Templates and narratives for change

At the end of a conversation with David Runciman about powerful women on the Talking Politics podcast (reposted on the LRB podcast; their chat starts around 18:00), Mary Beard had this to say:

The idea that women have a model for doing [changing the structures within which women can think of themselves as ambitious, as powerful, as clever, as articulate, and able to make that kind of difference in the world] -- and I don't mean a kind of role model, but I just mean a kind of cultural template for doing that -- until we can provide a narrative and a template, then I think we've got a problem.

This resonates with what I try (and fail) to do in policy innovation. It's not sufficient to have a new idea (= template). You also need to have a story (= narrative) that explains why anyone should care, and why it makes sense.

New Ethics as a Second Language

In lecture 27 of the Teaching Company course on Understanding the Brain, Jeanette Norden observes that we seem to learn morality using the same mechanisms we use for learning language.

Newborns can form all the sounds used in all the languages on the planet, but with exposure to their mother tongue they become fluent in a subset. It eventually becomes almost impossible to form some of unused sounds, and the idiosyncrasies of their language seem natural and universal.

This makes me wonder about the difficulties an immigrant might have in learning the peculiarities of a new culture. I’ve definitely been confounded from time to time by unexpected variations in “the right thing to do” – and there’s really very little difference between the culture I grew up in and the ones I moved to as an adult. “Culture shock” may not just be language and customs; it probably involves morality, too, since every system of ethics is a mixture of universals and particulars.

Of course, that’s not to say that one cannot become fluent in an alternative morality. It might just be harder than a native “moralizer”, particularly one who has never had to learn "ethics as a second language”, might assume.

And traditionalists around the world who claim that wall-to-wall American media “corrupt the morals of our youth” are probably right: I'd guess young people pick up the ethical biases of American culture by watching movies and TV even more easily than they pick up English.

Gender politics, big and small

I sense a lot of suppressed anger, and not just disappointment, among Hillary’s frustrated female supporters.

In a New York Times report this morning about Obama’s struggle to tap into Clinton’s donor base, Susie Tompkins Buell, a wealthy longtime friend of Mrs. Clinton, said she wanted to see how Mrs. Clinton was treated over the next few weeks, a sentiment that she said was shared by many of the women, especially, in her donor network. The Times says that for some, it is a matter of ensuring that Mrs. Clinton gets the proper credit, while others are waiting for the chance to question Mr. Obama.

This reminded me of a quote in a story that the Times ran yesterday about what same-sex couples can teach everyone else about marriage and relationships. Esther D. Rothblum, a professor of women’s studies at San Diego State University reportedly said that heterosexual married women live with a lot of anger about having to do the tasks not only in the house but in the relationship.

Factoid: The US has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but almost a quarter of its prisoners

The New York Times story Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’ is a staggering litany of American exceptionalism. A few excerpts:

Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations. . .

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation . . . China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison [excluding those in administrative detention]. . .

The United States comes in first [in] incarceration rates, [with] 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. [Next]is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. . . . England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63. The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

The story cites a variety of causes, including higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net, and elected judges.

Factoid: The prevalence of Alzheimer's is about 1% at 65 years of age, and doubles every five years after that

Source: Guy Brown, "Death special: The bitter end" New Scientist 13 October 2007

It's not a pretty picture. The Big Hope used to be that we'd live longer, but that disease and disability would be compressed into short period at the end of life. Well-being would be a step function that dropped off quickly just before we dropped dead. Unfortunately, increasing lifespan is combining with an increase in degenerative disease to create "expanded morbidity," a long and painful decline towards our demise.

The factoid in context:

The prevalence of most degenerative diseases, such as cancer, and vascular and neurodegenerative disease, increases roughly exponentially with age. For example, the prevalence of Alzheimer's is about 1 per cent at 65 years of age and approximately doubles every five years after that, to around 25 per cent for 85-year-olds. In the US, 46 per cent of people over 85 years of age are thought to have Alzheimer's. There are an estimated 5 million people with Alzheimer's in the US today, and as people live longer this number is projected to rise to 12.5 million by 2050 (Journal of Psychiatric Research, vol 36, p 281).

. . .

Of Americans older than 80 years, 74 per cent have a disability. They are also more likely to be forgetful, confused or depressed. Almost a quarter of non-institutionalised Americans over 85 are thought to be severely depressed.

A friend who teaches geriatric nursing tells me that the Boomer Generation is particularly unprepared for this fate: they have always rejected the prospect of growing old.

Guy Brown argues that we need to put "death, dying and dementia" on the political agenda. He advances the need for more research and hospice funding - and for a new attitude to death.

The hard part is teaching our hearts what our heads (in their more sober moments) already know: death is a part of life. It's hard enough accepting the small inconveniences of life; learning to accept death seems almost impossible. At least longer life spans means we have a little more time to practice than our forebears.

Indoctrinated against the Market – really?

Stefan Theil claims that French and German students are being taught that capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral. This is a crucial observation; such a pity, then, that the proof he presents in his Foreign Policy article Europe’s Philosophy of Failure is little more than a litany of inflammatory citations.

One can buttress almost any argument by selective quotation from a large enough corpus, and Theil does a good job. (Another good job is this video clip making the case that Top Gun is a gay love story.) However, a claim as sweeping as this requires at the very least a quantification of the frequency of critiques of the free market relative to neutral and positive statements. Even better would be opinion surveys of students that establish which biases they’ve absorbed; and best would be to show a correlation between specific texts/curricula and such opinions. He does quote polls, but they’re just ones of entire national populations.

I would not expect such rigor in Newsweek, where Theil is European economics editor. The readership of Foreign Policy, however, is well able to absorb a more academic approach – and deserves one.

It’s even more important to provide solid evidence when an assertion squares with most Atlantic intellectuals’ existing biases. (It definitely does with mine.) If he’s right, the divergence between the US and the EU will only increase over time, to both sides’ detriment. The implications for diplomacy and business strategy are profound. Even a greater loss, then, that he doesn’t give us better evidence to go on.

Animal Instincts

American spend $41 billion per year on their pets according to a feature article in BusinessWeek. That’s about $400 per household, and more than the GDP of all but 64 countries in the world.

It’s good to know that the old hard-wired priorities – relationships, even with animals, and schtuff – still trump the new intangibles. According to BW, the yearly cost of buying, feeding, and caring for pets is more than the combined sum of what Americans spend on the movies ($10.8 billion), playing video games ($11.6 billion), and listening to recorded music ($10.6 billion).

Pet care is the second-fastest growing retail sector after consumer electronics. But the intangible economy is unavoidable even here: services like ‘pet hotels’ (kennels, to you and me), grooming, training, and in-store hospitals, have helped PetSmart expand its service business from essentially nothing in 2000 to $450 million, or 10% of overall sales, this year.

(It seems that pets are now more popular as companions for empty-nesters, single professionals and DINKYs, than as kids’ sidekicks. With this kind of infantilization, will it be long before more grown-ups start admitting to still sleeping with teddy bears?)