Choosing Wisdom

Hermes Trismegistus, floor mosaic, Siena Cathedral, via Wikipedia

‘I will build the Zodiac…

The lives of men,

from birth to final destruction,

shall be controlled

by the hidden workings of this mechanism.’

Destiny and Necessity are cemented together.

Destiny sows the seed.

Necessity compels the result.

Few can escape their fate

or guard against

the terrible influence of the Zodiac…

If, however,

the rational part of a man’s soul

is illuminated…

… the working of these gods is as nothing.

But such men are few.

Most are led and driven by the gods

which govern earthly life…

To my way of thinking, however,

it is our duty not simply to acquiesce

in our human state,

but, through intense contemplation

of divine things,

to detach ourselves from our merely mortal nature.

Hermes Trismegistus in The Hermetica, as translated by Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy

Borrowed from the library of Dr Neel Burton

Compiled thousands of years ago at the time of the Pharoahs, is there any more prescient statement of Man’s current condition?

Beyond the mortal influences of genetic nature (Destiny) and environmental nurture with its unconscious influence on behaviour (Necessity), lies choice.

It is up to us to choose to think, to act freely, to gain insight, and so also gain Enlightenment.

Few make that choice.

Know your Source!

Modern life is an explosion of choice.  The art of modern living is discernment.

We are heuristic creatures, looking at the world not as a continual series of fresh situations, but through the lens of experience. It focuses and distorts information to fit within our pre-existing framework. We stereotype to rapidly understand and navigate the new. Mostly, this works to our benefit, saving us the need to algorithmically process all fresh data as a computer would. Occasionally it is detrimental, when we pre-judge incorrectly. But good or bad, it is still necessary, or we would face analysis paralysis continuously.

To choose correctly therefore requires a good sense of what our baseline – our frame of reference – is. Whether this provides context to the danger of radiation levels at Fukushima, or the political motivations behind airstrikes in Libya, or the most appropriate wine for dinner, a good working knowledge of reliable sources is crucial. That is the art of discernment and selectivity.

It gains internet expression in price comparison aggregator websites, physical embodiment in the  good sommelier at your favourite restaurant, scientific grounding through the process of peer review, and sartorial definition through knowing the talents and limitations of your tailor. More generally, it can be said to arise from insight: the ability to not just to be aware of new data, but to filter it correctly. Insight improves with practice: challenge yourself to actively interpret new situations, and to check your heuristic processes are running correctly by comparing your findings with trusted sources.

There are minor sources for each sphere of life. Taking clothes as an example, I like Ede & Ravenscroft for suits, jackets and trousers, Drakes for ties, and Rayner & Sturges ordered through Sartorial Executive for shirts. But however trusted these sources are, they are nothing but empty textiles without my major source for clothes: an internal image of self that I wish to project outwards. This major source has gone through iterative changes over the years, as it has been exposed to many other minor sources in the form of other people’s attire and the archetypes they embody.

If clothes are an external manifestation of the way we interact with the world, they are a first differential of our inner self: the person that we are, and the person we want to become. With insight and effort, that inner self will also go through a similar process of iterative change as we meet new (hopefully wise) people and explore new concepts. Those are our minor sources, melding together to form a major inner source of identity.

At our best, this is how we learn and grow as people.

The Destroyer of Worlds

Whether war, no-fly zone, or de facto rebel air wing,  allied military action continues in the skies over Libya.

In a fortuitous scheduling quirk, the BBC screened The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. This Powell & Pressburger 1943 classic is a movie I was certain I’d seen but in fact had not. The movie opens with a wartime chase culminating in the main character (named Candy, not Blimp) being thrown into a Turkish bath, before flashbacking to his younger self in 1902.

The immediate plot development is superficially that of a romantic comedy. There are one or two darker notes, but it is easy to shrug them off as reading more than intended into an innocuous scene. This is especially so for a modern viewer seeing the movie for the first time. Having the benefit an extra 68 years worth of movies, we assume ourselves to be more sophisticated than a wartime propaganda flick could possibly be.

The genius of the movie is that every nuance in the first third is entirely deliberate, as are other lines and scenes that appear to be amusing fluff. In hindsight, they become tragic foreshadowings of what happens to the world as the movie segues into the First World War. The darkness accumulates, and even an ostensibly happy post-war family scene where Candy talks about meeting his new wife has a looming bittersweet quality. Unlike his new family, who never cotton on to his mixed emotions, we are acutely aware of his deep sense of loss at never marrying his first love. This deftness of portrayal is a testament to Roger Livesey’s acting, on display throughout the movie.

Unusually for a propaganda film, two of the best speeches are given to a German character, played with conviction by Anton Walbrook. The thumbnail sketch of his family’s collapse in the interwar period is truly tragic, and all the more powerful for being delivered in an shockingly honest manner. And his later explanation to Candy of the war’s meaning lays out the realpolitik of why the principles Britain was fighting for were sacrificed to ensure victory.

The movie also lightly – but intelligently – touches on difficult areas such as the subjectivity of perception. Are the three women in different time periods played by Deborah Kerr really meant to be identical in appearance? I think not; Walbrook’s character almost says as much in a later scene. He married Candy’s true love, and does not really see her image in the portrait of the woman Candy married; Candy is absolutely convinced of their similarity, and they are both Kerr.

This clash between perception and reality is taken to its logical conclusion in the movie’s final scenes as it comes full-circle to the time-period of the opening scene. Candy reflects on his life; that “he has never changed”. But the viewer is acutely aware of a change in how we perceive him. From the reactionary, bumptious and foolish Colonel Blimp comic-strip archetype we assume him to be initially, we now understand the human qualities of the man, and the ideas and principles he embodies. As the movie’s title suggests, Blimp is now dead to us. Candy lives on.

The propaganda message of the film is thus remarkably nuanced for a wartime film, and perhaps partly explains why Churchill tried to prevent its release. In essence, it argues that Britain has to fight dirty to win WWII, and while that compromises its ideals and the very reason it fights, this is a less-worse fate than not fighting at all. It admits that the country is changing. But it also holds out a faint hope that while the essential humanity of people like Candy remains, the inhumane actions it as a nation takes during the War have a chance to be redeemed after. It argues that nations and armies behave differently – and less civilly – than people, but that while nations exist, war is necessary.

Despite preceding the Trinity nuclear tests by two years, it is both acceptance of – and remedy to – Robert Oppenheimer’s famous misquote of the Bhagavad Gita as he realised what Man had achieved: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”.

Libya is a far smaller conflict, but the movie’s resonance remains a sobering counterbalance to the fervid front pages.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is currently on Amazon.co.uk for just £3.93

Libya Ceasefire? Gaddafi plays Joker in the Pack

International Diplomacy is evolving from a stately Great Game into Speed Chess.

With the destabilising ramifications of Japan’s earthquake taking a temporary step back from the limelight, Libya has again taken centre stage.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have achieved something I thought extraordinarily unlikely a week ago, passing a UN resolution authorising a no-fly zone over Libya.

Not just that, but the detailed wording enables a remarkably broad range of potential triggers to intervention.

This wrong-footed me. I had assumed that their efforts were words not action, designed to bolster an impression of determined humanitarian activity that would play well with their home audiences, but in reality done with an expectation of failure at the UN. And to which they would then be able to say “well, at least we tried our best”. Russia, China and Germany (and to some extent even the USA) instead all chose to call the UK and France’s bluff.

That put the ball back into their court, leading to rumours that British and French jets would be over Libya within hours. Instead, they paused to co-ordinate plans. I wonder if there was an element of realpolitik here; perhaps an expectation that the pause would allow Gaddafi to quickly take Benghazi, and so negate the practical need for any serious military intervention.

Instead, and to my even greater surprise, it is Gaddafi who has blinked first, by declaring a ceasefire.

At this stage, I admit that what happens next is beyond my ken. The situation – and Gaddafi himself – remains too unpredictable. Part of me thinks he is saying whatever it takes to prevent international airstrikes, with actual attacks continuing to take place on the ground. If this happens, will the US/UK/France deploy their forces to the fullest extent authorised by UN Resolution 1973 or will they back-pedal and implement only the barest skeleton of a no-fly zone?

It really is a compelling real-time example of international brinkmanship. It displays how nations can get swept up into a ratcheting spiral of engagement. In this kind of rapidly-evolving game, unpredictability can overwhelm careful planning and Gaddafi is a past-master at putting a spanner into the works.

Drawing parallels with individuals in crisis situations, and my professional experience in that field, the best way to contain unpredictable and dangerous behaviour is for everyone else involved to act in a co-ordinated and highly-boundaried manner. This contains the unpredictability and allows a safe management plan to be implemented to solve the problem. But this requires everyone else involved in the situation to want the same outcome, so they have the motivation to speak with one voice. In the case of Libya, each party has its own vested interests, many of which are in conflict. The danger is that this permits unpredictable behaviour to easily get an upper hand.

Japan Earthquake: Consequences

Map of tsunami wave height; click for source

The twists and turns wrought by the Japan earthquake have gripped and troubled me. I am by nature, and to some extent profession, a contingency planner. When faced with a difficult situation, I tend to switch into a pattern-recognition and problem-solving mode, anticipating consequences in order to take advantage of them. The Japan earthquake is troubling because its medium and long term ramifications are very unsettling.

The facts are straightforward: the 9.0 magnitude earthquake that occured off the Sendai coast on 11th March was one of the most powerful ever recorded. It generated a massive and rapidly-arriving tsunami, leading to major loss of life and catastrophic damage. Several nuclear reactors at Fukushima are in danger of core containment breach, and at time of typing, there are reports of a minor containment breach at reactor 2. The Bank of Japan has pumped trillions of yen into the economy to prop it up during the crisis, and the emergency services and military appear to be doing the best they can under trying circumstances.

The consequences are much harder to define.

The loss of life is of course immensely tragic on personal, national and global levels. However, the calculating side of me is bound to point out that on that global scale (comparing it to previous natural disasters such as Haiti’s earthquake) it is not disproportionate.

Many tens of thousands (probably hundreds of thousands) of lives were undoubtedly saved by Japan’s affluence. Its wealth enabled adherence to strict building codes, making deaths from the earthquake itself relatively limited. This is a triumphant testament to technology and its careful widespread implementation.

The tsunami killed many more. It is much harder to prevent tsunami deaths. One would assume that Japan will respond by implementing more safety restrictions into its building code for coastal properties, such as mandating the orientation of buildings to permit the force of tsunami waves to pass through rather than destroy. These would be relatively straightforward regulations and I have little doubt Japan will respond well in this regard.

The economic consequences are more painful. Natural disasters are generally associated with an immediate GDP hit, followed by a rebound 6-18 months later as reconstruction kicks in. Under normal circumstances, Japan would follow this overall neutral pattern (as it did following Kobe’s earthquake). But Japan’s national debt is enormous at about 200% of GDP, and interest rates are already in the basement following decades of stagnation and the 2008 financial crisis. This limits economic room for manoeuvre and magnifies the impact of that short-term GDP hit, making it more likely to be prolonged. If Japan’s GDP is negatively affected for more than 6 months, it may trigger a global slowdown. Although it has been stagnating for 20 years, Japan is still the world’s 3rd biggest economy and a major recession would impact global demand chains.

This is particularly concerning for the UK, given that the success of the austerity programme being implemented by the coalition government is dependent on moderately strong private sector growth. Direct UK-Japan trade is in the order of about £10-20bn only, so although knock-on effects via the USA are harder to quantify, it’s possible that the fallout to the UK economy will be relatively contained. It’s simply too early to be sure about the impact on the UK beyond noting that several large insurers will bear major, but largely absorbable, losses.

Fallout of another nature is perhaps more troublesome in the long term. It’s highly unlikely that radiation from Japan will cause the UK any problems whatsoever. Even within Japan, the impact should hopefully be fairly limited, especially if the cores at Fukushima do not lose further containment. But the effect on our energy policy may be significant.

Elements of the Green movement have been swift to use the incident to buttress their more generalised anti-nuclear policies. While some environmentalists now support nuclear power as being cleaner than coal or oil, and therefore helpful in mitigating climate change, the majority still push very strongly against an expansion of fission plants. Public opinion has gradually been shifting back towards nuclear power in the decades since Chernobyl, but this progress is likely to be reversed in the emotional knee-jerk response to what we are seeing unfold in Japan. The longer it takes to control the cores, the worse that response is likely to be.

No method of power generation is risk and impact free, but nuclear is in many ways safer, cleaner and more cost-effective than other methods. It has some major drawbacks of course, not least that if all the lines of defense do collapse, then the consequence of a fully exposed core are very significant. Nuclear power stations are designed with significant depth of defense and I hope and pray that the depth is sufficient to allow the Fukushima cores to be brought under control. Newer designs of plant are more defended still (Fukushima is about 40 years old), with passive as well as active lines of retreat in case of emergency.

While it is absolutely right that nuclear plants should be designed with the precautionary principle uppermost in mind, I believe it is fundamentally wrong to construct an entire energy policy around such worst-case scenarios. Any energy policy has to be balanced not solely against the risk of incredibly unlikely catastrophe, but against the far more likely effects on the economy, and the need to securely keep the lights on.

Britain is a much more geologically stable country, and with newer reactor designs, I firmly believe that nuclear power is easily a safe enough option. It is also going to be necessary in order to maintain power grid stability in the face of our international obligations to mitigate climate change. Renewables alone simply cannot fill the gap in the short time we have. I hope there isn’t a knee-jerk response against nuclear fission’s planned expansion in this country.

Of course, a more lasting solution would be cost-effective large-scale nuclear fusion, and there is a very strong international effort to develop the technology required, which I touched upon in an earlier entry. That would be both cleaner and safer than fission.

National disasters can paradoxically bring out the best in people. All the reporting from Japan conveys images of an understandably shocked and frightened populace, but one attempting to work with authorities to rebuild their country. Having visited and worked there, I believe they will succeed.

Can’t get enough of that wonderful Duff

Whetted by Princess Ghislaine de Polignac’s recent obituary, I’m now reading the late Duff Cooper’s diaries. Ghislaine was just one of Cooper’s affairs during his time as British Ambassador to Paris, to the extent that he once found himself at a party simultaneously attended by three of his mistresses. He describes the event thus: “I was rather nervous. There was much jealousy in the air. Everyone was looking at everyone with suspicion. Like a ball in Balzac”.

An inveterate drinker, selfish womaniser and bon vivant, he was also intimately involved in many major political events between the outbreak of the First World War and the close of the Second. His lifestyle is such that the news of a sunny Spring day inspiring him to commission three new suits and dine at his club with a bottle of 1904 Pol Roger sits comfortably alongside the details of high diplomacy regarding a Treaty involving the Russians and Italians. His diary style is sharp, with flashes of dry humour. And while he has a strongly romantic and whimsical nature, it is clear that these episodes are never allowed to overwhelm him entirely.

Perhaps the very act of writing a diary helped him manage his conflicting nature. Putting down the thoughts of the day applies a filtering effect to conscious mind. We are forced to revisit our actions, justify them to ourselves, and decide if the outcomes met our ambitions. Duff Cooper’s strongly impulsive nature may have been tempered by the diary he kept so assiduously; a kind of mental laundry that allowed him to achieve balance and productivity.

Whatever motivation or benefits he found in keeping a diary, we are left with some golden lines of telegrammatic prose that serve to sketch a portrait of a charming and lively character. For example:

• of himself: “I make only one resolve for the coming year, i.e. to get rid of my reputation for drunkeness… the rumour is becoming a nuisance.”
• of an old flame: “she was the first unmarried woman – bar of course prostitutes – that I ever kissed.”
• of his future wife indulging in morphine: “I do hope she doesn’t become a morphineuse. It would spoil her looks.”
• of domestic staff: “my servant left me today to join the army. A mortal blow at my comfort. However Mother managed to procure me another.”
• of Prime Minister Asquith: “I thought him particularly unattractive… He is oblivious of young men, and lecherous of young women.”

Doubtless an amusing and enjoyable companion, he is perhaps not one that I would have wished to share too many confidences with. His diaries are ample testament to both these facts.

The Duff Cooper Diaries can be found on Amazon

Stylish, elegant, and well-dressed?

Style. Elegance. Dressing Well. These three terms are often used interchangeably when discussing clothes and fashion. This mistake propagates confusion and controversy, easily witnessed on the more popular internet discussion boards devoted to such matters.

I prefer to consider these three terms as independent – though occasionally intersecting – domains:

• Style is a clearly characterised and expressed mode of dressing.
• Elegance is expressing oneself according to accepted parameters of good taste, especially as espoused by those viewed as arbiters in such matters.
• Dressing Well involves choosing items that fit the wearer, are of good fabric, and are well-made.

When choosing how to dress, I would advocate actively deciding which domains you wish to target.

For instance, a junior professional in a conservative industry may prefer to initially focus on Dressing Well. Too strong a Style may attract undue attention, especially if the Style being chosen doesn’t overlap with Elegance. Equally, too much focus on Elegance at a junior level may be seen as affected rather than natural and so be looked down upon.

Those who are a little more advanced in their careers or years, and especially those who move in traditional circles, would be well-advised to aim for both Elegant and Well-Dressed status. However, many of those successful in these two areas will still lack Style. Their outfits are correct and the lines are pleasing to the conventional eye… and yet the person within cannot project themselves beyond this.

Still, for people with such lifestyles, this is a safer position to take than being Stylish and Well-Dressed without Elegance: when shunning traditional perceptions of classic good taste, one can be seen as dandy, bohemian and foppish.

On the other hand, such attributes may be very much in demand by those with lifestyles not dependent on conservative careers and who rather enjoy making the point that they can avoid such restrictions. The fashion industry in particular works hard to fill this niche. It is also where I would instinctively place my own sartorial ethos, despite using traditional tailored men’s clothing and not high fashion pieces in my attempts to achieve it.

Perhaps the most interesting group are those who are both stylish and elegant, but without being conventionally well-dressed. Finding such beauty in the generic, or even the superficially ugly, is a rare treat. It happens when a person’s underlying character and personality is such that they impress everyone they meet, despite appearances. It is a wonderful thing.

Unfortunately, a lot more people believe that they have this charismatic and magnetic personality than actually possess it. This “I’m special too” attitude is partially responsible for the large numbers of poorly dressed people in the world.

Finally, there exists a very small subset of stylish, elegant and well-dressed people. I struggle to think of real-life, well-known examples who have achieved this. It is perhaps rarer today than in the past, as it requires a longer-term approach to dressing, combined with unusual strength of character. Brummell, Chanel, Hepburn… these are the historical names that spring to mind. The reader may be able to suggest more!

I do not necessarily hold any one of these domains (or combinations of domains) as being better than the others. It is more important to actively decide which most appeal to your heart and soul, and dress accordingly. This is not a laissez-faire, “anything goes”, approach to dressing. On the contrary, once you set the target, you should aim high! But the target should be set by yourself, in accordance with your personality and life goals, and not by an outside agency.

Equality is not Fairness

 

The impact of women on male insurance premiums

The European Court of Justice ruled today that it is illegal for the insurance industry to use of gender to determine risk.

It contravenes the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) which requires that wherever possible, each gender should be treated equally in order to prevent discrimination. The result of this attempt to mandate equal rights has led to the bizarre situation of the Court being forced to rule that an industry which distributes the cost of insuring risk according to the eminently fair principle of riskier individuals bearing more of the cost, can no longer do so.

And I doubt that anyone really expects the outcome of this to be that men’s car insurance premiums will fall by more than a token amount. Instead, the more likely outcome is that women’s rates will increase instead, making the population as a whole a lot worse off. The impact on the wider insurance industry will affect pension annuities too: men generally get higher rates because statistically they are likely to die before women. Now both sexes will get something closer to the lower female rate.

This ruling is a beautifully accessible example of the difference between equality and fairness.

Treating everyone equally – assuming that just because they are all human beings, they all deserve the same treatment – is fundamentally unfair. People are not equal. Fairness and justice should be about equitable outcomes, not equal ones. Confusing these concepts leadings to well-meaning but ultimately self-defeating creations like the ECHR that do a disservice to the population they are meant to protect.

Individual variation resulting in inequality and differential outcomes is not something to be feared. Fairness demands that our society is freely able to distribute its bounty equitably – albeit unequally – between individuals.

Now, preventing discrimination is vitally important. But stopping discrimination is about preventing inequitable outcomes to individuals because of their group membership, not to prioritise the group membership over the individual, which is what the ECHR does.

The Court had no alternative but to rule the way it did, because the ECHR is deliberately phrased to emphasise the gender identity sub-group rather than considering humanity as comprising a mass of individuals who just happen to fall into various sub-groups.

Membership of a sub-group should never lead to inequitable outcomes; gender (or religion, race, sexuality, and so on) should never be used as a reason to inhibit rewards to a particular individual. But membership of a sub-group should never be used a reason to mandate equal outcomes with other sub-groups.

The way to avoid this is to bypass the importance of sub-group membership altogether: value the individual instead.

Related Articles

• This insurance ruling trivialises human rights | Stephen Booth (guardian.co.uk)
• EU court bans insurance sex discrimination (foxnews.com)
• Gender case hits insurance costs (bbc.co.uk)
• “UK insurers face “large-scale adjustments” over ECJ gender ruling” and related posts (insurancedaily.co.uk)

An eye on the main chance: Britain in a future global economy

Summarising recent efforts by Citigroup and HSBC to peer into the crystal ball of global economic development, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard ‘s Telegraph article makes fascinating reading.

The two reports agree with the conventional wisdom of BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries continuing their inexorable rise up the GDP league table, as traditional Western powers gradually slip down, but vary hugely in the degree of the change by 2050.

Citigroup projects a world heavily dominated by the East, with China and India together adding up to four times the GDP of the USA and Indonesia alone surpassing the UK, Germany, France and Italy combined. HSBC favours a more modest scenario of China taking the leader’s jersey from the USA, but then slipping back somewhat. The differing outcomes are largely due to variation in methodology between the two reports in how they account for demographic changes.

Living in the UK, I was impressed to see that even in Citigroup’s vision of Asian economic supremacy, we would be the sole EU country to retain a top 10 GDP ranking. This is mainly due to the UK’s population growth creating more workers to minimise the financial impact of an ageing population in a way that other EU countries cannot. Or as Evans-Pritchard cheekily puts it: “the UK faces a less disastrous ageing crisis than much of Europe… thanks to our unrivalled leadership in unwed teenage pregnancies.”

Of course, all modelling exercises are to some extent intellectual navel-gazing, especially when projecting so many decades into the future. Forecasting models get worse the more distant the outcome being scrutinised. Small errors in initial assumptions used are magnified, and microfissures in methodology become gaping crevasses.

But despite these caveats, it’s still fun to play in the sandbox.

The overall trend is one where the division between rich and poor will be less about which country you live in than about your access to capital and your skill-set. The middle-classes in currently advanced countries will face an inevitable squeeze in living standards, relative to the growing middle-classes of currently developing countries. World GDP will boom, but more so in the youthful large countries than the mature ageing economies. This will be politically difficult for the leaders of these older nations to manage. It may be good for the world as a whole, but individual countries will face a very different future with a different range of incomes than they’ve become accustomed to.

And the UK’s role in such a world?

For decades, the UK has worked hard to (often successfully) punch above its economic weight in world affairs. It’s done this through historic global diplomatic ties and through military expenditure. In the future, even if it slips to 10th in the economic league table, it will still gain position – in relative terms – compared its European neighbours.

By that time, the EU will have either sunk or swum its way through the current Euro debt crisis. It will be a looser alliance of free trading states with a more tightly integrated core; or it will be a closely-linked federated structure. And given events of the past month or so, it may well include elements of North Africa. The UK’s relatively thriving economy would give it a louder say than at present and that opens up intriguing possibilities. Would it be able to tilt the economic axis of the EU rightwards? Would it encourage transatlanticism? Or would it return to its historical roots and advocate a global approach to trade?

The relatively-thriving island of the UK could end up being surprisingly influential as a central broker in a world with disparate economic centres of gravity. A multipolar economic world (albeit with the relative heavyweights of the USA and China) represents an opportunity for vibrant middle-ranked countries to wield disproportionate influence that a world with just one economic axis does not. If the UK keeps an eye on the main chance, the future isn’t so depressing after all.

Related Articles

• Will ‘Chindia’ rule the world in 2050, or America after all? (telegraph.co.uk)
• Growth Forecasts Should Open Europe’s Eyes (online.wsj.com)
• London set for biggest boost in GDP growth says Citigroup (telegraph.co.uk)