Challenger Disaster: A Flashbulb Memory 25 Years On

Tomorrow the 28th January 2011 marks the 25th anniversary of the Challenger Disaster.

Professor David Pillemer calls Challenger a “flashbulb memory“, one of those rare events that remain permanently seared on our retinas. He cites other examples: 9/11, the assassination of JFK, and…well, I’m sure you all have yours. But while 9/11 remains vivid, it is the loss of the Challenger Space Shuttle that has the stronger hold on me.

This is the essential quality of the memory: our recollection of events is not factual, but coloured by emotion. Challenger’s explosion resulted in a loss of life orders of magnitude fewer than 9/11, or the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, or any other number of tragic events.

But Challenger is my flashbulb memory, for the simple reason that I was a child in the 1980s.

It was the last decade where there seemed to be an near-unalloyed trust in technology to solve our problems. By the dawn of the 90s, the side-effects of industrialisation and technological advancement (climate change, pollution, loss of the rainforests, ice caps and species) were becoming better understood. But in the 80s, technology was still the solution. And the Space Shuttle was the very embodiment of that optimistic ideal.

It will seem odd to those brought up on a diet of 24hr rolling news channels, but here in the UK, the story was actually broken by Newsround, a daily BBC children’s programme of bite-size news chunks that had a slot at about 5pm. But on this day, they interrupted the regular earlier kids’ programming to report the Challenger Disaster. I was one of the many children around the country who called their mother in to watch what was happening. You can see some (very poor quality) TV footage here. I don’t actually remember any of what was said in that clip. The words don’t stay, but the images and the emotions do.

The story had special resonance for children because for the first time, an ordinary teacher had been aboard, and had died along with the crew. Christa McAuliffe had been selected to go on the mission to inspire youngsters to learn about space, NASA, and the shuttle. In short, to inspire us in the optimistic technological dream of the future. The Shuttle’s explosion was more than literal. Amongst the falling wreckage were the shattered illusions of a young generation who couldn’t understand why such a powerful, advanced craft had failed so spectacularly.

Of course, today we are surrounded by far more technology than could be dreamt of 25 years ago, and it’s so much more user-friendly. And even by the mid-80s, the shuttle was old-hat. Plus, the extensive investigations into the loss of Challenger have explained much of the incident and we’ve been able to put it into context. But we are also more sceptical of technology, and more cynical of the world it operates in, and the immersion it demands of us. Perhaps it’s simply that I am older and so look on the world with more jaded eyes than I did when watching kid’s TV in 1986… but perhaps there is something wider in our aspirations that’s changed too.

I still believe in the power of technological innovation to improve quality of life and reduce misery and suffering. For every problem – and there are many – it creates, it is technology that offers potential for a solution. The genie is out of the bottle and no amount of Luddite thinking can ever put it back. We can learn to channel the power of technology to aid our happiness, not frustrate it.

Challenger has been lost for 25 years, but its symbolism is still potent, and can yet be redeemed.

“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God.”

- President Reagan

The Importance of Tolerance

 

Passenger crying after the Moscow airport bombing, photo credit Denis Sinyakov/Reuters

There has been a preponderance of Jung in my blog recently, caused by re-reading Psychological Types over the past week. As I type, news reaches us of a fresh terrorist atrocity, this time in Russia’s largest airport, with a suicide bomber killing at least 35. I find Jung’s words relevant:

[speaking of the superficiality of most human relationships]

A rapport of this kind is by far the most frequent; it rests on mutual projection, which later becomes the source of many misunderstandings.

[later]

As a rule, partisans of either side attack each other purely externally, always seeking out the chinks of their opponent’s armour. Squabbles of this kind are usually fruitless. It would be of considerably greater value if the dispute were transferred to the psychological realm, from where it arose in the first place.

A real understanding can, in my view, be reached only when the diversity of psychological premises is accepted.

I think Jung is trying say that so much of what we commonly think of as disputes about facts, possessions, territories, economic systems and ideologies are fundamentally disputes about ways of thinking; about personalities. This is not so much a clash of worldviews as it is a clash of ways of identifying those worldviews. Because most daily human interaction – and therefore political interaction – is focused on the superficial, true engagement with the other person is very rare, and violent clashes about proxy issues result instead. Most of the time these violent clashes remain social or verbal, and so pass largely unnoticed apart from an abundance of hurt feelings or reaffirmed prejudices.

Sadly, for Russia’s air travellers today (as it was those present at Gabrielle Giffords’ meeting recently), the violence can become physical.

Jung is an advocate of tolerance through wisdom, encouraging attempts to see the world through the psychology of others, to prevent such catastrophic outcomes.

The Aesthetic Life, or Why Clothes Matter

Mandalas are Eastern abstract artforms used by Carl Jung to explore the unconscious mind

From the division of Man into introvert and extrovert, came the suggestion that the conscious mind of the introvert is driven by his ego, and the extrovert by his sense of relatedness with the world. Subconciously, the introvert finds joy when emotionally satisfied by a beautiful intellectual system, whereas the extrovert finds happiness when held intellectually rapt by a beautiful sensual world. It is the dual satisfaction of both conscious will and unconscious mind that results in an optimal state of well-being.

Schiller suggested that “creative/wise play” allowed for the appreciation and development of Art/Beauty. This appreciation of the Aesthetic allows both introvert and extrovert to satisfy their conscious and unconscious needs. It is interesting to consider what forms of Art miight satisfy these two different types. It has been suggested that two branches of Art exist: the Empathic and the Abstract. Empathic art creates identifiable objects; representations of reality to which we feel an emotional response. An example would be the work of an Old Master. Abstract art requires an intellectual leap of reasoning to imbue with it with meaning and emotional content. Examples would include modern works of installation art.

Empathic art derives its power from its representative function; the real world idea it depicts and gives larger-than-life meaning to. It is not a stretch to suggest that it would appeal more to an introvert, who, in their desire to externalise themselves onto the outside world, consciously recognises the depicted idea, and fills it with emotional meaning in their subconscious inner world. Abstract art may appeal more to the extrovert, who notes his own overt emotional response to an otherwise meaningless abstraction and is then forced to internally derive an intellectual meaning. Thus, each type of art encourages each type of man to draw on both his conscious and subconscious mind into order to fully appreciate it, albeit by mirror-image methods.

Of course few of us are extremes of type, so few of us consume Art so rigidly. And even in extreme cases, practice and familiarity can lead to appreciation of the other form of Art than would otherwise be predicted. But the underlying theme being suggested is that when indulging in creative play, the form of play chosen by each type is such that it satisfies both conscious and unconscious yearnings.

The appreciation of the aesthetic thus enriches our entire psyche and so increases our sense of fulfilment and happiness. It is, as one writer put it, “objectified self-enjoyment”.

It does not require a great artist to appreciate the aesthetic; merely a mind willing to appreciate possibilities other than the crudely concrete. On the other hand, the creation of art offers a more interactive, possibly synergistic, medium for achieving happiness compared to the mere appreciation of pre-existing work. Naturally, not all of us are meant to be the next Turner Prize winner, but it is not the end-point of Art that is important, nor even the nature of it, but rather the process by which it is created, that is likely to drive the enrichment of our whole self. Whether the Art produced is bad or good is largely irrelevant under this theory.

What is more, Art can be defined exceptionally broadly. It is not just painting or sculpture, nor just literature or music. It is any activity where the aim is to blend conscious and unconscious, and rationality with sensuality. That opens it up to nearly everyone, although not all will feel confident enough to try.

For myself, as a strongly expressed introvert with no great skill with a brush or pen, one example of how I find some small creative release is the simple act of dressing every day. What are clothes but a means by which we design a collage for the day, or a theme to whistle as we go out about our life? We choose colour, pattern, form and shape and blend them together, adding in the vital ingredients of intellectual design and emotional response, and crucially, we do this to our very bodies, and then wear the product in full view of the outside world. What more vital way of creating Art could there be?

Perhaps I over-reach, and in truth, my tongue felt firmly pressed against my cheek while typing the more purple patches of prose in the above paragraph. But I do believe this: finding, appreciating and creating Art in its broadest sense – living the aesthetic life – elevates an otherwise mundane and tramelled existence into something that can satisfy both the conscious and the unconscious mind, and so pave the way to self-actualisation and individuation.

In short? Happiness beckons for the snappy dresser!

Hope, Happiness and the Potential of Man

Friedrich Schiller, Image via Wikipedia

It is commonly suggested that Man can be characterised as either an Introvert or an Extrovert. The validity of making such a distinction rests on the potential utility such taxonomy may bring; I am not interested in abstruse cataloguing without meaningful purpose. Does the attempt to divide Man into two broad groups help us understand him and the challenges he faces? Will it make him happy?

Carl Jung, drawing partly on Friedrich Schiller’s fertile correspondence with Goethe, suggested that the conscious mind of the introvert is driven largely by his ego (his internal sense of self)  while his sense of “relatedness” (affective/emotional responses) to objects in the external world is diminished. The extrovert, by contrast, is captivated by the world and his relationship to it, and the ego becomes secondary to this. Thus, “the extrovert discovers himself in the fluctuating and the changeable; the introvert in the constant”. Affectivity is “positively painful” to the introvert, while for the extrovert “it must on no account be missed”.

There is no better statement of this difference in approach to the world than that expressed when Schiller, the archetypal introvert, wrote to extroverted Goethe: “You have a kingdom to rule, and I only a somewhat numerous family of ideas which I would like to expand into a little universe”.

The introvert feels driven to externalise all the ideas he possesses within his mind, and make them manifest in the outside world. The extrovert yearns to internalise the world and consume it utterly. At their extremes, therefore, both the introvert and extrovert are autocrats, ruthlessly desiring absolute complete control, and unable to settle for nothing less.

A crucial point is that these drives and responses are functions of the conscious mind; they are how we overtly interpret in the world. But our opposite, inferior, nature can be found in the relatively submerged subconscious mind. So the extrovert finds harmony not just when emotionally exposed to a changing and vibrant external world ecology, but when he can come to intellectual terms with the impact and meaning of those emotions upon him. And the introvert waxes lyrical when he feels the emotional pleasure of appreciating an elegant rational system.

It is when the conscious drive moves in the same direction as the subconscious that this true pleasure results. Unfortunately, many of the systems in which we function do not encourage this dual approach to life. Schiller noted this, Jung remarked that it was worse by his time, and I may be bold enough to suggest that the situation has deteriorated further since. Jung said, “the differentiated function procures the possibility of a collective existence, but not that satisfaction and joie de vivre which the development of individual values alone can give”. Or, the need to earn money means that people gravitate to the roles and professions they are superficially productive at; the jobs that make the most use of their introverted or extraverted nature. They do these jobs to the practical satisfaction of their superiors, but not to the satisfaction of their inner self which demands more than this, and so they are unhappy.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, being a crisper wordsmith than I, phrased it thus: “You must choose between making a Man or a Citizen; you cannot make both at once”.

If both conscious and subconscious drives exists, both must be satisfied for our minds to be at peace. The challenge is therefore to find ways of living that allow for the exploration of this dual, yet intertwined, nature of our psyche. Schiller proposed that “creative play” or “wise play” (such as that involved in appreciating or making Art, or Beauty) would enable this. Both the extrovert and the introvert can express their inferior, subsconscious, selves through this process. Indeed, Jung postulated that this process is a conduit to expressing an inner symbolic representation of our true (whole) self.

The trouble is that to be wise when playing suggests the requirement of insight into what the end-point of our play should be. And that is a very circular argument as it is the creative play itself that is supposed to align our conscious and subconscious minds in this fashion. It is suggestive of an iterative process of incrementally improving wisdom and insight, whereby the act of play opens new avenues of thought, which in turn suggest new types of play, and so on.

It is worth pausing here to note that most people are not yet ready to even begin to play wisely. So Jung warns: “for them seriousness must occupy the middle place instead of play”; they must first think about their rational and emotional natures and the tension between them, before they are ready to use creativity to begin to meld the different parts together. This again reinforces the value of insight, and encourages self-reflection.

But if one is ready, the potential reward is individuation and self-actualisation. True individuality results from the ability to both be, and be separate from, the two opposing functions of our conscious and unconscious minds. Interaction between individuals would only occur when creative play was the aim of the meeting.

Is this achievable?

I suggest not in this lifetime! To be so fully cognisant and accepting of ourselves may theoretically be possible, but suggests to me such a differentiation from humanity as to be divinity.

But think of this: Man is the only beast to even contemplate such heights. We have the gall to wish to strive beyond ourselves, to fulfil our ultimate potential, to become god-like. The only collective community that would satisfy us would be the liberty of Mount Olympus. That is the truly remarkable thing about our species, and why typology and psychology are not mere taxonomy, but tools we can use to understand our potential.

It is this hope within us that fires our creativity. Eternal happiness may be the ultimate reward for all that effort, but for now, it is enough to know that splendid things will result from just the creative potential.

Roman Roulette

Image via Wikipedia

There are times where one must simply choose: which fork in the road of life do we follow?

Often, these crucial decisions can be delayed or the terms of the choice reframed so as to offer a more palatable contrast. And by planning ahead and understanding both yourself and your hopes for the future, the right answer can become self-evident.

But sometimes, even the wisest and most artful can find themselves faced with a crossroads that they have done little to prepare for, and a solution must be extemporised.

So it was with Josephus, a commander of the Jews in their rebellion against Roman rule in the 1st century AD. Legions led first by Vespasian and later his son Titus (both future Emperors) were wreaking revenge across Judaea, razing cities and massacring local populations. Josephus and 40 of his comrades found themselves cornered in a hideout in the city of Jotapata. He had predicted that the city would fall on the 47th day of the Roman siege, and his prediction had now come true.

Josephus, a moderate man, wanted to surrender and seek clemency. His colleagues felt death by suicide was the only honourable option. A man at ease with words, Josephus attempted to persuade them away from this decision, arguing it would be against God’s will to suicide. He failed in that line of argument, but convinced them that rather than each man killing himself, they should instead kill each other as this would be less likely to offend God.

We will never know whether what happened next was pure luck or brilliant inspiration, though the circumstances are all so odd that I rather suspect the latter. Josephus said that they should all stand in a circle and then every third man should be killed by his neighbour.

The brilliance lies in where Josephus stood in that circle. By positioning himself correctly, he ensured that every time the count went round, he was never the third man, and so was never killed. He and one other man were the last two survivors and with only one man left to persuade, he was now able to argue successfully in favour of surrender.

He lived, became a Roman citizen and left several important histories of the age behind. Some have painted him as a traitor, others as an opportunist. Perhaps he was. But I have to admire his skill and tenacity in surviving such a lethal situation. True, we’re unlikely to ever be in the exact same situation (though if you are, I recommend standing either 16th or 31st in the circle), but the ability to improvise and to persuade remains vital to survival.

The painting is The Triumph of Titus, 1885, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and can be clicked for a larger image

Good Connections

What is a good connection?

Last time I noted the increasingly interconnected and interdependent world we live in. Our lives are improved incrementally by ever more delicately balanced and efficient systems. Little did I know that a couple of days after writing that entry, I would experience a personal example of the fragility of the modern world.

As I type, I have the good fortune to see blue skies, swaying palms and a clear blue sea beyond. It is hard to be anomic in the sunshine of Mauritius. But mankind has a way of bringing trouble with him. Due to various techinical glitches, it took me quite some time to get my internet connection working properly. I was surprised by how frustrated that made me feel.

After all, there is little better than the prospect of some weeks in the sunshine, with no greater hassle than deciding when to go for a swim. Yet here I was feeling irritated and frustrated by an inability to check my email. This is a wonderful example of dependency on a technological web of connectivity. I dare say I am not alone in this, and as our society becomes ever more finely balanced in our human supply chain, we will all experience a corresponding increase in our dependency on these logistics systems.

One of the hardest challenges in life is choosing to put aside difficulty and frustration. Mankind has a love-hate relationship with uncertainty, to the extent that when it is not present, there is a tendency to find something new to think about and become concerned with.

To prevent this constant receding from view of happiness, value judgements must be made about the challenges we face. In truth, going without regular internet and email access for a couple of weeks or so would have been no great trouble. In fact, it would probably have been a very useful exercise in some respects. And yet, I was very satisfied when I managed to get the settings working and my umbilical cord to the internet womb was re-establised.

Connections are important; they permit transactions (both personal and financial) that make our lives more efficient and so can drive up quality of existence. But they are also ties that bind; golden handcuffs that we can be irrationally unwilling to be released from. The true test of any connection – be it a personal or a business relationship – is not whether it can be made successfully or not. It is not even whether it delivers net happiness when present. It must also be weighed against the net unhappiness when it is not present and due consideration given to how reliably present it is.

Fear of discarding bad connections can lead to an accumulation of mental detritus, and limit our freedom. Look liberty in the eye, and welcome it.

Beyond the Tipping Point: preventing a global collapse

The fundamental principle by which the modern world works is that increased efficiency reduces costs and therefore quality of life increases as each individual can either afford more of what they like or they can step up to improved quality at the same cost.

This is the basic driver behind every business endeavour: the delivery of content that would be too inefficient in terms of overall cost to quality of life for an individual to provide for themselves, and for which they are therefore willing to pay another to provide to them.

This core function of any financial transaction is true regardless of technological level, historical era, or magnitude of transaction. It applies just as much to the wool trade of mediaeval England, as it does to a hedge fund in 2011; and to the purchase of a loaf of bread by a citizen in the Roman Empire, as to buying a house today. Even hunter-gatherer tribal societies apply this principle by dividing the hunting and gathering (and other tasks of life) between different subsets of the tribe, thus improving overall tribal efficiency. Communist societies are no different either, with the profit motive being abstracted into (and distorted by) a central authority, still existing through quota allocations. While there exists a limited amount of resources to be divided amongst a number of people, the drive for efficiency will always accompany humanity.

There is therefore a permanent drive built into society to increase efficiency as to do so increases the economic power of any given transaction. This is to the benefit of both the seller and the purchaser as both have potential to get more out of the transaction: more service gained by the buyer, and more profit accrued to the vendor.

The limiting factor to this activity is the stability of the mechanism by which efficiency is increased. For every step up in efficiency, there is an increase in complexity. A highly unstable mechanism becomes unpredictable, and so costs rise, negating the initial efficiency gain. Risks to the system occur when unstable mechanisms are implemented in an attempt to extract the efficiency gain (and so extra profit) before the system is stable enough to endure implementation. If this happens, the net cost to both parties actually increases: the buyer purchases a faulty item or service, and the seller has to fix the problem.

This is the root of moral hazard, the financial risk associated with implementing any new system. It is the loss of this connection between risk and return that concerned central bankers so much during the financial crisis (both with regard to the way debt was repackaged/resold and with the bank bailouts thereafter), and continues to ripple outwards in examples as diverse (but connected) as the risks attached to European sovereign debt levels and credit availability in the mortgage market.

A more prosaic example can be found in the recent discovery of toxic dioxins in German eggs used in various products in the UK. Here the system is the interconnected nature of the global food industry, and the efficiency gained by leveraging mass industrial processes to feed populations at a cost they will tolerate. Without this complex logistic web, food would be significantly more expensive. The flipside is that the when the system fails, the negative effect ripples outwards much more than it would have in an earlier era.

Technological advances drive efficiency gains, which lead to more refined and extended logistics chains, delivering more affordable products to more people, driving up purchasing power and so, quality of life. The challenge is how to ensure systems that are implemented to improve efficiency are also sufficiently robust to reduce the risk of systemic collapse to a tolerable level. In other words, how not to push the system beyond the tipping point.

The question is what level of risk is tolerable? Any logistics chain is inherently risky. Equally, surviving independently of a wider economic network would be a subsistence and lonely existence. Redundant systems (or their abstract corollary, the insurance industry) stabilise complex system, but carry their own costs and so are themselves prone to the same failings (viz. the failure of collateralised debt obligations/CDOs to protect the banks in the way they expected).

Understanding how complex and chaotic systems interact with each other will be crucial to safeguarding our ever more complex and interdependent society.

But even that does not provide a solution to the fundamental conflict between efficiency and stability. I wonder if such a solution exists?

The only possible theoretical way out I can think of would be a the equivalent of a perpetual motion machine: a way to get something for nothing, a lifting off the pressure on resources. Perhaps developing fusion power would allow that, at least for a while? Virtually free unlimited power would increase efficiency of every other system, though of course we would then be dependent on yet another fragile system (the fusion power generation network). Still, I think it no random coincidence that every single major world power is investing in that fusion research. Certainly, I can think of no other project that has unified China, the EU, the USA, Russia, Japan, Korea and India in common purpose.

Changing Minds, Changing Worlds

It’s an old existential argument to suggest that everything we believe to be real is filtered through our own human perception, making it impossible to be objectively certain that reality exists. What is less frequently remarked on is Man’s ability to change the world around him by changing our shared perception of reality. Which brings me to the Six Ads that Changed the World.

Those are not necessarily the advertising campaigns I’d pick (though I think De Beers and Nike certainly deserve their places) and I felt obliged to rectify the paucity of meerkats when choosing an illustration for this post. But it made me think about the power of an advertising campaing to change minds and influence people.

Advertising is far more complex than most people realise. Overt advertising that simply aims to get you directly interested in a product at the time of watching is nowadays restricted to children’s advertising (parodied beautifully here) and time-limited sales or special offers.

More commonly, advertising now is about brand management. Maintaining a market presence by ensuring a certain image of the product and company is embedded in the target demographic’s psyche.

Commercial advertising campaigns therefore do the same thing as political parties, or different philosophical schools. They attempt to alter the way we look at the world by applying consistent directional pressure on our patterns of thought. By repeating and reinforcing this underlying  message through many different channels, minds are gradually moulded. Everyone thinks themselves immune to advertising, but the bottom line rarely lies, and advertising expenditure regularly results in increased revenue.

The same principles can be used in daily life by individuals, on a smaller scale. It is possible to define your own personal brand through consistent management of the impression you create on others. This requires some degree of insight, forethought and willpower. But if you don’t expend that effort, your subconscious will create a brand for you anyway. It just may not be a particularly helpful one to you under all circumstances. Modifying the brand to suit changing conditions, while remaining true to yourself, is the central challenge.

Predicting 2011… and beyond

Image via Wikipedia

At the start of a new year, it seems appropriate to cast one’s eyes forward to assess the year ahead.

Others are more ambitious and are seeking to peer into a more distant future. The Living Earth Simulator aims to integrate a vast quantity of different data sources into a model of the entire Earth, enabling us to describe the present planet more accurately than ever before, and so be able to wind the clock forwards and make predictions about the future.

I’ve mentioned the science of cliodynamics before, which aims to mathematically model the course of historical events. The LES is a similarly wildly ambitious project, and I suspect is unlikely to bear fruit any time soon due to the practical difficulties of the ask. Indeed, it may never work properly.

But I adore the vaunting ambition of the concept. This is Mankind’s blue-sky thinking at its most daringly hopeful.

And that is not a bad way to start a new year.