current issue
The authors in this issue of Social Research step back and take stock of what patience means to them, and in the process they come up with new insights into suffering, forbearance, divine authority, human queueing behavior, delayed gratification, savings behavior, and more. Patience evidently repays attention as a topic, but also as a lens into other topics. Sometimes, it tends to escape inspection because it has the transparency of a window. Luckily for us, this transparency is shot through with smudges and fingerprints, issuing from history, cultural variation, poetic and policy conventions, all marks of human efforts to define, capture, and harness patience. Still, patience resists being etherized upon the table of social science. It thus requires a measure of methodological slyness....
The essays in this volume illustrate the plenitude of issues that can be read more closely through the lens of patience. Through this plethora of perspectives, one thing that emerges to my editorial eye is that patience is an endangered virtue in our speed-driven times. Whether we wish to preserve and protect patience as a virtue is a vital question, but to debate that question properly, we need the very virtue we increasingly lack.
​
Social Research:
An International Quarterly
The New School for Social Research
79 Fifth Avenue, 16th Floor
New York, NY 10003
​
Tel.: +1 212.229.5776
Email: socres@newschool.edu
Impatience is a defining aspect of the modern world and its identity, as is starkly exemplified in the emphasis on technology. It is the central mode along which individual and social life are organized. In contrast, for Mahatma Gandhi patience is the crucial category for healthy individual and social existence.
​
​
Two critiques of mass media in the twentieth century gestured at its effects on the capacity of patience. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and Daniel Boorstin’s The Image examine how the media changed our imagining of the world, the scope of its relevance for us, and our ways of being in it. This article follows their lead by inquiring how being online further undermines the capacity for patience, manifested most clearly in the self-generating rage characteristic of social networks’ discourse. It refers this effect to three basic elements of the online world: the ubiquitous timeline format, the hybrid creature of written speech created by it, and digital objects that adapt themselves too closely to our needs, imaginings, and desires. All three foster a disruption of distances, where the remote and unfamiliar are experienced as unbearably close, a blurring of distinctions between inner life and external reality. A world composed of digital objects has lost what Hannah Arendt described as its power to “relate and separate people at the same time.”
​
​
Many consumers suffer from present bias. To present-biased consumers, the long term is a foreign country, and they are not sure they will ever visit. If consumers suffer from present bias, there is room to rethink national policies in multiple domains. Regulatory mandates might turn out to be better than economic incentives. Fuel economy and energy efficiency mandates might produce billions of dollars in annual savings to present-biased consumers. The net benefits of mandates that simultaneously reduce internalities and externalities might exceed the net benefits of incentives that reduce externalities alone, even if mandates turn out to be a highly inefficient way of reducing externalities.
​
​
A RACE AGAINST TIME: PATIENT SUFFERING IN THE CLINIC
The play of patience and impatience is often powerfully active in the experiences of the clinic. The onset of an illness, the exposure to suffering, and the awareness of our mortality that it awakens compel us to negotiate and renegotiate our relationships with time and with others. Seen in this way, drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, what emerges is not a fixed value but rather a continuous axis in relation to which we valorize the complex and multifaceted ways in which we relate to the unfolding of time.
​
PATIENCE IN THE ISLAMIC LIFEWORLD
While the exhortation to patience is commonplace in literary and religious traditions across the world, equally widespread are diverging etiquettes of patience and varied histories of its reception. The focus in this essay is on the medieval reception of patience in the Islamic world and the manifold ways in which that history has informed its modern invocations. Finally, the political purchase of patience is brought under relief by juxtaposing competing languages of statecraft in Iran and the United States.
​
HOURLY GRATIFICATION: THE POETICS OF PATIENCE IN AN AGE OF SPEED
The first serious and sustained literary response to cultural acceleration in modern society comes not from Benjamin or Simmel, as some have suggested, nor the work of Baudelaire and Flaubert, but the poetic experiments of Wordsworth. At the turn of the nineteenth century Wordsworth confronted an impatient mediascape, inhabited by readers requiring “outrageous stimulation” that the “rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.” He published poetry that programmatically tried the patience of his readers and changed the course of literary history. He also evolved a theory of patience, passion, and poetic genius that shaped literature and criticism through the twentieth century, but had its opponents early and late, from Percy Shelley to Raymond Williams.
​
ALL HE NEEDED WAS A HULL: SLOW CRITICISM IN CANCEL CULTURE TIMES
The essay traces an arc from a true story of shipwreck involving the ships Patience and Deliverance in the seventeenth century to a twenty-first-century conversation between the artificial intelligence system ChatGPT and the author on the subjects of patience and narrative crisis. It is suggested that deliverance from crises is integral to the conceptual structure of both patience and narrative. Features of patience as a “postcrisis virtue” are then sought to be captured within a triangulation of concepts: urgent patience (paradoxical and action-oriented), narrative patience (methodological and linguistic), and fake patience (mechanical and emotionless), leading on to a tentative listing of some features of a “slow criticism” attentive to the fractious anxieties of our times.
previous issue
THE CROWD
Vol. 90, No. 2 | Summer 2023
Guest edited by James Walkup
Articles by
Michael T. Heaney
Christian Borch
Sara Vestergren & Yasemin Gülsüm Acar
Brady Wagoner, Sarah H. Awad & Séamus A. Power
Gary Alan Fine
Mischa Gabowitsch
Stefan Jonsson
Robert Samet
Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury
next issue
Articles by
Peter M. Asaro
Franz Baumann
Sue Donaldson & Will Kymlicka
Mark Goodale
Philip Mirowski
Jeffrey K. Olick
Mario L. Small
Mai Taha
Kerry Whigham
MOST CITED
ARTICLES
• Chantal Mouffe, “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?” (Fall 1999)
• Jerome Bruner, “Life as Narrative” (Spring 1987)
• Peter Miller, “Governing by Numbers: Why Calculative Practices Matter” (Summer 2001)
• Richard S. Lazarus, “Hope: An Emotion and a Vital Coping Resource against Despair” (Summer 1999)
• Emanuel A. Schegloff, “Body Torque” (Fall 1998)
popular THIS
MONTH
• Wendy Doniger, “Gods as Difficult Guests in Greek and Indian Mythology” (Spring 2022)
• Mark Juergensmeyer, “Martyrdom and Sacrifice in a Time of Terror” (Summer 2008)
• Lawrence D. Bobo and Victor Thompson, “Unfair by Design: The War on Drugs, Race, and the Legitimacy of the Criminal Justice System” (Summer 2006)
• Axel Honneth and Raymond Geuss, “The Moral Birth of French Structuralism. Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss” (Fall 2018)
• Emma Seppala, Timothy Rossomando, and James R. Doty, “Social Connection and Compassion: Important Predictors of Health and Well-Being” (Summer 2013)
recent issues
news
SOCIAL RESEARCH
BACK ISSUES SALE
​
Back issues of the journal are available for purchase in special bundles.
Discover new authors and shop the multi-issue packages now.
​
THREE / FOUR ISSUES FOR $30
​
FIVE / SIX ISSUES FOR $50