What’s new, Pussycat . . .

I came upon an interesting phrase last week, ‘motivated reasoning’.

This refers to the general ‘activist’ practice of larding each contentious proposal or demand with a whole schedule of guaranteed knock-on benefits alleged to come as its natural result.  The idea is to use these add-ons as a way of slipping the main premise through without much examination.  After all, who is likely to want to be seen contesting something that is guaranteed to save the environment or end poverty or promote equality.

There are various manifestations of this, some more cynical than others.  The usual activist version is a corollary of an emotional attachment to some cause or other, taken to be gospel in its own right, and therefore beyond criticism, and from which the consequences desired can be seen logically to flow, as in a sequence of magical thinking.

A sort of ‘build it and they will come’ type of ideation.

This sort of dissociation seems to be a fundamental mindset of modern campaigning—be it over the planet or animal welfare or equality or what have you.  Activists tend to fall in love with causes rather than find them through any deeper thinking.  It possibly has always been the case, but nowadays it seems to be endemic—or maybe that should be epidemic.

People are hungry for meaning—any meaning!  Anything that might fill the existential emptiness within and give them the illusion at least of fullness.

But there is also a rather more calculated and deliberate sort of motivated reasoning, as described by Ryan Bourne in a recent Daily Telegraph business article: ‘When new interventions are proposed, it is tempting to exaggerate the benefits by implying broader gains than to those directly affected.’  He was speaking in the context of modern legislation creating a mandatory representation of females on company boards, purely on gender grounds.

‘The idea that government mandates for minimum female representation on company boards would filter down to better opportunities for other women in business has been an article of faith for nearly a decade.’  However, the international evidence some ten years later ‘suggests board quotas have little impact other than directly to those new women appointed.’

Really, there is nothing new in this.  Fifty years ago—and running in circles fairly close to the beginnings of modern feminism—it was quite clear to me that the core principle involved was often that of jobs for the girls—or for, at least, specific girls—and damn the rest.  But then it was after all predominantly a middle-class movement, and the one thing the middle-class are good at is looking after themselves.

Plus ça change . . .