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Great ExpectationsOctober 06, 2005 A snippet from something recently skimmed has stuck in my head: I've been arguing with it at odd moments, or maybe arguing with my memory that I actually read it. What I remember is a statement that it's difficult to change people's minds but nearly impossible to change people's actions. I think the reverse is a good deal truer, and that changing people's actions isn't all that hard. You don't have to hold a gun to someone's head, or threaten them with a whopping fine or five years in jail. Financial incentive is often enough, and it doesn't have to be much. All it took to make thousands upon thousands of people in my state stop throwing soda and beer cans into the trash or out the car window was a measly 5-cent deposit on each can. When I was growing up, the only thing anyone recycled was newspapers. Now nearly everyone I know tosses glass, plastic, and metal containers into a separate bin from the regular trash. Where I live, recycling is now a civic virtue, but recycling didn't become widespread because a whole bunch of us spontaneously realized that recycling is good for the planet. Plenty of us were converted to recycling because all of a sudden we had to pay a fee per bag or barrel for whatever we took to the dump -- but we didn't have to pay to get rid of recyclables. We changed our behavior for practical reasons -- to save money -- and pretty soon started feeling virtuous about it. The sequence wasn't "recycling is good, ergo I do it," or even "there's a $100 fine for littering, ergo I don't litter." It went more like "each bottle or can I chuck away costs me 5 cents, ergo I return them to the store; what a good girl or boy am I!" First the behavior changes; then the attitude catches up. Sure, sometimes it happens the other way round: you get sick of your slovenly behavior and resolve to clean up your act -- maybe you actually do clean up your act, or maybe you just buy a how-to book or video that tells you how to do it. In my lifetime I've seen some pretty big changes. In some cases, what was once barely conceivable, like recycling, has become almost a moral imperative. In others, practices that were once so widespread that their practitioners didn't bother to justify them are now almost inexplicable: Tell me again, Mom and Dad; why did black people have to sit in the back of the bus? Why couldn't women be doctors and firefighters and governors? "Peer pressure" often gets a bum rap: kids smoke cigarettes or use drugs or have sex because their friends are doing it, yadda yadda yadda. But often it's peer pressure, or peer expectations, that give us permission to not smoke, or to do something we wouldn't have thought of or wouldn't have dared on our own, like take on a new project or go to an antiwar demonstration. We're all affected by what those around us consider "normal," whether we adhere to the norm or rebel against it. Earlier today I read an article about the culture at Columbine High School at the time that two students killed several of their classmates and then themselves. Merciless teasing and ostracism of anyone considered different or weird or (gods forbid) gay was tolerated; it was acceptable, and those who didn't like it didn't dare speak or act against it. Apparently some school administrators don't believe this contributed to the tragedy. Sure, like the harassment and persecution of Jews and other "non-Aryans" didn't contribute to the Holocaust. Right. What happened in Nazi Germany, and in countless witchhunts and persecutions and genocides in other times and places, is that the norm became uglier and uglier, and only the weirdos and the eccentrics and the outsiders noticed. And weirdos and eccentrics and outsiders are by definition abnormal and not worth taking seriously. Most of our lives are shaped by what we do to make the money we need and want to keep ourselves going. What we do affects our attitudes: who can sustain for long the nagging thought -- never mind the absolute conviction -- that what we do all day is wrong? We feel superior to those "good Germans" who maintained they were "only following orders." Our excuse -- which I hope in some halcyon future will sound just as lame -- is "I have to make a living, don't I?"
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