Replace the foreigners," and they rush into every sector to take the law into their own hands and fill the vacancies, the petty traders such as taxi drivers, cake sellers, and shoe shiners follow suit and call for the expulsion of the Dahomeans or, taking tribalism to a new level, demand that the Fulani go back to their bush or back up their mountains.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“Now that they have fulfilled their historic mission of bringing the bourgeoisie to power, they are firmly asked to withdraw so that the bourgeoisie can quietly fulfill its own mission. We have seen, however, that the national bourgeoisie of the underdeveloped countries is incapable of fulfilling any kind of mission. After a few years the disintegration of the party becomes clear and any observer, however superficial, can see for himself that the only role of the former party, now reduced to a skeleton, is to immobilize the people. The very same party, which during the liberation struggle became the focus of the entire nation, now decomposes. The current behavior of the intellectuals, who on the eve of independence had rallied around the party, is proof that such a rally at the time served no other purpose than to have their share of the independence cake. The party becomes a tool for individual advancement.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“course if we choose to use a language comprehensible only to law and economics graduates it will be easy to prove that the masses need to have their life run for them. But if we speak in plain language, if we are not obsessed with a perverse determination to confuse the issues and exclude the people, then it will be clear that the masses comprehend all the finer points and every artifice. Resorting to technical language means you are determined to treat the masses as uninitiated. Such language is a poor front for the lecturer's intent to deceive the people and leave them on the sidelines. Language's endeavor to confuse is a mask behind which looms an even greater undertaking to dispossess. The intention is to strip the people of their possessions as well as their sovereignty. You can explain anything to the people provided you really want them to understand. And if you think they can be dispensed with, that on the contrary they would be more of a nuisance to the smooth running of the many private and limited companies whose aim is to push them further into misery, then there is no more to be said.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“The duty of the colonized subject, who has not yet arrived at a political consciousness or a decision to reject the oppressor, is to have the slightest effort literally dragged out of him. This is where non-cooperation or at least minimal cooperation clearly materializes. These observations regarding the colonized's disposition to work could also be applied to the colonized's attitude toward the colonizer's laws, his taxes, and the colonial system. Under a colonial regime, gratitude, sincerity, and honor are hollow words.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“In his Preface to the first edition of Peau noire, masques blancs Francis Jeanson tells how one day he wrote to Fanon asking for clarification of a particularly obscure passage in the book. An answer was duly furnished and Fanon added: "This passage is inexplicable. When I write such things I seek to touch my reader in his emotions, i.e., irrationally, almost sensually." Further on in his letter Fanon goes on to confess how he is drawn to the magic of words and that for him language is the ultimate refuge, once it is freed from conventions, from its voice of reason and the terror of coming face-to-face with oneself. "Words for me have a powerful effect. I feel it impossible to escape from the sting of a word or the vertigo of a question mark." He went on to say that, like Césaire, he wanted to sink beneath the stupefying lava of words that have the color of quivering flesh.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“The Aztecs, so the story goes, routinely disemboweled eight thousand faithful a week in their temples of the sun, a sacrifice to the god of the clouds to make him send them rain. Such things are hard to believe until you get mixed up in a war. Once you’re in a war, you see how it is: the Aztecs’ contempt for other people’s bodies was the same as my humble viscera must have inspired in our above-mentioned General Celadon des Entrayes, who, thanks to a series of promotions, had become a kind of chickenshit god, an abominably exigent little sun.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“A poor man in this world can be done to death in two main ways, by the absolute indifference of his fellows in peacetime or by their homicidal mania when there’s a war. When other people start thinking about you, it’s to figure out how to torture you, that and nothing else. The bastards want to see you bleeding, otherwise they’re not interested! Princhard was dead right. In the shadow of the slaughterhouse, you don’t speculate very much about your future, you think about loving in the days you have left, because there’s no other way of forgetting your body that’s about to be skinned alive.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn’t get you anywhere.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“Beauvoir seemed more sensitive than Sartre was to these subtle interzones in human life. The Second Sex was almost entirely occupied with the complex territory where free choice, biology and social and cultural factors meet and mingle to create a human being who gradually becomes set in her ways as life goes on. Moreover, she had explored this territory more directly in a short treatise of 1947, The Ethics of Ambiguity. There, she argued that the question of the relationship between our physical constraints and the assertion of our freedom is not a ‘problem’ requiring a solution. It is simply the way human beings are. Our condition is to be ambiguous to the core, and our task is to learn to manage the movement and uncertainty in our existence, not to banish it. She hastens to add that she does not believe we should therefore give up and fall back on a bland Sisyphus-like affirmation of cosmic flux and fate. The ambiguous human condition means tirelessly trying to take control of things. We have to do two near-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control. In Beauvoir’s view, existentialism is the philosophy that best enables us to do this, because it concerns itself so deeply with both freedom and contingency. It acknowledges the radical and terrifying scope of our freedom in life, but also the concrete influences that other philosophies tend to ignore: history, the body, social relationships and the environment.”
― Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others

“The pull of fascist politics is powerful. It simplifies human existence, gives us an object, a “them” whose supposed laziness highlights our own virtue and discipline, encourages us to identify with a forceful leader who helps us make sense of the world, whose bluntness regarding the “undeserving” people in the world is refreshing. If democracy looks like a successful business, if the CEO is tough-talking and cares little for democratic institutions, even denigrates them, so much the better. Fascist politics preys on the human frailty that makes our own suffering seem bearable if we know that those we look down upon are being made to suffer more. Navigating the tensions created by living in a state with a democratic sphere of governance, a nondemocratic hierarchical economic sphere, and a rich, complex civil society replete with organizations, associations, and community groups adhering to multiple visions of a good life can be frustrating. Democratic citizenship requires a degree of empathy, insight, and kindness that demands a great deal of all of us. There are easier ways to live.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“Between 1971 and 2013, Conservative Judaism went from being the denominational home of 41 percent of American Jews to representing only 18 percent. Along the way, the career of Jeffrey Myers would suffer the same fortunes as the movement.”
― Mark Oppenheimer, Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood

“Much of our public discourse about work starts from the assumption that the economists’ model is correct. People have to be compelled to work; if the poor are to be given relief so they don’t actually starve, it has to be delivered in the most humiliating and onerous ways possible, because otherwise they would become dependent and have no incentive to find proper jobs.4 The underlying assumption is that if humans are offered the option to be parasites, of course they’ll take it. In fact, almost every bit of available evidence indicates that this is not the case. Human beings certainly tend to rankle over what they consider excessive or degrading work; few may be inclined to work at the pace or intensity that “scientific managers” have, since the 1920s, decided they should; people also have a particular aversion to being humiliated. But leave them to their own devices, and they almost invariably rankle even more at the prospect of having nothing useful to do.”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory