Norway's high-yield social capital

David Brooks has an opinion piece in the New York Times (“The Hard and the Soft”) offering a potentially inspiring but somewhat sloppy explanation for Norway’s perennial success in winter sports (reconfirmed at the Vancouver Olympics). He retells the story of a Norwegian man who during WW II, as e member of the resistance, showed inhuman stamina and courage. He was also helped by numerous individuals, families, and villages who took deadly risks to help him evade for months the occupying Germans. Brooks concludes: “This astonishing story could only take place in a country where people are skilled on skis and in winter conditions. But there also is an interesting form of social capital on display. It’s a mixture of softness and hardness. Baalsrud was kept alive thanks to a serial outpouring of love and nurturing. At the same time, he and his rescuers displayed an unbelievable level of hardheaded toughness and resilience. That’s a cultural cocktail bound to produce achievement in many spheres.” Since the term “social capital” has a scientific ring to it, I am trying to imagine how a group of contemporary political scientists would go about studying the phenomenon Brooks describes. They would visit several villages, select representative samples, distribute survey questions, conduct in-depth interviews, etc. Then they would draft hypotheses and cobble together some kind of model establishing a causal relationship between dependent and independent variables, factoring in this and controlling for or abstracting from that. What better way to capture all the richness and glory of the astonishing human experience Brooks, in his elitist naïveté, wants to set up as an awe-inspiring moral paragon? But why worry about studying a minor incident that happened almost 70 years ago anyway? Political science has established definitively that history is mostly bunk, and we need to prioritize current incentive structures over just-so stories of past suffering, courage, or betrayal. And what can we learn from those Norwegian fishermen? They did have some psychosomatic resilience, a capacity for empathy, and a degree of, well, irrational courage. But - ultimately - they were a bunch of losers who were satisfied with a meagre, rather impoverished existence. What did they know of the intense lifestyle aspirations, vistas for unbounded self-expression, and all those other post-material values we have come to cherish so much (to say nothing of the handsome compensation packages handed out by banks and other post-material businesses)? Can you imagine what our world would have looked like had most people in civilized societies shared their parochial value system? As John Stewart Mill established long, long ago, burning dissatisfaction with one’s lot is the first and post important prerequisite for any human progress.