Author: Richard

“I invite you to the following exercise. Think about your personal history, and you will discover that everything in your life has happened such that you are here, right where you in this moment, reading this paper. Everything; where you were born, who your parents and friends are, where you went to school, what language you speak – everything leads to this moment. You can make a trace, from now into the past in way that shows that every turn you took, every choice you made, brought you here. So you were destined to read this paper today.
The beauty of this silly little exercise is that it shows us that if one looks at a history this way, it looks as if everything is predetermined of fated; but it isn’t. Your whole life was not directed at arriving here, you resulted here. And that is the nature of biological history, the way any living being lives. What happens is constructed moment by moment by the character of one’s living, always going in the path of well being, a choice of comfort, desire or preference. An animal may prefer to go one way, and in doing so, it happens to get eaten by a predator. If it had chosen another way, it might not have been eaten. Did it choose based on the consequences? No, it chose according to its desires in the present, because living is in the present. For animals there are no opportunities or resources. We humans may use these words as we comment on their behaviour according to how we explain what we see as happening to them. If we want to invent a human history, we will have to show a path of conservation that we follow. And what path do we follow? We follow the path of our desires, because desires define what we conserve. This is not a trivial point, and fundamentally we all know this. When we are concerned about what we are doing we are concerned with conserving that which we desire.”
“Biosphere, Homosphere, and Robosphere: what has that to do with Business?”
Humberto Maturana Romesin and Pille Bunnell

I have been grappling with the work of Humberto Maturana and his student and later collaborator Francisco Varela for many years. But until I stumbled across this paper by Vincent Kenny I hadn’t twigged the direct relevance of their ideas to purposive drift. But reading this quote from Kenny’s paper the links seem pretty clear:
“‘Every system is where it is, in a present, in congruence with its medium, and cannot be anywhere else.’ This is a typical statement by Maturana whereby he means to underline the coherence and congruence of each system in its domain of existence. A human system may not like where he is in the medium, and may feel extremely badly about what “life” has doled out to him, but he is where he is through a coherent series of structural interactions and changes in his ontogenic drift. It is interesting that we apply the word “drifter” in a pejorative manner to those folks who most obviously exemplify the human condition of structural drift, as if we , by our ‘rootedness’ were escaping this essential constraint and thereby exerting ‘control’ or ‘steering’ over our lives in a determining way.
Both the living system and the medium change in congruence with one another. They change their structure / shape so that they fit together in a drift. The concept of drift does not imply a chaotic situation because it is being determined on a moment-to-moment basis by the interactions. The path of drift is contingent upon the interactions. So unilateral steering is an illusion. This path of drift is a path without any choices. It is a path of conservation of (a) the organisation of the living system and (b) of congruence with the medium. This is the paradigm for survival.”
While some commentators have described Maturana and Varela’s ideas as representing “purposeless drift” in the sense that they are arguing against the idea of pre-determined outcomes. but I think this quote from Maturana suggests he may have similar ideas to mine about the purposiveness of drift:
“..this pleasure – I am not speaking about the “pleasure principle”- I am speaking about what happens whenever you take an organism and look at it in its normal circumstance. It lives in well being. Don’t you feel the bird flying, or the little mouse moving in the woods, are both well? If you were to catch the mouse and put it in the cage, what you would observe is that the mouse would move in what you would interpret as an attempt to get out. If you were to be put into a cage, you would do the same. You would not feel comfortable, and to attempt to get out as a way of recovering well being. And if you don’t attempt to get out, you become depressed and die. This is the case whether you are attempting to get out of a physical cage or a conceptual cage – whenever you realise that you are in a cage – or that you are where you do not want to be. The moment that you realise that you are where you do not want to be, you begin to do things which constitute the satisfaction of your wanting to get out from where you do not want to be. So when I say pleasure, I mean it in the sense of well being, or comfort, that is the case in the absence of discomfort.”
(Compare this to my ChangeThis manifesto, “Purposive Drift: making it up as we go along”and spot the similarities. As Bob Sutton remarked, “There are no new ideas”.)

Matt Jones has a lovely quote from Nassim Nicholas Taleb that I just couldn’t resist posting:
“We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurance of monstrous proportions.”

Paul Newman explained why he set up the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp for seriously sick kids:
“I wanted, I think, to acknowledge Luck: the chance of it, the benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others; made especially savage for children because they may not be allowed the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it.”
(Thanks to Dahlia Lithwick for her moving obituary of a good man.)

A while back I boldly asserted that:
1 The current financial crisis will be short lived and have less economic effect than many are currently predicting.
2. We are on the edge of one of the most productive and expansive periods of human development in the whole of our history.
The last couple of weeks have certainly challenged that view. People I really respect, like Billmon, are clearly very worried and they know a lot more about it than me. But cheery little ray of sunshine that I am and despite all the evidence to the contrary, I think I still hold on to my bold assertions. There are still vast amounts of cash sloshing around in the system and just maybe the current crisis is enough to wake up the people controlling that cash to stop chasing after fairy gold and move in to some of the very real opportunities for productive investment, promising real long term returns, that await those ready to move in to the Next Civilisation.

“‘The point everyone misses,’ wrote economist Robert Chapman a decade ago, “is that buying derivatives is not investing. It is gambling, insurance and high stakes bookmaking. Derivatives create nothing.”1 They not only create nothing, but they serve to enrich non-producers at the expense of the people who do create real goods and services. In congressional hearings in the early 1990s, derivatives trading was challenged as being an illegal form of gambling. But the practice was legitimized by Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who not only lent legal and regulatory support to the trade but actively promoted derivatives as a way to improve “risk management.” Partly, this was to boost the flagging profits of the banks; and at the larger banks and dealers, it worked. But the cost was an increase in risk to the financial system as a whole.2

Since then, derivative trades have grown exponentially, until now they are larger than the entire global economy. The Bank for International Settlements recently reported that total derivatives trades exceeded one quadrillion dollars – that’s 1,000 trillion dollars.3 How is that figure even possible? The gross domestic product of all the countries in the world is only about 60 trillion dollars. The answer is that gamblers can bet as much as they want. They can bet money they don’t have, and that is where the huge increase in risk comes in.”
“1. Quoted in James Wesley, “Derivatives – The Mystery Man Who’ll Break the Global Bank at Monte Carlo,” SurvivalBlog.com (September 2006).

2. “Killer Derivatives, Zombie CDOs and Basel Too?”, Institutional Risk Analytics (August 14, 2007).

3. Kevin DeMeritt, “$1.14 Quadrillion in Derivatives – What Goes Up . . . ,” Gold-Eagle.com (June 16, 2008)”

(I wouldn’t usually quote from something like Ellen Brown‘s blog, “The Web of Debt”, which may be on the wilder edges og the blogosphere, but in this particular case both the argument and figures in the quote seem pretty sound and worth remembering.)


Chicken Little may be right and the sky is falling down, but I think what is more likely is that we are seeing a flock of giant canaries gasping for breath. The turmoil in the financial markets, the surge in the price of oil and the floods in the USA and India can all be seen as warnings that our two hundred year old experiment is moving in to toxic territory. My biggest fear is that we will recover from these shocks too quickly. (This does not mean I have no sympathy for the hapless victims of these shocks who simply want to get on with their lives, I do.) But I am concerned that just as the lessons from the oil shocks in the Seventies were swiftly forgotten, we may find that as things return to “normal” in two or three years time, we will forget the message from our giant canaries that if we want to retain the benefits of our current ways of life we will have to change the way we organise and manage our life on this planet, starting now.

“Life in a complex world, and a life which reflects and values the complexity of both self and world, requires the ability to improvise–to deal with, and indeed to create, the unforeseen, the surprise. Interestingly, the Latin root of improvisation is improvisus, or unforeseen. Increasingly, it seems, life in or out of organizations requires of us the ability to both react appropriately to unforeseen events, and actually generate those events–to act creatively and innovatively. Football players have to react to surprising moves from the opposition, and also generate moves that catch opposing players off guard. They have to feed off the opposition’s mistakes, the contingency of the bouncing ball, and the condition of the pitch. A jazz musician both generates novelty, by making rhythmic, harmonic, or melodic choices that are surprising, and reacts to the novelty generated by his or her fellow band-members. A piano player might place an unusual chord behind a soloist in what would normally be a predictable harmonic progression. This creates a slightly different context, a surprise, which can lead the experienced improvising soloist to find new ways to navigate a song. This kind of creative dialogue is at the heart of much of what makes jazz a unique art form….Creativity and improvisation might be said to serve at least a dual role, therefore. They allow us to adapt in our own way to complex environments, and they allow us to express our own (inner) complexity through the performance of our interaction with the world. The concept of improvisation is, I believe, crucial to the existential reality of complexity.”
Alfonso Montuori

Tim Parks has an interesting article in today’s Guardian about Gregory Bateson. My favourite bit is a quote from Bateson himself:
“We social scientists would do well to hold back our eagerness to control that world which we so imperfectly understand. The fact of our imperfect understanding should not be allowed to feed our anxiety and so increase the need to control. Rather our studies could be inspired by a more ancient, but today less honoured, motive: a curiosity about the world of which we are part. The rewards of such work are not power but beauty.”
The only modification I would like to make to Bateson’s statement would be to change the first sentence to, “We would do well to hold back our eagerness to control that world which we so imperfectly understand.” and then it could apply to all of us.
Note: The Bateson quote is from “Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology” first published in 1972, pp 269

“… An enormous, and largely speculative, literature attempts to interpret anything important that our brains do today as direct adaptations to the environments that shaped our earlier evolution. Thus, for example, religion may be a modern reflection of behaviors that evolved to cement group cohesion among savanna hunters. But religion might as well record our human response to that most terrifying fact that a large brain allowed us to learn (for no directly adaptive reason)- the inevitability of our personal mortality. I suspect that most of our current cognitive life uses the nonadaptive sequelae of a large brain as exaptions, and does not record the direct reasons why natural selection originally fashioned our large brain.”
Stephen Jay Gould, “The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould (Hardcover)”, Jonathan Cape, 2006, pp232-233