Author: Richard

I love a good metaphor. Right now being stuck in the Sargasso Sea seems like a pretty accurate metaphor for where I am now. I suspect that many other people are there too. Take a look at these descriptions here, here and here and see if you agree.

Some of you may have noticed an absence of posts here over the past few weeks. The more perceptive among you might have linked this to the smattering of posts about my decision to stop smoking. You would be correct. As I wrote in early April:
“The curious thing is that the not smoking bit has been easy. I just haven’t. What has been more surprising to me is how hard it is to function effectively without smoking. So here I am adrift in a smoke-free zone, lost in a space I don’t understand and don’t much like. Let’s hope normal service will be returned soon.”
To which Brian Hayes wryly commented:
“Not to be one bit discouraging, it can also be said that a return to normal will not occur, will never occur and cannot occur; not once the trickery of a relentless brain merely wants a smoke. Methinks I had no idea how brilliant and stubborn a little pink flesh could ever be….”
Sadly, so far he has proved to be right

Regular readers will know that I rate Simon Caulkin very highly, so you can imagine my distress when I read the opening to his piece this morning:
“The bankers have claimed another victim – this column. Cost-cutting as a result of the worst media recession in a lifetime means that Observer Management will disappear next week.”
He concludes:
“As the 2009 Reith lecturer Michael Sandel noted last week, norms matter, because they so easily become self-fulfilling. It shouldn’t need saying in the middle of the biggest management meltdown in history, when the stakes are at their highest, that the debate about the norms that should govern a post-financial form of management must go on, even if not here. For my part, what I’ve learned from an amazingly rewarding 16 years will find its way into a book that, in honour of readers who are the joint creators, I had always thought of as The Observer’s book of management – although regrettably, and not of my doing, now without the capital “O”.”
Need I say more?

Matthew B. Crawford’s account of his job writing “value-adding” abstracts deserves very close reading and reflection. It is a story of our times that will resonate with many:
“My job was structured on the supposition that in writing an abstract of an article there is a method that merely needs to be applied, and that this can be done without understanding the text. I was actually told this by the trainer, Monica, as she stood before a whiteboard, diagramming an abstract. Monica seemed a perfectly sensible person and gave no outward signs of suffering delusions. She didn’t insist too much on what she was telling us, and it became clear she was in a position similar to that of a veteran Soviet bureaucrat who must work on two levels at once: reality and official ideology. The official ideology was a bit like the factory service manuals I mentioned before, the ones that offer procedures that mechanics often have to ignore in order to do their jobs.
My starting quota, after finishing a week of training, was 15 articles per day. By my 11th month at the company, my quota was up to 28 articles per day (this was the normal, scheduled increase). I was always sleepy while at work, and I think this exhaustion was because I felt trapped in a contradiction: the fast pace demanded complete focus on the task, yet that pace also made any real concentration impossible. I had to actively suppress my own ability to think, because the more you think, the more the inadequacies in your understanding of an author’s argument come into focus. This can only slow you down. To not do justice to an author who had poured himself into the subject at hand felt like violence against what was best in myself.
The quota demanded, then, not just dumbing down but also a bit of moral re-education, the opposite of the kind that occurs in the heedful absorption of mechanical work. I had to suppress my sense of responsibility to the article itself, and to others — to the author, to begin with, as well as to the hapless users of the database, who might naïvely suppose that my abstract reflected the author’s work. Such detachment was made easy by the fact there was no immediate consequence for me; I could write any nonsense whatever.”

Well here I am, still not placing cigarettes in my lips and lighting them, still feeling that I am adrift in a smoke-free zone, lost in a space I don’t understand and don’t much like and still hoping that this exercise in purposive drift will lead somewhere positive.
However, for the moment, my feelings echo David Orland’s important insight:
“It is this absence, in the end — and not the well-known phenomenon of withdrawal — that’s the real problem with quitting. Anybody can get through withdrawal, if they want to. Few, however, expect or are prepared for what comes next. It’s only when you quit that you discover what your fascination with smoking has all along been about: the everyday development and maintenance of moral life. Through the filter of a cigarette, the smoker orients himself to the outside world. It’s his very personal way of relating the outside world, the world of events, to the inside one, that of desire. And it is for this reason that, when the cigarette is taken away, the smoker’s moral life seems impoverished. It might even be said that he has, in some vague way, become less human. At least for a while.”

For much of my life I have liked to think of myself as a Shockwave Rider, surfing the waves of change, exhilarated by the ride. Though my reality has been generally very different and not nearly so boldly confident. (If I remember correctly John Brunner’s central character in the novel of that name got pretty weary with dealing with change himself at various points in the book.)
I have often contrasted what I portray as a very positive image of the Shockwave Rider with another Brunner quote, “It is one thing to talk glibly about the determinism of history but quite another thing altogether to find oneself caught up in historical forces like dead leaf on the gale.”. That dead leaf seems pretty familiar too and is, perhaps, a more accurate description of my trajectory over the years.
So in this period of turbulence and uncertainty, lets have a little sympathy for the dead leaves among us and hope that at least some of us can be blown into more congenial places.

Floundering around in a smoke-free daze, I realise that stopping smoking is a massive system intervention. For those of you who have never smoked and just imagine it to be a self indulgent addiction, the best analogy I can think of for what it is like to stop is is when you lose internet connectivity for some time or when your computer collapses. It is that sense of interruption to normal functioning. That “I’ll check it on google, oh no I can’t.” That sense of the balance of your world being disturbed. That feeling of not quite knowing how to proceed now the prop of that technology is no longer there to augment your functioning.
There is also something quite appalling about this kind of being lost and the busy attempts to divert oneself from the feelings that accompany it and the the wishing away of time in a kind of mindless yearning, which is a kind of blasphemy.
I was reminded of this everyday kind of blasphemy, reading Bryan Appleyard’s review of Lewis Wolpert’s “How We Live and Why We Die: the Secret Lives of Cells” in the New Statesman today. This was the key paragraph:

“Wolpert also goes into the many ways in which this machinery can go wrong. This makes life seem even more miraculous. Not only are cells improbably complex, they are also fragile and subject to catastrophic failure. Our existence depends on the ability of trillions of molecules to line themselves up in perfect order following billions of instructions, any one of which can be wrong or misread; and our ability to ponder that fact is dependent on a few custard-like pounds, lodged in an all-too-feeble dome of bone. Being alive and aware is, indeed, a miracle, whatever meaning you attach to that word.”
Reading that passage reminded me of watching a video of a lecture by Woldpert describing our development from a single cell some weeks ago. Now I find something about Woldpert very unsympathetic, so it wasn’t his charisma that awoke a profound sense of wonder and mystery in me. It was just the facts he presented that, in Appleyard’s words, revealed the sense of, “Being alive and aware is, indeed, a miracle, whatever meaning you attach to that word.”
I had a similar feeling reading Jonah Lehrer’s account of the role of dopamine in some of our most important, but non-conscious learning in his book “The Decisive Moment”.
These glimpses of wonder and mystery are something that should be central to our sense of well being, but too often get lost lost in the busy nothingness that can fill our days. This seems to be something I need to remind myself of, because it is something I too easily forget. Looking for another quote in a similar vein I found a piece I wrote a little over two years ago, “Mystery, Wonder and the Mystical”, where I concluded:
“It seems to me that if we are to lead full lives as human beings a sense of mystery, wonder and even the mystical are an important part of that life. This does not mean positing supernatural entities, indeed I would go further and say that positing supernatural entities diminishes our sense of of mystery, wonder and the mystical and somehow makes them too mundane and in a curious way touches on the blasphemous.”
The current economic and financial turmoil inevitably leads to a sense of anxiety as well as an opportunity to rethink. It’s a bit like giving up smoking or losing internet connectivity – a system disruption. Disruptive states are probably not the best places to be to cultivate a sense of wonder and mystery. But if we are to stumble through our individual and collective concerns and anxieties I think we do to find a way of doing so. As I have written before :
“One of the the things that make it so hard to see what is going on now is that we are living through two crises. The first is the chickens coming home to roost of a thirty year old experiment in implementing somewhat naive free market phantasies. The second is the flock of giant canaries that are telling us that our two hundred year old experiment in carbon fuelled industrialisation may be drawing to an uncomfortable close. The paradox is that maybe the solution to the short term crisis lies in setting out to solve the long term one.”
And, as Chris Corrigan writes in a long and thoughtful piece:
“Reverence has been a capacity of human life that has kept us accountable to each other and to our environments for hundreds of thousands of years. Many of us have shed that reverence and have dulled our sense to the awe that is inspired by a deep connection to the earth, to each other and to ourselves. Reverence is our operating system, and connection is our practice.”
So, let’s make reverence our operating system, cultivate a sense of wonder and mystery, celebrate the everyday miracle of being alive and find the sources of our well-being through purposive drift.

Jonah Lehrer, the author of my current favourite book, “The Decisive Moment” (“How We Decide” in the USA), also has an excellent blog, “The Frontal Cortext”. In a recent post on business books he concludes with a point that regular readers of Purposive Drift will recognise as theme dear to my heart:
“The larger point, of course, is that humans are terrible at acknowledging the (omni)presence of contingency and chance. We like explanations that cut across situations and aren’t subject to randomness, and so we psychoanalyze personalities and come up with elaborate theories of personality. Alas, these explanations often get the causality of behavior exactly backwards – who we are and what we’re like often depends on where we are and what we are doing. I’ve always loved this short quote from Richard Rorty: ‘Freedom is the recognition of contingency.'”

Nearly three weeks ago I decided to try an experiment. I stopped smoking. So far this has largely been a negative experience. When I say a negative experience I mean that it feels as if my primary activity during this time has been not smoking. Now this is bizarre. How can not doing something be an activity? Perhaps it is more accurate to say that being conscious of not smoking has been the primary focus of my attention over the past couple of weeks. But even that is not quite true. What has been going on is my awareness that the variety of discomforts and disabilities i have been experiencing could have been fixed or dealt with by lighting up again and the fact that I haven’t.
The curious thing is that the not smoking bit has been easy. I just haven’t. What has been more surprising to me is how hard it is to function effectively without smoking. So here I am adrift in a smoke-free zone, lost in a space I don’t understand and don’t much like. Let’s hope normal service will be returned soon.

“Imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning, a world where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. Imagine a world where what you gave away was more valuable than what you held back, where joy was not a dirty word, where play was not forbidden after your eleventh birthday. Imagine a world in which the business of business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in someday. Imagine a world created by the people, for the people not perishing from the earth forever.
Yeah. Imagine that.”
(Maybe it’s because I’m a sunny, little optimist, but I love that quote from Christopher Locke from the Cluetrain Manifesto so much that I wanted it to stand on it’s own. But I must point you to the link I got it from, which is a must read piece by Manisha Verma, “On The Evolution Of Open Source” on 3Quarks. I’ve read through it quickly twice already and must do so more carefully again. I suggest you do too.)