Life – Page 63 – Achilles & Aristotle

ProductiviDad

Working in South America nearly 20 years ago, I made a breakthrough discovery: if you know an English word ending in ‘ity’, you know the Spanish word if you replace it with ‘dad’.

This increased the variedad and utilidad of my conversations 100%. Sometimes the necessidad to find an opportunidad to use a ‘dad’ made esponteneidad a dificultad. But new vocabulary had opened a new world of possibilidades.

Now I am a Dad, the combination of children, work and life makes productividad an absolute necessidad. And blimey I’ve been productive this week. School runs, presentations, objectives, appraisals, cooking, cleaning, mowing the lawn. Phew. But with hindsight not enough time for thinking, reading and friends.

It’s all very well being ‘ProductiviDad’ but the good life needs a bit of ‘contemplación’ too. All work and no play makes Juanito a dull boy.

Children, Life, Odysseus

April Showers

Rain rain go away
Me and the boy set out to play
Driven back by hoods a dripping
When we should have been a skipping
Two straight weeks of being soaked
Is now getting beyond a joke.

Me and the boy set out for a day trip today. We got as far as the bus stop in a downpour and then couldn’t get on one. The Number 12 was all steamed up and no seats to go.

On the way back up the hill for a consolatory hot chocolate he suggested a step forward – ‘We could make an umbrella out of Lego!’ Necessity is the mother of all invention.

Life, Science, Work

Chaos and Complexity

I typed ‘Where does complexity come from given entropy?’ into Google this morning. Why? Because my life and work are in pretty good order, so a law of physics which threatens to mess them up is most inconvenient.

Given how hard it is to get anything done at work, given how fragile our lives and life’s works are and given the formidable obstacles to multicellular life a – how on earth do we get from chaos to complexity.

Before Googling, I’d read in the New Scientist that Precambrian alkaline oceans may have forced floppy-walled cells to get a shell – to keep the toxic alkalinity out. Alkaline oceans would also have promoted calcification. A problem and a solution jostling together.

I also read E.O. Wilson, the Harvard sociobiologist, explaining that the simplest way to understand complex human motivations, is the constant competitive/cooperative interplay between our loyalty to ourselves and that we pay to tribes and collectives -which give us faith, identity, mythologies and protection.

Speaking of which, high up the Google list of answers to my complexity vs entropy question was our old friend God. If the second law of thermodynamics demands increasing entropy, then a creator and His constant intervention seem to some like our only hope.

But I’m reminded of the classic sociological example I cited at work this week, in favour of not planning big things too much. You’re never more than five minutes from fresh bread in chaotic Paris but couldn’t get it anywhere in centrally planned Moscow – ecosystems are too complex to plan or design.

Instead of God, I preferred a great paper, which came top of the highly evolved ecosystem which is the Google search rank. MIT physicist Michel Baranger writes that the 20th century ‘certainty’ of scientific analysis has given way to the chaos of fractals and non-linearity.

Baranger admits complexity still defies a simple definition. But it does have these six features:

1) Complex systems contain many constituents interacting chaotically.

2) The constituents of a complex system are interdependent.

3) A complex system possesses a structure spanning several scales. (cell, leg, person; building, district, city)

4) A complex system is capable of emergent behaviour. (properties emerge at a higher level which are more than a description of the constituent parts – consciousness, life, society, culture)

5) Complexity involves an interplay between chaos and non-chaos. (if it’s all chaos nothing happens, if there’s no chaos nothing happens either)

6) Complexity involves an interplay between cooperation and competition for resources (the big one – drives reactions, feedback loops, religion, ethics, moral dilemmas, kindness and cruelty)

Fully embracing the messiness of chaos and complexity opens up the possibility that we might come to better understand the biological and social systems which drive us, and which we in turn drive.

The answers won’t be in neat models. But they would be a small step towards what E.O. Wilson calls a ‘New Enlightenment’. An Enlightenment built not on the determinism of Newton’s calculus and Adam Smith’s pin factory. Or on the individualism and reductionism of pure ‘survival of the fittest’. But one recognising that complexity comes from the jostling of chaos and order, competition and cooperation, small scale and large and interdependence of the whole.

What does that mean for my efforts to maintain a well-ordered life? Accepting a meteorite could flatten our house. That disagreements at work and at home are probably the drivers of progress. And that the competing demands on me create, yes, chaos; but also new complexity and the spur to creativity.

A reminder then that chaos and change can’t be avoided – you can only ride the waves not hold back the tide.

Life, Philosophy

Narrative or Episodic

I like (as do many others) the notion of lives as narratives. Interesting then to read a contrary view from my old philosophy tutor Galen Strawson – Against Narrativity.

He poses the question: is there really that much evidence that we are narrative beings? And if not, is it really so desirable – in terms of living a good life – that we seek to be?

What’s wrong with enjoying life as a smorgasbord of varied experiences and events. Does it all have to submit to the tyranny of a unifying narrative?

I was talking about this today. And as so often when you pick-up on something new – it then pops up everywhere. In my inbox this evening I find good old Montaigne on the same subject:

Our chiefest sufficiency is to know how to apply ourselves to divers employments. ‘Tis to be, but not to live, to keep a man’s self tied and bound by necessity to one only course; those are the bravest souls that have in them the most variety and pliancy. Of this here is an honourable testimony of the elder Cato:

“His parts were so pliable to all uses, that one would say he had been born only to that which he was doing.” Livy, xxxix. 49.

I do like the sense of a personal narrative. It helps make sense of it all. And along with the ‘can I look myself in the mirror test’ it keeps me on the right and proper path. But a sense of narrative shouldn’t be to the exclusion of Montaigne’s ‘divers employments’ and mixing it up a bit.

As my old tutor points out, a narrative can be both self-limiting and then dangerously self-fulfilling. Variety is the spice of life – and you only get one shot at it.

Children, Life, Odysseus, Poetry

Keeping the home campfires burning

April fools under canvas
Sunlit striking
Followed by lightning
Humans huddle
Around a smoky campfire
Back to basics
Hot and cold comforts
Austerity Britain
Keeping afloat with the Joneses
Unseasonal camping confirms
Keeping warm
With friends and family
Is all.

Despite my diffidence, we were early out of the traps for camping this year. Forecasts (realised) of thunder storms and temperatures of 2 degrees C were enough to deter six out of seven families on our first night – but not us.

Joined at midnight by family number two and then plucky three and four on the second day, it was initially very wet, then cold, then bright and breezy. In a man-made return to pre-history, a fire makes it bearable.

And once the kids are off to bed, with a glass of something warming in hand, there’s a camaraderie about camping which brings out the best in people. Everyone’s struggling a bit in this recession, but we’re keeping the home and camp fires burning.