Disaster: great news
I few months ago I posted about Dan Pink and his book Drive. Dan is speaking here in January (27 January at 18.00) so Fellows will be able to hear his thesis from the horse’s mouth.
The argument has two parts. First, Dan summarises the overwhelming evidence coming from both research experiments and empirical studies of corporate performance, showing that crude incentives (like cash) damage performance in complex tasks. This leads to his second point, or question: if the evidence so clearly leads to this counter intuitive and memorable conclusion why do so few outside the academic community know about it? Dan surmises that this is because those who benefit from incentives have too much to lose by allowing it to be known that their high salaries and bonuses don’t improve performance.
I was reminded of Dan’s work when reading a review by Bill McKibben of Rebecca Solnit’s new book ‘A paradise built in hell: the extraordinary communities that arise in disaster’. Solnit examines how people respond to natural disasters ranging from the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. You may recall the lurid coverage of the latter event which talked about rampaging gangs attacking victims and looting shops. It turns out these stories were massively exaggerated and many were later quietly retracted.
Instead Solnit’s detailed research comes to inspiring conclusion about what she calls….
‘…disaster communities. These remarkable societies suggest that just as many machines reset themselves to their original settings after a power outage, so human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful, and imaginative after a disaster, that we revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of a paradise is already within us as a default setting’
Solnit even suggest that when the authorities talk about ‘restoring order’, for example in New Orleans, this is not simply about providing services or tackling a real policing problem but also reasserting the need for authority in the dangerously egalitarian community which has emerged.
Both these ideas would have fitted neatly into Adam Curtis’ powerful 2007 series ‘The Trap’, which explored the origins of the idea that human beings are fundamentally atavistic and self serving and therefore in need of a combination of free markets to meet their appetites and authoritarian states to control their desires.
Remember as well a theme I was writing about a couple of years ago, the opinion poll findings showing the contrast between optimism about our own lives and pessimism about society.
Why is it that we seem to prefer bad news about human character? Is it a hangover of a particular neo-liberal ideology? Or maybe, more simply, it just makes us feel superior. Perhaps the best Christmas present we can give each other is a bit more faith in what we are made of.
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Comments
5 Comments on Disaster: great news
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Tim Gibson on
Tue, 1st Dec 2009 6:38 pm
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Dan on
Wed, 2nd Dec 2009 12:51 pm
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Clare Reilly on
Thu, 3rd Dec 2009 1:02 pm
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Charles Frith on
Sat, 5th Dec 2009 1:15 pm
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What I would like to hear from Mr Darling : Matthew Taylor’s blog on
Wed, 9th Dec 2009 11:29 am
If altruism is ‘a default setting’, why does so much philosophy, and political and economic theory, assume that humans are inherently self-interested? The social contract is predicated upon an assumption of egoistic human agents, likewise concepts such as social capital, and models of behaviour like Game Theory. In each of these examples, co-operation is encouraged because it might help an individual make the best of the situation with which they are faced.
What the research cited by Matthew suggests, however, is that we can tell a different story about human nature – viz., that we are innately other-regarding, but that we only allow ourselves to act on this in extremis. Interestingly, ethicists often assume that catastrophic circumstances will lead us to act against our moral codes – because we are more likely to act intuitively when times are tough. So our intuitions are better than we think, yes – but attempts to codify human behaviour assume the reverse: namely, that humans are self-interested. There is an inconsistency here, between the anthropological assumptions made in ethical theory and the observation of human intuition.
Perhaps this is an argument to abandon moral theory in favour of a person-centred approach, such as virtue ethics, in which we seek not to develop rules that govern behaviour but rather to ask what it means to be human, and to live in community with others in ways that enable all of us to flourish?
Christians have known for centuries that the light shines most brightly in darkness, and that suffering and hardship often bring out the very best in people. I’m not a theologian, but this is always seems to me like a compelling answer to the old “why does God allow bad things to happen to good people” question.
The Future of the City Fellows network met last week to debate this exact issue! The motion was ‘The City’s bonus system is incompatible with an ethical culture’, sparking some phenomenal responses from Fellows on both sides of the argument. This was the first in a series of events examining today’s challenging financial climate and our next debate in the new year will be on the social utility of financial services, exploring the link between the ‘City’ and the ‘real’ UK economy. If anyone would like more information on this event or on this network please contact clare.reilly@rsa.org.uk
I’d recommend reading Life Inc by Douglas Rushkoff. There’s an historical analysis of how normal people have been systematically stripped and distanced from our instinctual default of collaboration. The scientific method of breaking everything down into its smallest component means we aren’t connected to the output of our actions. Small collaborative groups know what to do when distressed but put those same people as small cogs in huge institutions and they’re powerless to fulfil their real potential. Or even be aware of it.
[...] but too often they felt like things Government was doing to people rather than with them. I also wrote last week about how well people often behave when they face a shared [...]
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