'Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?'

I have finally gotten around to reading an essay by Tony Judt that was referenced in a recent (and rather harrowing) article about the New York University historian's ordeal with motor neurone disease.

The piece, 'What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?' appears in the New York Review of Books.

I think it's well worth reading.

It's quite a lengthy excursion across the subject suggested by the title, and--among other topics--Judt considers differences between the political language of western Europe and the United States, the lingering relevance of nearly century-old economic debates and the difficult necessity of recovering a sense of common social purpose and belonging.

Much of it is not really earth-shattering, and there are some bits where I'm not really convinced.

But I was most struck positively by the parts of his essay in which he discusses, first, the past accomplishments of social democracy and, second, the need for it--if it wishes to maintain its success in the future--of reminding people about the reasons it emerged in the first place.

As to the past:

The welfare state had remarkable achievements to its credit. [...] The common theme and universal accomplishment of the neo-Keynesian governments of the postwar era was their remarkable success in curbing inequality. If you compare the gap separating rich and poor, whether by income or assets, in all continental European countries along with Great Britain and the US, you will see that it shrinks dramatically in the generation following 1945.

With greater equality there came other benefits. Over time, the fear of a return to extremist politics—the politics of desperation, the politics of envy, the politics of insecurity—abated. The Western industrialized world entered a halcyon era of prosperous security: a bubble, perhaps, but a comforting bubble in which most people did far better than they could ever have hoped in the past and had good reason to anticipate the future with confidence.

The paradox of the welfare state, and indeed of all the social democratic (and Christian Democratic) states of Europe, was quite simply that their success would over time undermine their appeal. The generation that remembered the 1930s was understandably the most committed to preserving institutions and systems of taxation, social service, and public provision that they saw as bulwarks against a return to the horrors of the past. But their successors—even in Sweden—began to forget why they had sought such security in the first place.

As to the future:

The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Social democrats, characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.

That these accomplishments were no more than partial should not trouble us. If we have learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek. Others have spent the last three decades methodically unraveling and destabilizing those same improvements: this should make us much angrier than we are. It ought also to worry us, if only on prudential grounds: Why have we been in such a hurry to tear down the dikes laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?

Well, are we?

I've spent a certain amount of time over recent years trying to figure out the processes that have made relatively decent societies and those that have seen them unravel.

I'm still not entirely sure; however, I think that being very aware that they can unravel is a healthy corrective to complacency.

And that's, perhaps, a start.

'It started in a railway tunnel'

Let it never be said of a 'traditional bourgeois lifestyle' that it was boring.

This thought brought to you via Geoffrey Hawthorn's review (sorry, for subscribers only) of Joachim Radkau's recent biography of Max Weber in the London Review of Books.

In the manner of much biography now, he writes about Weber’s character, illness and relations with others more than about the work, which he tends to regard as little more than an expression of how Weber was feeling: about his mother, Helene; about [his wife] Marianne herself, with whom Weber appears not to have had any sexual connection and who confided her difficulties and disappointments to Helene; about his brother Alfred, ‘MiniMax’ as students called him, who, like both Max and Marianne, was in love with Else Jaffé; about Mina Tobler, Max’s other lover, who after his death tried to seduce Alfred; and about Else herself, who when she was coming closer to Max was still married to the economist Edgar Jaffé, but was already with Alfred and had recently had an affair and a child with the psychoanalyst Otto Gross, who briefly upset her by starting a relationship with her sister Frieda. (Frieda’s next husband but one was D.H. Lawrence.) Marianne and Else were at Weber’s bedside together when he died, aged 56, in 1920. Marianne died in Else’s arms at 84 in 1954. Mina died in her arms at 87 in 1967. Else herself lived to 99 and died in 1973, in the same home in Heidelberg as the other two.

And:

Radkau reads him against the backdrop of his own erotic life. In 1909, Weber had realised that he was in love (as much of Heidelberg had been) with Else Jaffé, his aristocratic, intelligent and desirable doctoral student of years before. Marianne, torn between her own feelings for Else, a sharpened disappointment with her marriage, and her commitment to independence and expressiveness in women, was in some agony. Max was soon not pleased either, for in 1910 Else was to prefer the more open and sexually abandoned Alfred (they stayed together for the next 40 years). She and Max were not to connect again until she came to a lecture of his on Judaism in 1917 and allowed a brief affair (it started in a railway tunnel) two years later. In 1912, he turned to Mina Tobler, a pianist, younger and no less perceptive, who had delighted him by reading the argument on the Protestant ethic as if it were a novel, took him to Bayreuth and elsewhere, and adored him for the rest of his life.

One wonders: where, in the midst of all this romantic intrigue, did these people find the time and energy to write?

I must admit, had I known all of this, my reading of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism back in grad school would have been considerably more...well...interesting.

I mean...'Bayreuth and elsewhere': talk about romance!

What, in the end, was Weber so disenchanted about?

The calculus of the caring society

I'm not really much of a numbers guy, but I was struck by a recent post by Ben Goldacre at his Bad Science blog which highlights the care that needs to be taken when using statistics to measure changing social attitudes.

More accurately, he--for, like, the thousandth time--points out how the media fail to take this care.

My interest in this issue has increased, as I'm currently making my first forays into using serious quantitative data for a historical study. Indeed, I spent much of the last two days trying to come to grips with pivot tables so that I can make some sense of the information I've been carefully collating and entering into a spreadsheet.

Some of you may have gotten drowsy simply reading those last two sentences, and not long ago I might have been with you; however, I'm starting to find something exciting about making numbers do various little dances. (And, after a period of wanting to throw my laptop against the wall out of frustration, I seem to have gotten my tables to do what they are supposed to.)

I have the good fortune of working with a colleague who knows his way around numbers, and I've become increasingly aware of how much discipline is required in teaching your figures the requisite dance steps. This is especially so in cases when you're trying to use that data to tell you about such nebulous topics as 'cultural attitudes' or 'social life'.

The specific topic of Goldacre post was a recent spate of stories suggesting that there had been a shift toward a more 'caring society' based on a figure showing a greater number of births of children with Down syndrome. The logic behind this, I think, is that the growth in Down syndrome births showed a greater willingness to bring such pregancies to term. A number of media sources took this story and ran with it, expanding on the notion that this figure might tell us something meaningful about social attitudes.

And, yes, maybe they have changed in some positive ways.

But Goldacre points out the key problem with drawing that conclusion from that figure: while more Down pregnancies are being brought to term, there is another factor that needs to be taken into account in order to place that in its correct context:

There has indeed been a 4% increase in Down’s syndrome live births in England and Wales from 1989 to 2006 (717 and 749 affected births in the two years respectively). However, since 1989 there has also been a far greater increase in the number of Down syndrome foetuses created in the first place, because people are getting pregnant much later in life.

What causes Down syndrome? We don’t really know, but maternal age is the only well-recognised association. Your risk of a Down syndrome pregnancy below the age of 25 is about 1 in 1600. This rises to about 1 in 340 at 35, and 1 in 40 at the age of 43. In 1989 6% of pregnant women were over 35 years of age. By 2006 it was 15%.

I was not aware of the age-at-birth link to Down syndrome. (My mother was about to turn 44 when I was born. 1 in 40 might sound like long odds to you, but they're not long enough if you ask me...)

But what does this shift in birth patterns mean for claims of a more caring society?

Well:

The National Down Syndrome Cytogenetic Register holds probably the largest single dataset on Down syndrome, with over 17,000 anonymous records collected since 1989, and one of the most reliable resources in the search for patterns and possible causal factors. They have calculated that if you account for the increase in the age at which people are becoming pregnant, the number of Down’s Syndrome live births in the UK would have increased from 1989 to 2006: not by 4%, but from 717 to an estimated 1454, if screening and subsequent terminations had not been available.

Except, of course, antenatal screening is widely available, it is widely taken up, and contrary to what every newspaper told you this week, it is widely acted upon. More than 9 out of ten women who have an antenatal diagnosis of Down’s syndrome decide to have a termination of the pregnancy. This proportion has not changed since 1989. This is the “decisions” that Felicity Finch, Radio 4, the Mail, the Times, the Mirror, and the rest are claiming more parents are taking: to carry on with a Down syndrome pregnancy. This is what they are taking as evidence of a more caring society. But the figure has not changed.

While I'm interested in this story largely as a cautionary tale for the misuse of statistical data leading to the misunderstanding of society (which is a problem that is magnified in a historical context, when the statistics are a bit more iffy and our other information about social context more partial), Goldacre points out that there is a more direct reason why such stories are problematic.

Crass and insensitive moral reasoning helps nobody. If I terminate a Down syndrome pregnancy, is that proof that society is not a warm caring place, and that I am not a warm caring person? For many parents the decision to terminate will be a difficult and upsetting one, especially later in life, and stories like this make a pretty challenging backdrop for making it. This would have been true even if their figures had been correct, but as is so often the case, for those with spare flesh to wave at strangers, their facts and figures are simply incorrect.

He also links to further background provided by the NHS, if you care to look.