Predicting the Future II: What the 2012 Boat Race tells us about the future role of Government

In the Oxford & Cambridge Boat Race, crews must pass through the centre arch of Barnes Bridge. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Anyone who watched the tumultuous 2012 Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race would be forgiven for viewing my last post on Predicting the Future with a degree of skepticism. Who could have predicted the trifecta of unusual events: a lone swimmer disrupting the event, a broken oar within a few strokes of a controversial restart, and the collapse of one of Oxford’s rowers after their battered boat crossed the finishing line in an undeserved second place?

Surely our hypothetical reader would be well-justified in arguing that this sequence of events underlines a chaotic and inherently unpredictable model of reality?

My response is that in fact, it supports the essential thesis of my last entry: that complexity paradoxically reduces unpredictability by reducing the scope for an individual’s directed action to influence larger scale societal events. The Boat Race, like any sporting event, is a very simplified reduction of reality. It imposes strict and arbitrary rules on the flow of events and therefore creates a simplicity that is altogether lacking in real life. It is for this reason that sports are enjoyable to participate in or watch. They offer a glimpse into a simpler time, where one man – or small group of men with common purpose – could change their fate simply through concerted effort. Of course, as in those simpler times, the trajectory of those men’s lives in sport is much more prone to events; a lone swimmer can disrupt a race between two boats on a narrow stretch of the Thames, but cannot so easily simultaneously disrupt all global shipping routes.

Complexity and globalisation create systems so fundamental to society that they have immense redundancy. Competition between providers of these systems ensures this. Where the systems are narrowest – simplest – vulnerability is highest. Returning to the example of global shipping, blowing up the Suez Canal would have significant impact and it is possible to construct a hypothetical scenerio where this could be done by relatively few people. Staying in the Middle East, the global diplomatic attention focused on Iran is in part down to their ability to (transiently) disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

If complexity is an ally of predictability through creating redundant systems, this creates significant implications for good government. The historical guiding principle behind good government is that it should manage events. By anticipating and managing global events to national advantage, it is supposed to create conditions allowing its citizens to thrive. I would suggest that as the world becomes more complex, it should become increasingly easy for governments to predict the long-term future regardless of short-term fluctuations. For instance, globalisation is making China increasingly corporatist (and thus eventually capitalist) by forcing it to invest the large capital flows that its exporting creates. It is only when a country is isolated from the impact of global events that its behaviour becomes more unpredictable: North Korea being a prime example of this.

The implications of this for the (lack of) efficacy of sanctions are interesting, suggesting that the best way to manage countries like Iran would be to drown them in global capital and make it impossible for them to act independently as they’d be slitting their own throats. This theory is not dissimilar to MAD – the Mutually Assured Destruction of the Cold War – except that the embedding of a nation in the interdependent system is done through chains of gold rather than fear.

A counter-argument would be to highlight the financial crisis of the past few years; surely that proved beyond doubt that complexity creates more risk, not less? Certainly, the complexity of the collateralised debt market created an unexpected outcome. However, the underlying trend is little changed. Individual people (and countries) have been ruined, but the overall trajectory towards an increasingly globalised world has not budged. If anything, it has been strengthened by forcing countries like China to acknowledge their increasing responsibilities in that world of globalised capital, forcing them to act in ways that support the system. The beauty is this increasing enmeshment is done voluntarily, out of national self-interest. Would we have seen China allowing the yuan to appreciate to the extent it has in the past year without the financial crisis causing them to import inflation due to US quantitative easing programmes? I think not.

If it is becoming increasingly impossible for national governments to significantly make long-term differences to a nation’s path because of the effects of increasing complexity, what should a government actually do?

We are already seeing the effects: governments are becoming more like advertisers than managers. The role of government is to sell an image of the nation to its citizens, sufficient to make them content to carry on, almost regardless of what actually happens. Of course, this has always been true to some extent. But it’s not surprising that the nature of politics has accelerated in this direction over the past 20-30 years as it is over this period that the rate of globalisation has accelerated due to increasing technological, logistical and financial sophistication.

For those unhappy with the government-as-advertiser model, there is an alternative. Government can act as national life coach instead. It can work to reframe and reconceive reality in a way that is palatable for most of its citizens and encourages them to adopt a positive attitude to maintaining a role within the system. In some ways, this is little more than a minor difference to the advertiser model, but it does at least encourage a focus on broader measures of contentedness. This is the reason we see increased attention being given by governments to concepts like national happiness indices. They are ways to measure and influence the debate around national contendedness without actually having to make significant long-term differences in outcomes. Remember, under this model the government is life coach to the nation NOT to individual citizens within it, and the best interests of the nation do not always coincide with the best interests of all its citizens.

For the individual, the lesson from the impact of complexity remains similar. If you cannot escape the complexity, it will be easier to manage your attitude to events rather to manage the events themselves. But if you can work to reduce complexity in your life, you can diminish the impact of wider events on you personally, and increase your ability to manage your personal future. It’s becoming increasingly hard for countries to do this, but individuals – for now – still have far more scope to act.

Predicting the Future: Concepts and Problems

Dr Isaac Asimov, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing slightly right, 1965 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Toss a coin into the air. What are the chances it lands heads-up?

The conventional answer is 1 in 2.

The convention is wrong.

The conventional answer simply reflects what we can easily calculate: that if the coin is perfectly balanced, and there are no other environmental factors affecting the toss, then if you toss it a very large number times, the average chance of it landing heads-up will be once in every two tosses. An equivalent way to calculate this is to take a very large number of identical, balanced coins and toss each once: half would land heads-up.

However, it is exceptionally difficult to calculate the actual outcome of a single coin toss with any degree of accuracy. Certainly, it is a virtual impossibility before the coin is in the air and only slightly more feasible (at least theoretically) once the coin is in motion. That theoretical feasibility would likely involve cameras/sensors able to track the movement of the coin in the air, and a sufficiently fast computer simulation of the physics involved to be able to project an outcome an instant before the coin lands.

What does this little thought experiment tell us about probability, and about making predictions?

1. Tossing a single coin thousands of times yields equivalent predictive power to tossing thousands of coins simultaneously, assuming the coins in the second experiment are sufficiently similar (homogenous) to not bias the results.
2. Even once a suitably mathematically rigorous model is developed to predict the average behaviour of an entity (or of a sufficiently homogenous population), predicting what actually happens becomes harder and more complicated the narrower the timeframe and the smaller the unit being observed.

While it may seem that I am belabouring very simple mathematical & scientific principles, these two points are highly counter-intuitive to most attempts we make to predict human behaviour. The internal model of people that we tend to adopt is that individual members of society (including ourselves) are unique, and that extensive study of their singular natures is required to predict how they might act. Even then, we assume that our predictions will only hold in the short-term where fewer variables have time to interfere. An expression of what happens in the mind when these incorrect beliefs coalesce is the vanity of the fundamental attribution error, wherein our own motives seem rational & pure and those of others irrational & base.

In fact, people are both simpler and more similar than we like to believe. The reason for this is that we apply conscious thought to our actions in a much more limited fashion than is generally accepted. This should not be controversial: just try remembering the exact details of your last commute to work, and then tell me you are were acting in a fully conscious manner at the time! And yet, most people rail against such an interpretation of their lives.

It does however have advantages. Unconscious actions tend to be more automatic, and therefore more predictable, than conscious ones. Give people time and opportunity to actively choose a course of action, and they can react in surprising ways. But keep them moving on a path that requires relatively less choice, and their potential range of action diminishes. This theory of behaviour becomes extremely useful when thinking about how large groups of people may act. The complexity of societal structure itself is an exceptionally good narcotic agent on the conscious mind: it funnels and moulds our actions in a deep manner, subtly constraining our choices at every step while still providing the illusion of choice.

The beauty of this effect is that it leads to a surprising conclusion: societies – and the people within them – are MORE predictable the larger and more complex they are. Simple small societies bring us closer to the level of a free individual, and so create more opportunity for a single rationally-thinking person to make changes. Large, intertwined societies tend to blur the effect of a single person, reducing the noise affecting the signal indicating the direction of travel of the society.

Irrationality thus becomes an asset to predictability, and rationality a liability. Situations are harder – not easier – to predict when too many people in a group actively attempt to cognitively reason out their next course of action. By constrast, irrationality tends to be the product of the unconscious and automatic mind, and that is much more straightforward to anticipate. The irrational action may or may not actually be helpful in achieving the group’s aim, but it is almost certainly more predictable. Any student of the human mind will confirm this pattern, whether they work as psychiatrist, psychologist, politician, salesperson, negotiator or diplomat.

Of course, I do accept that if absolutely everyone acted rationally all the time, society would be perfectly predictable. This is why the behaviour of an algorithmic computer is theoretically predictable. The difficulty is where both rationality and irrationality co-exist i.e. the human context. Here, it is the presence of rationality that creates a more disruptive effect on predictive power than irrationality. The larger and more complex the society, the less impact a small amount of rationality can have. Trends, conventions and accepted boundaries, however arbitrary, are more effective constraints of behaviour than rational argument ever can be.

Psychohistory is the fictional science created by Isaac Asimov for his Foundation series, which postulates a mathematical predictive model of society. Today, the concept is being explored (albeit in rudimentary fashion compared to Asimov’s fantastical version) through the work of a range of behavioural modellers in many disciplines, though few would apply the term psychohistory to what they do or indeed even realise that their work may in future apply to such a field. The few who consciously strive towards such a distant grand ambition have renamed themselves students of Cliodynamics. Psychohistory as a term survives instead as the study of historical and sociological trends through the lens of psychodynamic principles.

The fictional science of psychohistory, or modern cliodynamics, faces massive practical challenges. Fortunately, two of them are being gradually solved simply by the passage of time: firstly, our ability to computer simulate complex models grows exponentially with increases in processing power; and secondly, our societies become ever more complex and intertwined, limiting the impact of disruptive, rational, behaviour.

While the idea of a fully developed psychohistory of society may induce feelings of anomie or nihilism, it should be emphasised that it does not negate the individual. Individuals will still exist, exercising both rational and irrational thought just as they always have. And they’ll still have all the same illusions around choice and freedom that they always have. It would be exceptionally hard to eradicate such a useful evolutionary trait. Just like today, each of us will still prefer to believe we can control the world, while minimising the degree to which it influences us. And just like today, it will be those with a strong sense of their own identity who will be most able to adopt quiet & discreet lives where such influence is indeed minimised.

Changing Opinions

Sitting on the Fence (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

How often do you change your mind about something?

I don’t mean having difficulty deciding something and bouncing between a couple of options while doing so. I mean, once you’ve made you mind up, how often do you really change it?

If you’re like most people, the answer is, “not often”. Most people try to make big decisions in a moderately rational way. The bigger the decision, the more they try to apply logic to solve it. Small decisions like whether to order a latte or americano today, tend to be left to the more primitive parts of our brain. For the big issues, though, we like to go through a vaguely scientific process of asking a question, acquiring relevant information, balancing the information against preferred outcomes, and deciding what to do. Trouble is, most big issues are big because they’re difficult to solve logically, which means we end up having to make a final “gut instinct” judgement call in order to finally decide our opinion about the problem facing us. We end up using a heuristic rather than purely algorithmic approach; I’ve discussed such Wicked Problems before.

Heuristic problem-solving is inherently fraught with uncertainty; it’s based on a pattern-recognition approach, the validity of which varies according to the mind of the person applying the heuristic filter. Put simply, the wiser the person, the more likely they are to reach a correct result. But if the problem is truly wicked, then one can never test the result, and so we can never definitively prove who is wisest.

There are many proxy markers for wisdom, including reported or perceived happiness, wealth, position and/or influence in the eyes of others, and how well words stand the test of time. None of these is entirely satisfactory, for self-evident reasons, which means that definining wisdom itself ultimately becomes a matter of consensus and opinion. This is clearly troubling if one is concerned about creating an objective yardstick by which to measure human progress.

However, it is empowering if you are more concerned about making changes that chime in with your own personal opinion. Firstly, it allows you to define the frame of reference for success and failure. Secondly, it promotes uncertainty in other people’s decision-making, creating a space for you to influence their judgement. And lastly – if you are interested in making large-scale rather than personal changes – it provides you with a long-term tool by which to modify the broader cultural perception of what is ethically correct. As a culture, we have even given a name to this last process: Politics.

Politics is the art of persuading a sufficiently large number of people that your opinions are culturally correct. This actually applies as much to a tyranny as it does to the kinds of limited/representative democracies most readers will live in. It’s just that the violence and speed of the mechanisms of changing government that varies: revolution in the former; elections in the latter. But more than this, far-sighted politicians also understand that the optimal way of persuading people of their rightness is to modify the cultural mindset within which the choice is made. Alter the frame of reference, and you can ensure a specific answer will always emerge. This is also something tyrannies and democracies share, with only superficial differences between the two: tyrannies tend to use coercive force and single-party elections; democracies use advertising and other softer propaganda like manipulating the flow of information.

All the above is no more than I would expect an average teenager to grasp, and I actually think many do (at least on an unconscious level), even if the usual response is anomic cynicism rather than recognising the empowering potential. The more thoughtful will recognise another implication, however: even quite severe unpopularity in the short-term is irrelevant, provided you can sufficiently alter the mindset of a large enough group of people to influence their long-term cultural mindset in your favour to protect your long-term survival. This applies to individual lives as much as it does to organisations and to political parties.

Coming full circle to the start of this post, changing someone’s mind is very difficult in the short-term. Instead, you have to alter the way they make decisions. The more time you have to do this, the easier it becomes. This is partly what accounts for incumbency effect in politics: it’s harder to dislodge a known politician from a post than if two unknowns are fighting for the same position. It’s not usually that incumbents have really proven anything about whether they’re right or not; it’s just that they’ve become part of the mental furniture of voters. Even if they’re unpopular in some respects, the incumbent still usually retains a higher chance of retaining power than if they didn’t have that mindshare of reality. In a US Election year, it’s worth noting that this is a big part of the reason that most US Presidents tend to get re-elected for a second term, even if at mid-term it seems like they’re unpopular. UK politics frequently operates similarly: being in government allows you to craft the narrative in a much deeper way than being in opposition, and you can see it in many of the Budget 2012 changes being announced today (esp. personal tax statements, reducing reliefs & benefits and increasing personal allowances), despite the potential for some other changes to be unpopular in the short term. And even when the longer-term cycle of change occurs, political parties never reverse even a majority of changes imposed by their predecessors, no matter how vehemently they may have opposed them at time of their introduction.

Reality is like chewing gum: sticky but malleable.

The ultimate expression of this thesis of persuasion is that tactics should always be secondary to strategy, and that strategy should be guided by clear long-term insightful aims. Only that will allow you to gradually work on altering the perception of enough people for them to reach what you would consider correct decisions. Logic and argument is a poor convincer of anyone except a computer. Persuasion through modifying the frame of reference of the argument works much better on human beings. Next time you disagree with someone, or need to negotiate with them, remember these principles rather than attempting to argue with them. You won’t convince them today, but you might just change their mind tomorrow.

Walkers Crisps expose the elusive nature of reality

UK readers have probably seen this advert; International readers may need reminding that our crisps are your potato chips. Regardless of where you are in the world, consider what Walkers Crisps are demonstrating with their latest advertising campaign. They have created three new flavours, none of which is instantly recognisable as the food upon which it is ostensibly based. They then exult in this flavour opacity by selling them “blind”, and asking eaters to guess what the flavours are, in return for a cash prize.

The success of this campaign depends on any one – or a combination of – the following axioms being true:

• Walkers are unable to accurately recreate complex food flavours in crisp format
• Crisp flavours are so divorced from real food flavours that devoid of an active packaging lable nudge, they cannot be recognised as such
• People are hopeless at actively identifying any flavour, relying heavily on explicit prompts in any setting
• Actual flavour doesn’t matter; only the idea of the flavour matters
• (we can take it as read that a somewhat bemused elderly lady speaking slowly to camera is also a necessary but not sufficient factor to crisp marketing success…)

My suspicion is that all the above are true to some extent, but it’s the point about the Idea mattering more than the Actual, that is the most interesting.

Seekers of truth have long debated whether there is a reality separate from human perception. Walkers’ contest demonstrates the impossibility of answering this question. Each entrant submits an answer based on their own perceptions. Walkers determines who is correct by reference to their food scientists’ design brief. But if a majority of people do not identify the flavour as the one Walkers meant their crisps to taste of, is it the taster or Walkers that is wrong?

The extreme Idealist position would be that neither camp is wrong, but rather that there isn’t such a thing as an objectively identifiable food flavour, only a consensus agreement between a large enough mass of people. This circular logic, of course, is what accounts for the longstanding joke that any previously unencountered food “tastes like chicken” (chicken having a sufficiently broad flavour so as to cover a multitude of new tastes). This dependence on perception & cozy consensus also underpins the problem outlined recently at the Oxford Wine Blog, discussing how to fairly rate wines.

What is true in the realm of food & drink applies equally in all fields of knowledge. For instance, there is much debate about the new psychiatric diagnoses being created by the upcoming DSM-V, with the concern (shared by myself) that it will encourage an over-medicalisation of the normal human condition. DSM-V loosens the diagnostic criteria for many existing disorders, and creates fresh ones too. This is a clear boon to the pharmaceutical industry (who will be able to sell into a whole new set of niches), to some blinkered professionals (who believe in their ability to heal everyone, if only they had more power to do so), and to those individuals seeking (consciously or unconsciously) to divest themself of responsibility for their situation and to adopt a sick role where they require treatment instead. Deciding where illness ends and normality begins has always been difficult, and in large part depends on consensus, something recently discussed at the start of a friend’s TEDx talk. The future seems murkier still.

There is a path forward. As individuals, we can try to acknowledge the gossamer-thin nature of reality. The lack of an objectively identifiable truth does not negate the emotional meaning of a subjective one. But crucially, neither does it elevate the subjective into the position of unquestionable fact simply because objectivity is difficult to ensure. Meaning is possible alongside such tolerance, even when Truth is not achievable. And with meaning, comes the potential for happiness.

In other words, Walkers crisps may not have a flavour all can agree upon, but we can still decide whether we like them or not.

Archetypes, Stereotypes, and the Absence of Knowledge

Image via Wikipedia

All knowledge is ultimately self-referential, imbued with only such meaning as we choose to give it.

The archetype is a difficult idea to grasp within Jungian psychology. Archetypes are thought to exist within our psyche, being innately derived. Jung suggested that their existence is due to our connection with the collective unconscious, a broad sharing of the unconscious mind across humanity and across the aeons. While this can have spiritual overtones – and to Jung it likely did – it can also be interpreted using a less spiritual framework. Archetypes can be considered as a set of psychological memes passed down socioculturally through the generations, perhaps reinforced genetically by some basic similarities between all humans in terms of how our brains are neuroanatomically formed.

Archetypes include our Self – the person we both are and aim to be; the Shadow – those traits that lie hidden within ourselves, and often from ourselves; and the Anima/Animus – the part of our psyche that allows us to understand and communicate with the opposite sex. It’s also perhaps possible to consider our Persona – the person we project to others – as a form of archetype, although I consider it a simpler more superficial entity than the others mentioned.

When these archetypes come into contact with the world, a number of consistent mythic symbols are created to understand them. They have been referred to as symbols, motifs or archetypes-as-such. I like to think of them as Stereotypes. Stereotyping is often thought of as a bad thing these days, but in truth, the Stereotype has an important beneficial function. They are widely-held, over-simplified views but that also makes them very useful as a short-cut to understanding the world. Stereotypical forms of archetypes include the mythological motifs of the hero, the wise old man, the earth mother, and so on.

As we perceive the world around us, we do not process every situation as being fresh data. Consider: colours are not real; colour is a perception, or construct, based on the wavelength of photons hitting our retinas. Similarly, what we think of other people are also not actually real people; they are constructs based on the data we receive from those entities. We each possess a personalised understanding of who other people are, and what they mean. There is no objective reference yardstick by which to measure them. We interpret their existence both consciously through reason, and unconsciously through archetypes and stereotypes.

A careful reader might now suggest that if conscious thought and reason can allow interpretation, then this potentially provides a scientific approach to understanding. This is only true if reason itself is independent of archetypal influence. As our rules of reason are human constructs, we cannot be entirely certain that this is so. Munchhausen’s Trilemma (also known as Agrippa’s Trilemma) suggests that any line of reasoning can eventually be boiled down to one of three arguments: circular, regressive and axiomatic. Circular arguments depend on the theory and proof supporting each other, regressive arguments become a never-ending series of proofs, and axiomatic arguments are based on an assumption of correctness.

This is a difficult proposal to accept, but consider a child asking why the sky is blue. You could argue that the sky is blue because we have defined the colour we perceive it to be as blue: a circular argument that ends the debate but does not fundamentally answer the question. You could humour the child by discussing wavelengths of photons and the energy they carry, the effect that energy has on the retina, transduction mechanisms, post-processing of the transducted stimuli into perceptions, psychological constructs of perception, the concept of a construct, the meaning of a concept, and so on, without ever really getting to a final irrefutable proof. This regressive approach allows for a vast expansion of knowledge, but at some point you have to limit your field of study, or be trapped in a never-ending sequence of “but why?”s. Finally, the poor parent of our inquisitive child may simply snap, and say “it just is”: a mere axiomatic assertion of truth.

You can choose to accept any one of the three horns of trilemma and still carry out much productive work, but that does not answer the trilemma’s problem.

Jung’s archetypes and the stereotypes that result from them could be conceived of as humanity’s practical solution to the trilemma. They give us a framework for understanding ourselves, each other, and the ideas and concepts we create, without us ending up in a never-ending morass of “unknowability”. Of course, archetypal theory is in itself just as trapped by the dilemma as is any other idea (and indeed, is the trilemma itself, if you want to give yourself a headache). But it does allow us to think about who we are in a practical way, and consider who we might become.

Buddhists have the concept of sunyata or “emptiness”, which seems to my limited understanding of the term to be a similar concept. It suggests a middle way between the nihilism and anomie of nothing being provably real and the illogicallity of considering what we think of as real being necessarily true. It hints at a way of finding meaning in the emptiness by embracing it and finding oneself in that void. Jung might call that individuation, the ultimate manifestation of one’s potential self.

All knowledge is ultimately self-referential, imbued with only such meaning as we choose to give it. And what a wonderful opportunity and privilege of our humanity that is.

The Modern-Day Monk

It is not surprising that several guests at Friday’s Royal Wedding were anonymously quoted as “feeling jaded” yesterday. Anticipation of great events is commonly followed by a drained numbness, even if the event meets elevated expectations. Life thus passes by as a series of interspersed highs and, if not lows, mediocre neutrals. Is this the sum total of the human experience?

Man has historically found three ways to neutralise this nihilistic perspective: fame, religion and propagation.

Fame, with its associated glamour, can be fleeting or it can last a lifetime. Occasionally it outlasts its originating source and is considered worthy – or notorious – enough to be important to historical and cultural record. Whether transient or semi-permanent, its nourishment to the famous person is thin when weighed against the permanence of death. It can sustain the mind in the short-term, but is ultimately lacking.

To combat this failure of Temporal Power to assuage anomie, religion developed to offer believers escape from death, whether through reincarnation or heaven. Such Spiritual Might remains a comfort to many, channelling and guiding human emotion into soothingly predictable paths. Like Temporal Power, it offers individuals a larger sense of self that is part of a grander existence than Hobbes’ description of Man’s life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.

But for many, meaningful fame is impossible (the Warhol-esque 15 minutes of reality TV or social networking hardly counts) and religious faith escapes them, or is actively shunned. Frequently, their final refuge is propagation and it is a rare parent indeed that does not think of their children as the best thing they ever did.

Creating the next generation is certainly a valuable role; I would not want to see the human species wiped out! But does it truly offer a solution to the impermanence of man? I suggest not; the real essence of even the best of parents is lost from collective memory within at most four generations. As long as the parent does not think too deeply about this inevitable historical dissipation, Familial Legacy can substitute for either Temporal Power or Spiritual Might and stave off despair at the prospect of death.

What if none of the above are to the liking of the individual, if all are thought to fail the essential test of overcoming fear of death and giving life meaning, what then?

Enter the Modern-Day Monk.

The archetype of the man who seeks spiritual enlightenment through disengagement from the world is an ancient one. We see echoes of his presence in all the major world religions, mythologies and philosophies. Traditionally, the Monk has sought physical separation from the world; either to wander alone or in the company of select fellow travellers on a similar journey. He has used asceticism as a tool to aid enlightenment. Asceticism encourages the abandonment of sensual pleasure and material wealth, deeming these to be distractions from personal growth.

The Modern-Day Monk follows a different path to individuation. It is not physical abandonment of the world that is important, but intellectual detachment. This detachment from the value systems of others (the Temporal, Spiritual and Familial spheres) nonetheless permits material and emotional engagement with the world. He is able to weigh up and measure situations and people rapidly, allowing only positive effects through to his inner self. He comes across to others as tolerant and moderate, as he has no need to be otherwise. He enjoys the world, but does not let the world rule his inner heart. And in the face of new challenges, he has an inner core of willpower – a clear sense of self – to neutralise against torment.

The more philosophically (or religiously) minded will have already identified the characteristics outlined in the preceding four sentence as the Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude respectively. The virtues are named Cardinal for being the hinge (L. cardo) upon which rests the door of life. It is not the door to a physical retreat from the world as the first step to an afterlife. It is a system to support and enhance our human desire to be part of the world, while not being ruled by it.

The Modern-Day Monk lives well, as well as wisely.

White Hair

Don’t dye it, don’t pull it out.

Let it grow all over your head.

No medicine can stop the whiteness;

the blackness won’t last the fall.

Lay your head on a quiet pillow; hear the cicadas.

Idly incline it to watch the waters flow.

The reason we can’t rise to the broader view of life

is because, White Hair, you grieve us so.

- Xin Qiji, 864-937, as translated in The Clouds Should Know Me By Now

The immortal and transcendent is lost to us because we tend to worry so much about our mortal and temporal problems. Learning to accept our mortality and its limits paradoxically frees us from those constraints. Or at least, from the emotional impact of those constraints.

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.

Suicide in Japan

Japan has an unusually difficult to interpret culture, at least to Western eyes. Its centuries of self-imposed isolation from the world under the Sakoku foreign policy of the Tokugawa Shogunate during the Edo period lent it a unique degree of insularity.

That this policy was only terminated under the duress of gunboat diplomacy when Commodore Perry sailed his “black ships” into Yokohoma Bay perhaps explains the sense of anxious inferiority that drove the country into the imperialism and breakneck economic development of the Meiji Restoration, and the militarism and nationalism underpinning the run-up to WWII.

The contrast between its remarkable rebound in the post-war years and the prolonged deflationary spiral of economic stagnation since the bursting of its property bubble in 1991 also tends to perplex outsiders.

I was fortunate enough to spend a couple of months working and studying in Japan many years ago, but cannot say I was able to do more than barely scratch the surface of this complex culture. Gaijin are always treated politely, respectfully, and with generous hospitality, but one was often not entirely certain of underlying attitude, and even sometimes definitely aware of the use of a carefully-applied mask of civility in order to maintain a sense of separation.

The complexity and insularity of their culture means that social norms within Japan can vary quite significantly from the rest of the world, and these norms are more likely to be maintained despite changing times. A striking example is the Japanese attitude to suicide. The esteem in which ritual suicide (seppuku) was held as an honourable solution to otherwise an unbearable situation is certainly not unique to Japanese culture. Similar deliberate ending of life to restore societal balance can be found in a number of cultures:  the falling on swords of classical Rome, and the Jauhur and Sati of Mughal India spring instantly to mind, and there are isolated individual examples in many other societies too. Still, the cultural background to suicide in Japan perhaps goes some way to explaining its persistently high rate.

Japan, by the most conservative estimate, has about 26 suicides per 100,000 population. The USA has 11, and the UK just 9. And with the impact of the 2008 financial crisis only adding to the longer-term economic malaise, the cost of those suicides on economic stability is climbing too, with estimates of 2.7 trillion yen (well over £20 billion) of lost output and costs due to suicide last year. Some of the associated costs are poignant in the extreme, and the spectre of a downward spiral of economic contraction and climbing suicide rates is an even more tragic thought than the deflationary spiral they’ve been trapped in for so long. The government is now trying to reduce the rate, but cultural attitudes are notoriously hard to shift.

The illustration is a cropped portion of Tatsumi Shimura’s Hanafubuki (Falling Cherry Blossom). The transient but beautiful cherry blossom season is metaphorically associated in Japan with the ephemeral nature of life itself. During the war, cherry blossoms were painted on kamikaze suicide mission planes; pilots sometimes even took cherry tree branches into the cockpit.

Sakura festivals are still held to celebrate the onset of the annual cherry blossom season, and I was fortunate enough to be able to time my own visit to Japan to coincide with the season. The TV news tracks the progress of the season as it gradually moves northwards through the country, and my itinerary let me celebrate the onset of the season twice, some weeks apart, in disparate parts of the country. Life and cherry blossom are indeed ephemeral but that’s no reason not to arrange them to your liking while you can.

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