Roz Savage's Blog, page 7

If you think our present government is doing an excellent job, our politicians are above reproach, and the British political system can’t possibly be improved, then you probably won’t enjoy reading Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, and you can also skip the rest of this blog post.

On the other hand, if you’re still miffed about Brexit, you might enjoy it. By “enjoy”, I mean you will be made to splutter with indignation and impotent fury (well, I was), and the UK’s epic own goal may make marginally more sense.

Even if you think Brexit was a fine idea, you may still enjoy the book. It depends on whether you feel comfortable with the UK’s future being a pawn in a power game played by a privileged elite.

The Eton-Oxford Fast Track

The book sets out how an exclusive caste of British men – those who attended Eton College, went to Oxford and became members of the Oxford Union (and, in many cases, the infamous, all-male Bullingdon Club) – naturally graduated to the House of Commons, having been educated since boyhood on how to win a debate through sheer force of wit and articulacy, but extremely little about morality, ethics, or the lives of less privileged members of society.

David Cameron, who called the Brexit referendum, and Boris Johnson, whose Brexit campaign won, are two such men.

I found it a strange experience reading the book. I overlapped at Oxford with Cameron and Johnson (Johnson graduated in 1987, Cameron in 1988, I in 1989) but the Oxford described is not the one that I knew. Here’s a little comparison.

 

Boris JohnsonDavid CameronMeGraduation Date198719881989CollegeBalliolBrasenoseUnivSubjectClassics (i.e. Greek and Latin)Philosophy, Politics and EconomicsJurisprudence (i.e. Law)Bullingdon ClubYesYesNoOxford UnionYesYesNoPrime Minister of UKYesYesNo (obvs)

 

Any or all of these factors meant that we were on parallel lines through the Oxosphere, but supremely unlikely to ever cross paths. While our future politicians (also including Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg) were learning the ancient art of political back-stabbing at the Union, I was more usually to be found on the river, in the college beer cellar, or asleep on a book of case law in the law library. While they were at the Union Ball, I was probably at the India Garden.

But I hope this isn’t just me having a chip on my shoulder about social class. Being a daughter of clergy somewhat places me to the side of the British class structure. I’m not even against privilege, per se (even as I recognise my own privilege). For me, it’s not about whether you’re privileged or not, but what you do with the privilege you have.

So How Did This Lead To Brexit?

There is clearly an enormous advantage in going to a school like Eton that nurtures the qualities of self-assurance, agility of thought, swiftness of wit, and ruthlessness in debates that is a perfect grounding for later success at Westminster. The House of Commons is reassuringly familiar to those familiar with the debating chambers at Eton and Oxford, and consequent ascent to the highest political post in the land seems almost like a natural progression. Even some people who don’t particularly rate Boris see a kind of inevitability about his rise.

The book implies that to Boris, Brexit was a rhetorical sparring match to see which side of the campaign could outwit (out-twit?) the other, just like in the jolly old days at the Union. Maybe he was peeved that the younger Cameron had beaten him to Number Ten, and taking the opposite side on the Brexit issue was payback time. Maybe he resented the European Union’s encroachment on British sovereignty, when clearly this was the prerogative of the British ruling classes.

To be fair, I’m equally vexed with David Cameron, who it seems hadn’t done his homework on which way the referendum was likely to go, and then despite saying he would stay on in office regardless of which way it went, promptly quit. Both men were playing with the future of our country as if the consequences would be no more serious than a bruised ego on one side or the other.

But as the eminently foreseeable consequences of Brexit play out – delays of imports and people at borders, additional bureaucracy, departing corporate HQs, and so on – buyers’ remorse may be setting in. As of May 2022, 47% of people in Great Britain thought that it was wrong to leave the European Union, compared with 39% who thought it was the right decision. And given the age group differential, the balance is likely to shift further towards Remain – according to the BBC in 2018, 82% of 18 to 24-year-olds would vote Remain in a second referendum, compared with the two-thirds of those aged 65 and over who would vote Leave.

Still, that ship has sailed, and to mix my metaphors, no point crying over spilled milk.

So, What Can We Learn?

At the conclusion of the book, the Simon Kuper suggests that Oxford confers an unfair advantage, and should be stripped of its power to distort British politics by turning it into a purely postgraduate institution. That’s not the way I would go. It was a tremendous honour to go to Oxford, and to deny that to all future undergraduates would be disproportionate and a shame. I wouldn’t want Eton to be less Eton, or Oxford to be less Oxford. The skillsets that they foster are valuable in the real world, so rather than making the top institutions less, why not make other institutions more?

Equalise the playing field at the highest common denominator, not the lowest.

It’s natural that the scions of the wealthier classes have a greater degree of self-assurance (or arrogance) that serves them well as they move through the world, but what if other schools were better funded and teaching was a well-respected and well-paid profession?

Couldn’t ordinary kids also be supported to become the best they can be, and encouraged to actively participate in our democracy?

Ah, democracy… I’ve written before about the shortcomings of democracy in its current form. Most pertinent here is that we elect individuals who are good at winning elections, not people who are going to be good at running the country. So maybe we’re overdue for electoral reform.

Humans being as we are, we are impressed by humour, eloquence, and self-confidence. If someone believes in themselves as a leader, we tend to believe that too, and it’s easy to be won over by superficial likeability rather than sound policies or good character. This is always going to be a failing of human judgement, so might it be possible to create a system of political representation, like a People’s Parliament, that draws on a diverse cross-section of the population? Truly government for the people, by the people?

But here we run into the old conundrum: that those in power are supremely unlikely to replace the system that put them into power.

As Frederick Douglass said in his West India Emancipation speech:

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.”

What are we willing to quietly submit to? And what are we willing to stand up for? Discuss. 

(If you’re interested to read more, there’s a good introduction to the book by its author, Simon Kuper, in the Financial Times.)

 

Photo by Tom Chen on Unsplash

John Muir said: “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” Suzanne Simard is proving that this is quite literally true – that nature in general, and trees in particular, is not competitive, but is intricately interconnected in a web of mutual support and reciprocity.

You might have seen her 2016 TED Talk about how trees talk to each other. I’ve just finished listening to her audiobook (read by the author), Finding the Mother Tree. What strikes me most, following on from my blog post about Carl Safina’s Beyond Words (and also an older post about Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer) is this: not only is non-human nature so much more intelligent than we suspected, but we have fundamentally misunderstood that it is deeply rooted (so to speak) in relationship, not individuality. Trees thrive by sharing resources, not hoarding them. As Suzanne puts it:

“The trees soon revealed startling secrets. I discovered that they are in a web of interdependence, linked by a system of underground channels, where they perceive and connect and relate with an ancient intricacy and wisdom that can no longer be denied.”

Her work began when, as a young employee for a logging company, she intuited that British Columbia’s “free to grow” policy wasn’t working. The idea was that eradicating “weeds” would allow trees in plantations to flourish without competition for water, nutrients, or sunlight. But the trees were sickly and yellow, and many died.

Over the course of decades of research, Suzanne has discovered that the health of trees depends in large part on their subterranean network of fungal mycorrhizae that allows the sharing of nutrients – and maybe something more. Maybe even kinship.

Most animals don’t do well in isolation – witness tragic zoo exhibits of lonely pitiful creatures, often displaying signs of stress, depression and poor health, labelled zoochosis. Trees are not so different. They have richer family lives than we had imagined. Experiments have shown that a tree can tell kin from non-kin, and shares more generously with its own offspring.

“The older trees are able to discern which seedlings are their own kin. The old trees nurture the young ones and provide them food and water just as we do with our own children. It is enough to make one pause, take a deep breath, and contemplate the social nature of the forest and how this is critical for evolution. The fungal network appears to wire the trees for fitness. And more. These old trees are mothering their children.”

In a forest, the whole really is greater than the sum of the parts.

“Plants are attuned to one another’s strengths and weaknesses, elegantly giving and taking to attain exquisite balance. There is grace in complexity, in actions cohering, in sum totals.”

I reference the community of trees in my forthcoming book, The Ocean in a Drop, in relation to Iain McGilchrist’s work on the two hemisphere of the brain – the reductionist left hemisphere, and the holistic right:

“The left hemisphere quite literally can’t see the wood for the trees; here in the UK developers of a proposed high speed train link have promised to plant new trees to replace the ancient woodlands that will be cut down, ignoring the fact that a wood is a deeply integrated community evolved over centuries, not just a bunch of trees you can cut down in one place and replace with saplings somewhere else. The right hemisphere intuits the wood as a place of harmony and rejuvenation (think of Japanese forest-bathing), peopled by ancient trees and rich in diversity and relationship. The left hemisphere just sees a collection of individual, substitutable objects.”

Speaking of brains, Suzanne Simard sees a parallel between the wood wide web and our own synaptic connections:

“…the biggest, oldest timbers are the sources of fungal connections to regenerating seedlings. Not only that, they connect to all neighbors, young and old, serving as the linchpins for a jungle of threads and synapses and nodes. I’ll take you through the journey that revealed the most shocking aspect of this pattern—that it has similarities with our own human brains. In it, the old and young are perceiving, communicating, and responding to one another by emitting chemical signals. Chemicals identical to our own neurotransmitters. Signals created by ions cascading across fungal membranes.”

Trees have a lot to teach us about how to live in a thriving web of mutuality, in collaboration rather than competition. Suzanne’s book is inspiring and uplifting – interwoven with her groundbreaking research is her own story of personal and professional courage, often facing scepticism, dogma, prejudice and misogyny as she tries to convince scientists and loggers that they have missed something fundamental about the nature of trees. She concludes:

“The scientific evidence is impossible to ignore: the forest is wired for wisdom, sentience, and healing. This is not a book about how we can save the trees. This is a book about how the trees might save us.”

Find out more about Suzanne Simard’s current work at the Mother Tree Project.

Photo by Lukasz Szmigiel on Unsplash

 

Other Stuff:

A reminder that I have a couple of public speaking events coming up – tickets available via the links below. I don’t do public events very often, so I hope you’ll grab this rare chance!

Friday 27th May: Solitude, Sustainability, and Systems Thinking: Rowing 3 Oceans for Change (UK, near Southampton)

Thursday 9th-Friday 10th June: Fifteen Seconds Festival (Graz, Austria): Riding the Waves of Change

PROMO CODE! 10 free festival passes available if you enter FSF22-FV6P3RUU at checkout

I’m curious about industrial revolutions from the perspective of workers, and I’d like your input. We are now supposedly going through the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and initially it seems to be the first one that has little use for humans. But so has every previous one, before it actually happened.

So what do you think humanity will do with its time, come the revolution?

First, some history.

 

A Short History of Industrial Revolutions

According to the Institute of Entrepreneurship Development, the first three industrial revolutions were:

First (1765): Mechanisation and the arrival of the steam engine/trains drew people away from agriculture and into industry.

Second (1870): Emergence of electricity, gas and coal, and the invention of the internal combustion engine, telegraph, and telephone.

Third (1969): Development of nuclear energy, electronics, and computers, opening the door to space exploration, accelerated research, robotics and biotechnology.

Fourth (now): Too soon to tell exactly, but its infrastructure includes the internet, virtual reality and AI.

Before 1765, there were pre-industrial revolutions. Ancient societies saw transitions such as:

The shift from hunter/forager societies to agricultureAgricultural revolution (starting around 1650): crop rotation, new style ploughs, enclosure, selective breeding, invention of the seed drillInvention of the wheel reducing the need for raw manpower in the form of slaves

(There may have also been ancient civilisations that were much more highly developed than we have given them credit for – see Graham Hancock’s books such as Magicians of the Gods.)

 

What I’m Wondering…

Humans have been useful throughout these historical developments, with the majority workforce shifting from slaves to farm workers to factory workers to service industries/professionals.

And I’m sure the question I’m about to ask has been asked at every transition point in history, but the answer is maybe less clear now, and this is why I’d like your input:

When computers, AI, and robots can do most of the work, what use does industry have for humans?

Back in the 1950s, we thought that exciting new technologies would take over most of the drudgery, and humans would have unprecedented leisure time to enjoy nature, keep fit, indulge in creative arts and pursue personal development. But instead we created twentieth-century forms of drudgery, largely in service industries.

Might we finally be able to fulfil that promise of more leisure time?

But if the industrial machine has little use for humans, how do we distribute wealth? Currently workers sell their time to the owners of industry in order to obtain the money to buy goods and services. These purchases in turn keep the industries ticking over.

So if there is little need for workers, then what? How does the engine of capitalism keep running? How will people obtain money? What will we do with our time? Do we even want this Fourth Industrial Revolution? Who benefits from it? Who gets to decide? 

I have some ideas, but I’d love to hear yours!

 

Other Stuff:

A reminder that I have a couple of public speaking events coming up – tickets available via the links below. I don’t do public events very often, so I hope you’ll grab this rare chance!

Friday 27th May: Solitude, Sustainability, and Systems Thinking: Rowing 3 Oceans for Change (UK, near Southampton)

Thursday 9th-Friday 10th June: Fifteen Seconds Festival (Graz, Austria): Riding the Waves of Change

PROMO CODE! 10 free festival passes available if you enter FSF22-FV6P3RUU at checkout

My talk description: Change is happening fast, and the face of the wave is only going to get steeper. Record-setting ocean rower Roz Savage shares insights on how to embrace apparent chaos as a catalyst for evolution. Drawing on her ocean adventures, she offers thoughts on how we can surrender to the wave, stop trying to control the uncontrollable, and instead maintain our balance and focus as we accelerate into an excitingly unpredictable future.

 

Photo by Saad Salim on Unsplash

I’ve just finished reading Carl Safina’s wonderful and eye-opening book, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. It has left me in no doubt that elephants, wolves, and orcas (aka killer whales – but rest assured, they have never killed a human) have complex emotional and social lives. Chances are, many other creatures do too.

And yet, when we look at how cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, and other livestock are often treated, the evidence would suggest we still live with the legacy of Descartes’ view that animals are mindless automata without any thoughts or feelings.

Is this a belief of convenience, that allows us to guiltlessly exploit animals for our own benefit?

In the book, Carl hangs out with researchers who have been watching elephants, wolves, and whales for decades, getting to know them as individuals, families, and groups. Their intelligence – deductive, social and emotional – is evident, as is the fragility of their survival. Do please read the whole book, but I’ve included some choice excerpts at the bottom of this blog post (beneath “Other Stuff”).

Laced throughout the book, between the beautiful stories of animal intelligence, are warnings about the tragic disregard humans have for these amazing creatures – another way in which we attempt to dominate the Earth, possibly for short-term gain or profit, but inevitably to our long-term detriment. When will we realise that all life is interconnected, and when we damage one part of the web, we impoverish ourselves?

Carl writes:

“For centuries, the fact that other animals don’t converse the way humans do has been interpreted as evidence of empty minds. Of course, that helps justify what we do to them. If they can’t think, there’s no need to care what they think… Darwin jotted in his notebook this searing one-liner: ‘Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.’”

Will future generations look back at the early 21st century, and feel the same sense of revulsion at the way we treat animals that we experience when we contemplate slavery?

What we do to wild animals is the same as what we do to each other. (White) humans have a long and shameful history of designating some groups “less than”, with those in power always putting themselves at the top. Carl Linnaeus, who created the classification system for living organisms, identified four human races, with crude characterisations of each. In 1777, Immanuel Kant created a hierarchy of races, Whites at the top, Blacks at the bottom. I don’t care to repeat the details of their racist views, but you can read more here.

This was a belief of convenience that enabled the enslavement, exploitation, degradation, abuse and murder of non-Europeans, particularly Blacks, for centuries. People who had a different colour skin, spoke a different language, dressed differently, had a different culture were deliberately cast as inferior for no reason other than that they weren’t white Europeans. For too long, the dominant group has equated “other” with “inferior”. White-skinned beings do it to Black- or Brown-skinned beings, and human beings do it to non-human beings.

To return to our non-human brethren, I’m not saying we shouldn’t keep and kill livestock (although I have many friends who might say that), nor that we should set them all free. We have domesticated these creatures to meet our needs – cows to produce more milk, sheep to produce more wool, pigs to be heavier, chickens to grow unnaturally fast. They haven’t been bred to do well in the wild.

Rather, I am saying that we should treat them respectfully, and as humanely as possible. Heck, maybe we could even treat each other that way too.

I’m reminded of the indigenous concept of the honourable harvest, which reads a lot like common sense:

Ask permission of the ones whose lives you seek. Abide by the answer.

Never take the first. Never take the last.

Harvest in a way that minimizes harm. 

Take only what you need and leave some for others.

Use everything that you take. 

Take only that which is given to you. 

Share it, as the Earth has shared with you. 

Be grateful. 

Reciprocate the gift.

Sustain the ones who sustain you, and the Earth will last forever.

 

 

Other Stuff:

I have a couple of public speaking events coming up – tickets available via the links below. I don’t do public events very often, so I hope you’ll grab this rare chance!

Friday 27th May: Solitude, Sustainability, and Systems Thinking: Rowing 3 Oceans for Change (UK, near Southampton)

Thursday 9th-Friday 10th June: Fifteen Seconds Festival (Graz, Austria): Riding the Waves of Change

PROMO CODE! 10 free festival passes available if you enter FSF22-FV6P3RUU at checkout

My talk description: Change is happening fast, and the face of the wave is only going to get steeper. Record-setting ocean rower Roz Savage shares insights on how to embrace apparent chaos as a catalyst for evolution. Drawing on her ocean adventures, she offers thoughts on how we can surrender to the wave, stop trying to control the uncontrollable, and instead maintain our balance and focus as we accelerate into an excitingly unpredictable future.

 

Quotes from Beyond Words, by Carl Safina

“Intelligent, social, emotional, personable, imitative, respectful of ancestors, playful, self-aware, compassionate—these are qualities that would gain most of us membership to an exclusive club,” wrote Cynthia Moss along with Joyce Poole and several colleagues. “They also describe elephants.”

“…an elephant isn’t just flesh; it is a deep store of knowledge needed for survival. All it takes for that kind of knowledge to continue succeeding is for the world not to change too much over the decades of a life. And for many thousands of years, that worked. However, elder matriarchs’ big tusks make them poachers’ preferred targets.”

“an elephant’s chance of being killed by a human is greater than their risk of death from any other cause.”

“Modernity’s self-imposed exile from the world seems to have degraded an older human ability to recognize the minds in other animals. Yet it can seem that other animals recognize human minds.”

“The oft-repeated line “Humans are rational beings” is probably our most half-true assertion about ourselves. There is in nature an overriding sanity and often, in humankind, an undermining insanity. We, among all animals, are most frequently irrational, distortional, delusional, worried… Perhaps believing false things comes bundled with our peculiar, oddly brilliant ability to envision what is not yet, and to imagine a better world… It’s not rationality that’s uniquely human; it’s irrationality. It’s the crucial ability to envision what is not, and to pursue unreasonable ideas.”

“What we’re really saying is “Please tell us a story that distances us from all other life.” Why? Because we desperately need to believe we are not just unique—as all species are—but that we are so very special, that we are resplendent, transcendent, translucent, divinely inspired, weightlessly imbued with eternal souls. Anything less induces dread and existential panic.”

“Twenty-five million years before today, dolphins were firmly in possession of our solar system’s brightest brain. In many ways it would be nice if they still were. When dolphins were the planet’s brain leaders, the world didn’t have any political, religious, ethnic, or environmental problems. Creating problems seems to be one of the things that “make us human.”

“Personality is probably the most underrecognized aspect of free-living creatures. Dolphins have personality galore. They’re born with personalities. Shy. Bold. Rambunctious. Bullying…. It’s not personality; it’s individuality. And it’s a fact of life. And it runs deep. Very deep.”

“Why do we continue to expect living things to be so incapable? Before we existed, they were already on the job. We so vastly underestimate them. We impose a self-isolation that deprives ourselves of experiencing so much of the world’s persona.”

“We are all so similar under the skin. Four limbs, the same bones, the same organs, the same origins, and lots of shared history. And between first breath and final gasp, we endeavor toward a common quest: to live, to raise our young, to find space enough for our lives, to survive the confronting dangers, to do what it takes, to the best of our abilities, to live out the mystery and opportunity of finding ourselves somehow in existence.”

“All the animals that human parents paint on nursery room walls, all the creatures depicted in paintings of Noah’s ark, are actually in mortal trouble now. Their flood is us.”

“if we treated animals as they deserve, human inhumanity to humans would stand out all the more appallingly. We might then turn our attention to the next step beyond human civilization: humane civilization. Justice for all.”

“Our species best understands the world yet has the worst relationship with it.”

“We see the whole universe through a human lens. The harder step is to get outside ourselves, look back at where and how we live. There is no better prayer to morning than to feel glad to know: the greatest story is that all life is one.”

 

Photo by Richard Jacobs on Unsplash

Some people think suicide is an act of consummate selfishness, that the person who took their own life failed to think about the impact on their friends, family, and whoever might find their body.

I’ve been thinking about this a great deal since the suicide of my friend and neighbour, Barry, three months ago. And I can’t bring myself to agree with this verdict of selfishness.

It may be true that those who voluntarily leave this life at their own hand are so turned in on themselves that they aren’t thinking about the effects on others. Possibly they feel so unloved and unlovable that they underestimate how much people will miss them when they’re gone. Some may choose to describe this as selfishness.

Cultural Conditioning

Certain social structures add to the condemnation and judgement. There is a great deal of stigma around suicide, particularly from religion. In the orthodox Jewish faith, “people who kill themselves are buried separately and not commemorated by a family sitting shiva. The stigma attaching to a suicide can even affect the marriage prospects of siblings.” In Hinduism, “Some scriptures state that to die by suicide (and any type of violent death) results in becoming a ghost, wandering earth until the time one would have otherwise died, had one not died by suicide.” This Wikipedia page sets out various other religious attitudes to suicide, most of them prohibitive.

But I would imagine that it takes a great deal of courage to take your own life. Life wants to live, and it goes against most people’s deepest instincts to end their own life. So why do some people feel driven to do it?

Unable to Be With Pain

My friend Wendela is a clinical psychiatrist in the Netherlands, specialising in suicide. Her theory is that suicidal people aren’t necessarily more sad or depressed than other people – they just struggle more to be with the sadness or depression. They can’t tolerate the pain, and death seems like the only way out.

Is that selfish?

At the risk of extrapolating from a sample size of one, I don’t see Barry as selfish, either in life or in death. Of course he had a degree of self-interest – we all do – but he was incredibly generous with his time and energy in our village community.

NOTE: I want to emphasise that I’m talking about a very specific case here, concerning a friend and neighbour. I can’t even begin to imagine the complexity and intensity of losing a child, parent, spouse, or sibling to suicide, so I don’t presume to write about that. This is just my personal perspective on a specific situation.

It’s All About Me

My thoughts on this are that I’m the one being selfish about Barry’s death. I’m sad, of course, but also mad at him for not being here any more, for having deprived me of his company, for foreclosing the possibility of all our future conversations and adventures. In short, it’s all about me.

As the priest said at Barry’s funeral, he needed peace and quiet, in order to replenish his resources. Where he is now, he has his peace.

What right would I have to deny him that? Supposing I’d miraculously been in a position to intervene before the pills took effect – would it have been the right thing to prevent him from choosing the time and the manner of his exit? I don’t think so. That would have been me subjugating his needs and desires to my own.

Surely a good friend would want what is best for someone they love, even if it doesn’t align with their own personal plans? I might have a different view about what would have been best for Barry, but it was his life, his choice. And I respect his right to choose.

Me-centric or Tree-centric?

To end on a slight tangent… I was walking in the woods with a wise older friend the other morning, and as we returned along the lane we passed chainsaw-wielding tree surgeons in harnesses, amputating tree limbs, gradually dismantling trees down to stumps. I remarked that this made me feel sad.

She replied that trees – in fact, Mother Nature herself – operate on different timescales than we do. I might, as a human who loves trees, have an opinion about them being cut down, but trees grow back (well, unless we’ve paved over their space in the meantime). I might wince at the sound of chainsaws, I might not like the sight of raw stumps, and I might miss the trees that have been reduced to firewood – but that’s me seeing the situation from a me-centric perspective, rather than a tree-centric perspective.

I’m still not sure on this one. Does a tree feel distress as it is dissected, limb from limb? A quick google search shows that science says a plant can’t feel pain because it doesn’t have a brain or nervous system. But it is very anthropocentric to say the only consciousness that counts is one that looks like human consciousness, generated by human-like physiology.

 

What do you think? Can a tree be conscious?

And what do you think about selfishness and suicide? Do you think it’s selfish, or not?

 

Other Stuff

Good news! Last Friday I finished the (hopefully almost) final draft of my forthcoming book, The Ocean in a Drop, due to be published by Flint Books on 27th October this year. Writing this book has been a journey…. at times on a par with rowing an ocean. Stay tuned for more updates as we approach publication date.

More good news! I’m speaking at a charity event in the New Forest in the UK on 27th May – details here. I rarely speak at open-ticket events, so if you’re anywhere near the south coast (near Southampton), it would be amazing to see you there!

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Two very different perspectives of Hurricane Katrina appear in the book I’ve just finished, The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, and a book I read a while ago, A Paradise Built in Hell, by Rebecca Solnit.

While Rebecca focuses on the generosity and altruism of ordinary people faced with extraordinary catastrophe, Naomi examines the long and dubious history of disaster capitalism, in which war and other calamities are exploited for profit.

You can read the full chapter from The Shock Doctrine here. It gives a good flavour of the book as a whole, although the chapter on the Iraq War is probably the most illuminating and, yes, shocking. It turns out there is no disaster that human greed can’t make much, much worse.

Snouts in the Trough

In the Shock version of Katrina, within hours of the hurricane hitting New Orleans, plans were being drawn up to turn the situation to maximum advantage, i.e. maximum profit. Construction and security companies were the first to get their snouts in the trough.

Not far behind were the developers who spotted a long-awaited opportunity to demolish the housing projects near the tourist honeypot of the French Quarter. According to a protester: “they used the disaster as a way of cleansing the neighbourhood when the neighbourhood is weakest. . . . This is a great location for bigger houses and condos. The only problem is you got all these poor black people sitting on it.”

As with the other disasters the book describes, much of the money designated to alleviate suffering and rebuild New Orleans was wasted. By the time the work had been delegated to sub-sub-sub-contractors and everybody had taken their cut, almost nothing was left for the intended purpose.

Meanwhile, many of the displaced residents of New Orleans were left not just without homes, but without jobs.

“Something else was familiar [i.e. similar to Iraq]: the contractors’ aversion to hiring local people who might have seen the reconstruction of New Orleans not only as a job but as part of healing and re-empowering their communities. Washington could easily have made it a condition of every Katrina contract that companies hire local people at decent wages to help them put their lives back together. Instead, the residents of the Gulf Coast, like the people of Iraq, were expected to watch as contractors created an economic boom based on easy taxpayer money and relaxed regulations.”

Naomi Klein echoes Rebecca Solnit’s view that good things can emerge from adversity, but contrasts it with the toxic trend of the last twenty years:

“Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social levelling, rare moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pulled together. Increasingly, however, disasters are the opposite: they provide windows into a cruel and ruthlessly divided future in which money and race buy survival.”

It feels very wrong that the beneficiaries of relief efforts are all too often massive corporations rather than the actual victims, and that even the most appalling humanitarian crises can be used to turn a profit.

I highly recommend The Shock Doctrine. It’s sickening reading, but important (and it does end on a more positive note).

What is Really Happening in Ukraine?

It makes me look at Ukraine, and while feeling enormous compassion for the people there, I can’t help wondering who is going to get rich on the back of their suffering. Will it be Western multinationals, or is Putin taking a leaf out of the American playbook and expecting Russian corporations to profit from the reconstruction? Is he, to use Naomi Klein’s phrase, trying to create a blank slate (or blank state) onto which he can impose his ideological will and/or exploit for financial profit?

The Silver Lining

Disaster doesn’t have to be all bad. Catastrophes have always happened and always will happen, but they can become positive forces for social cohesion and collaboration.

In the Paradise version of Katrina, people band together in the face of overwhelming grief and adversity, finding purpose and even joy by supporting each other, sharing whatever resources they have, tapping into unsuspected reserves of resourcefulness and kindness. Rebecca Solnit points to “a new vision of what society could become – one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local”.

A positive story also emerged in Thailand after the catastrophic Boxing Day tsunami of 2004. According to The Shock Doctrine, while Sri Lanka allowed international developers to permanently displace the small fishing villages that had lined the beaches, in order to redevelop the country as a major tourist destination, in Thailand the people took matters into their own hands and “reinvaded” their villages, picking up tools and immediately getting to work to reconstruct their family homes. The result was that community was preserved, and in fact even strengthened by their shared purpose.

And at the same time as they rebuilt their communities, they rebuilt the memories, individual and collective, that bind a community together. As Naomi Klein says, memories are “the greatest shock absorber of all”.

Trusting the People

Relevant to the above, I just heard a wonderful story on the Futurenauts podcast, related by Jon Alexander about a conversation he had with Audrey Tang (Digital Minister of Taiwan) about Taiwan’s response to the Covid crisis. The Taiwanese government invited massive public participation in designing their response. To Jon’s comment that the Taiwanese people must really trust the government, Audrey replied:

“It’s not about the people trusting the government – it’s about the government trusting the people.”

This is powerful. On the whole, people ARE trustworthy, especially when it is their families, homes, and livelihoods that are at stake. They will do a good job of organising themselves. They don’t need the help/interference/exploitation of big government or big companies. People are smart. Small is beautiful. The role of government should be to empower people to, as much as practicable, govern themselves.

This reminds me of Elinor Ostrom’s 8 principles for the management of the commons, and these two in particular:

Rules should fit local circumstances. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to common resource management. Rules should be dictated by local people and local ecological needs.

Participatory decision-making is vital. There are all kinds of ways to make it happen, but people will be more likely to follow the rules if they had a hand in writing them. Involve as many people as possible in decision-making.

The Shock Doctrine amply demonstrates how horribly wrong it goes when these principles are violated. A Paradise Built in Hell shows how powerful they are when given free rein to flourish.

 

Photo by Payton Tuttle on Unsplash

Can human beings ever change without a shock to the system?

We talk about wakeup calls – a bereavement, a diagnosis, discovering an uncomfortable truth, a breakup or crisis of some sort – but are we able to proactively change course before the flashing red danger lights and blaring alarms go off?

I’m listening to The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein. It was published in 2008, but is as relevant now as it was then as we contemplate our post-Covid future, the war in Ukraine, and the ever-more-real threat of climate change.

The Shock Doctrine hinges on Milton Friedman’s dictum that:

“Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”

The book explores the various ways that Friedman’s “real change” has been achieved, so far (I’m about a quarter of the way through) focusing mostly on the introduction of his laissez-faire capitalism to Latin America in the 1970s, often through brutal means – democratically elected presidents deposed or assassinated, left-wing intellectuals “disappeared” (i.e. tortured and murdered), populations intimidated into submission to the new regime. (For further reading on this, I recommend The Divide, by Jason Hickel, and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins.)

 

A Clean Slate

Naomi Klein is not suggesting that Friedman endorsed these genocidal strategies, but rather, explores the ways in which ideologues have attempted to wipe the slate clean in order to conduct their social experiments. Clearly, Friedman believed that this could only be achieved by precipitating a breakdown in the old system.

I am finding it uncomfortable reading for many reasons, but primarily because I don’t like to find myself agreeing with Friedman, whose economic theories I so fundamentally disagree with.

And yet when it comes to how change happens, I somewhat agree. My own forthcoming book features a hypothetical global catastrophe (a massive solar flare – not so far-fetched) that effectively throws the world back into the Dark Ages, enabling humanity to build a new civilisation based on principles of connection and compassion.

Am I just another insane ideologue hoping for a blank slate on which to conduct a social experiment? Of course, I don’t think I am, but probably neither did any of the other individuals that history now regards as unhinged megalomaniacs.

So hence my question: CAN humans change without a crisis?

 

A Line in the Sand

Psychologically, it seems we like to have a clearly marked turning point. As individuals, we (attempt to) make new resolutions not on any old day of the year, but usually on January 1st, a birthday, or some other significant date. We like to draw a line in the sand between the “old me” and the “new me”. This is an important component of our commitment to change.

Collectively, we’re much the same. Ritual matters. A president signing a new act into existence is a major photo opp, broadcast across the news networks as a symbol that we are doing things differently from now on.

Of course, I recognise there is a big difference between a military coup, a natural catastrophe, a new year resolution, and enacting a new piece of legislation, but they all share the clarity of a single moment in time when the old era ends, and a new era begins.

 

Kicking the Can Down the Road

When we look at the ecological crisis, though, we keep kicking the can down the road. Global warming, to take one aspect of the crisis, has a major PR problem in that it is invisible to most of us in the Global North (although all too evident in the Arctic and in small island states), and is gradual (although becoming less gradual all the time).

Yes, sure, from time to time heads of state get together and sign something noncommittal and then fail to act on their non-commitments. It is starting to feel very much like the addict who keeps promising to quit, but keeps failing, and the more times they break their promise the less anybody believes it (including themselves).

Paul Gilding, in The Great Disruption, sets out his case that we need to be disrupted before what he calls The Great Awakening. Things have to get worse before they get better. There’s something deeply archetypal about this narrative arc – in Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, the hero has to go into the innermost cave, endure the ordeal, in order to discover the boon that they will bring back to the ordinary world. We have a strong psychological attraction to the dramatic transformation, the road to Damascus, being reborn. Stories of gradual, mindful change just don’t appeal to our imagination in the same way.

 

The Easy Way or the Hard Way?

Of course I wish that change could happen proactively, incrementally, and painlessly. I just don’t think it will. The problems that humanity faces now – mass extinction, poverty, inequality, exploitation, violation of human rights, and many more – will persist for as long as the current power structures exist. Those with the power to create change lack the motivation, and those with the motivation lack the power.

I wish it were otherwise, but I believe we need breakdown before we can get to breakthrough.

But what we can do is to nurture the ideas that are lying around. It sticks in my craw to agree with Friedman on this, as I disagree with so much else that he stood for, but he was right on this one. We can start to put into practice, on whatever scale is within our power, the ideas that we would like to see come to life after the apocalypse.

And let’s remember that the original Greek apokalupsis meant “to uncover, reveal” – an apocalypse was originally not an end, but a beginning.

But that’s just my view. What do you think? Can we do this the easy way? Or will we have to do it the hard way?

 

Featured Photo by Ignacio Amenábar on Unsplash

Multitasking, sleep, stress, smartphones, social media, surveillance capitalism, algorithms, ADHD, EQ, children’s lost right to roam, education, air pollution, and the crisis of democracy.

Do any of those phrases catch your attention? Do they attract your focus?

These are among the many subjects that Johann Hari touches on in his quest to find out who stole our focus in his latest book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention–And How to Think Deeply Again. It makes for sobering reading.

There’s a good chance you haven’t read it. Book-reading is apparently a dying art, as our ability to read for long periods is eroded. Hari quotes the American Time Use Survey of 26,000 Americans, which reports that 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year. By 2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone. I suspect the UK figures would be similar.

So if you haven’t read Stolen Focus, I shall summarise.

Hari notes that many factors have contributed to the current crisis of concentration, and that (as with being deemed a failure in a supposed meritocracy) we are encouraged to blame ourselves, rather than the system.

“We live in an extremely individualistic culture, where we are constantly pushed to see our problems as individual failings, and to seek out individual solutions. You’re unable to focus? Overweight? Poor? Depressed? We are taught in this culture to think: That’s my fault. I should have found a personal way to lift myself up and out of these environmental problems.”

But being told to meditate more, turn off your smartphone notifications, or simply try harder, does not help. The system should take its fair share of the responsibility.

“The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns.”

A central problem is that the companies most responsible – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and so on – cannot separate the theft of our attention from their business model, which:

“can only succeed if they take steps to dominate the attention spans of the wider society. It’s not their goal, any more than ExxonMobil deliberately wants to melt the Arctic. But it’s an inescapable effect of their current business model.”

The longer we stay hooked on their content, the more data they gather about our browsing patterns, and the more valuable that data becomes to the highest bidders, who then use it to target their marketing messages precisely at our current interests – or at least, our current distractions. This is what psychologist Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism.

Ultimately, our time is a zero-sum game. Each human has the same number of hours in the day, so the more time we spend scrolling through superficial trivialities, the less time we can spend on things that require prolonged and focused attention… things like active participation in democracy.

“Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems, distinguish them from fantasies, come up with solutions, and hold their leaders accountable if they fail to deliver them.”

Hari connects the decline in book-reading with declines in our ability to understand complexity and nuance, and our capacity for empathy:

“…the medium of the book tells us several things. Firstly, life is complex, and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it. You need to slow down. Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page. Thirdly, it is worth thinking deeply about how other people live and how their minds work. They have complex inner lives just like you.”

He laments that our perpetual distraction is coming at the exact time that we really need to be paying attention. There are important matters that require our full focus.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this crisis in paying attention has taken place at the same time as the worst crisis of democracy since the 1930s. People who can’t focus will be more drawn to simplistic authoritarian solutions–and less likely to see clearly when they fail. A world full of attention-deprived citizens alternating between Twitter and Snapchat will be a world of cascading crises where we can’t get a handle on any of them.”

He paints a compelling picture of the need for action, and offers some suggestions:

“I would start with three big, bold goals. One: ban surveillance capitalism, because people who are being hacked and deliberately hooked can’t focus. Two: introduce a four-day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can’t pay attention. Three: rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely–in their neighborhoods and at school–because children who are imprisoned in their homes won’t be able to develop a healthy ability to pay attention.”

What do you think? Have you noticed a decline in your ability to sustain focus? Do you lose time diving down rabbit holes, only to emerge blinking into the daylight wondering what just happened? Do you follow links recommended by algorithms? Do you skip the 20-min read in favour of the 2-min read?

If you’ve managed to read all the way through this blog post without getting distracted, congratulations! And if you are now resolving to read a book, I can recommend Stolen Focus…

 

Featured Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Do you believe that we all get what we deserve? If you’ve done well in life, do you believe that your success is due to your own intelligence and hard work? If you’re disappointed with your life, do you believe your failures are due to your own shortcomings?

If your answer to these questions is Yes, then you are subscribing to the tyranny of merit, as described by Michael Sandel in his book of that name.

At first glance, meritocracy might sound like a good thing.

“This was the point of the rhetoric of rising. If barriers to achievement could be dismantled, then everyone would have an equal chance to succeed; regardless of race or class or gender, people could rise as far as their talent and effort would take them. And if opportunities were truly equal, those who rose highest could be said to deserve their success and the rewards it brings. This was the meritocratic promise. It was not a promise of greater equality, but a promise of greater and fairer mobility.”

But it has a toxic side. Your belief – or lack of it – in meritocracy has all kinds of consequences, not just for you, but for society, politics, education, economics, taxation, your opinion of others, your capacity for compassion – even on suicide rates. What could have become an aspiration of fairness has resulted in tremendous inequality. The shadow side of meritocracy can be summed up as the belief that:

“If I am responsible for having accrued a handsome share of worldly goods—income and wealth, power and prestige—I must deserve them. Success is a sign of virtue. My affluence is my due.”

 

Sorting for Success

The word “meritocracy” was first coined by Michael Young in his 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. The book was a satire, intended to be a warning, but instead has become an aspiration, espoused by politicians and assumed to be a generally good thing. Writing in 2001, Young laments:

“It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.”

He points the finger at what Michael Sandel calls “credentialism” – the early filtering of children, usually by the age of 7, into those earmarked for success, and those relegated to low status jobs. While a functional society needs a spectrum of people with a broad variety of skills, education values only a narrow range of intelligences – primarily linguistic and logical-mathematical. Not coincidentally, these are the intelligences that will be well rewarded by careers in banking, insurance, and the law, while the very practical forms of intelligence that equip people to be mechanics, plumbers, electricians and builders are comparatively under-valued. This might feel like the way it’s always been, and maybe it is – but it is nonetheless a choice that society has made, and we could make a different choice.

“Being good at making money measures neither our merit nor the value of our contribution.”

 

Taking Credit Where Credit Isn’t Due

The implications for your political views are significant. If you believe that your success is solely due to your own hard work and natural talent, and that anybody else could have achieved the same, then you’re likely to resent paying taxes to help those less fortunate.

But here are some questions intended to burst a bubble of self-congratulation, to introduce some humility into potential hubris:

Who were your parents? Were they supportive of your education?What school did you go to? Was entry to that school open to all?What people are necessary to your success – colleagues, subordinates, customers, suppliers, cheap foreign workers? To what extent are you enjoying the fruits of the labours of others?The current marketplace happens to value your specific range of talents. Are those talents actually making the world a better place? Are there other talents, currently less highly valued, that are also essential to a society?

The danger lies in the assumption that everybody is starting from a level playing field, and has an equal shot at success. This allows the winners to hold onto their winnings with a clear conscience.

“For the more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the harder it is to learn gratitude and humility. And without these sentiments, it is hard to care for the common good.”

But the playing field is not level, and those with the power to level it have no interest in doing so, because they benefit from its very lack of levelness.

“…those who land on top do not make it on their own but owe their good fortune to family circumstance and native gifts that are morally akin to the luck of the draw.”

 

A Kinder Philosophy

Recognising our own good fortune is a prerequisite for creating a fairer system.

“For why do the successful owe anything to the less advantaged members of society? The answer to this question depends on recognizing that for all our striving, we are not self-made and self-sufficient. Finding ourselves in a society that prices our talents is our good fortune, not our due. A lively sense of the contingency of our lot can inspire a certain humility.”

The real tragedy of believing that you live in a meritocracy falls mostly on the disadvantaged. If they are repeatedly told that anybody can become anything they want to be, then their failure to rise must be their own fault, rather than the result of a rigged system.

“If meritocracy is an aspiration, those who fall short can always blame the system; but if meritocracy is a fact, those who fall short are invited to blame themselves.”

Sandel describes the tragedy that is unfolding among those who do indeed blame themselves for their lack of success – the epidemic of addiction and suicide among the social groups who believed in the American Dream, only to find it has become a nightmare, a system rigged against them.

The meritocratic attitude even spills over into a rather toxic form of spirituality, in which we are told by books like The Secret that we can manifest anything we wish for, if we are sufficiently enlightened and/or holding the right energetic vibration, in a kind of spiritual meritocracy. Even at the same time as it purports to empower, this ethos holds us responsible for anything bad that comes into our lives.

So what is a better, more compassionate ethos? While there was much that was unfair in the pre-meritocratic world, at least it was obvious that the system was rigged, and that success in life depended heavily on the fluke of one’s birth or the vagaries of fortune. Sandel suggests a mantra that reminds us of this fact, there are many variables at play besides merit:

“There, but for the grace of God, or the accident of birth, or the mystery of fate, go I.”

 

More on this:

Alain de Botton’s excellent and entertaining TED talk on a kinder, gentler philosophy of success

The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson

I especially recommend The Tyranny of Merit to Democrat-leaning folks in the US. It offers a plausible explanation for Trump’s ascent that I think is essential reading.

 

Featured Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash

It was one of my many frustrations that from a rowboat you can mostly only see the surface of the ocean. The surface can be beautiful, but there is so much more.

I have the same frustration with life. So I have a compulsion to dive in deeper, to see what is below the surface.

A seafarer’s ability to see below the surface of the ocean is limited by the angle of her eye to the water. When you have a low vantage point, as from the deck of an ocean rowboat, you see the water’s surface from an oblique angle. A stand-up paddler will know that you get a better view from a board because you’re looking perpendicularly down into the water.

When you see the surface from an oblique angle, you mostly see reflection, so whatever colour the sky is, so will the water be, meaning it can appear blue, grey, black, pink, red, orange, silver, or a mix of all the above.

Once in a while, the underwater world would reveal itself by breaking through the surface. A group of dolphins would swoop by, or a bird would dive and emerge with a fish in its beak, or I would feel my boat being rocked by a huge school of yellowfin tuna. Once in a while I would see something more exotic – a whale spouting, a shark circling my boat, a turtle banging its shell against the hull.

But most of the time the riches of the deep were hidden from my view. My eyes were tricked by the surface reflections into thinking that was all there was, while in reality the mile or two of water beneath the surface was teeming with life.

I’m sure you’re getting the metaphor here.

It’s easy to believe that the surface appearance is all there is. But mostly that is refraction and distraction, concealing a deeper reality.

What deeper reality am I talking about?

In the ocean, there are countless creatures as yet unidentified by humans. Also ocean currents, underwater volcanoes and thermal vents, places where daylight has never penetrated, innumerable mysteries of the deep.

Analogies in the deeper human reality might include hyperobjects, long-term trends, shadows in the collective human psyche, hidden flows and forces, structures of thought and of society, operational narratives, paradigms, and dramatic changes bubbling under the surface, waiting to break through.

The news media tend to concentrate, unsurprisingly, on the news – that is, what is new. The human brain likes novelty, so while the news can be informative, it can also be a distraction from the larger forces at work.

By all means, be informed by the news, but don’t mistake it for all there is. The most important aspects of reality lurk beneath the surface.

Credit: https://systemssolutions.org/systems-...

 

Featured Photo by Dylan Shaw on Unsplash