Choosing Control

Bust of Emperor Augustus wearing the Corona Civica, on display in the Musei Capitolini (Rome). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The future really is almost here.

We now have flying cars, self-driving cars, and floating concept cars. Of course, the latter’s  technology would in my ideal world be used to create Back to the Future hoverboards just in time for 2015, but I digress…

The point is that our technological sophistication is extraordinary. Other examples would the powerful miniature computers we carry around (even if most people just browse Facebook, play Angry Birds, and make the occasional telephone call on them), the bionic exoskeleton that let a paralysed woman complete a marathon and motion capture technology that should make teleconferencing more useful. And as the sheer quantity of data exchanged across the internet increases, our ability to continuously access this data also advances by leaps and bounds.

Increasingly, the problem we face is one of control. The weakest link in all the above technologies are the human beings using them; we simply can’t crunch information as quickly as a computer. Our advantage lies in being able to prioritise data once we have a manageable amount to deal with. But we need help to winnow the initial mass down. This is why manipulating the flow of information is crucial. It explains the rise of search engines, automated control systems, and social networking sites. All of them personalise what information enters your conscious sphere; an invisible filter on the world.

The dilemma individuals face is how to retain a broad enough overview of the world to have a balanced perspective while not getting bogged down with excessive detail.

It’s impossible to ignore new technologies. Unless you are an avowed Luddite, you’re exposed to it daily. However, it is possible to prioritise. The world is tipping in favour of those who can correctly decide what is important. They can choose what data to exchange, adjusting their degree of privacy to accomodate this. And they can choose when to let automation run their lives and when to actively intervene to change course. These people will get the benefit of technological sophistication. Everyone else will be prone to becoming lost and homogenised within a morass of data and control systems.

What do you actually want to achieve, and why?

Life can be so fast-paced that people spend all their time running to stand still. Decide your goals. Then figure out what information you need to allow into life to facilitate them. For example, if you don’t need 100 different apps, don’t get them. It’s clutter; rubbish filling your mind and clouding it.

Do not be a human magpie attracted to the newest shiny object, and then instantly forgetting it.

Augustus Caesar’s personal motto of festina lente (“hurry slowly”) is more relevant than ever. A sense of control is not achieved by trying to do everything quickly, but by actively choosing when and how to act. Take the time to plan ahead and life simplifies. And technology returns to being a tool rather than a master.

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.

Soylent Green is nearly here… and it tastes sweet!

Cover of Soylent Green

I fear that this article will spoil the conclusion of Soylent Green for anyone who hasn’t seen the film, but the title is just too appropriate for this bit of news from The Telegraph:

Reports last week that researchers could be just six months away from producing the world’s first artificial meat, using thousands of stem cells bred in a laboratory, sent a wave of fascination around the world. Yet there is an even more ghoulish prospect ahead: the idea of eating artificial food made from humans.

This may sound like science fiction, yet a new technique for making gelatin from human DNA is attracting “increasing interest from research and industrial circles”, according to a new study by scientists from the Beijing University of Chemical Technology. The paper, published recently in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, revealed that successful experiments had been carried out in which human genes were inserted into a strain of yeast to “grow” large amounts of recombinant (genetically engineered) human gelatin.

Eating gelatin derived from human DNA, whether used in jelly babies or not, certainly makes me slightly queasy. But I suspect this development will be only the tip of a changing food iceberg. Food production is a key challenge facing the modern world. Climate change & population growth, together with socioeconomic demographic changes, are increasingly likely to cause a “food crunch” that may be even more paralysing to the global economy than the credit variety.

A typical Western diet is heavy in meat, processed foods and refined sugars. Production of all these foodstuffs is highly energy-inefficient and is resource-intensive to maintain. As a larger percentage of the world becomes wealthy, their diets will increasingly skew towards this paradigm. The cost of maintaining this diet will therefore continue to climb, requiring more technological intervention to sustain it. This is already happening in the form of new irrigation & hydroponic techniques and with genetically modified foods. In that context, growing human DNA derived gelatin in vats is an unsurprising development.

Where would you draw the line with what you’re prepared to eat, I wonder?

Old Media, New Media

Image via Wikipedia

Faithful readers will have noted a lack of fresh posts recently. For that, my apologies. I was in Rome for a short break, and was fairly busy either side of the trip. Rome is a charming place, made more so by the pleasant weather this time of year, and my brief sojourn in the Eternal City sparked several thoughts that will hopefully develop into future posts as they intellectually ripen over the fullness of time.

When I logged back onto my blog after this absence, I was pleased to see a good handful of comments on my last article, and astonished to see a massive – if transient – spike in page hits while I was away. This is the power of a national newspaper linking to me. By way of thanking, and returning the favour, to Ms Smithers and Ms Tims, the link was in the first line of their Guardian article. Their editor will, I’m sure, now call me personally to thank me for the reciprocal link, and the untold trillions of extra readers he has now gained as a result…

More seriously, it demonstrates that even in this era of “internet journalism” (or rather, widespread internet commentary) the brand power of national newspapers still holds remarkable sway. In the light of the reported impact of Twitter and the blogosphere on weighty matters such as the Arab Spring, and empty froth like the Giggs super-injunction, it’s worth noting that most people still retain residual loyalty to trusted brands and weight the value of the information received through that brand identity.

The sheer mass of new information and commentary that is generated by the internet on an hourly basis is too vast to be processed on an individual level. And any search engine’s algorithm is ultimately open to manipulation and the law of unintended consequences. Even if it filters information adequately by subject matter, it struggles to do so by quality. In this environment of an uncontrolled explosion of data, I suspect people actually find themselves more likely to stick with brands they know for their information.

It is analogous to going into the local supermarket and being faced with 30 brands of detergent. Theoretically, one could choose any of the 30 brands, but instead, we usually buy the same one each time. The broader the potential choice, the narrower the effective one. The sheer breadth of options acts as a psychological constraint, the so-called Paradox of Choice. Of course, there is a “sweet spot” of options (probably 3 or 4), where one could actually be bothered to try all the brands and see which one they prefer. But we’ve moved far beyond that point, both in terms of detergent and information sources.

The outcome, of course, is that people do not – and cannot – choose rationally between the options. They simply follow a brand, or a crowd. Branding provides an intellectual short-cut to choice and trust. This applies to detergent, to information… and to people.

The Hunch

Perhaps it’s the residual imagery of that infamous Hillary Clinton advert from the 2008 Primaries, or simply my memory of too many nights on call for work, but when the phone goes off in the middle of the night, I rarely think it’s good news.

Contrast that with the widely-reported response of David Cameron, British Prime Minister, to his middle-of-the-night phone call from Barack Obama: he “had a hunch” that the call was to tell him that Osama Bin Laden had been killed.

Obviously there are a number of potential explanations for this. For instance, he could have had some advance notice of the operation either from the USA, or from British Security Services who had noted the build-up to the American action. I think the former is unlikely given just how few people knew about the operation. The latter is perhaps more plausible, given the large number of British assets that are operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan these days. Or maybe he detected something in the tone of the voice of the staff connecting him to the US President that unconsciously let him realise that the tenor of the news in advance. Alternatively, Cameron might simply be unwittingly retrofitting his memory to fit the subsequent events, something that we are all prone to do without consciously realising the distortion.

But if the hunch was genuinely his initial reaction, it speaks volumes about the man and tells us something more profound than he may have realised when he said it. There must be a remarkably strong underlying sense of optimism running through your psyche for a man – especially one in his position – to be woken up in the middle of the night, and to suspect that good news is the cause.

Optimism at a psychological trait is poorly understood but appears to be multifactorial in its aetiolog: it arises from a combination of heritable factors and learned behaviours. It is associated with better physical and psychogical health; optimists tend to suffer less mental distress from negative events. Taken to an extreme, it can become unrealistically Panglossian, but on a more proportionate level it certainly seems helpful to life.

Regardless of your voting preferences, knowing whether a politician is optimistic or not is crucial to how they will act when in office as politics is discipline involving a series of wicked problems. An optimist will approach those decisions differently to a pessimist. It is easy to be cynical about, say, Cameron’s Big Society concept, but if he really is as optimistic as the quote suggests, then it is likely to be a genuine belief of his rather than a mere political convenience. It also impacts on the austerity programme the government is undertaking to cut the deficit; an optimist would tend to want to trust research supporting the ability of the private sector to at least partially offset public spending cuts, and give less weight to the contrary position, whereas a pessimist would be unlikely to be as willing to believe. A similar argument can be made to a willingness to reform large organisations such as the NHS.

Optimism doesn’t just colour the decision itself, it can also affect the eventual outcome. I’ve already noted that optimists tend to suffer less mental distress when faced with negative situations. This can lead them to be more willing to make changes that translate the negative into the positive (adversity into success). There is also research to suggest that those suffering from clinical depression actually view the world in a hyper-realistic fashion: their pessimism lets them judge odds more accurately than optimists or even average non-depressed people would, but also demotivates them from making changes to then actively skew the odds back into their favour.

Right decisions are rarely obvious before they are taken, in politics or more generally in life. Understand how you tend to approach decision-making, and so learn to better trust your decisions.

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.

The Devil at the Bar in the 5* Hotel

The Devil, from the Codex Gigas, by Herman the Recluse

I found myself in a busy hotel, the typical four to five star business-friendly tower block that can be found in any city of the world. The decor was all cheap material with inappropriately expensive finish. Designed to flatter guests despite its abbreviated lifespan that permitted cost-effective frequent refurbishment to changing tastes.

I knew I was coming to the end of my stay, but had one more meeting to attend, in the hotel’s restaurant. Present was a woman in typical relaxed business dress. She told me I had to choose what happened next: would I go to Heaven or to Hell?

I turned sideways to notice the Devil in human form, wearing suit sans tie, sitting casually at the bar, sipping a cocktail and smiling at me.

I sat silently, pondering my choice.

The woman was friendly. She told me to go for a swim in the hotel’s pool before making my decision; that there was no rush. I got up in a trance, and wandered the corridors, looking for the entrance to the pool. Every time I got close, it transpired that I had taken a wrong turn. I returned to the hotel lobby and sat down to think.

The woman returned and sat beside me. I told her that the two options were irrelevant. Whichever I chose, I would still be free to make further choices, which would then let me escape either Heaven or Hell, and return to Earth. But if I didn’t make a choice, I would be trapped in the hotel forever, waiting to decide, still looking for the pool. She smiled and I woke up, feeling surprisingly rested and refreshed.

The dream is easily understood in the context of my last post concerning the Hermetica, though it is interesting that I do not feel that I am facing a choice currently. Perhaps because I already consciously agree with the answer I gave in the dream.

Certainly, I prefer my home to that hotel.

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.