Ceteris Paribus

The "niceness" movement, and what to do about it...

Kenneth Minogue writes (from the UK):

The insistent question is this: how is it that so many schools have moved from the orderly world of that time [1960s--4BZ] to the violent distraction and educational failure of today? It is a complicated story in which the causal links can only be speculative. We must, of course, recognise that we are a very different society from that of two generations ago, better no doubt in some ways, worse in others. And the causal links we detect are only ever part of the story. 

Many social conditions have been identified as part of the change, but behind most of them, I suggest, is a massive change in our moral sentiments: notably, a rise in the currency of politicised compassion. This is a sentiment so much part of the air we breathe that it does not even have a name of its own. I began to be fully aware of it only in 2002, the year in which Teresa May, then chairman of the Conservative Party, electrified politics by suggesting at the party conference that many people regarded the Conservatives as "the Nasty Party". "Nice" and "nasty" began to surface out of the deeper waters of moral thought and sentiment to become actual tokens of political discussion, so we may for convenience call this whole tendency by the unlikely name of "the niceness movement". In these terms, the supreme moral virtue is compassion. 

This sentiment is not, of course, the niceness and decency that we rightly admire when individuals respond helpfully to others. It is a politicised virtue, which means that it is focused not on real individuals but on some current image of a whole category of people. Correspondingly, it invokes hostility towards those believed to have caused the pain and misery of others. Public discussion thus turns into melodrama. A very powerful version of this doctrinal compassion maps the distinction of oppressor and oppressed on to almost any social or international situation, and this mapping automatically directs our sympathies. Further, our sympathy for the oppressed is a demonstration to ourselves of our own benevolence. The fact is, of course, that political exponents of niceness may or may not be personally generous and benevolent. Doctrine is not character. 

Changes in family and educational life in our time cannot be understood without taking account of this immensely powerful idea of public compassion. The niceness movement seeks to abolish pain and stigma in every area of society. Important elements of it can be detected at least as far back as the 18th century, but it is only in our time that "nice" and "nasty" have revealed themselves as politically dichotomous. The remark about "the nasty party" was clearly what is often called "a seminal moment", because a whole political party sidelined policy distinctions between "left" and "right" in order to demonstrate Conservative niceness-about race, about single mothers, young persons wearing hoods and so on. 

[...]

We might therefore interpret the niceness movement as a feminisation of education, but in fact its range is wider. Its project is to banish pain (including the pains of duty) from our lives. It seeks to replace fear as the basis for good conduct in favour of rational understanding. It is above all hostile to punishment. We need not doubt, of course, that punishment is a rough and brutish idea. It seldom does full justice to the human complexities involved in delinquency. The great legal historian Frederick William Maitland wrote that the Greeks never developed a satisfactory system of law because they were always seeking the most philosophically satisfactory judgment in a case. Punishment is a curious structure confected from justice on the one hand and social order on the other. It is partly a retributive restoring of balance in a notional moral universe, partly a device for deterring bad conduct and partly an attempt to reform the character of the delinquent. Making law correspond to justice is the endless business of legislators, and rules can never catch up with changing circumstances. Lawyers and judges sometimes think that their business is to mete out justice rather than enforce the law, a mistake that muddles their wits and leads to judicial activism. To judge current law by the test of abstract justice can look like an admirable piece of idealism, but it generally leads to an endless merry-go-round of improving expedients that only move problems elsewhere. 

To lose one's grip on the centrality of punishment in our civilisation is to destroy the crucial balance between punishment and reward. Without the balancing severities of punishment and criticism, praise and reward take on the aspect of bribes, which demeans both those that give and those that receive. But the managers of our world increasingly resort to inducements. Teenagers aged 17-18 from poor families in Britain have been given Educational Maintenance Allowances to induce them to stay on at schools after the age of 16. Schools reported that most of the beneficiaries exploited the system, turning up to the classroom only to qualify for the grant. The idea that people should be paid to perform their duties is a pure case of the corruption that has doomed underdeveloped countries to poverty. The destruction of the punishment/reward balance is importing the same moral collapse here.

RTWT.

Pure comedy gold...I'm just not sure who to credit...

...the Obama administration, or Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal. Here's Dan, whose op-ed is titled " Obama's 'Hair of the Dog' Stimulus":

Medical science long ago debunked "hair of the dog" as a cure for hangovers. This truth, however, does not stop even the most intelligent on occasion from trying a wee nip of more-of-the-same to mitigate the symptoms of prior excess. We may call this the Paradox of Pleasure.

The American economy is about to explore on a grand scale a morning-after elixir the economist John Maynard Keynes called the Paradox of Thrift. Currently, the world's leading proponent of the paradox of thrift as a cure for what press parsons call "the excesses of the Bush era" is the president of the United States, Barack Obama.

On Tuesday Mr. Obama signed into law his $787,000,000,000 stimulus plan. Within the bill is a tax credit called "Making Work Pay." When Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked on Jan. 29 if any part of the president's plan was untouchable, he singled out Making Work Pay. This provision is the stimulus plan's booster rocket.

Keynesian stimulus only ends or softens a recession if most of the money is spent, rather than saved. If suddenly parsimonious Americans save too much of the plan's outlays, it won't work.
[...]
Short-term economic stimulus, somewhat like a recreational drug, seeks an immediate "injection" of money into the economy, not the slow, steady drip of normal investment.

The Obama people keep telling audiences how "smart" their government is going to be, and Making Work Pay is a clever way to overcome humanity's unfortunate impulse to save rather than spend in hard times.

The provision will cut the payroll tax in a way that on average puts an extra $8 in a worker's weekly paycheck. The genius behind this idea is that eight bucks is such a pittance that no one will take the trouble to save it. It will all get spent, and stimulus theory succeeds.
[...]
Still, it looks to me as if there is a Paradox of Virtue in the middle of the Obama stimulus.

George Bush tried stimulus last year by mailing out checks up to about $1,200, and human nature "defeated" that stimulus by saving too much of the check. The U.S. savings rate rose in 2008 to nearly 4%. That was bad. The smarter Obama team wants the savings rate this year and next to return toward zero. They want their billions spent, not saved.

Thus, frugality and prudence are suppressed and the compulsion to spend that got us into this mess is promoted as a necessity. This year and next, Thorstein Veblen's conspicuous consumption will be a virtue, and Max Weber's Protestant ethic may be regarded a vice. The world is upside down.

The Obama hair-of-the-dog strategy, however, may be running into a values-altering headwind. The people have been watching, and what they've seen are the wretched excesses of the subprime lending fiasco, the humiliation of Wall Street's clueless plutocrats, and the self-destructive ambition of Bernie Madoff's investors. This may force a change.

Vogue editor Anna Wintour commented in the Journal this week on the changing world of the spending ladies: "I don't think she is going to shop the way she used to in the immediate future." Ms. Wintour says "there's a very correct correction going on."

Indeed. Anxious parents might even introduce their children to ancient habits, such as a dollar-pinching weekly allowance or passbook savings accounts (if they still exist).

Another problem for the stimulus is that Mr. Obama himself is an unconvincing evangelist for spending our way to economic salvation. Bill Clinton could sell it. But Barack Obama's austere persona reminds me of a character who might inhabit an Ingmar Bergman movie. He calls to mind one of Max von Sydow's portraits of grim Lutheran self-denial.

I think the "correct correction" is upon us. The massive jolt to personal wealth the past year is likely to reverse the decades-long drop in the personal savings rate. The administration's hopes for a trillion dollars of Keynesian spending are going to be tripped up by a new mood of national sobriety.