This column by David Mitchell1 isn’t wrong per se. Yes, people are hypocritical about their stated wants versus their expressed political desires, and they always have been. (Granted, sentiment of this sort is much more a form of liberal-bashing than it is a free-ranging slam against people of all ideological backgrounds, not least because somewhere over the last fifty or so years a lot of conservatives decided to different degrees that selfishness, brutality and amorality were actually virtues on their own merits. But even so.)
But what I don’t get is how he thinks this is somehow new, or that we haven’t yet figured out how to deal with it. This is not the case. We know how to deal with it: laws and regulation.
Everybody knows, for example, that simple morality on its own isn’t enough to keep you from committing theft. Whether it was candy bars as a kid or jewelry as a teenager or songs you pirated last week, your moral compass is usually insufficient to keep you from stealing – particularly when who you’re stealing from is a faceless entity (be it the convenience store chain, the department store chain or the RIAA). The power of guilt only works sporadically to prevent theft, and usually only on a personal basis. What motivates us not to steal, ultimately, is fear and lack of necessity. We don’t steal because we fear the shame and/or consequences if we get caught, and we don’t steal because we decide that we don’t need to steal it. Over time, the fear and lack of need and occasionally guilt morphs into a moral code as we combine the disincentives against committing theft with our own recognition that stealing is kind of a jerkhole thing to do to people.
But the shame and consequences didn’t arise out of a vacuum: it arose because as a society we decided to make sure there would be shame and consequences for anyone who ventured into thievery. Institutions stigmatized and criminalized the act so that we would not have to rely on personal condemnation to deter would-be thieves. And this is where Mitchell makes his mistake: he places the brunt of his condemnation on the supposedly hypocritical public, rather than the political class which has grown more and more craven with each passing year.2
Look: I want to get the chance to travel at some point. There is plenty of the world I haven’t seen, and which has not been exposed to the awesomeness that is me. That’s an entirely rational desire for me to have. But I also recognize that doing so would probably generate a lot of carbon, far more than my fair share (even given that I don’t drive a car and I cycle everywhere and eat a lot of local food and a lot of other things that would probably make people think I am a hippie3 ). Given the choice, though, I’d have to admit that if I get the chance to travel, I will probably say “well, fuck it” and go on the trips.
That’s why it’s the job of government to make it harder for me to do something we know is bad for me to do. Plane taxes. Economic disincentives. At the harder end of things, hell, criminal laws. (Which probably wouldn’t be needed in this case, but you get the idea as it applies more widely.) Human beings are at heart selfish actors when it comes to personal gratification; it’s the job of government to make sure the drive for personal gratification doesn’t result in harm to the citizenry as a whole.
Which is why Mitchell’s ire is ultimately misdirected: he’s getting angry at people for being, well, people. This seems like a waste of time.4 You can’t stop people from being people. But you can feasibly stop political servants from being cowardly hypocrites. We elect political leaders to lead: if they don’t know in advance that people will punish them for hard truths then they’re stupid, and if they think they can avoid it it’s because we’ve allowed systems to fester where they can do so, which is why we’ve all generally concluded that only sociopaths and assholes want to be politicians. (That, and a bit of projection.)
- Which, incidentally, is also noteworthy for Mitchell disclosing the fact that he has a roommate. The guy is a pretty successful comedian and television star, and he has a roommate. Ah, London rental costs! The next time I am irked about rent in Toronto I shall remember this and feel better. [↩]
- I don’t feel the need to condemn any given country’s political class. They’re all pretty bad. Can anybody think of a good one? [↩]
- People who know me personally know that I am not a fucking hippie. [↩]
- Although the Catholic Church has not given up on it yet. [↩]
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Man, we Catholics were the first ones to give up on the whole “morality by guilt” thing. What do you think confession and Madre Gras are for?
Im not sure I really agree. I think Mitchell’s placing of the blame is about right, people seem the ones ignorant of the reality/ideal clash of politics.
The political structure is a reflection of the will of the people, it isnt their job to police morality but to enforce moral codes. Thats why the government is wasting so much money telling us wasting carbon is bad, so we wont buck at the restrictions it keeps proposing and publically are decried.
The government is often trying to cajole us into the moral regulation you speak about and people need to be more politically aware of it so we can accept some of the harder changes to come, and fight some of the ones that go too far.
Also maybe he has a flatmate because he likes company or is secretly gay. The man is never not on tv (pick a random panel show on this week in the UK, Mitchell will be on it), he must be able to afford something by himself.
What do you think … Madre Gras [is] for?
“Yo Mamma So Fat” jokes are part of the catechism now?
Argh.
Except in a few key points of history (notably revolutions and obvious crisis points) politicians are TRAILING INDICATORS of public opinion. It can take years from the point where the public considers something “immoral” or “unjust” or “wrong” to where politicians are elected that reflect that public sentiment or even just where political parties start to incorporate that into their platforms.
In a democracy shame and fear come from the bottom up, not the top down. If the public isn’t ready to call taking a plane for a business trip instead of teleconferencing “immoral” or “unjust” or even just “cheaper than it should be” then politicians aren’t going to do it either. That’s just how democracy works. It’s slow and haphazard and subject to public whims. Just be glad you don’t live in the USA where you can usually count on multiplying the amount of time it takes to get politicians to recognize a groundswell of public sentiment by at least a factor of 4 because of how conservatively our government is structured.
In a democracy when politicians take “unpopular” stances it’s either because they’re A) hugely popular figures who for whatever reasons of their own are imposing their own view of what’s moral onto the government and the public allows themselves to be dragged along with them, or B) quicker on the uptake than a lot of their fellow class of lawmakers and realize that public sentiment is shifting before the evidence gets through to the rest of them. Often a mixture of both.
what i learned from this article: MGK wants to leave Canada to go rob jewelry stores in other countries, but “the man” and his “laws” are keeping him from doing so.
It’s really an interesting position that the only thing that keeps people from committing theft is guilt and fear. In the second book of the Republic, Plato discusses the Ring of Gyges, a tale he puts in the mouth of Glaucon, that makes the wearer invisible when he so wishes. Glaucon postulates that anyone possessed of the ring of Gyges – that is to say, anyone who could reliably count on a distinct lack of consequences for the actions that he takes – would have no fear when stealing things, because he would be immune to the fear of consquences.
Socrates, Plato’s more common ventriloquist dummy, states that the motivation not to steal isn’t fear and lack of necessity, but rather the knowledge that not-stealing is part of a societal pact far more profitable to the individual than stealing. Stealing becomes wrong not just because of the fear of consequences, but also because if you managed to convince the world that stealing was NOT wrong, you would spend much of your time guarding your own stuff. You refrain from stealing then, to encourage a cultural mindset that dissuades stealing in others.
Stealing MP3’s on the internet, although morally wrong [i]on principle[/i] because stealing is wrong, has a slightly different place in the moral mind-set than does stealing a bike, a candy-bar, or even a politician stealing or misappropriating a lot of taxpayer dollars. There are a finite number of bikes in this world, and it’s fairly easy to see the consequences, not for you, but for the person, if that bike is stolen. They no longer have a bike, their life gets harder, etcetera. MP3’s have the dual properties of being replicable – you aren’t stealing the song itself, saying ‘this song is now mine’, you’re stealing a copy of that song – and of generally belonging to someone you’ve never met, are unlikely to meet, and who may in fact have a lifestyle so foreign to you that you cannot appreciably comprehend the loss of sixty cents of revenue on it.
Taxpayer dollars tend to be a mite different.
Why? Well, we all pay taxes, one way or another, be it sales tax, income tax, property tax, gas tax, tax tax, spam spam spam eggs and tax, etcetera. So there’s a certain inherent distrust for people who would steal them, because hey, now they’re stealing from _all_ of us. Moreover, there’s the tao of Ben Parker; with great power comes great responsibility. That’s not just ‘responsibility to serve your constituents’ – it’s the other kind of responsibility as well, the responsibility to your actions, which, with the possibility of being greater in scope than Joe Tuesday’s, simultaneously have a much greater goof-up factor, and therefore a greater amount of guilt to your actions. If you violate the public trust, it’s a slap in the face of the people who gave it to you.
And that, really, is the difference. We don’t go around to everyone we meet, shaking hands and saying ‘I promise not to be a dick.’ There’s a certain amount of that implicit in a social contract, more still in the rules of polite society and the socializing we’ve received as children, but we don’t take any more trust than is freely given, and we don’t make any promises not to violate that trust save but those which are implicit or case specific. Politicians do. When they take office, whatsoever that office may be, they do so with the public belief (or at least, the largest amount of public belief centered in any one candidate) that they will do the best job of anyone who could be elected to that position. They do so with the public trust that they agreed to uphold when they took office. They essentially said that they would be the politicians we deserved. And more and more, I can’t help but think that the vast political disenfranchisement in a lot of the Western world comes from us wondering what we’ve done to deserve the politicians we got.
Everybody knows, for example, that simple morality on its own isn’t enough to keep you from committing theft.
Everybody but people on the right who tend to say Morality is enough for me. It’s the hippies who need laws to tell them that they shouldn’t steal. If they were more moral then they would know better.
…. to the awesomeness that is I.
“People who know me personally know that I am not a fucking hippie.”
Too bad. I’m was hoping you’d be willing to consult on a spec script I just made up entitled Hippie Lawyer: The Lance Rainbowfield Story. It’s a Will Ferrell project.
There was some example of this regarding the use of facemasks or something similar in the NHL. Before it was the rule that you had to use that protection, many players went without, but polls taken from them showed a majority in favor of making that the rule. They went without because they wanted to be visible, among some other advantages, and they’d accept the safety risk until it became against the rules to take it.
Yeah, I’m really fuzzy on the details.
You know what significantly reduced the rate of carbon emission in the United States? $4/gal gas.
Now, the reason we were paying $4/gal for gas had everything to do with corporate greed enabled by market supply and demand and nothing to do with government regulation, but it’s illustrative to note how doubling the price of a commodity can significantly decrease it’s use.
You know what US Politicians did about $4/gal gas? Jack diddly squat. Lots of ideas were kicked around (drill, baby, drill! no more gas tax! windfall profits tax on evil corporations! big IRS rebates!) while people were screaming in financial apoplexy. Nothing was accomplished. Then the gas problem went away with the economic crash, and we started worrying about other shit.
I mean, this is a perfect example of MGK’s theory in action. Political cowardice in the face of overwhelming public distress gets us no results. Massive financial incentives to change our behavior work like a charm.
The problem is that Exxon and Shell and BP aren’t accountable to anyone. You can’t vote out the petroleum industry when gas rapes your pocketbook. But you CAN vote out the politicians for… well whatever reason you want. There’s very little leverage on big corporations that facilitate the bad habits, and pols are easily bought or terrified into submission. Whatchagonnado?
“This column by David Mitchell1 isn’t wrong per se. Yes, people are hypocritical about their stated wants versus their expressed political desires, and they always have been. …
Which is why Mitchell’s ire is ultimately misdirected: he’s getting angry at people for being, well, people. ”
Problem here is, you need to replace ‘people’, with the phrase ‘Guardian readers’.
I dont think its quite fair to group people in with Guardian readers. We arent that bad.
Mitchell’s approach is especially bad considering reforming the system (be it health care, finance, environmental regulations, or what have you) is not about blaming individuals, and blaming individuals is exactly what many right-wingers think is being done in these cases. So they get all huffy and mad because they think lefties are trying to make them feel bad about their personal decisions and blame everything on them. So this approach is doubly counter-productive (if you care about gaining support on the right side).
The problem with David Mitchell’s Guardian columns is that I’ve yet to read one that doesn’t feel like it’s written as his Peep Show character. Who is rather close to being the platonic ideal of a middle-class cowardly passive-agressive piece of scum. (That sentance came out sounding a lot more hostile and wrong than intended. Suffice it too say that anyone who’s seen the show will understand what I mean.) They all seem to be rather facetious, more concerned with making jokes than actually making points. Worse still, jokes that aren’t that funny.
Everything he seems to write seems overly arch, and less portraying his point of view than a view which he finds amusing to represent, which isn’t actually held by anyone.
His work with Robert Webb, particularly anything where they have co-writers can be great. Their double act works nicely as they temper each other. [One could argue that in Peep Show, Webb’s character has become less horrible than Mitchell’s in recent years, starting from when they got paid for Webb to be a Mac to Mitchell’s PC. More accurately, though, it’s just gone downhill to an extent, and Mark’s ended up sinking to lows almost imaginable in the context of the show, which is hard. Still good for a laugh, though.]
Anything else, he comes across as someone who wants to support the BNP, but feels like he should be “liberal”, and struggling to understand it all. Most crucially, he tends to pen “Why, oh why, oh why, oh why?” articles in the vein of The Mail’s Richard Littlejohn (right-wing hack) replacing “Asylum-seeker” with “Racist” or what have you. Crucially, he seems to just speak about all the problems without any faith that there could possibly be some way of making improvement. This is the sort of attitude that allows politicians to be as cynical as they like.
[Oh, and London accomodation costs are prohibitive. Worth noting that we also have one of the best underground railway systems in the world, which is inexplicably given a proportionally lower public subsidy than just about anywhere else, including the US, and is for some reason expected to be profitable, leading to rather high transport costs. Still, having a flatmate is probably something that he doesn’t actually need to do, but it’s massively more cost-effective. Still, it’s a pretty decent place to live, if you don’t mind the heat, people, and … well, living in a city.]
Churlish though I may be for criticising a man on his own website but… you’re having a go at David Mitchell for doing his “routine” here. He’s the Left Wing version of Jeremy Clarkson and should be viewed in the same way – by all means be amused by the delivery but don’t pay too close attention to the message, it’s just not that well thought through.
I buy that the Ring of Gyges tale explains why people *commit* theft, but what rarely gets analyzed is why people desire to steal in the first place.
I blame scarcity. Scarcity of resources, of social acceptance, whatever it might be, not-enough is the culprit.
You can’t stop people from being people.
I’m with you. This makes a lot of sense. People respond to incentives (necessity) and avoid disincentives (fear), like you said.
But you can feasibly stop political servants from being cowardly hypocrites. We elect political leaders to lead: if they don’t know in advance that people will punish them for hard truths then they’re stupid …
… and now you’ve lost me. I submit that elected officials have less incentive to listen to voters than those voters have to not steal from convenience stores. The U.S.’s defense budget backs me up on this.