Steven Pinker famously observed in The Blank Slate that ‘Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which all loose ends are tied and everyone lives happily ever after. Yet when it comes to the science of human beings, this same audience says: Give us schmaltz.’
The same is true of the politics of human beings, where educated people want stories of individuals overcoming the odds, and hate discussing depressing, but more useful, overall patterns.
A good example is the recent meme that among the recent Syrian influx may be the next Steve Jobs, a theme repeated by that hugely profound modern-day genius Banksy.
Jobs’s biological father was a Syrian migrant, therefore the logic goes, among the hundreds of thousands of migrants there will be another Steve Jobs. The story came up in this BBC piece, where it recalled:
His son, Steve Jobs, became one of the most creative entrepreneurs, revolutionising industries from personal computers through animated movies and music to mobile phones and digital publishing.
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