What's the risk?

Reading Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of our Nature” is a lesson in the life affirming properties of good statistics. His subject – violence –is one that arouses strong emotions, feelings that constantly lead us to conclusions that are wildly inaccurate. The danger of terrorism is a good example. He almost gets emotional stating the case that the threat of terrorism in America is tiny compared to almost all other dangers to life and limb.

“The number of deaths from terrorist attacks is so small that even minor measures to avoid them can increase the risk of dying.” He quotes a study that concludes that 1500 Americans died in car accidents because, fearing terrorist attacks, they chose to drive rather than fly. Less than 3000 people died in the 11/9 attacks (I refuse to use the illogical US method of abbreviating dates) yet every year more than 40,000 Americans die in traffic accidents, 20,000 in falls, 18,000 in homicides etc.

His thesis is counter-intuitive: that we are now enjoying the least violent period in human history. On page 235 (of 1025 – it’s a hefty read) he lists the “twenty  worst things that people have done to each other” and most of them we’ve never heard of.  Top of the list is the An Lushan revolt in 8^th century China which,  over a period of 8 years,  killed 40 million people –two thirds of the country’s population and a sixth of the world’s. Its modern equivalent would be 430 million.

If you think our society is violent just imagine that 8 years ago, ( in 2007, the year I think of as the “year of the mud” because of awful effect the wet summer had on festivals) an inner city riot escalated into a full scale rebellion, which has just petered out.  In this short period 40 million of us have died, and only 20 million remain.

The worst the 20^th century could manage was the second world war which including, as all the figures quoted do, deaths from starvation etc. killed 55 million.  Since then, according to Pinker, it’s been downhill all the way.

Thanks to modern statistics we can now get a very clear picture of what has actually been going on since life began. Even taking the view that there is no such thing as absolute truth, simply by collecting information and comparing it with other information we can arrive at conclusions which are much closer to absolute truth than were possible in previous centuries.  You don’t, for example, have to “believe” in evolution; the build up of statistical information shows quite clearly that it is the best explanation for the development of life.

The problem is our brains have not evolved to adapt to this situation. It was instant emotional reaction which enabled the first homo sapiens to survive in small bands of hunter-gatherers, and George W Bush’s “War on Terror” is a symptom of the damage this mindset can do in the 21^st century. To quote Pinker: “The 9/11 (11/9!) attacks sent the United States into two wars that have taken far more American and British lives than the hijackers did, to say nothing of the lives of Afghans and Iraqis. “

Why have we permitted our media to behave as if this accumulation of knowledge didn’t exist? Why do so many parents think that their children are at great risk from strangers when the statistics show that family members are a far greater danger? Why do people think that old ladies are in constant danger of physical attack when the danger is much greater to young men? The answer to these and many similar questions is that the media get more money by exaggerating our instinctive fears than be giving us the facts.

Why I hate Christmas (and why I don’t)

If I could change it, my Christmas would focus on the good things -

“Peace on earth and goodwill to all men” (and women of course)

It’s a time when we suspend our normal lives for a few days. We suspend the strife and stress of everyday life, we try to see the good in people we have little in common with – especially family members.

It’s a winter festival – so we celebrate the joys of winter – good food and drink, real fires, clear frosty nights, the muted colours and clarity of the landscape in winter.

It’s a time for parties, feasts, warmth, love and friendship

We would sing together and laugh together.  

But the rest would have to go:

It would have nothing to do with the birth of Christ. Nobody knows when Christ was born but the least likely date is mid December.  I’d still call it Christmas though because to change the name would offend lots of people I like and respect.

It would not be Pagan either – we don’t need any religious or pseudo-religious excuse to celebrate the turning of the year.

There would be no Christmas shopping. We would give gifts to those we love but not things we had bought.  If I couldn’t make or write or picture something for them I would give them something I already owned.   People would stop spending ridiculous amounts of money giving people STUFF they don’t need.

We would refuse to adopt American ideas of Christmas like SANTA CLAUS, and those horrible Christmas songs like “White Christmas”.

We would do away with all the “Dickensian” rubbish and return to an older more austere form of celebration. Dickens would go back on the Eng Lit bookshelf where he belongs, and all the mawkish Victorian carols would be banned.

We would stop sending Christmas cards to people we scarcely know and wouldn’t recognise in the street.  We would write personal messages to people we like and admire who otherwise we might lose touch with.

We would get rid of everything fake -  fake snow, plastic santas, fake conifers, fake log fires, fake goodwill, false sentiment

People would be fined for wasting electricity on gaudy lighting displays

Bah Humbug! Scrooge was right about the humbug but recognised in the end that the real message of Christmas was a good one.  So why not get rid of the humbug and keep the good stuff?

Food prices up again

The BBC News announces: 

"Food prices look set to rise after poor UK harvests due to recent wet weather." Further down the article says:

“Meanwhile, the global price of wheat has risen by some 30% over the past 12 months, adding to fears over rises in food prices”.

It’s easy to see the connection between the cost of food produced in Britain and the bad summer. We’ve had bad summers before, and we’ve had food price rises before. It’s the global bit that’s interesting – and frightening.  For 40 years or more the Green movement has been saying that there are not enough resources in the world to sustain the human population at Western levels of consumption, and that was before we knew about global warming.  From the eighties until fairly recently the “business as usual” proponents of “sustainable growth” have fought back as human technical ingenuity found ways to keep expanding the availability of those resources. 

They did that by expanding the use of fossil fuels, and it is this expansion which is driving climate change. This view is now very widely understood, but it is not at all easy to understand the completeness of the vicious circle we’ve got into, and perhaps the most difficult is why we got into it. The how is to do with the laws of entropy and the why is to do with the laws of evolution. Both are explained in this book, but it’s not easy reading: http://www.amazon.com/Too-Smart-our-Own-Good/dp/052176436X

I’ve tried to explain my understanding of these things here (My 2012).

Many now believe that it’s too late to do anything about it and that huge change is about to overtake the whole world. I prefer to believe that we will only start getting real when we are at the brink of catastrophe. Every news item like this brings that point closer.

Cabins Boats and Sheds

We watched Kevin McCloud playing the hippie last night - http://www.channel4.com/programmes/kevin-mcclouds-man-made-home/4od

It was an entertaining programme and I would have liked to see a straight documentary about him building a cabin on his patch of land, but as ever with modern TV the producers took over and turned it into something silly. It had to follow the model of other “lads” programmes and go completely over the top with biodiesel from sewage. Still, it came at a good time. We have just sold out boat.

The money had been transferred the day before and at 9 am yesterday we handed over the keys of the wide-beam barge “Father Goose” to Jonathan Taphouse.  This had been our second home in Bristol Harbour for nearly 3 years. Unfortunately, our situation had changed and six months ago we decided we would have to sell it. We had 30 people view it, two price reductions and three previous buyers pull out. It took a month of negotiations, surveys, and an ever growing catalogue of things wrong before we finally agreed a price.

This then was the moment I’d been working towards for 6 months and I felt awful.

Yesterday morning we went shopping and I spent an hour in Jessops unsuccessfully trying to decide what camera I wanted to buy. It didn’t make me feel any better, and even getting home, knowing I had a large chunk of money in the bank didn’t improve my mood much.

I suppose it’s a bit like losing a cantankerous old family member. Father Goose was something I had loved; it had become an intimate part of our lives.  There were lots of happy memories as well as much that was stressful and not so happy. Actually perhaps it’s wrong to think in terms of happy and unhappy. The boat, the pontoon, the people, the barges, cruisers, boats and ships, the streets, the buildings, the water, the swans, the light, the sounds...they were all intensely familiar. We can easily experience them again, but we will never be part of them again.  

For several months now my huge three year house-building project has been winding down. As I approached the last of the jobs on the house, the job of selling the boat took over as my primary focus. Now it’s gone and I’m finding it hard to replace. We have reached the position that Thelma has been longing for - financial stability. My brain tells me I am very fortunate, but my stomach is telling a different story. I’ve been feeling slight nausea for several days. It could have a physical cause – fighting off a virus perhaps- but it’s much more likely to be subconscious. I dreamed last night of being suddenly sick on the floor. What’s that about? I can’t remember the last time I was sick.

All my reading and research tells me that our human lives have no purpose, so why do I feel the need for my comfortable existence to have a purpose?  Why do I want to achieve something?

Partly I am uncomfortable with having large sums of money in the bank. By head buzzes with big ideas  - the flat in Bristol, the camper van and lately the cabin in the woods. What’s the common thread? I suppose they are all ways of finding an alternative to living all my life in one place.  For most of my life I’ve had a second home of some kind, even though my income has seldom risen even to the average. Now it’s very unlikely I will ever have another second home. 

Oh, poor you! No second home! Join the real world!

For Thelma it’s easy – if you want to live somewhere else for a while you rent. She does not share my intense need for “My Space” so well understood by the digital community, and by Kevin McCloud. A rented space is someone else’s space you are borrowing for a while.  It’s probably a male territorial thing.  We carry our personal life with us in our gadgets. This is why cars are so popular – the car is your space.  What Thelma sees so clearly is that the greater your commitment to an alternative space, the more like a second home it becomes, and the less freedom you have to move and change.

The challenge for me now is to adapt to a period of greater flexibility but less territory.  Perhaps just a little cabin? A shed?

On reading "Straw Dogs" by John Gray

I’ve not yet finished this book and I am also half way through Nicholas Stern’s “ A Blueprint for a Better Planet”, Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species”,  Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” and ”Britain on the Couch”  by Oliver James. I’ve also just finished re-reading Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene”.

Before “Straw Dogs” if asked why I am reading these books I would have said “To understand why humans behave the way they do.” I saw this as some kind of seeking after truth. Gray makes it clear that a search for truth is just another form of faith. “Darwinian theory tells us that an interest in truth is not needed for survival or reproduction. More often it is a disadvantage.”

Gray’s book attacks just about every pre-conceived notion that we humans have contrived. He attempts to sweep away all our illusions, all the fanciful ideas that our overgrown brains construct to make our lives more comfortable. There is no purpose to our existence, we cannot teach ourselves to live better, there is no good and no evil, no morals, no justice, no ethics, no afterlife. Happiness is irrelevant. Even our consciousness has very little control over our lives which are mostly lived exactly as animals live, by reflex.

I’m not sure that I “believe” all of this; it’s a lot to take on, but I can accept the main thrust of what he is saying, and that leads me to attempt a more precise definition of what I hope to achieve. What I am doing is trying to find some sort of consistency in what is going on around us. It was easy enough to find consistency if some external agency – e.g. God  – was deciding what went on. It was all “God’s Will”, and there are many people now who are adamant that the world is indeed shaped by God’s Will – my sister-in-law is one of them. It seems to me that the accumulation of scientific knowledge (that is the mechanisms of the physical universe) has led to an increasing understanding of the flaws in the creation theory, and the rejection of the traditional idea of God. Evolution is a far more consistent way of explaining life on earth, and as yet no scientific research has found a better one. I have enormous admiration for the way Darwin insisted on examining in detail every aspect of the living world which he had access to, even when his understanding of what he observed came into painful conflict with his Christian beliefs.

John Gray is professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. I’ve always been aware of the influence that philosophers have had on the course of history. The ideas of Plato, Sophocles, Kant, Machiavelli, Marx and the rest have had direct affects on the lives of millions.  Yet, have they really helped in this quest for the consistent?  It seems to me that philosophy has been so concerned with patterns of thought that it has neglected the way the natural world actually functions. Although he is an academic philosopher, what Gray is saying is that we don’t need thought. Life goes on perfectly well without all this philosophising.  

In our Western material culture the world seems full of contradictions, many of them neatly summed up by Gray: “It is no accident that the crusade against drugs is led today by a country wedded to the pursuit of happiness – The United States - (which is engaged in) a puritan war on pleasure”. That same country has one of the highest rates of church attendance in the western world and by far the biggest pornography industry.

One of our most cherished beliefs is in the sanctity of human life yet we deliberately kill each other in ever greater numbers. Everywhere it is obvious that the explosive growth of the human population is devastating the planet, yet we will not tolerate any deliberate policy to reduce those numbers.

I’ve been trading books and ideas with my friend Andy Brice recently, and he puts it like this: “...governments and almost everyone else in positions of power (are) still talking about the need for economic growth, only a few small voices in the dark are expressing the need for radical change and everyone else, i.e. the great majority of the population is doing 'business as usual' and chatting about when they are getting their phone upgrade.”

My reply was: “..or you could take the view that we should upgrade now for tomorrow we die”

I think this is a reasonable attitude to what we see around us. Why not take advantage of the fantastic technology available to us?  It won’t be available for much longer. Once it becomes obvious that the life we are leading is not sustainable, and once you look clearly at the implications of that, then the future looks very bleak indeed. Nicholas Stern, also a professor at the LSE, advisor to governments, and co-incidentally an old friend, makes a strong argument from the position of the liberal/left establishment. He is an economist so he has to believe that government policy can reverse the process of destruction. He puts his faith in intelligent people in positions of power being willing and able to negotiate international agreements which will control human rapacity. Those of us who think it is now too late for that are a small minority, but our numbers are growing rapidly, and I am convinced that one day those in power will see the full extent of the mistakes they are still making. By then the best we can hope for would be an apology, but by then a very large number of us will have ceased to exist and the great and exciting challenge for those who remain will be to live lives that are truly sustainable.

It might seem odd that I derive comfort from the thought that our descendents might be able to create a more sustainable society. I shall be dead; even my children will probably be dead. Why should I care? This is one of the strange and wonderful things about us humans – we do care very much about what happens to our species.

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