Invisible royalty

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It has been a dream since time immemorial to be granted one infinitely potent wish.  For those in myth and fable who have realised this dream, the results have not been happy.  When Paris asked for the most beautiful woman in the world, he gained not only Helen but also the Trojan War, his city's fall and his own death.  And Midas' unconsidered lust for gold destroyed the only thing he loved, his daughter.

People err in choosing causes rather than effects.  We say we want limitless wealth or power: we should consider why we want them.  Wealth and power are abstractions, realised only in their manifestation as ulterior objects and acts.  Given that any cause ramifies infinitely and in unsuspected ways, it is hardly surprising that neglecting to specify effects brings its attendant problems.

Intoxicated by possibilities, people also err in going to extremes.  To be rich you do not need to turn everything you touch to a precious metal, however seductive the symbolism may be.  Similarly, dominion over the world is trickier to wield than to ask for: the higher you rise, the more visible your success, the more obvious the disparity between you and your rivals, and the greater the incentive for them to pull you down.

The secret of success in this endeavour seems to lie in two things.  First, to specify very precisely the desired result, and secondly to cause as few ripples as possible.  Ideally this would imply that you get what you want without disturbing the rest of the world in the slightest; then there are no vengeful Agamemnons to come thundering after you.

Following these principles, the perfect wish might be based on a simple, everyday observation: that sometimes you seem to be flowing with the tide, sometimes against it.  In the former condition, you turn up at a station, and a train appears ten seconds later; when you arrive at a theatre that is sold out, somebody next to you asks if anyone would like to buy some spare tickets; traffic lights turn green as you approach them, allowing you to drive straight through without slowing down.  All of these things happen to all of us; but not all of the time.  My wish would be that, for me, they did.

I do not specify how this is to happen: I ask only for some mild effects.  Mild because as far as the rest of the world is concerned, they do not exist.  For everyone else, the train would continue to arrive randomly, sometimes just after they arrive, sometimes not.  Spare tickets would still occasionally materialise for sold-out performances.  Only from my privileged perspective is something special going on.  There would be no resentment, no attempts to deny me this convenience, because no one would be aware of it.

Contrast this with the people for whom the train does always leave just after they arrive, and who never are turned away from theatres or wait for red traffic lights.  Those who have this awesome power today are called royalty; and the price they pay for it is awesome too.  I, who would pay nothing, would be a new, more splendid variety: an invisible royalty.

(1987)

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Socratic wisdom

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To read Plato's Socratic dialogues is a thrilling intellectual experience.  They are vivid: it is easy to believe that you are there, sitting in some Athenian agora, or walking through the surrounding countryside, listening to the constant probings of this eccentric old man.  They are hauntingly familiar, shot through as they are with ideas which have since become central to Western culture.  But above all they offer a pristine sense of discovery: here, you feel, true philosophy, true knowledge, began.

Much of this sense arises from a return to absolute basics in the form of a newly-discovered fascination with words.  At the centre of Socrates' investigations of life's greatest issues - what is virtue? how should we live? - is a concentration on the key ideas: truth, the good, justice.  From the words themselves Socrates attempts to extract the vital core of those concepts, using a keen intelligence like a knife to strip away the inessentials to reveal their heart.  In comparison with this rigour, the earlier philosophers' attempts to build up a theory of the world look like fairy tales, fanciful collections of facts on which some arbitrary structure - the primacy of one of the four elements, say - has been imposed to lend a specious order.  In contrast, Socrates' method seems inarguably right - and totally contemporary.

Indeed, most modern philosophy proceeds in this way; the best of it offers us the same sense of Socratic exhilaration.  For example, the deepest German thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries -  above all Immanuel Kant - squeeze out drop after rarefied drop from those same key words: God, being, perfection, and the rest.  What is particularly exciting for the lay reader is the common starting point: these are our words, our concepts too; it is simply the genius of the great philosopher that takes them so far from their origins, just as a great pianist can turn even our domestic piano into a mighty instrument for soaring symphonies of sound.

We are so amazed by this intellectual funambulism - as the masters walk out over the metaphysical abyss into which the rest of us stare, edging their way across to the haven of knowledge and certitude - that we tend to overlook how unsatisfactory the end-result proves to be.  Witness the innumerable exegeses of the greatest philosophers' ideas, all of which contain hesitations, doubts, demurrals, or plain incomprehension.

We find this Socratic approach credible partly because of the inspiring example of mathematics.  There, a few simple axioms give rise to the most complex and elegant results - all of which are, in some sense, contained in the original assumptions, and which can be teased out by human ingenuity.  We somehow expect metaphysics to do the same with the corresponding raw stuff of ideas, as embodied in words.  But metaphysics seems to lack the precise tools of mathematical enquiry which allow each step of a proof to be inarguably verified.  As a result, different philosophers can with equal plausibility draw different - even opposing - conclusions from the same initial concept.  In our enthusiasm for this aspect of the Socratic method, we would do well to bear in mind Socrates' own assessment of why he was dubbed by the Delphic oracle the wisest man in Athens: because he knew how little he knew.

(1989)

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Intraviewing

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Interviews lie at the heart of most personal business interactions.  They are an attempt to cram into a few hours or even a few minutes the whole complicated affair of getting to know someone.  But unlike its social correlate, the process of interviewing is designed to come up with an answer, to pass final judgement on a person's worth.  As a result, there is an unnatural pressure on both the interviewer - to winkle out the 'truth' - and the interviewed - to give the best impression.  The two goals may be mutually incompatible.

Though the subject of the interview undoubtedly suffers more, the good interviewer probably works harder.  Interviewers are confronted with a complex human pinball game: they must ask questions, which presupposes some overall structure to the meeting, even if that structure evolves contingently; they must listen to the answers, knowing when to let silences hang, when to prompt, when to cut off; they must think of the next question which may or may not refer back to the previous answers and may affect later quizzing; they must also watch out for the tell-tale non-verbal clues - the hand covering the mouth, the scratch of the head, the constantly averted glance.  All this they must do, often while they read background information, write notes and begin to form an opinion.

The satisfaction gained from meeting these demands can prove addictive.  Like a deft sports player who hungers for ever more challenging opponents, the interviewer begins to relish the difficult interview where the subject dries up, is deeply inconsistent, or - best of all - responds with an equally dextrous finesse.

But there is another, far more insidious, pleasure to be had from interviewing.  At some point every interviewer realises that for thirty minutes, or an hour perhaps, in that small room, for that one person, they are God.  By attending the interview people implicitly accept your right to ask practically anything.  Their task is to aid you in your discovery that they are indeed the person you are searching for.  To expedite that realisation, they must therefore offer themselves to you for scrutiny as willing and submissive objects.  In doing so, they acquiesce in a state of vulnerability which is probably unique to this context, a vulnerability, moreover, proffered to a total stranger.

Even when an interviewer begins to abuse this submission, most subjects dare not retaliate; they find it hard to jump back to more general etiquettes where such behaviour would never be tolerated.  To disturb the unequal but accepted dynamics between the interviewer and the interviewed would inevitably threaten the format of the interview itself.  And without the interview there can be no success.

For this reason the interviewer must wield this immense if short-lived power with circumspection and responsibility.  An interview is like a profound but concentrated one-sided friendship: the interviewed offer you the chance to understand their deepest hopes and fears, to get inside their mind, but demand no reciprocal soul-baring from you.  This is more than interviewing, it is intraviewing.  It is a great and rare privilege.

(1989)

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Repeatability

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There is an ancient tale about a mighty emperor and a great artist.  The artist creates for the emperor a work of surpassing beauty.  Deeply moved by this work, the emperor asks the artist whether he could ever create another, identical, masterpiece.  'Assuredly, your majesty, I could create a hundred such works,' replies the artist, hoping for patronage.  Instead, the emperor has him instantly put to death, thus ensuring that the work of unmatched loveliness remains unique forever.

At the beginning of culture, there was no such dilemma for the prospective owner.  Every artefact was necessarily one of a kind.  It bore the marks of its maker as surely and indelibly as a child bears the features of its parents.  In this early Workshop of Eden, everything had a name from the moment of its creation.

Society developed.  Central to the idea of the new civilisation was the passing on of knowledge.  As human skills progressed, the concept of the pattern emerged, and with it fashion, the arbitrary and temporary preference for one pattern over another.  The latter soon led to objects being judged by their fashionability rather than their functionality: everybody wanted an amphora, but nobody wanted an ill-formed though perfectly serviceable amphora.  Since copies were to be mutually indistinguishable, they could have no past or future without an owner to redeem them from anonymity.  When things became numbers, the concept of consumerism was born, fashion's younger sibling.

But for centuries thereafter, full consumerism was still only a faint dream for the masses as yet unenfranchised by fashion, and a growing nightmare for the threatened elite of the already fashionable.  As manufacturing technology improved, the nearer the attainment of the grail of perfect repeatability became.  Although history's first assembly line - the ship-building works in the Venetian navy's Arsenal - was more concerned with quantity than quality, it showed the way for the fully-fledged factories of the Industrial Revolution and their later progeny.

Initially confined to material objects, the quest for repeatability has now infected all of modern life, passing from fashion into obsession.  Even our food has succumbed: when we buy a tin of soup we do not buy just soup; we buy the exact taste and consistency of that particular brand of soup.  Which is why we are so shocked when the same brand dares once to be different: like children, we want the world to remain safely and eternally familiar.  And this hunger for the perfectly and reliably repeatable experience now informs every consumer action: we buy a pop star's new album and watch a film's latest sequel in the hope that they will offer more of the same experiences, but with different details.

Even as we crave repeatability, we demand its negation - novelty.  But having found the new, we are doomed to return to it and to ask for the same novel experience.  If we do not, we are still in thrall to the tyranny of life's repeatability.  Yet if we do, we have simply extended the boundary of that tyranny.  Perhaps the tale of the emperor and the artist contains more wisdom in its barbarousness than we care to admit.

(1988)

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