The oscillating universe

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When we are born, we are co-extensive with the universe.  The light, the food, the warmth, everything that happens is part of us, a manifestation of our being.  Although we cannot formulate what it is, we know without self-consciousness or mediation, that the sun is at one with us, and that its rising is as much our natural and unwilled movement as our breathing or the beating of our heart.

Gradually, though, through small and larger pains, through encountering strange obstacles which do not bend to our will, we learn that there is an Other out there, a Not-us.  With time and a honing of the treacherous senses, that Otherness grows like a black balloon, filling all the space around us, until the darkness seems infinite, and we, small and frightened children now, an insignificant speck within it.

As during childhood our mind begins to understand this vastness, to order it through intelligence, we start to re-claim our lost natal heritage.  First our immediate surroundings are rendered safe, moulded into an integral part of our world, a daily given; then more and more is added until as an adolescent we feel that the universe may still be vast, a worrying and threatening place, but that our powers too are vast.

This is the glorious overconfidence of youth.  Just as those who have never fallen deeply ill, crashed a car or been robbed secretly feel that they really are immune to troubles, so at this age we employ a false induction: since we have never failed, we can do anything.  This is the time of magnificent idealism, when we feel that we have a responsibility for the world, that we can - indeed must - change it for the better.  We embrace mankind and the globe like a benevolent giant.

We forget how infancy taught us the world wanted none of our hugs and kisses.  Slowly and with hurt, we re-learn this lesson.  Checked now physically, now mentally, now in work, now in love, we realise that we cannot storm the citadels of heaven; that we are mortal, that we will die, and probably without achievements.  So we begin to turn our glance away from the wider horizons; we turn inward to marriage, to a family.

In mature adulthood, our domain has shrunk to the confines of the home.  We have responsibilities enough without taking on the troubles of the world.  Perhaps we ought to care passionately about starving millions; but what with yet another pair of new shoes for little Joey, and the house needing a fresh coat of paint, it all seems so far away.  The older we get, the tireder we get, the more vulnerable we feel to the random and pointless ravages of fate.  We do not want to fight; we want a quiet life.

Finally, as old age asserts its dominion, we want even less.  All desires are past, incomprehensible memories.  Friends and family are dead or distant; nobody claims us out there.  Now, we are the world: our bodies become our pre-occupation - that ache, that stiffness, that weakness.  Our days become the measured and self-observed inhalation and exhalation of breath.  As our heartbeats slow, and the oblivion of sleep flees us, we become a silent watcher of our own being; nothing else exists.

(1989)

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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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Thoughts for your pennies

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First, the doll-like farthing went.  Then the twelve-sided brass threepenny bit, the halfpenny, and finally, in an orgy of numismatic vandalism, the shilling, the florin and the half-crown.  At a stroke, two thousand years of monetary history were swept away, a victim of ephemeral economics and a fetish for decimals.  The penny coin alone lives on, its nominal value increased, though otherwise pitiably reduced.

Holding an old penny today is a curious experience.  It feels so large and so heavy compared to the footling tiddlywink counter we so aptly call a 'p'.  It is a marvel of classic design, with its proud image of Britannia, and its stylised, cryptic inscription - itself almost a summary of English history over the last five hundred years - garlanding the monarch's head.  Moreover, it is not an isolated example like our current coin, which feels like a litter's runt: the same majestic form can be found in a great series which tracks centuries of Royalty in England.

Nor was this a theoretical assemblage.  Until decimalisation - that long, mincing weasel word for British money's equivalent to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria - nearly two hundred years of the past was to be found in your pocket, every day.  Searching through each handful of change made even the most mundane of financial transactions an adventure, a chance to stumble across a treasure subtly hidden by being everywhere.

Coins of Elizabeth II and George VI predominated; but those of George V and Edward VII were common too.  The former looked like the last Russian tsar, or perhaps Tchaikovsky, while the latter had the bald head of an all-in wrestler and the facial hair of an Airedale.  With characteristic formality each succeeding king or queen faced in alternating directions, partners in a regal pavan, making some look back to their predecessor, and others gaze ahead, as if trying to descry the future and the features that would one day in turn look back at them.  

But more exciting than any of these were the coins of Victoria.  In her sixty-five years as queen, billions of pennies were issued.  Though most were recalled to the Mint, surprising numbers survived down to our own day, and were to be found occasionally amongst the coinage of her descendants like an immortal old dowager turning up unexpectedly at a family gathering.  The length of her reign meant that her portrait changed several times, from the delicate young girl at the start - looking like something out of a Jane Austen novel - to the stout and dour old woman at the end, when the empress of a third of the world lived out her long widowhood in sadness and comparative solitude.

Finding any of her incarnations always sent a thrill through me.  This coin, I thought, has seen a hundred years of the world, been handled by half the nation, bought a million objects; what a story it could tell.  And I remembered one of those immortal school essay topics - 'The life of a penny' - which seemed so pointless then, but which now acquired a deeper wisdom.  A wisdom cut off now, just as that great metal river of coins pouring down through history has been cut off, dammed, diverted, and turned into the feeble trickle we know today.

(1989)

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The Turing point

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Most days of our lives we are required to prove who we are.  But communicating our identity to someone else - without recourse to intrusive techniques like genetic fingerprinting - is a tricky philosophical problem: in what true and dependable outward manifestations does the inner self lie?  Clearly, in nothing so mutable as appearance.  Instead, what is needed is some external correlate of the singularity that resides within.  Almost always the sign that is chosen is our signature.

On cheques, documents, instructions, receipts, orders and acknowledgements, our characteristic doodle is deemed to be a true and sufficient token of our participation and implication.  For most legal, economic and historical purposes, we are nothing but our signatures.  Yet how primitive it is: it harks back to an age when the ability to sign was so rare as to be almost magical.  The signature was like a secret rune, an imprint of the soul.  In practical terms, forgery was well-nigh impossible, since so few could write their own name, never mind anyone else's.  Today, the usefulness of signatures is founded on the assumption that, although ubiquitous now, each one remains inviolably unique.

This is about to change.  Technology is reaching the stage where machines will be able to produce perfect copies of any signature, correct down to the details of pen velocity, pressure and inclination to the paper.  At a stroke - or several - the trustworthiness of the signature will disappear.  With it will go our primary means of identifying people.

To combat this, other attributes will be investigated.  Voice recognition systems are already in use; their proponents claim that they can distinguish infallibly between a human voice and an impersonation.  This may be so, but related developments are subverting their usefulness.  Cognate devices can emulate an input voice by reversing the procedures of recognition, synthesising sound from the resultant data.  According to the original discrimination scheme, the output is necessarily identical.

A similar approach can be applied to any other human attribute.  For every verification test is made up of two processes: analysis and comparison.  The analysed input can therefore be used to reproduce all its salient characteristics - salient according to the test, that is - thus ensuring that the artificially constituted feature passes the test.  Anything that can be measured can be mimicked; and anything that mimics as well as the test can judge is indistinguishable by that test from the original.

So it will be that for any check proposed as a way of establishing personal identity, a machine will be able to mimic the specific feature under scrutiny.  Imagine, then, a machine that can simulate to the point of interchangeability every testable characteristic of a given person.  The aping machine, in all such respects, is that person.  Nor is this limited to the obvious tests of individuality: the same applies to intelligence, emotions and the rest of life's baggage.  This is the Turing point, when the distinction between machine and human vanishes.  And it will come.  Enjoy the uniqueness of your signature - and your humanity - while you can.

(1988)

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