Looking down on others' needs

Most of us have pretty clear ideas about what we want at any point in time (food, drink, sex, peace and quiet etc), but are less good at planning our lives in the long term. Sometimes we get it right and marry a warm and sympathetic partner, get a job that pays enough and keeps us interested, and have holidays and recreations we enjoy. We then congratulate ourselves on our wisdom rather than our luck, and consider what should be done about people who are lonely or in unhappy relationships, are unemployed or in poorly-paid and tedious jobs, and who otherwise lead dreary and unhappy lives. For some people, this concern for the needs of others is part of their job. They include politicians and other policy-makers, but also a whole range of professions that make day-to-day decisions about people with learning difficulties, people with mental health problems, the elderly and infirm, and others judged incapable of making decisions about their own lives.

But this task raises a real problem: on what basis can you assess the needs of other people? One traditional solution is to assume that all people have the same needs and should live their lives in the same way (usually involving the performance by the entire community of the same religious or patriotic rituals). But in more individualistic societies, another way of assessing needs is required. Fortunately, psychologists and social researchers have the answer: detailed lists of human needs and ‘objective’ measures of the quality of life. The oldest of these categorisations of needs, and the one most people have heard of, is Mazlow’s Hierarchy.






Mazlow proposed that human beings seek to satisfy needs in a set progression, starting from the most basic physiological needs. Once these needs are satisfied, human beings can aim to satisfy successively higher needs, leading ultimately to self-actualisation and self-transcendence. What do these last two phrases mean? ‘Self-actualisation’ for Mazlow meant reaching one’s full potential, which he believed was marked by creativity, an internalised morality, spontaneity, and closeness to others. ‘Self-transcendence’ referred to peak experiences in which a person experiences a sense of spiritual fulfilment.

There are some obvious problems with Mazlow’s approach. People are too diverse to fulfill their needs in the orderly way he suggested. We can all think of examples of people who follow a different hierarchy: people who starve themselves for beauty or for religious belief, and people who seek out risk and danger. People also differ in what they regard as ‘self-transcendence’. People like Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary proposed it could be achieved through drugs (so for that matter did Ian Drury in his song Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll). To most of us, however, drug-taking looks more like self-destructive hedonism. I suspect that Mazlow esteemed ‘self-transcendence’ because he was a humanist psychologist. If models wrote hierarchies of needs, they would probably place beauty and poise at the top, while footballers would place agility and teamwork. In other words, setting up a supposed hierarchy of needs becomes an implicit way of ranking other people or looking down on their needs. This would not matter too much, except that hierarchies of needs get imposed on others.

The most imposed hierarchy of all is that of rationality. Many philosophers (who as a rule are rather good at reasoning) have decided that rationality is not only at the top of the hierarchy but also the true marker of humanity. People can then be ranked according to their reasoning powers, with questions raised about the extent to which people with severely-impaired reasoning are really human. This has led to the ‘thought experiment’ by the philosopher Peter Singer and others which compares the relative worth of a severely-disabled person and one of the more intelligent animals. Singer’s views are subtle and have been misrepresented, but anxiety about this kind of though experiment are understandable. They are based on the fear that somewhere in a garret is a lonely soul planning a rise to political power in which thought experiments will be implemented. Then the killings will begin again.

My life as a steam engine

Each old person is a living museum. They remember old ways of dressing, cooking and eating, old words and old ways of thinking. Some try and continue to live in the old way, but others adapt while being aware of what has changed. Technological and social change is now so fast that people in early middle age can feel outdated and hence ‘old’. They watch bewildered at things that are day-to-day and commonplace for younger people, like Facebook, text messaging, and music downloads. Even stranger are fundamental changes in patterns of thought, like the transition from being a steam engine to being a car.

When I was young, absolutely no-one reported that they were experiencing ‘stress’. The common metaphor of the time was the steam engine, which still dominated rail transport. Like a steam engine, people said they were ‘under pressure’ when life became difficult, the answer to which was ‘to let off steam’. This involved some physical activity or other form of release such as drinking and socialising. By the 1970s, however, steam engines and rail transport had largely been replaced in people’s minds by motor transport, and people came to regard themselves as being a type of car. Cars and other fast-moving machines suffer from metal fatigue and stress, and this became the dominant metaphor for the emotional state experienced when people face adversity. The conventional answer to being ‘under stress’ or ‘stressed out’ is inactivity, or possibly handing over responsibility for their condition to a therapist. There is no shortage of these, all promoting their services as helping people avoid the sad fact that life includes a fair share of loss, pain and grief.

As for me, I still think of myself as more of a steam engine than a car. When life gets difficult, I prefer to become more active. Of course, it is still helpful to unburden myself on my wife and others, even if it does make them feel stressed.

Synthetic nostalgia

Go to any country in the world, and you will find folk museums. These aim to show how people lived their daily lives in the reasonably recent past, at least within the memory of the oldest inhabitant in the land. Folk museums differ from historical reconstructions, like the Plymouth Plantation and Williamsburg in the USA, which show a much earlier time, close to the origins of their societies. In most countries, folk museums show rural life, but not in England. In the world’s first industrialised and urbanised country, there is no popular memory of rural life: instead, our folk museums contain facsimiles of coal mines, factories, canals, and terrace houses. These evoke strong feelings of nostalgia and personal identification. My wife, who was born in the Black Country, can visit the Black Country Museum and recognise the type of house her grandmother lived in when she visited her as a child. I too experience nostalgia when I visit this Museum. Yet none of my parents or grandparents, as far as I know, lived in back-to-back houses in the Black Country or elsewhere. My nostalgia is therefore synthetic. Where does it come from?

The origin lies with my parents, particularly my father. He was born in 1914 in what seems to have been a reasonably prosperous family which lived in villages and suburbs on the outskirts of Birmingham. He told me that, when he was a child, the family had a domestic servant. Yet his parents were defrauded of their business, and he came home from school one day to find the family’s furniture and other possessions on the street following eviction. He passed the exams for the local grammar school, but failed the interview. In the absence of a secondary education, he did a variety of poorly-paid jobs, including truck driver (at the age of 14!), chauffeur, workhouse clerk, and even coalman. Eventually, he became a welder on the Land Rover track in Solihull and then in Birmingham. I remember him cycling to work in the rain, and the burn marks down his chest from welding sparks. I am not sure how these experiences shaped him, but my father always had a strong sense of social justice and a commitment to trade unions and the Labour Party.

I spent the early years of my life following these footsteps and inheriting his ambitions. I was active in Labour Party politics and imagined myself as a future MP. I felt part of a working-class movement that would make society more just and treat all people with respect. So when I first visited the Black Country Museum, I identified with the past lives of the working-class, and adopted this synthetic nostalgia. I do not believe my experience is unusual: the difference between us all is the nostalgia we adopt. I have a genial colleague at work who has adopted the mannerisms of an Oxbridge scholar even though he comes from near Bolton. I know of people of marginal religious faith who have adopted the lifestyle and clothing of the committed believer to assert their membership of a lost identity.

My father, Dad, died in 2000. He spent the last 15 years of life unable to speak following an operation for cancer of the throat. As a man who enjoyed talk and argument, this must have been a great loss, but he managed his life with day-to-day stoic courage. I do not pass a day without thinking of him. From both parents, I learnt the importance of education as a means of advancing from dreary low-income work, and have spent my working life in fulfilling occupations with few money worries. I still retain my father’s political convictions, though, unlike him, I feel unrepresented. The political party that he and I worked for year after year has all but disappeared. Its successor, which calls itself the ‘New Labour Party’, has betrayed almost all the hopes of those who voted it into office. After the Iraq War began, I tore up my party card. I am no longer nostalgic for an imagined working-class past, but my anger and sense of betrayal remains strong.

Riding the Autistic Spectrum

Where are you located on the Autistic Spectrum? Do you have the full set of the ‘triad of impairments’ (impairments in social interaction and communication, and repetitive behaviour) that used to be the main markers in fixing a diagnosis of ‘Autism’, or are you just a bit obsessional? Do you just like to live in a clean house, and do you follow routines in getting up, washing, cleaning your teeth, going to work, and so on. Be careful, someone might accuse you of being ‘autistic’.

A few years ago, the diagnosis of ‘Autism’ was made infrequently, even for children with major problems. Parents would spend years seeking an explanation for their child’s unusual behaviour until they would eventually light on a psychiatrist prepared to make the diagnosis. Clinicians are now more willing to diagnose Autism, and are helped by a number of useful diagnostic measurements, but in the meantime the diagnosis has changed into a spectrum. The idea of regarding a disorder as a spectrum rather than a diagnosis is based on the observation that most of the distinctive traits and behaviours comprising the triad of impairments do not have a clear cut-off point. In other words, people do not have either impaired communication or unimpaired communication, they have degrees of impairment. This sounds sensible, but there are problems.

In the first place, people use ‘spectrum’, but still think ‘diagnosis’. Being told someone is ‘on the Autistic Spectrum’ becomes a synonym for a diagnosis of Autism, even though the person in question does not have the severe impairments traditionally associated with the diagnosis. Over time, this problem has got worse because spectrums, by definition, do not have a clear cut-off point distinguishing when you are or are not on the spectrum. In the case of Autism, this has meant that the term is now used to designate a whole collection of behaviours that not long ago would have been regarded just as being odd or eccentric. This repeats the process that took place some years ago with the diagnosis of ‘Depression’: now everyone who feels a little miserable or unhappy says they are ‘depressed’. This wouldn’t be so bad if it was just a matter of the names people give to themselves, but names have consequences. Calling yourself ‘depressed’ rather than ‘miserable’ suggests you have a medical condition which requires medication. Calling your child ‘autistic’ rather than ‘a bit obsessional’ suggests you need expert assessment and treatment. Concerned parents thereby divert scarce professional resources from those who do actually experience severe problems in their daily lives, including those who have ‘Autism’ in the original sense of the word.

Apart from this problem, there is an unresolved puzzle with the Autistic Spectrum: what is at the other end of it? My unsystematic observations indicate that there are a group of people with significant impairments who are rarely recognised as such. There is therefore no diagnostic term to describe them, but I will call them ‘Asystemic’. Whereas people with Autism find human behaviour hard to interpret but are more confident in dealing with systems and machines, people with asystemic disorder have no problem understanding other humans, indeed they revel in their human contacts. However, they are unable to comprehend machines, including those we use in our daily lives. You can recognise asystemics when you see people failing utterly to work simple machines like a photocopier, a computer, or even a lift. It is quite common to see asystemics frantically pressing the lift call button in the belief that this will make the lift realise that their need is urgent. In other words, asystemics, lacking a ‘theory of machines’, anthropomorphise the devices they come in contact with. Are asystemics disabled? Many find refuge in jobs like psychology, social work or even politics, where their understanding of human behaviour is valued and the devastation they cause by their failure to appreciate systems will be hidden for some time. Of course, from their perspective, most of the rest of us must seem ‘autistic’, and by comparison to them, we are.

A cliche rears its ugly head

And now for a review of current clichés. By definition, there is no such thing as a new cliché, but some rise and fall in popularity - a bit like a roller-coaster ride.

‘It’s been a roller-coaster ride’: this is used for any event in which a person’s emotions are engaged, the idea being that expectations, fear etc rise and fall to an extreme degree. Or perhaps, it simply means that the person has been excited a lot. The problem with this cliché is that roller-coasters always return to where they started, so in the end no progress has been achieved. In other words, it's not been a journey.

‘It’s been a journey’: this cliché is uttered by every losing contestant on a talent show. It means that they are aware of changes in their life resulting from taking part in dancing, singing, ice-skating etc. The trouble with this cliché is that most journeys (such as the daily travel to work) are tedious and involve no process of self-enhancement. In other words, they do not involve a learning curve.

‘We’re on a steep learning curve’: learning curves are now always ‘steep’, meaning that there’s a lot to learn in a short time. No-one ever says ‘We’re on a learning curve with an easy gradient’. The trouble with steep learning curves is that they reflect on the speaker: other people might think “They find the learning curve steep because they are a bit thick?” In other words, it does not help them going forward.

‘Going forward’: this is a phrase often added by managers to the end of a (or indeed any) sentence. Examples are: “We need to upscale our marketing strategy going forward”, and “I am about to go the bathroom going forward”. Management speak exists to signal membership of the management tribe, and to conceal the frightening lack of skills of many managers (usually concealed beneath an equally frightening self-confidence). See The Apprentice on television. But what do I know: I am from a sleepy village.

‘Sleepy village’: I heard this old favourite during the meeting of G20 finance ministers, who, according to BBC News reports, met in the ‘sleepy village’ of Horsham. Horsham is actually a sizeable town not far from London, and the meeting took place in a village near Horsham. Was the village ‘sleepy’? If it was like my own village, most of the inhabitants get up early to commute or work locally. As a result, there are not a lot of people around during the day, and journalists therefore assume they are all a-bed. But then, most BBC newsreaders nowadays are not interested in the news: they instead aspire to appear on Strictly Come Dancing and other talent shows where they will face their moment of truth.

Moment of truth: this dreary phrase is now used for any kind of crisis (or even a question in a quiz show). It is probably a translation of ‘el momento de la verdad’, which is used in Spain for the time at which the bullfighter plunges the sword into the bull. People who use the phrase in English should therefore consider who in their crisis is the bull and who is the bullfighter. Otherwise, they should adopt a zero-tolerance policy towards this cliché.

Zero-tolerance: this is sometimes coupled with its cliché predecessor ‘get tough’, as in ‘We should support a get-tough zero-tolerance’ policy towards...’ This phrase derives from the supposition (unsupported by evidence) that arresting people for minor infractions of the law will reduce overall crime rates. It thus part of the ‘war on crime’ which has produced more clichés than any other field of human endeavour (eg ‘crack-down’, ‘bring back the bobby on the beat’ etc). Why is this? Crime is difficult to deal with, and effective policing involves discretion when to ignore, when to caution, and when to respond. How much easier for the public and its politicians to pretend that all problems can be solved by militarising the police and treating the rest of society as its potential enemies. How much easier to use a cliché than to think for yourself.

Another road to extermination

One benefit of living into your 60s is having seen the end of the world many times. I have seen numerous films in which the world (or at least New York) is destroyed by aliens, asteroids, nuclear war, plague, and even falling into the sun. Most of these films were set in the distant future which, at the time they were made, was the 1990s or the early years of this century. Of course, I have also lived through manned interplanetary and interstellar space flight, all of which should have taken place by now. And there was that manned flight to Jupiter eight years ago which ended in a mysterious series of art-house cinematic effects.

Interest in the end of the human species has been revived recently by the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the grim realisation that almost all species that have lived on the planet have evolved out of existence. It is possible that humans could be like sharks, crocodiles etc, which have stayed more or less the same for millions of years. However, that would not please all the predictors of our demise who have made a comfortable living by spreading alarm about extermination as a result of ecodoom, nanodoom, plague (again), and (popular in the USA) the idea that God will finally decide to wipe us all out while saving only a few Godly white Americans.

Attracted by the thought of a more comfortable life, I would like to join the doomsayers by proposing a new road to extermination: death by quality assurance. Quality assurance (QA) began as an heroic enterprise. In the 1950s, Japanese manufacturers became alarmed at the poor quality and reputation of their products. They realised that customers were increasingly demanding reliable products with a higher specification. Mass-produced standardised good were no longer satisfactory: cars and other products had to be differentiated according to wishes of the customer. This all required a rethink of the production process: instead of mass production lines of workers carrying out repetitive tasks over which they had no control, workers were encouraged to redesign their work to improve quality and efficiency. This all worked: Japanese cars and other products gained a reputation for reliability and good design.

However, something terrible happened to QA once it passed from private industry to public services. Instead of being concerned with responding to customers and innovating production, the term became associated with the exact opposite: imposing centrally-directed targets, standardising procedures, removing control from the people who actually do the work, and inspection. It is time-consuming to inspect the day-to-day work of schools, hospitals and local authority services, so ‘QA’ soon became a matter of checking paperwork. This in turn provoked public services to generate standardised operating procedures, with paper reporting and IT systems to record compliance. In addition, designated QA personnel were appointed to check that all paper is produced according to central demands. Needless to say, this all demoralises staff, who respond by working to contract (ie doing the bare minimum) and covering this up by manipulating their paperwork. This in turn results in government ‘strengthening’ inspection and making the problem worse.

The result is that, over time, the number of people setting targets, devising standardised procedures, completing paperwork, and inspecting each other has risen, while the people who actually do the work (growing food, making things, running power stations, teaching children, ministering to the sick etc) are getting squeezed out. The current recession has speeded this up: manufacturing jobs are being cut, while banks need more (and probably equally ineffective) ‘supervision’. If we extrapolate this trend, we can see a time later in this century when people who know how to grow and make things will have almost completely disappeared. The vast numbers of QA staff will then sit in their darkening offices, starving to death, tapping out lists of targets and procedures on computer systems that no longer work.

Two pictures of the university

Look at the pictures on your boss’s wall - they tell you a lot about him. Are they scenes of distant landscapes, all aspiration and vision; or pictures of battles, conflict and subjugation? Most likely, they are abstract - the art of meaninglessness. Meaninglessness is the common feature of big organisations. Created to build things, teach people or provide public safety, they now exist to maintain themselves. Big organisations outlast the puny individuals who staff them or think they ‘manage’ them. This is why we often refer to organisations as buildings, such as ‘The White House’ or ‘Scotland Yard’. Inside buildings are structures, and all big organisations have structure plans, in which the human components are heaped up in hierarchies of power.

The best picture of this vision of an organisation was painted by Pieter Bruegel in 1563, and is shown below.




Bruegel’s Tower of Babel is still under construction but is shaped like an organisational hierarchy. The ruler, who is shown in the bottom left of the picture, surely intends to occupy the highest level of the completed building. There, he will be only one floor below God and the angels from whom he no doubt believes he derives his right to rule. Other individuals in the picture are insignificant and trivial compared with the vast structure they are constructing. Some are abasing themselves in front of the ruler, but not talking to him or each other. Communication of a different sort would of course have taken place had the Tower been completed. There would have been a cascade of orders, strategies and targets descending from the ruler and his advisors down the multiple levels of the structure. These would, however, have become increasingly incomprehensible to its occupants. This is because the large physical barriers made evident in the painting prevent the groups of people in the different departments and hierarchical levels of the building speaking with each other. As a result, each department develops its own language and culture, and becomes unable to co-operate in the shared task of completing the Tower. Unable to understand the cause of their failure, the former inhabitants of the Tower adopt a blame culture, which in this case means blaming God.

Despite this historical and biblical example, new Towers of Babel are being built all over the land. In fact, this has become the dominant way of organising our society. Whole areas of public life that used to be run by people with primary competence such as engineers, doctors and teachers are now run by managers sitting at the top of their Towers of Babel, issuing streams of commands, guidelines and targets. This even applies to universities, which began as self-governing communities committed to the enhancement of competence in teaching and research. No longer. My own university has recently re-organised its self into a small number of ‘colleges’, each subdivided into a few large ‘schools’. The job of academic staff has become that of responding to centrally-set targets in an atmosphere of near-secrecy. Indeed, it is easier to discern information about the Chinese secret service than the school in which I work. Attempts to facilitate staff from different departments to group into multi-disciplinary research centres, as in the Tower of Babel, are impeded by structural barriers. This kind of structure can result in staff becoming isolated and resentful: some will leave; other perform without enthusiasm.

However, there is another picture of the University, shown below.



This is by Raphael in 1511, and is usually called the ‘School of Athens’, although many of the philosophers in the picture are not Greek. This picture is an extreme contrast with the Tower of Babel. There is still a splendid building, but the emphasis here is on the space rather than the structure. Within the space, there is intense discussion within different groups of philosophers, apart from one isolated figure (thought to represent Diogenes) at the front. Several of the groups are moving and are about to exchange ideas with other nearby groups. There is no hierarchy of power evident (although in an academic community we would expect a hierarchy of esteem) and no physical impediment to communication.

This picture of the university as an extended conversation matches the traditional model of university organisation as seen in Oxford and Cambridge. Academics and students from different disciplines are mixed together in colleges. These have rituals which help bring staff together for meals and meetings. There are departments which bring together staff in the same discipline from different colleges, and research centres which combine staff from different disciplines who are working on common problems. This complex organisation presents major problems for those seeking to assert personal power (‘manage’) these universities, but their desire for a simpler structure has fortunately been defeated on several occasions. Few other universities have similar patterns of organisation, but those which are near the top and rising in most rankings of research and teaching usually also have complex (deemed ‘chaotic’) mixtures of schools, departments, research and teaching centres.

Can Towers of Babel be transformed into Schools of Athens? My university now has a new Vice Chancellor in charge. We shall see whether he takes the road of glorifying in power by peering down at us from the top of his Tower, or helping us meet and discuss how to research and teach better.

Yet another theory about Shakespeare’s sonnets

William Shakespeare is a tale of mystery and imagination. The mystery is that we know virtually nothing for certain about his personal life and his character. The imagination comes with the numerous ‘biographies’ which have filled these gaps with speculation (Shakespeare was a Catholic, he was gay, he was really Francis Bacon etc). I see no reason why I too can not join this great enterprise.

Most of the speculation about Shakespeare revolves around his 154 sonnets rather than his plays. These appear intensely personal, express the deepest emotions and have mystifying allusions to other people (most famously to the ‘fair youth’ and the ‘dark lady’). It is not surprising that biographers see the sonnets as a book of clues to be deciphered. However, they all make the same fundamental mistake: they assume Shakespeare wrote for any reason other than money. Shakespeare came from a family of small businessmen, and his father had lost money, position and status following prosecution for illegal trading. Sons from such families usually seek the security of cash in hand. There is also the fact that Shakespeare was a Warwickshire man, from a very commercially-minded part of the world (I speak as a native of that County myself). Nonetheless, Shakespeare’s attitude was probably common among those who write for a living, then and now. Another Midlander, Samuel Johnson, wrote “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

The results can be seen in Shakespeare’s life and from what we can gather about his attitude to his work. His poems were published as commercial enterprises, but he showed no interest in publishing his plays (presumably because they were the property of the stage company he wrote for). After he retired on what seems to have been the comfortable proceeds of his writing, he showed no apparent interest in writing his memoirs or writing of any kind for pleasure. So what are we to make of the sonnets? They were published in 1609, but some at least seem to have written several years earlier. My proposal is that Shakespeare wrote them on demand for wealthy subscribers. The subscribers (who in England of the time would have been aristocrats such as the Earl of Southampton) would have regarded the sonnets rather like Italian Renaissance princes regarded the paintings they commissioned - as evidence of their wealth, learning and taste. They might even have been a precursor of the Valentine’s card, being despatched to their lovers. Of course, as in almost everything he wrote, Shakespeare produced the most wonderful poetry and the sharpest observation of human nature. But then, he was a professional.

So there is no need to speculate who Shakespeare’s fair youth and dark lady were, because they were someone else’s fair youth and dark lady.