Month: February 2011

Life

Newspad

With remarkable prescience Arthur C Clarke gave his character Dr. Heywood R. Floyd a Newspad in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It collected a constantly refreshing stream of all the world’s news. But he also noticed (with even more impressive prescience) that one could live entirely immersed in that stream of information and never exhaust it – or have time for anything else. 

A study I saw a few years back said the combined broadcast news output in the UK created four hours of rolling news for every hour of real time elapsed. Who is watching? I guess only the advertisers know.

Last night I watched a documentary on the comic and gameshow host Bob Monkhouse. Undoubtedly a funny man, but publicly too ‘slick’ and as a ‘stand-up’ a little cruel I felt. There was more to him than that though. He struck me as a rather brilliant polymath trapped in a sharp suit and perma-tan. He was a talented illustrator, wit and observational comic as well as a consummate professional. He didn’t strike me as very happy. 

It transpires Monkhouse was also an avid, perhaps manic, collector. He collected films. I’m sure 2001 was one. He collected so many that he was dragged through the courts for sharing them with the odd celebrity friend, causing allegations of fraud and copyright abuse. At one time he had the world’s 3rd largest collection of films in private hands. In the end the courts didn’t take his precious films from him, but substantially drove his collecting underground. Come the advent of the VCR his obsessive collecting found a new outlet in simultaneously taping multiple channels worth of TV. His collection is now a unique archive – a veritable Noah’s ark – of British TV from the 1970s and 80s before the advent of ubiquitous digital recording.

Back to Clarke. I myself live in a constant stream of news collected by RSS and delivered to my 3 connected devices – my own ‘Newspads’. On holiday in France this year, the lack of mobile coverage meant I was pulled unwillingly from the flow of news and forced to adapt to the stiller waters of the swimming pool and the lapping waves of the Mediterranean. I suffered withdrawal for several days before escaping my addiction.

Three thoughts strike me from this. First the prescience or ‘pre-the-science’ of Arthur C Clarke is remarkable. Second, that the hundreds of hours of Bob Monkhouse performing as a mid-market game show host, might, just be transcended by the thousands he collected, to become his more remembered legacy to human-kind. But that he enjoyed but a small fraction of the hours of either during his life. 

And finally, that I should take care to avoid the danger of the Newspad which Clarke predicted in the year of my birth: “Even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever changing flow of information from the news satellites.” Surfing means just that, riding the crest of the information wave, not swimming or drowning in it.

Aristotle, Ethics, Life, Work

Kindness

Three takes on kindness. First, a person I scarcely know – without any guile or hesitation – kindly bought me my coffee at work on Friday. I was completely thrown by it. An older man, he works in Human Resources. My implicit assumption, as we queued, was he would be against pretty much everything I’ve done in the last 3 years – targets, strategising, downsizing and redundancies. I expected him to look to get away from me as fast as politely possible. But no, he opened his wallet pulled out a five pound note and asked me what I would like. I had a coffee and a nice talk.

I sent him an email last night to thank him for his kindness. I said how touched I was and that kindnesses are like ripples from a pebble thrown in a pond. They multiply and spread and can go on to lap over many people. I said his kindness went on to touch everyone I met for the rest of the day. And this wasn’t an an idle promise – Wired thinks so too.

Take two. In a rare moment of peace, with the family out and about, I looked up the definition of cognitive dissonance this morning. I’ve got cognitive dissonance at the moment, as, in a significant life choice, events have unfolded in a way which completely mystifies me. Reading Wikipedia, I find one feature of cognitive dissonance is ‘sour grapes’. When expectations are not met, or the actuality turns out not to meet your expectations, we rubbish the things we previously wanted or valued. Like Aesop’s fox who branded the grapes ‘sour’ because he couldn’t reach them; we desire something, find it unattainable, and reduce our dissonance by trashing it. The technical term is “adaptive preference formation.” Sour grapes probably help keep us sane.

But as interesting for me was the ‘Benjamin Franklin effect’. I’m increasingly a fan of old Ben – he had a good life and good approach to it. When I get some time I plan to read his autobiography. I’ve already downloaded it in expectation. Here’s how Wikipedia describes the effect:

Franklin won over a political opponent by asking him a favour and he relates thus:

I did not … aim at gaining his favour by paying any servile respect to him but, after some time, took this other method. Having heard that he had in his library a certain very scarce and curious book, I wrote a note to him, expressing my desire of perusing that book, and requesting he would do me the favour of lending it to me for a few days. He sent it immediately, and I return’d it in about a week with another note, expressing strongly my sense of the favour. When we next met in the House, he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility; and he ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death. This is another instance of the truth of an old maxim I had learned, which says, “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.”

Apparently after lending Franklin the book, the opponent had to resolve the ‘dissonance’ of his attitude towards Franklin, because he had just done him a favour. He justified doing the favour by convincing himself that he actually liked Franklin, and, as a result, treated him with respect instead of rudeness from then on. Marvellous.

Take three. It’s a wonderful thing Wikipedia. The emergent wisdom of the crowd and the ‘perfect equilibrium’ between the supply of generous volunteer experts and demand from thirsty enquirers after knowledge. But economics is economics, and they do need a bit of money to make it work. I got an email this week from Wikimedia UK Foundation offering me ‘hearty thanks’ – in their words – for the kindness of my spontaneous donation on 22 December. As I noted at the time, they got the money largely thanks to Aristotle. Aristotle has convinced me that virtues aren’t born in, they are made. And I reckon giving £50 to Wikimedia was my first truly instinctive Aristotelian moral act. Instant, without question, recognising that there was no penalty for free riding, but just giving to Wikipedia because I use it, value it and am grateful for it.

So whether you subscribe to the the ‘cascade of kindness’ theory, the reverse psychology of Benjamin Franklin or the ‘trained’ ethics of Aristotle, of one thing I am certain – kindness is powerful stuff.

Life, Truisms

Truisms iv) Demos

Growing up in a safe, benign and predominantly urban country like the UK, means you miss out on a lot of the experiences which define life in other countries. We don’t really have natural disasters, extreme weather, earthquakes, civil war, endemic illness, extreme poverty, lawlessness, corruption, dictators, or sectarian governments. Very lucky us. We have comparatively big Government and we are comparatively happy with it.

But take a look around the world today – Egypt going from peaceful, hopeful mass demonstration to violent disorder, Australia bracing for a continent sized cyclone which would cover swathes of the USA and would obliterate the UK, France and Germany, Sudan seceeding from itself and the routine drip drip drip of deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq or any number of other countries you care to mention. Government or the lack of it has a hand or the responsibility in all of these.

I was reading to my daughter about Henry VIII and Tudor England this evening and explaining beheadings, religious persecutions and kingly philandering. I said people were poor, had few rights and had many arbitrary rules imposed upon them by church and state. I used the past tense but on reflection not much has changed in much of the world.

This makes me reflect on four of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms:

Abuse of power comes as no surprise

Government is a burden on the people

Grass roots agitation is the only hope

Imposing order is man’s vocation for chaos is hell

Number one, I fear, is a nailed on certainty. Even Platonic Philosopher Kings go bad without term limits. Chaos is a hot hell, but dictatorship is a cold one. I used to think Government was my friend, but having worked in it I’m not so sure. It’s more like HAL 9000 crossed with a particularly mindless golem – and that’s in a stable affluent parliamentary democracy not a kleptocracy, sectarian or police state. Grass roots agitation probably is the only hope for many. I’m lucky to live where I do, and a good five centuries after Henry VIII.