Pinocchio Politics

February 27, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the Puritan mind, virtue is found in dutiful hard work, and easy pleasure is the road to ruin.  That mentality still reigns in certain strains of American thought. 

In yesterday’s post about Charles Murray, I said that US conservatives imagined  Europe to be something like Pleasure Island in the Disney version of Pinocchio.  Murray is fairly vague about the penalties Europeans pay for their pleasures.  He says only that they miss out on the satisfactions that we Americans have – doing a meaningful job, being a good friend, etc.  – though I don’t think he provides much evidence for that assertion.

In Pinocchio, the penalties are clearer and more terrifying.   The forces that govern the island and lull the boys with pleasure eventually transform them into donkeys.   A boy’s ears suddenly grow long and furry.  A tail springs out from his backside, tearing a hole in his pants.   When he realizes what is happening, as he sees his hands turn to hooves, he tries desperately to resist, but in vain.  He is now a donkey, a dumb beast under the command of the Island government.  This is the inevitable sad end for all the boys on the island. 



Do Europeans face a similarly horrible outcome?  While Murray demurs, Rick Santorum boldly speaks out.  Last week a New York Times blog embedded a video of Santorum relating his fantasies about the Netherlands.  It’s well know that the Dutch government is unusually indulgent of pleasures.  Not only is it generous in the usual Euro-socialism categories (family allowances, vacation weeks, unemployment insurance, etc.).  But the government even licenses drug dens and brothels.  Amsterdam is a Pleasure Island for grown-ups.

But pity those fools.  For just as Pinocchio’s peers paid a price, so do the Dutch.  The wages of their sin, according to Santorum, is not Donkeyism.  It’s Death.



Here’s a transcript of the first part of the clip.

In the Netherlands, people wear a . . . bracelet, if you’re elderly.  And the bracelet is “Don’t euthanize me.” 
Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands, but half the people who are euthanized every year — and it’s 10 percent of all deaths for the Netherlands — half of those people are euthanized involuntarily, at hospitals, because they are older and sick. And so elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital, they go to another country, because they’re afraid because of budget purposes that they will not come out of that hospital if they go into it with sickness.

It’s not true, of course.  There is no forced euthanasia in the Netherlands, and the elderly Dutch do not wear the bracelets that Santorum imagines.  (The Times blog reports on the stringent requirements for legal voluntary euthanasia.)

I do not know why conservatives are so irresistibly drawn to this fantasy of death – forced euthanasia and death panels–  but they are.  They must convince themselves and others that universal affordable health care, health care that people don’t have to work and suffer for, must be a mortal danger.

 It’s one thing to use this pleasure/danger idea in cautionary tales for children – Pinocchio or Hansel and Gretel.  It’s another to use it as the basis of lies in discussing public policy.

Europe – the Tempations of Pleasure

February 26, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

At the ESS, in almost each session I attended, a speaker would refer to Charles Murray’s recent book.  This would happen in the Q-and-A, not in the formal presentation, and the speaker would invariably add that he or she had not yet actually read the book. 

Neither have I.  But for the purposes at hand, what we get from the reviews or excerpts is probably sufficient.  I’ll be curious to actually read the book and see Murray’s data on the moral disintegration of the white working class, but what strikes me now is Murray’s choice of bad guys – the liberal white elite. 

This explanation is nothing new.  Forty years ago, James Q. Wilson was making the same argument to explain the increase of drugs, crime, welfare, and out-of-wedlock births among African Americans in the 1960s.  It seemed unlikely then that what kids in Bed Stuy were doing had anything to do with ideas about “self-actualization” and “self-expression” that were becoming popular at Brandeis and Berkeley. But that was the argument Wilson was making.

Fast forward to 2012, and who does Murray blame for trends among poor whites?  Educated liberals . . . even though Murray allows that their behavior is exemplary. Yet they are to blame because they have not raised their voices in judgment on the ways of poorer whites.  This reluctance to preach is immoral not just in its consequences; its causes too may be venal.

If you are of a conspiratorial cast of mind, nonjudgmentalism looks suspiciously like the new upper class keeping the good stuff to itself.

Murray and Wilson are smart guys, so it must be something other than the evidence (or lack of evidence) behind their anti-liberal animus.  Something leads them to see a causal link between the behavior of rich liberals and that of poor people, and that something seems to be the Protestant Ethic*, a mind-set that makes them deeply suspicious of pleasure.  Virtue, in this Protestant-Ethic view, resides in self-denial, and much of Murray’s book is about how the decline in virtue has led to personal and social disaster. (My earlier post on this is here. )

But even where this abandonment of the Protestant Ethic has had no such visible ill effect, Murray insists that something is wrong.  Like in Europe.  Murray writes about the Europe  “Syndrome” – a complex of “symptoms.”  But it’s different from other diseases because it’s just so darned attractive.  In this passage late in the book, Murray looks across at Europe and sees an incarnation of the Pleasure Island scene in Disney’s Pinocchio.

There’s a lot to like about day-to-day life in the advanced welfare states of western Europe. They are great places to visit. But the view of life that has taken root in those same countries is problematic. It seems to go something like this: The purpose of life is to while away the time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible, and the purpose of government is to make it as easy as possible to while away the time as pleasantly as possible – The Europe Syndrome.

Europe’s short workweeks and frequent vacations are one symptom of the syndrome. The idea of work as a means of self-actualization has faded. The view of work as a necessary evil, interfering with the higher good of leisure, dominates . . . The decline of fertility to far below replacement is another symptom. Children are seen as a burden that the state must help shoulder, and even then they’re a lot of trouble that distract from things that are more fun. The secularization of Europe is yet another symptom. Europeans have broadly come to believe that humans are a collection of activated chemicals that, after a period of time, deactivate. If that’s the case, saying that the purpose of life is to pass the time as pleasantly as possible is a reasonable position. Indeed, taking any other position is ultimately irrational.

The alternative to the European Syndrome is to say that your life can have transcendent meaning if it is spent doing important things – raising a family, supporting yourself, being a good friend and good neighbor, learning what you can do well and then doing it as well as you possibly can. Providing the best framework for doing those things is what the American project is all about. (p.284)

Those poor Europeans.  They’ve been turned into donkeys, leading meaningless lives, unaware of the absence of transcendent meaning in their lives – sans friends, sans neighbors, sans family, sans craftsmanship, sans belief, sans everything but their sybaritic pleasures.

No wonder the Republicans constantly warn us against the temptations of “European-style socialism.” The warning is not really necessary since most Americans don’t know about legally mandated vacation time, maternity leave, paternity leave, government support for all families with children, job protection, and other family-friendly policies. Nevertheless, the conservative helmsmen stuff our ears with wax and lash themselves to the mast lest the siren song of European pleasure lead us off our American course.

----------------------
* Robin Hanson, from whose blog I borrowed the excerpt from Murray’s book, says that Murray’s view of vice and virtue is part of the agricultural stage of society – “a farmer-style intellectual point of view” (the full blogpost is here). The agricultural revolution stretches back thirty centuries, give or take, but I think the puritan ideology Murray exemplifies is much more recent – not necessarily simultaneous with the rise of Protestantism, but not far off.

Inflation - Garden Variety

February 22, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sports is a business. 

The Dow is getting close to 13,000.  The Knicks are getting close to .500.  This month at least, it’s the Knicks who have been doing better, but then the Dow doesn’t have Jeremy Lin.  The Knicks do. 

The Knicks are owned by MSG, and the change in the Knicks’s fortunes has been taking place not just on the floor of the Garden but on the floor of the Stock Exchange as well.  Here is the chart of MSG vs. the Dow so far this year.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Lin’s breakout game was against the Nets on Feb. 4, a Saturday.  The next trading day, Feb. 6, MSG shows mostly a continuation of a pre-Lin upswing.  But Lin does seem to have had an effect.  The stock kept rising over the next several days, climbing higher than it had been in a couple of years.  February 13 was the first trading day after Lin’s 38-point game against Kobe and the Lakers.  Both the volume of trading and the price were up. 

The people at The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective (they have an understandable interest in all things Lin) have tracked the Lin effect on the stock price and compared it with similar periods surrounding the arrival of other big Knicks – Carmelo and Stoudemire.  Air ball.  Apparently, the traders at the NYSE ignored those trades at the Garden. 
The Collective provides one other financial indicator:  $503.82.  That was the average cost of a ticket to Sunday’s game against Dallas (the Knicks won by five).  That Nets game back on the Feb. 4th would have cost you, on average, only $140.57.  The price of a Knicks ticket has more than tripled in less than a month.  Talk about inflation (and no, I’m not going to say it, not here, not in the post’s title, not anywhere.  Enough already.)

Distinction in the Buff

February 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

According to a story in today’s Guardian, Bourdieu is “the second most frequently quoted author in the world, after Michel Foucault.”  

Sociology students the world over are familiar with concepts such as social reproduction, symbolic violence and cultural capital.

Funny you should mention cultural capital, given another story in the Guardian (and elsewhere) about Dominique Strauss Kahn.  I may be misinterpreting Bourdieu, but I think cultural capital includes the ability to distinguish what is of high quality from what is ordinary.  La distinction is what characterizes the French elite.

As for Strauss Kahn,  certainly a member of that elite, he’s being questioned by French police about his part in recruiting prostitutes for “soirées coquines” at a hotel in Lille.   (In France, being a client is not illegal, but pimping is.)  DSK is claiming that he didn’t know the women were prostitutes.   As his lawyer said, shortly after the case came to light in France,  

People are not always clothed at these parties. I challenge you to tell the difference between a nude prostitute and a classy lady in the nude

That “classy lady” may not be le mot juste.  Worse, this Times translation also loses the Bourdieu angle – distinction.   Here’s what the lawyer actually said,

Je vous défie de distinguer une prostituée nue d'une femme du monde nue.

I’ll have to reread Bourdieu to see if he makes the point that la distinction requires that people have their clothes on.