I have just been reading a draft article about public attitudes soon to appear in a current affairs magazine. The article uses a battery of statistics to highlight the paradoxical nature of our attitudes. To put it in a nutshell:

• Generally, we are happy and optimistic about own lives and families
• Important objective aspects of our lives ranging from health to affluence (notwithstanding the current crisis) to life expectancy are improving
• Many 'social fabric' indicators including crime levels, teen pregnancy, divorce and even drink and drug consumption, are either static or going in the right direction, and are anyway not that much different from ‘happier’ countries like Denmark

Yet despite all this we - like the other big four Western European countries - are ever more pessimistic about the direction in which we think the country is going. There is a range of explanations for this phenomenon.

Inequality. Many social researchers and progressive commentators argue that the more equal a country is the happier it is. We may be better off than we were but we are also more unequal, hence more unhappy about society.

Migration and diversity. Robert Putnam and others have shown how people who live in diverse and fast changing communities are – regardless of their own background - less content.

Politics. Our pessimism about society is really just pessimism about this Government. Would a new Government restore the heady optimism of the summer of 1997?
 
Decline in values. From Melanie Phillips to Richard Reeves to David Cameron there are those who highlight a decline in morality and public spiritedness. Is this why we are so open to the Conservative’s Broken Society mantra?

Private hubris, public despair. This is the thesis I outlined a few months ago. The rise and rise of individualism coupled with the decline of collective institutions means we have an exaggerated account of our own efficacy (which appears to be a hard wired trait) and a diminished account of society’s scope for collective progress

The media. Bad news sells. Most of us get our information about the world out there from a media ever more desperate to get our attention by peddling rage and fear. This view is underlined by the gap between the positive story we offer about our own communities and public services and the negative view we have of communities and services at large.

Each of these accounts is worth exploring but none of them are wholly convincing. But social pessimism is a bad thing - it undermines trust and the myth of decline contributes to bad politics and policy making.

'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself' said Franklin D. Roosevelt in his inaugural address. The modern version is 'we have nothing to be pessimistic about but pessimism itself'.    
  
 

• Richard - 15 Sep 2008 10:24pm

  Interesting as ever. You have not tried to suggest that these explanations are mutually exclusive, but I think it is useful to consider how they might interact, and the directions of causality. Either of you may correct me, but it seems that Tessy expands well on the mechanism of the 'private hubris public despair' account (with the private hubris side hard-wide as an adaptive delusion, as you say). Essentially it is hard for an individual to, for example, simultaneously hold a strong pessism about environmental change and an enthusiastic commitment to the efficacy of collective environmental action. So public despair can arise from a lack of involvement in meaningful, goal-directed collective activity; it is hence attributable to a decline in social and moral-communal capital. This itself accounts for the reality, or fear of, a decline in values; the community has less influence over people's perception of the world and over their behaviour. Local migration and diversity relates to declining social capital but we need to be clear how we understand this. It is not demographic diversity that is necessarily corrosive to social capital but moral diversity - or a fear of moral diversity caused by a lack of shared identity, ritual and custom. It is true that demographic and moral diversity may tend to correlate, but this is tragic rather than inevitable. The declining relevance of the community to individual lives leaves a gap in their relationship with the world which is filled by the media and commodified culture. As an account of the world, the media filter has obvious shortcomings and bias, leading to further anxiety and pessimism. 'Inequality' comes in here too, as people begin to compare themselves as much with celebrities and with those the media praises as with other people in their communities - inevitably causing unhappiness. As for 'politics,' I'm not sure just quite how much the average person worries about the government and connects politics to their own life. It surely creates a media context, though. Anyway, that's my take. There's surely more to say. But once we understand how different factors fit together, we can consider opportunities for intervention at every level.

• Tessy Britton - 13 Sep 2008 4:57pm

  Social pessimism is certainly discouraging Matthew, not least because it can darken our perceptions of people, not trusting their motives or good intentions. All the points you mention are very valid, but I agree that there must be more and I am not discounting adaptive biological reasoning as a contributing factor. Being more pessimistic must surely be the 'safer' option? I have just read a new report on volunteering patterns in older age groups in the US called More to Give. There were a couple of points in the paper which made me wonder if our pessimism doesn't reflect our own behaviour to some degree as well? If you are active in your community, volunteering, mentoring etc, I suspect you have a greater optimism about life in general and trust more in the good intentions of others in particular? One example: "Fifty-five percent of Experienced Americans believe they will leave the world in worse condition than they inherited it, while only 20 percent believe they are leaving the world in better condition. Those most actively engaged in volunteer work feel less pessimistic and are more likely to increase their service than those not engaged." The Primary Review also found that pupils whose schools were actively engaging them in environmental projects, were less anxious about global warming. While our optimistic/pessimistic thinking patterns are proven to very important to maintaining our wellbeing, and can be learned, I think there are indicators that personal behaviours raise or reduce these optimistic attitudes as well. Perhaps policy makers should focus more energy on enabling us all to participate in pro-social behaviours, engage us in imaginative projects. Links to the research: http://www.aarp.org/research/family/volunteering/moretogive.html http://www.primaryreview.org.uk/ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Learned-Optimism-Martin-Seligman/dp/0671019112

• Tessy Britton - 13 Sep 2008 4:54pm

  Social pessimism is certainly discouraging Matthew, not least because it can darken our perceptions of people, not trusting their motives or good intentions. All the points you mention are very valid, but I agree that there must be more and I am not discounting adaptive biological reasoning as a contributing factor. Being more pessimistic must surely be the 'safer' option? I have just read a new report on volunteering patterns in older age groups in the US called More to Give. There were a couple of points in the paper which made me wonder if our pessimism doesn't reflect our own behaviour to some degree as well? If you are active in your community, volunteering, mentoring etc, I suspect you have a greater optimism about life in general and trust more in the good intentions of others in particular? One example: "Fifty-five percent of Experienced Americans believe they will leave the world in worse condition than they inherited it, while only 20 percent believe they are leaving the world in better condition. Those most actively engaged in volunteer work feel less pessimistic and are more likely to increase their service than those not engaged." The Primary Review also found that pupils whose schools were actively engaging them in environmental projects, were less anxious about global warming. While our optimistic/pessimistic thinking patterns are proven to very important to maintaining our wellbeing, and can be learned, I think there are indicators that personal behaviours raise or reduce these optimistic attitudes as well. Perhaps policy makers should focus more energy on enabling us all to participate in pro-social behaviours, engage us in imaginative projects. Links to the research: http://www.aarp.org/research/family/volunteering/moretogive.html http://www.primaryreview.org.uk/ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Learned-Optimism-Martin-Seligman/dp/0671019112

 

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