{"id":193,"date":"2008-08-20T14:06:29","date_gmt":"2008-08-20T20:06:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/crawler\/?p=193"},"modified":"2008-08-20T14:06:29","modified_gmt":"2008-08-20T20:06:29","slug":"credit-and-blame-from-the-late-charles-tilly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/2008\/08\/20\/credit-and-blame-from-the-late-charles-tilly\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Credit and Blame’ from the late Charles Tilly"},"content":{"rendered":"

This past Sunday’s New York Times<\/a> book review examined ‘Credit and Blame,’ a new book from the late Charles Tilly. Alexander Star of the Times writes:<\/p>\n

Two years ago, the sociologist Charles Tilly, who died this spring at the age of 78, published \u201cWhy?,\u201d a slim volume examining our compulsive drive to give reasons for what we do. Explaining, he stressed, is a social art; what counts as a good reason always depends on the relationship between who\u2019s giving the reason and who\u2019s taking it. If you spill a glass of wine on a stranger, you might shrug it off with a conventional remark like \u201cI\u2019m a klutz.\u201d If you spill a glass of wine on your wife, you are more apt to tell a story: \u201cI was feeling nervous because of the bills.\u201d It\u2019s one thing to give someone a bad explanation. It\u2019s even worse to give the wrong kind of explanation. If you expect your doctor to give you a technical account of your illness and you receive a clich\u00e9 instead, you feel you are not being taken seriously.<\/p>\n

In \u201cCredit and Blame,\u201d Tilly looks just as closely at our most ethically freighted explanations. When something happens that alters our environment for the better or for the worse, we are rarely content simply to say, \u201cOh well, those are the breaks,\u201d or \u201cI suppose I got lucky this time.\u201d Instead, we leap at the chance to deem someone \u2014 anyone \u2014 responsible. We blame our parents when we are unhappy, and credit them for their sacrifices when they die. Thanking friends and family at the Academy Awards ceremony may be, as another sociologist has written, \u201cthe ultimate American fantasy\u201d of giving credit, while winning a lawsuit against a local polluter may be the ultimate fantasy of affixing blame.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

WARNING: Spoiler Alert<\/p>\n

As a sociologist, Tilly was more interested in how we assign credit and blame than when it\u2019s right to do so. Should we care that when a chief executive attributes his company\u2019s success to his own intelligence or decisiveness, he\u2019s probably wrong? Why do we put more blame on someone who drives through a stop sign at night and kills a child than on the countless others who drive through stop signs and kill no one? Tilly does not answer such questions, but his analysis suggests that for all the bad judgments we may make about the supposed malfeasance of terrorism-neglecting bureaucrats or the homeless, our habits are not easily reformed. Blaming, he argues, is not a vice or an aberration but an essential habit that allows us to maintain and repair our relationships with others. Our justice detectors are not fundamentally defective. They are suited to the task of setting things right \u2014 approximately.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The full review.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past Sunday’s New York Times book review examined ‘Credit and Blame,’ a new book from the late Charles Tilly. Alexander Star of the Times writes: Two years ago, the sociologist Charles Tilly, who died this spring at the age of 78, published \u201cWhy?,\u201d a slim volume examining our compulsive drive to give reasons for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39074],"tags":[39112,66,117],"class_list":["post-193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sightings","tag-culture","tag-theory","tag-trends"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":194,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions\/194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}