Eleven Things: This time it's June

“Without trepidation, then, I offer the following prediction. One century hence, if a roster of economists is asked to identify the intellectual father of their discipline, a majority will name Charles Darwin.”

Robert Frank, The Darwin Economy, 2011

“The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists... It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single story… the hope that it will be ‘refuted’ by some shattering breakthrough is about as reasonable as the hope that we will return to a geocentric vision and discard Copernicus.”

Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 1995

“The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously the same.”

Charles Darwin, 1871

"There is a melancholy fantasy, propounded a century or more ago by Theodor Fechner [and others] of a complete library.  The library is strictly complete, boasting as it does all possible books within certain rather reasonable limits… The principle of accession is simple, if uneconomical: every combinatorially possible sequence of letters, punctuation, and spaces, up to the prescribed book length, uniformly bound in half calf…  The entire and ultimate truth about everything is printed in full in that library [but] there is not room in the present phase of our expanding universe, on present estimates, for more than a negligible fraction of the collection… In seeking the truth we have no way of knowing which volume to pick up nor which to follow it with, but it is all right there.”

W V Quine, Quiddities, 1987

1

I read about an experiment with hermit crabs.  Nothing cruel or nasty.  The scientist wanted to know about courage, or timidity, and whether it was an evolved trait or not.  He – I’m pretty sure it was a he – had a hundred or so hermit crabs, and he scared each one, one at a time, and then waited to see how long before the hermit crab came back out of its shell.

And he did that several times, so that each hermit crab had several scares and several opportunities to re-emerge.  I don’t think they were big nasty scares, just little scares, like a noise or a shadow or somesuch, just enough to prompt the hermit crab to disappear the fuck back into its shell as quickly as possible.

And then the scientist waited, timing each hermit crab, timing each occasion, seeing how long before the hermit crab popped its head back out again.

A few hermit crabs re-emerged pretty quickly, every time, and some hermit crabs took ages.  Most hermit crabs were somewhere in the middle.  All the hermit crabs were either quick, or slow, or somewhere in the middle.  He didn’t find crabs that were sometimes quick and sometimes slow.

The scientist plotted the emergence times and it looked roughly like this:

Which is to say: a normal distribution.  A small and roughly equal number at either extreme, with the majority in the middle.

The hermit crabs that re-emerged quickly from their shells he deemed ‘brave’; and those who took ages he deemed ‘timid’. 

The evolutionary argument is this: the scary thing COULD be a threat, something big and nasty that will eat you; OR it could be just a shadow, a thing of no consequence whatsoever.

If it’s a threat – if it’s hungry and has claws and teeth and stuff – re-emerging early is a risk.  Re-emerging early means you might well be eaten.  Being brave, taking the risk, means you might get eaten.

On the other hand – maybe it was just a shadow?  In that case, re-emerging early means – you get to the food (or the sex, or whatever else it is that the alert contemporary hermit crab has on his or her mind) before the other hermit crabs.

At the other end of the spectrum, if it was just a shadow, the timid ones emerge to find – no food, no sex, in fact all other hermit crabs have already emerged and moved on.  You do that too often, and you’re soon dead.

But if it was a threat, then the timid ones emerge to find – all the other hermit crabs have been eaten and you, the timid ones, survive.

Fierce, Darwinian stuff.  Over time – over thousands of generations – if it turns out that emerging early is a good thing, then braver hermit crabs will breed more than the more timid hermit crabs, and the whole of hermit crab culture – their entire normal distribution – will edge towards the ‘braver’ end of the spectrum.  Get too cocky though and the brave outliers (who, in comparison to their forebears, will be stupendously brave) will simply get eaten and won’t have the chance to breed.

Relative to all the threats (hungry things with teeth) and all the opportunities (food things that hermit crabs like to eat) the normal curve edges up and down, up and down, over time.

So.

First thing: there is a distribution curve of all the distribution curves.  You can add them all up, all the bravery/timidity distributions there have ever been, and THAT is a normal distribution.

Second thing: today’s brave and timid hermit crabs are merely brave/timid relative to today’s threat/opportunity environment.  It’s difficult to say much more than this.  Maybe these are, on average, the bravest hermit crabs there’ve ever been.  Or, perhaps, they are the most timid and once upon a time the hermit crabs were ferociously brave and we should thank our lucky stars that we humans are not having to live through the time of horribly ferocious hermit crabs.

Third thing: we are hermit crabs.  A scary Covid thing has happened and we disappeared into our shells and now some of us have ventured out and some of us are still in our shells and no previous normal distribution of brave/timid tells us anything about the new landscape and precisely none of us know what happens next.

Two

“Do you remember that time in 2020 when everything nearly fell apart?  When all those people died and the only people who kept everything going were all those key workers?”

WE MUST LOOK AFTER OUR KEY WORKERS

Three

A dreamscape in which Greek myth, a disguised psychology, meets in battle with Viennese culture (a disguised mythology) at the end of empire.  Robert Musil on drums! Egon Shiele on sax! Lead misogyny by Sigmund Freud! There is an inexpressible hue to proceedings, a colour wash of leaden yellow, an incommensurable assembly of marigold and daffodil, an autumnal sunbeam on impossible buttercups, a miscellany of lemon.   Joy and tragedy yoked, and yolked.

Listen: the gods are whispering.  That which once was dust is dust no more; a mote emotes, sings, carouses and caresses, falters, fails.  We are sad, of course – who wouldn’t be?  But we have to imagine ourselves happy, do we not?

Perhaps it is for the best.  I cannot say.  I would prefer it were otherwise.  I would prefer…

…well, what is the point of a long list?  It can be summarised very efficiently:

I would prefer if it were Finland.

Four

It was, until recently, June, so I thought of Prince.

I wonder what he’d make of all this?

He probably wouldn’t even have noticed Marcus Rashford.  Marcus is a young man who plays football very well and fleetingly became the focus of media attention for his efforts to address hunger in Britain.

“Hunger in Britain”.  There are so many things wrong about this that I don’t even know where to start.  One thing’s for sure though: how in fuck is it the case that action by government to reduce the number of hungry children in the world’s sixth or seventh wealthiest country requires the intervention of a footballer?

Or:

How in fuck is it the case that funding for the NHS should come from a centenarian walking laps of his garden? (Also: why didn’t they promote him to honorary Major rather than honorary Colonel? Then someone could have asked his advice on how to deal with fascists rampaging through picnics in central London: “Crowd control to Major Tom”…)

Or:

How in fuck is it the case that proper grown-up discussion of the rights of women, the rights of trans people and the safe-guarding of children should depend on the pain and perspective of a writer of children’s stories?

What the bloody hell is going on?

I could be sympathetic, I suppose, and acknowledge the legitimacy of contributions to public life from any source, and acknowledge the need of a locked-down culture to find heroes of any kind, and acknowledge the value of good souls in these strange dark times…

But I don’t feel sympathetic: I feel angry.  Furious, in fact.  And furious not just at the obvious target – the most comprehensively awful UK government I have ever witnessed – but furious too at everything that brought that government about.  Which means everything from Britain’s colonial past, a panoply of misplaced national myths, a system that rewards presentation over content, an economic model that allows extremist control of the majority of media outlets, a system that is structurally patriarchal, racist and exploitative, the chronic failure of the major political parties to reform the voting system, the promotion of venal sycophancy over effective competence, the fallout from the mismanagement of the 2008 crash… and – of course – the failure of my own class, the reasonably prosperous, reasonably well-educated, liberal metropolitan white folk who thought the values of the Enlightenment were self-evidently superior to the alternatives and who therefore presumed we could sort of get on with whatever it was that pre-occupied us and that we were under no real duty to roll up our fucking sleeves and make sure that all the wins were secure and that society as a whole was as best placed as it could be to address the next set of challenges, be they to do with securing genuine social and racial justice, saving the planet from irreparable environmental harm or accelerating the emergence of a genuinely sustainable economy.

So, yes, I’m furious about that too.  We haven’t done enough. I haven’t done enough.

Five

In the last few months of her life Samantha spent quite a lot of time sat in a chair designed especially for people with strength or mobility problems: electrically powered, it essentially tipped itself along its leading edge to help its occupant in and out of the chair, saving them from the fight with gravity.  Samantha would sit there, wrapped up in an eskimo suit of blankets and scarves (it chills you from the inside, cancer) whilst painting, eating, watching television, stroking the cats, chatting with whoever was nearby and playing with her iPad.

On the television there was an advert for a cruise along the Rhine.  Samantha wanted to go.  

She hated going on holiday: it was too much hassle, and there were the cats to think about, and there was so much going on back at base.  (One of the reasons for not dying yet, she explained to her GP, was that she had too much going on.)  But a river cruise?  Better than one of those awful ocean cruises – no storms or sunbathing to worry about – and a slow-motion temptation when there’s not much time left.

Maybe it was like Dunbar, Yossarian’s buddy in Catch-22, who wanted to live as long as possible, so played quoits, the game he hated most in the world, because that would make the time go more slowly, which would mean he lived for longer.

We never made it to the Rhine.

But our day trip to Hastings was perfect.

Six

Sometime the Title of the Poem is 

Longer than the Poem Itself 

(especially when the poem is a generic attack 

on an entire class of narcissistic kleptomaniacs 

with blond hair, orange skin 

etc

for whom imagined future glory is

more important

than such ephemera as

your actual family

or

the actual here and now)

You started as your father’s ugly grunt;

your quest since then? To find the loved you missed.

And so: you’ll last for ever on a list

appearing in the ledger as ‘A Cunt’

Seven

Don’t worry, there won’t be many more of these.  I mean, if you really wanted to read for this long you’d have committed to a novel, or a long piece in The Atlantic or the TLS, or at least something with characters and a beginning and a middle and an end.

But, you’re here now, and if you’ve got as far as seven then you’re probably committed to making it all the way to the end.

And in acknowledgement of that, and with gratitude, I want to gaze at my confusion, your confusion, the confusion, and say: this is how it is now.

I used to wonder about the Orange Marches.  (I’m quite glad they’re not yellow marches, otherwise they might have appeared in number three instead, and that would have made even less sense.) What are those orange people doing – those young people, especially – marching around in memory of an event that happened more than 300 years ago?  For god’s sake (I would say to myself) get over yourselves!  It was long time ago.  Enough already.

I slowly realised that today’s youngster who goes on their first march is not ‘remembering’ the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.  S/he is, rather, succumbing to a surround-sound pressure from others and is expressing their sense of belonging by going on a march in the middle of July with all the other people they think are ‘like me’.

People ‘like me’.  The most powerful behavioural force there is: what other people you think are like you do.  

It goes a long way to explaining a lot of weird shit.  Feeling a bit confused, lonely, not sure of what to do or where to go or how to be?  (Welcome to the human condition, kid!) (And welcome, especially, to the human condition in the time of late capitalism and early Covid!) Don’t worry!  A handy belief system is readily available, and it comes with a whole bunch of behavioural tropes (eat this, don’t eat that; walk here but not there; wear this but not that; etcetera) and a ‘community’ of other people who are ‘like you’; and all you have to do is support a particular football team or believe in a particular god or refuse to wear a mask or be angry about a particular set of historic events and YOU WILL BE REASSURED.  No matter how outlandish, dangerous or bereft of fact or evidence, reassurance for your confusion is available: all you have to do is join the story and ‘belong’.

But that’s not that bad bit.

The bad bit is that this tendency, this behaviour, this rush to reassurance, this is the rock on which any assumption of automatic progress founders.  The assumption that – for example – the scientific method or democracy or empiricism or humanism will over time supplant magical thinking or totalitarianism through some natural, automatic process is misplaced.  Because that assumption is in turn predicated on the belief than each and every individual will adopt some sort of critical, reasoning posture (or even an “intentional stance”) and that, from such a position, everything else follows.

Most individuals do not adopt such a posture.  You might – but that’s because you’ve been lucky (in a Rawlsian sense).  

For most people, as the world becomes scarier (read: less predictable, more uncertain) their need for reassurance goes up.  (Take away the confidence that the future will be better than the past, for example; or that diseases can always be controlled…) And that reassurance comes not from abstractions like ‘the Enlightenment’ or ‘representative democracy’ or 'trust the scientists' but from THE EXPERIENCE OF BELONGING TO A GROUP OF PEOPLE LIKE ME.

And, since belonging consists of ‘having a shared story’ then it’s the stories that matter, not the facts.

Which is all by way of saying: unless and until progressive liberalism (etcetera) has better stories than jingoistic retrograde conspiracy thinking, all of this only goes one way...

Or something.  I don’t know.  I’m as confused as anybody else…

Eight

Watch out – the pan-psychists are everywhere.

Nine

It’s not just in our past; it’s in the past…

I had some clean money and I used it to buy petrol

where it became dirty

The evil oil company paid some of the dirty money

to the government

in the form of tax

where it became clean again

I did some work for the government

and they paid me

with clean money

which I used

to buy petrol

Also

I saved some

in my pension

My pension fund managers decided

not to lend my clean money

to the evil oil companies any more

which is great

except

what if they decide that the following companies are evil:

horrid supermarkets

nasty bankers

exploitative property developers

mining companies

anyone involved in the production of motor vehicles

anyone involved in the production of items that cause any harm to animals

anyone who uses plastic

anyone who is aggressive towards trees

Eh?

Will I still have a pension, clean

or otherwise?

Ten

They say that the secret of good comedy is

timing.

But it’s the same with life, no?

Break too early, and you’re just being reckless.

Wait too long, and you’ve lost your nerve.

Funnily enough, the saving grace is – you’ll never know.

Eleven

It’s late August now, and the virus is bouncing around like a reverberation: local spikes, sudden increases and decreases in infections per whatever, all guidance superfluous, the shape of the future coming into view.  This is how it is now.  For the foreseeable future.  Messy. Confusing.

We must look after our key workers.

This phase, we don’t have a glorious spring for juxtaposition, or a fine summer to help us live outdoors and maintain our distance. No.  This time, the clouds are closing in, and the sky darkens, and we must gather inside.  Inside.  In groups.

In school rooms and pubs.  In offices and theatres.  In cafes and clubs.

In school rooms.

Who are you?  Where do you belong? Are you timid or brave?