(This post started out as a comment on Niq's blog post regarding changing the rules of succession to the throne of the UK. Niq sees it as a modernist plot aimed at undermining the monarchy itself. I disagree.)
I'm wary of commenting on royalty. The medieval doctrine of the King's Two Persons has been updated, in our time, as a dichotomy between the royals' role as National Figureheads and their role as Mildly Irritating Celebrities. No matter how elevated you try to be, it's hard to prevent the discourse from degenerating into How Wonderful Her Majesty Is and whether Charles Should Stand Aside And Let Wills Take Over After She's Gone, which is a subject that interests me marginally less than the salt content of frozen peas.
But behind the soap opera there is a dark magic at work here, one that medieval philosophers understood far better than modern journalists, for all that they never knew whom their king was boffing on the side.
Niq believes that the "defining characteristic" of a monarch was to be a military leader. I think that role was only ever peripheral. It fell into disuse when the army became professional, for two reasons. First, the more reflective type of soldier began to think that it might be better (from the participant's point of view) for battles to be directed by people who had studied the subject full-time, rather than by some playboy in a funny hat.
The second, and more important, reason was that with a professional army, you no longer needed the king to raise his standard in order to signal to the peasants that it was time to down tools and come to fight. And that is our clue to what kings are really for.
A monarch's most basic job is to be recognised. No matter what our disagreements, on topics ranging from eugenics to spinach recipes, we all owe allegiance to the same monarch (which is how we know we're British). And once she announces what our national policy is - re, for example, Libya - that's what the country will do (us included), whether we personally agree with it or not.
(Of course a constitutional monarch doesn't make announcements like that in person, but through her officers in government and/or parliament. But that's a minor distinction.)
So: does changing the law of succession weaken the monarchy as an institution?
On the face of it - no. That's why there had to be a meeting of Commonwealth heads of government, and they agreed to the change unanimously. If just one country had opposed it - or even abstained - then there'd be the real prospect of a split monarchy, and that really would mean the end of monarchy as a useful institution. But they all approved it, so that particular crisis was averted.
If there is a danger here, it's the "can-o'-worms" type: the danger that by drawing attention to the subject, you will encourage people who want to make other, further-reaching changes.
But in truth, they didn't need encouragement.
Speaking from one of the loyaller Colonies, I can assure you that the "Monarchy vs Republic" debate is never far below the surface, particularly during a news drought. Any columnist in New Zealand, faced with a looming deadline and no imagination - which is to say, most of the time - won't hesitate to reach into their bag of pre-mulled opinions and reheat some tired old diatribe about either Shaking Off The Legacy Of Imperialism or Maintaining The Roots Of The Nation.
If anything, I think that changing the rules as a concession to modern ideas of "fairness" will make the monarchy more robust. It reinforces the idea of a living institution, whose rules can change. And it reminds us all that, when all is said and done, the queen is queen not because of who her parents were, but because we say she is.
"Divine right" died with Charles I, and good riddance to it.
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Games and fun
Games play (heh) an important part in my life.
I blame my big brother. He introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons at the impressionable age of, ooh, about 13. It was new and exciting, a fun game in those days, before the news media and fundamentalist Christians had heard of it; a friendly, co-operative game, bringing socially inept geeks together in their common love of fantasy and fairy tales.
D&D has come a long way in the 30 years since then (mostly backwards, at least for the players, although obviously it's kept the publishers in business). But it's also given rise to an entirely new genre: the computer FRPG.
It's not widely appreciated, even by players of both, how different the computer FRPG is from the version with pencils and paper and polyhedral dice. Some people think that writing the perfect computer FRPG is just a matter of coding a big enough world, and faithfully and meticulously translating enough of the rules. But this thinking ignores the most important rule of all, which is the core of the difference.
Put simply: the pencil-and-paper game is a social event - a bunch of people get together to have fun. The computer version is a storytelling medium - the "author" draws up a plot, and the player's job is to find a way through it. There may be many different ways, some arriving at slightly different endpoints, but the basic framework and goal are not negotiable. (True, most human DMs start out with a similar "plot" in mind. But good ones will change it as they go along; only bad DMs will try to force their players to stick to a framework they planned from the start. A well-run game is not so much a story as a symposium.)
And that's why the computer FRPG is a form of art, no matter what Roger Ebert says on the subject; because it's not like the social game that is played between friends. Rather than spending so much time defining "art", I think Ebert should give more thought to his idea of a "game". Games like Neverwinter Nights, the Zelda family, Morrowind, Jade Empire - these are not about winning or losing, or even playing. They are about experiencing a story.
Some of them allow more latitude than others. Resident Evil imposes a fixed path, set out by constant short-term motivators. Neverwinter Nights - the most faithful translation of pen-and-paper rules I've seen - forces you to jump through the hoops laid out in the order required, because there's simply not much else to do. Oblivion, by contrast, gives you near-complete freedom - but there's still a single, central storyline to be completed.
The 2008 version of Prince of Persia is an extreme example. Not only do you have to follow the plot (with virtually no latitude about what order you do things in or what skills your character develops), but when you screw it up, you're immediately returned ("restored") to the point just before you did. This mechanism caused a lot of controversy at the time - some people thought it was taking the risk and the skill out of the game.
But, in truth, none of these games is about risk or skill, any more than watching a whodunnit is about your ability to outguess the fictional detective. They are about the experience.
And that, dear Mr Ebert, is art. Some of it is even, I would claim, good art.
I recently replayed Jade Empire, and I would say that, in script, acting, cinematography and (most importantly) storyline, it stands comparison with decent Hollywood action movies. Zelda: Twilight Princess is by turns engrossing, thrilling and touching, as well as beautifully visualised. Oblivion, while scriptwise a pale shadow of Morrowind, tries to make up for it with technical execution (I recall the first time, stealing through some tunnel, I saw an ogre ahead of me - I almost wet myself).
There's also, of course, plenty of bad art in the genre. Assassin's Creed has a confused and cliched storyline, with little latitude to explore and no attempt to reconcile the inconsistencies. Ditto Freelancer, and Neverwinter Nights 2. Bad writers keep you on the story railroad by putting in arbitrary, unexplained restrictions to what you can do. Whereas the better games either trap you in a storyline where there is always an obvious, immediate short-term goal (Zelda, Resident Evil), or continually nudge you towards the plot with internally consistent motivators (Morrowind).
But even bad art is still art. Good art shows what it can aspire to.
If the computer FRPG were really just a digital version of the tabletop game, then Ebert would have a point. As it is - well, he should try playing through some of these games. Then let's see if he can still maintain that he hasn't experienced some kind of art.
I blame my big brother. He introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons at the impressionable age of, ooh, about 13. It was new and exciting, a fun game in those days, before the news media and fundamentalist Christians had heard of it; a friendly, co-operative game, bringing socially inept geeks together in their common love of fantasy and fairy tales.
D&D has come a long way in the 30 years since then (mostly backwards, at least for the players, although obviously it's kept the publishers in business). But it's also given rise to an entirely new genre: the computer FRPG.
It's not widely appreciated, even by players of both, how different the computer FRPG is from the version with pencils and paper and polyhedral dice. Some people think that writing the perfect computer FRPG is just a matter of coding a big enough world, and faithfully and meticulously translating enough of the rules. But this thinking ignores the most important rule of all, which is the core of the difference.
Put simply: the pencil-and-paper game is a social event - a bunch of people get together to have fun. The computer version is a storytelling medium - the "author" draws up a plot, and the player's job is to find a way through it. There may be many different ways, some arriving at slightly different endpoints, but the basic framework and goal are not negotiable. (True, most human DMs start out with a similar "plot" in mind. But good ones will change it as they go along; only bad DMs will try to force their players to stick to a framework they planned from the start. A well-run game is not so much a story as a symposium.)
And that's why the computer FRPG is a form of art, no matter what Roger Ebert says on the subject; because it's not like the social game that is played between friends. Rather than spending so much time defining "art", I think Ebert should give more thought to his idea of a "game". Games like Neverwinter Nights, the Zelda family, Morrowind, Jade Empire - these are not about winning or losing, or even playing. They are about experiencing a story.
Some of them allow more latitude than others. Resident Evil imposes a fixed path, set out by constant short-term motivators. Neverwinter Nights - the most faithful translation of pen-and-paper rules I've seen - forces you to jump through the hoops laid out in the order required, because there's simply not much else to do. Oblivion, by contrast, gives you near-complete freedom - but there's still a single, central storyline to be completed.
The 2008 version of Prince of Persia is an extreme example. Not only do you have to follow the plot (with virtually no latitude about what order you do things in or what skills your character develops), but when you screw it up, you're immediately returned ("restored") to the point just before you did. This mechanism caused a lot of controversy at the time - some people thought it was taking the risk and the skill out of the game.
But, in truth, none of these games is about risk or skill, any more than watching a whodunnit is about your ability to outguess the fictional detective. They are about the experience.
And that, dear Mr Ebert, is art. Some of it is even, I would claim, good art.
I recently replayed Jade Empire, and I would say that, in script, acting, cinematography and (most importantly) storyline, it stands comparison with decent Hollywood action movies. Zelda: Twilight Princess is by turns engrossing, thrilling and touching, as well as beautifully visualised. Oblivion, while scriptwise a pale shadow of Morrowind, tries to make up for it with technical execution (I recall the first time, stealing through some tunnel, I saw an ogre ahead of me - I almost wet myself).
There's also, of course, plenty of bad art in the genre. Assassin's Creed has a confused and cliched storyline, with little latitude to explore and no attempt to reconcile the inconsistencies. Ditto Freelancer, and Neverwinter Nights 2. Bad writers keep you on the story railroad by putting in arbitrary, unexplained restrictions to what you can do. Whereas the better games either trap you in a storyline where there is always an obvious, immediate short-term goal (Zelda, Resident Evil), or continually nudge you towards the plot with internally consistent motivators (Morrowind).
But even bad art is still art. Good art shows what it can aspire to.
If the computer FRPG were really just a digital version of the tabletop game, then Ebert would have a point. As it is - well, he should try playing through some of these games. Then let's see if he can still maintain that he hasn't experienced some kind of art.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Personal faults
Last I saw, niq was trying to make this a new meme, so here's my contribution:
- I'm lazy. I have a chronic aversion to work (defined as "doing what I'm paid for"). In my defence, this wasn't the case when I had a job that interested me; but then, I haven't really gone out of my way to find such a job (my research suggests they are very few and far between). My present employer sees laziness as a positive character trait: "Lazy people are efficient, they're good at identifying what really needs to be done", he says.
- I'm arrogant. I think I earn "about enough", and I'm impatient of those who want to earn vastly more - more than about three times what I make. I think most of the economic misery in the world today can be laid at the door of ambitious people.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Mistrust, mistakes and misdirection
Remember Britain's "War Crimes Act"? Passed in 1991, amid a faint public hysteria at the thought that if foreign bad guys took refuge in the UK, we couldn't prosecute them. The headline baddies at the time were aging Nazis who may or may not have been living in Britain for years, but there was always an assumption that the long arm would also scoop up truant Serbs, Russians, Chechens, miscellaneous Africans, and others who might be prone to attract adverse media coverage to their atrocities. Basically, the law allows certain categories of criminals to be tried in British courts if they are foolish enough to come within their reach, even if what they did was legal in their own country, and even if it happened long before the law was passed.
I know, I know. A lot of us said so at the time. But you can't argue with Nuremberg, and that's the precedent. A perfect illustration of hard cases making bad law.
In the news today, that law has come back to bite Britain in the proverbial. Hearing the news that Tzipi Livni, a former Israeli government minister, was due to visit London, some enterprising Palestinian activists went to a magistrate and got a warrant issued for her arrest. Ms Livni promptly cancelled her visit.
(I did always like to dream of doing that to George W Bush, but it was hard to find anything concrete to pin on him. "Starting a war on false pretexts" is not considered a crime nowadays, even though it was in 1945. Plus, he never visited.)
Anyways, the British ambassador in Tel Aviv was hauled before the Israeli foreign minister and given a stern lecture about what would follow if Israeli government officials decided they could no longer visit the UK. Normally these affairs are couched in diplomatic language, but based on the British government's reaction ("This can never ever happen again"), I can only imagine this one was pretty brutal. The Israeli government waxes indignant still. Deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon splutters that the whole thing "makes a mockery of universal jurisdiction".
I've always thought that "universal jurisdiction" was a silly idea. (Something I have in common with Henry Kissinger, apparently.) Although let's not forget it was originally an Israeli idea in the first place.
But never mind the hypocrisy of all parties concerned here. Frankly, between Palestinian terrorists, Israeli politicians and the British foreign office, this looks to me like a perfect opportunity to reintroduce trial by combat. What really bothers me about this story is what the British government is promising to do next.
Foreign secretary David Miliband says: "The procedure by which arrest warrants can be sought and issued without any prior knowledge or advice by a prosecutor is an unusual feature of the system in England and Wales. The Government is looking urgently at ways in which the UK system might be changed in order to avoid this sort of situation arising again."
It's not about making sure Israeli ministers can visit safely. If that was all they wanted, they could just give the woman diplomatic immunity. What Mr Miliband is talking about, here, is establishing political control of an inconveniently-independent judiciary. No warrants to be issued unless a prosecutor - a political appointee - says so.
Now, Britain's law lords are, as a rule, neither stupid nor shy. I don't imagine that they'll fail to see this move and block it, which shouldn't be too hard. My guess is that by the end of the month, the government's proposals will have quietly morphed into amending the War Crimes Act to raise the bar for issuing a warrant (which is clearly what they should have proposed to begin with). But the whole episode is interesting for the light it casts on the thinking of the current crop of politicians: "If it's going wrong, take it over".
Which goes back to the issue of trust.
Delegation demands trust. As long as you trust your underlings, you can give them jobs to do and then let them get on with it. Modern life teaches us to think of "control" as something absolute, fine-tuned, responsive - the kind of control we have over a car, over our phone's ringtones, over our own webpage. But politics is supposed to be more subtle than that. In politics, no matter how powerful you are, you have to let other people make decisions. That's what politics is.
Because they will make those decisions anyway. You can't stop them. You can lead them, but only if you're willing to treat them as "on your side". And that means identifying your interests as, if not identical, then at least aligned with theirs. The skill of politics is to persuade other people that this is, in fact, the case.
But If you treat your underlings as enemies, they will take on the role. What choice do they have?
I know, I know. A lot of us said so at the time. But you can't argue with Nuremberg, and that's the precedent. A perfect illustration of hard cases making bad law.
In the news today, that law has come back to bite Britain in the proverbial. Hearing the news that Tzipi Livni, a former Israeli government minister, was due to visit London, some enterprising Palestinian activists went to a magistrate and got a warrant issued for her arrest. Ms Livni promptly cancelled her visit.
(I did always like to dream of doing that to George W Bush, but it was hard to find anything concrete to pin on him. "Starting a war on false pretexts" is not considered a crime nowadays, even though it was in 1945. Plus, he never visited.)
Anyways, the British ambassador in Tel Aviv was hauled before the Israeli foreign minister and given a stern lecture about what would follow if Israeli government officials decided they could no longer visit the UK. Normally these affairs are couched in diplomatic language, but based on the British government's reaction ("This can never ever happen again"), I can only imagine this one was pretty brutal. The Israeli government waxes indignant still. Deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon splutters that the whole thing "makes a mockery of universal jurisdiction".
I've always thought that "universal jurisdiction" was a silly idea. (Something I have in common with Henry Kissinger, apparently.) Although let's not forget it was originally an Israeli idea in the first place.
But never mind the hypocrisy of all parties concerned here. Frankly, between Palestinian terrorists, Israeli politicians and the British foreign office, this looks to me like a perfect opportunity to reintroduce trial by combat. What really bothers me about this story is what the British government is promising to do next.
Foreign secretary David Miliband says: "The procedure by which arrest warrants can be sought and issued without any prior knowledge or advice by a prosecutor is an unusual feature of the system in England and Wales. The Government is looking urgently at ways in which the UK system might be changed in order to avoid this sort of situation arising again."
It's not about making sure Israeli ministers can visit safely. If that was all they wanted, they could just give the woman diplomatic immunity. What Mr Miliband is talking about, here, is establishing political control of an inconveniently-independent judiciary. No warrants to be issued unless a prosecutor - a political appointee - says so.
Now, Britain's law lords are, as a rule, neither stupid nor shy. I don't imagine that they'll fail to see this move and block it, which shouldn't be too hard. My guess is that by the end of the month, the government's proposals will have quietly morphed into amending the War Crimes Act to raise the bar for issuing a warrant (which is clearly what they should have proposed to begin with). But the whole episode is interesting for the light it casts on the thinking of the current crop of politicians: "If it's going wrong, take it over".
Which goes back to the issue of trust.
Delegation demands trust. As long as you trust your underlings, you can give them jobs to do and then let them get on with it. Modern life teaches us to think of "control" as something absolute, fine-tuned, responsive - the kind of control we have over a car, over our phone's ringtones, over our own webpage. But politics is supposed to be more subtle than that. In politics, no matter how powerful you are, you have to let other people make decisions. That's what politics is.
Because they will make those decisions anyway. You can't stop them. You can lead them, but only if you're willing to treat them as "on your side". And that means identifying your interests as, if not identical, then at least aligned with theirs. The skill of politics is to persuade other people that this is, in fact, the case.
But If you treat your underlings as enemies, they will take on the role. What choice do they have?
Friday, November 27, 2009
Trust me, I'm a blogger
Apparently, the pope doesn't approve of the Twilight series of books and movies. The Vatican feels it's morally unhealthy for millions of teenage girls to be lusting after soulless monsters.
The only person I know who's seen the latest movie agrees that His Holiness has a point. Vampires have always had erotic undertones, from Dracula to Buffy, but at least they had the decency to remain undertones and subplots in an Epic Tale of Heroic Resistance to Ancient Supernatural Evil. Whereas Twilight, from what I hear, has abandoned most everything but the sex.
Of course, vanishingly few teenage girls are likely to care what some decrepit crossdresser thinks of their favourite soft-porn fix. The pope still carries some influence, but not as much as he'd probably like. Which brings me to today's ramble.
There was a report on Slashdot the other day of a survey that said that more than one-third of employees surveyed (in Canary Wharf and Wall Street) would sell confidential customer data, if the price was right. Of course the penalties for that sort of thing are pretty stiff, and it's unlikely they'd ever be offered enough to offset those. But it's still preying on my mind.
It seems to me that there's been a sharp drop in trust. And with trust goes loyalty.
It's not so much that, once, we would have "trusted" bankers to be honest. Really we had no choice. Bankers - like butchers, bakers, priests, auto mechanics, lawyers, computer programmers, farmers, manufacturers of everything from airliners to zip fasteners - most everyone, in fact - did their work, or at least the important bits of it, behind firmly closed, opaque and soundproof doors. Even journalists, those apostles of openness and transparency, kept their own work to themselves.
Now all that has changed.
Take itemised billing. We got into the habit of checking our bills. And occasionally there would be a mistake - not often, but it seemed often enough to make it worth the trouble. Banks and credit cards led the way, followed by phone companies, shops, restaurants, professional services, hotels... slowly but surely, we reached the point where nobody just says "That'll be four hundred and seventeen dollars thirty-two, please" any more. We get itemised bills... and we're expected, nay, actively encouraged to check them.
The Internet has spread this 'doublecheck' attitude to all walks of life. Now you're considered a chump if you believe a news report, without cross-checking. You're supposed to check prices before shopping for anything that costs more than groceries. Check reviews of consumer goods, movies, hotels. Follow every link. What we get then is a barrel of conflicting reports. And none of them is authoritative, because what we've done now is to reject the very idea of authority. We don't trust anyone to tell us "the truth".
All of which is just the way we thought we wanted it. We're all economically rational beings in pursuit of the perfect information that will enable us to make the optimum decisions about how to use our resources. We're all smart enough to make our own decisions - aren't we?
But now we don't expect the truth, most people have given up even the pretence. Politicians and corporations openly talk about "spinning". Journalists increasingly disclaim responsibility for the truth of what they say. With the notable exception of FOX News, most media make some effort or pretence to tell "the truth" - but the best they ever manage, the best they can ever manage, is what we've learned to call "spin": a single view of "the truth", which may make perfect sense within itself, yet still look entirely different when seen from a different angle.
And so the "perfect information" that, economic theory says, we need to make our decisions, is more elusive than ever. The people qualified to make decisions are the ones who not only have, but also understand, all this information. Authority figures. The very people whose advice we no longer trust.
Even this could work, in theory. Instead of letting the professionals get on with their work, we watch them with the intensity of a child watching an ice-cream cone being filled. Unfortunately, also like the child, we have only a very superficial understanding of what the cone is being filled with. This doesn't matter to the child, because she trusts the ice-cream vendor...
What really screws us up is, as always, human nature. When someone says to you "I don't trust you, I'll be watching your every move", what's your natural reaction? Do you think of the person as a friend, one of us, someone you want to help? Or is there a part of you that starts to think: how much can I get away with, can they really tell what I'm doing anyway, damn' know-it-all prodnose...
When you treat someone as your enemy, over time, they'll start to think of themselves that way.
And yet it seems that, increasingly, that's the expectation for how we should treat one another. Employers monitor their employees' activities; and worse, that's increasingly seen as "reasonable". School-age children are told to include references and citations in their work - an undreamt-of requirement in my day, until I reached university. Parents are supposed to monitor their kids, not just outdoors, but increasingly in school, on the bus, on the Internet, you name it. In the UK now, you need to be registered on a central database if you want to work anywhere near children. In the USA, I'm told, you need to show photo ID to enter a government building.
I was listening to a BBC podcast recently, which talked about the policing of political demonstrations. Protesters complained about the practice of "kettling" - corralling people in a limited area and not letting them leave for a certain time - a practice that, not infrequently, scoops up and seriously inconveniences innocent passers-by. Then there's the practice of police systematically photographing demonstrators (try to photograph a cop, on the other hand, and you stand a good chance of being arrested on the spot).
The police superintendent wheeled out to defend the Met talked about the "small minority" of "troublemakers", whom, apparently, the police can't distinguish from the eternal "law-abiding majority". And so, he concluded, the fuzz have no choice but to treat everyone as a potential terrorist.
That officer, I thought, was missing the point in the same way I've been talking about here. By casting "police" as "us" and "protesters" as "them", the police have made their job a hundred times harder. Police are supposed to see all law-abiding people as "us"; only criminals are "them". If they didn't treat every protester as a criminal - an enemy - then maybe the protesters themselves would be more inclined to help the cops do their job.
Mistrust leads to resentment. Resentment leads to hostility. Hostility leads to enmity. The pursuit of economic rationality has led us into a deeply dysfunctional world, one in which everyone really is our enemy.
Somehow, we need to rebuild trust.
A good starting point might be to rethink what we mean by "trust".
If someone lies to us, and we know they're lying to us, does that mean we shouldn't trust them?
Catholics are familiar with this concept. They've long since accepted that the fairy-tales told in the Bible are not "true" in the strict sense of being literal descriptions of actual events as they happened. But that doesn't matter. What actually happened to a bunch of ancient Jews is not important to us, now, today: what matters is how we live our lives and bear ourselves to God, and the stories in the Bible (they believe) are the best guide to how we should do that. "Truth" is immaterial - only "faith" matters. That's what our sceptical age has forgotten.
The only person I know who's seen the latest movie agrees that His Holiness has a point. Vampires have always had erotic undertones, from Dracula to Buffy, but at least they had the decency to remain undertones and subplots in an Epic Tale of Heroic Resistance to Ancient Supernatural Evil. Whereas Twilight, from what I hear, has abandoned most everything but the sex.
Of course, vanishingly few teenage girls are likely to care what some decrepit crossdresser thinks of their favourite soft-porn fix. The pope still carries some influence, but not as much as he'd probably like. Which brings me to today's ramble.
There was a report on Slashdot the other day of a survey that said that more than one-third of employees surveyed (in Canary Wharf and Wall Street) would sell confidential customer data, if the price was right. Of course the penalties for that sort of thing are pretty stiff, and it's unlikely they'd ever be offered enough to offset those. But it's still preying on my mind.
It seems to me that there's been a sharp drop in trust. And with trust goes loyalty.
It's not so much that, once, we would have "trusted" bankers to be honest. Really we had no choice. Bankers - like butchers, bakers, priests, auto mechanics, lawyers, computer programmers, farmers, manufacturers of everything from airliners to zip fasteners - most everyone, in fact - did their work, or at least the important bits of it, behind firmly closed, opaque and soundproof doors. Even journalists, those apostles of openness and transparency, kept their own work to themselves.
Now all that has changed.
Take itemised billing. We got into the habit of checking our bills. And occasionally there would be a mistake - not often, but it seemed often enough to make it worth the trouble. Banks and credit cards led the way, followed by phone companies, shops, restaurants, professional services, hotels... slowly but surely, we reached the point where nobody just says "That'll be four hundred and seventeen dollars thirty-two, please" any more. We get itemised bills... and we're expected, nay, actively encouraged to check them.
The Internet has spread this 'doublecheck' attitude to all walks of life. Now you're considered a chump if you believe a news report, without cross-checking. You're supposed to check prices before shopping for anything that costs more than groceries. Check reviews of consumer goods, movies, hotels. Follow every link. What we get then is a barrel of conflicting reports. And none of them is authoritative, because what we've done now is to reject the very idea of authority. We don't trust anyone to tell us "the truth".
All of which is just the way we thought we wanted it. We're all economically rational beings in pursuit of the perfect information that will enable us to make the optimum decisions about how to use our resources. We're all smart enough to make our own decisions - aren't we?
But now we don't expect the truth, most people have given up even the pretence. Politicians and corporations openly talk about "spinning". Journalists increasingly disclaim responsibility for the truth of what they say. With the notable exception of FOX News, most media make some effort or pretence to tell "the truth" - but the best they ever manage, the best they can ever manage, is what we've learned to call "spin": a single view of "the truth", which may make perfect sense within itself, yet still look entirely different when seen from a different angle.
And so the "perfect information" that, economic theory says, we need to make our decisions, is more elusive than ever. The people qualified to make decisions are the ones who not only have, but also understand, all this information. Authority figures. The very people whose advice we no longer trust.
Even this could work, in theory. Instead of letting the professionals get on with their work, we watch them with the intensity of a child watching an ice-cream cone being filled. Unfortunately, also like the child, we have only a very superficial understanding of what the cone is being filled with. This doesn't matter to the child, because she trusts the ice-cream vendor...
What really screws us up is, as always, human nature. When someone says to you "I don't trust you, I'll be watching your every move", what's your natural reaction? Do you think of the person as a friend, one of us, someone you want to help? Or is there a part of you that starts to think: how much can I get away with, can they really tell what I'm doing anyway, damn' know-it-all prodnose...
When you treat someone as your enemy, over time, they'll start to think of themselves that way.
And yet it seems that, increasingly, that's the expectation for how we should treat one another. Employers monitor their employees' activities; and worse, that's increasingly seen as "reasonable". School-age children are told to include references and citations in their work - an undreamt-of requirement in my day, until I reached university. Parents are supposed to monitor their kids, not just outdoors, but increasingly in school, on the bus, on the Internet, you name it. In the UK now, you need to be registered on a central database if you want to work anywhere near children. In the USA, I'm told, you need to show photo ID to enter a government building.
I was listening to a BBC podcast recently, which talked about the policing of political demonstrations. Protesters complained about the practice of "kettling" - corralling people in a limited area and not letting them leave for a certain time - a practice that, not infrequently, scoops up and seriously inconveniences innocent passers-by. Then there's the practice of police systematically photographing demonstrators (try to photograph a cop, on the other hand, and you stand a good chance of being arrested on the spot).
The police superintendent wheeled out to defend the Met talked about the "small minority" of "troublemakers", whom, apparently, the police can't distinguish from the eternal "law-abiding majority". And so, he concluded, the fuzz have no choice but to treat everyone as a potential terrorist.
That officer, I thought, was missing the point in the same way I've been talking about here. By casting "police" as "us" and "protesters" as "them", the police have made their job a hundred times harder. Police are supposed to see all law-abiding people as "us"; only criminals are "them". If they didn't treat every protester as a criminal - an enemy - then maybe the protesters themselves would be more inclined to help the cops do their job.
Mistrust leads to resentment. Resentment leads to hostility. Hostility leads to enmity. The pursuit of economic rationality has led us into a deeply dysfunctional world, one in which everyone really is our enemy.
Somehow, we need to rebuild trust.
A good starting point might be to rethink what we mean by "trust".
If someone lies to us, and we know they're lying to us, does that mean we shouldn't trust them?
"What are you thinking about?"There are times we choose to accept the lie, knowning full well what it is, because we trust the liar.
"Oh, nothing."
Catholics are familiar with this concept. They've long since accepted that the fairy-tales told in the Bible are not "true" in the strict sense of being literal descriptions of actual events as they happened. But that doesn't matter. What actually happened to a bunch of ancient Jews is not important to us, now, today: what matters is how we live our lives and bear ourselves to God, and the stories in the Bible (they believe) are the best guide to how we should do that. "Truth" is immaterial - only "faith" matters. That's what our sceptical age has forgotten.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Deep Thought, shallow mind
IBM announces a computer that simulates a cat's brain.
Well, not quite. What it says it's actually built is a neural network with as many neurons as a cat's cerebral cortex. That's quite a long way short of a cat's whole brain. And it works at least a hundred times slower than the real thing. And it takes truly ridiculous amounts of computing power and memory to do it - if you could somehow chain together every computer I've ever seen in my life, including various super-computers in my journalistic career, they wouldn't even be fit to read its keyboard.
The thing must play a mean game of chess.
Why a cat? Because neurologists have been playing with cats' brains for a very long time. I still remember reading an account in Scientific American of dream research on cats, over 30 years ago, and they've remained a popular experimental subject ever since. Maybe because they're so like humans - egotistical, arrogant and lazy. Anyway, the feline brain is extremely well mapped territory.
And of course it lends itself to all the obvious jokes about lasagne and mice and sleeping and walking on keyboards...
Which brings me to my point. (Yes, I've got one.)
If you build a brain without a body to put it in - what is it going to think about?
I don't know about you, but when I wake up in the morning the very first thing I think about is generally "does it feel like I've had enough hours asleep?" - if not, I'll start looking for clues (like light and noise levels) that might indicate that it's not, in fact, morning. If it's still night, I'll try to eliminate whatever discomfort caused me to wake up and then get back to sleep. If it is morning, then I'll try to make myself as comfortable as possible while I open curtains, drink tea, dress, breakfast, etc., etc...
Basically, the driving motivation of my thoughts at this point is my bodily comfort.
And that remains true for a lot of the day. My body needs things to eat, clothes to wear, a roof over its head and a chair under its bum, all of which it will go to considerable trouble to optimise. It contains, within it, the desires for chocolate, alcohol, sex, coffee, toilet paper and other good things. Take all those desires away, and what exactly would be left?
"This intellectual being/These thoughts that wander through eternity", as Milton puts it. But would those even exist, if it weren't for the deeper physical needs that give rise to them? Even the sense of boredom is caused by physical constraints - the physical inability to do what you want to, when you want to do it. In science fiction, the archetypal Brain In A Jar is usually obsessed with the simple goal of acquiring a body for itself. (Or - which is the same thing - the delusion that it already has one.)
But if it had no concept of what a body was, then what exactly would it think about?
If anyone from IBM is reading this, maybe they can answer me.
Well, not quite. What it says it's actually built is a neural network with as many neurons as a cat's cerebral cortex. That's quite a long way short of a cat's whole brain. And it works at least a hundred times slower than the real thing. And it takes truly ridiculous amounts of computing power and memory to do it - if you could somehow chain together every computer I've ever seen in my life, including various super-computers in my journalistic career, they wouldn't even be fit to read its keyboard.
The thing must play a mean game of chess.
Why a cat? Because neurologists have been playing with cats' brains for a very long time. I still remember reading an account in Scientific American of dream research on cats, over 30 years ago, and they've remained a popular experimental subject ever since. Maybe because they're so like humans - egotistical, arrogant and lazy. Anyway, the feline brain is extremely well mapped territory.
And of course it lends itself to all the obvious jokes about lasagne and mice and sleeping and walking on keyboards...
Which brings me to my point. (Yes, I've got one.)
If you build a brain without a body to put it in - what is it going to think about?
I don't know about you, but when I wake up in the morning the very first thing I think about is generally "does it feel like I've had enough hours asleep?" - if not, I'll start looking for clues (like light and noise levels) that might indicate that it's not, in fact, morning. If it's still night, I'll try to eliminate whatever discomfort caused me to wake up and then get back to sleep. If it is morning, then I'll try to make myself as comfortable as possible while I open curtains, drink tea, dress, breakfast, etc., etc...
Basically, the driving motivation of my thoughts at this point is my bodily comfort.
And that remains true for a lot of the day. My body needs things to eat, clothes to wear, a roof over its head and a chair under its bum, all of which it will go to considerable trouble to optimise. It contains, within it, the desires for chocolate, alcohol, sex, coffee, toilet paper and other good things. Take all those desires away, and what exactly would be left?
"This intellectual being/These thoughts that wander through eternity", as Milton puts it. But would those even exist, if it weren't for the deeper physical needs that give rise to them? Even the sense of boredom is caused by physical constraints - the physical inability to do what you want to, when you want to do it. In science fiction, the archetypal Brain In A Jar is usually obsessed with the simple goal of acquiring a body for itself. (Or - which is the same thing - the delusion that it already has one.)
But if it had no concept of what a body was, then what exactly would it think about?
If anyone from IBM is reading this, maybe they can answer me.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
The price of liberty is - everything
Of all the sad things about the Internet, the fourth most depressing, I've decided, is the rise of "libertarianism".
This, for those of you lucky enough to have missed it, is a political idea whose conditions seem to be ripe - though not as ripe as its conclusions, which are higher than a skunk's latrine. During the Cold War it seemed just plain silly; before the Internet it was written off as an adolescent phase one grows out of, much like Leninism; before the economic crisis it seemed to be addressing an abstract, tedious problem that few people cared about. But now it's gaining traction.
It's sad, really. "Libertarianism" started out as an extreme left-wing idea, aimed at freeing people from the shackles of arbitrary authority. Now, it's been adopted gleefully by those whose main concern is to preserve their own privileges. For that, I mostly blame Ayn Rand - the woman who made a career out of her personal bitterness that the Russian Revolution had robbed her of the wealth and privilege that, she was raised to believe, were hers by right. Rand took a deeply held personal belief - that there could be no possible justification for strangers to have taken her toys away - and turned it into what's euphemistically called the "philosophy" of Objectivism.
Now, in a reasoned debate with any real political philosopher, Rand wouldn't have lasted five minutes. In her lifetime she was, rightly, ignored by everyone. Her ideas simply don't take account of - well, pretty much anything outside her own head.
But on the Internet, that's no longer a problem. Online, it's not hard to find a clique of true believers for absolutely anything. St Patricks' Day is a global conspiracy to promote the colour green? Barack Obama is the direct male heir of Genghis Khan? The Rapture actually happened in 2002, and now we're living through the End Times? There is no belief so bizarre that some idiots won't support it.
Better yet, those who don't support you - no matter how numerous - can simply be ignored. And so you can live in a beautiful dream bubble in which yours is the mainstream opinion, and you never have to defend it. It's a curious paradox, that free speech has delivered us to exactly the opposite of the situation that John Stuart Mill, with his sunny Victorian logic, hoped for: where every idea goes unchallenged, and nobody ever needs to change their mind.
And people see these sites, and there will always be a small number of those people who imagine that there must be something to them.
Take this drivel, for example. These morons seem to think that there are people who oppose exploiting the Earth. (Of course there are such people, by the same no-niche-left-unfilled principle I've just been describing. But to characterise this belief - that we need to exploit the Earth - as a courageous, individualistic stand against repressive conformism, makes about as much sense as handing out leaflets proclaiming "The sky is UP! Don't let THEM deny it!")
The Exploit-the-Earth loons remind me of the philosophy of Franz Fanon, who held that violence has a liberating effect. To make oneself free, one must break taboos; and the greatest of these is violence, especially murder. How do you show your defiance for the eco-nazis who would subjugate human life to the interests of trees and squirrels? Set fire to a tree today!
We are free, within the law, to destroy what we own. You can, if you like, buy a field, then salt the earth with chemicals so nasty that nothing will grow there and no builder will ever want to build on it. It's your property - if you want to destroy it utterly, the libertarians would say, that's nobody's business but your own.
But does that make it right?
This, for those of you lucky enough to have missed it, is a political idea whose conditions seem to be ripe - though not as ripe as its conclusions, which are higher than a skunk's latrine. During the Cold War it seemed just plain silly; before the Internet it was written off as an adolescent phase one grows out of, much like Leninism; before the economic crisis it seemed to be addressing an abstract, tedious problem that few people cared about. But now it's gaining traction.
It's sad, really. "Libertarianism" started out as an extreme left-wing idea, aimed at freeing people from the shackles of arbitrary authority. Now, it's been adopted gleefully by those whose main concern is to preserve their own privileges. For that, I mostly blame Ayn Rand - the woman who made a career out of her personal bitterness that the Russian Revolution had robbed her of the wealth and privilege that, she was raised to believe, were hers by right. Rand took a deeply held personal belief - that there could be no possible justification for strangers to have taken her toys away - and turned it into what's euphemistically called the "philosophy" of Objectivism.
Now, in a reasoned debate with any real political philosopher, Rand wouldn't have lasted five minutes. In her lifetime she was, rightly, ignored by everyone. Her ideas simply don't take account of - well, pretty much anything outside her own head.
But on the Internet, that's no longer a problem. Online, it's not hard to find a clique of true believers for absolutely anything. St Patricks' Day is a global conspiracy to promote the colour green? Barack Obama is the direct male heir of Genghis Khan? The Rapture actually happened in 2002, and now we're living through the End Times? There is no belief so bizarre that some idiots won't support it.
Better yet, those who don't support you - no matter how numerous - can simply be ignored. And so you can live in a beautiful dream bubble in which yours is the mainstream opinion, and you never have to defend it. It's a curious paradox, that free speech has delivered us to exactly the opposite of the situation that John Stuart Mill, with his sunny Victorian logic, hoped for: where every idea goes unchallenged, and nobody ever needs to change their mind.
And people see these sites, and there will always be a small number of those people who imagine that there must be something to them.
Take this drivel, for example. These morons seem to think that there are people who oppose exploiting the Earth. (Of course there are such people, by the same no-niche-left-unfilled principle I've just been describing. But to characterise this belief - that we need to exploit the Earth - as a courageous, individualistic stand against repressive conformism, makes about as much sense as handing out leaflets proclaiming "The sky is UP! Don't let THEM deny it!")
The Exploit-the-Earth loons remind me of the philosophy of Franz Fanon, who held that violence has a liberating effect. To make oneself free, one must break taboos; and the greatest of these is violence, especially murder. How do you show your defiance for the eco-nazis who would subjugate human life to the interests of trees and squirrels? Set fire to a tree today!
We are free, within the law, to destroy what we own. You can, if you like, buy a field, then salt the earth with chemicals so nasty that nothing will grow there and no builder will ever want to build on it. It's your property - if you want to destroy it utterly, the libertarians would say, that's nobody's business but your own.
But does that make it right?
Friday, September 11, 2009
Responsibility
I see Gordon Brown has issued "an apology" to Alan Turing, for the persecution he suffered at the hands of the British government.
That's all nice and peachy, but it does raise the question: "What exactly is an apology for?" It's a bit late for Turing, who's been pushing up daisies this half-century or more. Gordon Brown was less than three years old when Turing died, which makes his personal complicity a bit tenuous, and his contrition a bit - contrived. None of the officials who had anything to do with his case are still alive - or if they are, they're understandably keeping their heads down.
Such belated apologies are all the rage lately. When Tony Blair came to power in 1997, practically the first thing he did was to apologise for Britain's actions in the Irish potato blight. The Australian prime minister apologised for the treatment of aborigines; the Japanese government issued an apology to the "comfort women" of those parts of Asia occupied during the war; Pope John Paul II apologised for many of the past crimes committed in the name of the Catholic Church, with particular reference to women, "other Christians" and Jews. Last year, the Church of England issued an apology to Charles Darwin, and earlier this year, the US Congress apologised for slavery.
These apologies vary in coherence and usefulness. The Pope's statement was admirably clear as to its goal ("We are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours [Jews] to suffer, and asking your forgiveness, we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood") - but vague as to exactly what he thought he was apologising for.
The Japanese and Australian apologies have been different in that at least some of the victims of their actions are still alive, and the governments have actually made token gestures towards restitution. It would be going too far to call them "sincere", but they at least seem to have some meaning.
The American apology over slavery, it seems to me, is simply incoherent. Since Congress now represents all Americans, black and white, it follows that part of the nation was apologising to itself. It may express regret, but by "apologising", it seems to me that the US government is implicitly saying "we, a white nation, have done wrong". It would make more sense for Georgia to apologise to the Cherokee over the Trail of Tears - since both the state of Georgia and the Cherokee nation still exist as distinct entities in their own right - but that would inevitably open a whole can of worms about all the Indian nations: treaties broken, wars and war crimes on both sides throughout the 19th century.
Tony Blair's apology over Ireland made more sense: "Ireland" is still a recognisable entitiy, and Blair was the legitimate, linear successor of Lord Russell. However, the timing made it clear that the driving need was not for absolution, but to be seen to make a concession for the sake of peace in Northern Ireland. It was based squarely on the needs of present-day politics, not historical understanding.
The Church of England, for its part, was mostly interested in diverting attention from its internal struggles over gay clergy. The Darwin apology was part smokescreen, part weapon against its own fundamentalists - by reminding them that the Church had erred in the past by being too strict, not the opposite.
And Gordon Brown's is similar. In the wake of the furore over the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Turing apology serves several purposes. It creates some mostly-good press; it subtly reminds the western world in general, and America in particular, that Britain has its own priorities and sense of justice; and it reminds them that there was a time, within living memory, when the whole of the western world - America included - had reason to be very glad of that sense.
Otherwise, it makes little sense. Turing's persecution was not something the government of the day set out to do wilfully or spitefully: in 1952, anti-homosexual attitudes were deeply entrenched in practically all levels of society. Turing was not singled out by an enemy, but prosecuted, quite routinely, by the legal system. It's not the government that owes him an apology: it's the British people. The logical person to apologise to him, on behalf of us all, would be the queen. Not Gordon Brown.
Nor is Brown foreswearing the practice that led to Turing's plight: basing laws solely on public morality, not public welfare. On the contrary, he has presided over a considerable expansion of laws banning things on the basis of nothing more tangible than public disgust.
I firmly believe that this blurring of distinctions between roles - between people, state, and different layers of government - is the cause of most of what's wrong in our world.
Take the al-Megrahi case, for instance. Whether he was guilty or not, he was clearly a scapegoat for his country. We pretended that he alone was responsible for Lockerbie, because we could punish him and then move on with commerce. That's why he was greeted as a hero in his own country, and rightly so. He was a hero - a sacrifice on behalf of his country. That should surely earn him some glory on his return.
And his release - the British and Scots governments alike find it convenient to pretend that this was a purely Scottish legal decision, with no political interference. This is of course garbage - both governments clearly interfered for all they were worth - but by pretending it was "just the normal course of Scottish justice", they both disclaim responsibility, and thus avoid embarrassing questions. It's a trick that successive British governments have used to great effect. Unpopular policies are blamed on Europe, or America, or the World Trade Organization, or some treaty or other. More often than not this is pure smoke; the policy is the government's own.
And even if it isn't, the decision to implement it in this damn' silly way - is.
That's all nice and peachy, but it does raise the question: "What exactly is an apology for?" It's a bit late for Turing, who's been pushing up daisies this half-century or more. Gordon Brown was less than three years old when Turing died, which makes his personal complicity a bit tenuous, and his contrition a bit - contrived. None of the officials who had anything to do with his case are still alive - or if they are, they're understandably keeping their heads down.
Such belated apologies are all the rage lately. When Tony Blair came to power in 1997, practically the first thing he did was to apologise for Britain's actions in the Irish potato blight. The Australian prime minister apologised for the treatment of aborigines; the Japanese government issued an apology to the "comfort women" of those parts of Asia occupied during the war; Pope John Paul II apologised for many of the past crimes committed in the name of the Catholic Church, with particular reference to women, "other Christians" and Jews. Last year, the Church of England issued an apology to Charles Darwin, and earlier this year, the US Congress apologised for slavery.
These apologies vary in coherence and usefulness. The Pope's statement was admirably clear as to its goal ("We are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours [Jews] to suffer, and asking your forgiveness, we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood") - but vague as to exactly what he thought he was apologising for.
The Japanese and Australian apologies have been different in that at least some of the victims of their actions are still alive, and the governments have actually made token gestures towards restitution. It would be going too far to call them "sincere", but they at least seem to have some meaning.
The American apology over slavery, it seems to me, is simply incoherent. Since Congress now represents all Americans, black and white, it follows that part of the nation was apologising to itself. It may express regret, but by "apologising", it seems to me that the US government is implicitly saying "we, a white nation, have done wrong". It would make more sense for Georgia to apologise to the Cherokee over the Trail of Tears - since both the state of Georgia and the Cherokee nation still exist as distinct entities in their own right - but that would inevitably open a whole can of worms about all the Indian nations: treaties broken, wars and war crimes on both sides throughout the 19th century.
Tony Blair's apology over Ireland made more sense: "Ireland" is still a recognisable entitiy, and Blair was the legitimate, linear successor of Lord Russell. However, the timing made it clear that the driving need was not for absolution, but to be seen to make a concession for the sake of peace in Northern Ireland. It was based squarely on the needs of present-day politics, not historical understanding.
The Church of England, for its part, was mostly interested in diverting attention from its internal struggles over gay clergy. The Darwin apology was part smokescreen, part weapon against its own fundamentalists - by reminding them that the Church had erred in the past by being too strict, not the opposite.
And Gordon Brown's is similar. In the wake of the furore over the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Turing apology serves several purposes. It creates some mostly-good press; it subtly reminds the western world in general, and America in particular, that Britain has its own priorities and sense of justice; and it reminds them that there was a time, within living memory, when the whole of the western world - America included - had reason to be very glad of that sense.
Otherwise, it makes little sense. Turing's persecution was not something the government of the day set out to do wilfully or spitefully: in 1952, anti-homosexual attitudes were deeply entrenched in practically all levels of society. Turing was not singled out by an enemy, but prosecuted, quite routinely, by the legal system. It's not the government that owes him an apology: it's the British people. The logical person to apologise to him, on behalf of us all, would be the queen. Not Gordon Brown.
Nor is Brown foreswearing the practice that led to Turing's plight: basing laws solely on public morality, not public welfare. On the contrary, he has presided over a considerable expansion of laws banning things on the basis of nothing more tangible than public disgust.
I firmly believe that this blurring of distinctions between roles - between people, state, and different layers of government - is the cause of most of what's wrong in our world.
Take the al-Megrahi case, for instance. Whether he was guilty or not, he was clearly a scapegoat for his country. We pretended that he alone was responsible for Lockerbie, because we could punish him and then move on with commerce. That's why he was greeted as a hero in his own country, and rightly so. He was a hero - a sacrifice on behalf of his country. That should surely earn him some glory on his return.
And his release - the British and Scots governments alike find it convenient to pretend that this was a purely Scottish legal decision, with no political interference. This is of course garbage - both governments clearly interfered for all they were worth - but by pretending it was "just the normal course of Scottish justice", they both disclaim responsibility, and thus avoid embarrassing questions. It's a trick that successive British governments have used to great effect. Unpopular policies are blamed on Europe, or America, or the World Trade Organization, or some treaty or other. More often than not this is pure smoke; the policy is the government's own.
And even if it isn't, the decision to implement it in this damn' silly way - is.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
The tree of nuts
There's something that bothers me about the sight of an armed man talking about "watering the tree of liberty".
(I would reprint the picture here, but I can't find a copyright-free version, so you'll have follow the link if you don't know what I'm talking about.)
It's not the sight of an armed man apparently so close to the president. I'm sure the Secret Service is on top of that, and anyway, it'd do any president good to feel a little less cocooned from time to time. Nor is it the reference to blood, or the implied threat. Well, not wholly that, anyway. No, what bothers me most is the double standard.
In 2004, Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker was publicly charged with threatening the life of the president from an ocean away, with no more than an ironic joke - in a television review column. After an almighty ruckus, the Guardian was forced to not only issue an apology, but also delete the article from its website. You want to read it today? Tough.
But when a man who's actually got a gun makes a much more specific and personal threat, from within the same town as the president himself, that's free speech?
Yeah, I'm seeing how that works.
People who talk about "liberty" need watching. It's not the same as "freedom". Freedom is harmless - you're born with it, you decide every minute of every day how to exercise it, and most people manage to do so their whole lives without ever seriously endangering another human being. But "liberty" is something positive, it's a thing that has to be seized from the cold, dead hands of "tyrants". The very word is drenched in the blood of martyrs. "Freedom" is an assertion; "liberty", an accusation.
(I would reprint the picture here, but I can't find a copyright-free version, so you'll have follow the link if you don't know what I'm talking about.)
It's not the sight of an armed man apparently so close to the president. I'm sure the Secret Service is on top of that, and anyway, it'd do any president good to feel a little less cocooned from time to time. Nor is it the reference to blood, or the implied threat. Well, not wholly that, anyway. No, what bothers me most is the double standard.
In 2004, Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker was publicly charged with threatening the life of the president from an ocean away, with no more than an ironic joke - in a television review column. After an almighty ruckus, the Guardian was forced to not only issue an apology, but also delete the article from its website. You want to read it today? Tough.
But when a man who's actually got a gun makes a much more specific and personal threat, from within the same town as the president himself, that's free speech?
Yeah, I'm seeing how that works.
People who talk about "liberty" need watching. It's not the same as "freedom". Freedom is harmless - you're born with it, you decide every minute of every day how to exercise it, and most people manage to do so their whole lives without ever seriously endangering another human being. But "liberty" is something positive, it's a thing that has to be seized from the cold, dead hands of "tyrants". The very word is drenched in the blood of martyrs. "Freedom" is an assertion; "liberty", an accusation.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
The science of karma
A fascinating new study from Germany finds that revenge doesn't pay.
In a sane world, this would be no surprise. Energy spent on making someone else's life crap, is energy that's not working for oneself, or one's loved ones. In economic terms, it's simply a waste of resources. From Othello to Captain Ahab to the Count of Monte Cristo, our culture is full of illustrations of how revenge is a dish best not eaten at all.
The fact that this isn't considered blindingly obvious is probably because there are so many batshit-insane people around nowadays. In particular, believers in that beguiling branch of maths known as "game theory" - a category that, nowadays, includes almost everyone concerned with social sciences. Game theory, as popularly interpreted, implies that if someone does something bad to you, you should retaliate proportionately against them.
As far as it goes, the theory is fair enough. But it doesn't go nearly as far as many people think it does. Game theory, like every mathematical theory I've ever heard of, is based on a vast pile of mostly-unspoken assumptions that simply aren't true in the real world. For instance, there's the assumption that all players are following the same rules, which are not liable to change. Then there's the assumption that the number of players is constant - nobody will enter or leave the game mid-way. Or that all players have the same motivation. In most economic and social contexts, these assumptions are patently absurd. But they're so seldom stated that it's easy to forget they're there.
Now, thanks to Prof Dr Armin Falk of Bonn University and his co-authors, we have concrete evidence that "negative reciprocity" is truly counter-productive. In particular, the study finds, vengeful people are much more likely to find themselves unemployed.
What does work, on the other hand, is "positive reciprocity". Turns out that, regardless of the level of motivation, returning good behaviour leads to a much more profitable relationship than punishing bad behaviour.
What I like about this study is that it doesn't care about means or mechanisms. It doesn't try to prove, or even imply, that reward is a better motivator than punishment, or that relationships based on threat of punishment are unhealthy. It doesn't even try to argue with game theory. Maybe these things are true, maybe they aren't; that's not the point here. The point is that there is a measurable difference in outcomes.
In a sane world, this would be no surprise. Energy spent on making someone else's life crap, is energy that's not working for oneself, or one's loved ones. In economic terms, it's simply a waste of resources. From Othello to Captain Ahab to the Count of Monte Cristo, our culture is full of illustrations of how revenge is a dish best not eaten at all.
The fact that this isn't considered blindingly obvious is probably because there are so many batshit-insane people around nowadays. In particular, believers in that beguiling branch of maths known as "game theory" - a category that, nowadays, includes almost everyone concerned with social sciences. Game theory, as popularly interpreted, implies that if someone does something bad to you, you should retaliate proportionately against them.
As far as it goes, the theory is fair enough. But it doesn't go nearly as far as many people think it does. Game theory, like every mathematical theory I've ever heard of, is based on a vast pile of mostly-unspoken assumptions that simply aren't true in the real world. For instance, there's the assumption that all players are following the same rules, which are not liable to change. Then there's the assumption that the number of players is constant - nobody will enter or leave the game mid-way. Or that all players have the same motivation. In most economic and social contexts, these assumptions are patently absurd. But they're so seldom stated that it's easy to forget they're there.
Now, thanks to Prof Dr Armin Falk of Bonn University and his co-authors, we have concrete evidence that "negative reciprocity" is truly counter-productive. In particular, the study finds, vengeful people are much more likely to find themselves unemployed.
What does work, on the other hand, is "positive reciprocity". Turns out that, regardless of the level of motivation, returning good behaviour leads to a much more profitable relationship than punishing bad behaviour.
What I like about this study is that it doesn't care about means or mechanisms. It doesn't try to prove, or even imply, that reward is a better motivator than punishment, or that relationships based on threat of punishment are unhealthy. It doesn't even try to argue with game theory. Maybe these things are true, maybe they aren't; that's not the point here. The point is that there is a measurable difference in outcomes.
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