How the attention economy is sucking our will to platform

 

People (like the economist Ashley Hodgson) have long been talking about 'the attention economy.' When I first heard about it, it sounded liberatory and utopian: with the advent of the internet, the theory went, people would be paid as a kind of tribute for work they'd chosen to do, kind of like how you leave coins for a busker. 

Nowadays, the attention economy has more dystopian overtones. A friend of mine from college worked for years for a company that built super-computers to calculate the value of bits of space on the internet and bid against other super-computers in instantaneous, online options. Apparently that kind of thing is going on all the time, humming along in vast rows of air-conditioned calculation.

And more than that: basically everyone in the developed world now, from big tech companies to online sex workers, is trying to get your attention. (Me too, sort of.) OK, they may not be aiming at your attention in particular, but, in general, the more attention the better.

Of course, that was always sort of the case. Vendors in markets from time immemorial have shouted at passers-by to try to get them to buy their goods. Then there was advertising, which obviously didn't start with the internet. Getting someone's attention has always been the first step to getting some of their money.

As with other aspects of life, in some ways what the internet has done is simply speed everything up and expand it to a global scale. But social media especially has also introduced a new form of currency in the form of likes, followers, and so on. In the world of the bird app, or of the codex of visages, it's the man with many followers who's king.

And online publications like Quillette and Vox have, obviously, gained influence (and income) by gaining re-tweets rather than by selling collections of the articles in the form of glossy magazines. This has led to one of those little features of online life that runs up against the norms of anybody with a liberal education from more than 10 years go: people refusing to share links to a piece they then condemn.

The reason that seems so weird is that there used to be a strong norm in intellectual life that you didn't hide books or articles or try to stop their circulation. Imagine if I'd said to my fellow students 15 or 20 years ago 'I've read this book I strongly disagreed with but which has been influential; I therefore won't name it, and in fact I've withdrawn it from the library and hid it under a bush so that it won't circulate further.' They would have thought I was bonkers, not to mention that I was curtailing open debate and infringing on their own freedom to read what they saw fit.

I do think all these points still hold today for those who refuse to link to pieces they hate; but I can also see where they're coming from. They're right that clicks help websites, in a way that lending someone a book didn't help Penguin or Anthony Kenny. They're anxiously aware of the importance of attention in the new ecosystem we now live in - and they're keen to deny its oxygen to their enemies. 

All of this might, to some extent, help explain the recent vogue for de-platformings - that is, preventing people from hearing someone speak on campus because you don't like them or what they have to say. This kind of thing is yet another phenomenon that even people as young as this blogger tend to find pretty peculiar - it's another thing that, I think, most of my fellow undergraduates in the first few years of the millennium would have seen as obviously not the way to behave.

One way of looking at what's going on with de-platformings is to think about what the de-platformers think they're doing. One of the things they think they're doing, I would submit, is akin to not linking to a Quillette article. They see their campuses like their chirrup or mug-scroll feeds, and they don't want them to contribute to funnelling more attention towards Christina Sommers (or whoever). 

I remember hearing one of the bullies who tried to shut down Sommers' talk at Lewis & Clark Law School  saying something like 'You already know what she's going to say from YouTube.' Again, she's still wrong to act in the repressive way she did - Sommers still had a right to speak, and the students to hear her - but I think I now understand a bit more about why that student was acting as she was. 

Back in the day, Bjorn Lomborg (or whoever) coming to speak was interesting partly because you got something you didn't get from reading his articles or books. Nowadays, you can easily access recordings of public intellectuals online. But the mention of YouTube, I think, also suggests that the student was thinking of Sommers' appearance very much in internet terms. She didn't see the talk as a source of ideas or as an experience - she saw it as a kind of bid in a game whose point is to amass the most attention-chips. She saw it as she might have viewed a fellow student sharing a Sommers YouTube talk on social media. 

Christina Sommers giving a talk, Bruce Gilley publishing an article - back in the last millennium the obviously correct reaction to such things would have seemed, to most sane individuals, even those who disagreed with them, not much. Maybe they would have gone along and asked a critical question; maybe they would have written a letter to the student paper. Other people paying attention to such things didn't seem much of a threat.

On the online world, though, especially on social media, life is a high-stakes (OK, low-stakes, but it feels high-stakes) battle for attention. Attention accruing to your ideological rival empowers them and thus seems to threaten your own views and values. This economy of attention has become a kind of vortex, not only sucking previously rather somnolent groups like classicists into it, but also exerting its sucking effect on what's left of the offline world. The online economy of attention is sucking at our universities like a horrific hair-cutting 'solution'; and it's sucking at our will to let people explore ideas. 

Be with us now

 

In the depths of the lockdown, in the middle of my fortnight's stay at a quarantine hotel, I saw my friend. He was standing there at the end of my bed. He was smiling, and exuding the same bonhomie as ever. But the feeling I had upon seeing him wasn't joy. Why not? Because he had died a few months earlier. 

If I was living in a less rationalistic culture - any other culture than the one I do live in - I have no doubt I would be talking about that episode as the visitation of a ghost, spirit, or angel. As it is, I'm more inclined to believe it was a dream. Though maybe a dream of a particular sort, born of particular circumstances. 

I'm talking about lockdown dreams, the particularly vivid dreams that people have been reporting after weeks of being cooped up at home or in a hotel, sometimes without seeing another living person for weeks on end. These dreams come in different shapes and sizes, and not all of them involve people, but the ones that do suggest an obvious explanation. Are these dreams the result of our brains' effort to make up for the lack of human contact by providing us with the images of our friends?

It's interesting to me that, in the same period that I had the dream I mentioned, I was also praying to Mary with the rosary, something I'd never done before in my life (I've never been a Catholic, and I'm not one now). There were other reasons for that (I'd just been in a city with some beautiful Catholic churches, where I'd been exposed to and drawn to the practice), but it has struck me that it is a style of meditation that involves, first and foremost, calling upon a figure, a personality, a person.

Prayer, of course, often works in this way. Christians call upon God, Jesus, Mary, and various other saints. Muslims call upon Allah. Buddhists call upon Buddha and numerous bodhisattvas and spirits (and sometimes even visualise them as a form of meditation). Ancient Greeks who were ailing would call upon the healing God Asclepius and then go to sleep in one of his sanctuaries, where he would then appear to them in dreams. 

There are many reasons why people pray, but one may just be loneliness. We want another presence in the room, in our lives, for the night. In a sense, religious activity is a way of inviting people over, for dinner, say, and is often figured as such - the Greeks imagined the gods enjoying the smoke from their sacrificial feasts, and the Christian Eucharist re-enacts the Last Supper, seeing Christ as really (or symbolically) present once again. 

The many different forms of religious ritual obviously imagine different sorts of togetherness with different supernatural guests. And, as with ordinary guests, we may want to invite them over for different reasons. We may want to invite over someone powerful and reassuring, someone who will allow us to sleep with some sense of safety. We may want a mother-figure to smile down on us and tell us everything will be alright. We may want a raucous fellow-reveller like Dionysos.

None of this is to suggest that sending out invitations of this sort is necessarily a silly thing to do, even if we don't happen to believe that any of the guests are really going to be there. Whether or not we find it silly may, in any case, in some sense be neither here nor there. It may simply be something we humans do during lockdowns, in the desert, in the hour of our death. We find other ways of having our friends over, other ways of seeing them. 

Harsh but unfair

 

I remember reading once, in a book on Athenian law (perhaps this one) that anthropologists had observed that in societies where criminals were less likely to be apprehended, penalties were harsher. It made sense; after all, modern developed countries, with their highly developed surveillance technology, have (by historical standards) strikingly lenient punishment regimes; pre-modern ones, by contrast, which had zero or only rudimentary policing, had more of a tendency to turn to the gallows, the guillotine - or the gulp of hemlock.

The observation came back to me recently in connection with the current vogue for 'cancelling.' The frequency of this phenomenon has been questioned, but what seems to concern many people isn't necessarily how widespread it is, but how harsh the punishments can be. A disabled grandfather is sacked for sharing a comedy sketch. A researcher loses his job for re-tweeting a study about the effectiveness of peaceful compared with violent protest. And all the while, not-especially-controversial views and tame jokes elicit the kind of fury that used to be reserved for blood feuds. 

Given the many instances of such 'cancellations' that have occurred, it might seems strange that a good few people continue to insist that the whole phenomenon is made up. But there might be a way of explaining both why they think that and why some of these same people engage in such disproportionately harsh punishings of individuals who violates their norms. 

The reason they think the free speech crisis isn't really a crisis is partly because they see people saying things they dislike all the time. That's been one of the effects of the explosion of social media: whereas twenty years ago you wouldn't often be exposed to views from outside your thought-world, and you'd have to put in some work to have your views broadcast, now it's easy to post things and even easier to see things others have posted. 

If you have narrow parameters for what ideas are acceptable, it follows that you're likely to see quite a lot of what are to you unacceptable ideas. Twitter must be terrifying - all those people saying things you think are terrible! What's more, most of them are getting away scot free.

The temptation, then, is to make an example of anyone you are in a positions to punish, pour décourager les autres. This is what ancient societies were up to as well. It makes sense, especially if you consider the point of view of the potential criminal. 

You can look at risk as the combination of how likely a bad thing is to happen, and how bad it will be if it does. You may not be that likely to fall of the cliff if you go right up to the edge, but if you slip you'll die, so why risk it? If you're in a society without a functioning police force, the chance you'll be apprehended for doing something bad is pretty low. One way for the state to increase the risk you face (and hence deter you from wrongdoing), is to increase the penalty you risk facing. You think you probably won't get caught, but if you do...

The temptation to make an example of someone might be especially great when there are artificial barriers in the way of punishing other people who are up to the activity you dislike. For example, if a lot of the people saying things you find unacceptable are represented by anonymous Twitter accounts. Or if there's been a state amnesty saying you can't punish any of the members of a tyrannical junta.

That last thing, of course, is what happened in Athens after the murderous regime of the so-called Thirty Tyrants. Once the democracy had been restored, there seems to have been an agreement not to prosecute anyone involved with the Thirty, except for the Thirty themselves (some of whom had already been killed in the process of restoring the democracy). (What exactly the amnesty required is, like most things in ancient history, a little bit controversial).

In 399, only four years after the Thirty had been toppled, the philosopher Socrates, who had links to some of the Thirty (including Critias, one of the more extreme members), was executed on a vote of a popular jury. Why? It's complicated; there were lots of factors that led to that outcome, including the way he went about defending himself (if that was even what he was up to) in court. 

But one possibility is that his prosecutors indicted him on a charge of inventing new gods and corrupting the youth precisely because they couldn't prosecute him for what they were really angry at him for - the actions of the Thirty. And they also couldn't prosecute many of the people who they knew had collaborated with the Thirty. Nor could they prosecute Critias and others who were already dead. But Socrates was there, still going about his business asking irritating questions in public...

Note that the theory, if it's right, explains not only the excessiveness of the punishings but also the way they have of mistaking their object. At least, it looks an awful lot like all of the guilt for something is being loaded onto the back of one, unfortunate person who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That, of course, is another phenomenon that's familiar to anthropologists: scapegoating. 

One way to stop this sort of thing, as you might guess, is to get better at apprehending wrong-doers. But it's very questionable in cases like the ones mentioned above (sharing comedy sketches and so on) whether anyone's done anything wrong at all. Another way is to reduce narrow-minded people's exposure to views they find distasteful. 

Doing that by force would be wrong (people should be free to go on social media, of course), but it might be advisable, considering the kinds of moral risks involved, for some people to think twice about the amount of time they spend online. In other words, if you can't deal with different ideas, it might be best just to stay off Twitter. Otherwise you might find yourself with a cup of hemlock in your hand - handing it to an innocent person. 

Dropping the past

 

Stephen Jones recently put out his list of the best rugby union teams of all time. Like a lot of these 'best of' lists, it doesn't seem to be based on much more than Jones' impressions and memories. His list doesn't go back further than the 1970s. Can we do better?

To start with we'll need to think about what we mean by 'the best.' Does that mean the 'with the best record'? In that case we'll need to bear in mind how much teams played - winning 15 matches in a year is harder than winning 5. Do we mean 'the best relative to contemporary rivals?' If so we'll want to have a sense of how strong the teams of various different eras were. Or do we just mean 'the best at rugby'? The problem with that approach is that it's no fun, since the pro teams of today would clearly have destroyed the amateur sides of yesteryear. 

And anyway, rugby teams play against other teams around at the same time, not against teams from 50 years ago. Supremacy in the present is the name of the game. So let's go with 'best relative to their contemporary rivals.' Note that if we're really focused on who's the best - as in, most likely to win - we'll have to be disciplined and not care so much about who has the most iconic players, who won the most memorable series, who had the most positive cultural impact, etc. Those things might be more important in saying which teams were the greatest, but not so much which were the best.

The next thing to think about is what we mean by a 'team.' Teams change over time. There's probably some form of fancy analysis that could be done tracking the similarity of teams over time, but I don't know how to do it. And some teams are clearly more stable than others. Touring teams and tournament sides probably produce the most similar lineups, since they're drawn from a squad that's brought together for a particular period of time. 

So, for what it's worth, here's my list. 

1. New Zealand 2011-17. An 100% record in tests in 2013, 17 consecutive victories up to June 2014, 1st place in the Rugby Championship six times, plus a couple of World Cups. Thrashed the Springboks 57-0 in 2017.

2. South Africa 1949-52. Won test series against All Blacks 4-0, and then went on their own tour of the five nations, beating them all (including Scotland 44-0) and losing only 1 of their 31 matches overall. 

3. New Zealand 1905-6, the original All Blacks. Toured Britain, France, and North America winning 35 out of 36, scoring 976 points and conceding 59. 

4. England 2002-3. They didn't win the 2002 Six Nations, but won the Grand Slam in 2003. Beat the Springboks 53-3 at home and the Wallabies and All Blacks both home and away. Beat Australia again in the final to take the World Cup.

5. The 1924-25 All Blacks, dubbed The Invincibles' after winning all of their 32 matches (including one against each of the home nations). Points for: 838. Against: 116.

6. The 1937 Springboks, also dubbed 'The Invincibles,' slightly less deservingly, after suffering only two losses on a 29-match tour of Australia and New Zealand. 

7. New Zealand in the late 60s. A series victory against the Springboks in 1965 kickstarted a 17-match winning streak that was ended only in 1969 by Wales. 

8. South Africa 1995-1998. After the World Cup victory they lost a test series at home to the All Blacks for the first time in 1996, but they then swept the Tri-Nations in 1998, winning 17 consecutive matches. 
 
9. Australia 1999-2001. Two Tri-Nations victories following on from the 1999 World Cup. 

10. Wales in the 70s. Won 7 Five Nations championships including 3 Grand Slams. Lost both tests against NZ in 1969, and could only draw against South Africa the following year. Lost to NZ again in 1978. Formed the core of the British Lion team that won the test series in NZ in 1971.

In praise of prose

Near the end of his mammoth 6-volume Oxford History of Western Music (which, I must confess, I haven't read all the way through), Richard Taruskin suggests that musical notation may now have outlived its usefulness. Notation emerged in order to preserve and transmit music, to enable other people to play something far beyond the context it was originally composed in. But when I can upload my latest composition straight onto YouTube (be warned), why bother writing it down?

A few years ago, the top Facebook execs apparently decided that prose was going the way of musical notation, if not necessarily the dodo. Their thinking was similar to Taruskin's. Now that we can just speak into a camera and upload the video onto the world-wide web (as they're calling it), why would anyone go to the trouble of writing their thoughts down? 

The huge shift to video on social media that the tech execs anticipated hasn't quite materialized (at least not yet). There are a lot more videos online, and YouTube has become a venue for spoken commentary and argumentation (what the Greeks would have called rhetoric) from ordinary citizens in a way that was never quite possible in the world of TV, with its relatively few channels overseen by hierarchical corporations. And yet, people are also still writing a lot of prose.

I think that's a good thing. The written word, you see, still has its advantages.

The main one is that it allows both writer and reader to take things at their own pace. That means you can wait till you're really sure of what you're saying to write it down. You can look up everything you can find bearing for or against your argument and include it in a footnote. You can even change your mind and write a completely different sentence to the one you thought you'd be writing. And your reader can go back and puzzle out what you've written if they don't quite get it the first time round. They can pause for a while to ponder what you've said before moving on to the next paragraph.

Writing also has some plus points when compared to conversation. Now, I'm aware we're all intensely aware of the joys of in-the-flesh interaction at the moment, after weeks if not months of lockdown. In-person conversation has its plus points too (not least of which is that we seem to find it inherently enjoyable). But we're also all aware, I think, that there are things we choose not to say to people's faces. Often that's a very good thing. Often it's a result of an apparently natural tendency to want to be kind to each other. At other times it can be a result of hierarchy or outright intimidation. That means it can often be easier to state what we really think in the privacy of our own rooms (or, at least,  behind the partial screen of a laptop screen).

Of course, many people are retreating to their rooms to voice their thoughts - they're just doing so into a camera rather than on a page. They're obviously free to do so - I'll defend their right to that to the death, even if Voltaire might not really. But what shift to video there has been has brought with it its own issues. We're rarely intimidated in front of someone talking to us on YouTube in the way we might be in real life, and (as comment sections attest) we usually feel free to reply in ways we wouldn't in person (sometimes even to a pathological degree). But videos do transmit things about a person - like passion and attractiveness - in a way that often distracts us from the tough but necessary work of evaluating claims on their merits. Since the types of charisma that videos transmit aren't equably distributed, it can also exacerbate various forms of privilege.

All that, obviously, is why I've written this entry. 

Bow, wow

My first Greek teacher at school was one of those wizened, old-school schoolmasters they don't seem to make anymore. He was a deeply civilized man - he played the cello and the piano to concert standard as well as being able to talk more entertainingly about Cicero (an advanced skill in itself). He was usually kindly and often humorous, but he also had a stern side. I remember him leaning over my friend (who had just farted in class), his face inches away, pronouncing, very distinctly, 'Let nothing get in the way of learning!' It was rumoured he'd been in the SAS. When we got too rowdy supporting the First XV he would simply walk along the touchline and we'd all go quiet.

It was the same walk as he had in chapel. Somehow he was always the last one in, though I don't think that was an official role. We'd all be fidgeting, gossiping, poking each other with compasses, that sort of thing. He would walk down the aisle, his clipping shoes sealing up the silence behind him like he was zipping up the door of a tent. And when he got to the end, he would bow his head to the altar.

It was interesting to me partly because he was usually so upright. Later I encountered the same oscillation between bowing and upright posture at the San Francisco Zen Centre. It took me years of experience with different Buddhist groups before I could put aside my distaste for bowing to Buddha statues. Whether it was a Western egalitarianism or a Protestant distaste for idols, I didn't like it. Part of me still doesn't. And - something it's taken me years to admit to myself - part of me does.

The rationale for the formal postures they have at Western Zen centres tends to focus on mindfulness. Bowing and then standing upright and so on at different times certainly does require a certain alertness, but there's also something else going on. Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of the SF centre, apparently tripled the number of bows there because he thought Westerners needed to 'get their heads down.' The Tibetans who do full protestations have a phrase about that practice as a way to 'turn the cup upside down.' Bowing is, in other words, a way of practising and cultivating humility.

But it can also go deeper. Pack animals that have clear hierarchies in the wild - dogs, for example - seem to feel more secure in the presence of a undisputed top dog (a role human owners have stepped into). We may have something of this in ourselves. Bowing to Christ or the Buddha may be as much about handing over responsibility to them as anything else. And surrendering responsibility over ourselves is something we seem to find strangely comforting. There's something of this in the erotic sphere too, with a whole subculture of people who enjoy putting themselves in subordinate positions. Kneeling as part of oral sex and as part of religious ritual may not be as far apart as we like to think (a similarity that's been noted by generations of poets).

An increase in humility in one person is often accompanied by a growth in pride somewhere else, though, and humility can sit dangerously close to humiliation. That's what used to give me the willies about bowing, and still does occasionally. The Kings of Persia used to demand a full prostration from their vassals, something the Greeks called proskynesis. (Earlier, Kings of Assyria had required the same form of obeisance; below is the black obelisk of Shalmeneser III, who is standing over the defeated Jehu of Israel). When Alexander the Great started demanding similar treatment, his Greek and Macedonian peers took it as a sign of a slide towards tyranny. Forcing people into head-down positions and onto the ground can be elements of torture, featured from medieval heresy trials to the prisons at Abu Ghraib.

The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick's ritual of 'taking a knee' in protest against perceived injustice has now been more widely adopted as part of the 'Black Lives Matter' movement. The posture is uncannily similar to the way Catholics genuflect to the altar. That, of course, isn't necessarily to the discredit either of the protests or of Catholicism. As we've seen, bowing clearly has deep roots in human psychology as an expression of devotion. It's a central part of the human palette of gestures, as much as hugging someone or jumping for joy.

As the same time, given its potential for abuse it's easy to see why some (like the UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab) have refused to take a knee, seeing it as a symbol of submission. That it clearly is, though perhaps what's really going on in such cases isn't a distaste for submission in any context, but simply for submission to that particular cause (and Raab did indicate that he would bend the knee for the Queen). My old Greek master bowed to his idea of God, but apparently not for much else. This might be part of the point of religious types of bowing, to find a way of satisfying the human urge for submission in a way that nonetheless preserves our independence. Whether that works out in practice will depend partly on your idea of God.

Others will particularize their acts of submission, holding their heads up high in everyday life while choosing not to in certain contexts. But it might make sense to always remain a little on guard wherever we choose to bow our heads. I know it's possible to get too hung up on this; after all, bowing is a very common way simply of greeting other people across the Far East. But when it comes to more ritualized bowing, the kind of bowing that turns your heart upside down, it might be worth choosing your masters wisely. Be careful, in other words, what you bow to.

Lockdowns and liberalism

For all the different forms the debate over the lockdowns has taken, it's the absence of one argument that's surprised me the most. At least until recently (as the lockdowns have dragged on), I was aware of very few people, at least in mainstream media, emphasizing that the lockdowns were a violation of our civil liberties.

That's surprising, because they clearly did restrict our liberties to a degree that's probably not been paralleled since the Second World War. Putting the whole population under house arrest is quite a serious move, not only virtually cancelling freedom of movement, but also related rights (some of which are constitutionally enshrined in the US) like freedom of assembly - at least until the 'Black Lives Matter' protests.

Come to think of it, though, maybe the reason the civil liberties argument hasn't had much of an airing is simple: it wouldn't be particularly convincing in the context of a global pandemic. That's because a pandemic is a situation in which my freedom clearly impacts others. My going about the place risks spreading a disease to others, and thus doing them harm.

In other words, it violates John Stuart Mill's 'harm principle,' perhaps the essential principle of liberalism. The idea is that people should be free to do as they like as long as they don't harm others. The only problem with this famous principle is that it's no help at all.

Everything we do harms others in some way; even if all we do is sit at home and meditate we're using up space and resources that might have gone to somewhere else. And besides, someone might find my sitting at home and meditating annoying and hence (so the complaint might run) psychologically harmful. So where do we draw the line?

As an objection to Mill's principle as a philosophical principle this seems pretty devastating. But it may retain its usefulness as pragmatic principle or as a rule of thumb. Most liberal democratic societies have in fact operated more or less on the principle that people shouldn't do things which clearly cause others serious harm (on a reasonable definition of 'harm'). Who decides what clearly constitutes harm on a reasonable definition? We do, through our democratically-enacted laws.

This isn't the blog post where I tell you whether I think the lockdowns did more good than harm. At least not at any length: my sense at this point is that, while Covid-19 is clearly dangerous (killing something in the region of 0.1% of people it infects), it's significantly less dangerous than some thought (this widely-read article depended on a 3-4% fatality rate, for example). Against this danger we have to stack all the negative health effects of the lockdown.

Part of those will flow from the economic downturn caused by the lockdowns. But part of them will flow from the suspension of our freedoms. And they'll do so in a way which sheds light on the value of those freedoms.

Simply put, freedom isn't simply a matter of the consequences of what are sometimes taken to be natural entitlements. Besides its moral claims, it also has pragmatic ones. One of these is that it allows decisions about individual lives to be made by the people who know the most about those lives - those individuals themselves.

The lockdowns effectively prevented people from making decisions in reaction to the circumstances of their own lives. My own parents are an example: my father suffers from a medical condition that benefits from him going to the gym, something that also helps release my mother from the strain of being a care-giver for a time. But the British government decided that it would be best for them to stay cooped up at home.

This is a version of a problem Joanna Williams touched on in her piece on domestic violence and the lockdown. She concluded that that problem could easily have been eased if the government had simply decided to trust those who needed 'to take a second walk or go and sit on a park bench for half an hour.'

The point is that liberalism doesn't just function as a system of moral entitlements. It's also partly a solution to problems of information. How do we know who needs to go sit on a park bench, get out and exercise, or whatever? The government could try to gather all that information itself, but it's far simpler just to let individuals make their own choices. They know their own circumstances better than anyone else, and they're more motivated to take care of themselves.

This is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the points at which we can see liberalism and democracy intersect or overlap. Democracy, too, can be seen as the consequence of moral entitlements (the idea that people should be political equal). But it can also be seen as a way of gathering individual preferences in the most efficient way - by allowing people to express them, and then counting them up.

Of course, one of the things people have long seemed to want is a stable state that can ensure a basic level of order. That usually involves imposing some minimal rules. But there's a danger of the state overstepping its bounds, like a clumsy Gulliver, keen to help, who ends up squashing whole footprints of Lilliputians. The trouble is precisely that he's too big, and too far away, to see what the the smaller people are up to, or to hear everything they are trying to say to him.

There are obviously only two solutions: Gulliver knows his place, or he's replaced by a more nimble giant composed entirely of Lilliputians, a millions-strong Megazord. This is something we will come back to. In the meantime, a well-meaning Gulliver is stalking the earth - lovingly and crushingly.

Beta's colander

This is a classic titanic post, because (as so often) I don't really know what I'm talking about. Through the lockdown I made a half-hearted attempt to learn R, the leading statistical programme. As usual, what caught my eye was an ancient Greek. 

Specifically, Eratosthenes of Cyrene. Eratosthenes is one of the great figures of Hellenistic Alexandria. He was head of the library there, the highest intellectual position of the day. He's best remembered today for estimating the circumference of the earth to an astounding degree of accuracy, but he was also a polymath interested in literature, music, and, as we'll see, mathematics. He was called 'Beta' by his peers, not because he was on Reddit, but because he was the second best at everything.

Not too far into my studies in R, I came across Eratosthenes' sieve, a simple algorithm that's often used as an exercise for coding students. What follows is an attempt to unpack one way of coding Eratosthenes' sieve in R, with some help from a friend and some code I found online. I struggled with it a bit myself, which should hopefully put me in the ideal position to explain, since I can remember what confused me (everything), and nothing about it seems obvious to me. 

I'll start with the sieve itself. The point of it is to find all the prime numbers up to a certain point (let's say, up to 100). Starting with 2, what you do is to move through the rest of the numbers crossing out all of the multiples of 2 (since if they're multiples of any other number higher than 1 they can't be prime). Then you do the same with 3, 4, and so on, until you can't do it anymore, since all the multiples of the number you started with have already been crossed out (as multiples of an earlier number). Then you can look at all the numbers that haven't been crossed out. Those are your primes. 

I guess it makes sense as an exercise for beginner coders because it's a pretty easy to understand algorithm, a set of steps for a brain or computer to work through to get a set of outputs (here, prime numbers).

So - as previously advertized - below is one way of getting the R programme to become, for a thrilling and infinitely repeatable moment, the head librarian of Alexandria. After the code itself I'll break it all up into bits, accompanying each bit with some comments that hopefully a) are correct and b) help you understand what's going on. Code is bold, the commentary (a highly Alexandrian form) not. The commentary is talking to R and telling it what to do (imperative mood).

sieve <- function(n) {   

if (n < 2) return(NULL) 

  a <- rep(T, n) 

  a[1] <- F 

  for(i in seq(n)) { 

    if (a[i]) { 

      j <- i * i 

      if (j > n) return(which(a)) 

      a[seq(j, n, by=i)] <- F 

   }

  }

}

sieve <- function(n) { 

Make "sieve" a function that does the below to a number we'll call "n." (This just names our algorithm and makes it a function, a way of doing things to what's in the brackets that follow).

if (n < 2) return(NULL) 
a <- rep(T, n) 

If n is smaller than 2 then spit out NULL. (In other words, refuse to do this computation if it's on a number of numbers less than 2).

Make a vector called "a" and store in it n repetitions, all marked "true." (T stands for 'true.' This is like writing out the number in the grid above. Saying they're all true effectively means we're starting with the assumption that they're all prime.)

a[1] <- F 

Store the first item as false in "a." (Because we want to get rid of 1 immediately?)

for(i in seq(n)) { 

Start with i = 1, iterating the code between here and the closing }, incrementing i by one each time, until i = seq(n). (Note the opening curly bracket. The code within the for loop, contained between the curly brackets, will run a number of times equal to the number of elements in seq(n), starting with i = 1, and with the value of i increasing by one each time it runs.)

if (a[i]) { 

If a[i] is true, the code within the ensuing curly brackets will execute. If a[i] is false, it won't. (So if an individual number is false, it won't run the code. At this point that's just 1, as specified above, so I think this just stops R running this algorithm with the number 1. That's actually important, because if it did it would cross off all the numbers and we wouldn't get any primes; another way of looking at this is that being a multiple of 1 doesn't mean a number isn't a prime, and the algorithm needs to recognize this.)

j <- i * I

This finds the square of i and stores it in variable j. Remember we're in the for loop, with i incrementing each time the loop repeats. The first time round i = 1 and j = 1; the second, i = 2 and j = 4; the third, i = 3 and j = 9; and so on.

 if (j > n) 

If (and only if) the square of i is greater than the number of elements in the entire sequence...(i.e. that number times itself is larger than e.g. 100...)

return(which(a)) 

Return the sequential positions of all those numbers in a which are true (T). (The idea here is that if we've reach a number whose square is greater then the number of numbers in the sequence, e.g. 100, then we've found all the primes already. I guess this is just a separate assumption that happens to be true?)

a[seq(j, n, by=i)] <- F 

Mark as F (false, i.e. not prime - in other words, cross out) all the numbers in a between the jth and nth (the nth being the last) that are divisible by (that's what 'by' does) i (and thus aren't prime). This line is the heart and soul of the code, the steely essence of Beta's colander. 

OK, I'm still not sure I understand all of that, so if you want to try to help out in the comments be my guest. 

Stairway walks in Wellington #1: Oriental Parade to Mount Vic Lookout (and back again)

This post is a tribute to Ada Bakalinsky and her classic Stairway Walks in San Francisco, which was once gifted to me by a fellow Hellenist. Anyone who's lived in both cities (as I've had the good fortune to do) or has even been to both immediately notices the similarity - both are compact, hilly cities build around a bay (with all the weather that that brings). And, though SF's obviously a lot larger, I'd wager that windy Welly can more than hold its own in terms of unexpected shortcuts from one vertical plane to another, and in terms of stairways in particular. So I thought I'd write up a Bakalinskian 'stairway walk' in Wellington here, partly just because it's an enjoyable thing to do. It may be the first of many, or the last of one. We'll see.

But for now, here's a walk that'll take you from down by the harbour on Oriental Bay up to the commanding heights of Mount Victoria Lookout and back again, with an embarrassment of prospects along the way. It think it took me about an hour and a half, but I could imagine it filling out up to two hours if you lingered a bit longer at the top to luxuriate in the panoramic views. (The Google Maps estimate doesn't seem to account for the incline, and it's pretty much all inclines).

The Freyberg Pool is a good place to start - it's within striking distance from Courtenay Place, the city's entertainment hub, and is easy to find (it's a massive sports complex jutting out into the habour). Walk back down the road toward the city with the harbour on your right until you get to the cafe Lola Stays. Just to the left of that is a long steep row of steps. Go up those and turn right up another little stairway. Go down the road with the Copthorne Hotel on your right, then turn left then left again onto McFarlane (trust me, it's the only way). Keep going up McFarlane as it dips down and then soars up until the boats below start looking like toys.

On your right you'll start to see a old (well, early 20th century) brick monastery looming above you - that's St. Gerard's. There's a stairway just to the right of it. Go up that with the monastery now looming above you to the left.

Then just continue upwards along the road till you come to the start of the town belt on Mount Victoria. Once you've entered into the forrested realm (where the Dark Riders once roamed), things can get a bit confusing. There are so many little paths! Try to stick to the main one, and if you stray off it (as you probably will), just keep going up and to the right, way from the water sparkling away to your left through the trees.

Near the top at least you should be able to re-join the main walk-way, and start getting a sense of how things are about to open up into light and sky.

At this point you'll see Mt. Vic lookout itself, with its monuments, artifacts, and 360 views of Wellington Harbour (as well as its glimpse of the Cook Straight).

And somewhere down there you'll see St. Gerrard's again, this time with you looming above it.

At this point (if you want to follow this walk) look out for the Lookout Road (with the radio tower on the right of it), and walk along that, looking out along the way for look-outs, e.g. one onto the Westpac Stadium (a.k.a. 'The Cake Tin').

At the end of this there's a little lookout nook with a statue of the city's eponymos. And more views (e.g., if you look the other way from the last picture, it's like you're not really in a city at all).

From here there's another little stairway to the right. If you go down this you'll walk through or past a little green area/lawn/park. Here's the view back up the hill once you've done that.

As the sign suggests, you're now on Thane Road. Follow this on its winding downhill trip (with more views on the right over Evans Bay) until you turn a sharpish right corner with another green area to your right. (And a sign for the Southern Walkway). Get on this. It's not a stairway but it probably should be. Instead it's a virtually vertical concrete path that'll takes you like a glass elevator down as you face the harbour.

There are a couple of turns off here. You can basically turn left and even more sharply downhill whenever you feel like getting back to Oriental Parade. I think this one turns off onto Hay Street, but I kept going onto Glass. Here's the NuZild-shabby little park marking the turnoff onto Glass.

Just down the road from here there's also a secret meditation spot where, the day I was there, someone had left their passport - and then returned to get it just as I was wondering what to do. Anyway, once you've had your moment of reflection in the face of the harbour you can turn down to your final staircase, at which point Oriental Bay will be there to welcome you back.

And then? Get an ice-cream, lay on the beach, go for a swim - whatever you want. As with Bakalinsky's bountiful book, there are plenty of possible add-ons and variations, as well as completely different routes in the same area. This was just to get you started in case you needed an idea. Oh, and here's that last area on a slightly better map. If you want you can not turn down Glass but instead keep going to the end of the Southern Walkway, which would probably add 15 minutes or so.

Is Theodor Fontane the German Hardy?

Again, I don't know enough to say. I did just read Unterm Birnbaum (Under the Pear Tree) and there were things about it that reminded me of Hardy - the strong sense of place, the use of local dialect, the pastoral setting combined with some very dark themes. The prose is deceptively simple, also, I think, like Hardy's. There's also the fact that Hardy and Fontane both seem to be in that rarefied set of writers who've achieved greatness both as poets and novelists. And that both touched on topics that were seen as 'inappropriate' by the society of the time.

Fontane seems most well-known in the German-speaking world for his ballad 'John Maynard' about a steamship captain on Lake Erie whose ship caught fire but who stayed with it and steered it to shore. Bizarrely to my mind, the repeated, 'Und noch ---- Minuten bis Buffalo!' ('And ----- minutes more to Buffalo!) has apparently been etched into the memory of generations of German school children. It is an exciting poem. The rest of Fontane's ballads read as very alien nowadays, even (or maybe especially) the 'English-Scottish' ones.

Fontane's lyric poetry, though, is straightforward, lucid, and, I would say, moving. (In the first two of these qualities his lyric poems are different to Hardy's.) I just wanted to post a couple here. The beauty is all in the simplicity - a simplicity which is, again, often a slightly deceptive one.

Der erste Schnee.

Die Sonne schien, doch Winters Näh’
     Verrieth ein Flockenpaar;
Es gleicht das erste Flöckchen Schnee
     Dem ersten weißen Haar.

5

Noch wird – wie wohl von lieber Hand

     Der erste Schnee dem Haupt –
So auch der erste Schnee dem Land
     Vom Sonnenstrahl geraubt.

[6]

Doch habet Acht! mit einem Mal

10

     Ist Haupt und Erde weiß,

Und Freundeshand und Sonnenstrahl
     Sich nicht zu helfen weiß.

I don't have any great grasp of German poetry, but the simplicity, the 'naive' joy in nature, and the bittersweetness of the ending - the sense that certain kinds of longing are inevitable - reminds me of nothing so much of Wilhelm Müller's Winterreise, as famously set to music by Schubert. All these notes - simplicity, an intimacy with nature, and, finally, of the inevitability of life's joys passing - all that is even stronger here:

In der Krankheit.

(Brief an E.)

     Mein ganzes Zimmer riecht nach Wald,
Das machen die kiehnenen Tische,
Glaub mir, ich muß genesen bald
In dieser Harzesfrische.

5

     Du bist noch kaum bei uns daheim

An unsres Kindes Bettchen,
Und sieh, schon sitzt ein muntrer Reim
Auf meinem Fensterbrettchen.

     Er sitzt allda und schaut mich an

10

Wie auf dem Felde die Lerchen

Und singt: „Du hast ganz wohlgethan,
Dich still hier einzupferchen.

[21]

     „Steh nur früh auf und schweif umher

Und lache wie der Morgen,

15

So wird dies grüne Waldesmeer

Schon weiter für Dich sorgen.

     „Und schied’st Du doch zu dieser Frist,
So tu es ohne Trauern,
Das Leben, weil so schön es ist,

20

Kann es nicht ewig dauern.“