Contexts Crawler

CNN reports:

From the frontiers of mirth research, scholars offer these words of comfort: If you are mortified of dancing for fear of being the butt of jokes, don’t worry, you are far from alone. There’s even a word for it — gelotophobia. Sound like a disease involving Italian ice cream? No, it’s the potentially debilitating fear of being laughed at. This condition — the term comes from gelos, Greek for laughter — was among the topics discussed this week at a four-day meeting of the International Society for Humor Studies, an Oakland, Calif.-based collective of psychologists, sociologists, linguists and other academics who probe funniness from every conceivable angle

The setting for all this debate is the birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes, the author of “Don Quixote,” the mad knight who was always good for a laugh as he tilted at windmills. The president of the humor society, British sociologist Christie Davies, offered insights Tuesday on the state of humor in today’s world. Among other things, he said, jokes in eastern Europe were a lot better when the communists ran the show.

“Once you have a democracy with free speech, you have fewer jokes,” said Davies, an emeritus professor at the University of Reading, in England. “Jokes, in many ways, are a way of getting around restrictions on what you can say. That was a very important factor in eastern Europe.”

The full story.

The latest issue of Newsweek featured an article entitled, ‘The Future of Freedom: The Fate Of Liberty In The Next Century Is Fragile, In Part, Because The Very Notion Is Now So Ill-Defined.’

Newsweek reporter Robert J. Samuelson writes,

In a century scarred by the gulags, concentration camps and secret-police terror, freedom is now spreading to an expanding swath of humanity. It is not only growing but also changing–becoming more ambitious and ambiguous–in ways that might, perversely, spawn disappointment and disorder in the new century.

Undoubtedly, it was time for some sociologists to weigh in…

In 1900, this was unimaginable. “Freedom in the modern sense [then] existed only for the upper crust,” says political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset of George Mason University. There were exceptions–America certainly, but even its freedom was conspicuously curtailed, particularly for women and blacks.

…

Traditional freedom historically meant liberation from oppression. But now freedom increasingly involves “self-realization.” People need, it’s argued, to be freed from whatever prevents them becoming whoever they want to be. There’s a drift toward “positive liberty” that emphasizes “the things that government ought to do for us,” says sociologist Alan Wolfe of Boston College. This newer freedom blends into individual “rights” (for women, minorities, the disabled) and “entitlements” (for health care, education and income support) deemed essential for self-realization.

Read more.

The Washington Post reports, “the question of whether the country is happier today than it was in, say, 1970 turns out to have a surprisingly good empirical answer. For nearly four decades, researchers have regularly asked a large sample of Americans a simple question: ‘Taken all together, how would you say things are these days — would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy?’”

This new article includes the addition of commentary from sociologist Ruut Veenhoven who disputes a widely accepted theory from USC economist Richard Easterlin, known as the ‘Easterlin Paradox,’ which highlights the paradoxical disconnect between a nation’s economic growth and the growth of its happiness. This theory has traditionally been confined to rich, Western countries.

Easterlin attributes the phenomenon of happiness levels not keeping pace with economic gains to the fact that people’s desires and expectations change along with their material fortunes. Where an American in 1970 may have once dreamed about owning a house, he or she might now dream of owning two. Where people once dreamed of buying a new car, they now dream of buying a luxury model.

“People are wedded to the idea that more money will bring them more happiness,” Easterlin said. “When they think of the effects of more money, they are failing to factor in the fact that when they get more money they are going to want even more money. When they get more money, they are going to want a bigger house. They never have enough money, but what they do is sacrifice their family life and health to get more money.”

Sociologist Ruut Veenhoven counters:

Not everyone agrees with Easterlin and his economic-growth-is-not-the-way-to-happiness theory. Ruut Veenhoven, a sociologist in the Netherlands and the director of the World Database of Happiness, argues that wealth is actually a very reliable predictor of happiness. If you take a snapshot of people in different countries, he argues, the data shows that people in Denmark, Switzerland and Austria report being happier than people in the Philippines, India and Iran, and the people in those nations report being happier than those in Armenia, Ukraine and Zimbabwe.

Veenhoven has even come up with a measure similar to one used by public health officials to measure the burden of disease — how many years of happiness a person might enjoy in different countries. The Swiss apparently have the highest number of “happy life years” — 63.9 — while Zimbabweans have the least — 11.5. People in the United States have an average happiness of 57 happy life years.

Read more.

A recent article in the Washington Post discusses how members of the clergy, who have traditionally been courted by presidential candidates, are now liabilities, furhter complicating the role of religion in politics.

Washington Post staff writer, Michelle Boorstein writes,

“First it was Republicans, and now Democrats, scrambling in recent presidential elections to snuggle up closely to men of the cloth, seeking the endorsement of well-known clergymen and campaigning with preachers, all in an effort to demonstrate how godly they are.”

“But a curious thing has happened in this year’s contest for the White House. Candidates are having to distance themselves from preachers, almost as quickly as they had sought their embrace. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) denounced his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who was videotaped asserting that the federal government had brought the AIDS virus into black communities and that God should “damn” America.

Sociologist Jacques Berlinerblau weighs in…

“The chickens are coming home to roost,” said Jacques Berlinerblau, a Georgetown University sociologist who writes a religion and politics blog called “The God Vote.” A post that got 50,000 hits called “Huckobama” asked why Democrats who have criticized President Bush’s overt faith expressions aren’t more critical of Obama.

“That’s the new Faith-and-Values friendly liberalism of the Democratic Party in 2008. And that’s something that might make it hard for secularists to live their lives in peace,” he wrote.

Among the speeches Berlinerblau cited was one Obama made in February, preaching at length about Jeremiah 29, saying, “God has a plan for his people.” The separationist group Interfaith Alliance has been sending out alerts about candidates for months, including when Clinton said last June that she’d like to “inject” faith into policy and when McCain said in September that the Constitution established “a Christian nation.” The group also included an Obama speech in October in which he told an audience that, with prayer and praise, “I am confident that we can create a kingdom right here on Earth.”

A recent piece from the Week in Review by the New York Times included commentary on the upcoming elections and the racial divide. Times reporter Marcus Mabry writes, “whether Mr. Obama captures the White House in November will depend on how he is seen by white Americans. Indeed, some people argue that one of the reasons Mr. Obama was able to defeat Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was that a large number of white voters saw him as ‘postracial.’”

Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson was asked to comment.

“Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, argues that the one arena where black grievance is acceptable is in music, particularly in hip-hop, where an estimated 70 percent of listeners are white. But the generation exposed to hip-hop, mostly under 40, are part of what Mr. Patterson calls a growing “ecumenical” American culture that is unselfconsciously multiracial.

This Obama Generation came of age in the post-civil-rights age when color, though still relevant, had less impact on what one read, listened to or watched. It was the common crucible of popular culture, he said, that forged a truly American identity, rather than the “salad bowl” analogy cherished by diversity advocates.

Mr. Obama’s campaign so de-emphasized race that for most of the 17-month nomination contest much of the news media became obsessed with the question of whether he was “black enough” to win black votes.

Most African-American Democrats were for Hillary Clinton early on, until voters in Iowa proved to them that whites would support a black candidate.”

Full story.