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All-encompassing rant
Jan. 17th, 2010 10:09 amMariella Frostrup was wheeled out this week for the oft-repeated Haiti appeal on Radio Four. "Sometimes", she said, "there are events that are so horrible that one's first instinct is to turn away. I'm going to ask you not to."
That's the way to get me on board. Start with a sentence so self-evidently wrong that Birks' first instinct was to say, "er, no.".
Because, as evidence has shown, the bigger the event, the less people turn away. Money and help floods in regardless. If there's one kind of event where appeals are unnecessary, it's the mega-disaster. Just give a phone number and a web address. People will give.
Which was why I, in a typical moment of contrariness, decided this morning to donate to the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society, the "morning appeal" on Radio Four today. Hampered by a speaker of whom I had never heard, an acronym that I couldn't remember (ENREEAS) and a phone number that was utterly forgettable, the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society is one of hundreds of "unsexy" charities. I remember as a child reading with fascination in the Radio Times the amounts raised by these appeals. Sometimes it was frighteningly small, less than a hundred quid. I used to hunt for the least sexy charity of the year.
And these unsexy charities will suffer as a result of Haiti. I remember pointing out to a friend who works in marketing that one of the big problems about marketing for charities is that, if you spend £100k and increase your charity's take by £200k, this is marked a success, but what if the amount that is given to charity only increases by, say, 20%, with the other 80% being taken away from other charities? Then, if those charities respond in kind, you end up with the 20% more being donated to charity overall, but only a fifth as much actually making it through to the recipients. The rest goes in marketing.
Haiti was not a good time for the God Squad, although, with their marvellous genius for non sequiturs, that will never beat them down. One particular tosser on Sunday (the Radio Four "religious" version of Today) said that his faith was reinforced by the strength of faith of the victims of the Haitian disaster. "How could I deny God when these people who have suffered so much more have maintained their faith?" he seemed to be asking. It's a line of thought so devoid of logic that I'm not really sure where to begin in destroying it. It's like coming up against the statement "Most clouds are televisions, but some are white". All you can really say is that the statement is nonsense.
I prefer the fire and brimstone people here. When a dreadful earthquake struck Portugal in, er, 1755 I think, there was a fairly forceful line, not ignored by that good old moderate John Wesley, that it was God's punishment for the Inquisition. There, now that's the kind of God I can cope with, the good old Jewish vengeful and wrathful God that showed Sodom and Gomorrah what for. Basically, with that kind of God, you knew where you stood. But the faithful of Radio Four's "Sunday" can't be like that, which is why they have to fall back on what is in essence a circular argument, that there is a God because believing in God makes people feel good. Faith is true because it is a comfort.
And this is an interesting argument, one touched on by a few books recently published. Barabara Ehrenreich's "Smile Or Die" looks at this "emphasis on the positive" and the "drive for happiness". As I've written before, I reckon that "the pursuit of happiness" bit in the American Constitution was a serious error. If they'd thrown in "the pursuit of truth, even if it makes us unhappy", then things would be in a much better state. For, as Ehrenreich points out, any emphasis on the positive entails a certain disrespect for truth. Indeed, that is inbuilt into our society. People do not say things because they would be "hurtful" to others. They excuse this to themselves because, in essence, they support the line "ignorance is bliss". Or, more accurately, because they do not want to be the bearer of bad tidings. They want to bring happiness, even if it means concealing the truth.
Well, that's fair enough. Society wouldn't function very well if everybody said what was on their mind, all the time. But it has now been taken to a ridiculous extreme. When no-one is willing to be the bearer of bad tidings, you get caught up in a group optimism that can lead to disaster. I remember, at a company meeting we once had, one of the "rising stars" (now departed) said to me "why do you have to be so negative?". I had just asked for a little bit of granularity on yet another broad brush brilliant strategic idea. I answered, "because someone has to be".
The "pursuit of happiness" has almost become a religion in itself, but it poses serious questions. If our happiness is all that matters, what price truth? What price freedom? Should we see Brave New World as a utopia rather than dystopia? Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project which I admit I have not read, appears to consist of a woman deciding that she was not as happy as she should be, and therefore set out (and chronicled) a year where she used all of the tin-pot psychological books available to maker herself more happy. Not realizing, I assume, that it was her discontentment with her lack of perfect happiness that was actually the root cause.
As Ehrenreich points out, the major flaw in much of society today is that it starts out with an attitude and then looks for the facts to fit it, rather than the other way round. Thus anyone who kind of says "look, I don't want to be a party pooper, but the facts don't really fit this line" is condemned as "negative". People who should be told things early are not told them, which makes it worse for them in the long run. The same happens with boards, with companies.
Even the stats can be misleading. Married people are happier (and live longer). Should one therefore seek to get married? Not necessarily. It's possible that people who are happier are more likely to get married than are unhappy people, so getting married won't actually make you happier. And people who are happier tend to live longer ( a definite case of where ignorance is bliss). Similarly, we are told that, once a certain level of wealth is reached, more money does not make you happier. Richer people are found to be no more happy than those moderately comfortable. However, once again, lookat it another way. If you are happy, you have less ambition, less reason to strive. If you are unhappy, you are striving, and one of those areas in which you strive is to make money. You get richer, and you become a bit happier, which makes you as happy as the people who did not strive to get rich because they were happy in the first place. Voila, the stats now tell you that rich people are no happier than those who are not rich. Mayhap, but if they hadn't made that money, they would be less happy. Getting rich made a positive difference for them.
Woody Allen nailed it in Annie Hall, more than 35 years ago, when he was with Diane Keaton and stopped a "happy couple" in the street. He discovered that the secret of their happiness was that they were shallow consumerists who loved buying things, believed in the American Dream, and thought about very little. Clearly, that's the trick.
________________________
That's the way to get me on board. Start with a sentence so self-evidently wrong that Birks' first instinct was to say, "er, no.".
Because, as evidence has shown, the bigger the event, the less people turn away. Money and help floods in regardless. If there's one kind of event where appeals are unnecessary, it's the mega-disaster. Just give a phone number and a web address. People will give.
Which was why I, in a typical moment of contrariness, decided this morning to donate to the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society, the "morning appeal" on Radio Four today. Hampered by a speaker of whom I had never heard, an acronym that I couldn't remember (ENREEAS) and a phone number that was utterly forgettable, the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society is one of hundreds of "unsexy" charities. I remember as a child reading with fascination in the Radio Times the amounts raised by these appeals. Sometimes it was frighteningly small, less than a hundred quid. I used to hunt for the least sexy charity of the year.
And these unsexy charities will suffer as a result of Haiti. I remember pointing out to a friend who works in marketing that one of the big problems about marketing for charities is that, if you spend £100k and increase your charity's take by £200k, this is marked a success, but what if the amount that is given to charity only increases by, say, 20%, with the other 80% being taken away from other charities? Then, if those charities respond in kind, you end up with the 20% more being donated to charity overall, but only a fifth as much actually making it through to the recipients. The rest goes in marketing.
Haiti was not a good time for the God Squad, although, with their marvellous genius for non sequiturs, that will never beat them down. One particular tosser on Sunday (the Radio Four "religious" version of Today) said that his faith was reinforced by the strength of faith of the victims of the Haitian disaster. "How could I deny God when these people who have suffered so much more have maintained their faith?" he seemed to be asking. It's a line of thought so devoid of logic that I'm not really sure where to begin in destroying it. It's like coming up against the statement "Most clouds are televisions, but some are white". All you can really say is that the statement is nonsense.
I prefer the fire and brimstone people here. When a dreadful earthquake struck Portugal in, er, 1755 I think, there was a fairly forceful line, not ignored by that good old moderate John Wesley, that it was God's punishment for the Inquisition. There, now that's the kind of God I can cope with, the good old Jewish vengeful and wrathful God that showed Sodom and Gomorrah what for. Basically, with that kind of God, you knew where you stood. But the faithful of Radio Four's "Sunday" can't be like that, which is why they have to fall back on what is in essence a circular argument, that there is a God because believing in God makes people feel good. Faith is true because it is a comfort.
And this is an interesting argument, one touched on by a few books recently published. Barabara Ehrenreich's "Smile Or Die" looks at this "emphasis on the positive" and the "drive for happiness". As I've written before, I reckon that "the pursuit of happiness" bit in the American Constitution was a serious error. If they'd thrown in "the pursuit of truth, even if it makes us unhappy", then things would be in a much better state. For, as Ehrenreich points out, any emphasis on the positive entails a certain disrespect for truth. Indeed, that is inbuilt into our society. People do not say things because they would be "hurtful" to others. They excuse this to themselves because, in essence, they support the line "ignorance is bliss". Or, more accurately, because they do not want to be the bearer of bad tidings. They want to bring happiness, even if it means concealing the truth.
Well, that's fair enough. Society wouldn't function very well if everybody said what was on their mind, all the time. But it has now been taken to a ridiculous extreme. When no-one is willing to be the bearer of bad tidings, you get caught up in a group optimism that can lead to disaster. I remember, at a company meeting we once had, one of the "rising stars" (now departed) said to me "why do you have to be so negative?". I had just asked for a little bit of granularity on yet another broad brush brilliant strategic idea. I answered, "because someone has to be".
The "pursuit of happiness" has almost become a religion in itself, but it poses serious questions. If our happiness is all that matters, what price truth? What price freedom? Should we see Brave New World as a utopia rather than dystopia? Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project which I admit I have not read, appears to consist of a woman deciding that she was not as happy as she should be, and therefore set out (and chronicled) a year where she used all of the tin-pot psychological books available to maker herself more happy. Not realizing, I assume, that it was her discontentment with her lack of perfect happiness that was actually the root cause.
As Ehrenreich points out, the major flaw in much of society today is that it starts out with an attitude and then looks for the facts to fit it, rather than the other way round. Thus anyone who kind of says "look, I don't want to be a party pooper, but the facts don't really fit this line" is condemned as "negative". People who should be told things early are not told them, which makes it worse for them in the long run. The same happens with boards, with companies.
Even the stats can be misleading. Married people are happier (and live longer). Should one therefore seek to get married? Not necessarily. It's possible that people who are happier are more likely to get married than are unhappy people, so getting married won't actually make you happier. And people who are happier tend to live longer ( a definite case of where ignorance is bliss). Similarly, we are told that, once a certain level of wealth is reached, more money does not make you happier. Richer people are found to be no more happy than those moderately comfortable. However, once again, lookat it another way. If you are happy, you have less ambition, less reason to strive. If you are unhappy, you are striving, and one of those areas in which you strive is to make money. You get richer, and you become a bit happier, which makes you as happy as the people who did not strive to get rich because they were happy in the first place. Voila, the stats now tell you that rich people are no happier than those who are not rich. Mayhap, but if they hadn't made that money, they would be less happy. Getting rich made a positive difference for them.
Woody Allen nailed it in Annie Hall, more than 35 years ago, when he was with Diane Keaton and stopped a "happy couple" in the street. He discovered that the secret of their happiness was that they were shallow consumerists who loved buying things, believed in the American Dream, and thought about very little. Clearly, that's the trick.
________________________
