Virtue

In his essay "Looking Back on the Spanish War, George Orwell wrote the following passage: 

Civic Virtue  in Green-Wood Cemetery
by Rhododendrites

Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the 'change of heart', much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system. (emphasis added)

Orwell's concession of the "partial truth" of the talk of the need for a "change of heart" proceeds naturally from a comment he made in his essay about the work of Charles Dickens:

The central problem — how to prevent power from being abused — remains unsolved. Dickens... had the vision to see that. ‘If men would behave decently the world would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds.

Orwell identifies a classic paradox  here: how do you make a good society out of human beings with impulses, and in some case a real disposition, to behave badly. The context of these quotes also hints at a solution. In art and literature in religion, in all areas where human beings choose to participate and where we accept our participation may change us, even if we do not necessarily choose to change, we consent to address our inner lives and thoughts, the source from which our behaviour springs. Thus, a writer such as Charles Dickens, or a religious teacher, or a poet, painter or playwright can exhort us to see ourselves and the world in a different way. Religious teachers and artists have the authority to ask us to change the way we think, and in that sense the person we are. Politics, on the other hand, exists to define standards of behaviour we will, if necessary, enforce. Enforcement, in the final analysis, means some form of violence. 

To begin with the principle: the body politic does not have the right to shape its members. Politics stops at my skin. To go on to the practical: as Orwell notes, focus on the individual serves to distract from the real business of politics: putting in place the rules, expectations, and structures we require in order to live together as the people we are, not the people some utopian vision hopes for.

The insecurity state: investment in humiliation

No kidding. A sworn peace officer upheld the law and the constitution, and it made the news. It made the news mainly because he did it in an airport, and by a consensus that nobody actually remembers agreeing to, constitutions and laws have generally stopped at airport doors for a long time now. Well before 9/11 serious people told us that questioning or laughing at the very serious and important security people at airports, and their very serious and important security measures, would result, and should result, in severe legal consequences. They called making jokes about bombs in airport lines "stupid", referring to the sad history of hundred-ton airplanes brought down by humour. As George Orwell pointed out in his description of the goose-step, a government and society able to prohibit or restrict laughter has moved its whole society a long way toward totalitarianism.

And then two impudent kids distributing leaflets with advice about dealing with security checkpoints at American airports, and a sheriff's deputy walked into the Albany New York airport. As President Obama put it in another context, that sounds like the start of a joke. But what happened next is no joke: the serious and important edifice of aviation security collided head on with the concept of limited government codified in the United States constitution, and the constitution won. One decent law officer simply repeated, over and over, to an obviously hostile government functionary, that people handing out flyers and filming had a constitutional right to do so and hadn't broken any laws.

So what made the airport official in question so hostile? Why try to block some leaflets? I try to beware of large political explanations for individual actions. Occam's razor of politics tells us to never attribute anything to conspiracy if you can adequately explain it by stupidity, and I would add that I never attribute to ideology anything I can attribute to an individual attitude. At the same time, the nature of airport screening did not come about by accident, and to some extent it doesn't matter if the system has a lot of thought behind it or not. We have evolved an airport security system that strips us of our rights, our dignity, and our ability to choose. Since we don't like that but we have a limited ability to resist it, we compensate by telling ourselves that airport security matters, that it must keep us safe, that hoops the authorities line up for us to jump through must have some justification.

Anyone who has experienced a neurosis that involves magical thinking knows the process. If you convince yourself you will die if you don't wash your hands before eating, the more elaborate and difficult your hand-washing ritual gets, the more you believe that ritual has kept you safe. In the same way, travelers who have submitted to the humiliations of airport screening have an investment in the insecurity state. One way to defeat magical thinking is to force it to submit to the test of reality. One police officer insists that law and constitution, not magic, applies even in airports. One action will not bring down the insecurity state, but one person can make a difference.
Good job, officer.

Big nanny

Not too long after I started riding my bicycle in Toronto, I had the seat and the handlebars sprung. Toronto has some of the worst road surfaces I can remember riding a bicycle on, and I don't like coming home after riding with a headache. And since I have no hope that Toronto will maintain the streets, I spring my bicycle and grit my teeth.

But the same city that claims to balance its budget by the proverbial shaved hair every year, the same city that regularly proposes to raid its assets to meet current needs, the same city that scrimps on repairs to infrastructure, the city with some of the highest transit fares on the continent, can somehow afford to pay "inspectors" to prowl the streets looking for front yards that offend their esthetic sensibilities, and write up orders for the property owners to conform.

Cities can and should provide mechanisms to resolve disputes about people's decorating or design choices when informal neighbourhood dispute resolution fails. Cities can and should provide encouragement to homeowners who want to plant trees, as the City of Toronto does. But imposing a citywide standard on the appearance of houses, particularly ones the neighbours don't object to, merely wastes money.

In the same paper, we read another story, also about an individual's less than happy encounter with government. The story contains a paragraph which could, by itself, define the psychological contours of the nanny state:

But one of the agencies involved maintains the rules were applied fairly and equally, and Wilson must follow them like everyone else.

Yes, the government must apply the rules fairly and equally, but that doesn't suffice: the rules also have to make sense, and their application has to make sense in each individual case. Maybe in this case they do; not every business or home owner who complains of unfair treatment has a good case. But I would suggest the following rule: if an issue concerns aesthetics or "quality of life", governments should restrict their role to mediation rather than attempting to impose rules.

Meanwhile, could we focus on important things and fix the potholes, please?