Politics – Philip Bradford

Vaclav Havel’s Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World

In 1994, shortly after becoming President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel travelled to the USA and delivered an address in Philadelphia called “The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World”. The USSR had recently collapsed and a new form of capitalism was spreading its influence over the world, connecting disparate cultures via fractal conduits of trade and migration. Havel worried that without some new narrative to paper over their differences, this abrupt connection of cultures would lead to conflict. Wars were already sparking in the Middle East and Europe and international diplomacy was difficult. Cooperation required governments to look past their own interests in favour of a more general conception of progress. People needed a unifying ideal to cleave to, which would encourage them to move with one purpose against international problems. It had to be new, because the 20th Century was an age of emancipation where people had begun to recognize the richness of different perspectives; there were protections for indigenous cultures and no single ideology of the time was strong enough to overpower all the others. Organized religion was also declining in the West, where science had replaced metaphysical explanations of natural phenomena and damaged the credibility of the religious enterprise. Havel therefore looked for inspiration in two ideas drawn directly from modern science. He called them “transcendent” in the hope they might provide us with a sense of rootedness in the cosmos and encourage us to see things from a superhuman vantage. Contemplating them would be like turning over a precious jewel in your hand, as facets become alternately reflective and transparent and expose, by turns, the dark interior of the mineral or the refulgent world around it.

The Ideas

“…Because it’s not enough to just live. You have to have something to live for. Let it be Earth.”

Admiral William “Bill” Adama – Battlestar Galactica.

The first of Havel’s transcendent ideas is the Anthropic principle, which was developed originally to help explain a puzzle in cosmology. By the mid-twentieth century, astronomers had discovered that space was accelerating – the universe did not appear to be in a steady state – and they knew that the heavy elements essential to life had been created gradually in stars through a process of nuclear fusion. They also knew that stars have finite lives – that they burn up and out, cooling over time – and their propensity to harbour life in rocky planetary systems diminishes as the universe ages. It follows that carbon-based life forms like humans could not evolve if the universe were significantly older or younger than its present age. Moreover, it suggests that we find ourselves looking out on a cosmos at an auspicious moment¹, a kind of island of habitability where conditions are conducive to life.

The Anthropic principle – or the observation selection argument – says it is natural the universe should be the age it is, since if the universe were significantly older or younger there would be no sentient life around to notice. The same argument can be used to explain why the universe’s physical laws appear to be fine-tuned for life. The various forces and species of matter are related in a very particular way. Were the relative strengths of the fundamental forces slightly different, not only would life be prevented from evolving, but there would be myriad other effects: heavy elements would not be able to fuse in the furnaces of the stars, the structure of atoms would dissolve and the universe might expand too fast or collapse too early to allow life to develop.

In summary, the Anthropic principle says that it is necessary that life forms should observe a universe which operates in a state and at a time propitious for life. Havel felt this tautology might accord humanity a special place in the universe. He observed in his Philadelphia address that:

“…from the countless possible courses of its evolution the universe took the only one that enabled life to emerge.”

In other words: since we are here, privileged to be able to look out at an otherwise sterile cosmos, one might conclude that the purpose of the universe was to produce life on Earth – perhaps, even, to produce humankind².

It is an arresting thought and like many others I find Havel’s formulation of the Anthropic principle attractive. But there are also some important philosophical objections. By suggesting that the universe was meant to produce human life, Havel follows in a long line of philosophers who try to lend humans a noble position in the hierarchy of things. Strictly speaking, however, one might follow the same line of argument and infer that the purpose of the universe was to create rocks – or puddles. In The Salmon of Doubt, Douglas Adams joked that a puddle might look up at the clouds which disburse rain, then at the numerous puddle-shaped depressions in the ground and equally conclude that the benevolent purpose of the universe was to produce puddles.

I can think of a further, more fundamental objection, which is that it makes no sense to define the purpose of everything there is. Teleology makes no sense with respect to everything – only between two or more things. That is why humans invent Gods to lend meaning to everything they can see – but the logic is faulty, for in positing a God, we have ignored the original problem, which was to explain everything instead of just a part of everything. Asking what is the purpose of everything is therefore meaningless. If modern scientific theories are correct, and humans developed naturally out of the interstellar medium, then human purpose can only be understood in terms of the rules that brought them into being and which govern their development. Purpose only makes sense without a maker if you have a mechanism like evolution, where the rules of the biological system determine how the system will play out.

Havel’s second transcendent idea is the Gaia hypothesis. Introduced in the 1970s by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, Gaia theory says that the Earth is maintained in a state favourable to life by a series of negative feedback loops. The whole of the Earth – atmosphere, lithosphere and biosphere – can be viewed as a single, self-regulating system that holds the temperature and chemical composition of the Earth’s surface within limited bounds. The idea was prompted by several observations³: for example, that the biosphere is able to withstand tremendous shocks from volcanic eruption or asteroid impact, that the temperature of the Earth’s surface has been largely constant for billions of years despite increasing solar luminosity and that the atmosphere is maintained within a state of high thermodynamic “disequilibrium”⁴ (i.e. reactive gases like oxygen and methane are constantly replenished⁵).

Lovelock illustrated his idea with the Daisyworld model, where a planet is inhabited by two different species of daisy – one white and the other black. Daisyworld is experiencing a period of global warming, caused by the brightening of its parent sun. The white daisies reflect sunlight, cooling the planet, while the black ones absorb sunlight and heat the planet up. Their growth rates are assumed to depend solely on temperature and neither daisy can survive in excessive heat or cold, so the populations reorganize themselves, as the sunlight intensifies, so that the temperature remains comfortable. The daisies are therefore able to stabilize their environment without conscious intention. Lovelock proposed that similar (though much more complex) feedback mechanisms of biology and chemistry have been active on the Earth throughout its history. If there is a significant perturbation in living conditions, then the balance of biological populations will adjust to compensate. Havel put it like this:

“[Gaia] theory brings together proof that the dense network of mutual interactions between the organic and inorganic portions of the earth’s surface form a single system, a kind of mega-organism, a living planet – Gaia – named after an ancient goddess who is recognizable as an archetype of the Earth Mother in perhaps all religions. According to the Gaia Hypothesis, we are parts of a greater whole. If we endanger her, she will dispense with us in the interest of a higher value – that is, life itself.”

The Point

In his capacity as playwright and politician, Havel was trying to generate a narrative anchor that would inspire people to work for the general good of the planet. In a way, his argument is a humanist response to nihilism. Like Nietzsche, he is striving to impose meaning on a meaningless world. This may sound absurd (it is absurd) but there is nothing strange or laughable about it. Humans are compelled to weave their own struggles into stories so that they can make decisions about the future. We can understand this with an analogy:

Imagine you have designed a species of biological robot whose sole purpose is to pass on its genetic programming to future generations. The robot lives as part of a group in order to increase its chances of survival and procreation and therefore needs to consider its own needs and to weigh them against those of other individuals in the group. Since there is no absolute purpose to their lives beyond the continuation of their genes – and because you cannot hard-code a response to every imaginable crisis – you program the robots to make decisions based on the problems they can see around them. They build these problems into abstract narratives, which place the robots in the context of the problem and shut out all the extraneous noise of the universe. In this way, the tremendous complexity of a real-life problem is reduced to a simple, idealized case. The process is similar to building theoretical models in the sciences.

It seems to me that humans have developed like this and we use narratives like this. When faced with global problems, we invent stories which involve all of humanity in a struggle against those problems. Difficulties arise when other humans (most of us who do not work in international relations) have their own troubles that resonate louder than the global narrative. These might be because day-to-day survival is more important, or simply because an individual cannot picture themselves in a global context and chooses to pursue personal goals instead. Looking at recent progress in tackling climate change, it is clear that we cannot easily make a global narrative more urgent in the mind than a narrative of nationhood, race, or personal gain⁶. Inventing an inter-planetary or inter-species war would probably be the most expedient way to overcome our differences – something akin to the plot of the Battlestar Galactica television series, Watchmen or The Three Body Problem. The tragedy – if one can call it that – of our isolation is that the only enemies we can find, now, are other humans.

Notes and Further Reading

In this context, “moment” refers to a span of several billion years…! ↩︎
Although the non-avian dinosaurs – whose own evolutionary aspirations were so rudely curtailed at the end of the Cretaceous period – might have something to say about Havel’s anthropocentric philosophy. ↩︎
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/gaia-hypothesis ↩︎
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01969-y ↩︎
This can be contrasted with the atmosphere of a dead planet like Mars, which is static and composed almost exclusively of inert carbon dioxide. ↩︎
J. Diamond, Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change, Penguin Books, 2020. ↩︎

Sympathy for the Devil

*Araneus diademata* on the Camino near Astorga. Taken 28 October 2021 with an Apple iPhone.

Human beings are all biological machines, though our functions are not wholly determined by the reproductive purpose that shaped us. Individually, we are all more or less deficient and more or less unique in our needs. Indeed our “needs” cannot even be comprehensively or objectively defined. Philosophical advice, therefore, can only ever be approximate and good philosophy – like good literature – can be quite general, but never definitive.

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Sometimes our spirit is just a “bad kiln” and the whole act of life is a sort of compromise¹. But even in this absurd predicament, the human animal can still find moments of clarity – of bliss – that it plucks from diverse sources and holds by way of compensation. Since we are all working with different raw materials, it is instructive to write out your own maxims – as Marcus Aurelius did in his Meditations – and return to them regularly. This will serve as a reminder of how to live well and push you closer to the Tao.

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James Lovelock proposed that the Earth’s biosphere acts as a single organism to regulate the temperature and habitability of its surface. Tolstoy’s view of history was similar, where individuals – even those with the stature and force of character of a Humboldt or Napoleon – play unwitting roles in a greater, more general flood of human activity, governed by myriad invisible forces. Looking at humanity as a kind of superorganism, we see that the vast majority of people – those who cannot usefully contribute to the fight against global warming, or the relentless exploitation of the world’s resources, or any of the other major threats to civilization – would do better to stop worrying and focus on their life at measurable scales. Attending to tangible, small-scale decisions gives us a sense of personal value and benefits those close to us. You can volunteer in an art or conservation group, get involved in local support groups or school governorships. If more people decide to “sweat the small stuff” and really engage in their immediate environment, we may find that the bigger picture looks after itself. Only when you have mastered the small things that you have real control over should you move onto generalities. As Voltaire famously observed, il faut cultiver notre jardin.

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Many of us do not pay sufficient attention to the reality of what our life means to those around us. We fixate on the frightening stories projected by our portable computers and we go to great lengths to isolate ourselves from our surroundings. In Oxford, it is now more common for me to see students running or walking with headphones than without; and fast, efficient vehicular transport is everywhere privileged over the long, meditative dérive. In the past, religions like Christianity would encourage regular self-scrutiny. On a weekly or even daily basis, priests would remind their errant congregations that they were being supervised by an eternal, lidless eye and that their actions would be weighed accordingly. Having lost our belief in the metaphysics of religion, we have thrown out many of the rituals that travelled in tandem, including the useful habit of looking at our actions from “outside”.

The Self has insinuated itself onto the altar recently vacated by God and human interests have been allowed to eclipse all other considerations. We idolize certain characters in literature and art, but rarely think about how people would react if they could watch our own lives, as though we were the hero in a story. Would they admire my strength or wisdom? Would they view my actions with approval? Why not? In trying to answer these questions, we can better appreciate our own significance. You may be shocked to discover – as I was, on reflection – that you are not a particularly good person.

As religion’s hold on young people has waned, other stories have grown in influence, playing on similar themes. Walk into a public viewing of The Return of the King and you will see that the cinema is packed with young men of the most diverse extraction. All will be deeply conversant with the script and the screenplay. Some of them may reach such a pitch of excitement that they quote the script out loud, along with the film; others are absolutely silent, their faces rapt, eyes glittering, as they follow the Madonna-like figure of Liv Tyler and squeeze the hands of their terrestrial girlfriends. Watching these films is a form of communion for these men. They idolize Aragorn and Faramir – noble characters with wide appeal – and their response is subconscious, absolutely religious and animal.

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Is there any reason why religious rituals cannot be resurrected for atheists? I would argue that watching a sermon by Rowan Williams or Malcolm Guite is just as valuable for me – a secular atheist – as for a true Christian believer. And reading one of Williams’ essays or poems is just as illuminating, just as moving. It is interesting to wonder why modern attempts by de Botton and Grayling to secularize religious teachings have met with little success. Is it a failure of concept or execution? Could it be bad luck? Perhaps it would be better to just go and skeptically participate in religious services, arm-in-arm with the faithful.

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Losing touch with our physical environment makes us vulnerable to errors of judgement. Part of this is linked to our obsessive consumption of digital media, which turns other people into categories and isolated soundbites. If all we have to work with are journalistic reports, then we tend to become interested only in a person’s ideological identity, as McCarthyists, communists and Catholics were in the past. The Twitter user does not debate with humans: they engage in skirmishes with “TERFs”, or “woke” people. But these terms (so often incorrectly applied) are distortions of reality. Bellow observed that people who watch lots of television derive their observations ready-made, packaged by somebody else. This is dangerous for common sense, because it is predicated on the human context, on specificity and texture, which cannot be communicated via newsprint. Common sense develops rather through action and direct enquiry. The loss of this intuitive mode is damaging to thought. Einstein said²: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift”. I think we see this in the absurd and totally disproportionate vilification of J. K. Rowling. Her views on transgender rights – expressed with the utmost respect and careful moderation of tone³ – are misrepresented by some as a form of physical violence or taken as proof of an irredeemably flawed character. There is much that can (and should) be said about the scape-goating and straw-manning of Rowling, but for now it is interesting simply to note that, had these frothing critics met Rowling before her views on transgender issues became public, they would – unanimously, I am sure – have declared her the very model of a wise and decent person.

Sympathy is easy when you live online: you can virtue signal with black squares or little rainbows whilst having no genuine feeling for anyone who disagrees with you, or for the person down the road with a distasteful opinion and a life loaded with extenuating circumstances. For good evolutionary reasons, most of us are generous to people we know, or to strangers that do not threaten us. Most people also harbour exaggerated opinions which can be massaged into softer, less virulent forms through conversation. This is not evident if you have never spoken to a stranger, or spend all of your time listening to podcasts.

If all you can see of a person is 280 characters, then your opinion of them is necessarily reductive. Without serious conscious effort, your brain will extrapolate that person’s entire character from one comment on a single issue. You will become a snob, in other words. And because their comments live on in cold characters immutable, you cannot assess the person’s level of conviction. You do not know if they have changed their mind, you cannot catch their ironic smile, or the spark of humour dancing behind their eyes – all these details that are automatically and subconsciously interpreted during a conversation, which we use to inform our emotional response. Presumably this is why, in an era of near-ubiquitous video conferencing, government diplomacy is still conducted in person.

The greatness (and goodness) of individual men and women is a fairly static quantity when averaged across time and culture. In The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow’s eponymous hero unashamedly places the brilliant, crippled Jewish property magnate William Einhorn in the same league as Caesar, Machiavelli and Ulysses. Augie says:

“It was him that I knew and what I understand of them in him. Unless you want to say that we’re at the dwarf end of all times and mere children whose only share of grandeur is like a boy’s share in fairy-tale king’s, beings of a different kind from times better and stronger than ours. But if we’re comparing men and men, not men and children or men and demigods… then I have the right to praise Einhorn and not care about smiles of derogation from those who think the race no longer has in any important degree the traits we honor in these fabulous names.”

If your point of departure is that your interlocutor is stupid or evil then you will understand nothing about your point of view or theirs. Why? Because if you assume that their opinion is a natural concomitant of faulty brain chemistry, then nothing can reasonably be done about it. Chances are that you will go further and illogically assume that their stupidity/iniquity proves you are correct. Suppose instead that this person is averagely good or averagely reasonable and you will find they generally have a good reason for holding the opinions they do. This is because we are like machines – we have errors of input and errors of computation – and like all things we obey laws of averages. Chomsky has brought up the same point in the context of scientific enquiry⁴. He observes that finding the right question is equivalent to finding a fruitful way of looking at a problem, which means that finding the right question takes you a long way on the journey towards a solution. The crucial point is to look at some physical phenomenon and not just assume that it is obvious. Deciding that an apple falling from a tree is a surprising fact rather than an inevitability may lead you down a path of inquiry that eventuates in new knowledge.

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Machines are fallible. Humans are fallible. When making a decision about what to think or do, we carefully weigh our personal experiences against the opinions of others. There is no absolutely general way of doing this, which is probably why the faculty never evolved.

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In politics, straying too far from the middle – in any direction – always leads to ideological inconsistency and disaster. Why? Perhaps because our human needs are in conflict with one another⁵. Perhaps also because rules of government must function on average to be successful. Our needs and desires sit on scales that we measure against the reality of our own lives. In politics as in literature, we use our own experience as a yardstick. We want autonomy, but not too much. We want support, but excessive support is impractical and counter-productive. Rules are developed (ostensibly, at least) so that a maximum of people experience a minimum of discomfort.

Now this “middle path” of politics may seem a rather insipid, toothless goal to strive for: we all know that we should tolerate others, try to question our own opinions, maintain a degree of skepticism… But it isn’t really, because many of us do not truly apprehend it, nor do we always vote for it. There is a world of difference between knowing and understanding. Ethical ideals must be weighed against the exigencies of life and experience is needed to harden knowledge into understanding. We are all of us like the birds in Attar’s story, who travel in search of their King, the Simurgh, whose name means thirty birds. Borges describes how a host of bird-pilgrims journeys through seven valleys or seas on their way to the Simurgh’s castle⁶: “the next to last bearing the name Bewilderment, the last the name Annihilation.”. Most of the pilgrims desert or succumb to the rigours of the journey. In the end, however:

“Thirty, made pure by their sufferings, reach the great peak of the Simurgh. At last they behold him; they realize that they are the Simurgh, and that the Simurgh is each of them and all of them.”

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Footnotes and References

Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March, Penguin Modern Classics (2001) ↩︎
James Lovelock and Bryan Appleyard, Novacene, Allen Lane, pp. 20 (2019) ↩︎
J. K. Rowling, J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues, http://www.jkrowling.com [Last Accessed: May 2024] https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/ ↩︎
Noam Chomsky, Asking the right questions, YouTube [Last Accessed: May 2024] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGs-4h0wQj4&list=LL&index=2&t=2231s ↩︎
I will discuss this point further in my next article, Prisoners of Progress, which examines our relationship to technology. ↩︎
Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, Vintage, pp. 130-131 (2002) ↩︎

Reluctant Messiah

First of all, there’s no theory. In fact, I don’t know of any theories in the social sciences… I don’t think the term ‘theory’ should be applied to fields as intellectually thin as the social sciences… Theory is very different from understanding. We live our lives often pretty successfully without any theories about other people… There [are] very few areas of human life where there’s anything that you might call a theory. Even in biology, when you get very far beyond big molecules it starts to get pretty descriptive… In the world of human affairs I don’t think there’s much in the way of theory. I think the message you’ve got to take is use your sense… Look at history… Break through the propaganda images. Remember that the institutions are trying to indoctrinate you… Keep that in mind. Compensate for it. And if you do these things I think you can get as good a sense of the world as anybody has.

N. Chomsky, The New World Order. Recorded speaking at the University of Maryland (30/12/1998).

A boom surged over the reedbeds. The marsh harriers hesitated, their long, cruciform bodies suspended for an instant before they resumed their heavy-winged hawking. A treecreeper stopped on the trunk of a yew, absolutely still, then whipped suddenly back into life like a glitch in the great cosmic video feed. Another boom was heard. This time a general pause descended as the birds recognized the ancient call to moot. It was a signal given traditionally by the bittern, but none of the other birds had seen him for years. The heron said he had followed the swallows south and would never return. Others thought perhaps he had been caught by a fox or crushed by a plow. But the bittern had been an important figure, once. Even the crows and the owls begrudgingly admitted that he was worth listening to on selected topics.

And so it was that the birds started to gather in a circle around the stump of an old oak. A grasping, clutching wind lifted beneath a canopy of cloud. It tugged at the birds’ soft plumage and whipped at the reed heads, writing strange, shifting glyphs into the water beneath. Some of the birds started to mutter anxiously amongst themselves: would he really come? Was it not rather a foghorn they had heard, carried here from the coast? But by now the birds were too numerous to be mistaken, so they waited impatiently for the bittern to appear. It was two minutes to six. The setting sun fled into the west beneath a bruise of purple cloud. Then suddenly a shadow detached itself from the body of the reeds and the bittern was there, water dripping copiously from the base of his jacket.

The bittern stalked swiftly and awkwardly to the middle of the circle. A bird of retiring disposition, unaccustomed to the gaze of other animals, his frame bowed beneath their scrutiny and the weight of their expectation. When he reached the stump, however, he stood very tall, his striped neck longer even than his body, his beak thrust like a sword-stick over the congregation. His inscrutable fish-eyes picked out the starlings bobbing on a telephone wire above him, then the bright-breasted finches, tits, stippled falcons, squat and mottled drakes that formed his audience on the ground. Nervous laughter bubbled from rooks in a nearby hawthorn. The bittern cleared his throat and the sound was like the crackling of cigarette paper on a cold day.

“I have lately walked abroad. I rode in foreign vehicles, spoke in foreign tongues and afterwards I flew back over our native isles – famed for their great wealth but full of the poor and hungry, the hungry and the poor… It was not so, abroad – wherefore then this paradox? Are we not a proud and noble people? Did we not recently win this land, so rich in life and resources, from the clutches of tyranny?

“As I flew, I saw how decades of Austerity has bankrupted our towns and wrung the vitality from its people. Water. Energy. Public transport. Security. The Postal Service. Healthcare. Education. Management of the prisons. Everything privatised or monetised! Rendered flimsy and mean.

“They say that government must be weak and local government weaker: only then can business be done. And when they have total freedom these businessmen say they must bow to the forces of an unfettered economy, which represent the truest aspects of avian psychology. I say, but are they the best? They say these economic forces – these dictates of Mammon – cannot be circumvented. I say they contradicted themselves when they took an axe to our institutions and its government. They say we are rich – just look at their balance sheets! I say look at France and Germany, then look at the corpses wandering our streets. There are holes in our roads and the futures of our children.”

“We try to nourish ourselves on images of the past, but the images look ridiculous, screen-projected from collapsing walls. They will not save the tourists from disappointment. England is become a gang of pallid, tracksuited waifs marauding through a driverless, conductorless, late-running, two-carriage train on a voyage to nowhere. It is become the echo of a scream. New housing developments empty of amenities – void, therefore, of community – glide plangently past the windows. The poverty of imagination, the stench of ugliness is everywhere.

“Where is our shame? We cannot feel shame for things we do not see. The other train passengers are captivated by screens, their eyes mirrored in surfaces smooth and iridescent as an oil-slick, headphones piping an alternative present straight into their ears. Stuck in the long queue for a ticket machine, sitting on a soiled and broken chair, eating a muffin made by a 3D printer, there is always Netflix. Thus have the enervating winds of technology and the free market stripped the wealth from our society and atomised our communities. Never in the history of this country has the ordinary person been so alone and consequently so impotent.

“In the midst of this nightmare, a General Election approaches. Yet Labour is without charismatic leadership. Why this matters so much to the electorate is clear as newsprint. Over years in opposition, Labour grew demoralised, purposeless and desperate to please; then, faced with flagrant lying on the part of the government, they became self-righteous too. This unfortunate combination has made them vulnerable to media pressure, causing them to swing erratically from one position to another on contentious issues like transgender rights. The result is that Labour has become associated with the the illiberal liberal élite, embittering a large proportion of the British working class against them.

“On the other side of the benches, the Conservatives endure. Probably the least imaginative of the major parties, they continue to pump public money into their own businesses, devastating society at large and destroying the institution of government. While they may appear more resistant to media opinion than Labour, their own concessions to Trumpian electability produced Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. By refusing to be held accountable for anything, they have allowed the stupidest, most venal members of their party to entrench themselves in government and in the Lords. Ironically, they consider this evidence of success.

“Somewhere in the centre, ignored by all, lies the still-living corpse of the Liberal Democrats. At the level of public political debate they do not even exist. In this way, the power of the market, through its influence on the media and the thinking of the electorate, has eroded government competency to a critical point.

“Our country therefore lies poised for a new party to bring forth a new political method. Its ministers will be the disaffected members of other parties and its supporters will come from every corner of the land, every echelon of society. At first, our focus will be exclusively on ideas: the praxis of government and the problems facing our people. Only with an iron grip on policy can we haul ourselves above the media mêlée. Modern political debate is a game of name-calling and myth-making, but against the clarity we will bring this will become irrelevant. We reject all comparison with previous political ideologies because we want to borrow ideas from any source. We will not pretend our answers are immortal or universal – they will be expedient; appropriate to time and context. Thus will we befriend Sufis and scientists and birds of every imaginable colour. We will come with fresh eyes to the problems of the world and through discovery we will advance, fording the river stone by stone.

“Our focus on ideas will confer two further advantages. First, immunity from labels like Conservative and Liberal will allow us to borrow soldiers from the ranks of the other political parties. If we are to succeed – to rule ourselves, or to bring other, worthier candidates to power – we will need the expertise of those already in government. These refugee parliamentarians will be united under a principle that transcends them. Instead of grappling with each other, they will fall on problems like electoral reform, overpopulation, education, greenhouse gas emissions, recycling… Gradually, organically, they will find brotherhood in the excitement of discovery. Second, by focusing exclusively on policy rather than ideology, we will elevate the overall level of political discourse. We will become the bar against which other parties are measured.

“I spoke to many people during my travels and listened to their problems. They were hungry for answers… Truly, they were like children! And at the end, as I turned to go, in a pleading voice they asked: ‘But what can we do…?’ And what they meant, of course, is: ‘Give me an answer – reassure me that the experts will do something.’ But I cannot. No one can say precisely what form the solution will take, if indeed it arrives at all. I can only point to precedents, where groups of people have banded together and, after long and arduous struggle, changed laws or systems of government. There never has been a shortcut to change or an easy substitute for collective action.

“We have among us an army of young professionals who are cynical about politics, but their lives are too easy to impel them to change it. Convenience has not just liberated us from the drudgery of everyday tasks: it has made us passive, anxious and wounded our sense of personal significance and meaning. From this position, then, if you have a brain but know little about the structure of power, change seems impossible. Only by walking out of the door, across the field and over the next hill will you realise that it is up to you – it is your duty – to fall on top of a solution. This does not mean that everyone needs to become a climate scientist or a politician – but we must start to talk to each other again, find solutions as communities.

“Let me address them directly, these young people who still secretly believe love and happiness are their birthright: go listen to the waves pounding on the rocks beneath the pier; spend an afternoon in a home for the elderly. Gaia will endure with or without humanity. We are a dream passing over the pale blue film of Her mind’s eye. Now that Her climate is warming, it is likely that there is nothing to hope for except a noble end to our civilisation. We can take the Ouroboros as our emblem – a metaphor for all societies with the power to produce more than they need. To die suffocated by our own greed… That is the prospect before us now. Perhaps it is the fate of all higher forms of life.”

Gradually, the twilight took on a foreboding depth. The starlings flickered like marsh lights on the telephone wire overhead, illuminated by their portable electronic devices. Raindrops crackled on fallen leaves and plunged headlong into the reed spears. A sussuration grew until it washed away the meaning of the bittern’s words and only the faint sound of his voice was left in the darkness at the centre of the circle. The birds crowded close and listened as best they could, but the bittern, unseeing, continued at the same volume – his voice converted into a kind of static interference.

Advertising and Filters in Perception

We are going on a dérive. The oyster-lamps of Bordeaux are glowing pink and silver-green over the quais. Beneath my feet the Garonne races quietly inland, massive and mud-coloured, folding creamily around the piers and then away to join the black nimbus of sky. It is late, but the pont de pierre is still busy with couples heading into town. Some talk animatedly and stride with purpose towards their goal; others are taut, more alert to your gaze, half-expectant. Restless and a little dizzy in the heat, I hope to lose myself under the trees of la rive droite. At Place Stalingrad a young man eases insolently past, his headphones ostentatiously proportioned, incongruous against delicate waves of hair, the soft skin around his jaw. They seem by turns terribly secure and terribly vulnerable, these headphone-wearers, cocooned in a stream of sound. They have replaced their journey with a diversion, with better prospects, with self-improvement, piped straight into their ears. I have the surreal impression that I have been replaced too. Filtered out. I do not really exist. I am become a kind of wallpaper.

People are more or less unique depending on how you scrutinize them. If you examine someone closely, talk to them a little, they may well appear singular in character or appearance. But should you choose a coarser filter – just their gross daily perambulations – they become shallower, more uniform and predictable, less important. Like in physics, where different mathematical models are needed to capture the behaviour of systems at different spatial or temporal scales, so human interactions can be treated at different levels of complexity. With the correct choice of perceptual filter, a human being can be extruded into a set of speeds and oscillations. When I arrive at a hotel in a new city, believing myself free, I am quickly ensnared by the local geography. My movements become more predictable, determined by the shortest distance to the local metro station or grocery store. From above, I can be seen running through grooves in the city architecture – channels of low potential. Perhaps you cannot predict exactly where I will be moment-to-moment, but you might start to build a statistical picture, even use this picture to manipulate me.

Our conscious awareness has natural frequency filters, just as our eyes are only sensitive to a certain range of electromagnetic frequencies. Walking through the countryside, my attention tends to rest at small and medium scales. I notice birds, certain insects, cloud formations. I have a dim awareness of plants and trees… Bird calls may transport me further afield, but my knowledge of geology is poor and the wider context is often overlooked. A geographer or local historian would have the intellectual tools to interpret features in the landscape which are physically larger or vary more slowly. They could point to links between stone and soil characteristics, associate the shape of hills with our industrial past (e.g. chalk pits or old lime kilns). They could probably assimilate things that I would not even see.

I remember watching a family wandering around Ashdown forest shortly after the pandemic. The sky was grey and lachrymose. Rain came reluctantly and vertically from a luminous belly of stratus. There were Dartford warblers in gorse on the other side of the valley and goldcrests down by the river. The family passed in front of me, chatting and laughing in a loose train – all except one of the daughters, who was absorbed in her mobile phone. She followed in the wake of her elder relations and would only look up for the briefest moment to avoid walking into something or to take a photo of the scenery. Her surroundings were always perceived via a screen, like a Chinese teen in the National Portrait Gallery. There is the same three-second choreography: a half-second to register the scene, the phone is raised as intermediary, the camera is engaged, a photo taken – and already her back is turned and she is walking away…! Head lowered and ears insulated from unforeseen distractions. Even liberated from the smartphone, I wonder how much this girl would have been able to extract from her countryside experience? Her parents probably hadn’t given her the tools to take anything except the minimum of wonder allotted to all human beings when faced with the superhuman and the beautiful. No one’s fault, as such. Just unfortunate.

On the other hand, teenagers are famously difficult to impress and our interests evolve as we age. Even now I might arrive in a multi-storey hotel and explore nothing except the route from my apartment to the common room and the exit. I am happy to exist like this for weeks at a time, but I have friends whose restless curiosity drives them to examine the full corridor and all the floors. They will know the floor plan, the plumbing, the history of the experimental nuclear facility next door and the times the wild dogs are most active in the evening. The security guards, the ladies who prepare our meals, the national spirit and national spirits are all swiftly and ruthlessly incorporated into their vision of the world. These friends of mine – these people of exceptional capacity – they are hard to tie down. Sometimes I liken them to angels, speaking in a language that can only be approximated, appearing briefly on the road, ministering, advising, then off again on their own private crusade, leaving behind them gifts of fading embers that we cannot read. I wonder if an officer in Napoleon’s army might have reflected similarly on how a military campaign can be mobilized by the will of one man, the force of character required, but also, perhaps, the complicity of others around them and eventually the formation of a personality separate from the man himself.

Standing (as I once did) in the lobby of Henri-Coandă airport, every muscle scolding, head fugged with sleeplessness and the soot of small-time aspirations, a sense of elation dawned that I was about to return to France, but also that perhaps no great things can be achieved without serious struggle – and perhaps I have to make a choice between the uncomfortable and the comfortable. When you work with these men and women of great internal stature, you can feel the rules creaking – they apply pressure at the edges of our small certainties to make space for their ideas.

Another headphone-wearing Frenchman angles past, eyes averted. How do I appear to these people? Am I a shade flickering at the edge of their awareness? What about in England, in Morlock-land, where public spaces are tightly packed and there is meagre, perfunctory support for local government – would these EarPod introverts see the potholes, the cracked bus shelters? Would they interpret these things as an economic necessity? Would they really feel the deprivation?

The headphone-wearing pedestrian deliberately rejects reality in favour of entertainment – usually a podcast or musical stimulus – that is divorced from the process of travel. In these moments they are no longer citizens in the same way – they exist separately from their immediate surroundings and join the mediaverse. They become, perhaps, an element in the great global smoothing of ideas – the force that levels traditions, particularity, and cultural asperities – embracing a monoscape of cafés serving coffee in the same aseptic surroundings, with Tolix chairs, crass tattoos and tumbling tropical houseplants.

Self-indulgent cynicism, you say? Armchair sophistry? Perhaps so. Clearly headphones help you to learn on the move or enjoy a musical digression, they can save you from rampant advertisements and the speechless drudgery of the daily commute, but if the action of covering your ears becomes ingrained then you have already started to fall off the world, to lose your grip on the parquet floor. The inveterate headphone-wearer renounces their citizenship because they choose not to engage with their environment and the people in it. It is the first duty of a citizen to notice. Looking at the appalling reality of the dilapidated station platform and then savouring your discomfort without artificial distraction or aural analgesic is an essential ingredient of political engagement. People rarely act to right a wrong unless they are personally wounded. Let the boredom mellow. Stop reading about what other people think. You will find that your own thoughts rise like vapour into the vacuum. Specious justifications for selling off public spaces, citing “unprecedented” economic challenges, will cease to be convincing. Your curiosity will engage, and you will lock into the running flywheel of experience. You may catch the arrival of the first swifts in April and marvel how their screams are thrown sideways by the sonic envelope of an approaching tram; a confusion of whooping, strangled cries may lead you to a hidden corridor of greenery between terraced houses, where a sparrowhawk beats its wings in a tumult of gulls and jackdaws.

I remember passing through Paris on New Year’s Day, when I decided to try to walk around without consulting my smartphone. Suddenly my long list of objectives shrank to just one: locating the Seine (from which point I knew I could find my way around). The day was overcast, so my eyes keyed into small details like the shape of trees, the flow of pedestrians and traffic – anything that might help me orient myself as I groped slowly southwards. I took eccentric side streets and was kindly advised by an old lady in a shop that sold chocolate Florentines. I spoke to the Florentine-seller himself, who quietly suggested I ignore the old lady and continue on my original bearing. Not knowing where I would end up, I took the time to scrutinize the graffiti I passed, the façades. I started to build a mental map of major roads. I gave myself up to serendipity and accepted that I might have to settle for a restaurant that was there rather than a restaurant that was good value or well-regarded. There was no “wow” fatigue, such as you get when wandering around certain national monuments, where five Egyptian sarcophagi may be ranged side by side, succeeded closely by a hundred Greek and Roman statues. I absorbed impressions slowly. They were digested. If we take a more playful attitude towards exploration, maybe we can avoid an over-concentration of footfall in popular places – achieve a temporal and spatial smoothing of flux.

Similar to the way the urban fox has physically diverged from its rural cousins, humans that live in big cities are forced to adapt to new “survival” pressures. Our intelligence has made us more flexible than foxes, so the shape of our skulls remains the same regardless of where we live. It is rather the shape of our minds that changes. Where a countryman might be free to let their awareness roam unchecked over sights, sounds and new acquaintances, city dwellers must resist a thousand daily attacks on their attention. Even walking under trees on la rive droite of Bordeaux, finding the tranquillity to form three contiguous sentences as part of my internal monologue is difficult. I tread over lights – absurdly bright – recessed into the ground. Like the arboreal moths which will find it impossible to traverse without becoming disoriented, so my thoughts are interrupted repeatedly by the intensity of the light. The frequency at which the lights have been placed become superimposed on the frequency of my thoughts. Poor urban design is a violence against the mind of the individual. Ugly buildings should not be tolerated any more than buildings that pollute.

Why do we allow our attention to be exploited in public places? Compare the metro systems in Prague and London: in Prague, the platforms are completely free of advertisements, the walls are generally uncluttered and you can leave the metro almost as refreshed as you entered it; in London, however, every square inch of the metro has been sold off for product placement. Travelling down the escalator portals, walking to the platforms, waiting for a train, seated inside the carriages – at every stage there are billboards selling sex, supplements and fast fashion which drag terribly at our attention. This visual bombardment is made worse by noise – produced by the roughness of train wheels and track – which can exceed 100dB on some lines. The psychic friction born out of these audiovisual distractions is converted into brain fug and a reluctance to engage with our surroundings. We would not tolerate an audible beep or periodic electric shock designed (yes, designed) to annihilate our train of thought – so why advertisements?