Prompted by the current water shortage, today’s Sunday Age published two side by side articles on a “new culture of dobbing� that is developing in the State of Victoria.One is by Kate Darian-Smith, a professor of history at Melbourne University. It’s intelligent and well written, but, at the time I started writing this post, it not available on-line. The other is by Chris Berg, a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs. It’s a piece of top of the line, world’s best practice asshattery.
According to Berg:
AUSTRALIA is a nation founded by people who were dobbed in. Perhaps that’s why one of the first rules we learn in life is not to dob in each other: what happens in the playground, stays in the playground.
This lesson, quite obviously, doesn’t come from our teachers or parents. Dobbing is one of the ways that they can know about our infractions of their rules, such as swearing and sneaking away at lunchtime to buy chips at the 7-Eleven. Our anti-dobbing tradition frustrates this, and means that parents and teachers have to police us themselves.
There’s nothing uniquely Australian in Berg’s opening. Not his claim that our anti-dobbing culture is uniquely Australian – claiming that one’s nation has a unique culture is something intellectuals (and soi-dissant intellectuals) do the world over. Nor is the idea that “what happens in the playground, stays in the playground�. English and American schoolkids share Aussie kid’s contempt for dobbers – all that changes is the vernacular. A popular playground rhyme in Manchester in the sixties went something like this:
Tell-tale tit!
Your tongue will be slit
And all the little dickie birds
Will get a little bit.
Berg continues:
Whatever its historical basis, Australia’s tradition against dobbing works well. Trust is a foundation of community. Without trust, individuals struggle to develop relationships with others.
We need to know that when we confide in another person, we can reasonably expect the confidence won’t be used against us. When we invite another person into our home, we can reasonably expect they won’t bring a baseball bat and start destroying our possessions.
That’s right, boys need to know, that when they stand over a smaller boy in the playground and demand his lunch money, that he’s not going to run off to a teacher and inform on them. Girls need to know that when they harass and belittle the geeky girl with the glasses that she’ll just go off quietly and collapse into a sobbing heap and respond to questions like “What’s the matter?� with a sullen “Nuthin’�. This is the foundation of trust between individuals. I have no idea what the baseball bat metaphor is about.
Trust is vital in a market economy as well. When we buy an item we’ve seen in a store window, we trust the seller to give us that same item in a box.
We expect real estate agents to sell us houses that are actually on the market. In Nigeria, where, after decades of corruption and poverty, levels of trust are abysmally low, houses display placards stating this house is not for sale. One popular scam in that country is to sell houses the scammers do not own.
That’s the sort of society you get when there’s endemic dobbing – one where people rip you off by selling you houses they don’t own. Berg’s argument here is a big insult to the intelligence, so I won’t insult your intelligence any further by pointing out Berg’s very obvious error of argument.
Berg’s position isn’t entirely lacking in nuance – he recognises that some forms of dobbing may be good for society:
Reporting crime or terrorism helps, rather than harms, the viability of our communities by making us feel safer and more confident in our person and possessions. As a result, no one complains. The thief knows that stealing is wrong, and the dobber knows that stealing is wrong. Everybody accepts laws against stealing.
But not everybody accepts all government legislation. Speed limits are a good example of this.
Actually, terrorism and stealing are also pretty good examples of this: every act of terrorism is an explicit and active rejection of government legislation outlawing terrorism and every act of theft a rejection of the criminalisation of theft. But let’s not be awkward – let’s stick with the sort of socially acceptable law-breaking indulged in by otherwise law-abiding citizens – a group which obviously doesn’t include terrorists and thieves, just an AWB manager or two.
The Victorian Government has set speed limits, for example, at 50 or 60 km/h. Hop into a car for even a few minutes, and you will notice that almost everybody exceeds that. Most cars travel five to 10 km/h over the limit, and few tickets are given out to drivers who do.
In fact, drivers who obey the speed limit can often be more dangerous than those who go at the speed of other drivers. Most of us would be outraged if we were dobbed in by another driver for going 5 km/h over the limit.
There’s that old “it’s dangerous not to speed when everyone else is doing it� line – which is complete tosh. Drivers who exceed the speed limit are absolutely and invariably more dangerous than droivers who don’t – particularly to any hapless pedestrians who might get in their way when they slam on the brakes that second or so too late when they realise they can’t possibly run the traffic lights. A driver travelling at 10 kph over a 50 kph hour limit (that is at 60 kph), using maximum braking force, will have a stopping distance 44% higher than the 50 kph slow-coach he’s overtaking so he can get pole position at the next set of lights. Any former high school physics student can work out why.
There’s plenty more factoids and non-sequiturs still to come but why should I hog all the fun? Take a look for yourselves.
7-11s and baseball bats?
Not very Aussie.
In fact, drivers who obey the speed limit can often be more dangerous than those who go at the speed of other drivers.
Because ahm err…
Well, it’s obvious innit? People who obey the road rules get everybody else all riled up, making them prone to being in accidents. There’s that and all the dodging and weaving you have to do to get around the little suckers – tricky work, especially in the wet.
I saw that article .. well, I saw the opening sentence and the “dangers of observing the speed limit” quote, which was highlighted as a teaser, and moved right along.
Like Anna, I was impressed by how american this article sounds – “store windows”, “7-elevens”, and “baseball bats”. Who is Chris Berg anyway, besides being paid by the IPA to disseminate right-wing propaganda.
What is Berg so wrried about?
What has Berg or the IPA done that is dobbable?
Chris Berg is just firing the opening salvo in a move to deregulate the road rules which are obviously a restriction on individual liberty.
No doubt Chris considers speed signs and traffic lights as merely advisory and he wants a market approach to pedestrian crossings – It is up to the driver to balance the cost of damage to his car from hitting a pedestrian with the loss in earnings/time by stopping at a crossing.
Chris is probably very upset that the NT Government is finally putting in speed restrictions on its roads (because people were somehow managing to crash their cars at speed on dead straight roads with no one on them at about 5 times as the rest of the country)
I saw that article .. well, I saw the opening sentence and the “dangers of observing the speed limit� quote, which was highlighted as a teaser, and moved right along.
Quite right John. There are only so many hours in the day.
On a more serious note – if you’re a neoliberal or libertarian, how can you argue that capitalism can function without knowledge- i.e. people dobbing in your business if it charges more for the same product?
Chris responds.
Gummo, while I fully agree with you that speeding down suburban streets is a particularly stupid idea, it’s not as simple as high school physics. The skills of the average driver (or, more precisely, the lack of them) are also at issue.
The vast majority of drivers don’t use the maximum braking force available the brakes in a crash situation. Manufacturers have had to introduce Brake Assist, which, essentially, slams on the brakes and holds them on if it thinks you’re trying to do a crash stop.
Speeding is a problem, but it’s by no means the only driver failing out there.
I’ve always defined ‘dobbing’ as something done with the intent of getting someone into trouble – and doing so on a persistent basis.
So ringing the water line on a neighbour who’s using a couple of thousand litres a day on watering a couple of marigolds and a lemon tree isn’t ‘dobbing’ – but running them in for watering their plants, jaywalking, opening a bottle of wine in a public park, and spitting on the street would be.
There’s an element of petty malice in the way that I conceptualise ‘dobbing’, that I don’t think that Chris Berg is recognising.
Robert Merkel – I’d like to hear me on how driver skills can overcome the laws of physics please?
“There’s an element of petty malice in the way that I conceptualise ‘dobbing’, that I don’t think that Chris Berg is recognising.”
Oh no, he recognises it. He defines “petty malice” as “dobbing for things I don’t think are a big deal”. You only differ on where you draw that line.
Much more silly for me is the suggestion that anti-dobbing culture is a really important foundation of trust in society. The most important sort of trust – the security of knowing you’re unlikely to be robbed, bashed, ripped off, murdered with impunity, is a product of our trust that people dob when it’s important.
The only trust we get from anti-dobbing is the trust that we won’t get caught for petty offences – well, you could always, y’know, not commit them.
“On a more serious note – if you’re a neoliberal or libertarian, how can you argue that capitalism can function without knowledge- i.e. people dobbing in your business if it charges more for the same product?”
What is a neo-liberal anyway?
But in answer to your question, capitalism (or any political philosophy for that matter) can’t function without knowledge. Though it can function perfectly well without perfect knowledge. Indeed, perfect knowledge would be inefficient.
wbb: “Robert Merkel – I’d like to hear me on how driver skills can overcome the laws of physics please?”
Robert Merkel didn’t say that driver skills overcome the laws of physics. He was saying that speed isn’t the only contributor to safety in a car.
No, I don’t think so. I define dobbing as a persistent and malicious outsourcing of bullying. A complaint about every infraction of every rule is nothing more than bullying by proxy, for mine, and I have a problem with that.
I agree that his thesis about trust is utter bollocks – but I do worry that the Government is encouraging a surveillance culture within our community:
I don’t see how this differs substantially from: “If you haven’t done anything wrong, what have you got to worry about?”
wbb: put simply, most drivers don’t utilise the brakes to their full extent in panic stop situations. The difference between the theoretical best braking distances, and what mug drivers actually do in the real world, is in the order of 20%.
There are other factors – for instance, tyre tests by motoring magazines suggest that braking distances can vary in the order of 5-6% or so between brands; and, yes, el cheapo no-brand Chinese and Indonesian tyres are the worst by some margin. Not keeping your tyres at the recommended pressures can also add a couple of percent or so.