What do I mean by "conventionally nice"? I mean not being rude towards a person right in front of you. I mean following the conventions of your society that define what it means to be polite and gracious. It means not making a fuss or embarrassing anyone.
What it doesn't deal with are things like "what are the implications of your behaviour not with regard to the people you know, but towards people you've never met?" There was a Twilight Zone episode that dealt with this issue, titled Button, Button.
The plot involves a young couple who are struggling financially who have a mysterious stranger deliver a device with a button on top. The guy who has it delivered tells the woman that if she pushes the button on top two things will happen: she will receive $200,000 in cash and someone she has never met will die.
This is what an ancient spiritual tradition like Daoism or Buddhism would call a "parable". It's a story that forces the people hearing it to think in a totally new way. What it said to me was that in our modern lives we are surrounded by choices that dramatically effect people we've never met. For example, when we choose to wantonly expend greenhouse gases into the atmosphere we increase the likelihood that there are going to be floods in Bangladesh that will kill many, many people. Fly in that airplane, buy a Hummer, etc, and you are pushing the button.
The "punchline" of Button, Button is in the ending where the mysterious stranger shows up with a briefcase full of cash for the woman after she pushes the button. He takes the button mechanism away and tells her that "the next person to get the button will be someone who has never met you----". This just emphasizes that we are all at the mercy of decisions that other people will make that influence our lives.
Another thing that being "nice" fails to deal with are situations where there is a conspiracy in your community against admitting an unpleasant truth about themselves. There was a movie that dealt with this problem that I remember from when I was a much younger man. The Nasty Girl is a fictionalized version of the life of a real person, Anna Rosmus, who as a 16 year old girl decided to enter an essay contest on the subject of "What my city did during the war". Her initial inquiries got answers that basically said that her town was a hotbed of resistance to the Third Reich. When she did primary research---as in looking at old newspapers---she found out that it had actually been a stronghold of the NAZI movement before Hitler ever gained power. Wanting to find out even more, she eventually sued the town in order to get access to it's archives, which pointed out that there were a number of concentration, slave labour, and, POW camps in the area. (Some "hotbed" of resistance.) Eventually she became so unpopular that she left the country due to the constant flow of death threats and emigrated to the USA.
 |
| Here's a "nasty girl" who everyone reading this blog should know about! Anna Rosmus. Image used under the Fair Use Copyright law. From the Jodi Solomon speakers bureau. |
The important lesson to learn here is that sometimes being an upright, moral person involves pissing off your neighbours by saying things that nobody wants to hear.
I could probably come up with some other things that show being "conventionally nice" doesn't mean that you are an upright, good person. But I hope that these two examples are enough to answer the point that my CBC reporter made about the folks who attend Trump rallies. They might be nice to one another, but that doesn't mean by any stretch of the imagination that these are really good people.
&&&&
I raise this issue because of a point that I heard mentioned by Michael Lind on the Ezra Klein Show. The main point that I recall from this interview was that people who support Donald Trump do not do so for something as objective as their own material benefits but rather from the way they identify themselves. According to Lind, one of the main distinctions between Trump people and liberals is how they feel about education. Liberals tend to see education as something that they had to work for and see as a capital that they can bank on in the future. Trump supporters, on the other hand, tend to see it as just a badge of unjustified, elitist entitlement.
Looking at things from Lind's point of view, we can see why support for Trump---and other populists like the Conservative party of Canada---tends to be concentrated both in failed working-class communities (ie: the "rust belt") and rural areas. This is because of the fact that rural people in Canada tend to have less post-secondary education than urban people do: less than 50% in rural areas, more than 60% in urban ones.
(These figures come from a 2006 report by the Canadian Council on Learning. I can only assume that this difference is even worse in the USA---Canada has far greater percentages of post secondary education than America: Canada 56% in 2018 compared to 46 for the USA. If the numbers don't add up, remember that I'm working from two different time frames: 2006 and 2018.)
 |
| Michael Lind, image from "Newamerica". C/o the Wiki Commons. |
I can relate to this, as in my blue-collar work life I had several jobs where people in management discriminated against me because I had a university degree. For example, I once asked about applying for a day job at the university (I worked the night shift) and my supervisor told that if I did I'd have to pass a manual dexterity test (ie: one of those things where people have to show that they can thread a nut onto a bolt). He never asked anyone else to do that---but he knew I had a Master's degree, which meant to him that I was something like developmentally challenged. Another time I was being hired for a janitorial job and the foreman was helping me fill out the application form which would be sent to the head office. When I said that for several years I'd been at university he had me write something else. He actually said "it would be better to say that you were in prison than that you were at university".
(I shouldn't have to say this, but I grew up on a farm and spent most of my childhood doing extremely "practical" things. Moreover, the house I live in was a total slum when I took possession. I spent twenty odd years gutting and rebuilding it---and did a very large amount of the work myself. Whether or not you have a university degree has absolutely nothing to do with whether you can hammer a nail straight.)
I think that this divide in the way people look at the world explains the gulf that is opening between classes both in the USA and Canada with regard to the climate emergency. The argument for doing something about it---the consensus among university researchers---may have traction among educated urban voters but has the opposite effect with many rural and working class people who believe that simply because someone is educated, that pretty much by definition disqualifies her from having a useful opinion about much of anything.
I'm not exactly sure why it is that so many rural and working-class people think this way, but from my background I can come up with some suggestions. Educated, urban people work within a matrix of interdependence with a lot of people with different types of expertise. In that context it's extremely obvious that no one can know everything, and we all have to rely upon others in order to get something done. In contrast, rural and blue-collar people have to learn how to be self-reliant and get the job done. It's important for educated urban people to see the complexities that lead to more and more regulations. But the people on the ground who get their hands dirty often see all of this added complexity as just making their lives harder and harder. (I've often heard small contractors complain bitterly about how constantly evolving safety and environmental regulations have made it almost impossible for them to make a living.)
In a complex interdependent world, we all have to build up communication skills and learn to be patient and wait for others to get things done according to their own particular schedule. In contrast, in a world of self-reliance it's more important to be hard-working and the only regulations that really count are the ones that nature imposes upon you. You simply cannot wait for someone else when there is a crop rotting in the field and winter is coming!
&&&&
Another conversation on the Ezra Klein show, How Whole Foods, yoga, and NPR became the hallmarks of the elite, looks at this divide from a different angle. In this podcast Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues from the viewpoint of understanding how Thorstein Veblen's concept of "conspicuous consumption" has morphed in the last few decades.
 |
| Elizabeth Currid-Halkett. Taken from the University of Southern California website. Used under the "Fair Dealing" provision of the Copyright Act. Cropped by Bill Hulet. |
For those of you who haven't come across the idea before, conspicuous consumption is the idea that wealthy people often buy expensive things just because they are expensive. It's a way of differentiating yourself from other people who just don't have as much money. A car, for example, can only go the speed limit in the city. So what's the point of spending $100,000 to buy a Porsche when a cheap compact will work just as well? The point, according to Veblen, is that it points out to everyone around you that you have so much money that you can buy a Porsche.
The problem with conspicuous consumption, according Currid-Halkett, is that middle-class people are so materially well-off now that conspicuous consumption doesn't really work well anymore. Instead, if you try to show off by building a huge mansion or driving a ridiculously expensive sports car it is increasingly seen as being silly. In addition, there are so many "knock-offs" around that it is easy to get a hand bag, for example, for $50 that looks just like one that cost $20,000 from a high-end fashion store.
So what's happening instead is that the wealthy people are paying big dollars in order to develop "intellectual capital". The $50,000 car is no longer a symbol of high status, it's the large vocabulary, the degree from a prestigious university, and, being concerned about the right causes---like the climate emergency. (Incidentally, this explain's Fran Lebowitz's saying that Trump is "a poor person's idea of a rich person". Really poor people are still impressed by conspicuous consumption---like Trump's ostentatious lifestyle---whereas the middle class and higher have moved on to the "intellectual capital" ideal. According to that scale, Trump is just a boob with too much money.)
This last bit needs to be thought about in a little detail, because it deals with a major issue in populist resentment towards elites. I'm referring to "virtue signalling". The problem with something like climate change is that to understand it and see it as a real problem you have to be part of the educated universe where something as nebulous as consensus among experts working with computer models has any real traction. In contrast, working-class people need to be emotionally-engaged with something a lot more tangible---like abortion. In this case, Currid-Halkett would argue that showing off by driving a Porsche has transformed itself into showing off (ie: "virtue signalling") by driving a Tesla. Much the same process is involved with other forms of "virtue signalling", like eating free range eggs, veganism, organic food, yoga, etc.
Intellectual capital, however, can be just as expensive as conspicuous consumption. People pay for it by sending their children to expensive private schools, private music lessons, STEM camps, tutoring, preparation for Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT), and so on. It also involves giving children enhanced opportunities like going to language immersion schools, sending them on overseas trips to learn a second language, paying for adult children to work as unpaid "interns" in an industry like fashion, publishing, journalism, etc.
What this industry of "coaching" does is allow the wealthy to "game the system" while at the same time suggesting that we live in a real meritocracy---where everyone who is smart and hard-working enough can get to the top. Moreover, it has had the weird psychological effect of removing any sort of moral guilt that any particular wealthy person might have about their wealth. That's because they have worked hard to change the money they inherited into intellectual capital. No matter that you have the money to spend your summers at prep school instead working in construction to save up for university---you still have to put in the hours with your tutor doing physics problems! This has the weird effect of letting people who've been born with a silver spoon in their mouth honestly believe that they are self-made men!
I suppose one of the best pieces of evidence for Currid-Halkett's thesis is the recent scandal involving wealthy people buying admission to elite American universities for their children by either bribing coaches to put them on sports teams or by paying "ringers" to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Presumably, these extreme measures are taken by parents only for students who simply cannot qualify no matter how much money gets spent on prep schools and one-on-one tutoring.
&&&&
If anyone is still reading this weird mess of an editorial, I'd like to offer my usual pitch for financial support. You can use Patreon, or, PayPal. You can do a monthly subscription (thanks for being so awesome Jeff!) or a one-time donation (thank you Liz for being so awesome!) Everything is greatly appreciated. Think of what I am doing is---at least in part---wading through the intellectual river that is the Web and selecting the ideas that are the most interesting for my readers to consider. This is exactly what editors at newspapers and magazines do, and it means that you get a chance to "keep up" without having to devote a huge amount of your time listening and reading.
&&&&
Let's go back to those bosses that discriminated against me when I was looking for work. There's no objective reason why an education would mean you have no aptitude for practical skills. But there very well could be a general "rule of thumb" that most people with university degrees have no practical skills---because they spent their youth as "intellectual orchids" being carefully nurtured in some prep-school "hot house" so they would have the "intellectual capital" to make it in the middle and upper classes. I'll admit that I'm a weird creature that literally "boot strapped" myself into being a working-class intellectual because of an ability to do without sleep and a perverse obsession with learning. (I certainly never got much support for my intellectual pursuits from my family---but they at least never got in the way of them, which was something.) Most normal people want to have fun in their youth, so they don't make the heroic efforts I did to learn whenever an opportunity arose. It's those nurtured orchids that employers were afraid of hiring because they felt that they'd have to spend an inordinate amount of time "baby sitting" them. Generally, when I got a chance to prove myself the boss eventually agreed that I was "a bit odd---but OK".
&&&&
One of the big dangers I see is that this class warfare based on education is becoming based on geography. As I mentioned before, rural areas and places with declining industrial activity have significantly higher percentages of people who haven't received a post-secondary education. And it is specifically those parts of the nation that have become hot-beds of alienation from things like dealing with the climate emergency. As Alastair Sharp pointed out in an article in the National Observer:
The Conservatives won 121 ridings with an average density of 423 people per square kilometre. That compares with an average density of more than 2,000 people per square kilometre in the 157 Liberal-held seats and almost 1,900 in the 24 NDP seats. (The national average density per riding is 1,418.)This divide between educated elite members of the community, and working class "stiffs" needs to be dealt with if we are going to avoid more and more of problems. This article is already far too long for a weekend Op Ed, but I'd suggest that one practical step would be moving towards some sort of proportional representation system. Our present First-Past-the-Post system exaggerates localized problems---such as giving almost all the prairie seats to the Conservatives. Here's a graphic from the Fair Vote Canada FaceBook site that illustrates this point. Populist alienation did well in the prairies during the last election, but under a proportional system there would have been a fair number of Liberal and New Democrats elected there who would have represented a very different point of view.
&&&&
I started off this discussion by talking about the "nasty girl" and a Twilight Zone episode. Then I jumped to talking about virtue signalling, conspicuous consumption, and, intellectual capital. What holds these things together? That CBC reporter who was saying that Trump supporters are "nice" was referring to a very simple, clear understanding of what it means to be a "nice" human being in the modern world. I've been busy in this essay trying to point out the gob-smacking complexity and ambiguity that dominates things like the rise of conservative populism. I haven't tried to come up with a solution to the problems we face (other than proportional representation), but I do think that people of good will need to get rid of their preconceived notions about life. It is far, far, far more complicated and ambiguous than most of us believe most of the time---and all of us believe some of the time. And being a good person who is trying to make the world a better place involves spending a great deal of time questioning just about everything we take for granted!
&&&&
No comments:
Post a Comment