My second subject for today is about class. Britain is renowned as a class-ridden society, in which no social interaction is without class signals. Kate Fox, in her book 'Watching the English', dissects various aspects of this (amongst the English specifically). The book is not universally liked, but I found it amusing and informative. One recurring feature was the similarity between the working and upper classes, with the middle classes splitting them.
The USA, despite claims to the contrary, seems to me to be more class-ridden than England. Class might not be based on birth or speech, but it has far more influence over people's lives. The most well-known is their attempts to 'keep up with the Joneses' through conspicuous consumption, which is also an unendearing feature of the English middle classes. Conspicuous consumption is very blatantly not about quality, despite the initial descriptions one might encounter. Expensive wine, when blind-tasted, tastes worse to most people than cheap wine. The whole of fashion is the same. It is a way to show off. It is how people show power and superiority, in just the same way as peacocks strut their pretty but pointless tails to peahens.
I had a good friend at university who was visiting for a year abroad. We got along very well; she proved herself to be a rational and sensible person who dealt with my foibles sanely and pleasantly. My reserve wasn't a friendship-breaker: it was an endearing aspect of my culture. This attitude is sadly absent amongst people who actually live in my culture. Perhaps one grows sick of reserve if one deals with it all the time.
She moved to the US and found a good job with a big banking firm, as one would expect for a motivated and intelligent economics major. Like a candle in the wind, her attitudes changed. Being around bankers, what mattered was expense. I should wear expensive clothes, and they should be just what other people wore: tight, v-necked T-shirts and leather loafers. Not one thing could be skipped. In one way, I respect the chameleon-like ability to blend in culturally. On the other hand, it didn't seem conscious: when I objected, I was not met with 'well, it's just the way we do things here', but 'don't be so obnoxious'. Who knows whether she'd just been putting up with England, and had hoped I was the same, or whether her attitudes really did change that much?
It did give me cause to contrast English and American class prejudices. The problem with me being me was that I wasn't 'classy'. My clothes appeared dull, boring and staid, and therefore low class. By not showing off, I was admitting inferiority, and no amount of questioning the implicit assumption that showing-off was necessary not to be inferior could change that belief. English class, on the other hand, operates by speech and taste. One distinguishes oneself as gauche and unclassy by showing-off. It is not genteel; it is protesting too much. It is for the nouveau-riche. Class is in speaking well, in manners and in choosing appropriate items despite cost. It is almost independent of wealth, and given the upper classes' predilection for keeping old items as hand-me-downs, rather than acquiring modern, new replacements, it is possible to live more cheaply in the upper class than in the middle classes.
It seems to me that although neither upper-class has a particularly pleasant outlook on life, the English upper and working classes (in one incarnation) are closer to enlightenment and classlessness than any of the Americans. Inferiority is not dependent on income or spending. The notion of intrinsic inferiority is inherently [incompatible with enlightened intellects...] objectionable. But here in England it is very easy to make the leap from the upper-class disdain for spending and focus on personal traits to a reliance on personality for judging a person's worth, which is how I think it should be done.
I do not think that all people have the same worth. I do think that characteristics such as trustworthiness, kindness and thoughtfulness make a person much more worthy than the opposites. This is a very far cry from American attitudes that suggest that showing off one's body and income implies superiority. It is galling not to be allowed to question this assumption, and I'm glad I live in a country where at least some of the population have the class and wisdom to allow me to do so. Of course, the working class now has disposable income, and even people on benefits compete in these grotesque displays of worth. Similarly, the old class beliefs are dying as the nouveau-riche are no longer nouveau, and so the middle class and American notions of class are spreading in both directions.
It is only amongst the poorest of the poor, such as immigrant workers, and some of the rich, including, I suppose, the academic world, that one can find the classic traits of openness, acceptance of difference and engagement with those differences that make a person truly superior.
That's a nice place to end, but as always I have more to add after my finely-crafted finish. These traits that I appreciate are important for many reasons: they include the questioning of assumptions and therefore the self-controlled imposition of free will over external influences, the deep engagement that constitutes real friendship and relationships that so many people seem to desire, and the judgement of individuals that as well as precluding class markers also eliminates racism and discrimination.
Finally, I have found that many of the nicest people I have met, who display these traits in abundance, were bullied misfits of some sort at school. There is nothing like that sort of upbringing to ingrain the ability to question cultural values, think for oneself, avoid discrimination and accept (other) misfits.
Saturday, 8 January 2011
Human resilience
I have two things to write about today: firstly human resilience and apathy, and secondly about class, conspicuous consumption and my personal experiences.
Human resilience is noted in the news every day, since it makes wonderful 'human interest' stories, and is a very common topic for fiction (and, of course, biography, of which there is far too much nowadays). It is the capacity of humanity to deal with adverse events. Usually the news and fiction describe events that would be unusual or extraordinary here, and invite us to respect and admire, and depending on the person, support the humans who are demonstrating such spirit. You can think of your own favourite example. Do it now.
Resilience also has a more narrow psychological definition (
http://www.nh.gov/safety/divisions/hsem/behavhealth/documents/loss_trauma.pdf), which is the ability to deal with adverse life incidents without psychological trauma. This is in contrast with recovery, which involves short-lived trauma but a return to normal. As the references artical makes clear, psychology has rather ignored the subject of resilience, regarding it as pathological. Normal people do experience terrible grief and are unable to function at first, but normally recover. Psychology can help accelerate recovery, and cause recovery in those unfortunate individuals who experience chronic symptoms (post-traumatic stress disorder). This chimes with popular culture, which suggests that normal, healthy and balanced people feel everything, preferably deeply, but 'recover'.
The article takes issue with psychological opinion because psychology has ignored resilience, and treated resilient and recover-ed/ing individuals as the same. Apparently resilience is often far more common than recovery. Resilience appears to be normal, especially for life-threatening and dangerous events such as assault and robbery. People achieve resilience in different ways, which in other situations could be maladaptive.
I started thinking about this subject earlier today because it occurred to me that resilience and apathy are two sides of the same coin. What we laud as resilience in bad situations is exactly the same thing that we decry as apathy in others. I have for some time now mentioned to people when the subject arose that I have found that people with bad childhoods tend to fall apart when they escape from those situations. I have known a number of people, with whom I have had personal and in-depth conversations, who had very unpleasant childhood experiences. I have known many people count me as such a person... Such children display hard-working and high-achieving personalities: we were successful at school and maybe at university. But as such people reach a stage at which one would expect them to bloom, nothing much happens. It is my belief that it is the resilience that allowed them to cope that also causes them to fade when the problems are gone. Even the dull life of mediocre achievement seems good enough compared to their past experiences. This is almost certainly not conscious: it must be in the stress responses, or lack of them, that make motivation hard when life seems relaxing.
I think that it is vital to realise that it is the same character trait that is simply useful in one situation and maladaptive in another. I will quote the article itself for support:
'...whereas those who cope well with bereavement are sometimes viewed as cold and unfeeling, those who cope well with life-threatening events are often viewed in terms of extreme heroism.'
All I set out to do here was contrast our opinions of heroes and villains, as has also been done in fiction in the past. Heroes rise above trauma to defeat villains, who are cold and unfeeling and cause trauma. But both have a heroic nature: they are resilient. Both also are socially maladapted: they are emotionally distant. The article explains other mechanisms for resilience other than distance, including arrogance. That seems even less appealing.
Similarly, we admire the starving orphans in India who scour rubbish tips for a fe rupees worth of goods. They have resilience. And yet we despise our own citizens who take no interest in political issues and not only ignore the plight of those starving children, but ignore even political opportunities in this country. I want to suggest that those two things are the same: it is all resilience. I am a resilient, hardy character. Personal things don't change me. I once knew a singularly unpleasant person, and had a discussion about whether I could best be compared to a giant oil tanker, splitting the waves of positive and negative experience, or a little coracle, remaining afloat even as I rode them. I stick with the tanker metaphor, although she did her best to sink me, just to experience the thrill of power over my emotions. Making me feel bad was apparently better than not affecting my feelings at all. I wonder if I'll ever understand love...
Opposites attract, so I suppose if I end up with one person, it'll be someone who really does experience every little thing as great and important. That way the two of us will have a balanced view of life.
Enough of me, though.
Yesterday I caught the end of the film 'The Truman Show' on television. The whole world watched a dramatic ending on television, and the final scene showed one man asking another "see what else in on". Humans can have incredibly moving experiences and recover. It could be a terrible tragedy, such as the death of one's family and the loss of one's legs, which a few years on has someone saying "I'm just as happy as I was before", as has been shown (I think I've linked to it before: a study asked lottery winners and new paraplegics to rate their happiness some time after the event, and paraplegics were very marginally happier, although the two groups were almost identical). But that exact ability to cope with disaster is the same ability to cope with triumph: we treat those two things just the same.
Humans can have incredibly moving experiences, that we might hope would reform their natures and make them better people, and they remain the selfish and thoughtless creatures they have always been.
Faced with this incredible inertia of human character, it's no wonder that rulers, teachers and philosophers the world over have given up on improving the human condition; hermits left humanity behind, their misanthropy only the result of long experience of sharing wisdom and finding it squandered. A villain is merely a hero who has known humanity for too long. If people are selfish and stubborn, and generally cope with any situation, why not oppress them instead of helping them, if one has the power?
It is not enough for us to be resilient. What separates a hero and a villain is not their character, but their situation. A heroic nature that is rich and powerful will be a villain, without the principles and conscious effort to restrain himself. If I ever earn much money, it only then that I should be judged. I deserve no respect for enduring an unpleasant childhood quite yet. We need to respect Stoic principles of thought and conscious self-control and improvement, rather than subconscious resilience. Every human is resistant to change, and has a natural tendency to revert to human nature, for both good and ill. This resilience is only respectable when it is harnessed and controlled: when a person has the insight to improve himself when change is good, control himself when selfishness is tempting, direct himself when thoughtlessness is normal and resist change only when it is harmful. It is self-control and self-direction that needs our praise, and not every instance of resilience fits that description.
It is the triumph of free will over instinct; of thought over human nature, that we should pursue and acclaim.
Human resilience is noted in the news every day, since it makes wonderful 'human interest' stories, and is a very common topic for fiction (and, of course, biography, of which there is far too much nowadays). It is the capacity of humanity to deal with adverse events. Usually the news and fiction describe events that would be unusual or extraordinary here, and invite us to respect and admire, and depending on the person, support the humans who are demonstrating such spirit. You can think of your own favourite example. Do it now.
Resilience also has a more narrow psychological definition (
http://www.nh.gov/safety/divisions/hsem/behavhealth/documents/loss_trauma.pdf), which is the ability to deal with adverse life incidents without psychological trauma. This is in contrast with recovery, which involves short-lived trauma but a return to normal. As the references artical makes clear, psychology has rather ignored the subject of resilience, regarding it as pathological. Normal people do experience terrible grief and are unable to function at first, but normally recover. Psychology can help accelerate recovery, and cause recovery in those unfortunate individuals who experience chronic symptoms (post-traumatic stress disorder). This chimes with popular culture, which suggests that normal, healthy and balanced people feel everything, preferably deeply, but 'recover'.
The article takes issue with psychological opinion because psychology has ignored resilience, and treated resilient and recover-ed/ing individuals as the same. Apparently resilience is often far more common than recovery. Resilience appears to be normal, especially for life-threatening and dangerous events such as assault and robbery. People achieve resilience in different ways, which in other situations could be maladaptive.
I started thinking about this subject earlier today because it occurred to me that resilience and apathy are two sides of the same coin. What we laud as resilience in bad situations is exactly the same thing that we decry as apathy in others. I have for some time now mentioned to people when the subject arose that I have found that people with bad childhoods tend to fall apart when they escape from those situations. I have known a number of people, with whom I have had personal and in-depth conversations, who had very unpleasant childhood experiences. I have known many people count me as such a person... Such children display hard-working and high-achieving personalities: we were successful at school and maybe at university. But as such people reach a stage at which one would expect them to bloom, nothing much happens. It is my belief that it is the resilience that allowed them to cope that also causes them to fade when the problems are gone. Even the dull life of mediocre achievement seems good enough compared to their past experiences. This is almost certainly not conscious: it must be in the stress responses, or lack of them, that make motivation hard when life seems relaxing.
I think that it is vital to realise that it is the same character trait that is simply useful in one situation and maladaptive in another. I will quote the article itself for support:
'...whereas those who cope well with bereavement are sometimes viewed as cold and unfeeling, those who cope well with life-threatening events are often viewed in terms of extreme heroism.'
All I set out to do here was contrast our opinions of heroes and villains, as has also been done in fiction in the past. Heroes rise above trauma to defeat villains, who are cold and unfeeling and cause trauma. But both have a heroic nature: they are resilient. Both also are socially maladapted: they are emotionally distant. The article explains other mechanisms for resilience other than distance, including arrogance. That seems even less appealing.
Similarly, we admire the starving orphans in India who scour rubbish tips for a fe rupees worth of goods. They have resilience. And yet we despise our own citizens who take no interest in political issues and not only ignore the plight of those starving children, but ignore even political opportunities in this country. I want to suggest that those two things are the same: it is all resilience. I am a resilient, hardy character. Personal things don't change me. I once knew a singularly unpleasant person, and had a discussion about whether I could best be compared to a giant oil tanker, splitting the waves of positive and negative experience, or a little coracle, remaining afloat even as I rode them. I stick with the tanker metaphor, although she did her best to sink me, just to experience the thrill of power over my emotions. Making me feel bad was apparently better than not affecting my feelings at all. I wonder if I'll ever understand love...
Opposites attract, so I suppose if I end up with one person, it'll be someone who really does experience every little thing as great and important. That way the two of us will have a balanced view of life.
Enough of me, though.
Yesterday I caught the end of the film 'The Truman Show' on television. The whole world watched a dramatic ending on television, and the final scene showed one man asking another "see what else in on". Humans can have incredibly moving experiences and recover. It could be a terrible tragedy, such as the death of one's family and the loss of one's legs, which a few years on has someone saying "I'm just as happy as I was before", as has been shown (I think I've linked to it before: a study asked lottery winners and new paraplegics to rate their happiness some time after the event, and paraplegics were very marginally happier, although the two groups were almost identical). But that exact ability to cope with disaster is the same ability to cope with triumph: we treat those two things just the same.
Humans can have incredibly moving experiences, that we might hope would reform their natures and make them better people, and they remain the selfish and thoughtless creatures they have always been.
Faced with this incredible inertia of human character, it's no wonder that rulers, teachers and philosophers the world over have given up on improving the human condition; hermits left humanity behind, their misanthropy only the result of long experience of sharing wisdom and finding it squandered. A villain is merely a hero who has known humanity for too long. If people are selfish and stubborn, and generally cope with any situation, why not oppress them instead of helping them, if one has the power?
It is not enough for us to be resilient. What separates a hero and a villain is not their character, but their situation. A heroic nature that is rich and powerful will be a villain, without the principles and conscious effort to restrain himself. If I ever earn much money, it only then that I should be judged. I deserve no respect for enduring an unpleasant childhood quite yet. We need to respect Stoic principles of thought and conscious self-control and improvement, rather than subconscious resilience. Every human is resistant to change, and has a natural tendency to revert to human nature, for both good and ill. This resilience is only respectable when it is harnessed and controlled: when a person has the insight to improve himself when change is good, control himself when selfishness is tempting, direct himself when thoughtlessness is normal and resist change only when it is harmful. It is self-control and self-direction that needs our praise, and not every instance of resilience fits that description.
It is the triumph of free will over instinct; of thought over human nature, that we should pursue and acclaim.
Tuesday, 30 November 2010
quotation about marriage
'The unequal power sharing situation that a "Biblical Marriage" involves is basically a 24/7 re-ennactment of the Stanford Prison experiment. I'm not saying that every or even most unequal relationships are abusive, but the potential is very much there. Frankly, when one person has socially recognized power over another, the first person tends to turn into a jerk, and the second person quickly stops resisting. The latter is probably part of why abuse is chronically under-reported in the Christian community.
And of course, even in a healthy, non-abusive relationship, there's still the fact that women are pressured to "stay in the kitchen" while men are pressured to become the primary or sole breadwinner, with no real consideration for the fact that maybe either partner isn't suited for that job.' - Miles Teg
On the subject of abuse:
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_campus_rape.html
And of course, even in a healthy, non-abusive relationship, there's still the fact that women are pressured to "stay in the kitchen" while men are pressured to become the primary or sole breadwinner, with no real consideration for the fact that maybe either partner isn't suited for that job.' - Miles Teg
On the subject of abuse:
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_campus_rape.html
Tuesday, 23 November 2010
'Hedonism' (3)
It's not really about hedonism at all, but it follows from the last post I made. I mentioned one problem I have with specialization, and that's how it leads to instability in life because it is, in essence, a risk.
I think it's worth mentioning the link to the subject of 'The Spirit Level', which I never finished reviewing here. People take risks and many suffer the consequences of failure because of the urge to do well. If you need to acquire phenomenal amounts of wealth in order to stand on an equal footing with the wealthiest, then you need to take the sorts of risks that provide such massive benefits if they pay off. It is patently untrue (to me; proving it will have to be a subject of another post) that it is possible to work one's way up to being a millionnaire or billionnaire without any luck at all, but merely by hard work. Part of the proof will necessarily involve pointing out that listening to millionnaires explain how they did is a perfect example of selection bias; you need to count not only the people who are successful self-made millionnaires, but also the people who tried and failed.
The risk of success is not the same as the pressure. The pressure to succeed, whether it stems from personal goals, family needs or social environment, might well be stressful in itself, but that stress is in addition to the stress of taking on risk. A person might very well know that he is at risk: that the job is uncertain, or that the field is unstable, but need to specialize anyway. One of the effects of inequality is to set unreasonable standards for people to aspire to. If there are 'super-rich' people who own or earn (typically both, in one sense of the word 'earn') far more money than even the very well-off, people will aspire to that level of wealth, and will take risks to get there.
These risks can be working very hard in the hope that this will pay off later, when if it doesn't you've wasted your life, including your chance at a pleasurable social life, and quite possibly your health if you worked very hard.
Or the risk can be putting your money on a risky bet. Or getting a difficult loan. Or simply studying for, or taking, a job in a well-paid but small sector, in which numbers and market demand might make a big difference. In this context, risk covers a multitude of choices the outcome of which is not known by the chooser, but without which long-term success is not possible.
The greatest risks are too much even for most aspiring millionnaires, and in modern society, too much for the very poor, since they already have a nice enough life. Whenever someone says that a hopeful just doesn't want it enough, it annoys me. The hopeful isn't desperate enough to risk losing what he has. Taking risks is not manly; it's boyish. Risks are for those who have nothing to lose, except a lot of testosterone, and these people are typically young boys just making their way into society.
However, I see it as fundamentally unequal that risks are necessary and of different value to different people. A very wealthy child can take risks safely, knowing that his parents can support him. The risks are not risks to him, but merely opportunities. That is not equality, for which some people hope, nor equality of opportunity, for which I hope. As long as risk is necessary, the rich will have more opportunity.
I also regard it as wrong that one's outcome in life can depend on chance; that to do well one must risk some fairly consequential failure. The ideal would be that talent, ability and hard work, which are indistinguishable from each other, fully determine outcome, so that if there were millionnaires they were the most talented and dedicated individuals.
If it were truly possible for anyone to earn any of the range of incomes in society then wealth by birth would not be such a terrible thing; a person would merely be as well-off as anyone else who wished to be. The two problems of wealth are the unfairness of people receiving not only what they didn't earn, but what others cannot hope to earn, and that if a person starts from that point, they will be able to accumulate more: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, or 'wealth accumulates'.
I wonder what the arguments are against a cap in income in a country. If we set it at 5 or 10 times the national median would we damage the economy greatly? If we did damage it greatly, would that actually matter in terms of human suffering, or would it simply reduce some otherwise worthless numbers?
If one could currently earn the national cap, the argument would go, then one would simply do less work until the national cap was the market rate for the amount of work. And presumably the argument would be that an inferior job was being done on the work cast off in this way, and hence the company and the economy and the efficient distribution of goods all suffers.
But I wonder if there really is such a detrimental effect. The person who doesn't work as much surely benefits; he gets time off, and relief from the pressure of chasing more. Because really, I wonder if people at that income level really feel the need for it, rather than simply getting caught up in a competition to earn; to beat one's own score and everyone else's, in which income is the score. Do they actually need that extra income, or is it merely exploring the limits of what is possible?
Secondly, I wonder whether the job will be done worse. There are plenty of sensible people out there who respond very poorly to the extreme financial incentives that are in place at the top of corporate hierarchies. Mismanagement and corruption are hardly rare nowadays, and are often the consequence of arrogance, risk-taking and bonus/incentive chasing. In a culture in which risk is better understood and avoided, and in which money can no longer be a target to chase, rather than earn, it is quite possible that people will behave more responsibly. The cult of the CEO has been interestingly examined in the book 'Bad Company' by Gideon Haigh. The psychology of incentives, and how incentives can fail, has been examined by many behavioural economists and psychologists.
http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_our_loss_of_wisdom.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html
These two talks looked appropriate, but there are a number of examples: how motivating incentives encourage not creativity and inventiveness, but hidebound devotion to established systems, and only encourage better concentration at work that is mentally understood; how introducing monetary incentives over-rides or replaces moral or other concerns rather than adding to them, even when the two are aligned to create the same action; how culture and financial reward in these working environments leads to short-term goals and often not even good short-term strategies.
All these influences that cause problems would be lesser in a more equal society, in which CEOs earned a fraction of what they earn today. Is one man really worth 50 average people, or even 10 people in the top percentile of the population? Can any job reasonably require a better candidate than the job of running the whole country? If we made these CEOs work only 10-hour weeks and shared the work, would these large number of very intelligent replacements really ruin a company more than a CEO? I really doubt that a CEO is necessarily such a specialized and talented individual. The idea that people who are paid a lot must be very talented because they earn it, and therefore would be good at your company being paid a bit more has it the wrong way round: using the money as a way to judge talent is a mistake in trusting market decisions.
The more you abstract from the quantity you wish to judge, the more liable you are to bubbles. CEOs are just earnings bubbles; entirely over-rated, but paid because everyone believes everyone else. Once again, economics terms can be applied successfully to individuals within economies. A sane, rational world would judge the talent directly.
I've had a bit of a tangent here, but to return to the concept of ' The Spirit Level', it is the ultra-rich who cause the problems. The well-off accountants and financial officers who earn (at the moment) £40,000-100,000 are not the ones at the top end of the gross inequality spectrum, making everyone else anxious to keep up. It is the ultra-rich who are the problem.
I think it's worth mentioning the link to the subject of 'The Spirit Level', which I never finished reviewing here. People take risks and many suffer the consequences of failure because of the urge to do well. If you need to acquire phenomenal amounts of wealth in order to stand on an equal footing with the wealthiest, then you need to take the sorts of risks that provide such massive benefits if they pay off. It is patently untrue (to me; proving it will have to be a subject of another post) that it is possible to work one's way up to being a millionnaire or billionnaire without any luck at all, but merely by hard work. Part of the proof will necessarily involve pointing out that listening to millionnaires explain how they did is a perfect example of selection bias; you need to count not only the people who are successful self-made millionnaires, but also the people who tried and failed.
The risk of success is not the same as the pressure. The pressure to succeed, whether it stems from personal goals, family needs or social environment, might well be stressful in itself, but that stress is in addition to the stress of taking on risk. A person might very well know that he is at risk: that the job is uncertain, or that the field is unstable, but need to specialize anyway. One of the effects of inequality is to set unreasonable standards for people to aspire to. If there are 'super-rich' people who own or earn (typically both, in one sense of the word 'earn') far more money than even the very well-off, people will aspire to that level of wealth, and will take risks to get there.
These risks can be working very hard in the hope that this will pay off later, when if it doesn't you've wasted your life, including your chance at a pleasurable social life, and quite possibly your health if you worked very hard.
Or the risk can be putting your money on a risky bet. Or getting a difficult loan. Or simply studying for, or taking, a job in a well-paid but small sector, in which numbers and market demand might make a big difference. In this context, risk covers a multitude of choices the outcome of which is not known by the chooser, but without which long-term success is not possible.
The greatest risks are too much even for most aspiring millionnaires, and in modern society, too much for the very poor, since they already have a nice enough life. Whenever someone says that a hopeful just doesn't want it enough, it annoys me. The hopeful isn't desperate enough to risk losing what he has. Taking risks is not manly; it's boyish. Risks are for those who have nothing to lose, except a lot of testosterone, and these people are typically young boys just making their way into society.
However, I see it as fundamentally unequal that risks are necessary and of different value to different people. A very wealthy child can take risks safely, knowing that his parents can support him. The risks are not risks to him, but merely opportunities. That is not equality, for which some people hope, nor equality of opportunity, for which I hope. As long as risk is necessary, the rich will have more opportunity.
I also regard it as wrong that one's outcome in life can depend on chance; that to do well one must risk some fairly consequential failure. The ideal would be that talent, ability and hard work, which are indistinguishable from each other, fully determine outcome, so that if there were millionnaires they were the most talented and dedicated individuals.
If it were truly possible for anyone to earn any of the range of incomes in society then wealth by birth would not be such a terrible thing; a person would merely be as well-off as anyone else who wished to be. The two problems of wealth are the unfairness of people receiving not only what they didn't earn, but what others cannot hope to earn, and that if a person starts from that point, they will be able to accumulate more: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, or 'wealth accumulates'.
I wonder what the arguments are against a cap in income in a country. If we set it at 5 or 10 times the national median would we damage the economy greatly? If we did damage it greatly, would that actually matter in terms of human suffering, or would it simply reduce some otherwise worthless numbers?
If one could currently earn the national cap, the argument would go, then one would simply do less work until the national cap was the market rate for the amount of work. And presumably the argument would be that an inferior job was being done on the work cast off in this way, and hence the company and the economy and the efficient distribution of goods all suffers.
But I wonder if there really is such a detrimental effect. The person who doesn't work as much surely benefits; he gets time off, and relief from the pressure of chasing more. Because really, I wonder if people at that income level really feel the need for it, rather than simply getting caught up in a competition to earn; to beat one's own score and everyone else's, in which income is the score. Do they actually need that extra income, or is it merely exploring the limits of what is possible?
Secondly, I wonder whether the job will be done worse. There are plenty of sensible people out there who respond very poorly to the extreme financial incentives that are in place at the top of corporate hierarchies. Mismanagement and corruption are hardly rare nowadays, and are often the consequence of arrogance, risk-taking and bonus/incentive chasing. In a culture in which risk is better understood and avoided, and in which money can no longer be a target to chase, rather than earn, it is quite possible that people will behave more responsibly. The cult of the CEO has been interestingly examined in the book 'Bad Company' by Gideon Haigh. The psychology of incentives, and how incentives can fail, has been examined by many behavioural economists and psychologists.
http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_our_loss_of_wisdom.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html
These two talks looked appropriate, but there are a number of examples: how motivating incentives encourage not creativity and inventiveness, but hidebound devotion to established systems, and only encourage better concentration at work that is mentally understood; how introducing monetary incentives over-rides or replaces moral or other concerns rather than adding to them, even when the two are aligned to create the same action; how culture and financial reward in these working environments leads to short-term goals and often not even good short-term strategies.
All these influences that cause problems would be lesser in a more equal society, in which CEOs earned a fraction of what they earn today. Is one man really worth 50 average people, or even 10 people in the top percentile of the population? Can any job reasonably require a better candidate than the job of running the whole country? If we made these CEOs work only 10-hour weeks and shared the work, would these large number of very intelligent replacements really ruin a company more than a CEO? I really doubt that a CEO is necessarily such a specialized and talented individual. The idea that people who are paid a lot must be very talented because they earn it, and therefore would be good at your company being paid a bit more has it the wrong way round: using the money as a way to judge talent is a mistake in trusting market decisions.
The more you abstract from the quantity you wish to judge, the more liable you are to bubbles. CEOs are just earnings bubbles; entirely over-rated, but paid because everyone believes everyone else. Once again, economics terms can be applied successfully to individuals within economies. A sane, rational world would judge the talent directly.
I've had a bit of a tangent here, but to return to the concept of ' The Spirit Level', it is the ultra-rich who cause the problems. The well-off accountants and financial officers who earn (at the moment) £40,000-100,000 are not the ones at the top end of the gross inequality spectrum, making everyone else anxious to keep up. It is the ultra-rich who are the problem.
Monday, 22 November 2010
Hedonism (2)
I forgot to include in my post about hedonism my analogy with something that has formed quite a large part of my life (for better and for worse), which is game playing, on the computer particularly.
When one first plays a game, it's a voyage of discovery: the new rules, interactions and the consequent strategies are there to be discovered, and the first few games are interesting simply because of that. Perhaps, with board games, they're the most thrilling that the game ever is, because it's a challenge to find better strategies quickly, without anyone benefitting from experience or prior knowledge. I haven't played computer games against others, and certainly not on initial release, so I can't say the same for my computer game experiences.
Nonetheless, the challenges of learning the rules and developing 'broken' strategies are thrilling, and everyone will gradually settle down in a flatter part of the learning curve (not necessarily the same level of skill for everyone, but nonetheless flatter). New strategic discoveries are rare, and re-playing the game takes on a different meaning for people. The games that have replay value typically involve scoring systems of some sort. The game does not involve merely a win and a loss, but points. The essential feature is that a player can continue to beat himself, even when he is very likely to 'beat the game', such as by beating AI opponents.
The other major source of replayability is a certain randomness that throws up plenty of strategic decisions: randomness not in the outcomes of players' decisions, but in the set-up of the game that gives a huge range of different possible situations. Patience (by which I refer to any one of the range of solo card games) doesn't often involve scoring, but does give a random set-up that makes each game a different puzzle.
When people play a game that they can save, and have played many times before, the temptation increases greatly to save the game just before important decisions. People save regularly as well, in case things happen that the player didn't predict. Of course this makes sense; why lose a whole game because of one chance disaster, when all you'd do is start again and put a lot of work in to another game to get to the same point?
Or, alternatively, why accept that although you'll win, you'll win with a low score that won't be anywhere near your best?
The game (series) that I've played most is Civilization, which has long games of many hours. An event early on can heavily influence the rest of the game; it's quite possible to win from behind, but less likely that the win will be a big score. So I did get into the habit of saving games regularly, then frequently, and at one time, almost every battle (and there are plenty in a game).
The pursuit of the 'perfect game' distorted not just how much I saved, but also the whole strategy that goes with it. If I were running a real civilization amongst a number of hostile ones, I'd probably run a much larger standing army to avoid the risk of losing entirely. But when I can reload and the AI won't necessarily even make the same decision to make a 'surprise' attack, and I can certainly have a mobile defence force in place anyway, I can keep fewer units. Similarly, when a city can be taken by one unit (70% chance, let's say), and right at the beginning of the game I can choose to found my second city or build a third military unit, of course I'll found that city and take the chance that I lose: because I won't really lose!
When it comes to cheating at games like that, even so far as distorting strategy to account for the cheating, it's a personal decision about what's most fun (as long as they're one-person games). I can take big risks and reload when they don't pay off if I really want to push for the perfect game.
But in real life, as I hinted, I wouldn't take such risks; it's not sensible when you can't reload your life! And yet life is very similar, in that big risks have enormous rewards. And there are so many people out there that there's always someone desperate enough (or stupid enough, or testosterone-fuelled enough) to take a risk. The population is so large, in fact, that not only do people take risks, but that these risks pay off for a large number of people.
If I want success, how am I to achieve it? Am I to play safe, ensuring a decent, dull life, just as playing safe would lead to a moderate, decent game result? What is success?
Well, if success is merely surviving, then given my country I am almost guaranteed to succeed until about 80, and almost guaranteed to fail some time round about then.
But success is not about merely surviving, in my mind or in popular usage. Success is about being rich: it's about rising to the top and proving one's worth with objective achievements. How am I to rise to the top (assuming at least some ability)?
If I am to do as well, or better, than risk-takers, I must either be born with a vast amount of wealth, so that I don't need to take a risk, or I must take risks on as well. If we assume that I have some modicum of insight and ability, I can assure myself that I need only take risks that are slightly less risky than other people's risks, because my superior management will make my risks pay off at least as well.
Nonetheless, since risks give the most reward, I must take risks.
The problem is that I cannot reload my life. I have only the one life. When a risk goes wrong I can't try again in my pursuit of the perfect life. I can either acquiesce to a future of dullness and safety, or chase a dream of success which is highly unlikely to be realised simply because of the chances involved, even without considering human error. Neither option inspires me greatly.
I would describe risks in real life as anything from taking an uncertain position in a stock market to the course one chooses to study, or the field of work in which one specializes. Specialization itself is a risk, because you are ruling out a number of options in order to maximize the reward from a small subset of the options.
Obviously there are wide-ranging implications, other than the possibility of me being depressed.
Capitalism is half-predicated on the specialization of labour. Markets, for example, recognize that each person can't do everything for himself, and that it's better for a farrier to make horseshoes for everyone than for everyone to make horseshoes for himself. The problem is that as we chase more and more productivity, by which countries are measured, people must specialize more and more, because specialization does lead to greater efficiency. As nature shows us (and I've mentioned before the similarity between the theory of natural selection of species and market economics, which is basically natural selection of corporations), specialization leads to instability and collapse. A species well-adapted for a niche environment is poorly adapted for other environments and therefore sensitive to change.
When we consider an economy as a whole that's not a problem: a few people lose work here as demand shifts, and a few people get a lot of money elsewhere as they find themselves in demand, and things balance out as people train, or re-train, for the jobs that pay well. But have the people who lost work really been well-served by specialization? When one has put 10 years into learning a job, does one really want to spend 2-3 years re-training because of the unpredictable whims of the markets?
I'm not suggesting that we plan our economies instead. Planned economies would simply delay the inevitable, whilst wasting lots of money from other people on wasted labour. But I do wonder whether we should be chasing productivity, with the inevitable pressure for specialization. A Renaissance man, who can do many tasks, might not be as productive as a man who has learned a little bit more about one of them, but he is a happier, safer and less risk-exposed man.
At the moment the western world is talking about reducing banking risk exposure; about reducing leveraging, re-writing risk models and not underwriting risky corporate behaviour. But just as Hari Seldon, of the Foundation Series (by Isaac Asimov), invented psychohistory, which was eventually applied to individuals (with low certainty), having grown out of psychology, we should think about risk exposure on a personal as well as corporate level.
We have complex models for risk exposure for big banks, and yet none at all modelling risk exposure for humans, or considering the personal costs of that exposure that happen every day.
We have only one economy, and we get a crash every ten years or so. Just as we want to deleverage our banks to prevent a crash every ten (or thirty) years, we need to deleverage ourselves, to avoid the likelihood of a 'crash' for each person. We need personal liquidity: the ability to leave a risky position. And personal liquidity is not just accomplished by good labour rules about employment and maybe emigration, but also about specialization.
If we force a bank to specialize in a certain type of stock, of course it'll be susceptible to crashes in that stock. This is, as far as I know, the main justification of corporate takeovers of dissimilar businesses (barring, of course, the giant bonuses for the directors who initiate them). And yet no-one cares about individual susceptibility to market changes.
It takes time to re-train; time that a person doesn't have spare. The more specialized labour is, the more time he's wasted in his initial training, the more time he'll need for re-training, and the more sensitive his job is to market changes. Humans are successful because our minds make us adaptable in many ecosystems. Why are we so forcefully undoing this? Is there a point in a market when the human costs of specialization outweigh the productivity gains (and presumed human benefits)? Have we reached that point yet? Are the costs and benefits to the same people, and therefore is it right to weigh them against each other?
I don't know, but I wish someone would look into it.
When one first plays a game, it's a voyage of discovery: the new rules, interactions and the consequent strategies are there to be discovered, and the first few games are interesting simply because of that. Perhaps, with board games, they're the most thrilling that the game ever is, because it's a challenge to find better strategies quickly, without anyone benefitting from experience or prior knowledge. I haven't played computer games against others, and certainly not on initial release, so I can't say the same for my computer game experiences.
Nonetheless, the challenges of learning the rules and developing 'broken' strategies are thrilling, and everyone will gradually settle down in a flatter part of the learning curve (not necessarily the same level of skill for everyone, but nonetheless flatter). New strategic discoveries are rare, and re-playing the game takes on a different meaning for people. The games that have replay value typically involve scoring systems of some sort. The game does not involve merely a win and a loss, but points. The essential feature is that a player can continue to beat himself, even when he is very likely to 'beat the game', such as by beating AI opponents.
The other major source of replayability is a certain randomness that throws up plenty of strategic decisions: randomness not in the outcomes of players' decisions, but in the set-up of the game that gives a huge range of different possible situations. Patience (by which I refer to any one of the range of solo card games) doesn't often involve scoring, but does give a random set-up that makes each game a different puzzle.
When people play a game that they can save, and have played many times before, the temptation increases greatly to save the game just before important decisions. People save regularly as well, in case things happen that the player didn't predict. Of course this makes sense; why lose a whole game because of one chance disaster, when all you'd do is start again and put a lot of work in to another game to get to the same point?
Or, alternatively, why accept that although you'll win, you'll win with a low score that won't be anywhere near your best?
The game (series) that I've played most is Civilization, which has long games of many hours. An event early on can heavily influence the rest of the game; it's quite possible to win from behind, but less likely that the win will be a big score. So I did get into the habit of saving games regularly, then frequently, and at one time, almost every battle (and there are plenty in a game).
The pursuit of the 'perfect game' distorted not just how much I saved, but also the whole strategy that goes with it. If I were running a real civilization amongst a number of hostile ones, I'd probably run a much larger standing army to avoid the risk of losing entirely. But when I can reload and the AI won't necessarily even make the same decision to make a 'surprise' attack, and I can certainly have a mobile defence force in place anyway, I can keep fewer units. Similarly, when a city can be taken by one unit (70% chance, let's say), and right at the beginning of the game I can choose to found my second city or build a third military unit, of course I'll found that city and take the chance that I lose: because I won't really lose!
When it comes to cheating at games like that, even so far as distorting strategy to account for the cheating, it's a personal decision about what's most fun (as long as they're one-person games). I can take big risks and reload when they don't pay off if I really want to push for the perfect game.
But in real life, as I hinted, I wouldn't take such risks; it's not sensible when you can't reload your life! And yet life is very similar, in that big risks have enormous rewards. And there are so many people out there that there's always someone desperate enough (or stupid enough, or testosterone-fuelled enough) to take a risk. The population is so large, in fact, that not only do people take risks, but that these risks pay off for a large number of people.
If I want success, how am I to achieve it? Am I to play safe, ensuring a decent, dull life, just as playing safe would lead to a moderate, decent game result? What is success?
Well, if success is merely surviving, then given my country I am almost guaranteed to succeed until about 80, and almost guaranteed to fail some time round about then.
But success is not about merely surviving, in my mind or in popular usage. Success is about being rich: it's about rising to the top and proving one's worth with objective achievements. How am I to rise to the top (assuming at least some ability)?
If I am to do as well, or better, than risk-takers, I must either be born with a vast amount of wealth, so that I don't need to take a risk, or I must take risks on as well. If we assume that I have some modicum of insight and ability, I can assure myself that I need only take risks that are slightly less risky than other people's risks, because my superior management will make my risks pay off at least as well.
Nonetheless, since risks give the most reward, I must take risks.
The problem is that I cannot reload my life. I have only the one life. When a risk goes wrong I can't try again in my pursuit of the perfect life. I can either acquiesce to a future of dullness and safety, or chase a dream of success which is highly unlikely to be realised simply because of the chances involved, even without considering human error. Neither option inspires me greatly.
I would describe risks in real life as anything from taking an uncertain position in a stock market to the course one chooses to study, or the field of work in which one specializes. Specialization itself is a risk, because you are ruling out a number of options in order to maximize the reward from a small subset of the options.
Obviously there are wide-ranging implications, other than the possibility of me being depressed.
Capitalism is half-predicated on the specialization of labour. Markets, for example, recognize that each person can't do everything for himself, and that it's better for a farrier to make horseshoes for everyone than for everyone to make horseshoes for himself. The problem is that as we chase more and more productivity, by which countries are measured, people must specialize more and more, because specialization does lead to greater efficiency. As nature shows us (and I've mentioned before the similarity between the theory of natural selection of species and market economics, which is basically natural selection of corporations), specialization leads to instability and collapse. A species well-adapted for a niche environment is poorly adapted for other environments and therefore sensitive to change.
When we consider an economy as a whole that's not a problem: a few people lose work here as demand shifts, and a few people get a lot of money elsewhere as they find themselves in demand, and things balance out as people train, or re-train, for the jobs that pay well. But have the people who lost work really been well-served by specialization? When one has put 10 years into learning a job, does one really want to spend 2-3 years re-training because of the unpredictable whims of the markets?
I'm not suggesting that we plan our economies instead. Planned economies would simply delay the inevitable, whilst wasting lots of money from other people on wasted labour. But I do wonder whether we should be chasing productivity, with the inevitable pressure for specialization. A Renaissance man, who can do many tasks, might not be as productive as a man who has learned a little bit more about one of them, but he is a happier, safer and less risk-exposed man.
At the moment the western world is talking about reducing banking risk exposure; about reducing leveraging, re-writing risk models and not underwriting risky corporate behaviour. But just as Hari Seldon, of the Foundation Series (by Isaac Asimov), invented psychohistory, which was eventually applied to individuals (with low certainty), having grown out of psychology, we should think about risk exposure on a personal as well as corporate level.
We have complex models for risk exposure for big banks, and yet none at all modelling risk exposure for humans, or considering the personal costs of that exposure that happen every day.
We have only one economy, and we get a crash every ten years or so. Just as we want to deleverage our banks to prevent a crash every ten (or thirty) years, we need to deleverage ourselves, to avoid the likelihood of a 'crash' for each person. We need personal liquidity: the ability to leave a risky position. And personal liquidity is not just accomplished by good labour rules about employment and maybe emigration, but also about specialization.
If we force a bank to specialize in a certain type of stock, of course it'll be susceptible to crashes in that stock. This is, as far as I know, the main justification of corporate takeovers of dissimilar businesses (barring, of course, the giant bonuses for the directors who initiate them). And yet no-one cares about individual susceptibility to market changes.
It takes time to re-train; time that a person doesn't have spare. The more specialized labour is, the more time he's wasted in his initial training, the more time he'll need for re-training, and the more sensitive his job is to market changes. Humans are successful because our minds make us adaptable in many ecosystems. Why are we so forcefully undoing this? Is there a point in a market when the human costs of specialization outweigh the productivity gains (and presumed human benefits)? Have we reached that point yet? Are the costs and benefits to the same people, and therefore is it right to weigh them against each other?
I don't know, but I wish someone would look into it.
Saturday, 13 November 2010
Hedonism
I once thought of hedonism as a pointless, selfish and silly way of life. I was a serious person who planned ahead for sensible, fulfilling things, and got pleasure from achievement (probably because there wasn't much else in the way of fun as a child).
Hedonism seemed very short-sighted. If we refer to economics terminology, it seemed like extreme future discounting: you take your moment now, no matter what happens in the future. That's not a sensible way to live a whole life (if you're a perfect economical being for their models) and people who don't do it as very small children tend to grow up to be much more successful than those who do.
Hedonism can be variously defined, but here I'm sticking with 'pursuit of or devotion to pleasure, especially that of the senses.' I know that it's also a philosophical school of thought, and I know that hedonism also means to many people neglect of duties and responsibilities, but I'll leave those things as possible effects, rather than central to the definition.
Hedonism, both my definition and the philosophical school, has many critics, and there are plenty of books about it. Perhaps the most famous is 'A Portrait of Dorian Gray' by Oscar Wilde, which certainly concerns hedonism.
Not only staid and resilient people like my younger self regard hedonism as bad. Most religious people, or even idealists, look down on simple pleasuring of the senses and the chase of experience. I know that many people who've been through tough experiences, or are going through them, look for something other than the present as motivation, and find people who enjoy the moment to be short-sighted and wasteful. Those same people, when they find themselves in nicer lives, often lose the drive they had; they got drive from the stress of the situation, and are not adept at manufacturing it themselves.
Stoicism comes from hard times. Stoics value virtues over achievements, the pessimistic view that one might consider to underlie Stoicism being that achievement is barely possible, and even then only transitory. Pain is all you can expect, and all you can control is your responses to the sorrows of life, rather than any aspect of that life.
And one of the best Stoics was Seneca, teacher of Nero (one of the ultimate hedonists!). Seneca wrote one particular book, called 'On the shortness of life' on which I want to dwell for a moment. In this book he says that life seems short, but the way to ensure contentment and happiness is to fill it up: to keep yourself busy. People who look back on their lives and see nothing are depressed and disappointed. This insight has been confirmed by modern neuroscience: you form more memories when you're doing new things than when doing things you know. Well, perceived time is different. Two weeks in a pleasurable holiday location forms as many memories as one week, in terms of looking back.
Seneca's ideas, apart from being two-thousand years ahead of his time, struck a chord with me, even with my younger self. I kept myself busy then (or rather, I was kept busy with lots of activites at school). And they lead to hedonism: if you want to lead a contented, fulfilling life, you must seek out new experiences and avoid boredom. You must chase new achievements at the very least, and experience new things along the way.
So now I'm older, and I look back on the things I've done, there's quite a list, and yet it's not extensive enough. Were I to go hiking with friends now I could encounter some fairly extreme conditions and not really remember it well, because I've been there a number of times before. My friends would find it spectacular. The conditions would have to be unmanageable for inexperienced hikers before I got too excited.
I enjoy hiking, but are 'boring' hikes worth it? What's in it for me (barring the obvious good time with friends in places we've not been together)? I want special memories. I want a fulfilled life: already I look back and regret the opportunities lost, and find that the last few years seem quiet. How can I reverse this gradual deterioration of the quality of life, when everything seems the same?
I need to find new experiences: I need to form special memories. And for that, I need more and more special challenges. And each time I rack up the 'specialness', that level becomes more normal. So inevitably special events occur less and less frequently, until life merges into one dull day after another. And then I'm old and grey, and ready to give up on life, and youngsters like me can't understand it. Only maybe I do now.
Can this be prevented? There are plenty of things to do and try in the world, but will they all merge into similar levels of 'thrill'? Is life really a question of living fast, taking greater and greater risks, and then dying young? Do we only have a limited number of special experiences before we either die of the risks associated with chasing them, or grow old and uninterested in the boredom that life offers?
At the moment I can only hope that I can continue to chase new things as much as I find I can. I'm sad that at the moment that's quite minimal, but I'm willing to continue throughout my life. More and more I hope I can live to see anti-ageing and rejuvenation therapies, so that I can go back and re-experience the worlds of the undergraduate again. But will it really be the same? I was shy, depressed and paranoid the first time. The second time I'll be old and world-weary. Perhaps I'll never have a good few years of fun and frolics with a few like-minded people who become good friends. If I learned less fast, would new experiences remain thrilling for longer? Is learning quickly a good way to guarantee depression?
One thing I can say, though, is that I don't want to settle down and 'nest'. The idea of forsaking even more possibilities and deliberately achieving boredom and sameness goes against everything that Seneca has to say about living fulfilled lives.
I can also now understand even more why people might react so deeply against foreign and unusual things. As soon as your horizons are broadened, they cannot be easily shrunk. I see the whole world of possibilities, cultures, sights and experiences and regret that I cn't try them all. Not seeing them, or being able to dismiss them in your ignorance as nasty people, sinners or otherwise suffering from it helps people feel fulfilled in their small worlds.
Hedonism seemed very short-sighted. If we refer to economics terminology, it seemed like extreme future discounting: you take your moment now, no matter what happens in the future. That's not a sensible way to live a whole life (if you're a perfect economical being for their models) and people who don't do it as very small children tend to grow up to be much more successful than those who do.
Hedonism can be variously defined, but here I'm sticking with 'pursuit of or devotion to pleasure, especially that of the senses.' I know that it's also a philosophical school of thought, and I know that hedonism also means to many people neglect of duties and responsibilities, but I'll leave those things as possible effects, rather than central to the definition.
Hedonism, both my definition and the philosophical school, has many critics, and there are plenty of books about it. Perhaps the most famous is 'A Portrait of Dorian Gray' by Oscar Wilde, which certainly concerns hedonism.
Not only staid and resilient people like my younger self regard hedonism as bad. Most religious people, or even idealists, look down on simple pleasuring of the senses and the chase of experience. I know that many people who've been through tough experiences, or are going through them, look for something other than the present as motivation, and find people who enjoy the moment to be short-sighted and wasteful. Those same people, when they find themselves in nicer lives, often lose the drive they had; they got drive from the stress of the situation, and are not adept at manufacturing it themselves.
Stoicism comes from hard times. Stoics value virtues over achievements, the pessimistic view that one might consider to underlie Stoicism being that achievement is barely possible, and even then only transitory. Pain is all you can expect, and all you can control is your responses to the sorrows of life, rather than any aspect of that life.
And one of the best Stoics was Seneca, teacher of Nero (one of the ultimate hedonists!). Seneca wrote one particular book, called 'On the shortness of life' on which I want to dwell for a moment. In this book he says that life seems short, but the way to ensure contentment and happiness is to fill it up: to keep yourself busy. People who look back on their lives and see nothing are depressed and disappointed. This insight has been confirmed by modern neuroscience: you form more memories when you're doing new things than when doing things you know. Well, perceived time is different. Two weeks in a pleasurable holiday location forms as many memories as one week, in terms of looking back.
Seneca's ideas, apart from being two-thousand years ahead of his time, struck a chord with me, even with my younger self. I kept myself busy then (or rather, I was kept busy with lots of activites at school). And they lead to hedonism: if you want to lead a contented, fulfilling life, you must seek out new experiences and avoid boredom. You must chase new achievements at the very least, and experience new things along the way.
So now I'm older, and I look back on the things I've done, there's quite a list, and yet it's not extensive enough. Were I to go hiking with friends now I could encounter some fairly extreme conditions and not really remember it well, because I've been there a number of times before. My friends would find it spectacular. The conditions would have to be unmanageable for inexperienced hikers before I got too excited.
I enjoy hiking, but are 'boring' hikes worth it? What's in it for me (barring the obvious good time with friends in places we've not been together)? I want special memories. I want a fulfilled life: already I look back and regret the opportunities lost, and find that the last few years seem quiet. How can I reverse this gradual deterioration of the quality of life, when everything seems the same?
I need to find new experiences: I need to form special memories. And for that, I need more and more special challenges. And each time I rack up the 'specialness', that level becomes more normal. So inevitably special events occur less and less frequently, until life merges into one dull day after another. And then I'm old and grey, and ready to give up on life, and youngsters like me can't understand it. Only maybe I do now.
Can this be prevented? There are plenty of things to do and try in the world, but will they all merge into similar levels of 'thrill'? Is life really a question of living fast, taking greater and greater risks, and then dying young? Do we only have a limited number of special experiences before we either die of the risks associated with chasing them, or grow old and uninterested in the boredom that life offers?
At the moment I can only hope that I can continue to chase new things as much as I find I can. I'm sad that at the moment that's quite minimal, but I'm willing to continue throughout my life. More and more I hope I can live to see anti-ageing and rejuvenation therapies, so that I can go back and re-experience the worlds of the undergraduate again. But will it really be the same? I was shy, depressed and paranoid the first time. The second time I'll be old and world-weary. Perhaps I'll never have a good few years of fun and frolics with a few like-minded people who become good friends. If I learned less fast, would new experiences remain thrilling for longer? Is learning quickly a good way to guarantee depression?
One thing I can say, though, is that I don't want to settle down and 'nest'. The idea of forsaking even more possibilities and deliberately achieving boredom and sameness goes against everything that Seneca has to say about living fulfilled lives.
I can also now understand even more why people might react so deeply against foreign and unusual things. As soon as your horizons are broadened, they cannot be easily shrunk. I see the whole world of possibilities, cultures, sights and experiences and regret that I cn't try them all. Not seeing them, or being able to dismiss them in your ignorance as nasty people, sinners or otherwise suffering from it helps people feel fulfilled in their small worlds.
Thursday, 11 November 2010
Media storm
There were a lot of news articles today about a Conservative councillor in Birmingham who apparently wrote on Twitter
'Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan't tell Amnesty if you don't. It would be a blessing, really.'
This was a foolish thing for a professional politician to say to the public in general. However, the coverage that it has generated is ridiculous. It is not racist to express dislike for someone who is dark-skinned. It is not racist to express dislike for someone by referring to a culture-specific punishment. For a start, it conflates race with culture, so the person calling it racism is clearly ignorant of the distinction between discrimination and racism.
The Leader of the Commons managed to imply that this councillor had threatened stoning! Now it may be that his short post is very different from the one I have quoted, but the councillor has threatened nothing of the kind. He has asked someone to stone her, and offered the persuasive reward of not being reported by the councillor to Amnesty International.
Saying that you'd be happy that someone else is dead expressed extreme dislike, or else is hyperbole. Neither is an offence (either in law, or, as far as I am concerned, in feeling). I wouldn't want people to express hope about my death, but it's not offensive. Insults are offensive: dislike is not.
It's not a threat either. He has not said that he'll do anything nasty to her; just that he'd be happy if something were to happen. It is just about plausible that a man of some power over others, in the presence of like-minded people, could make something happen with this statement, when combined with other statements. It is also far more likely that this statement is simply bombast. It's certainly not a threat in any traditional sense of the word.
So it's not racist, sexist, offensive or threatening. Why the news stories? Oh, wait: a man said something not very nice! Yes, that makes for a great title and quotation. Just think of all the better news stories out there: what the council have done recently, what they've failed to do, how council tax is changing this year, how this councillor has contributed to the council's successes and failures...
but no, I forgot. Politics isn't about running the country. It's about temper tantrums and throwing mud.
So let's look at Yasmin Alibhai Brown, who says she found Mr Compton's attitude 'loathsome' and that a 'flippant apology' would not be enough.
'If I, as a Muslim woman, had said about him what he said about me then I would be arrested in these times of the war against terror. He does not have more of a right to say these things about me that I do about him and I think words matter when you are in public life.'
So she's a saint of propriety, who would never say something as close to being offensive, or expressing dislike, as this councillor has done? Let's look at an article of hers in The Independent:
'But even Jesus wouldn't go this meek in the face of the hard, well-planned demolition of the post-war British welfare state.'
Hey wait! Isn't this taking The Lord's name in vain? How can she be so flippant about something so sacred? If this were Mohammed being thrown into conversation there'd be a stream of letters complaining about it, and she'd be preaching respect for other people's values.
'...straight men feel they "disgust" women, who only have sex because that "is a price they are willing to pay for a relationship".
I suppose Fry is absolutely sure that rich and famous gays like him pull young, beautiful boyfriends because there is mutual attraction and no more.'
I suppose she can point out to me where he says anything about his own relationships? Oh sorry, I'm supposed to allow her to read whatever she wants into other people's statements.
'Immediate response: shut up Fry, why don't you, about stuff you can't know anything about? You clearly have odd and unhealthy feelings about the body and its needs. Sex to be good doesn't have to be really bad, filthy, grubby, disgusting and dislocated from the emotions. '
Two things here. Firstly, if considering things of which one has no experience is not allowed, I assume that all human imagination is pointless? The great works of fiction (as well as lesser ones), thought experiments, biochemistry and physics should all shut up?
Secondly, isn't calling Mr. Fry odd and unhealthy just a tad homophobic? GAY HATER! Am I not allowed to read implications I want to from her comments? Then why can she do it to others... sorry, I forgot. Double standards are a healthy form of commentary.
'You can't dismiss this controversial interview as just publicity whoring to shift the latest instalment of his autobiography.'
I'm sorry... did a supposed feminist just diminish the sacred (sorry, awful) meaning of 'whore' by using it in a metaphorical sense? Dear oh dear. What would the world be like if people were allowed to express dislike and disapproval with colourful language? It'd probably contain councillors expressing the possibility of pleasure at the death of newspaper columnists.
'Richard, for example, a colleague, ... said he felt sick when he thought about "the juices and soft flesh" of a woman. There has never been much open conversation about these ugly attitudes'
Sorry to reiterate a point, but a personal feeling is not an ugly attitude. Unless he treats women unfairly as a result of not wanting to know their juices, 'Richard' is expressing a perfectly acceptable sentiment.
'Most disturbing is how Fry's odious tirade now makes it acceptable, even cool to express sexist views.'
Sexist? Where? Oh, sorry. Aren't men allowed to talk about their desires, pleasures and observations about sex? Is it sexist to want pleasurable sex without emotional baggage? It's clearly not what Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wants ('really bad, filthy, grubby, disgusting') but I'd call it intolerant and offensive to dismiss my desires in such a way. Why can't we have an open conversation about her ugly attitude without odious tirades such as hers? Before I finish, I just love the phrase 'sex to be good doesn't have to be really bad...' Who swallows this trash?
Really, I have some sympathy for the man. This woman either doesn't think enough, or else thinks too much about selling articles to idiots and not enough about writing sense.
'Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan't tell Amnesty if you don't. It would be a blessing, really.'
This was a foolish thing for a professional politician to say to the public in general. However, the coverage that it has generated is ridiculous. It is not racist to express dislike for someone who is dark-skinned. It is not racist to express dislike for someone by referring to a culture-specific punishment. For a start, it conflates race with culture, so the person calling it racism is clearly ignorant of the distinction between discrimination and racism.
The Leader of the Commons managed to imply that this councillor had threatened stoning! Now it may be that his short post is very different from the one I have quoted, but the councillor has threatened nothing of the kind. He has asked someone to stone her, and offered the persuasive reward of not being reported by the councillor to Amnesty International.
Saying that you'd be happy that someone else is dead expressed extreme dislike, or else is hyperbole. Neither is an offence (either in law, or, as far as I am concerned, in feeling). I wouldn't want people to express hope about my death, but it's not offensive. Insults are offensive: dislike is not.
It's not a threat either. He has not said that he'll do anything nasty to her; just that he'd be happy if something were to happen. It is just about plausible that a man of some power over others, in the presence of like-minded people, could make something happen with this statement, when combined with other statements. It is also far more likely that this statement is simply bombast. It's certainly not a threat in any traditional sense of the word.
So it's not racist, sexist, offensive or threatening. Why the news stories? Oh, wait: a man said something not very nice! Yes, that makes for a great title and quotation. Just think of all the better news stories out there: what the council have done recently, what they've failed to do, how council tax is changing this year, how this councillor has contributed to the council's successes and failures...
but no, I forgot. Politics isn't about running the country. It's about temper tantrums and throwing mud.
So let's look at Yasmin Alibhai Brown, who says she found Mr Compton's attitude 'loathsome' and that a 'flippant apology' would not be enough.
'If I, as a Muslim woman, had said about him what he said about me then I would be arrested in these times of the war against terror. He does not have more of a right to say these things about me that I do about him and I think words matter when you are in public life.'
So she's a saint of propriety, who would never say something as close to being offensive, or expressing dislike, as this councillor has done? Let's look at an article of hers in The Independent:
'But even Jesus wouldn't go this meek in the face of the hard, well-planned demolition of the post-war British welfare state.'
Hey wait! Isn't this taking The Lord's name in vain? How can she be so flippant about something so sacred? If this were Mohammed being thrown into conversation there'd be a stream of letters complaining about it, and she'd be preaching respect for other people's values.
'...straight men feel they "disgust" women, who only have sex because that "is a price they are willing to pay for a relationship".
I suppose Fry is absolutely sure that rich and famous gays like him pull young, beautiful boyfriends because there is mutual attraction and no more.'
I suppose she can point out to me where he says anything about his own relationships? Oh sorry, I'm supposed to allow her to read whatever she wants into other people's statements.
'Immediate response: shut up Fry, why don't you, about stuff you can't know anything about? You clearly have odd and unhealthy feelings about the body and its needs. Sex to be good doesn't have to be really bad, filthy, grubby, disgusting and dislocated from the emotions. '
Two things here. Firstly, if considering things of which one has no experience is not allowed, I assume that all human imagination is pointless? The great works of fiction (as well as lesser ones), thought experiments, biochemistry and physics should all shut up?
Secondly, isn't calling Mr. Fry odd and unhealthy just a tad homophobic? GAY HATER! Am I not allowed to read implications I want to from her comments? Then why can she do it to others... sorry, I forgot. Double standards are a healthy form of commentary.
'You can't dismiss this controversial interview as just publicity whoring to shift the latest instalment of his autobiography.'
I'm sorry... did a supposed feminist just diminish the sacred (sorry, awful) meaning of 'whore' by using it in a metaphorical sense? Dear oh dear. What would the world be like if people were allowed to express dislike and disapproval with colourful language? It'd probably contain councillors expressing the possibility of pleasure at the death of newspaper columnists.
'Richard, for example, a colleague, ... said he felt sick when he thought about "the juices and soft flesh" of a woman. There has never been much open conversation about these ugly attitudes'
Sorry to reiterate a point, but a personal feeling is not an ugly attitude. Unless he treats women unfairly as a result of not wanting to know their juices, 'Richard' is expressing a perfectly acceptable sentiment.
'Most disturbing is how Fry's odious tirade now makes it acceptable, even cool to express sexist views.'
Sexist? Where? Oh, sorry. Aren't men allowed to talk about their desires, pleasures and observations about sex? Is it sexist to want pleasurable sex without emotional baggage? It's clearly not what Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wants ('really bad, filthy, grubby, disgusting') but I'd call it intolerant and offensive to dismiss my desires in such a way. Why can't we have an open conversation about her ugly attitude without odious tirades such as hers? Before I finish, I just love the phrase 'sex to be good doesn't have to be really bad...' Who swallows this trash?
Really, I have some sympathy for the man. This woman either doesn't think enough, or else thinks too much about selling articles to idiots and not enough about writing sense.
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