Five Bad Motivations With Good Outcomes

Plus a Rattle Bag of Juicy Links

Bowie as Ziggy, 1972. Photo: Getty/Michael Ochs

Catch-up service:
Do You Wear the Mask Or Does the Mask Wear You?
Congrats Keir, You Won, Now Change
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Joe Biden?
The Age of Centrist Heroes Is Over
Creativity Needs Stupidity

1. Egotistical ambition

Chuck Todd, veteran American political pundit (OK, with a name like that, I probably didn’t need to say ‘American’), is changing his view on Joe Biden’s character. On a recent podcast, Todd said that Biden’s refusal to step down has made him “rethink a lot of the Biden biography. I still can’t believe he ran for president in the first place, given that his family was in crisis in 2018…I can’t believe he has put his family through this. And looking at his behaviour now, in clinging to this, I think the entire narrative on Joe Biden is gonna change, in that everything’s always been about his ambition and his ambition comes first.”

Perhaps, but if so then may I suggest that Americans, the liberal ones at least, offer up a prayer of thanks for Joe Biden’s insatiable ego? Biden defeated Trump in 2020 when, as I’ve said before, nobody else could have done so. In office he passed a string of consequential bills, including America’s biggest ever investment in green energy, while delivering on his promise of bipartisan cooperation. A political system that seemed to be in permanent deadlock began moving again. It might all have been to satisfy one man’s deep need to feel important, but still, it got done. I agree that Biden’s ambition now threatens both his legacy and America’s future - but the point is that ambition is a sword that cuts both ways.

Here’s T.S. Eliot (actually a line from his play, The Cocktail Party): “Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm – but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” This is deliciously cynical but it surely has a corollary: half of the good that gets done in the world is also due to people who want to feel important. Impure motivations can, under the right circumstances, lead to fantastic outcomes. We spend too much time worrying about whether people’s hearts are in the right place; what matters is what they do.

2. Selfishness

From roughly 1600 to 1900, our species endured three humblings at the hands of great thinkers. The first, courtesy of Copernicus and Galileo, was the discovery that we are not at the centre of the universe. The second, courtesy of Darwin, was that the human mind is not the glory of Creation but an accident of natural selection. The third, courtesy of Freud, was that we don’t even know our own minds, and hide our darkest thoughts from ourselves.

About halfway through this period Adam Smith told us something else important: that our intentions, good or bad, matter less than we think. Smith’s news was chastening, too, but also cheerful: we may be fallen creatures, but hook us up in the right way and we do each other good without trying to: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”

Capitalism’s reliance on self-interest is often described as a defect. The Marxist intellectual G.A. Cohen argued that since humans have both selfish and cooperative propensities, it would be better to design a system that harnesses the latter rather than the former - build a “suitable organisational technology” and we can make selfishness insignificant. The philosopher Dan Williams argues that Cohen’s view is rooted in a misunderstanding of human nature.

The inescapable truth, says Williams, is that all social systems are driven in part by self-interest and social competition, because humans have a mix of selfish and altruistic motivations. Capitalism is only unusual in that it makes the self-interest visible and undeniable. This makes sense to me, and explains why capitalism has a bad reputation. It’s a system which has brought about, in the context of mixed economies, a vast increase in human welfare. But we’ll never be entirely comfortable with it, because it shines a spotlight on our weaknesses as well as our strengths. For the most part, we don’t enjoy being honest about ourselves.

3. Pretentiousness

I once heard David Bowie, in an interview, recall that as a young man he would carry around paperback books by French existentialists because he wanted to look like an intellectual. He would keep them in his coat pocket, making sure that the title or author was visible to passers-by. It was, in retrospect, laughably pretentious. But at some point, he said, he started to read them, and actually found them interesting. He absorbed the ideas of Sartre and Camus into what became a rich Weltanschauung.

Pretension might be seen as a failed attempt at seriousness (those who insist, rather stridently, on being unpretentious and “down to earth” are scared either by failure or seriousness or both). But it can also be seen as a bridge to seriousness, or a downpayment on it. Somehow you have to get from where you are, to where you want to be. You can’t worry too much about whether people think you’re getting ahead of yourself.

The vastly erudite critic George Steiner, often dismissed as pretentious by Anglo-Saxon empiricists, hated the phrase Come off it, which he thought of as distinctively English. Beethoven wouldn’t have composed his Ninth Symphony, Michelangelo wouldn’t have painted the Sistine Chapel, if they had listened to someone saying Oh come off it, he said. And I do think they might have listened. Even great artists can be vulnerable to the charge of pretentiousness, since most of them feel like fakes at some point; at some point, most of them are.

Brian Eno, Bowie’s sometime collaborator, suggested that “pretentious” should be a compliment: “The common assumption is that there are ‘real’ people and there are others who are pretending to be something they’re not. There is also an assumption that there’s something morally wrong with pretending.” To the contrary, he says: “Pretending is the most important thing we do. It’s the way we make our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise.”

Bowie spent the 1960s doing poor imitations of the pop stars he wanted to emulate, spinning through a dizzying array of failed incarnations. The problem, as we now know, was not a lack of talent. It’s that he wasn’t being pretentious enough. He wasn’t daring to become something or someone completely new. It was only when he risked ridicule and leaned into art pop that he created Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust. From then on, he never stopped pretending to be something he wasn’t.