rowland manthorpe dot com

I’ve just finished a piece on unemployment and confidence for the RSA Journal. While I was procrastinating, I read Eamon Duffy’s review of Keith Thomas’s new book in the LRB (subscriber protected). One passage made an interesting contrast to what I was writing:

People in our society think of unemployment as a curse, and derive much of their identity and satisfaction from work. But Thomas begins his chapter on work and vocation by exploring the conventional early modern view that work was at best a necessary evil.

For classical Greence the best life was one of leisure, “not idleness, of course, but virtuous activity of mind and body, involving no manual albour and unconstrained by the need to earn a living”. For ancient Christianity, work was the “primal curse”, inflicted on humankind as a punishment for the Fall.

Both classical and Christian orthodoxies informed early modern attitudes, so that the devoutly Protestant John Locke could assert on both counts that “labour for labour’s sake is against nature”. There would be no work in heaven.

Have a good weekend everyone.

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This 

What is luck? Do some people have more of it than others? If they do, where do they get it?

The new Harry Potter film is tremendous - no matter what the reviews say. I can’t say what it would be like if you weren’t a massive fan who’d read all the books several times, but I enjoyed it.

The film features one of J. K. Rowling’s best creations: “liquid luck”, or felix felicis. This potion gives anyone who drinks it good fortune for a short period. Harry wins a small vial in a contest and takes it in order to convince Professor Horace Slughorn to give up a memory. You can see the results in this bootleg. It looks very much like confidence.

In another scene, Harry pretends to slip some felix felicis in Ron’s drink, to boost his morale before an important Quidditch match. Ron plays perfectly, embued with near-magical powers by his mental state:

The link between luck and confidence is made explicit elsewhere. Taking too much of the potion, we are told in the book, can cause giddiness, recklessness and overconfidence. When Harry does have a sip, Rowling writes:

Slowly but surely, an exhilarating sense of infinite opportunity stole through him; he felt as though he could have done anything, anything at all … Harry got to his feet, smiling, brimful of confidence.

Chance, by definition, is what we cannot control. But luck is not wholly implacable. A little observation of our lives tells us that some people attract more of it than others.

In his book The Luck Factor the psychologist Richard Wiseman describes the behavioural habits “scientifically proven to help you attract good fortune”. Lucky people are “social magnets”, he says, who build “networks of luck”. They have a relaxed attitude towards life. They are open to new experiences. Lucky people listen to their hunches and gut feelings, and they anticipate good fortune in the future. They expect their interactions with others to be successful.

Wiseman erroneously gives a list of actions, instead of the disposition they spring from. But he is correct to say that Fortune has likes and dislikes. Above all, she is attracted to confidence.

The idea that Fortune cannot be influenced comes from Christian philosophy. Ever since the Christian philosopher Boethius first called Fortune the sightless goddess in the sixth century AD, people have liked to imagine that she is thoughtless and indiscriminate in the bestowal of her gifts. In Titian’s painting, Fortune is symbolised by the wheel, turning inexorably, careless of who it crushes.

Classical philosophers saw more clearly. Luck is not blind. As the Roman historian Livy recognised, she prefers certain individuals.

Livy gave us the phrase “Fortune favours the brave”. Courage, however, is not so valuable for us. In our time, Fortune prefers the confident.

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This 

At the Royal Court last night, to see Jerusalem, by Jez Butterworth. An astonishingly rich play, with a truly incredible central performance by Mark Rylance (as Johnny “Rooster” Byron, pictured). They’ve extended the run. This is a must see.

I’ll be thinking about Jerusalem for a long time. There’s so much to it, although it manages to cram it all in without ever turning boring or pretentious. It reminded me of Angela Carter - the short story “Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, in particular - and the best bits of Neil Gaiman. He’s also recreated A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and this is what Butterworth does here, with Rylance as a Puckish Lord of Misrule.

Gaiman has often lamented Fairie’s departure from the real world. Butterworth makes the same point here, but instead of connecting it to the loss of childhood in the normal way he connects it to adolescence - that strange, unnerving time when sex undermines reality. The constriction of adolescence is a major theme here - Rylance’s character deals drugs to the local teenagers. Like Carter, who pictures the Puck with an enormous, irrepressible erection, Butterworth sees the sexuality of all those folk tales.

I was also strongly reminded of Darkmansby Nicola Barker. Like Jerusalem, Darkmans is a brilliant portrait of contemporary Britain - there’s a superb portrait of a feckless builder - but it’s also a strange, mystical book, deeply concerned with myth and history. At ten million pages, it’s too long for its slightly disappointing ending, but it’s still an excellent read. If you enjoyed Jerusalem, I suggest you start here.

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This 

Something odd is going on at the National:

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This 

Taken yesterday, in Gospel Oak, London.

Lots of this sort of thing around at the moment. As Kirstin put it, in the comments to this post:

People will take just about any amount of contradictory crap. Right now, thousands of fifteen year old girls are sitting in maths, dreaming about the day they’ll have enough money for a boob job and use their new-found confidence to get on the front cover of FHM.

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This 

Yes, that’s the headline on the email I’ve just received from MyFootballClub:

An offer of £55,000 has been made for Ebbsfleet United striker Michael Gash, the player that MyFC members raised £20,000 to buy. Members are deciding whether or not to sell the the striker and make a profit on the deal - voting closes today (Friday 24 July) at 20.00 BST.

Do you think they know? Maybe someone should tell them.

(MyFC is, of course, “the world’s first and only web-community owned football club. I take this email as proof of Stringfellow’s rule, which states that any and all internet projects must, inevitably, descend into smut).

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This 

The fiercest attacks on the BBC come from conservatives. I was reminded of this during a stimulating discussion with Peter Wallis, aka Peter York, last week. Peter’s doing some research on attitudes towards the BBC and seemed to be under the impression that I was someone worth asking. Can’t think which crazy fool gave him that idea.

Among the subjects I failed to enlighten Peter on was the connection between conservatism (which I loosely subscribe to) and support for the BBC (which is only right and proper among civilised people). He ended up writing down “social cohesion”, which I do think is important, but not in the way it’s normally taken to be. I’m with Mark Thompson on this one. He says:

I think there is a lot of evidence that this remains quite a closely-knit culture where people have a lot of things in common …it’s for the British public to decide how far they want to feel part of different cultures and communities. The truth will be some of both.

In other words, national programming will survive because people desire some level of cohesion.

The reason that conservatives should support the BBC is a prudential one. I am not talking here about social conservatives (who oppose the BBC’s cultural liberalism), or free-market conservatives (who find the license fee just as offensive); I am talking about traditional, old-fashioned conservatives - Burkean conservatives. These people should be instinctively against any radical change, especially when the system as a whole is in such a state of flux.

Britain’s broadcasting system has grown up through a patchwork of piecemeal reforms. It is imperfect, unusual, and untidy. Idealists would like to sweep it all away and replace it with something more rational (or replace it with nothing, which is what replacing it with the market would be). But, as Burke observed all those years ago, idealists are to be ignored. He preached reform not revolution. Thankfully, that is where the current consensus sits today.

Burke also said that tough times would bring out the genius of long-standing institutions. John Lloyd, one of the best commentators on this sort of thing, makes the same point in an excellent article in Prospect:

We have inherited a great boon: a large and powerful media organisation that is open to debate … all of its programmes are explicitly part of the public square—open to argument exactly because we are nearly all paying for them, because we all have a stake in the BBC as a national, public institution.

Lloyd calls the BBC an accidentally lucky gift. Conservatives, of all people, should know how precious these gifts are.

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This 

Malcolm Gladwell has a long article in this week’s New Yorker on overconfidence. It doesn’t add much to the points he has already made, although it contains a lot of nice detail, particularly about Bear Stearns under Jimmy Cayne and Alan (Ace) Greenberg.

Gladwell gets a lot of criticism. Some of it is deserved. He’s also fine writer - precise and witty, with a good sense of timing. There are a couple of chuckle-out-loud lines in this piece.

It’s worth a read.

UPDATE: John Lanchester suggests why overconfidence may be particularly prevelant in financial fields:

Artists, sportsmen, surgeons, plumbers, and the rest of us have secret voices of doubt, inner reservations about ourselves, but if you go to work with money, and make money, you can be proved right in the most inhumanly pure way. This is why people who have succeeded in the world of money tend to have such a high opinion of themselves. And this is why they seem to regard themselves as paragons of rationality, while others often regard them as slightly nuts. The chairman and C.E.O. of Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld, in his no-apologies testimony to a congressional committee after his company’s collapse, gave us a glimpse of this state of mind in its full pomp.

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This 

Warning: nerdy political theory post coming up.

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, co-authors of Nudge, one the most important political books of last year, have a special fondness for Odysseus. They particularly like the bit where he confronts the Sirens, because this seems to them to be the perfect example of a “nudge”. Odysseus ties himself to the mast so that he doesn’t have to rely on willpower alone. In just the same way, they argue, we can tweak our physical environment to ensure that our good selves overcome our greedy, irrational selves, the parts of us which cannot resist temptation.

This is an influential meme. It turns up on websites like selfgrowth.com, where Dr. Alex Benzer (author of The Tao of Dating for Women, among other books) has christened it The Odysseus Protocol (sample quote: “Now Odysseus is one crafty dude”). It features in academic and political debates about libertarian paternalism, the philosophy underlying Sunstein and Thaler’s work.

I’ve always found something slightly suspicious about both the idea, but it was not until I began to read Raymond Geuss’s collection of essays Outside Ethicsthat I worked out exactly what. Geuss writes brilliantly (naturally; he is brilliant) about the German thinker Theodor Adorno. He summarises Adorno’s view of Odysseus thus:

the “archetype of the bourgeois individual” … Odysseus gains knowledge, control over nature (and aesthetic satisfaction) by virtue of self-repression, being bound to the mast, and by virtue of reducing his sailors to the status of (temporarily) mutilated slaves, who must row with stopped ears.

This relates to Adorno’s view (developed, like the above, with Max Horkheimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment) that Enlightenment ethics, in particular those of Immanuel Kant, are essentially sadistic. (Anyone who’s read Vernon God Little will be, like me, reading “Immanuel Kant” as “Manual Cunt”). The fully rational universe that Kant describes, above all its emphasis on “duty“, can only be explained by an enjoyment of pain - that, or an enjoyment of pain being inflicted.

The widespread acceptance of The Odysseus Protocol would also seem to support a disturbing further thought. As Geuss puts it:

…the real world which we inhabit is already the world of de Sade - of universal sadism directed at self and others and of sadism’s mirror image, masochism - if just a little bit less fully and systematically organised, a bit less “rational”, than [de Sade's great work] The 120 Days of Sodom.

Perhaps you find this a bit far-fetched. Consider, in this light, the words of our friend Dr. Benzer:

he made sure his crew wouldn’t be tempted by plugging their ears, and he made sure he didn’t do anything silly by getting himself tied up nice and tight.

Less Marquis de Sade, more Oooh matron! Even so…

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This 

Everywhere I turn at the moment, there’s someone telling us what we need to do to repair our financial system. Martin Wolf is the latest to try his hand: his Fixing Global Finance is reviewed this week by Robert Skidelsky in the NYRB.

I’m not qualified to comment on the detail of Wolf’s plan, but it seems that he is pessimistic about the possibility of reform in the short term; Skidelsky shares that pessimism. Both fail to come up with radical options for change. I can’t help but wonder if this failure (and of course not everyone will see it as a failure) has anything with the identity of Wolf and Skidelsky. They are about as eminent as financial experts get, but they are firmly placed inside the system. It may seem natural to consult established experts, but is their worldview preventing us from seeing different futures?

This might be an obvious point, but I was particularly struck by Slavoj Zizek’s way of putting it in his clever little book On Belief. In order to move from a situation where politics is considered merely as a series of pragmatic interventions to a politics of Truth, Zizek advocates not a return to Marx - already a cliche, as he points out - but a return to Lenin.

Two features make Lenin the right man for our times, Zizek says (although he was talking more generally - On Belief was written in 2001).

First, his position outside Marx’s inner circle (Lenin had never met Marx; moreover, he came from a land at the Eastern borders of “European civilisation”):

It is only possible to retrieve the theory’s original impulse from this external position; in exactly the same way St. Paul, who formulated the basic tenets of Christianity, was not part of Christ’s inner circle, and Lacan accomplished his “return to Freud” using a totally distinct theoretical tradition as a leverage … in the same way that St. Paul and Lacan reinscribe the original teaching into a different context

Lenin is also a man for our times because of his explicitly political outlook (the reinvigoration of Marx, by contrast, is deeply apolitical). What Is To Be Done?, Zizek says, is

the text which exhibits Lenin’s unconditional will to intervene in the situation, not in the pragmatic sense of “adjusting the theory to the realistic claims through necessary compromises”, but, on the contrary, in the sense of dispelling all opportunistic compromises, of adopting the unequivocal radical position from which it is only possible to intervene in such a way that our intervention changes the coordinates of the situation. The contrast here is clear with regard to today’s Third Way “postpolitics”, which emphasises the need to leave behind old ideological divisions and to confront new issues armed with the necessary expert knowledge.

I am not as willing as Zizek to embrace Lenin: the consequences of his kind of political intervention are rarely pleasant, and often deeply unpleasant. But the end of Skidelsky’s review - where he castigates Wolf for his lack of historical perspective - does make me think that something along these lines might come to be pass, market theory and politics are readjusted in painful ways:

A willingness by the US government to end macroeconomic imbalances depends on its willingness to accept a much more plural world … Whether, even under Obama, the US is willing to accept such a political rebalancing of the world is far from obvious. It will require a huge mental realignment in the United States. The financial crash has disclosed the need for an economic realignment. But it will not happen until the US renounces its imperial mission.

Hugo Chávez says he intends to give What Is To Be Done to Barack Obama, the definitive Third Wayer, at their next meeting. Somehow, I’m not sure this will have the desired result…

UPDATE (21.07.09): Raincoat Optimism (a fellow member of Bloggers Circle) has more on the Zizek-banking connection, as well as some (rather complicated) reflections on compassionate conservatism.

Tweet This  Delicious This  Digg This