Spinning the moral compass Everything we thought was good turns out also to be bad. […] Climate change demands a reversal of our moral compass, for which we are plainly unprepared.
George Monbiot at monbiot.com
Ba-ba-ba Ba-barbecue Hats off once more to Ray Cannon, this time for guiding us into new technology that takes our diet straight back to the palæolithic. We can now grill flesh, fowl and vegetable right outside the kitchen door using the biggest Camping Gaz accessory I’ve ever seen. (It turns out the distinctive barbecue flavour arises from sauce, fat and juices burning on the fuel, not from the charcoal itself — or in the case of our gas appliance, the lava rocks. Did we know? Thanks, Ray.) Vorsprung durch Technik.
Eight to ten millennia back, humans invented agriculture and adapted to a diet in which grain played a large part. With storable food began the accumulation of capital and greater opportunities for domination between humans. But while peasants supped porridge and haggis, the tables of the mighty bore the meat, fish, fruit and vegetables of the palæolithic diet, as centuries of paintings remind us. The very rich, wrote Scott Fitzgerald, are not like us. No, and perhaps to them we grain eaters always looked like smart cattle. Or perhaps not so smart, at that.
No success like failure Last night author and therapist Susie Orbach led a discussion at our local Starbucks on “how to cope with risk and failure in a society hooked on success”. Delighted to discover that where society sees failure, Orbach too more often sees strategies of accommodation.
She knows there’s no success like failure
and that failure’s no success at all.
I liked too her endorsement of the value of seeing the extent to which we are each the product of specific circumstances, not simply the free and potentially omnipotent spirits our culture celebrates. Orbach is a founder of Antidote.
The event was part of the Coffeehouse Challenge programme of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, which aims to once again see coffeehouses everywhere filled with invigorating debate on issues of local concern
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Did we do that? Despite a challenging start from Orbach, there was much rehearsing of familiar conversations — how driven many successful people are; money isn’t everything — and never broke out of orbit around the principal speaker. More tellingly, we geniuses neglected to identify actions to address whatever we thought the problem was. But I did get to see that my own concerns centre on the extent to which people express or suppress their playfulness.
Big birthday To Fenland last weekend to celebrate the 75th birthday of my mother Bel Macdonald with Miki, sisters Jo Taylor and Caroline Macdonald, brother-in-law Neil Graham, and friends Alber & Gina Gommers. Two memorable meals and I almost got to visit in reality the upper levels of the nave of Ely cathedral, site of many childhood dreams. Miki took pictures on Saturday and Sunday.
Go global Globalisation is a two-edged sword. Citizens of rich countries hope to wield one edge and be spared the other. People like me, employed in rich countries, are enjoying goods and services produced more cheaply in poor countries. Programmers in Bangalore (to take one example) are enjoying selling their services to the rich. The world price for programmer time is now set in India; it no longer supports family life in Essex. Programmers (and many others) here are feeling the sword's other edge.
Essex has been richer than Bangalore for a long time. There is no reason this should always be so, nor is that likely. Advances in transport and telecommunications erode the differences in productivity that have produced such sharply different standards of living.
But globalisation exploits more than advances in technology. We enjoy freedoms here that have nearly eliminated slavery and sweated labour from rich countries. These freedoms were won hard, and slowly, from a growing middle class whose appetite for cheap goods was eventually overwhelmed by revulsion at the squalid consequences. Or at any rate, the local, visible squalor; slavery and sweated labour could flourish over the horizon. Globalisation arbitrages that difference in moral standards.
Globalisation both exploits and threatens that difference in moral standards. The technology that binds Indian and Chinese producers more closely into our economy confronts us with the same questions Dickens posed the Victorians: should children suffer like this to bring you cheap coal and tin?
The controls that maintain this state are hallowed: import quotas and immigration controls. Citizens of rich countries, like myself, are largely free to wander the world and work where we wish. Similarly our businesses; the mobility of capital is the primary demand of globalisers. In contrast, in contravention of our espoused principle of free trade, we strictly control both where poor people can live and work, and what they can sell us. (The WTO is, in the paradoxical human fashion, the institution that both formalises and erodes this state of affairs.)
The liberal democracies — the rich countries, that is — are justly proud of our record of eliminating the domestic and colonial slavery and sweated labour long thought essential to the welfare of our dominant minority. But should we ever have to explain ourselves to a visitor from another star — or a deity — we should have a hard time distinguishing the present international system from slavery.
Become a champion of globalisation and declare it incomplete until it encompasses the free movement of not just capital, but also of goods and people.
Read my code A breakthrough in the work I’m doing in collapsing and accelerating the process of writing software. We’re developing ways to write software — a description of the behaviour of an imagined machine, that can be enacted by a computer — without first writing the same description in English. I’ve been using the expressive power of APL to develop intermediate vocabularies in which to write the business rules in a form the computer can enact, and so let us test and explore our expression of the rules. A discussion with one of the senior clerks (the domain experts on the rules) ended with her saying: I think I get it. Let me see the code.
This is revolutionary stuff. No one does this. Oh, except with APL. We’ve always done this.
Walking and wealth at Woburn A rare escape from the keyboard yesterday for a 10-mile totter in Befordshire, much of it on public footpaths around and through the Woburn Abbey estate of the Dukes of Bedford. My leg muscles have awoken from their long slumber, and my vitamin D supply refreshed by the radiation it turns out we need after all. And I got a lesson in managing money.
This week will see the library of Nicholas Battye (now catalogued, labelled and packed, thanks mostly to the work of Nick Sowicz) depart to the care of the Marquess of Northampton pending its installation at Canonbury Tower. I had been impressed by the care taken with the move by the Northamptons, up to rejecting the professional remover’s quote and sending their own retainers in a hired van. Had I all that money, I thought, I shouldn’t spend my time on such savings. Wandering through the Bedfords’ estate brought a new perspective. Had I all that property (and the family imperative to pass it from generation to generation) I should spend a lot of time managing it. Happily, I do not, and I don’t.
This weekend getting VECTOR 21.3 ready for printing, and packing and labelling Nicholas Battye’s library.
Now driving a newer Proton, bought Friday, and wondering how it will change my politics. Robin Cook wrote in The Guardian of the corrupting effect of driving an Aston Martin.
Perhaps this poem will help.
by Karen Press
To be ordinary
becomes his desire,
to be camouflaged inside confusion
by the mottled moral complexion of the unstreamlined
unmassaged unenhanced days and nights
surviving one by one fate's endurance tests
without thunderbolts or blazing chariots or a goddess's love,
to be lumpy, muted, slightly ungrammatical,
to backtrack, go off at a tangent, repeat himself,
exaggerate, underestimate, miscalculate,
to wear out his shoes and get lost inside his jacket,
at all costs to avoid transfiguration, to avoid shining.
from The Canary’s Songbook, published last month by Carcanet. Available to purchase from the Carcanet website (ISBN 1857547632, priced £8.95).
Visit www.carcanet.co.uk and receive a 10% discount and free p&p.
Vectoring in Paul Mansour popped over on the Queen Mary II on a programming holiday which ended with two days of useful meetings in London, before I disappeared into my hole for the Bank Holiday weekend, working on VECTOR. Results are encouraging, see the new front page and Rules was a great way to finish.