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.