Keep them kids dirty

…and you’ll find that they turn into quite Germanic freakazoids who obsess about order and doing things right. So yeah, you parents, make sure you change the wee ones’ diapers regularly. If you don’t, your kid might well turn out to have an anal fixation – which doesn’t have to be a bad thing seeing as it usually means that holding anything to do with anal matters in deep contempt. “All is well in suburbia”, you might think, but not so quick: the Freudian down-side to this is a fetishisation of the brown stuff. Yup.

You might wonder where this is coming from so suddenly. So did I when I read this piece that explains the majority of German banks’ reluctance to invest in hedge fonds or, shall we say, their tendency to avoid risky investments, with the mere fact that Germans are generally anally fixated because German parents don’t change German children’s diapers very often. True story as per the current issue of Vanity Fair; if you’re keen, here’s a German analysis of the piece. Anal fixation apparently comes about when one is exposed to one’s own excrements for unnaturally long periods of time and it is expressed in exaggerated avoidance of dirt – hence the ‘clean’ bankers.

The reason I chose to mention this topic on this extremely clean blog is the following: Claiming that German bankers are hesitant to do risky investments because they had to spend so much time in their own poop when they were little and because that led to the development of an exaggerated fondness for things being done cleanly and orderly – well, that’s a clear case of hermeneutics gone wrong! Just because Fact A ‘Germans invest conservatively’ and Fact B ‘German parents (allegedly – I want to see proof of this!) like to leave their kids smoldering in their excrements for long periods of time’ have one thing in common, which is that both these facts apply to Germans, doesn’t mean that there is a causal relationship at work here. Furthermore, just because it makes for a good story (for which audience?) doesn’t mean it is true, and just because it suggests a kind of mechanistic causality between ‘how often do I change my kid’s diapers’ and ‘what kind of person will the kid eventually become’ which I am sure many parents would buy into IF THERE WAS ANYTHING TO THIS LOGIC – which there is not – also doesn’t mean it is true.

So I say, folks: Check the stories that you are presented for the kinds of causalities they offer, especially when they are trying to explain an entire nation’s financial behaviour with one single natal behavioural fact.

It is true though that people outside Germany tend to be amazed about Germans’ relationship to their own bodily waste. A deep sense of befuddlement and ignorance of the German soul marks some of the conversations on the topic. English anthropologist Kate Fox, for instance, believes that German toilet bowls ‘catch’ the drop first so that the user, upon completion of the job, can get up, turn around and be amazed at seeing the finished product. She believes that the German toilet user needs to first know – and seeing really is believing in this case – what has been going on inside his or her own body. Only then he/she will flush, Fox claims (in this book).

The above is another clear case of overinterpretation. Search your brain for a second, dear enlightened reader, and remember what else we know about Germans. Yup, there was this thing with the practicality focus…dropping makes a splash and catching the drop on a sort of intermediary terrace doesn’t. Which is why German toilet bowls used to be shaped the way they were (as with all thing, we’re adopting the American system now). Practicality rules over anal fixation. QED.

The danger with monocausal explanations is that they are beguilingly simple. We fall for them every time. They sway us easily especially if we want to believe the ludicrously reductionistic proposition that is being proffered. Such must have been the case with the German-financial-anal-fixation piece in Vanity Fair. In light of the fact that Germany came through the recession so well I would say, however, that dealing with one’s own financial shit is always a good option no matter how one came to acquire the capability to do that. (Seriously, what does it matter??) I don’t feel the need to reduce German banks’ hesitancy about risky investments with Freudian intellectual acrobatics. If I did, then I’d probably be saying to all my American friends with kids: ‘Just let them kids be for a little while yet, you never know, it might save your economy.’