Success is a lottery: America's new work ethic

Max Weber famously described the American work ethic as deriving from the Calvinist leanings of the protestant settlers of New England.  Weber's brilliance was in making this counter-intuitive proposition make sense. The Calvinist doctrine of pre-destination says that it doesn't matter what you do - whether you're saved or not has already been decided. You would think this would make people feel helpless and apathetic, but Weber showed how it could actually motivate people to work harder. He thought Americans worked so hard because they wanted to prove to their neighbours that they had been chosen as special by God.The easiest way of doing that was to earn a fortune, through personal thrift, industriousness, and temperance. But not to spend that fortune, since its significance was as a measure of God's blessing, not opulence.

Unfortunately Weber seems to have used Benjamin Franklin's satirical almanac as if it were a straightforward sociological report on the American soul. In any case, if it was once true that American media reflected back an image of a protestant work ethic it now reflects something quite different: success as a lottery. Just about every success story whether of love or money is presented in the media is about luck, being in the right place to be spotted by a handsome prince who is 'the one for you' or literally winning the lottery. America's heroes, from science-fiction to thrillers, come by their special endowment of heroic capabilities by some kind of lottery: they are born special, have some kind of bizarre accident that gives them special powers, get some kind of secret medical drug/treatment, etc. The story focuses on what they should do with their powers, on the ethics of heroism as it were. Rarely do we see a hero who makes himself special, by the kind of long-term commitment and sacrifice that is in fact required for super-human performance (such as in sports).

The problem here is the problem with lotteries. They take you directly from wishing to achieving, without the intermediate steps and hard work of becoming. They are therefore suitable only as fantasy. Indeed this way of understanding the American Dream is, from the current social mobility statistics, increasingly true of the American reality. It is somewhat ironic that while Americans now generally believe that they can achieve anything they set their minds to, they are actually less focussed on or realistic about how to achieve those things and more ready to hope that luck or fate smiles on them than they were in the time of predestination.

The Ugly Reality of Bhutan's Gross National Happiness

Bhutan is famous for its pursuit of Gross National Happiness, not Gross National Product. How very enlightened. What a wonderful lesson about harmonious living for us in the corrupt consumerist West to learn from the spiritualist Buddhists. Bhutan's example is brought up whenever governments (such as Cameron's in the UK) try to talk about happiness, so it is perhaps worth spending just a moment looking into how great Bhutan really is.

According to  Human Rights Watch, not very nice. Their interpretation of happiness is a communitarian one, of going back to Bhutan's true cultural roots, which has had rather unpleasant consequences. Since the late 1980's its government has pursued a sustained policy of ethnic cleansing against their ethnic Nepalese citizens (around 1/6 of the population). This culminated in more than 100,000 living in refugee camps in India and Nepal (though a large number have since been resettled as refugees in the USA and elsewhere). Meanwhile the nearly 100,000 ethnic Nepalis remaining within the country are classified as non-citizens: excluded from voting and by various laws and bureaucratic obstacles such things as identity documents, government jobs, buying or selling land, higher education and business licenses.

Perhaps we shouldn't be so keen to buy the exotic orientalist bullshit of a land where everything is nice and happy and human nature is better. It's like all those European and American communists who spoke rapturously about how wonderful and happy the Soviet Union was back in the 1930s, almost all without ever visiting. Earthly paradises are always located somewhere far away that you instinctively know not to try to find because they really exist only in your imagination.

Shangri-La is a fictional place you know.

True friends....

Actual Facebook status update:

Friends will tell you what a bad decision you are making. True friends will stand by you no matter what they believe and support you. So, accept me for my strength. Love me for my weakness. Be there for the good and the bad. Remember, I will never be who you want me to become -- I am who I am.

 Apparently "true friends" are dogs.

Defending marriage demeans everyone else

The rational choice craze that has swept through the social sciences and politics can claim another victim in conservative pleas to defend marriage by giving incentives - extra tax-rights and other privileges - to married couples. But first a rational choice approach to marriage is an oxymoron; and second such privileges work not as incentives for marriage but through demeaning the status of other kinds of relationship.

Reflections on a visit to Israel

I recently enjoyed a perfectly pleasant and uneventful trip to Israel, which nonetheless brought me to see the country in a new way. I had been used to thinking of it as an abstract way, as the nexus of various political and moral problems. Now I see it as a more real and normal country and, at the same time, a more unique one.

6 reasons to junk financial news

What the hell is the point of the financial news segment at the end of the real news?

Efficient not effective government

It's not Big Government that's the biggest risk to your rights, liberties, and prosperity. It's effective government.

What's so great about teaching evolution?

Religious types hate their children being taught about evolution in school science class because it clashes with their beliefs. On the one hand those beliefs are wrong. On the other hand, however true it is, evolutionary theory is neither useful knowledge or training for children and could be dropped from the curriculum without doing any harm to their education.