Thoughts and Comments

This page of the Blog will be devoted to random thoughts, and comments on events and issues ranging as widely as my mind...

19/06/12: The following essay was borne from too much listening to the news in the last few days - hope you find it thought provoking!

The Myth of the Individual

How much of the money that we gain over our lifetimes have we gained through our own efforts?  When we complain about the government taking our money in taxes we implicitly suggest that pretty much all we earn is rightfully ours.  In effect, we talk as if the government is stealing from us.  When we buy luxury items we do not feel guilty that others have very little, because we know that we have earned what we have, and have a right to use it how we will.  We may also feel that many poorer people have only themselves to blame: if we are individually responsible for our success, they must be individually responsible for their failure.

The arguments above take each of us to a point where we often slip headlong into two opposing camps of opinion.  Those on the left of the political spectrum insist that societal and economic factors determine the success or failure of individuals.  Those that fail therefore require help and encouragement; we cannot hold the individual responsible.  On the right, these ideas are seen as morally corrosive, producing feckless individuals who are not willing to help themselves, feel they have a right to external help, and sometimes actively make their own position worse in order to attract that help.

Can we avoid slipping into one of the two rather extreme camps described above? One way to find a more balanced approach is to consider the natural world.  After all, it is the concept of ‘survival of the fittest’ that gives us the idea that we are each locked into a struggle with other, entirely separate, individuals.   For a long time we studied the natural world by looking at individual species and their ecology, and our understanding of whole systems was simply an aggregation of those individual stories.  But as we have learnt more, the importance of inter- and intra-specific interactions has become increasingly obvious; we study ecosystems and landscapes, discuss webs of inter-related behaviour.

We have come to realise that the actions of one species, or one group of species, can have a massive effect on the behaviour and survival of others.  These effects occur, not just through predation, parasitism or mutualism, but just through the co-existence of different organisms.  Species and individuals are connected by complex feedback loops – one action can cause another, and through a chain of consequences make a repeat of the first action more (or less) likely.

It does not make sense to say that gene A or B is beneficial (in terms of increasing the survival and reproductive success of an individual) without reference to the environment in which such genes act.  A trait which is beneficial where one set of species and conditions interact may be actively harmful under different circumstances.  And so for any individual animal it is not just its own capabilities and choices that are important.  It is the capability and choices of the other individuals (of all types of species) that share (or have an impact on) its environment.

It would obviously be foolish to consider a sleek, healthy tiger as entirely the product of its own efforts.  It may have caught its own food, protected its own territory and avoided disease and injury.  But if there was no prey to catch, if another species carried a disease it could contract, if its forest habitat were altered by external events, that same tiger could be in a dreadful state.  It might even be that the aggressiveness that made it a good and successful hunter actually led, in changed conditions, to its downfall.

On one hand, the case of the tiger fits the left wing point of view outlined above – failure is not necessarily the tiger’s own fault.  But it also fits with the right wing point of view – the tiger goes out and makes the best of what it has, however hard the conditions.  We can be sure (because it has no safety net or conscious choice) that it will always make an effort.  Its failure will not be due to malingering.  And so its failure does not carry a moral stigma.  At the same time, it should not be helped, because that failure is natural; to keep the species strong selection must be allowed to weed out failure.

Let us consider the example of the tiger, substituting a person for the tiger.  I imagine that most people would agree that the person being considered, (having no safety net to fall back on) is likely to be trying her best to do well.  Her success or failure is therefore not the result of variation in effort.  It must instead be due to a mixture of innate ability and the nature of the external environment in which she acts.

As few would allow human beings to die in order to allow natural selection to weed out the weak, there is now a case for helping this failing person, whose failure is not morally her own fault.  But as soon as we accept that failure is not the fault of the individual, we provide an incentive for other individuals to deliberately fail, in order to get the same help.  Suddenly, the right wing assumption is fulfilled; people are failing on purpose, or at least through lack of effort.  Help must be removed in order to force them to make the most of what they have.

We are left with a classic Catch-22: if we do not help people then those who fail (and in the extreme cases die) will probably not deserve the suffering they face.  But if we do help people, we are likely to be helping a number of individuals who do deserve the suffering they face, and are perfectly able to avoid it.

What do we do in the real world? Stop providing assistance to the worse off in order to separate the sheep from the goats?  But then those that face increased suffering will be those least culpable; those who really are not in those conditions through choice.  The problem, of course, is even more intractable than this two state (responsible/not responsible) example; in humanity there is every shade of grey, and the moral extremes are rare cases. 

Too often the intractable problem described is judged in simplistic terms by those who have done well in terms of wealth and power.  Because they perceive their wealth as the product of their own actions, they naturally perceive other people’s poverty as the product of those people’s actions.  But their view of success is as unrealistic as their view of failure.  An example can help to show this.

In a developed country, even a successful business person, who has never used the health service or public transport, has never claimed any benefits, and who came from a poor family, cannot say she has done it alone.  She has benefitted from the fact that she lives in a country where there is an advanced transport network, a health service, structured and reliable supplies of utilities, waste disposal services, social care and so forth.  She may never have used some of these services, but they support her workers and keep them healthy.  The education system provides them with skills that she does not have to teach (even though she makes use of them).  The transport system distributes her goods, and utilities make manufacture and communication easy.  All the parts of her society provide her with a market in which to sell her goods, and the means with which to do it.

Especially (not ‘even’) in a free market economy, wealth is based on individuals specialising in their work.  And if you specialise, you become reliant on others for areas you do not understand.  Otherwise you are a generalist, and the efficiency of specialisation is lost.  So our business person relies on builders, nurses, cabbies, lawyers, dustbin men, waiters, supermarket employees.  They lift her up on their shoulders so that she can use her skills better.  And in turn she lifts them, by generating profit and providing jobs, and through her taxes.  Those taxes are a payment for the luxury of living in a society that is structured so that efforts can reap reward.

Consider a person with the potential to do well in business, but who lives in a country without any infra-structure or education system, who must walk ten miles to the nearest well every day.  She may try ten times as hard as her counterpart in a rich country, and not see a hundredth of the reward.  No individual can (or does) do it alone.

The only possible way to escape the dilemma described is to change how people think about society.  We need to understand that, in a modern capitalist economy, we are entirely interdependent.  If the concept of an interdependent society is recognised and taught to children (rather than the concept that each person is a self-interested individual) then in the future they are less likely to take selfish decisions, to cheat the system, to take unfair advantage of help.  And if those at the top humbly understand their reliance on society, they are less likely to have the arrogance to avoid tax while blaming the poor for their poverty.  And the example they set will reinforce societal bonds, and begin to filter through to individual behaviours.

There is no easy solution to the dilemmas discussed.  A more realistic ideology is not a magic wand.  There are always those that will take advantage of the shared benefits of an inter-dependent society.  But such cheats will be marginalised by the recognition of interdependence, and they will be fewer in number as a result.

This change of approach is a way to at least join the fight, to counter the barrage of individualistic ideology that at present faces us all throughout our lives.  Scientists are realising that individualistic models alone cannot make sense of the natural world.  It is clear that they cannot provide a realistic approach to human society either.  In order to build countries in which people are fulfilled and happy, we must reject the narrow, destructive myth of the individual.

Nature and Fear 05/06/12

This morning I read a blog by Alca torda, about working and living on the isolated island of Copeland.  The descriptions led me to think about fear, and how it is related to the natural world; the short essay below explores this relationship.

We often associate fear with being alone in some isolated natural wilderness; when we think about being frightened, the distance we are from the nearest group of people is an important factor.  Of course, in the UK we are not threatened by predatory animals; our fears about such isolation are in that sense irrational.  Nature in the form of elemental forces is likewise only a real danger to us in extreme circumstances.  Such circumstances do occur, especially in less tamed environments like mountainous areas or at sea, but issues such as flooding, or hypothermia, or being hit by falling trees, are matters for worry, not the source of visceral fear.

Storm at sea, Cabo Finisterra, Spain

So, in our search for the source of our fears we are left with fears of the imagination, and questions about our relationship with the natural world.  A historical pattern been recognised by many in human interactions with nature.  This begins with a state of conflict in the days of our ancestors, where nature was a real threat to survival, a deadly force to be tamed.  Early man (and more recent settlers of wild lands) drove these threats back physically, through hard labour; their fear had a real basis, and the idea of conservation or the protection of nature was alien – nature had the upper hand, was little understood, home to the supernatural.  It was something to be appeased and feared.

Iron Age walls in the mist on Skomer

As we gained knowledge, and gained the technology to domesticate our surroundings, this idea of conflict receded, and people began to actively seek out the awe-inspiring and frightening aspects of the natural world.  They wanted a thrill, but in a situation where risks were controlled. This thrill-seeking approach was encapsulated by the Picturesque movement in the 18^th Century; the love of wild coasts, soaring mountains, volcanoes etc.  Such landscapes and set pieces were recreated in the gardens of the rich across Europe, the wonders reached through gateways watched over by the god Hermes.

To be close to raging torrents, deep chasms and soaring mountains was an exhilarating, romanticised experience; associated with a yearning to be part of nature, a spiritual a well as an exciting experience.  But it was not an experience of cold fear; instead it was perhaps more to do with letting go, immersing oneself in basic instinctual reactions, unthinking; a thrill similar to that of vertigo, where the fear is in part the result of a desire to jump.

Stone circle, Dartmoor

Today we have moved even further from the natural world, and our ignorance of it has a different form to the ignorance of our ancestors – borne now out of a lack of interest, even out of contempt.  The natural thrills of mountaineering or white water rafting are still sought, but all too often the desire for a crude adrenalin rush has replaced the more romantic, spiritual experience of the Picturesque.  Nature has become a tool for the fulfilment of desires, not a mystery to immerse oneself within.  Perhaps this is because competition between people now provides the real thrill – our battles inside the market ecosystem, within which we are immersed in those same instinctual desires and fears.  And if we are excluded from this, there is the brutal competition between gangs or races or religions or countries.  Nature is soft and tame in comparison, at least to those disconnected from it.

To summarise: being simply scared has not been a part of our interaction with nature since those times when we fought against it to establish a foothold of civilisation (fear of diseases aside) and perhaps the most enlightening period of the human/nature relationship was at the threshold between taming nature and becoming contemptuous of it.

The early period of fear was perhaps most associated (through ignorance) with the idea of supernatural intent lying behind natural events – the idea that they were punishments for wrong-doing or rewards for pursuing a virtuous way of life.  Storms, volcanic eruptions and so forth were personal, directed against people by some terrible conscious force.  In other words, the fear came from the projection of essentially human motivations onto nature.  And these human motivations lie beyond the harsh but fair interactions of the natural world, which occur without malice or love, through natural instinct alone.  Human emotions and the ideas that accompany them can spiral beyond the limits of these natural struggles into extremes of evil, or extremes of good.  And here we find the substrate of fear – within ourselves.

Grounds of Chatsworth House, Derbyshire

There is no fear in an isolated environment if we do not consider other people, or their ghosts or their past deeds.  It is in the shadow of the ruined building, under the sweeping beam of the lighthouse, or in the actions of a lunatic that we find fear.  Nature provides the backdrop, draws into relief those human extremes.  It is our reaction to nature, and our disconnection from it that leaves us feeling alone and exposed within it.  By interacting with nature, finding its patterns and being involved in its dramas, we find comfort from our fears in its laws and cycles.  We come full circle, finding civilisation in the natural systems that we destroy in order to impose our order. 

  Port Sunlight (added 26/05/12)

In my last entry, I commented on the isolation that can pervade modern societies, as portrayed in music and in the film ‘Driver’.  In many ways what is represented is the opposite of a utopian ideal.  Although, in terms of technology and material provision, many modern populations enjoy an existence that might have been considered utopian fifty years ago, the outcome of this progress has not been the fulfilment of a societal dream.  What is missing?

In the spring I visited Port Sunlight on the Wirral, a ‘model’ village built by the owner of a soap factory to provide his workforce with a decent quality of life.  And all aspects of material aspiration are evident; green spaces, wide roads, good quality housing, good practical amenities.  But the village was built with a wider, deeper and more considered view of humanity, and the needs of human beings.  There is a social club, a bowling green, a theatre, a school and an art gallery.  In Port Sunlight the pieces have been put in place that allow people to form communities spontaneously, because each aspect of their lives is geographically integrated; homes, factories, theatres mixed together.  People would work alongside neighbours; they would see them quite by chance on the way to drop their children at school, in the pub, or at the social club or theatre.  The physical structure created is such that social bonds grow without further intervention, because people’s lifestyles, shaped by their physical environment, coincide with such social interactions.

The physical framework of the model village allows natural human interactions to flourish, because it has been created at a human scale, and is integrated, not reliant on people travelling long distances.  The alternative is the present zonal planning system in the UK, where housing lies in one part of town, entertainment in another, workplaces in another.  People get into their cars to travel to the facilities they use to fulfil the various needs of their lives.  As a result of carrying out these activities in remote locations, they form networks of people that are disjointed from the physical network of people they actually live amongst.  There are two outcomes: 1) interactions with others are not spontaneous; they must be planned in advance, and 2) those who cannot travel, or who are unemployed, find themselves trapped in a physical framework where there is no community, isolated from ‘remote’ interactions between physically disparate people.

One potential result of 1) is that people can choose who to meet and when to meet them; they do not have to tolerate spontaneous or imperfect interactions; they can live within virtual ghettos populated only by people who are certain they like each other.  There is a danger that under such conditions, people lose the ability to tolerate and compromise with others, that they become unused to dealing with critical or differing opinions to their own.  There is the potential for the evolution of extreme and prejudiced views.  There is also little opportunity for personal growth; only through interactions that we would not choose in advance can we learn to choose differently, or find out about things that we have not previously realised or appreciated.  The compartmentalisation of groups of individuals is made potentially more serious by new technology, which allows us to live within bubbles of virtual stimulation.  We can listen to music, watch films or surf the net, rather than interacting with the people physically close to us.

The isolation of vulnerable people, the elderly, the unemployed and those without close family (2) is a problem which is just as serious.  Where communities are geographically integrated, interaction with such people occurs naturally, without effort.  People get to know each other through daily contact.  Importantly, the existence of a geographically integrated community means that vulnerable or marginalised people have large networks of people that can help them.  Where this network does not exist, well-intentioned people are often loathe to interact with such individuals, because they fear getting ‘trapped’ with someone dependent on them.  Where a community exists, one-off acts of kindness and support can be offered without this kind of concern – everyone is involved in helping out, and the burden does not fall onto one person’s shoulders.  This provides an arena where people can get to know each other without fears about committing themselves to too much; in other words, it allows people to interact with marginalised individuals just as they would with anyone else.  And in this kind of environment, such individuals have the opportunity to grow in confidence, and to provide something in return; the marginalised can become important actors in their community, and may have different approaches and ideas that can produce benefits for all.

In conclusion, we need to use the planning system to create a physical framework that allows communities to develop naturally.  The test of a utopian society should be: can a person live alone within this society without being lonely?

Reflections on listening to music by Archive and watching the 2011 film 'Drive'

The electronic / ambient music (apologies to anyone who likes more accuracy in their descriptions of musical genre; I have never been able to grasp them that well!) of Archive, and that of the soundtrack to ‘Drive’, seem to me to be music projected into a void; there is a lonely space in which there is only the singer and perhaps the person who is the object of their song.  Beyond there is an ‘everything else’ that is hollow; a functionalist reality that is alien to the feelings expressed.  This reality does not counter or challenge those feelings, it just consumes them.

In the film ‘Drive’ the audience sees few (if any) other people apart from the protagonists; their lives are played out in a void, from which people appear and disappear.  There is no ‘society’ no context – no structure apart from that of wants and the methods and likelihood of achieving them alone.  Such wants and desires and pursued in potential conflict with the individual wants of others, who are only encountered in the context of such functional interactions.   The emptiness of such a world can be compared to the very full, complex, cultural and historical norms which more traditional rock, pop, folk, reggae etc singers either, rail against, celebrate, or express their alienation from.

A good example of the rich backdrop to the stories told in more ‘traditional’ music is provided by Bobby Gentry’s song 'Ode to Billy Joe'.  The song is about a girl finding out about a boy who has committed suicide by jumping off a bridge.  Her suffering goes completely unnoticed by her family, who pass on the news as an aside, commenting and then returning to the normality of their meal, while it is clear to the listener that the singer had a much deeper relationship to the dead boy.  In this case there is a solid something that is not noticing or understanding the turmoil of the singer – a societal structure that is (imperfectly) caring, that has its own values and conventions that may be wrong, or suffocating, but which constitute a different perspective to be reacted against, or adapted to.  In this there is comfort for the listener, as well as frustration; the challenge of overcoming such societal constraints and deficiencies can provide a reason and a purpose beyond individual wants.  A society of other people can be persuaded, shocked, attacked or ridiculed, while a collection of isolated individuals is an adversary with which it is pointless to fight.

The history and communities of rock, or folk, or heavy metal, or punk, represent appeals to a mass of people, and react in some way (positively or negatively) to the communities and cultures they have risen from.  The shared cultural background can be fought against, one group against another, or an individual against a coherent majority.  In contrast, market-driven, functional structures are empty frames; responses to them pass through them like water through a sieve.  The qualitative value of ideological ideas, or human needs, is irrelevant to the rationality of the market.  Electronic / ambient music and films like ‘Drive’ face and illustrate this empty, emotionless world.  Their message is applied to a clean, empty space in which characters float; it seems to reflect loneliness and a lack of purpose.  It is feeling poured out into a void, and that void is the space where society used to be.