A Rational Optimist's Reluctant Case for Panic

As European rugby fans look back with regret on (yet!) a(nother!!) chastening weekend, one of Monday’s papers put up a poll: When do you think a northern hemisphere team will next win the World Cup? There was a choice of the next five tournaments, 2019 to 2036. (Plus ‘none of the above’, one assumes…) Which got me thinking about something that has been nagging at me for a while. On this kind of timescale - a few years to a few decades into the future - I just don’t think people are very good at conceiving of fundamental change. Rather, and more-or-less regardless (so I contend) of how well informed we might be about the facts of global social, technological, or environmental change - we sort of assume that life will carry on just about how it always has within our experience, with incremental developments maybe, but without major upset. So while the players at major sports events will change, the basic pattern - a big, multi-week jamboree involving mass movement of people around the world, major new infrastricture, huge inputs of cash, energy, water, and so on - will remain, we expect, essentially identical. Hence we start planning for the 2036 World Cup now.

Certainly, this has always been my belief. Although I’ve been concerned about environmental issues for as long as I can remember, I consider myself (favourably, of course) to be towards the optimistic end of rational. So I find it very hard to believe that any of the properly charismatic species will ever really be allowed to go extinct; and I have this powerful faith (i.e., belief without a shred of evidence) that we as a society will in the end, when it really matters, pull something out the bag on climate change. To a certain extent, parenthood enforces such an outlook - first of all we convince ourselves that we are bringing life into what is basically a favourable world; and then we try to ensure our kids have childhoods as good - preferably better - as our own were. Incremental change, on an overall upward trajectory.

But a couple of things I’ve read recently have shaken that stubborn optimism of mine, to the extent that I’m starting to find casual talk of a 2036 World Cup faintly ridiculous.

First, Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. Read as a primer in Marxist theory, in economic and industrial history, in neoliberalism and its sinister symptoms, it is compelling. I was less convinced by some of the projections - for instance, his energy analysis seems shaky and whilst Wikipedia is wonderful, it bears an awful lot of the weight of Mason’s arguments about a future of unlimited free stuff and no need to work. (Oh, and his data visualisations are just awful.) But it’s a terrific read nonetheless (subject, I hope, of a full post in due course); and it is, in parts, terrifying. For instance, in laying out the looming pensions crisis - evident already in the imminent downgrading of my own (excellent, public sector) policy. And the economic consequences of taking climate change seriously (as he argues that we must), which include a collapse in the share value of some of the world’s largest companies, if (when!) we tell them that large fractions, perhaps 60-80%, of the assets on which this value is based - as yet unburnt fossil fuel reserves - must stay in the ground. In fact, I was convinced enough to adapt the title of his ninth chapter for this post. And, reluctantly, I'm leaning towards seeing our current, post-crash situation as more than a painful period of austerity that will end as soon as we vote the nasty posh boys out of office, but rather as a sign of far less pleasant things to come. As Mason puts it,

“The OECD’s economists were too polite to say it, so let’s spell it out: for the developed world the best of capitalism is behind us, and for the rest it will be over in our lifetime.”

The second key book for me has been David Mitchell’s wonderful novel The Bone Clocks. I’m a long-time Mitchell fan, I just love the worlds he creates, and suspend my disbelief willingly for his forays into the supernatural simply because of the power of his characters and the beauty of his prose. The Bone Clocks follows one of his most vivid creations yet, Holly Sykes, through six intertwined novellas and across seven decades, from the 1980s to the 2040s. And it is the final section, set in rural Ireland in 2043, that presents such a stark imagining of a drastically different future. Here is Holly, a few years older than me but basically of my generation, who has lived - as I have - with the rise of technology into every aspect of life; but who in her 70s is now experiencing the ‘endarkenment’ - chaotic times of 21^st Century tech that still works occasionally, of power for those who can generate their own energy or grow their own food, or who have the might to take that from others. My copy of The Bone Clocks includes a short interview with Mitchell, in which he is asked whether this dystopian end to the novel reflects his own view. “Yes”, he responds,

“I’m afraid our civilisation is defecating in the well from which it draws life. We’re leaving our grandchildren a hotter and less secure world… We’re intelligent, but we’re not wise.”

Now I’ve read similar sentiments countless times from environmental prophets of doom, but taken alongside my research into the implications of population 10 billion  for this adventure, as well as Postcapitalism and the rest, I find myself concluding that life in twenty or thirty years time - and forget the grandkids, this is for me, for us - might very well be very different from how it is now. So I’m actually not too fussed about losing perks from my pension, simply because the I can't really imagine the plan of retiring comfortably sometime in the 2040s panning out…

The optimist in me still thinks of the resilience of nature - a different, feral, nature maybe, but nature nonetheless - and of humanity. Sure, we’re seeing the what Kevin Gaston call’s the ‘extinction of experience’, the sad loss of connection with nature; but as I’ve written before, I think baselines shift: people just get used to this new normal and find joy where they can. I fervently hope my kids get to see some real nature, but I know too that they won’t regret what they have not known; that regardless they will be complex, connected, happy-sad members of the 10 billion.

But I will regret.

And thus underperforming sports teams are placed in proper perspective.

Peer Review, Amis Style

I have read for pleasure for as long as I remember, some books haunting me for years after I finish them, others drawing me in only while they last. But two authors had a particularly formative influence on me in my late teens, in very different ways. Richard Dawkins caused me to reassess my position in the world. And Martin Amis showed me that so-called literary novels could also be pretty good fun. In the couple of decades since, my tastes have changed. Amis’s early novels, which made such an impression, were written while he was much younger than I am now. They are probably best left to sixth formers and twentysomethings. And as for Dawkins, well, I was convinced early on, argumentitatively so for a while; but the need to fight those fights left me as I drifted into the happy state of live and let live that Ben Goldacre wonderfully characterises as ‘apatheism’: "I'm an apatheist. It's not that i don't believe, it's more that I find all discussion of the issue shit-boring". Dawkins, of course, is still fighting; and Amis is still writing. Indeed, superficially the two seem to have followed similar trajectories from exclusive schools through Oxbridge and early brilliance and into… well, if satirist Craig Brown’s name hadn’t appeared at the bottom of this set of (supposed) Dawkins tweets would you have known they were in Private Eye? And his second volume of memoirs was greeted in Nature thus: “Brief Candle is about as edgy as Sir Mick and the Rolling Stones cranking out the 3,578th rendition of 'Brown Sugar' — a treat for fans, but reinscribing boundaries rather than crossing them”. Amis is also an easy target for ridicule, expressing with apparent seriousness not enormously sophisticated opinions on grown-up issues, like (according to the magnificent Chris Morris) 'a senile 12-year-old'. Nearly time (he's 66) for him to consider his own advice:

“Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour. They come good at thirty, they peak at fifty… at seventy, novelists are ready to be kicked upstairs.”

As with so many things I got up to when I was young, then, reading Dawkins and Amis is probably best remembered fondly than attempting again now.

And yet.

I just read a Martin Amis book. True, it was not a novel, rather a book of his literary criticism and journalism (The War Against Cliche - just the kind of ‘bits and pieces’ book I enjoy). But it was good fun, and reminded me of Amis’s twin saving graces. First, he can really write. It’s partly the technical stuff - elsewhere, he writes that you should never start successive paragraphs with the same word, unless for effect, in which case do three in a row. Impossible to unread that command and I’ve obeyed it ever since. Whether or not it makes a difference stylistically, it makes you think about your writing in useful ways. More generally I just derive great pleasure from reading a sentence like:

“Excluding a few dry-outs, in hospitals and prisons, and the very occasional self-imposed prohibition, Malcolm Lowry was shitfaced for thirty-five years”

or:

“The book bristles with beauties, charm, sublime comedies; it is also, for long stretches (approaching about 75% of the whole), inhumanly dull… The question ‘What happens next’ has no meaning, because there is no next in Don Quixote’s world: there is only more.”

The second reason to re-try Amis is that he’s funny.

For instance, he decides to review Desmond Morris’s The Soccer Tribe by writing six pages of anecdote about the travails of being an intellectual football fan (note for younger readers: in the 1980s football fans were a trainspottery bunch, before Sky required us to profess to enjoy the lucrative game), not mentioning the book until the final sentence, whereupon:

“I have only time to add that Morris’s book is handsomely packaged, that the pictures are great, magic, brill, etc., and that the text is an austere, an unfaltering distillation of the obvious and the obviously false.”

For instance, on Norman Mailer:

“He isn’t frightened of sounding outrageous; he isn’t frightened of making a fool of himself; and, above all, he isn’t frightened of being boring. Well, fear has its uses.”

For instance, the new monster in Michael Crichton’s The Lost World

“…shows promise. It is a carnotaurus, a light-heavyweight with horns… ‘Diet: Meat’, as my dinosaur encyclopaedia bluntly assures us. This is good. In the Jurassic era, as in our own, vegetarians are a drag.”

So he can write, he can amuse, and he can, of course, be cruel. (On Crichton again: “Animals — especially, if not quite exclusively, velociraptors — are what his is good at. People are what he is bad at. People, and prose.”) But Amis’s reviews are also, in aggregate, much nicer than I had expected. He states as much himself: as a critic,

“[y]ou hope to get more relaxed and confident over time; and you should certainly get (or seem to get) kinder… Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it when you realise how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember… ”

This surprising (and admittedly somewhat self-interested - note the ‘how long they remember’…) sensitivity to the efforts of others - no matter how substandard - is echoed in his review of a volume of John Updike’s collected journalism:

“Kind to stragglers and also-rans, to well-meaning duds and worthies, and correspondingly cautious in his praise of acknowledged stars and masters, Updike’s view of twentieth-century literature is a levelling one. Talent, like life, should be available to all.”

Think on this, then, before you set upon the next unfortunate manuscript to land in your inbox. And try always to get kinder.

Piloting the Imperial Shuttle

At staff meetings and the like, I often find myself channelling Princess Leia. The HoD, faculty head, or whoever will be outlining some pioneering new initiative, but what I’ll hear is General Madine announcing the theft of an Imperial shuttle to the assembled rebels in Return of the Jedi: “Disguised as a cargo ship, and using a secret Imperial code, a strike team will land on the moon and deactivate the shield generator.” To which I incredulously respond (usually - I hope! - to myself), “Who have they found to pull that off?!”

Well, finally - finally! - I get to be General Solo, and my strike team is assembled.

The hazardous, desperate, hare-brained, potentially glorious mission in question? Establishing an interdisciplinary curriculum to deliver to 5000+ second year undergraduate students here at the University of Sheffield. Specifically, I have taken on a part time secondment as an Academic Lead within our new cross-faculty programme, Achieve More, which aims to offer all of our undergraduates the chance to work collaboratively, across disciplines, to better understand some of the major challenges facing society - and how research can help to address these.

Various things attracted me to this post - and one should not underestimate the influence that turning 40 can have on major life decisions - but essentially, I applied because I think it is time to walk the walk of interdisciplinarity. Back in 2007, when I participated in NESTA’s Crucible programme (about which I have written before), I was already pretty sold on the idea the tools required to address global challenges would need to be draw from a range of different disciplines. At a Crucible reception, we heard the head of HEFCE commit to this interdisciplinary agenda, and subsequent funding initiatives in the environmental sector (e.g. Valuing Nature) have backed up this commitment to a certain extent.

But something else they got us to do on Crucible was to design the ‘University of Utopia’ - given a blank slate, how would we go about designing a university? Our plans differed in details - things such as establishing fast lanes so that academics can walk briskly between buildings unimpeded by loitering students, as I recall - but one common thread was that none of us went for a departmental structure. Put simply, if you start from the perspective of questions or challenges - ‘food security’ would be a good example - then it makes little sense to sit all the plant scientists in one building, apart from all the political scientists, historians, chemists, and so on.

And yet, universities are the way they are - to some extent, the way they have always been - and departments are not going away. Initiatives like Achieve More, then, are intended to bring us that bit closer to Utopia. It is no surprise that we are not alone in thinking this way - indeed, I would suggest there is a general trend across the UK higher education sector to offer students broader opportunities, in addition to the depth of disciplinary knowledge that has always HE’s primary selling point. Both Exeter and UCL, to pick a couple of examples, have programmes allowing students to engage with research with a focus on major societal challenges.

In part this is a recruitment tool, sold on employability. For instance, I recently heard digital health entrepreneur Kieran Daly say that businesses such as those he supports are looking to hire T-shaped people - graduates with a breadth of knowledge across disciplines, as well as a depth of knowledge within their core subject. How widely-held this preference is among employers remains to be seen, but certainly some of the key qualities we are seeking to instil - effective teamwork, good communication skills, a range of critical thinking skills, and so on - ought to look good on any CV.

More generally, however, this shift towards a more holistic view of what higher education should deliver can be thought of as an attempt to re-establish the idea of ‘scholarship’ in a 21^st Century context. Some existing programmes seem focused much more on enriching the undergraduate experience than on ticking ‘employability’ boxes - see the Broad Vision programme at the University of Westminster, for example, which gets artists and scientists involved in creative conversations and collaborative projects. This chimes really well with my own experiences on Crucible and elsewhere: above all, working outside the comfort zone of your own discipline - especially when you are given the freedom to fail, to talk and collaborate and create but ultimately to come up with nothing functional - ought to be fun.

All very well in theory, then; but the devil, of course, is in the logistics. What separates Achieve More from programmes at other institutions is the scale of its ambition - we want all our students want to participate, not just a highly motivated, self-selected few. Which means that conversations with colleagues typically start with ‘That’s a great idea BUT…’ Better, of course, than ‘That’s a terrible idea AND…’ But the ‘BUT’ is big. And addressing that is what will be keeping me busy for a while.

So if you’ll excuse me, people are relying on me to get that shield down. I just need more time…