Electronic social networking

Australian magpies - they converse a lot, perhaps more intelligently than much that is posted on Twitter

 Young people, particularly but not exclusively, are heavy users of various electronic social networking systems, of which Twitter and Facebook are currently the most widely used. Most of them will also spend a great deal of time in front of computers, surfing the net. Is all this good?  There will be many who argue that it’s an intrinsic part of modern youth culture, so what’s the problem?  Well, the technologies are not, in themselves harmful, and they can be useful, but in exacerbating the developing tendency of adolescents to require constant stimulus and distraction from anything needing focused effort, they can be said to be dangerous to society. Let’s consider the arguments.

Twitter1 is a website through which users can send messages – called tweets - and read those of other users. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page. They are publicly visible by default; senders can restrict message delivery to lists of nominated friends, but reports of the way Twitter is used suggest that the idea of being at the centre of some hypothetical community of friends attracts the attention-seekers as well as those who have difficulty – perhaps because of their mobile phones and computers – interacting with real people. So they make their tweets available to the world.

Facebook¹ is a website on which users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. They may also join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school, college, or other characteristics. Facebook was produced in 2003 at Harvard by a nerdy student called Mark Zuckerberg, dubbed a ‘social autistic’ by Sadie Smith2, and has spread like a flame through the combustible world of the would-be-connected young: there are now an estimated 500 million users.  The idea of ‘friends’ is central to Facebook; in pursuit of connectivity users post information about themselves that may include the minutiae of their daily lives and blow-by-blow descriptions of their activities, as well as intimate details of their lives.

The question is, I think, what is the point of Facebook and Twitter? Do they serve any useful purpose?

Surprisingly, Twitter, with its 140 character restriction, comes out ahead in relation to that question. At the trivial level a friend pointed out that, having suddenly decided to dine out in New York the question of which restaurant provided good food (and good value?) was solved by sending out a tweet asking about restaurants in the area. Several replies (from unknown people), with recommendations, were received within five minutes. Not an earth-shaking result, but indeed useful and indicative of a general class of queries likely to elicit responses from the ‘Twittersphere’. But it’s a rather startling thought that – even in New York – there were enough people checking Twitter at the time for some of them to know about restaurants in that particular area and be prepared to reply. At an equivalent level, tweets and text messages are sent into television – and I suppose radio – stations where there is discussion of some subject or issue in which people are interested. So the senders are immediately involved (or at least they feel as if they are) and get the chance to contribute – although hardly in depth.

More usefully, Twitter is credited with providing the vehicle by which young people in Iran were able to tell the world what was happening to them as Iranian police and Muslim fundamentalist thugs broke up their demonstrations in favour of ‘non establishment’ candidates in the 2010 elections in Iran. In effect the twitterers provided a news outlet and focussed the world’s attention on events that were not covered by conventional western media, which might otherwise have been ignored. Some believe there is a Twitter revolution under way in Iran, and that the technology is having a significant effect on the rulers of the country, who have a considerable problem limiting the flow of information. However, we must recognise that there is no way of establishing whether a tweet is true or false, and no way of confirming the location of the sender, so there must be debate about how much of the information coming out of Iran is genuine, and the extent to which it reflects the views of the population3. Nevertheless, since I subscribe to  the idea that a free press is an essential component of a free society, I must accept that Twitter has the potential to make a contribution that outweighs the triviality of most of its uses. (In this respect I noticed, in the weekend papers, that a Canberra academic is the target of a lawsuit because of a (allegedly libellous) remark she posted on Twitter. Even if the lawsuit fails one must question the judgement of a – presumably intelligent – person who does something like that.)

In the case of Facebook, the main argument that might justify its existence is that it helps to satisfy the basic human need to belong, to have an identity as a member of a group within which we are recognised and valued. This provides the basis for self-esteem. Families are the most immediate and important groups in this respect: in traditional societies the local community provides the milieu within which families and individuals are embedded and have their recognised and acknowledged places, but the gradual breakdown of families and family bonds in Western societies means that many young people are denied that support and recognition. So they look for something else among their peers and associates and Facebook seems to offer a community of friends, a community within which they can say: ‘This is who I am; this is why I matter”. It also provides instant feedback from someone, somewhere, 24 hours a day, and this constant reassurance comes without the stress of real-life, face-to-face conversation. Jaron Lanier² argues that, on Facebook people “reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate. But there is no perfect computer analogue for what we call a “person”: the attempt to turn life into a database is a degradation, based on a philosophical mistake. Computers cannot represent human thought or human relationships, therefore recognition of otherwise unknown ‘friends’ by Facebook is based on incomplete information, besides involving no significant personal commitment.

There are major disadvantages to both Twitter and Facebook. Much (probably most) of what is posted on Twitter is trivial in the extreme. It has been labeled ‘pointless babble, better characterized as social grooming’[1] and, more serious than the fact of its triviality, there are strong indications that, among the young, particularly, Twitter and Facebook engender the feeling that it is essential to be in contact all the time, that you must respond to the flood of tweets and if you haven’t updated your Facebook page for a few hours you are out of touch. Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationships that connection permits—none of this is important. Social networking software clearly encourages people to make weak, superficial connections with each other, hardly likely to contribute positively to constructive social discourse. There is an inability among the young, addicted to these technologies, to develop empathy. This cannot develop through social networking because we are not aware of how other people are really feeling  -  we cannot pick up on body language when we are communicating through a screen4.

A consequence of the addictive urge to be ‘connected’ was highlighted by an article in the New York Times about the impact of these social networking technologies on schoolchildren in California. Students are constantly distracted or inattentive: responders to the article overwhelmingly decried the effects of the technologies on school work. A contributor to the NY Times discussion said that many of the descriptors of technology-infused school kids match those of criminal personalities: inability to maintain concentration on necessary tasks, need for constant and instant gratification (being bored is an offense!), and worst, failure to appreciate the necessity of personal investment of time, attention, and effort in order to accomplish anything worthwhile. It is clear that, uncontrolled – as they mostly are, at least by America parents – these technologies pose a profound new challenge to focus and learning: apparently students can’t think independently or originally, and information, if it isn’t coming to them from a screen, is ignored as having no value.

Baroness Susan Greenfield4, an eminent British neurosurgeon and scholar, has expressed serious concerns about the need felt by the wired, cell-phone generation, for instant gratification: the whole concept of chat and texting, bypasses the most fundamental human communication – actual conversation. And because, in technologies like Facebook and Twitter  ‘pithy allusion substitutes for exposition’5, the art of conversation, of interesting development of an argument or an idea, is clearly endangered in this socially uncoupled generation. In the profession I followed, clarity and accuracy of expression are essential in the business of conveying sometimes complex ideas so they can be understood, tested, refined and either discarded or promulgated. This is hardly likely to be a skill developed, or appreciated, by those for whom sloppy inaccurate expression  and abbreviated, unpunctuated telegraphese substitute for disciplined written communication. Shoddy prose bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident of what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (“It’s only my opinion…”).

Social networking sites apparently tap into the basic brain systems for delivering pleasurable experience. In the case of Twitter, where users post an almost moment-by-moment, stream-of-consciousness account of their thoughts and activities, however banal, the addictive nature of the activity is much like traditional sources of instant gratification  -  sex, drugs and drink. The compulsion to know what other people are doing and thinking and feeling is, arguably, a form of voyeurism, although for many people, the idea of describing your thoughts and actions in minute detail is absurd. Why would you subject your friends to that, and how much trivia can you absorb? The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme—the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world6.

There are other problems, or potential problems. One of these (depending on your point of view – you may think it’s acceptable) is targeted advertising. Because the personal information on Facebook sites is publicly available it can be used by companies who can target their advertising very precisely to groups or regions – another step in the commercialisation of our world and encroachment on our privacy. Where once the Internet seemed an opportunity for unrestricted communication, the increasingly commercial bias of the medium—”I am what I buy”—brings impoverishment of its own.

Clearly these technologies are here to stay; they have their uses and those will no doubt expand.  They have hundreds of thousands of users – although mass adoption does not, in itself, constitute a logical or intellectual argument in their favour. For those who have reached ‘responsible adulthood’ (which research indicates is about the age of twenty-two in males; younger in females) Facebook, Twitter and their ilk may well be used sensibly for profit (in the widest sense) and pleasure. Used sensibly they undoubtedly provide agreeable methods of communicating with real friends, and Twitter may be a useful source of information. The dangers they pose in relation to the inability of kids to concentrate, endless time-wasting, low social skills and possibly poor ability to develop strong personal relationships, are part of the spectrum of problems generated by computers and mobile phones in general. The dangers to children can be overcome (although in most cases they won’t be) by parental control and discussion, talking to each other, encouraging reading real books with substantial content, discussing implications of the technologies. In relation to time-wasting, if you are among those who think that addiction is not a particularly harmful condition, and that spending time constantly updating your activities for the benefit of Facebook ‘friends’, or sending bursts of inconsequential information into the ether, to join the mass of equally banal, inconsequential and short-lived information swirling through the it, then there’s nothing to argue about: that’s a value judgment, not an objectively arguable fact. I would just have to say that those are not values I subscribe to.

At a more basic level these electronic social technologies cause us to examine our assumptions about the purpose of life and how we should – in some fundamental sense – spend our time. Is time spent exchanging useless information via Facebook and Twitter wasted any more than time spent watching rubbish on television? Probably not. But the question pushes us back to the idea of a fulfilled life, of reaching our physical and mental potential. Both need work and self-discipline. In the long run time spent doing something worthwhile will be  far more rewarding than time frittered away in exchanging trivia. Strong, rewarding human relationships will be far more rewarding than the accumulation of large numbers of ‘friends’ on Facebook, most of whom mean nothing and do not meet the criteria of genuine friendship.

Sources consulted

1 Wikipedia

2 Sadie Smith: “Generation Why?’ NT Review of Books, Nov. 25.

Jaron Lanier was cited by Sadie Smith.

3 Annika Wang: ’Twitter and the Iranian elections’, CIMA, Nov. 2009.; Daily Mail, Nov. 2010.

4 Report of a speech by Baroness Greenfield: “How Facebook addiction is damaging your child’s brain.

5 Tony Judt: ‘Words’ NY Review of Books, July 2010.

6 Clive Thompson. NY Times Magazine. Sept. 7, 2008.

 

On friends and friendship

Born, brought up and educated in Africa, we lived in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) and South Africa. Pursuing my career in science we moved to Scotland, England and later Australia, taking our children with us. The friends we accumulated along the way tended to reflect the stage of our lives at the time: when we were young parents with small kids, most of our friends were people from the same group – small children and their requirements take up a great deal of time and attention, so it’s easier to make friends with people who have the same preoccupations and who find children and their doings subjects of engrossing interest. As our children grew interactions with other parents decreased, or at least changed as the children themselves influenced the friends we made and it became necessary to meet the parents of their friends, and the parents of those with whom they shared activities, on a different basis. And, of course, there were always friends and acquaintances from entirely separate groups, such as people we met through work or sport.

Friends and colleagues: Paul Joe Dick Sune. In Estonia, at working meeting; 40 years since we all first met at a conference - and it looks like it! Work and social groups have overlapped over the years.

We use the word ‘friend’ quite loosely in relation to people ranging from acquaintances, who don’t really mean much to us and to whom we are not particularly important, to those with whom the ties of shared interest and mutual concern are strong and durable. The difficulty, quite often, is to know the difference. Real friends, the ones that matter, are willing to do things for you that might involve inconvenience for themselves; they’re seriously concerned about your welfare, well-being and happiness. They’re there for the long haul, so even if you don’t see each other for years, when you do get together it takes very little time to re-establish the relationship, to pick up where you left off, fill in the gaps and enjoy each other’s company.

So there are gradations in all this; most of us have a range of different kinds of friends, from the solid, intense, important relationships to the unimportant. There are people whose company we really enjoy; others with whom we’re happy to spend time when it’s mutually convenient, and there are people we meet who are irrelevant to us except insofar as they are fellow-members of the human race and deserving of consideration for that reason. The more casual friends may be fun to be with, when all is well on both sides of the relationship, but we are likely to find that, in many cases, we’re not important enough to them to make them ready and willing to put themselves out for us – and that may include not being willing to provide a sympathetic ear when we want a confidant. It’s a two-way business, of course: there may be times when we’re not interested in a friendship developing beyond the casual, but there will also be times when we put quite a lot of work into a relationship to find that the interest isn’t really reciprocated. It hurts, but in those cases we may as well cut our losses and walk away.

Regardless of whether we have led a peripatetic or stable and locally-rooted life, the patterns of friends and friendship groups change with age. Those who live their lives in one place, who grow up and grow old in the community they were born into are likely, I suspect, to have fewer friends than those who, like me and my family, have moved around. They will have a much more settled sense of place, of belonging to a community that defines their place in the world. No doubt old friendships solidify into comfortable patterns of long-settled mutual regard with well recognised problem areas that can be avoided, as well as highly-valued areas of shared experience. And, it seems reasonable to assume, the overlap between different groups of friends and acquaintances is much greater when most of the people involved have deep roots and multiple connections in the community. Nevertheless the friends of youth grow older and change, interests diverge, relationships with others affect friendships, people move away, or die. Society changes and everyone is affected.

And there is another point: not only do we change with time but, because we tend to project ourselves in quite different ways in different environments, the person we seem to be within one group may be slightly different from that in another. So the way we’re seen by the people in our local sports club may be entirely different from the way we’re seen by our workmates or by our family and neighbourhood friends and acquaintances.

For the transients, who move in and out of communities, the problem is to develop friendships that are meaningful, relationships that matter, in each of the communities in which they find themselves. And, having developed such friendships, then – as we did so often – they may have to be left behind. Furthermore, even if the ‘residence time’ in various places is measured in years, the connections and overlaps between the groups associated with work and sport and family and neighbourhood communities, if they exist at all, are likely to be much weaker than they would be for people who stay in one place for all most of their lives.

The whole process of making friends gets harder as you get older: the children leave home; you retire and move away from, or lose contact with, your community of workmates; your recreational activities become more restricted – perhaps you no longer play tennis or golf in the pennant competitions, or you drop sport entirely in favour of the bridge group, or whatever. People you meet are more set in their ways; they have their friendship circles and may not be much interested in expanding them, they may make polite enquiry about your family but are not much interested in hearing about them and their doings. So the real friends scattered down the years and across the world hold their value, even if their direct impact on our day-to-day lives is now miniscule or non-existent. They justify the hassle of travel.

When should we die?

Sunset from 9-mile beach, Western Australia. Seems appropriate to the subject!

This doesn't sound like a very cheerful 

subject, and I guess it isn't, really. But it's easier to get through life if we face the problems that it throws at us, and look for practical solutions. This is not an attitude that our (western) societies are good at; we'd much rather - generally - duck tough issues and hope they'll go away. Or we take refuge in platitudes and spout half-understood aphorisms that allow us to pretend we have a solution. So I thought it might be interesting to look at the problem of how we, and our society, approach the last days of our lives.

The stimulus for this particular polemic was a conversation with a friend of mine, whose mother-in-law is dying. She's an old lady, with dementia, can't look after herself and has largely lost control of her bodily functions. She now has an ugly infection in one of her eyes. It can't be treated, and the doctors are concerned, apparently, that the infection will spread down an optic nerve into her brain and kill her. The only possible treatment would be to remove the eye.  But why would you do that? What good could it do? The doctors are hamstrung by legal requirements to preserve life, and it seems that's what they have to 'officially' recommend.  No-one wants to make the obvious decision, which must be to do whatever is necessary to ensure she is as comfortable and free of pain as possible, which is likely to involve, as I understand it, large doses of morphine or some similar drug, but take no positive, 'heroic' and expensive action. If the morphine doses are sufficient to 'snuff out the flickering flame of life', well, so be it. The result will be better for all concerned, not least for the old lady lying there in a painful, confused and hopeless little heap.

This discussion is, of course, a 'sub-set' of the arguments about euthanasia which, being an active process, has all sorts of additional complications. We won't go there - at least not this time. My argument is simply that, for all of us, there is a time to die, and nothing is gained by postponing it for a while at the cost of pain, indignity, inconvenience, unpleasant work for all those who have to look after the dying, and the expenditure of ridiculous quantities of material resources - as well as occupation of hospital beds that could be better used by others. There are numerous tales similar to the one I have told here, about people dying of cancer, who go through round after round of unpleasant, inconvenient treatment, often with unpleasant side effects, to (possibly) prolong life for a few months. Why do they do it?

The answer, I suggest, is because that's what's expected. We rush for treatment, and once we're in the hands of the hospitals we tend to lose control of the process.

Underlying all this is the idea that human life is somehow invaluable. This is quite frequently asserted as if it was completely inarguable. It derives, I believe, from the underlying fear we all have of dying, so we argue that every life - which of course includes ours - must be preserved as long as possible, whatever the cost. This has been developed into doctrine by Christianity and permeates western societies. Well, I think it's a stupid assertion/doctrine/position, which can and should be qualified. When the time comes to die, it would be good to accept the fact and do it well.

Autumn at Withycombe - colour at the end of the line

 

  P.S. Two posts today do not indicate a rush of creativity (if that's the right word); just that I had them done and got around to posting them - it's been raining all day.

African animals

Giraffes in Botswana - May 2009

Years ago, before Diana and I were married, we went off in my little Vauxhall – you have to be quite old to remember them – to spend a few days in Wankie game reserve. (That was before Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, when Wankie became Hwangie, but that’s beside the point, as is the fact that my mother was horrified: we WEREN’T married!)

Not long after we entered the reserve we looked up to see, regarding us quizzically over the top of some quite large acacias, the heads of two giraffes, quite close to us. Nothing extraordinary, but the picture is indelibly printed in  my memory. Big eyes, long noses, jaws rhythmically chewing the cud. Graceful necks and astonishing legs. How did all that evolve? They were just the first of the wonderful animals we saw, some of them very close to the car – like the lioness lounging a few metres from the road side, not interested in us or the large herd of buffalo on the other side of water held back by an earth dam.  We watched elephant drinking and splashing about in another dam, in the evening, so close that I rather nervously turned the car so we could move away if they came TOO close. In between times there were all the usual beautiful antelope – impala, kudu, spectacular sable and the little ones, duiker and stembuck. Warthogs, running with their ridiculous tales in the air, were amusing then, and remained so to us over other visits to African wildlife parks, over many years.

You can still go to Africa and see the charismatic megafauna, the birds and antelope, hippos and crocodiles in the rivers but, as human populations increase rapidly, wildlife numbers are crashing across the continent. The reasons are well known: poaching, habitat destruction, direct competition between humans and animals – people who depend for their survival on crops and domestic animals don’t take kindly to either being eaten by wild animals – and all sorts of ecological imbalances. And it’s not just wildlife that is suffering from the impact of rampant human reproduction; across vast areas rural Africa ecosystems are being irreversibly damaged – trees are cut, overgrazing destroys vegetation, soil erosion eats away at the topsoil. There are all sorts of well-meaning, and undoubtedly valuable, programs and groups concerned with halting the degradation and loss of wildlife, but we seldom see any attempt to come to grips with the fundamental, underlying problem: too many people.

Shock; horror! Politically incorrect to an alarming degree! What am I saying? That there should be mass culling of humans? Well, of course not, but it does seem that any discussions of African populations in international forums are circumscribed by furious assertions about racism from the African politicians. This accusation is a throwback to the 1960s, when many African countries were struggling to get rid of colonial rule by various Europeans, but it’s irrelevant now. You can’t solve problems unless you face up to them and pretending that the human population explosion across Africa isn’t a problem is sheer stupidity. If Africans are to enjoy reasonable standards of living they have to stop having so many babies. They can’t expect to achieve the profligate and unsustainable standards we in ‘the west’ indulge in, but they can certainly aspire to better than most of them now have.

The usual answer to this question of population control is that there must be economic development, and a focus on the education of women. Then the women will want, and be able, to control their own fertility. But that’s a whole different discussion. I guess the point I want to make here is a more philosophical one: why do we humans think our priorities and requirements for living take precedence over every other biological organism? As part of this attitude we assume it’s unquestionable that the earth’s resources should be exploited to meet our needs, and also frequently make assertions that we should not set limits on the resources that may need to be expended to save a single human life. That’s absurd. But what are the limits, and what determines them? This seems to be a philosophical black hole into which most attempts at rational discussion of the fundamental human dilemma caused by our success as a species disappear.

It’s hard to see solutions. And African animals are only one symptom of the problems. There will be wonderful animals wandering around Africa, doing their thing, for years yet, but I’m not sure my grandchildren could go to that continent and find more than traces of the superbly complex and rich environments that were there not so very long ago. Sad, sad, business.  They have as much right to their time on this planet as we do, but their date with extinction is being brought forward rapidly.

Go well

Joe

Paranoia

Castle on the coast of Estonia. Does this symbolise what we're afraid of?

In the last few days there have been the usual breathless news headlines associated with terrorist threats: small bombs originating from Yemen, addressed to a synagogue in Chicago were found (following a tip-off) in cargo planes. One of the planes landed in Britain and the bomb was located there. This allowed the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, to express the view that it was possible the bomb(s) was intended to explode while the plane was over Britain. I wonder if he had any evidence whatsoever for that suggestion? I doubt it. Like every politician, and most of the media, Cameron seemed to find it necessary to feed the paranoia about terrorism that appears to be universal in western countries. Of course there might have been some benefits to Cameron in playing the very common game of the politics of fear; it would provide him with an opportunity to strut his stuff as the defender of public safety. (‘Look how concerned your government is…!’)

Yes, there are terrorist threats, emanating primarily from Muslim countries. And yes, we have to combat that terrorism and, as far as possible, take whatever actions are necessary to ensure that planned attacks are not successful. But do we have to hit the panic button to the extent we do whenever an attempted bombing is foiled – or even when they’re successful? The panic and system gridlock in the United States after 9/11 was unadmirable. If I was a terrorist and wanted to disrupt the economies and pattern of life in western countries I would, every now and then, ‘leak’ to the western media hoax warnings that attacks were imminent giving vague, but convincing, information about their type and probable targets. There would be a good chance that these would result in a flurry of excited reports in the media, and possibly shut-down of airports and all sorts of expensive searches and precautions. (I assume that this is, in fact, fairly common. We frequently hear of plane delays etc. because or warnings about non-existent bombs.)

The point is that our responses to such threats, whether real or mischievous, are out of proportion to their implications. But, but, but… I can hear the outrage! People could be killed! Yes, indeed they could, and probably will be. The chances are that there will be more successful attacks such as those on the Twin Towers in New York (9/11), on restaurants in Bali in 2002, on commuter trains in Madrid in 2003 and on the Underground in London in 2005. But does paranoia help solve the problem? Clearly not. And should the prospect – or the reality – bring our societies to a grinding halt? Equally clearly, not. Western security forces have to keep working in the background to foil these things, as they frequently do, and we do need security at airports (although whether that should run to full body scans and searches is arguable), but in most cases we don’t need to shut up shop and cause enormous inconvenience and expense. Life must go on.

Let's get this in perspective. The most successful of modern terrorist attacks (9/11) killed about 3000 people. But every year Americans kill about 10,000 of their fellow-citizens with handguns, and wound another 50,000 – not to mention about 20,000 accidental woundings and 15,000 gunshot suicides. Yet the  vociferous and successful gun lobby manages to persuade the congress (and the Supreme Court) that owning a gun is an inviolate right under the (2^nd amendment of the) Constitution. We might also look at things like road death statistics in most western countries, and deaths from avoidable self-abuse like smoking. Where’s the logic in it all? Why don’t the Americans wage a war against their own bizarre (lack of) gun laws instead of against Iraq, where they killed a few hundred thousand people and destroyed the government of a country (albeit a rotten dictatorship) in the course of President George W Bush’s ‘war on terror’? It’s also hard to argue that the war in Afghanistan, intended to control/reduce terrorism, is serving that purpose. And why isn’t cigarette smoking banned? (The answer is obvious.)

I’d like to make two points: one concerns the question of probable risk; the other – peripheral to my main argument here, but of some interest – concerns how terrorism might best be fought.

I don’t have data quantifying probable risk but there’s no question that, for the average person, the chance of being killed or injured in a motor accident is hundreds of times higher than the risk of being killed or injured by a terrorist bomb. We accept that, and many other risks, and live with them because we value our cars and are prepared to take our chances and pay the price. I wonder what the economics of road safety campaigns are: how much is spent per life lost on the roads, relative to the economics of public paranoia about terrorism – i.e. how much is spent on security, how  much time is lost and inconvenience caused, per life lost to terrorist bombs?

Our paranoia is not confined to the risks from terrorism: we are obsessed with safety and risk avoidance in every aspect of our lives. There are constant demands for precautions against all manner of real and imagined hazards, ranging from absurd regulations against asbestos in buildings (even if it’s covered in paint and tucked away somewhere) to safety at work provisions that range from the sensible to the ridiculous, and the endless strictures on the packaging of almost everything we buy. Considerable imagination is sometimes required to think of how an item can be dangerous, but you can be sure the manufacturers will warn against every real and imagined hazard in their eagerness to cover their asses against legal action by idiots who are convinced that life should be free of all risk, but who have managed to hurt themselves and want someone to pay for it. (Those same idiots will die, in due course, like everyone else.) The problem is finding the right balance between sensible precautions and acceptable risk, but, there’s no indication that our societies are likely to find that balance – if we got anywhere near it there would be a good chance special interest groups would protest vociferously that their particular obsessions must have exceptional treatment. Balance doesn’t look like a sensible option through the blinkers of uncritical bias!

And so I could go on, but let’s get back to terrorism. If you read books or articles by people who understand the problem – its causes and scope and the best ways of combating it – the general opinion is that the most effective counters are not high-tech surveillance (although that has a place) but recruitment and training of people familiar with the language and customs of groups who may be considered threats. These people are introduced into the societies we are concerned about, to ‘keep their ears to the ground’. Like terrorist ‘sleeper’ cells our agents may be in place for years without taking action. But we need lots of them. The point made at the beginning – that the most recent bomb threats were ‘defused’ (!) as a result of a tip-off – supports this argument. We should also be studying the societies of concern, learning to understand their concerns and aspirations, helping to solve their problems. Agents and diplomacy and well-targeted aid (if that’s not an oxymoron) are cheaper and more effective than bombs and cruise missiles and predator drones, which frequently make the problem worse; they can legitimately be regarded as terrorism by those – often innocent, like western victims of terrorist attacks – who are their victims, or the relatives and friends of those victims. 

Resilience

Resilience is defined as the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its original structure  and function.  The idea can be applied to all sorts of systems – from simple physical things like springs, which behave linearly within certain limits, to human relationships (for example marriage) and complex ecosystems. In the case of simple physical systems the response to disturbance (e.g. stretching the spring) is completely predictable unless the disturbance is too great and catastrophic distortion results. The responses of complex systems, where there are interacting processes, can generally be predicted with far less accuracy.  Complex systems are all, to some extent, adaptive; there are a number of processes and pathways which influence their resilience – their capacity to tolerate disturbance and to recover. However, severe disturbance may cause them to settle into stable states that are not the same as their initial state.

Without getting too deeply into all this, I thought it might be interesting to toss around a few ideas about resilience and its implications at (what scientists call) three organizational levels: people in partnerships; regional ecosystems, and the whole world. (If you want a clear and interesting treatment of the subject read the little book  ‘Resilience thinking: sustaining ecosystems and people in a changing world’ by Brian Walker and David Salt (2006); Island Press – you can get it on Amazon.com).

 

If we consider people in partnerships – whether married or not – we see that, at any given time, the situation (their interpersonal system) can be in any of a number of states. They might be having a good spell, happy together, no strains in the household – at least none that can’t be solved amicably. But that situation can be disrupted by any of a number of disturbances: financial problems, stress brought on by children to which the partners may react differently, work-related problems that translate into tension and arguments at home, and so on. Everyone knows all this and, if they think about it, is aware of the virtually infinite number of possible problems that might beset human relationships. The resilience of any particular relationship – the capacity of the partners to absorb stress and bounce back to a happy and stable state  clearly depends not only on their own emotional maturity and willingness to work at it, but also on their age, cultural expectations, support system, and on the state of the relationship at any particular time.  If a relationship is strong and healthy, it may be able to withstand quite massive stress and without catastrophic  disintegration. But if things are bad, and the relationship is in a steadily deteriorating state – going downhill in colloquial terms – relatively minor disturbance may cause it to collapse abruptly into a different, possibly stable but also possibly unpleasant physical and psychological state.  Things may stabilise in states that are sub-optimal, but not disastrous, and there may be resilience within those states.

So what’s the point of all that? It’s just a restatement of things that are the stuff of everyday life, of books and films and TV drama, stuff that we all know, isn’t it? Well, yes, but it seems worth looking at it from a point of view that is a bit different from the usual emotional, subjective, often dramatized approach.  Obviously, the sketchy remarks in the previous paragraph can be developed and elaborated as far as you like; the value in doing so can be expected to lie in the insights that can be gained from an analytical approach to what makes partnerships hold together, how resilient they are and what disturbances are likely to be disastrous.

The Darling River near Louth in the Murray-Darling Basin

Denuded rangeland near the Darling

Lets look at something completely different: say a river system. At time of writing there is, in Australia, an unedifying, vehement and unconstructive argument going on about how to manage the Murray-Darling Basin. This is by far our biggest river system – it has tiny flows in comparison to the great rivers of the world like the Amazon, Mississippi, Ganges, Yellow River, Congo, Mekong… - but it’s very important to Australia. The rivers are long and flow through large areas of flat, dry country, but there are important wetland areas in various parts.  Ecologically the  region consists of complex ecosystems that supported a wide range of vegetation and wildlife. European development has brought massive changes: vegetation has been cleared or denuded by grazing and crops, grown in monoculture, have replaced the natural plant communities over significant areas. Biodiversity has been lost. Barrages and dams have changed the flow of the rivers and large amounts of water (generally far too much) are extracted for irrigation. Overall, the character and hydrology of the catchments has been radically altered and their resilience greatly reduced. In large sections of the irrigated areas soil salinity, the creeping, lethal scourge that has destroyed numerous civilizations throughout history, is developing rapidly, reducing the productivity of the land and, in some parts, taking it out of production. Throughout the Basin soil health and fertility are declining.

From the European point of view the original state of the Basin was not useful – we (Europeans) demand that the system must be economically productive, within the parameters of our economic system and life-style expectations. (Whether those expectations are justifiable is another question but, for this discussion, we’ll dodge that one.) It is arguable that the human socio-economic systems in the irrigation towns, complex in themselves, are stable, and it is clear that those communities have no intention of changing and adapting, if they can avoid it. But the Basin’s ecosystems are not stable:  they have lost resilience and been pushed over their recovery thresholds so that they could not  return to their original, natural state, even if human activity stopped. They are maintained in their present condition by the constant input of energy from fossil fuels harnessed by human effort but, at present levels of exploitation, there is continued degradation so that, in the near future, there will be negative feed-backs to the human economy. These will cause deterioration in the socio-economic system. The problem, therefore, is to identify an overall stable state that halts land degradation and allows the wetlands to survive and the river system to function as a stable ecological entity, while still supporting the present populations and their economy.

The debate is well under way and, as I said, much of it is unedifying and unconstructive because people insist on ignoring facts and resorting to emotional polemic. It is generally agreed that the Basin must not be allowed to degenerate any further, but there’s not much agreement on how to satisfy people and maintain the health of the natural ecosystems. The adaptability of the ecosystems is fairly well understood but, so far, there is not much sign that the people of the Basin are prepared to be adaptable.  If they could be persuaded to think in terms of their own resilience and the way it is linked to the natural system on which they depend it may be possible to move more rapidly ( and less rancorously) towards solutions. These must involve action at  a range of levels (scales) from farms and small businesses, to catchments, townships and the region as a whole.  There are no guarantees, but ‘resilience thinking’ (as Brian Walker calls it) would almost certainly help move the Murray-Darling Basin towards a viable, stable ecological and economic state and help avert catastrophic collapse – like so many of the irrigation-dependent cultures in human history – into a degenerate system of little value to humans, supporting far less life than it can.

Turning to the whole world, the obvious and much-discussed interactions are those between humans and climate. I’m not going to discuss the likelihood of significant, human-induced climate change, caused mainly by burning fossil fuels and emitting the resulting gases into the atmosphere. Let’s just say, in modern jargon, that it’s a ‘no brainer’; if you are seriously biased, or have no interest in looking objectively at the scientific evidence, you might cling to the argument that the evidence is not conclusive enough to cause us to take preventive or adaptive action. But if that’s your position you’re out on a limb; the only serious debate is how much global temperatures will rise, what the impact of the rises will be, and what we are going to do about it.

The interesting question, for the purposes of the present discussion, is how much resilience can we hope for from global climate and ecosystems? Where are the thresholds between stable states and catastrophic decline. The interacting factors are obvious enough: the ‘greenhouse effect’, exacerbated by emissions from fossil fuel combustion; deforestation, with the changes that causes in the energy balance of the land; the ‘heat island’ effect of the world’s burgeoning cities, and the feed-backs from darkening Arctic oceans and advancing deserts in various regions. It probably isn’t possible to calculate when thresholds will be reached, and what collapse might look like. My own view (for what it’s worth) is that regional collapse is already happening, and this will continue. We could, in theory, stop the process of climate change and global ecosystem degradation – we  know what needs to be done – but there is no indication from history, and certainly none in the attitudes of modern humans, that we will. The human species, in evolving to its present position as the dominant global organism, has arrived at a level of hubris, combined with aggressive selfishness, that seems to virtually preclude mass action involving reducing the consumption of the earth’s resources and standards of living. The Americans lead the way!

I did say ‘mass action’. There are (probably) millions of people who are concerned about the future of the planet as a system that can support humans living decent, comfortable lives that do not demand extravagant consumption. But they are not in the majority. There are also billions of people who are only concerned to increase their consumption and standard of living – and they have a case. Taken overall, things don’t look good. The resilience of our earth has been overwhelmed, the feed-backs are negative and we have pushed the system into an unstable state. Parts of it retain resilience; all we can do is try to use that capacity and maintain enough livable regions to support a reasonable population of humans who may have recognised the need to live in balance with the natural systems they have managed to preserve.

The (double) generation gap

Three generations -Utah 2009

Assorted grandchildren -Withycombe, Mt Wilson NSW. Christmas 2009

We hear a lot about the generation gap, generally with reference to relations between teenagers and their parents. They are certainly a real problem, caused to some extent by bubbling hormones and biology – the urge of the younger generation to take over the world, which they KNOW their parents aren’t capable of managing properly. It’s exacerbated by the huge changes in information technology (mobile phones, e-mail, facebook and ‘the web’), with which the young are so much more comfortable than their elders and which shape their social lives to such a large extent

But spare a thought for the generation before the parents – the grandparents. Their family relationships can be difficult and their role in the family – if it exists as a unit – unclear. There are all sorts of reasons for this. If you could go back in time, to periods in our prehistory that are largely lost in the mist of ages, but are actually not that long ago in terms of the history of humankind and the evolution of cultural patterns and behaviour, you would find social systems very different from the fluid and rather amorphous interactions that characterise modern (western) societies. Humans have been around in much the same physical form we see now (allowing for large differences caused by nutrition) for around 100,000 years. Throughout much of that period we lived in small groups that followed the same life-style for generation after generation: hunter-gatherers whose lives were dominated by the seasons and the availability of food. It’s safe to assume that, in these groups, anyone who survived to old age – which was probably quite young in our terms – was revered for their experience and (in some cases) wisdom. As their physical abilities declined they would have been able to contribute to their societies in all sorts of ways and would have been respected accordingly. (However, there was also a ‘down’ side: in some societies, if times were hard, the elderly were left to die – inarguably a pragmatic solution, although perhaps unpalatable to some modern sensitivities.)

In more recent historical times, family bands and small communities remained strong and the old were generally respected and valued as the repositories of community knowledge and folklore. In some cultures they still are, but as printed matter became more and more widely available in much of the (so called) civilized world, following the invention of the printing press in Europe in about 1450, and the advent of printed books, the information available and accessible to people increased rapidly. By the 17^th century novels and story books, technical literature and political pamphlets, as well as commentaries on the Bible and religious matters, were becoming commonplace – at least in Europe. Newspapers and magazines appeared in the 18^th century and by the 19^th century literacy was sufficiently widespread to create a market for a cheap press in Europe and north America (these remarks don’t apply to most of Africa). So, in those countries, people no longer relied on word-of-mouth and the knowledge of the aged for information; there was far more of that available than even the wisest grandparents could provide. And nowadays, of course, with vast libraries available for a few computer keystrokes – a technology that many of the old manage with difficulty, if at all – the redundancy of the old as sources of knowledge is complete.

But it isn’t just the loss of their role as repositories of knowledge that has made grandparents redundant; it’s the fluid and mobile pattern of modern life. Young people move away from home and end up, after marriage or the establishment of stable ‘partner’ relationships, living away from the parental home, in another city or, not infrequently, another country.  Of course this has always happened, but it’s now the norm rather than the exception (I don’t have statistical support for this assertion, but would be prepared to bet heavily that it’s correct), so many grandchildren grow up without the day-to-day contact with grandparents that help cement relationships. For families to get together requires an effort, an occasion. Some parents – probably particularly those who had happy childhoods and retain deep and genuine love for their own parents – make the effort as often as they can and work on maintaining at least affectionate relationships between their children and the grandparents. In other cases it’s all too hard, life is too busy and, if truth be told, it just isn’t worth the effort, so grandparents are left to live out their lives with infrequent and superficial contact with the children of their offspring. And, on the occasions they meet, those children, when they are young, are simply bemused when they do are told to show affection to these old and apparently irrelevant people whom they hardly know.

The situation may be made worse if grandparents can’t refrain from comment when they are witness to behaviour that, in their youth, would have brought swift and severe disciplinary action but which, for their children’s offspring, brings only a mild reprimand or some sort of negotiated agreement. Grandparently intervention is seldom appreciated by either of the other generations. As grandchildren mature, through the ‘terrible twos’ to rambunctious 8-10 year olds, and then teenagers, there’s a reasonable chance they will acquire at least a veneer of civilisation and good manners, perhaps enough to realise that the essence of successful human relationships lies in concern for the well-being of others. This translates - for those aware enough to see it, even subconsciously – into concern for the happiness of grandparents: which means being nice to them. Acting against such civilised instincts is the modern cult of individuality – the ‘me before everyone else’ syndrome. This, as it develops in teenagers under the influence of their subculture, may swamp basic humanitarian instincts towards kindness and consideration as well as the residual genetic bonds which, unsupported by cultural reinforcement, may not be significant factors in the second generation.

If we accept the selfish gene hypothesis – that virtually all the strategies adopted by biological organisms for the preservation of their species are aimed, ultimately, at the transmission into succeeding generations of the genetic material that defines the species – then there are no strong biological reasons for valuing grandparents. They have done their job: they have produced offspring that have survived and, in turn reproduced themselves. The genes continue on their way. Perhaps that’s the reason for the pride many grandparents take in their childrens’ children, even though those children carry only one quarter of the grandparents’ genes.

Culturally, the role and importance of grandparents is embedded in ancient stereotypes, no doubt deriving from epochs when the older members of groups and communities were important not only as sources of wisdom but also as child-minders and community leaders, providing the focal points who helped provide and maintain the identity, coherence and continuity of the group. Religious strictures to honour your father and mother – like the sixth commandment, said to have been given by God to Moses, and Muslim teachings based on the Quran (also said to be the word of God) – are undoubtedly derived from those epochs. The teachings are, arguably, simply formalisations of practical and useful arrangements that evolved over hundreds of generations, now elevated to the status of inarguable doctrines based on the unquestioned words of highly questionable concepts of god. Today, if grandparents continue to make a significant contribution to the survival and success of generations beyond that of their offspring, they reinforce the old cultural reasons for those doctrines.

Its’ not all bad, of course. There are many cases and situations where grandparents are indeed loved and honoured, where they can and do make useful contributions to the families of their children, relieving the pressures of modern life by child-minding, transport and, in some cases, financial contributions. Like successful marriages, it takes work, but it has to be worthwhile. As the old live, on average, longer and longer, their ability to contribute to their families, and society as a whole, emotionally as well as in practical ways, should not be allowed to go to waste. 

Can I remind you to look at http://threadsinthetapestry.blogspot.com/ for a few earlier efforts. (I'm still learning this package, so presentation consistency leaves a bit to be desired)


Go well 


Joe

Time warp

The farm where I grew up in (what was then) Rhodesia. The people in the photo were (L-to-R): one of my aunts, my mother and my youngest brother (killed in an accident in 1975)

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Time warp

I’m driving west from the Blue Mountains, over the divide to Bathurst and out onto the western slopes. I’m on my own because Diana is in Bermuda, doing her grandmotherly duty for Judy, who is travelling. It’s been a good season. After years of drought there’s been good rain across the country areas; the grass is an un-Australian, vivid green and canola crops in flower paint some paddocks blinding yellow in a perfect, cloudless spring afternoon. Tanks are full and cattle graze leisurely or stand unmoving in the sun.

The roads are quiet and, along the route I am using, there’s a blessed absence of the heavy trucks that make driving an ordeal on so many Australian roads. I have the music of my era on my iPod playing through the car audio system: Kris Kristoferson singing ‘Me and Bobby McGee’; Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand with ‘You don’t bring me flowers’; Kenny Rogers and ‘The Gambler’; Sammy Davis junior, Frank Sinatra, Glen Cambell and, more modern but of the same genre, John McCutcheon with songs like ‘Dancing in the street’. And so on – lots of songs; not a sophisticated taste in music but I react to it with visceral pleasure. It would be good to be able to bottle this feeling, these moments that must be called happiness. Not deep, exciting happiness; just quiet pleasure. Some of the music stirs memories of people and places and events from long ago and far away; sometimes I just ‘go with the flow’ – in a good car on a quiet afternoon, with a long way to drive, I can allow myself to indulge in the time warp, to let the years slip away and remember when we always looked forward, when there were always things that needed doing, goals to aim at.

There’s an aphorism about life being wasted on the young, who are profligate of the good times, of their health and energy and exciting relationships. They always want a future filled with the reality of present dreams – they want more excitement, more success, more ‘things’, more sex (certainly in the case of males). But there’s another aphorism about finding time to watch the flowers grow, and that’s important too. ‘Carpe diem’ – seize the day. It’s all you have and however long you live, that will always be the case. I guess ‘carpe diem’ means what you want it to mean, but in my view it means ‘appreciate what you have right now – ‘bottle it’ mentally and emotionally. Life is the sum of our experiences, but it’s also – and primarily – the here and now, so if we seize the moment, the day, savour the good things, come to terms with the bad, then when we allow ourselves to drift into a time warp we will rekindle some of what we felt back then – it will be worth revisiting the past.

I think, for most people, life’s rear view mirror tends to have a rosy tint; it’s easy to remember the good times and if we remember them as better than they really were, well, there’s no harm in that. We usually choose not to remember, at least we don’t dwell on, the mistakes we made, the times we embarrassed ourselves, the worries and troubles and boredom – those are the memories that come back when we’re feeling down; they’re not good for our self-respect and will make us feel worse. ‘Vain regrets’ are always sterile, although very difficult to avoid. Frank Sinatra sang “Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention…”. Lucky him! (It made a good song, but was it believable? Probably not, but who cares now.) I liked the more realistic attitude implied by Burl Ives (MANY years ago): “The years go by, and I try to grin; keep things from getting’ under my skin…” – altho’ the theme of his reminiscence was “life gets tejus, don’t it?”, which doesn’t suggest a very optimistic outlook. Just go with the flow, old man, and take what comes.

There is one more thing about this time warp business: reminiscence and warm fuzzy feelings, brought on by music and beautiful country afternoons, or whatever, are all very well, but living in the past can’t be recommended. There are countless novels and stories built on ideas like revenge for past wrongs, seeking ‘closure’ (whatever that means) in relation to the death of loved ones, trying to resurrect faded love, and so on. There are people who don’t accept that the world has changed, that whatever your age, you have to move on; they cling to old habits and customs, like a few die-hard British in the fading splendour that reflected the British Raj in India, or the white people who cling on in Zimbabwe, dreaming of Rhodesia and the life we knew. I would like to go back to that, too, but the country and the people and the way of life we knew are long gone and vilifying Mugabe – however justifiably– won’t bring any of it back. There are still things to do that are worth doing, and afternoons in the sun that are worth living.

New start

I started off this pastime with threadsinthetapestry.blogspot.com, but discovered, after a little exploration in Google, that this wasn't as original idea as I had thought, so I have changed to Ideas and speculations. If you come across this one and you're interested in my first four postings, you'll find them at the threads in the tapestry address, so please have a look. The first one explains why I'm doing this, and I'm not going to repeat that explanation.

Today's posting will include two pieces (besides this one)because I have been thinking about them and drafted them without getting around to putting them on the site. They were actually written about a week apart, but since I don't yet have any regular commentators or correspondents, it doesn't really matter if they're all posted today.

The pieces are 'Time warp' and the 'The (double( double generation gap'.

Obviously, I hope someone reads them and reacts

Go well

Joe