A view from the bunny farm...

God, but it’s great to win! It’s euphoric: a hormonal high that justifies all the effort, the discipline, pain and calculation that goes into achieving… and the greater the pain, the worthier the win.

The publicity, respect, new friends and opportunities, accompanied perhaps by wealth and power, re-brand our identity.

Yes, success also has its hazards. It can download new responsibilities and unexpected obligations. It affirms the priorities effort and focus that led to the success; it can also affirm any mistakes that were in the mix. It can bring new temptations and distance a winner from nurturing relationships of the past. Success can also lock into place a punishing need to keep winning… a one-time winner can quickly lose the lustre.

In a democracy, where people “fight” for electoral “victory” and the laurels of governance and have to face that contest for re-election time and time again, strategies for re-election necessarily kick in the moment a politician takes that coveted seat.

It’s good and necessary that those who govern be accountable to those who consent to be governed. But obtaining that consent can invite the deployment of devices that are more apparent than real. Dumbing things down to self-evident slogans, for example, can side-step a lot of complicated rationale. Clothes and charisma can hide shortcomings. Announcing “fresh” crises can divert an electorate, particularly if the crises can be blamed on others and/or easily solved. Self-promotion and the power of the party influence perceptions of personal effectiveness; the immediacy of “good” outcomes can be persuasive. But initiatives that are slow to yield returns offer windfall kudos for one’s successor.

Addressing issues of complexity or long-term social change can leave an electorate wondering what the hell you’re up to: keep it simple, keep it quick. Attention spans in contemporary culture are short and readily re-directed. Some issues, therefore, are best kept in the background. Politicians are criticised for “spin” but there may be no alternative. No politician can do everything, be everywhere, or fully satisfy everybody. It’s a high-risk occupation… ignore the wrong issues and any one of them can blow up in your face; focus on the wrong issue and you’ll be accused of ignoring “real” problems.

And, the more complicated societies become, the harder it gets to please most of the people most of the time. Any opportunity to do so will be snatched up before the opposition gets hold of it. Issues that deny opponents a popular advantage are pretty sure to be pushed into the spotlight, whether or not they’re particularly significant.

And the difficulties of evaluating vast amounts of information make decision-making tricky. Few people have the time, training and expertise, or the patience, to wade discerningly through, for example, the 111 million hits I get when I Google “climate change”. And that’s before I start getting into the real science behind the issue. Information flows have become such torrents of confusion that most people get bored and go away.

So governments tend to crowd their concerns around a few fetishistic issues that can be illustrated by way of clear, vivid personal impacts. So “health services” gets presented as wait times, cures for cancer or pandemics like ‘flu or HIV viruses; “the economy” is reduced to sets of indicators like share market indices, unemployment rates and GDP; “crime and security” to things like “crackdowns” (longer prison sentences), crime rates, police and military budgets and interminably repeated rhetoric about the hair-raising threats we face from terrorists abroad and “youth crime” at home. And this makes life easy for a nation’s lazy or under-resourced media: all that readily accessible chatter.

Within all of this the nature of “success” bears examination: competitive success and the psychology of winning… and the social implications of winning in a competitive society. By definition, the least competitive are destined to be losers. Will they also be of the least concern, the least listened to?

In most contexts, one winner will be surrounded by a field of losers. And, for a winner, being well ahead of all those losers in the distance is comforting. Yet “losers” in the game of acquiring power and money nevertheless make many necessary contributions to society and its sustainability.

Power and money, removed from social contexts, are worthless… but how concerned for the “losers” that sustain his or her community can a “winner” really afford to become?

What are the reciprocities? Should there be reciprocities? What are the privileges and responsibilities of winning? What constitute the reasonable expectations of “losers”? Can good ideas, good people and wider arrays of choice, better solutions and greater hope be left to die in chasms between the rival collectivities of party politics?

All of these things are, of course, in fact worked out, in a sort of a way, in the to and fro flux of government action and inaction, prioritisation and policy formation, most of it implicitly. But, as an encouragement to raise these questions more explicitly… let me offer several thought experiments:

1. Consider is the high-ranked notion of “efficiency”. What would “efficient” government look like? Efficiency calls for predictability and reliability and, in real life, efficiency can be over-rated. A highly efficient government would have to micro-manage our every inclination… it would be an excruciating, dystopian dictatorship by experts and cost accountants. So perhaps we should call for the formation of a Bureau of Inefficiency to modulate the level of efficiency in our society. If things get too regimented, it would be empowered to introduce new reporting standards and evaluation procedures, overstaff top performing offices, restructure core functions, pass out caffeinated alcopops at lunchtime and launch viral attacks on the databases. In extreme cases, it should be empowered to contract the French civil service to conduct a performance review.

2. THEN there is, in any society, “the last guy”. I don’t believe anyone chooses to be out of work, drug-addicted, poor, illiterate, scorned, banged up in jail, vulnerable, homeless or embroiled in pointless violence. Rather, I think life’s often unfair and we’re far too casual about preventing or redressing the inequities… and it’s our community’s good health that suffers, hurting us all. I recall an old Arlo Guthrie monologue  that’s very funny in a serious sort of a way. It includes the following: “You know, you have a bad time of it, and you always have a friend who says ‘Hey man, you ain’t got it that bad. Look at that guy.’ And you look at that guy, and he’s got it worse than you. And it makes you feel better that there’s somebody that’s got it worse than you. But think of the last guy. For one minute, think of the last guy. Nobody’s got it worse than that guy.”

So, just imagine: what if, instead if evaluating a government’s performance by sets of economic data and policy implementation, broken election “promises” and screeds of social statistics, the whole reckoning was based on just one measure: the health, welfare and happiness of one person… the “last guy”. If, through the structural workings of the state, the “last guy” was feeling better about life, everyone better off than the “last guy” would also, in all likelihood, also be better off or happier. Imagine, every New Year’s Eve… an in-depth interview on national television with the “last guy”.

A first step on the road towards this might be to pay politicians the median wage (whatever it is), ban lobbyists and toughen up penalties for corruption.

3. How about the issue of democratic representation? In the western tradition, we usually appeal to the blatantly elitist Athenian model. In the Samoan matai system, all male heads of families also sat in on decision making at the fono, or assembly, as of right, rather than as the result of election. And decision-making in the fono is by consensus. Then, in the decentralised federation of the Haudenosaunee democracy of North America, women were granted a bit more respect. So there’ve been attempts in several cultures to get it right. But, even where things have moved beyond the majority-rule principle of the “Westminster” system to consensus decision-making, and despite attempts to improve representation by way of various forms of proportional voting, it’s always stopped short of actually trusting each other to get it right.

So… how about representation by random selection? It’s good enough for jury service, and what is Parliament but a big jury? “Called up” for parliamentary duty you’d face, say, a five-year term at the “helm” as a parliamentary panellist; you’d get a living income and reasonable expenses, job protection while you’re “away” and rehabilitative assistance afterwards. Each year, a fifth of the representatives would be chosen, given a quick orientation course, and begin their terms of service; and the longest serving fifth would be retired to resume their lives as ordinary citizens. In between, there’d be a nice flow, enough for continuity’s sake, and, although parliamentary panellists would pick up influence along with experience, they’d be out the door before lobbyists could completely corrupt them totally or the power trip gave them too many ruinously dangerous ideas. Some panellists would bring wonderful ideas for reform with them, and be partial to wide-ranging views in the communities that their terms of appointment required them to serve. But, best of all, they’d be genuinely “representative”. Some lazy, stupid people would be bound to get into the net… and that would change things?

THE real reason I brought you here …

is to suggest that the most robust safeguard we losers can offer our democratic cabinets of political winners is critique.

We should be constantly agitating, not on our own behalf for petty advantages and trivial tax cuts, but especially and most vehemently wherever we see failures of democratic principle or natural justice, or impartiality, and ant endangerment to the land and its resources… things, in other words, that involve risks of damage that’s not readily be undone.

The eyes of an elected politician can seldom focus on anything more than a few years distant; the winner sees the next challenge, and has to understand it in personal terms. We losers are less bound by the detail and proximity of all that. We can vote people into power then get on with framing longer-term, bigger views… grander , worthier views to do with the kinds of experience that are going to be available to the generations of our grandchildren, and their children after them.

It was a high-powered oil company executive who introduced me to this view of politics, in the course of an interview for a book I’d been commissioned to write. He was a company-trained strategist who referred to the parliamentarians and cabinet ministers a couple of times as “here-today, gone-tomorrow bunnies”.

He told me that his company’s approach was keep its main objectives straightforward and consistent. And to work to a 20-year plan. The Chinese were successful, he said, because they took a much longer-term view of things than countries in the West. The idea, he said, was to keep a succession of current, glossy, politically attractive “big proposals” on the appropriate cabinet ministers’ desks. Sooner or later, they’d be faced with circumstances that called for a persuasive response and, if your proposal was on top of the pile and the best looking, the bunnies would be bound to pick it up in their panic.

Anyway, it wasn’t necessary for a government to always do what you wanted — the critical need was for decision-making to move forward. With laws in place, his company could work to its own advantage within the terms of whatever came down. “It’s like sailing a yacht,” he told me. “If there’s a wind, you make way; if not, you go nowhere.”

His company and others, he said, had helped several countries — he mentioned Indonesia — draft environmental protection legislation because, if they then complied and things still went wrong, the solution would be to tighten to legislation.

And, regularly, his company offered tactfully worded appraisals of government policy and its “public” impacts.

He was describing an adversarial relationship between his company and the countries it worked in… very profitably.

And I’d suggest that we losers can learn from that sort of bunny-baiting approach to government — and make it more thoroughly “our” government — by keeping our main objectives as straightforward and consistent as demands for “justice, honesty and good government”. And, if we’re looking towards the welfare of our grandchildren, we can work to a 20-year plan too. In fact, we could make that a 30-year plan.

Along the way, we keep throwing ideas at the “ bunnies”, we persistently offer our tactfully worded critiques, and we push them to make substantive decisions that let us make our communities happier, healthier, friendlier and more satisfying, interesting places to inhabit — just as the oil companies have to engineer their own massive returns, we can do “compliance”… then it’s up to us to furnish our living space with the qualities of life we seek.

Even the “last guy” should benefit from that.

Looking ahead

THE FRUITS of science have been phenomenal… and what could once be parodied as the inspired labour of eccentric boffins with test tubes, telescopes or butterfly nets is now more likely to be the strategically sophisticated, systematic work of international teams pulling patterns and regularities from the networked analysis of torrents of data, much of it remotely gathered and often from sources and forces invisible to the naked eye.

Nevertheless, science continues to be the patient application of observation, experimentation and measurement, and the collection of data followed by logical analysis and the formulation of testable statements. Over the centuries, it has produced a very powerful body of knowledge. Fields like electronics and nanotechnology, genetics, physics, chemistry and materials science have been leaders in the accelerating delivery of new applications and the articulation of new questions… lots and lots of new questions. But the leading edge of science is far broader even than this.

Science has revolutionised everything from architecture to entertainment, artistic expression to information gathering, work to warfare, education to reproduction… shopping, sports, the contents of our grocery carts and the way we prepare them, what we read and the way we read it. Our ideas of what our homes should be, contain and provide have very largely been shaped by science, and we are not what we would otherwise have been.

Historically, as the major pathways science branched into specialisations with their own diverging pathways and branches, the body of science has become an exponentially growing array of sophisticated sub-disciplines addressing almost every conceivable interest, hundreds of them: acoustics, and aerodynamics, aerology, aeronautics, agronomy, anesthesiology, anatomy, analytical chemistry, archaeology, astrobiology, astrodynamics, astronomy, astrophysics, audiology, bacteriology, biochemistry, bioinformatics, biophysics, botany, calorifics, cardiology, cellular biology, classical mechanics, clinical chemistry, chronobiology, computational physics, condensed matter physics, cosmology, cryogenics, cytology, developmental biology, embryology, endocrinology, all the way through to… zzzz… and each proliferating branch of modern science has its own sets of particular academic and career qualifications, its own specialised technologies, methodologies, conferences and journals, its own applications, relevance and perceived value. Science has so much breadth as to be all but impossible to keep up with: thousands of scientific journals are published each year and scientists struggle to keep abreast of research and theoretical developments in their own and immediately relevant spheres of interest. For non-scientists, it is nigh impossible.

Yet, directly or indirectly, science informs most of the decisions we make in our personal and public lives (or the excuses we offer afterwards), as well as what we conceive of as being “possible” and the ways we imagine achieving it. We find science and applied reason persuasive. With its own language, values and conventions, science has many of the attributes of a culture and, even in places where its principles do not reach, its flag is raised and its cultural forms are mimicked to conjure up reassuring mirages of authority.

The outcomes of scientific achievement haven’t all pleased everyone all the time, or to the same extent — some people, in fact, have fallen violent victim to it. And, because science costs money and is applied to make money, the fruits of science have tended to drop more generously into the laps of the wealthy. Some of the changes made possible by science have been experienced by some people as an imposition, even as the means of their oppression and annihilation. But that has seldom been science’s first intention.

Science was the principle champion of the maturing rationalism that took hold in the West with the European “Enlightenment” of the 18th century, and the elevation of “reason” as the necessary measure, justification and mechanism of human progress. In this role, science has produced an approach to understanding the world, the human condition and, many would say, the universe.

Science is said to have freed people from the chains of “superstition”. Well, it has tried… the upset here arises from a seriously limited public comprehension of science. One consequence of that is our tendency to heap enormous expectations onto science, relying on people in white coats to come running in and mop up after our every social, moral and economic blunder. The popular over-estimation of what science can do is a real danger in public decision-making. It was, we should remember, their sublime confidence in the unsinkability of the Titanic that fatally delayed the effective response of many of its wealthy, well-educated passengers to their real predicament.

This widespread but mistakenly uncritical trust in “science” and technology has been aggressively exploited. Thus for example, over-prescription is particularly rampant in North America where a rich vein of credulity has been mined to sell psychiatric and psychoactive medication. Therapists and their patients can look like co-conspirators in thrall to drug companies. The pharmaceuticals industry is driven first and foremost by the pursuit of financial returns and led by marketing objectives, hence its interest in natural, universal, unavoidable “afflictions” — enduring markets, like the effects of ageing, freed from limiting diagnoses that involve injury or infection — as rich fields for drug diversification.

Intellectually, few have turned the contamination of popular knowledge to greater profit than Walt Disney, the billionaire anthropomorphist, who was personally responsible for so much of the Western mind’s confusion and “anti-knowledge” about nature. He depicted nature as weak and vulnerable and, worst of all, as “cute”. Nature simply IS. It is nature that is invincible; we are the vulnerable ones. Nature can wipe us off the face of the planet as soon as we cross the line, impassively and without the least concern about collateral damage. Nature will go on.

Walt Disney is why stupid people get mauled by bears. One of his most characteristically despicable acts of charlatanism was to have a special centrifuge built to fling lemmings over a cliff so his cameras could affirm a popular but totally wrong-headed folk myth. But I find him most objectionable for his stunting of so many people’s capacity for awe. He put wonder in a safe little suburban headspace called “cute” that helped open the door to an unprecedented depredation of the natural world. The world described by science is nothing at all like Disneyland.

A large part of our vulnerability to the likes of “cute” is that, as adults, we get most of our science through the filters of the scientifically careless (or feckless) and sensationalising popular media. And we are far more socially predisposed to hearing stuff that affirms us or amuses us, even if it’s been generated with that purpose solely in mind. We recoil from information that challenges us.

Very significantly, science is a disciplined commitment to change: old ideas are constantly being jettisoned as their failings are identified and new, better-proven ideas supplanted them. Science offers no guarantees of absolute certainty. Its “dead” ideas file includes phrenology; the “balance of nature” (a notion that ecosystems, left alone, will arrive at a stable state of maximum productivity); the notion of human “races”; the “steady state theory” of the Universe; the principle of a “vital force”; the argument that instinct is evidence of hereditary knowledge; the theory of a “triune brain” that was popularised by Carl Sagan in his 1977 book, The Dragons of Eden… all have been consigned to science’s dead files’ drawer.

Then there are, of course, a good number of scientific theories that are best thought of as “in formation”. So, for example, there’s no agreed, conclusive theory of gravity, or of the origin of the universe. And there are a number of competing theories and ongoing scientific debates about the origin of the Moon, the demise of the dinosaurs, the nature of time… scientific issues seldom remain closed forever.

And, in public contexts, there’s a fraught line in North America between an interest in science — real science — and a kind of nervous hysteria that’s expressed in extremes, as doctrinaire “scientism” or atheism on the one hand or, on the other, as a credulous “belief” in alien abductions and the special effects imagery of films like Star Wars, Avatar and Lord of the Rings… yet we remain so innumerate that we buy lottery tickets every week. We hold obsessive fears about infinitesimal risks, but harbour gross over-estimations of our capacities for consumption and problem-solving. Then we brandish the existence of science as an assertion of our good sense. While our self-deceptions seem life threatening in the end, we’re very lucky to get as much good science as we do, even if we understand scarcely a word of it.

Science, we must remember, is a human activity. It began as a human response to the great mystery that is the Universe. In his diary, Rene Descartes, the 15th century French soldier whose mathematical genius paved the way for the emergence of modern science, recorded that “one night when I was in a deep sleep, the Angel of Truth came to me and whispered the secret connection between geometry and algebra.” Then there is the story of the great Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, a co-founder of quantum mechanics, who was asked by a student about the superstition attached to the horseshoe Bohr had nailed to the door of his summerhouse. Bohr denied believing that the horse shoe brought him luck, then mischievously added: “but I understand that it works whether you believe it or not.”

Albert Einstein said his life work in physics was an extended meditation on a dream he’d had as a child: he was on a toboggan and the stars — it was night time — changed color as the toboggan accelerated down the hill. And, in his late 60s, he described a moment he vividly remembered from his childhood: “I experienced a miracle… as a child of four or five when my father showed me a compass.” It excited him so much that he trembled and grew cold. “There had to be something behind objects that lay deeply hidden… the development of (our) world of thought is in a certain sense a flight away from the miraculous.”

Science is a creative, exciting, powerfully enabling and imaginative realm, and it is a powerful tool. A great part of science’s inspiration is awe: an experience of awe that is not totally different from the awe that, for millennia, has been inspiring the genuine mystics of many cultures. But science has not yet unraveled the mystery. Nor, in its entirety, is it ever likely to.

For that to happen, and for it to be intelligible, the mystery would have to be no greater than the reach of the human mind, and the human mind’s shortcomings make themselves abundantly clear. Science would also have to become something it is not. Its questions are all about “how?” and, without the “why?” it can leave us in the cold.

A large part of life is sustained by a sense of “meaning” and the scientific worldview does not extend to that. Meaning is left to culture and to religion, both of which give every appearance of creative fatigue and intellectual torpor. But, coasting downhill with their tanks dry, they are rolling past the abundant replenishments that science and philosophy offer.

Material reality is science’s domain. And it is so often breathtaking: the capacity of science to resolve the paths and study the intertwined histories of subatomic particles in nanoseconds, and to track the passage of billions of far-off stars and galaxies back to the point of their cosmic creation; to discover the vulnerabilities of a bacterium and the marvellous accomplishments of a spider; to demonstrate that all life is interconnected… yet popular culture and contemporary religion give the appearance of being impassively unimpressed by all of this.

That’s too bad, because the pursuit of knowledge on its own puts us on a classically tragic path… glorious without question, but tragic because we can never know quite enough. Every path forks and every fork leads to new needs to know and, along the way, we release genies that we can never again hold captive. It is a one-way quest because its pursuit erases the reality that lay behind us. We are changed and, changed, we yearn for more change but we cannot know where we are going. There is no Minotaur to overcome at the end of this labyrinth, just the entry to another labyrinth.

The discoveries, the insights, the narratives and the visions of reality that science lays before us lead us to the very extremes of human understanding and, ultimately, that is our final boundary, our horizon: even science is bounded by the capacities of the human mind… despite the head-splitting intellectual accomplishments of mathematicians and theoreticians whose conclusions defy human capacities of visualisation and imagining.

It is precisely at this point that culture and religion should be vigorously, explosively evident: creating, celebrating, encouraging, exploring and debating, opening channels for gratitude and delight, generating ideas, insights, tears and laughter… science is delivering its contribution, but we can only make good use of “reason” — pragmatic good sense — when we weigh it against, for example, “compassion”.

It is not good enough that qualities like generosity, loving-kindness, courtesy, forgiveness, pity, mutuality of respect and hospitality should be set aside as aspects of private personal morality… as eccentric, individualised options distanced from political expression, social policy and public debate. Without them, science and reason will do us no good at all.

We need to ease up on reason — it’s not like we’re all THAT good at it — and demand more of our poets, theologians, visionaries, painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, priests, dancers, writers, liturgists and choreographers: we need fresh visions and imaginings of our own redemptive place in the universe. We need an existential present tense that fills us with excitement and awe. We need reinvigorated curiosity, a quickened conscience, a poetic of purpose, a livelier aesthetic sense… new capacities for love, trust, adventure and morality…

This is the hope-giving essence of humanity’s continued progress. This is where we must demand priority and investment and resourcing: in means of making reason virtuous and progress worthwhile.

There’s not a lot of point flying to Mars if our hearts and hopes, spirits and ideals can’t flap their wearied way to the top of nearest hill.

And (click here): The bagpiping connection (Michael Grey)