Daniel Patrick Moynihan on how little we can do to change the world
And the one benefit of knowing that
An advisor to four presidents, Harvard professor, Ambassador to India and then to the U.N., senator from New York, and author of several books, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and rare public intellectuals in political office. This is taken from his Playboy interview, conducted in March 1977, when he’d been a senator for two months, and published in the collection The Playboy Interview.
Moynihan has just described a social program that had achieved as much as it was going to and remarked “Conditions of life are not going to improve so very much.”
Playboy: The social scientists aren’t going to be happy to hear that news.
Moynihan: Oh, they can do a lot of things. The most useful, maybe, is to tell us what we can’t do.
There is just one social program of which its sponsors have said, “That works.” And that is castration, as a treatment of sexual offenders. And you know where they practice that? Denmark.
Greely and Rossi in 1964 did a great study on how well the Catholic parochial schools did what they purposed to do — influence the religious practices of the children who went there. And this was the rather depressing conclusion: They don’t.
The first results came in on Head Start and, “My God, it’s marvelous! These four-year-olds from Head Start know twice as much as these four-year-olds who haven’t been.” But by the time they were all six, everybody knew about the same amount.
Our assumption about how much you can influence behavior through manipulating this institution or that institution — more money here, less there or whatever — turns out to be wrong. The Safe Streets Act was a disaster. You spend four billion dollars and you don’t get anything. Because you don’t know anything about that. You’ve got to face up to what you haven’t been able to do.
Playboy: Where does that leave us?
Moynihan: No happier, but with fewer illusions — and illusions produce expectations. And when illusions are not delivered on, that is easily interpreted as bad faith. You said you could do such and such, but you didn’t. Therefore, it meant you didn’t intend to. That’s not good for anybody.
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