It's human nature- the FT and the Conservatives

We live- so the advertising slogan tells us- in financial times. We also live, especially since credit started crunching, in very interesting times.

The FT correspondents and pundits have been puzzling out loud this last year or so about all their old certainties (market, efficiency, light touch regulation blah blah). And they run columns from various other centrist/right figures that make for interesting reading too.

Jesse Norman (who he?- more below) had a column headed "Human beings are not mere selfish agents" on Friday December 5.

We are daily conditioned to think of human beings as "economic agents": as purely self-interested, endlessly calculating costs adn benefits and highly sensitive to marginal gains and losses.
But a problem arises when this economic image feeds back into society and becomes our default picture of human motivation. We secretly know this picture is wrong; and our best economists know it is wrong too. We are aware that it cannot explain such things as volunteering or philanthropy. We fret about excessive materialism. We yearn endlessly for the things money famously cannot buy: love, friendship, joy. Yet without an alternative picture of what a human being is, we have nowhere else to turn.
We need a different vision and a richer conception of humanity in our public policy. Such a vision starts by recognizing the limits of humna nature. It emphasises the importance of independent institutions, competition and entrepreneurship as factors driving prosperity. It rejects the idea that humans are merely passive vehicles for utility, in favour of a far more dynamic conception of human capability.

Well, this wouldn't be out of place in the pages of Resurgence or some such rich hippy publication. I think Norman (who he? again) is on about bounded rationality.

But then, I've read Noam Chomsky riffing on the utter poverty of the neo-liberal vision of human motivation in similar (well, better) terms. Except a few minutes of googling can't find it me. But I did find the following, from either Robin Hahnel or Michael Albert, authors of ParEcon: Life After Capitalism-

The first answer [in response to "human nature is bad and nothing can change"] I like to give I first heard from Noam Chomsky. Imagine you are in an upstairs window looking out over a nearly empty street below. It is a scorching hot day. A child below is enjoying an ice cream cone. Up walks a man. He looks down, grabs the cone, and swats the child aside into the gutter. He walks on enjoying his new cone. What do you think, from the safety of your distance from the scene, about this man? Of course, you think this fellow is pathological. You certainly don’t identify with him and think, that’s me down there, I would do that too. Instead you would be horrified and you would likely even rush down to comfort the child. But why?
If humans are greedy, self-centered, violent animals wouldn’t we expect that all humans, confronted with the opportunity to take a delicious morsel at no cost to themselves, would do so? Why should it horrify us when we see someone do it? Why should we find it pathological? The answer is that we actually do not think that people are innately thugs. We only gravitate to that claim when it serves our purposes to rationalize some agenda we hold for other reasons entirely, such as when we ignore widespread injustice because to do otherwise would be uncomfortable, costly, and even risky.

Remember the Replicants "I've seen C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate"? What couldn't they do? They couldn't feel empathy...

And now the punchline, for those of you patient enough to still be reading-

Jesse Norman is the Conservative candidate for Hereford and South Herefordshire. His book Compassionate Economics is published this week by Policy Exchange.

Yep, the same Policy Exchange who advocated de-populating Liverpool, Sunderland and Bradford...

For another post- the fascinating article on the politics of the organic movement in the latest Lobster...

"But people die in Nursing Homes"

My best mate, "Dr Dave" was down for a visit. Somewhere in the haze of curry, porter and Aliens (the movie that is), we got to talking about death and euthanasia and all that stuff. Inspired by the recent documentary of a guy with MND taking the sensible steps. Or sensible sips, I suppose.

Dave related a story of how he had recently done a home visit, and ended up diagnosing someone with dementia, and then having a conversation with this person's spouse.

Dave: Well, if it gets to the stage where you find it difficult to cope, um... there can be social services input, home care etc. It may become necessary- if it all gets too much- to put [patient] in a nursing home.

Spouse: But people die in Nursing Homes.

Dave: " " [speechless]

Now, patient and spouse both in their late 70s...

WTF?

Did they not see what had happened to their parents? Their aunts and uncles? Their friends, by this age, FFS? Don't they get how life ends?

Me, I blame the War. When I qualified as a health care professional, there were still a few around who'd fought in it. They were, on the whole (without sinking into all that Greatest Generation guff), phlegmatic and realistic. They'd seen friends die, and they knew how life ends, and that they'd had 60 years or so that others hadn't. But those lot are mostly gone, so the people doing the dying now grew up in the 40s and 50s, and the war was a bit of a game, but rarely life and death.

Oh, and I also blame the Death of God. For the Victorians, death was no taboo, sex was. With fewer of us believing in a hereafter, those taboos have switched.

Best book I ever read about this- "The Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker.

Enough cod-sociology for one day I think...

Go with the Flow

I often think of states not just as having a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, but also as being obsessed with regulating/encouraging free flows (e.g mercantilism to neoliberalism) of capital.

Of course, they're less keen on the free flow of people. That- “border patrols”- will need a separate posting.

Traffic lights are a trivial example of this:

The modern electric traffic light is an American invention. As early as 1912 in Salt Lake City, Utah, policeman Lester Wire invented the first red-green electric traffic lights. On 5 August 1914, the American Traffic Signal Company installed a traffic signal system on the corner of East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. It had two colors, red and green, and a buzzer, based on the design of James Hoge, to provide a warning for color changes. The design by James Hoge allowed police and fire stations to control the signals in case of emergency. The first four-way, three-color traffic light was created by police officer William Potts in Detroit, Michigan in 1920. In 1923, Garrett Morgan patented a traffic signal device. It was Morgan's experience while driving along the streets of Cleveland that led to his invention of a traffic signal device. Ashville, Ohio claims to be the location of the oldest working traffic light in the United States, used at an intersection of public roads until 1982 when it was moved to a local museum

And of course, we regulate our own flows (toilet training, emotional “repression” and the whole Norbert Elias thing. This, from the wikipedia page about him gives you a taste:

Elias' most important work is the two-volume The Civilizing Process (Über den Prozess der Zivilisation). Originally published in 1939, it was virtually ignored until its republication in 1969, when its first volume was also translated into English. The first volume traces the historical developments of the European habitus, or "second nature," the particular individual psychic structures molded by social attitudes. Elias traced how post-medieval European standards regarding violence, sexual behaviour, bodily functions, table manners and forms of speech were gradually transformed by increasing thresholds of shame and repugnance, working outward from a nucleus in court etiquette. The internalized "self-restraint" imposed by increasingly complex networks of social connections developed the "psychological" self-perceptions that Freud recognized as the "super-ego." The second volume of The Civilizing Process looks into the causes of these processes and finds them in the increasingly centralized Early Modern state and the increasingly differentiated and interconnected web of society.

And on the subject of flows, we have the in a good groove flow-

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.

And then of course there's the (often) bad “going with the flow” (of other people/the norms) phrase. The quote below is from page 276 of an amazing book called “The Other Side of Time: A combat surgeon in World War 2”

In the course of an argument in the command post somebody said, "Oh, shit, let's be practical," and I looked over to see Manfred staring at the floor, shaking his head, muttering in German. When I listened, he was saying, "Oh, shit, practical again, here comes practical marching. I'll never be free from practical." I asked him about his little chant, and he told me his definitions of "practical." The word praktisch had been a two-syllable club he'd been beaten by fellow students and teachers and businessmen and clergy all through the nightmare years. "Stop being such a god-damned idealist" Be practical!"

"You know what practical is?

"Practical means I know right from wrong but I'm too fucking scared to do what's right so I commit crimes or permit crimes and I say I'm only being practical. Practical means coward.

"Practical frequently means stupid. Someone is too goddamn dumb to realize the consequences of what he's doing and he hides under practical.

"It also means corrupt: I know what I ought to do but I'm being paid to do something different so I call it practical.
"Practical is an umbrella for the everything lousy people do."

I handed Manfred a bottle of brandy. "A toast, Manfred. Here's to the destruction of the practical!"

"The cowardly, greedy, vicious, plausible practical!"

The ultimate flow though- the one that will render all the others moot- is the flow of carbon dioxide from its long term sequestration as coal, oil or gas, into the atmosphere...

So it goes..

Internet-related Attention Deficit Disorder, or “IRADD, WTF?, QED, OMG”

For years I've been saying that I was glad I'd done one undergraduate degree/developed some writing and research skills before the internet came along. Looking at people skimming and blagging their way through degrees, I've thought "that technology you're using is making you lazy." Hell, I'm even old enough to have been forced to learn my 12 times tables, while other kids were playing around with their new-fangled pocket calculators.

Anyway, now I have even more anecdotal evidence to "back up" my gut instinct.

Three articles I've read recently (as part of my general way-leads-on-to-way google-binging) are worth quoting at length.

The first is a fascinating and sad account of "The History of Flight Simulators: Two Cambridge Inventions" by John M. Rolfe. I only got it via a Googlecache, and even that seems to be gone now.

Anyway, here's the relevant bit, from a report by Frederick Bartlett in December 1940:

"Signals in the periphery of his field of attention tend increasingly to be neglected. Thus he will fail to respond to a falling indication fo the petrol gauge by turnign on to the reserve supply. He becomes increasingly distractable. And, increasingly, feelings of bodily discomfort begin to obtrude upon his consciousness. If he becomes aware of his diminised accuracy of performance, he is apt to attribute this, not to his own shortcomings, but to imperfections that have developed in the apparatus."

Then Nicholas Carr asks "Is Google making us stupid?"

The whole thing is worth reading, as opposed to "skimming"

As in, he quotes a "recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London"

"It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense."

Personally I think Carr's gloss on Frederick Taylor is a bit crude, and historically inaccurate, but there's plenty of other good stuff here-

"The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction."

and

"As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

From that article on Atlantic Monthly, I was only a click (after stopping for a breakfast of pancakes) from this-

The Autumn of the Multi-taskers by Walter Kirn

Oh, the whole thing is good.

"But on to the next inevitable contraction that everybody knows is coming, believes should have come a couple of years ago, and suspects can be postponed only if we pay no attention to the matter and stay very, very busy. I mean the end of the decade we may call the Roaring Zeros—these years of overleveraged, overextended, technology-driven, and finally unsustainable investment of our limited human energies in the dream of infinite connectivity. The overdoses, freak-outs, and collapses that converged in the late ’60s to wipe out the gains of the wide-eyed optimists who set out to “Be Here Now” but ended up making posters that read “Speed Kills” are finally coming for the wired utopians who strove to “Be Everywhere at Once” but lost a measure of innocence, or should have, when their manic credo convinced us we could fight two wars at the same time."

and this

"The next generation, presumably, is the hardest-hit. They’re the ones way out there on the cutting edge of the multitasking revolution, texting and instant messaging each other while they download music to their iPod and update their Facebook page and complete a homework assignment and keep an eye on the episode of The Hills flickering on a nearby television. (A recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 53 percent of students in grades seven through 12 report consuming some other form of media while watching television; 58 percent multitask while reading; 62 percent while using the computer; and 63 percent while listening to music. “I get bored if it’s not all going at once,” said a 17-year-old quoted in the study.) They’re the ones whose still-maturing brains are being shaped to process information rather than understand or even remember it."

Clifford Stoll made similar arguments in a book called "Silicon Snake Oil", which I rather liked at the time (1996 or so).

Of course, this whole- "growing up offline" was a trade-off - in the 70s and 80s I went around expecting the crispy end of the world any and every day. Now we've got the squishy, and slower, end of the world to worry about. So it goes.

Hmm, forms of procrastination

A largely "wasted" day Saturday. Could have been doing useful things with my life, stretching myself, producing things that other people find useful.
Instead... read two so-so whodunnits/thrillers set in Australia, and then washed that down with Clive James essays from "the Meaning of Recognition".
Procrastination eh, yeck.

PS The two books were Claire McNab's "Death Understood", which was OK, but didn't really *go* anywhere, and Garry Disher's "PayDirt", for which Richard Stark, creator of the Parker novels, ought really to be officially credited...

Movies I'd like to see

OK, a short list so far, but...

Paul Greengrass directing Matt Damon as "Macbeth"
I don't think (and can't be bothered to check imdb) that anyone's done a movie version of Macbeth since Roman Polanski. And I can't think of anyone to do brooding anguish with blood on his hands that Damon directed by PG. And if it stopped them spoiling the perfection of the Bourne trilogy (esp the last two- the first was rank) then all the better.

This is from a scrap of paper - I think written in the aftermath of seeing the dismal Cap'n Picard version of Macbeth in the West End late last year. Urggh...

Reading on the Stepper- ROTS the brain

Ah, only a year and a week.
Been busy.

Now going to start posting stuff here occasional burblings.

Various blogs need starting, IMHO
- "Reading on the Stepper"- ROTS the brain. As part of attempt to capture a bit more of what I read
- Something on Manchester and Climate Change (as part of MCFly)
- Something on Chomsky at 80
-er, that'll do...