Life – Page 90 – Achilles & Aristotle

Obituary

We had another big leaving do at work this week. Hard to do justice to over 30 years (by my rough estimate 8,000 or so working days) of a person’s working life in 15 minutes of speeches, but it felt a bit flat all told.

A friend of mine I spoke to at the event, put me onto the ‘QI Book of the Dead’ before Christmas. Several dozen great men and women, of all times and places, types and backgrounds. From Ghengis Khan to Henry Ford, Florence Nightingale to Emma, Lady Hamilton (left). They are a remarkable bunch. It’s an easy and enjoyable read. I won’t spoil its many surprises here. But three things stood out for me:

1) You absolutely can’t write your own epitaph

2) Many of the most famous and powerful people died in disgrace, despair or destitution – but often didn’t care so much about it in the end.

3) Most of the thinkers we revere today were completely ignored in their own lifetimes.

It summed up for me to: enjoy the day, follow your passions, have fun, and, if any of it is remembered, it probably won’t be what you expected. I think I’ll let go of my obituary, it won’t be me who writes it – either in work or life.

Life

The Daffodil

The Daffodil, or more classically and correctly the Narcissus, perfectly captures my week.

First my daughter. Three years ago when she started school, I sometimes thought of her as a little snowdrop, a tiny beautiful flower, but gently bowed and diffident. She cried all the way through her first school play, reached out to me with beseeching arms in her second, slightly self-consciously danced a solo in the third; and belted out a song, whilst whipping others into line, in this year’s Christmas special.

Caring teachers and a lovely little school have straightened her stem, burst open her petals and encouraged a more confident little trumpet in the middle. In recognition, and ending months of parental anxiety, this week she won a place at a super new school. Like the picture above she now has more of the ‘Narcissus Geranium’ about her than the original snowdrop. It’s lovely to see.

The second set of flowers came at work. I found myself talking to a roomful of our people from Alexandria and Cairo (despite the unrest at home), Abuja, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Lahore, Recife and the UK about our Prime Minister’s recent speech on Multiculturalism. I said I think it’s all about how petals and centre – or stigma – relate in the national flower. I drew three flowers. One with petals and no centre, one with a huge centre and ‘teddy bear’s ears’ petals and the last with daffodil-like proportions.

I said, in my view, if there is no shared centre, just independent and separate ‘petals’ of separate cultures who never mix, a society will have tensions. Similarly if the centre is so large that the central culture dominates and excludes ‘outsider’ cultures, beleaguered, excluded groups will live unhappily. What’s needed – and substantially what I believe we have in the UK – is a good balance of centre and petals; things in common and things on which we live with and benefit from difference.

What was interesting for me was when the woman from Brazil stood up and said, for her, there was a fourth option. Her picture was petals within a circle. That’s how she feels about Brazil, their culture is the sum of their petals. I guess a lot depends on the balance of ‘new’ and ‘old’, ‘migrant’ and ‘indigenous’, ‘history’ and ‘present’. A daffodil culture works for me.

My final Narcissus blossomed in a rich conversation over fish, chips and peas on the balance of Kierkegaardian ‘ethical roles’ and the central self. My interlocutor has impressively re-asserted her central self, to rebalance her life and lessen the competing and narcissistic demands of all those making a claim on her.

This set me thinking, and, as I said, once again the daffodil strikes me as the ideal flower. The ‘daffodil life’ wins over everyone with its ramrod straight ethical stalk, a healthy petal spread of life roles. But, it’s the vivid central trumpet of the self that ‘makes’ the flower – just like my little girl.

Passing a florist today, me and my boy bought our first daffodils of the year after his Birthday lunch. They are a joyous symbol of spring. A wonderful thing the daffodil.

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.