Legalize the Hallucinogens, Too

Drug Week, Part 2

While we are reforming the drug laws, I think we should legalize the hallucinogens, too.

I don't like them either. I like staying in reality.

Nonetheless, the people on hallucinogens are rarely dangerous to others, and the drugs themselves do not seem to be addictive. They don't, as far as I have read, have many other side effects. Some drugs that do seem dangerous, like PCP, are sometimes classed as hallucinogens. If we ever get down to cases we can argue the safety of each drug.

Let the FDA regulate them for quality. Tax them. Use police resources for something else.

Marijuana is No Worse Than Bourbon

I think the time may finally be ripe to legalize marijuana.

Let me say clearly that I do not use it. I think it makes people act stupid. I see no appeal in it personally. And my kids would still be in big trouble if they used it.

I feel pretty much the same way about bourbon.

The nation tried a great national experiment in prohibiting alcohol. It failed. Kentucky is now proud of making bourbon. The nation is now trying a great experiment in prohibiting marijuana. It failed. Kentucky already produces a great deal of marijuana. If it were legal, the state would be proud of producing that, too.

I think "sin taxes" are a good idea. When we legalized, regulated, and taxed alcohol production, the product got safer, most of the criminals were driven out of the business, and the state got lots of revenue. The same would happen with marijuana.

Legalize pot now. And tax it hard.

Bright Idea at the Posse Retreat

I just got back from the Posse Plus Retreat. Posse is a scholarship program that sends a group of students from the same city (Boston, in Centre College's case) to college together as a mutual support group. Each spring all the posses (there is one group admitted each year) host a retreat for a larger group of students, faculty, and staff. It is always a great retreat, full of good talk, bonding, hilarity, and usually one Bright Idea. One that seems bright to me, anyway.

Right now the college offers the Centre Commitment. We promise that the college will make it possible for each student to study abroad, have an internship, and graduate in four years. If we fail, the student can have another year, on us.

We came up with a possible fourth plank for the Centre Commitment: We promise that the college will make it possible for a student to graduate with no more than $10,000 of debt.

This is just in the workshop stage, and no one with the power to make it so has bought into it yet. I think, though, that it would be a popular idea, and fits with the spirit of the rest of the Centre Commitment.

I will let you know if this notion bears fruit.

The Kentucky 50 by 50

I enlist your help in making a list of the 50 things in Kentucky that every Kentuckian should see or do.

In ten days I will be 49. I have lived in Kentucky for the last 19 years. I have done a few things that I think all Kentuckians should do -- been to Lincoln's birthplace, attended a race at Keeneland, been to the state capitol, eaten at Moonlite Bar-B-Q. Still, there are many I have not. I have never been to the Kentucky Derby. I have never really explored the Red River Gorge. I have not been to the Louisville Slugger Museum.

So I propose to post a list of the 50 things I want to see and do in Kentucky before I turn 50 in 2010. Please send me your suggestions.

I will post the list on my birthday (April 13). I expect the debate about the list will be interesting.

Is a Social Imaginary a Habitus?

Charles Taylor describes a social imaginary as a repertory of practices that a people use to make sense of their social world. This sounds like what Pierre Bourdieu means by a habitus. I think Taylor is contrasting a social imaginary, which ordinary people hold and act on, with a social theory, which intellectuals use to evaluate the world. Bourdieu contrasts a habitus with, among other things, a social structure imagined as a permanent thing, rather than a practice that people enact.

I think Taylor and Bourdieu start from different points, but converge on something quite similar - and quite useful in understanding how society is actually lived and made.

Viewing Society Objectively

Charles Taylor, in Modern Social Imaginaries, has clarified an issue that is always a problem for me in teaching a sociological view of society.

It is normal for people to think of society from their personal perspective, of the people we know and the institutions that we interact with. We know there is a big world beyond what we know, but we tend to view it as like what we know, multiplied by millions. One of the great gifts that sociology brings is the ability to see that there are many kinds of people who are not like us. Sociology lets us see the big picture of society. Indeed, I think modern societies are so big and so complex that they could not function without sociology. Sociology provides the reflexive knowledge that makes it possible to make order in huge complex societies, as well as to understand order in huge complex societies.

I understand the big picture overview. James Scott's excellent book Seeing Like a State captures this sense of what it means to see society as a whole. Individuals disappear; the state planner deals with whole categories of people - sexes, races, classes, regions, religions, etc. Seeing like a state is, in a sense, one subset of seeing like a sociologist, of having a sociological imagination of society as a whole.

However, it is alienating to only see society from this large category, bird's-eye perspective. If you are the state manager or the equivalent (a captain of industry, a news publisher, a general) the state-level view is empowering. On the other hand, if you are not, if you are among the millions being managed, the state-level view is the opposite of empowering.

Some sociologists focus instead on how society is an open field for collective action. They study social movements. They study how ordinary people band together to fight the established powers and change the world. Indeed, such sociologists encourage, join, even lead social movements.

Sociology as a discipline, therefore steps back from society to view it both as a highly structured field of order, and a highly fluid field of resistance to, and reshaping of, that order.

Charles Taylor says that these two views are flip sides of the same coin of the modern social imaginary. In premodern societies, the society, the nation, the kingdom was one because it was anchored in a point or act that transcended ordinary time. God appointed the king, who unified the kingdom. The nation existed from time immemorial and embodied its primordial rights.

Modern societies, by contrast, are understood to have been made by "the people" in ordinary time. The state began to gather information to run this new kind of secular (meaning "in time") society to tax it, arrange its military security, create its representative institutions, and do the thousand and one things that states now do. If that is all that had happened in making modern states, we would only have, and only need, the "seeing like a state" view of society.

But modern societies also developed a counter-perspective on society, and with it a place for making counter-actions: the public sphere. The public sphere is the place in which social movements are made. They counter and balance the state.

Both the view from perspective of the state, and the view from the perspective of the public sphere - the view from the coffee house, if you will - are ways of viewing society objectively.

The Public Sphere is Secular

Charles Taylor's Modern Social Imaginaries is concerned primarily with how modern society created three new spheres in which people could act: the economy, the public, and "the people." All three were created by imagining them as separate from, and a check on, the polity - the state, as we now think of it.

Premodern Europeans already thought of a sphere separate from the state which acted as a partial check on it: the church. The public sphere, Taylor suggests, is analogous to the church. But there is an important difference: the public sphere is secular. Taylor does not mean that the public sphere has to be separated from God, nor that the people acting in it must be separated from religion. Rather, he means that the public sphere is a place created in time by the people (some of them, anyway) acting collectively. And the way the people interact with the polity, and the economy, and the democratic machinery of the people as sovereign, all take place in time with reference to the order of this world.

The time of the public sphere is homogeneous, profane time. We may think of religious time or eternity as also existing, but the business of the public sphere is conducted in this world's time. And the business of the public spheres of other societies are also conducted in time - in the same time and in the same relation to time.

The modern public sphere makes the "public opinion" of the modern social imaginary essentially secular in the way it is made.