Forever Eden

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"On Sunday 7th August your teddy can have a go at parachuting on Rusper School field...The guided walk will be 4-5 miles, starting from the Village Hall at 3 p.m., and returning for tea at approximately 5.30 p.m...There will be a coffee morning at Orltons, Rusper, on 11th July, from 10 a.m. till 12 noon.  Proceeds - 75% to St Catherine's Hospice, 25% to Rusper Conservative Association...Wanted urgently! Wool - odd balls or skeins - even old knitted items which can be unpicked - to keep the needles clicking on babies' vests and 6" squares...At the time of writing these notes, we are having quite a dry spell, and if this continues, it is a good time to hoe very diligently..."

Extracts from the July 1988 Parish News of St Mary Magdalene, Rusper.  A characteristic mix of endless tombola, religious propaganda, local politics, gardening, prayer, advertising and homely saws - 'a smile will always increase your face value.'  As English as the village of Rusper itself, with its main road, quiet and winding, and a side street dominated by the Victorian schoolhouse; a couple of ancient pubs, a general store with empty sherry bottles in its bare and dusty window, and venerable houses leaning on each other like old age pensioners; a noticeboard with the times of the daily bus to Horsham, and details of the next meeting of the parish council; an Elizabethan coaching inn - and, of course, the parish church.

Resplendent amidst the bright green grass and lichened graves, the warm stone of the neat and compact building has been meticulously restored, and looks as if it has been dressed and placed only yesterday.  Which it has, except that yesterday here is 700 years ago.  The simple and dignified nave ends in the thickset tower whose earliest arches are narrow and show only the slightest of points.  On the east face there is a clock; on the cover of the Parish News the hands stand at an eternal ten to three.  Inside, faded plaques record the three hours and three minutes taken to ring all the changes on the eight bells in 1903, together with a list of names.  Names of the bellringers, names that somehow always reappear on memorials to those fallen in that Great and most terrible war which shattered the old world of villages like Rusper forever.

Now it is the continual shrieking of the straining jets as they lift off from nearby Gatwick which rends the peace of this idyll.  But Rusper endures, just as the families who lost their sons and husbands and fathers endured.  Rusper and its ilk lie at the quiet and indestructible heart of England.  They populate a land which still has flower shows where the double crust apple pie is "to be displayed on a plate or board and not in a tin or container" if it is to be eligible for the 40p first prize or 20p second prize. A land which is easy to mock for its unfashionable beliefs: "Lady Cox asked for the prayers and support of fellow Christians in her endeavour to enshrine Christian worship and R.E. in our schools."  But it is also a land of fundamentally decent and caring folk - "my sincere and grateful thanks to the many people who wrote to me while I was in hospital.  The friendliness of Rusper people is indeed wonderful."  Wonderful indeed.  As the Reverend Eric Passingham says in his Letter from the Rectory: "The curtains pulled back revealed a touch of Eden."

(1988)

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Digital reality

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A few hundred years from now the world currency will be the Tera. Short for Terabyte, it represents a million million bytes of digital information. Roughly speaking this corresponds to half a million printed books. The data contained in a Tera will be arbitrary but meaningful: it will be the equivalent of a random selection of a twentieth of the British Library's present holdings. Within such a deluge there will be countless useful facts as well as countless useless ones. The sheer volume will ensure that there are enough of the former in every Tera to provide near parity in value with all other Teras of random structured information.

Surprisingly, a Tera is a small unit. A human being processes about two Teras every hour; multiply that by a world population of tens or hundreds of billions and you have millions of billions of new Teras every year. Add in the billions of computers and their information, as well as the countless billions of Teras from the past, and the quantity becomes unimaginable.

Billions of computers because by this time they will be ubiquitous. The basic models will be as small, cheap, and easy to use as a pen or pencil. Like pencils, they will be thrown away after a couple of uses. But where writing implements can be said only in a metaphorical sense to offer half a million English words or the ability to perform operations in calculus, the pen-sized computers will possess these skills literally, as well as providing myriad other functions.

But nobody will bother using them, any more than people use slide rules or log tables today. The real, state-of-the-art computers will be invisible. They will be the chair you sit in, the wall you lean against, the ground you walk on. The chair will not have a computer as such: it will be one. Or rather, every aspect of it - its shape, its colour, its position - will be the output from one.

Such environmental computers will no longer model reality through simulations: instead, they will offer an infinitely detailed alternative version that merges seamlessly into the old, physical variety. Potentially, every aspect of our world will be formed by computers capable of creating every experience.

Most people will be hooked on this drug of artificial, digital reality. Unlike the already addictive arcade games and television serials of today - which are flint tools in comparison to this future technology - digital reality will not just be a temporary substitute for real life, it will replace it totally, until the latter has no independent meaning. Like all junkies, digital addicts will habituate and constantly demand fresh stimulation in the form of new, manufactured experiences. To provide them, the billions of environmental computers must feed ravenously and unceasingly off the only source of experience's raw material, the Teras of structured data held around the planet. Their competing demands for a limited resource will valorise it; information will become society's most sought-after commodity, its invisible gold, its weightless coinage. Those that control that information, the data lords, will rule the world.

(1989)

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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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