Human beings cope best with causal black-and-white relationships: “if I eat that bright-red berry, I get sick”; “if I see a sabre-toothed tiger chasing me, I must run”; “if I have a job and a family; I will be happy”. They are much worse at understanding probabilities and weighing up opportunity cost: “red berries (and families) can either be tasty or poisonous; if I take the risk of having one at random, I need to know how debilitating the poison might be, before judging whether the potential benefit of being lucky enough to get a tasty one is worth it”.
This more nuanced view of the world requires a high level of both insight and cognitive processing, and an acceptance of uncertainty and risk. Most people can intellectually grasp the necessity of such an approach but recoil from implementing it in their daily lives. It is much simpler to operate under certainties, and most people’s daily lives are so busy that they lack the opportunity for reflection.
Modern society reinforces this intellectual laziness. We cram a vast quantity of multi-tasked activity into a day, and still feel the need for more. Adults have become infantilised, desperate for the reassurance of an umbilical connection to an omniscient and omnipresent mother, except this parental figure is now the disembodied social network of the internet, mediated via our phones and laptops, by Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and other media.
I note in passing that Mark Zuckerberg, the inventor of Facebook, has just been named Time’s Person of the Year, which reflects how pervasive his worldview of “connectivity = benefit” has become.
The similarity of our relationship to the internet to that of the child to the parent under Bowlby’s Attachment Theory and Mary Ainsworth‘s Strange Situation experiments is striking. When separated from the connection to maternal, even womb-like, presence of the internet, even adults show all the signs of a child bereft of a maternal presence: feeling somewhat lost, alone, unsettled, uncertain and ultimately glad of reconnection. Anyone who has lost their mobile phone will be familiar with this phenomenon.
This child-like regression shows that we have ceded more and more active processing of the world to intemediaries, and now expect those systems to solve our problems for us. Our willingness to take personal responsibility and balance risk against reward has diminished. Nowhere is this more striking in our collective response to the risk of terrorist atrocity. Since 9/11, there has been an implicit assumption that preventing another terrorist attack has overriding importance.
This is absurd. Terrorism is a fact of life, and its probability of occurence cannot be reduced to zero. Reducing its risk comes at a cost, both financial and societal. We recently saw this in the furore about airport security measures such as body-scanning and pat-downs. Defenders of the policy always fell back on a variant of “we must do everything we can to protect our skies” without acknowledging that this simply isn’t true. A more accurate statement would be “we must do everything we can to protect our skies, providing that doing so doesn’t damage our ability to live our lives freely any more than we as a society are willing to accept”.
In other words, when judging how much security is required, one needs to quantity the extent of the damage caused by 9/11, and compare that to the small but cumulative damage caused by irritating large numbers of passengers. Quantifying these matters is complex, and touches upon the difficulty of assigning worth to non-tangibles, something I discussed yesterday. The refrain of “if it saves one life, it’s worth it” is plainly false, as if that were true, the way to achieve it would be to ban all air travel completely.
IATA is now planning the introduction of a much more sensible, risk/reward based approach to passenger screening. It sounds a far better way to deal with the issue than existing systems, but when it goes wrong – and no system can be perfect, as the risk is always higher than zero – it will face criticism that “we didn’t do enough” and the temptation will again be to add more layers, rather than deciding what level of risk is acceptable.
Leaving air travel aside, the more fundamental point is that the best way to progress as an intelligent society would be to encourage the understanding of probability, risk and opportunity cost. Not to mention encouraging independence of thought and a willingness to take personal responsibility for one’s actions. I have my doubts as to whether a critical mass of the population will do so. As rewarding as it is, such liberty is also frightening and that may be a step too far for most.
The Internet? I read articles and journals and forums and opinion pieces and blogs and spend the rest of my time thinking about the vast amount of information it provides. I do use FB as a playground, and I am hopelessly addicted to webcomics, but the rest of the internet? It is the university education I never had the opportunity of experiencing. If I could get a USB socket in the back of my neck, then I’d get it. (I have Googled it, they are not currently available) It has provided me with company when I had zero support, information when I had no way of knowing my way, it has introduced me to ideas, encouraged me to express my own, saved my neck a fair few times, and brought friends into my everyday life.
By comparison, reality is vastly overrated.
Nice last line.
The thing is, like most things, the internet has brought benefit as well as problems. This goes to the core of what I’m trying to say about judging risk. I’m not saying junk it. I’m saying that we don’t really judge its effect on us much, and there is an underlying assumption in many of the systems that loom large within it that increasing connectivity will always bring benefit.
Because of its disembodied nature, there is a great temptation to assign undue authority to its systems, because they are so much larger than us as individuals. The frequency with which wikipedia links are cited as evidence of fact is a small example of that, but it’s more pervasive than that. Without getting too Matrix-y about things (it’s such a cliche!), I do believe that it’s a question of systems of control and how many degrees of freedom one has to operate with those systems. Those that define the system, also define our reality within the system.
This is NOT unique to the internet, it’s actually true for any social system including our real lives, which is why I segued into the discusion of terrorism vs security.
Obviously, there are a lot of benefits to all these systems, but the tendency is to assume that the system (and its underlying assumptions) are correct. What I would like to encourage is a greater active questioning of systems by those within them. I would love for everyone to actively look at their lives and try to judge whether the balance of risk and reward of each system they participate in is right for them. Not saying I always successfully do this myself, of course, just that I think a more thoughtful, risk/reward-aware, approach to the positions we take can only be helpful in terms of aiding insight, and happiness. That’s the key point I was trying to make, albeit rather circuitously!
What? Are you saying that Wikipedia is not always true?
*Gasps*
Note: Still not touching the terrorism issue with a bargepole. Or someone else’s bargepole.
“This is NOT unique to the internet, it’s actually true for any social system including our real lives, which is why I segued into the discusion of terrorism vs security.
Obviously, there are a lot of benefits to all these systems, but the tendency is to assume that the system (and its underlying assumptions) are correct. What I would like to encourage is a greater active questioning of systems by those within them. I would love for everyone to actively look at their lives and try to judge whether the balance of risk and reward of each system they participate in is right for them.”
One result of actually living (to greater or lesser extent) in this way is a fair amount of loneliness. Most people really don’t want to make such decisions for themselves IMHO, for a panoply of reasons, I suppose. Nuance is not popular. Thoughtfulness is slow and laborious. The media howl for unanimity and uniformity; of course to each unit’s own definition of what that should be — Fox News versus PBS for instance, or whatever the British equivalents might be. And the influence of the media is IMPOSSIBLE to overstate.
I’m skewing things, perhaps, by using the word loneliness. A fairer word might be aloneness. I think most people equate those two. But they are very different conditions.
This is a grand time to be old. Been there, done that comes in handy, because precious few things are so novel, so striking, so important, that they HAVEN’T been seen or done before. That’s useful in thinking for oneself: more data to draw on. More experience. A wholesome amount (I hope it’s wholesome!) of F——- It to things, ideas, opinions of other people. A little more comfortability about what I think, me, myself, at least for this moment.
The French have an expression that fascinates me: etre bien dans sa peau. What I’m trying to describe is like feeling/being good in one’s own head. Probably some of that freedom when one is old comes from the knowledge that one isn’t as likely to be around to deal with many consequences. (Of course the danger is real of being a know-it-all, stick-in-the-mud old person, of whom we all know a vast quantity, I’m afraid. But I’m talking, or trying to talk, about freedom here.)
Can this conceivably be understood before one is old? I doubt it. But I want to say it anyway, because I want to tell you (generic you and anyone else reading this) that it gets easier as you get older to stand alone. Start now, keep on. And keep on keeping on.
“That’s the key point I was trying to make, albeit rather circuitously!”
Not to be more circuitous than thou — but YES. Here endeth the sermon.
What a wonderful and insightful comment! Thank you for taking the time to write it. It links in beautifully with some of my own thoughts (something similar was in the back of my mind, when I chose the image of the lighthouse standing alone against the stormy sea as the illustration for this post) and extends them neatly in some directions. I hope you don’t mind my using it as a bit of inspiration to write my latest new entry.
Are you kidding? I’m thrilled to think that something I wrote was useful to you. For all my brave talk about aloneness (truly it is more than that, but still…) it’s wonderful when a voice responds from virtual space. The toughest part of writing my own blog is the constant shooting of arrows (of thought) OUT THERE — and not knowing, or very infrequently knowing, whether they connected with a target. I do envy you your active readers and commenters: but I suspect that even for you it must still sometimes be a struggle keeping on.
Also, thanks for the illumination (ahem) about the lighthouse; if a symbol doesn’t hit me over the head, I’ll miss it.
I sometimes wonder why I blog; I tell myself it’s largely to have a venue that forces me to think through vague ideas a little bit more than I would otherwise. And I do honestly think that’s the biggest part of it.
But of course, I’m certain that part of it is also the idea that others will read it and perhaps respond. That’s a little bit of Vanity/Ego, but that’s not such a bad thing really. Pan Metron Ariston, and all that.
If it’s any consolation, I don’t have large numbers of readers (though rest assured, the ones I do have are all very valued, of course!) And I have glanced through your blog on a few occasions; you have some interesting pieces there.
“I sometimes wonder why I blog” —
this inspired me to think about that as a question or koan or hwa doh –
Today I posted my own response and tried to pingback (whatever that is!) to you, but don’t think it worked. So this is just to let you know you are quoted today on T2T post, Why I Blog, and complimented by name and link.
Happy New Year!