Justice, fairness and privilege

As parents we are always seeking to inform our children about rules and justice and fairness. Our children's stories, particularly our more traditional tales, often also build these concepts (see our booklist Fairness, Justice and the Legal System). No matter how hard we try though, it seems as if sometimes some of the more prominent, or at least news-attracting, members of our society undermine those lessons by their behavior and the headlines they draw: politicians, sportsmen, prominent business people. Why should this be?

This article, Absolutely: Power corrupts but it only corrupts those who think they deserve it, from the January 23rd, 2010 Economist sheds some light. Interesting.

They argue, therefore, that people with power that they think is justified break rules not only because they can get away with it, but also because they feel at some intuitive level that they are entitled to take what they want. This sense of entitlement is crucial to understanding why people misbehave in high office. In its absence, abuses will be less likely. The word "privilege" translates as "private law". If Dr Lammers and Dr Galinsky are right, the sense which some powerful people seem to have that different rules apply to them is not just a convenient smoke screen. They genuinely believe it.

The things you never knew . . .

I must have walked by Liberty's of London hundreds of times in my life. I've even been in a few times to buy Christmas presents and the like. What I never knew, and this fact comes courtesy of Candida Lycett Green in Unwrecked England, is that the mock Tudor face of the building is built from the timbers of the HMS Hindustan and the HMS Impregnable, respectively 80 and 98 gun ships-of-the-line built in the first half of the nineteenth century. There are stories all around us that we never know about.

Happiness II

There is another article, Even in Tough Times, Happiness is its Own Reward, from Laura Rowland in Money & Happiness, January 23, 2008, on happiness research. She summarizes the key findings from the book The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approaching to Getting the Life You Want by Sonja Lyubomirsky.

I find it interesting that the conclusions they draw from their research on happiness parallels those of our research on reading: Genes play a role as does luck (circumstances of privilege, health, etc.) but ultimately happiness is substantially a product of concious or intuitive decisions on the part of individuals to be happy or to pursue actions that will predispose themselves to be happy.

The good news, Lyubomirsky says, is that we can manipulate 40 percent of our happiness level by consciously adopting the behaviors of happy people. She's the first to admit that some of these strategies -- such as "act like a happy person" -- sound a little corny. "I'm the most reluctant user of self-help literature," she says. "That's why there's an emphasis on science -- to look at what is effective, what works, how it works, and why it works."

Lyubomirsky outlines specific techniques that have been found to boost happiness, and different ways to employ them. They include practicing gratitude and optimistic thinking, nurturing relationships, committing to goals, developing coping strategies, learning to forgive, increasing flow experiences, practicing spirituality and meditation, and being physically active.

She emphasizes that creating happiness requires sustained effort, commitment, discipline, and self-control -- similar to staying in physical shape. "I think it is work, but it's very fulfilling, enjoyable work," she says. "You have to be motivated. The good news is that some of the practices become habitual with time, and, like exercise, do get easier."

This is not dissimilar to what we have found vis-a-vis reading. Life circumstances and native ability are influential but the ultimate determinant of whether a child becomes an enthusiastic and habitual reader is much more closely related to a set of personal actions and activities that predispose them to this desirable outcome.

Addle-pated modernist

Philip Hensher in the January 9, 2010 edition of The Spectator, reviewing Sarah Bakewell's How To Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Answers.

Eight years later, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne began to write his Essays, a book which still seems to speak to us directly with all the force of rational understanding and an identifiable human personality. If Montaigne marks the beginning of modernity, it is because he tells us exactly what he is like; how he sees the world, fallibly and yet honestly; and because there was no book in the world like it before, and we are still writing books rather like it today.

Montaigne, in common with all great authors, has continued to be infinitely applicable. Centuries of academic readers have found a 17th-century sceptical writer, a rambling Romantic, a Victorian moralist, a modernist experimenting with perception and free association, and, alas, a post-modernist, playing with the random associations and hidden structures of words. Nietzsche was fascinated by Montaigne. Proust is steeped in him; the final image of A La Recherche, of lives extending far into the past and into the future, of men suspended above long tracts of time and memory as if on giant stilts, is taken as if in homage from the Essays.

I guess he passes Edith Wharton's plasticity test.

Happiness research

The field of happiness research is one that is easy to mock and is horribly subject to light headed projects. However, there have been some fascinating studies over the past couple of decades. There is an article, Big Brother Wants You to be Happy, by Laura Rowley in Money & Happiness, February 4, 2010. Rowley features Carol Graham's Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires. I'll provide a link as soon as we get it in. The article in general, and Graham's book in particular, frame the topic of happiness in all its glorious complexity.

Graham's book reviews the recent research on happiness (more than 100 papers were published between 2001 and 2005 analyzing self-reported happiness surveys). Generally speaking, within countries, wealthy people are happier than the destitute, but after that the relationship is complicated. Once people make a certain amount of income, comparison effects start to kick in, and then happiness depends not so much the wealth we enjoy, but how it compares to what our neighbors, co-workers or other members of our reference group have.

Cross-country studies of wealth and happiness are even more problematic. "Across countries we find that on average wealthier countries are happier than destitute countries -- but after that there's no linear relationship," Graham explains. "People in Afghanistan are as happy as people in Latin America, even though objective conditions are worse in Afghanistan. Kenyans are as satisfied with their health care as Americans."

That's because cross-country surveys are rift with mitigating factors, such as innate cultural traits. "Some of the poorer countries are very happy when you look at average per capita happiness and average per capita GDP, but you are picking up cultural differences in the way people answer surveys," says Graham. "Nigerians, Danes and Venezuelans are naturally cheerful in the way they respond. That gets muddied in cross-country comparisons."

For the real twists and turns in comprehending happiness:

And among the truly quirky findings about happiness: People report that they prefer unpleasant certainty to positive uncertainty. Consider the happiness of Americans at the beginning and late stages of the economic crisis that erupted in late 2007. "Happiness levels were higher in June 2009 than in January 2008, although living standards were markedly higher in 2008," says Graham. That's because in early 2008 no one knew the size of the economic storm the country was sailing into, Graham suggests.

Between January 2008 and June 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen by roughly 30 percent, and unemployment had nearly doubled to 9.5 percent, but "the same respondents assessed living standards as better in June 2009 than January 2008," says Graham. "The idea is, 'I'm poorer than I was before, but now I know what I've got to deal with.'"

Graham has found a similar phenomenon in fast-growing economies: People prefer stability to break-neck growth. When a country such as Brazil experienced double-digit growth, "that was a very destabilizing experience," says Graham. "Things are changing rapidly, rewards are changing; people around you are making big gains, so even if you're gaining it doesn't seem to be as much. The uncertainty bothers you."

Pick them up again and tack them on where they were not at all needed

From Jack Corbett Mariner by A.S. Hatch and obtainable through www.jackcorbett.com with all proceeds going to the New York City Rescue Mission.

Jack's peculiarities of speech became more pronounced, and the Irish brogue, mixing with the cockney dialect he had picked up in English ships and about the Liverpool and London docks, which was at other times less noticeable, asserted itself more distinctly when he was deeply moved. The cockney features of his dialect were intermittent. Sometimes he would drop his h's all about in a most promiscuous and reckless way and pick them again up and tack them on where they were not at all needed; while at other times - in the same sentence perhaps - he would keep them where they belonged.

Herodotus and Chesterton on Travel and Customs

Herodotus, the father of history and raconteur extraordinaire had this observation to offer after all his travels around the ancient world.

If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably, after careful consideration of their relative merits, choose that of his own country. Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best; and that being so, it is unlikely that anyone but a madman would mock at such things. There is abundant evidence that this is the universal feeling about the ancient customs of one's country.

which makes me think of G.K. Chesterton's observation in this post, ending with:

A man is perfectly entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as incomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he comprehended it. The very fact of its unfamiliarity and mystery ought to set him thinking about the deeper causes that make people so different from himself, and that without merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself.