Purposive Drift

Operation was a success, doctors have been impressed with how quickly Richard has been recovering. He should be moved out of intensive care today.

Richard had his heart operation this morning, and is now in intensive care. More updates will be posted here, stay tuned.

I had been planning to use this site for a different purpose over the next few days. This was going to be the point where friends and family could get the latest information about my progress with an operation to replace a valve in my heart and to bypass an artery.
Well,the plan still holds, but with a very large, very unhappy but. This morning I was supposed to be ringing the bed manager at the Heart Hospital to find out what time to come in and, all being well, to have the operation tomorrow.
Yesterday, I got a telephone message telling me that my operation had been cancelled because of an emergency and I should now coming in on Sunday 25th with an operation the following day.
So, life remains on hold, sigh mixed with fury.

Well, mine has not be so good recently, hence all the blank spaces on this site. However, I should be getting some new bits put in soon and once I have recovered and found the energy I lack at the moment, we should be back to lots of new thoughts of a purposive drift kind.

“If you think about that from the perspective of human evolution, our great capacity is not just that we learn about the world. The thing that really makes us distinctive is that we can imagine other ways that the world could be. That’s really where our enormous evolutionary juice comes from. We understand the world, but that also lets us imagine other ways the world could be, and actually make those other worlds come true. That’s what innovation, technology and science are all about.”
(From a talk with Alison Gopnik at Edge.org)

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.”