life

There’s a lot of truth in Matthew Crawford’s article The Case for Working with your Hands, although although the attempt towards the end to link it to the financial crisis is a little clunky. His general points about the value of manual work still stand, particularly where he implies¹ that the education system in a modern economy is little more than a delivery system for office workers. The best shot comes towards the end of the piece, though:

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions (like when I dropped that feeler gauge down into the Ninja). In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make.

The “visceral experience of failure” is not something that people enjoy facing, but it’s essential to experience it for exactly the reasons that Crawford describes. Those who haven’t been through that aren’t the sort of people I’d trust, but unfortunately wealth and power tend to protect you from the impact of those those experiences – you might experience failure, but you won’t necessarily experience it viscerally. In the information economy, this is multiplied by the fact that the distance from failure is increased; Crawford suggests all students should learn a trade before they begin work, but it would perhaps be simpler (if less politically acceptable) to simply hold people accountable for their actions.

And now I’m going to plaster a wall.

1. Only implies – this is the New York Times, after all, where one may rock the boat only within carefully-defined parameters [↩]

As I sit on the terrace looking up at the night sky over the Mediterranean, what’s going through my head?

1. I don’t do demonstrations any more – I’ve been charged by horses, clubbed with batons, narrowly avoided a lungful of something nasty and it didn’t really achieve much, to be honest. If I was out on the streets, I’d be stunting like this.

2. History always favours the winners. There’s a fairly obvious connection between this and my lack of demonstration-ing, but it doesn’t really matter that much. It occurred to me only because I was listening to the mix “Recollections from Old London Town” on the HAFTW blog (direct download on mediafire). Best listened to with the windows open so that the noise outside and inside bleed together.

3. I sent a list of Things To Do to an American friend who’s visiting Old London Town for a few days. Trying to think of things that would be a) worth doing, b) not too obscure / alienating and c) not too obvious / depressing, I realised how much of London I miss and how much I don’t, and how long it’s been since I spent any time there. Everything could have been swept away by recession for all I know, although that would probably be an improvement on the non-dom hard currency package tour that it had become.

4. What am I doing, sitting on my terrace on a Saturday night after yet another action-packed week? Ah, but it wasn’t action-packed at all – they rarely are these days. I’m in exile, not just from London, but from a way of life. Did you know that? Probably you didn’t. I’ll tell you all about it some other time, although you’ll have to buy the drinks unless that UNICEF contract comes through. Nobody can give me any performance indicators for returning from exile.

5. It’s very difficult to distinguish between self-destructive behaviour and self-constructive behaviour. Right now there are no clouds in the sky to derail thought, the dogs have quietened for the night, the lights across the bay are ghosts on the water. Put your troubles to bed before you lay your own head down, and good night.

First:

A teenager in the US state of Florida has committed suicide in front of a live internet audience. Abraham Biggs, 19, from Pembroke Pines, near Miami, killed himself hours after announcing his intention to do so on his blog.

Second:

A former police chief in Argentina, wanted for alleged crimes against human rights, has shot himself dead in front of television cameras. Mario Ferreyra was giving an interview on top of a water tank at his home in the northern province of Tucuman… pulled a pistol from his boot and shot himself behind the ear. The Cronica television cameras were still rolling, transmitting live, as the distraught family gathered round.

Third:

And there the children of dark Night have their dwellings, Sleep and Death, awful gods. The glowing Sun never looks upon them with his beams, neither as he goes up into heaven, nor as he comes down from heaven. And the former of them roams peacefully over the earth and the sea’s broad back and is kindly to men; but the other has a heart of iron, and his spirit within him is pitiless as bronze: whomsoever of men he has once seized he holds fast: and he is hateful even to the deathless gods.

Some argue that communications technology has been driven by Eros, but surely Thanatos must have his turn?

The New Statesman presents findings from the Fear in the Mega-Cities survey (so far, so Dredd), which I’m afraid simply aren’t very interesting, and only one thing stood out for me. In Paris, Rome, London, New York, Cairo and Sao Paolo, “Losing loved ones” features in the top five fears, but not so in Moscow, where “Remaining alone” takes its place. That shift in emphasis – from future loss to present lack – tells of a thousand lonely lights in a thousand crumbling apartment blocks, and also makes me less likely to move to Moscow in the near future.

Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.

- Peter Medawar

(HT: Cosma Shalizi)

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