Pimlico, Tirana, Self-righteousness

Artistic Administration in Albania

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing -- say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved... If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence.

- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, ch. 5.

...all over town, drab, grey communist-era buildings have been given a multi-coloured make-over, as part of a policy spear-headed by Tirana's mayor, former artist Edi Rama, now in his third elected term.

He defends his clean-up and repainting as being far more than superficial. In the streets that have become patchworks of green, scarlet, yellow and purple, tax collection has become completely successful, he says.

He adds that pride in newly planted public spaces has been restored and with it a civic optimism. And he has many more ambitious design and construction plans.

...he points to surveys suggesting more than eight out of 10 residents want his makeover of the capital to continue - more, bizarrely, than confess to actually liking the new look.

"After many years of a totally rigid, collectivistic society, we found ourselves in an atomised, individualistic society," he says.

"So the deal now is to try to reconstruct a sense of belonging to the city and its public spaces, along with a sense of responsibility for them.

"Tirana before was like a woman lying in a bed because of a very serious disease. And now it is like a woman who got up, made herself up and is walking again with pride."

- Albania takes strides towards EU accession, BBC News

Do not do your good deeds in public for men to see

Being pleased with your own upstanding deeds is moral poison, according to recent research. Whilst not exactly news, it's nice to have a scientific angle on it:

...new research by Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong at the University of Toronto levels an even graver charge: that virtuous shopping can actually lead to immoral behavior. In their study (described in a paper now in press at Psychological Science), subjects who made simulated eco-friendly purchases ended up less likely to exhibit altruism in a laboratory game and more likely to cheat and steal.

...the findings add to a growing body of research into a phenomenon known among social psychologists as "moral credentials" or "moral licensing." Historically, psychologists viewed moral development as a steady progression toward more sophisticated decision-making. But an emerging school of thought stresses the capriciousness of moral responses... When people have the chance to demonstrate their goodness, even in the most token of ways, they then feel free to relax their ethical standards.

In 2001, Benoit Monin and Dale Miller of Princeton published a pioneering study of this licensing tendency. The study investigated whether showing a lack of bias in one situation would free subjects to express prejudice later on. They found that people who had designated a woman as the best candidate for a gender-neutral job were then more likely to recommend a man for a stereotypically masculine job. Another experiment yielded similar results with regard to race.

Newer work has focused on morality more broadly. Earlier this year, researchers at Northwestern reported that subjects who wrote self-flattering stories later pledged to give less money to charity than those who wrote stories that were self-critical or about someone else. In another recent study, participants who recalled their own righteous deeds were less inclined to donate blood, volunteer, or engage in other "prosocial" acts. They were also more likely to cheat on a math assignment.

- Buy Local, Act Evil (Can organic produce and natural shampoo turn you into a heartless jerk?), Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, Slate

The article makes the point that some of the results - regarding race and sex - can also be understood in terms of people displaying politically correct behaviour at first and then feeling free to disregard PC constraints afterwards. This makes a degree of sense, as it can get tiresome to keep pretending you think in a totally PC way and suppressing the parts of your thought that threaten to stray. If you find this burdensome it is totally rational to make a couple of token appointments to keep the Furies off your back and then go off and do what you were going to anyway - "look, I've hired a load of women when I didn't have to, now let me hire a man to do a man's job, yeah?" There's also some comments below the article arguing against the conclusions. It does seem to me that whether you choose green or earth-destroying products in an experimental simulation where it costs you nothing and it's apparent to the experimenter may not compare too well to the real-life situation. I'd expect the real-life situation to be less complimentary to ecologically-concerned citizens than an experiment like this, but it would be nice to have some studies on it.