WHERE ON EARTH ARE WE GOING?

I’m increasingly confused. We’ve a government with a big majority who said Brexit would benefit us. To be fair we expected neither a pandemic or a war in Europe but I’m sitting here today wondering if anyone has (or had) a clue as to how to manage our affairs. I also wonder if they really care. No strategy. No values. Not a clue. And that is the problem with the insularity of Britain right now.

One of the greatest US Presidents might have been Robert Kennedy – he was assassinated in 1968 so we never found out. He said:

“The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better.”

 

I don’t think  our current Prime Minister capable of such thoughts. 

As I watched the Trooping the Colour spectacle on TV the camera picked out a forlorn couple - Carrie and her husband in the crowd. That was a surprise because the nationalistic oom-pah-pah  - and that sense of “aren’t we in Britain good at this?” should have surely thrilled them. Perhaps they were reflecting that their escapade would soon be over and this soured their day.

 

No one has a clue because there is no plan and never was just a strategy apart from “Get Brexit Done”. I’m beginning to wonder if in the cold light of 2022 the inevitability of this mightn’t be beginning to untangle. In five years’ time the  4 ½ million of 11 – 16 olds will all have the vote added to the 5 ½ million of 17 to 24 year olds and we then have a very different looking electorate. It doesn’t feel like the Conservatives have much chance when that happens.

 

Evidence. In Australia the right wing Liberals have just lost an election turfed out by a coalition of what’s called the Teal vote (“teal” from the colour blueish green – Conservative fiscal policies plus a vigorous green agenda and many of the candidates are women). It’s a new start.

We are in an era of real change – figures like Putin, Trump and Johnson seem weirdly out of step with the new younger voters who are largely liberally minded, cosmopolitan, experimental, friends of change and very opinionated. They feel in the UK, and elsewhere, as remote  from the Brexit campaign and the Jubilee celebrations as anyone could be. 

Robert Kennedy, again, and wasn’t he terrific?

“There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.

The past is another country as LP Hartley wrote in his novel “The Go-Between”, interesting but not always instructive. The world now is full of people in America, France, Spain, Germany, China, India and Australia with whom I feel I have more in common with than, say, almost anyone in the current cabinet. 

I like my country – the climate, the architecture, our sense of humour and the food. The food? So much better than it used to be because of much greater foreign influence. 

 

So where are we going? If we follow the instincts of the younger generation I suspect we’ll end up as a better, more civilised, more tolerant place. A country with open borders again. A country that enjoys itself more and stops looking over its shoulder at the threat from foreigners.

 

Back to Kennedy again:

“The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better.”

 

Yes. I’ll buy that.

ANOTHER ROAD TO DAMASCUS MOMENT

I’ve had a strong sense of scepticism about the wonders of technology for some time like many from the pre-digital generation. And yet I love what’s happening too….

This week I started to read “The Second Machine Age” by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. Eryk is the Director of the MIT initiative on the digital economy. You too should read the book which is well and freshly written.
   
No, it won’t change your minds; but it’ll focus you on the historical realty that nothing changed for thousands of years when humanity was on a “very gradual upward trajectory” until, wallop, the Industrial Revolution. James Watt’s brilliant tinkering enabled the steam revolution to initiate the biggest transformation in the history of the world.

They talk, by the way, extensively throughout the book about the brilliance of “tinkering” as opposed to first generation breakthroughs. Tinkering or recombinant thinking - recombining, fiddling about with what you have to produce something extraordinary - is what creative people do best and always have.

But it’s the digital world where tinkering has really come into its own. The authors trace the exponential growth of the sector citing Moore’s Law whereby he stated that the growth in computing power would double every year (which for the past four decades it has). The implications of that are astounding. On a trivial level the ASCI Red and the world’s fastest supercomputer reached 1.8 teraflops in 1997 and cost $55 million to develop. Just nine years later the Sony PlayStation 3 reached 1.8 teraflops and cost $500 to buy.

These guys are incredibly optimistic in answering the “so what?” question.

“The second machine age will be characterised by countless examples of machine intelligence and billions of interconnected brains working together to better understand and improve our world. It will make mockery out of all that came before.” 

They make a mockery of Gross Domestic Product as a measure of economic growth when so much of the new economy is free-to-use. More music is being heard, more news read, more use of Google, Skype and so on is transforming our lives (at the fringes but nonetheless usefully.) Go back half a century and one of the brightest but unfulfilled minds got it right.
   
“The Gross National Product does not include the beauty of our poetry or the intelligence of our public debate. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion. It measures everything, in short, except 
that which makes life worthwhile.” 

That was Robert Kennedy.

The unbridled enthusiasm of this book is wonderful. We live in an increasingly interconnected world where hitherto untapped sources of creativity are becoming available to everyone.

Thanks Eryk and Andrew. What makes our lives really worthwhile may be closer to hand than we’d thought if we just have to courage to reach for it.

I was a bit of a sceptic because I found the subject hard. Now I’m a believer.