A couple of times recently, I have been taken back to work I did in the 1970s on the justification for majority voting, both in government and the legal system (jury trials).
The first writers to treat the matter seriously were Rousseau and Condorcet, the latter - among other talents - a mathematician specialising in the theory of probabilities.
Condorcet showed that majority voting is a good guide to truth:
(1) the more enlightened (knowledgeable) is each individual voter, with a minimum requirement that they be more likely to be right than wrong on any one occasion (p = greater than 0.5)
(2) provided that when voting, voters are trying to give the right answer
(3) and provided that they vote independently of each other - if one voter follows the lead of another, that simply reduces the effective number of voters
If these conditions are met, then in a majority vote the probability of the majority being right increases (and quite dramatically, heading towards p = 1 [certainty])the larger the vote gap between majority and minority.
Since I did the work in the 1970s, the TV quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? has come along and it demonstrates Condorcet's theorem perfectly. When a contestant Asks The Audience to select the right answer from four possible answers, he or she can safely assume:
(1) that the Audience is quite knowledgeable- Quiz show live audiences are likely to contain a high proportion of people good at quizzes
(2) members of the audience have no motive to give answers they believe to be untrue (they enjoy giving right answers!)
(3) they vote independently of each other using push-button consoles with little or no time to consult the person sitting next to them
Hey Presto, the audience's choice of right answer will, almost certainly, BE the right answer. If some researcher checked back over Ask the Audience choices, I think they would rarely find that the Audience got it wrong. Ask the Audience is a No Brainer if you don't know the answer yourself.
There is more serious stuff in my essay "Majoritarianism" on my website www.selectedworks.co.uk
Originally published on this site on 25 August 2011
All nine books I have published since 2016 are available online at Blackwell, several at discounted prices. Search "Trevor Pateman" at Blackwells.co.uk. My personal website is at trevorpateman.com
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Friday, 6 December 2019
Wednesday, 25 September 2019
Is there a Right not to be Conceived?
I don’t read much popular
science, but recently in a local bookshop I picked up Adam Rutherford’s A
Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived (2016) which is a very
readable introduction to modern genetics and its historical background. At one
point he illustrates the hazards of inbreeding by telling the tragic story of
Charles the Second of Spain who died in 1700 aged thirty nine, but after a lifetime
of painful illness and distressing incapacity. When people marry out of their
family then after six generations they will have sixty-two different ancestors;
after eight the number rises to two hundred and fifty-four. But because of the
marriage of cousins to cousins, uncles to nieces, and disregarding the
possibility of unsanctioned incest, Charles the Second had just thirty-two sixth-generation
ancestors and a mere eighty-two eighth generation ancestors. “This is not
desirable”, comments Rutherford at page 190, notably because the probability of
a recessive congenital disorder being activated dramatically increases.
A few pages later (page 200)
Rutherford tells us that in 2005 one United Kingdom ethnic group produced 3.4%
of all live births but 30% of all babies with recessive congenital disorders.
He then goes on to discuss genetic counselling as a way of reducing such
outcomes which in practice arise largely from repeated first cousin marriages,
which are allowed in English law. But I was shocked by his figures, which I had
never come across before, and felt that genetic counselling sounded like a
feeble response. But how to think through the problem in a dispassionate way?
I imagined using something
like John Rawls’ veil of ignorance. In his major 1971 book A Theory of
Justice, Rawls tries to show what kind of social contract individuals
would agree to if they were obliged to decide not knowing important facts about
themselves as individuals. So, for example, if behind the veil of ignorance you
did not know whether you would turn out to be male or female when the veil is
lifted, then it is most unlikely that you would agree to a public decision
making method which excluded females – or males, for that matter – from any
franchise. You would tend to favour universal suffrage which minimises your
risk of being disadvantaged and maximises the opportunity which others,
thinking along the same lines, would be willing to grant you.
In the case I am trying to
consider, those behind the veil of ignorance have not yet been conceived.
Nonetheless, these potential persons can be imagined as listeners to a genetics
lecture which informs them, among other things, that their risks of being born
severely disabled are greatly multiplied if first cousins are allowed to
conceive children, especially if done repeatedly. They are given figures and
the problem of recessive genes explained. They are told that the risk of being
born disabled is greatly reduced when the law forbids conception between such
closely related individuals. Eventually, they have to decide on the level of
risk they are willing to accept in formulating one of society’s fundamental
laws, the law which sets out with whom you may and may not conceive
children. (So fundamental are
incest laws that we rarely pause to reflect that they are, in fact, always our
foundational eugenic policies).
This kind of risk question
has been posed in other ways for other life and death issues. In a 1785 classic
work on majority voting, the title now usually translated as Essay on
the Application of Mathematics to the Theory of Decision-Making, the Marquis de Condorcet pointed out that
when the death penalty is provided as a possible punishment in any society,
there is always the possibility that an innocent person will be executed – and
that is irreversible. So he asks us to consider the question: What
probability would you accept for an outcome in which you yourself might be
executed though innocent?
From the point of view of the
unconceived, the choice seems fairly straightforward whether you think along
Rawlsian or Condorcetian lines. Though you stand to lose something from
outlawing a host of close relative reproductive relationships – you will never
get to be Philip the Second of Spain - this potential loss of benefit is
minimal compared to the risk of being born to a life of pain and discomfort
which may be very short and may, unfortunately, be quite long. You will listen
to the geneticists and you will outlaw reproductive relationships which carry a
high risk of causing you serious harm if you are born within them.
This calculus done from the
standpoint of the as yet unconceived is quite different from that deployed by
those entering genetic counselling. They are being asked the question, Do
you want to risk having a seriously disabled child? not the
question Do you want to risk being one? Those counselled are
real, existing people. They may be under family pressure to start a family
together. They may be in love. They may be gamblers. They may not believe in
science. They are unlikely to be thinking of the fact that their choices may
well yield very large health care bills, to be paid for out of other people’s
taxes. Overall, they are not well placed to answer the question in terms of the
best interests of an as yet unconceived child.
In other words, though adults
normally think otherwise, their situation in real life is not always one where
they can be assumed to be good judges for children, still less for children who
have not yet been conceived. Both veil of ignorance reasoning and Condorcetian
probabilistic reasoning suggest that our laws about who you can and can’t have
children with are lax, and that the fall-back of genetic counselling
unreasonably favours the interests of the living over those of the unconceived.
Trevor
Pateman explores other gaps and failures
in our moral thinking in essays included in his The
Best I Can Do (2016) and Silence Is
So Accurate (2017)
Wednesday, 14 August 2019
Voice Mobility
The other day, I
recorded my first podcast. Since I had not been in a recording studio for many
years, the sound engineer suggested that I make a sample recording - just a few
minutes long - and then listen to the playback before returning to my
soundproof booth to do the real thing.
I sat down with the
engineer and he pressed Play on my sample. What
do you think? he asked at the end. I
sound a bit posh is what came out, immediately. He was surprised (maybe he had
heard no poshness) and puzzled, Is that a
bad thing?
Well, yes and no. Yes,
because it may give listeners the wrong idea about me. I didn’t start life with
a posh voice; I acquired one as a result of succeeding educationally and
thereby becoming socially mobile. But I’ve always liked to think that my voice
has not been quite so mobile. I still recall once meeting a university
acquaintance from a similar background but a decade after we had both left
Oxford. I was appalled by his accent, Oxford and affected. But it probably
wasn’t affected at all; it’s likely that he had just assimilated more easily.
Now here am I, someone
who hasn’t taught a university seminar or been to a middle class dinner party
for twenty years, placing myself in front of a microphone and immediately, to
my own ear, sounding posh. Maybe the subject matter explains it: I was reading
something I had written about Milan Kundera’s theory of the novel. Maybe if I
had been talking in a less scripted way about my childhood or a pet hate I
would have sounded different.
I had other criticisms
of my first attempt. My voice was too high pitched - first night nerves; I
spoke too slowly - I was afraid of stumbling over words, an age-related hazard.
And when I listened to the final product, I thought I sounded a bit camp. The editor
of Booklaunch (Stephen Games) who had
requested the podcast picked up on the last two aspects, asking that in any
future recording I should be a bit faster (but not less dramatic).
But there is a case to be made for the poshness. The voice in
which I read my piece about the novel was appropriate to the subject matter. It
was full of words I never learnt as a child, only much later from
teachers and friends. If I had read it in my original accent, it would have
sounded false because a listener would realise that those words being spoken in
an identifiably lower class accent would never have been spoken in a lower
class home. That falseness would have been more distracting than the poshness.
In contrast, if someone who had grown up speaking with a Scottish or West
Indian accent had read my piece for me, it would be less distracting or not
distracting at all because those accents are not in themselves class-related.
In middle and upper class Scots and West Indian homes, one also talks about the
novel.
To hear the finished podcast, go to
Monday, 5 August 2019
Memory meets De tre vise men of Dalarna
Click on Image to Enlarge
Like death and taxes,
memory losses are inevitable. We may swear to ourselves or to someone else that
this moment will never be forgotten but it will, even before old age or worse
sets in. As psychologists keep trying to tell us, to little effect, our minds
constantly reorganise our memories: deleting, mislaying, editing, revising,
inventing. Our memory is a bit like Microsoft run amok, improving or weeding to
its own satisfaction yesterday’s Word docs while we sleep.
There are things I
would like to write about but when I sit down to it, I promptly discover that I
remember no more than the file name. Oh, they are splendid file names but standalone
they do not make a splendid story.
The objects which pass
through our hands perhaps have a bit more success in being there when we want
them. It’s true that we lose things, bin them, give them away, forget where we
have put them but, still, some survive and often for much longer than the
memories which we may hope to find still attached - but don’t.
Today I come across
this charming card which has managed to accompany me through many house moves
since it was purchased in 1964 - fifty five years ago! The summer of that year - I had just turned seventeen - I organised for myself a holiday job in Sweden, working in the Hotel
Siljansborg situated beside Lake Siljan in the province of Dalarna.
Everyone is familiar
with one Dalarna thing: those simple, chunky carved wooden horses painted in
bright colours (traditionally red) with simple floral decorations in green,
white, blue and yellow - the last two the colours of Sweden’s flag. When I came
to the end of my time at the Hotel Siljansborg, I was given one as a leaving
present and I still have it.
The carved horses were
a portable part of a larger tradition of visual folk art, centred in Dalarna,
which flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and which produced
painted furniture and wall decorations in which the floral motifs ( the
technical name is Kurbits and I was
able to google it because I still remembered the word) are always present.
My card has pin holes
in the top corners so at one time I must have displayed it. A horizontal banner
across the top spells out what the original depicts: De Tre wise man matthei 21 Cap Malat ar 1841 an A L S ( The Three Wise Men Matthew chap[ter] 21 Painted [in the] year 1841 by A L S ).
Aren’t they splendid?
Not a whiff of the Middle East. No donkeys or camels to bring them to the stable,
just fine Dalarna horses. The three kneeling figures who could have been modelled on the
local priest or lawyer - maybe they were; a rather patrician Joseph and a matronly
Mary, her black leather shoes peeking out from under her full skirts. It looks as if having babies is something she takes in her stride.
We are very
familiar with the idea that human beings fashion God in their own image; in
Dalarna, they imagined the Nativity as something which happened not so long ago and just
down the road. But I suspect that their religious beliefs were at least as
robust as those of people who were brought up on donkeys, flowing robes, and
sandals. But either way, the Dalarna folk artists were thinking rather like those who re-thought Shakespeare as West Side Story.
On the back of the card, the work
is titled De tre vise men
(modernising the spelling) and given as originating from the small town of
Rättvik which provided the postal address for my hotel. Then it gives the
current location of the work as the Zornmuseet.
That opens a file: one day, during hours off work, I walked to the Anders Zorn
museum in Mora. It googles and I am immediately offered a portrait of the
artist (1860-1920) which I recognise as one of which I took away a postcard. But
though I can google as much of his work as I want, I can’t see the folk art
which must also have been in the museum.
I google a bit more. It is out of the question
that I walked. Mora is 37.8 kilometers from Rättvik!
The World Memory finds
and opens its files for me in half a second and, once again, forces me to revise my own
memory.
*
This essay is now published in Trevor Pateman, Between Remembering and Forgetting (degree zero 2019). Online stockists include Amazon and Waterstones but individual orders are also taken directly at patemantrevor@gmail.com and will be charged at cover price post free in the UK at £15 and 20€ when payment is made from SEPA countries direct to a German bank account. Currently no US distribution available.
Sunday, 28 July 2019
Do The Dead Have Any Rights?
Whatever rights the
dead may have, they are secured for them by the living. A man writes a will
disinheriting his children; they go to court to have the will set aside and a
living judge decides the matter. Another man writes a will endowing a fund out
of which lawyers can be paid to defend his reputation against all-comers. But
in a jurisdiction where English law prevails, that would be pointless: there is
no offence of libelling the dead. Only the living can be libelled. In France, the dead are protected too.
The living grant rights
to the dead, no doubt guided very much by what rights they themselves would
like to be accorded when they die. Rights for the dead are about anticipation,
not retrospection. So in most cultures, maybe all, there are protocols for
handling a dead body and disposing of it. Failure to observe those protocols is
both shocking and probably a sign of some breakdown of the social order. If the
protocols dictate at least a shroud and an individual grave, then something has
gone very wrong if naked bodies are tipped into common graves, as often they
are in times of plague and war.
But does it make sense to say that the rights
of the dead have been violated in such circumstances? After all, they know
nothing of what is going on. And we can understand and criticise what is
happening without invoking the language of rights. So, for example, we could
say that if we don’t show respect towards the dead, we will soon cease to show
respect to the living, to each other. And that is not going to be good news.
This argument is a cautionary, prudential one rather than a rights-based one.
It is also the case
that the language of rights seems inappropriate where there is constant flux in
the protocols which set out the rights of the dead. It is only very recently in
my culture that burning bodies has been accepted as an alternative to burying
them; even more recently that it has been thought acceptable to harvest vital
organs - with or without explicit consent -
from those who may have died only minutes beforehand. It doesn’t seem
that “rights” come into it. It looks more like “needs must”.
Nonetheless, we do
accord rights to the dead which are quite extensive and sometimes not always
explicitly reflected upon. Most of these rights relate to property and
reputation. Some deserve to be challenged.
An elderly widow with
no children and a great deal of inherited wealth writes a will leaving the
whole lot to a donkey sanctuary. She has every right to do so. There is no
Public Advocate enabled to go before a judge and argue that the will should be
set aside. There is no one who can stand up to say: Your Honour, the reality is
that we have far too many donkey sanctuaries; donkeys are being bred to
populate them; the sanctuaries are not much more than a lucrative scam for
those who promote them. I urge you to divert the late widow’s wealth to the
oncology department of her local hospital where, at public expense, she
received extensive treatment for several years. It would be right for her
estate to be put back into the community from which she took so much. Ditch the
fake donkeys, Your Honour!
It would require a
revolution in our thinking to find that argument compelling. I would welcome
such a revolution, but as things stand, the imagined Public Advocate’s argument
is nothing more than an open threat to property rights which - in our minds -
are inextricably linked to the idea that those are things which can be passed
on. Quite cursory analysis would show that there is really not much of a link
between the idea of a property right and the idea of an indefinitely and
indefeasibly transmissible property right. A practical demonstration of the
distinction between property right and transfer right was once provided in
traditional gypsy cultures where both the caravan and its contents were burnt
on the death of its owner. But woe betide anyone who had thought to steal from
the caravan during the lifetime of its occupant.
So much for property.
What about reputation? Here there is a cluster of protocols which create or
enshrine rights to externalised memory, to memorials. Someone dies, they are
buried, and their grave marked with a tombstone giving name, dates, some
personal details and maybe a Commendation, “A Kind Father to all His Children”;
“She Loved the Donkeys”. All this involves several financial transactions, none
of which guarantee that tombstone in perpetuity. In practice, grave furniture
is quickly neglected by those who have paid for it; the weather takes its toll
on soft stone; the graveyard fills up - and eventually everything is bulldozed
to make way for new graves or simply public green space. The dead are
forgotten. No one much minds because the protocol has allowed memory to be
gradually, not abruptly, extinguished. Those who mourn have been given their
time.
In contrast, when a
memorial - a monument - to a dead person is erected in public space, whether at
government expense or funded by public subscription, it seems to be some kind
of assumption that they thereby acquire a right to stand or sit there, in stone
or bronze, in perpetuity. There is no protocol for taking these things down, no
equivalent to the protocol which allows graveyards to be cleared out. In the
context of lively conflict over statues of controversial figures, it would
actually be helpful to develop some kind of intellectual framework which would
aid us in deciding when a statue’s lease on public space has run out.
One
criterion might be whether we still remember the name and history of a person
memorialised, regardless of whether the memory is fond or hostile. Yes, for
most of us, it’s still Nelson on top of the column in Trafalgar Square. But who
are those characters who occupy the surrounding plinths? If you can’t so much
as name them, why would you want them to remain there, in perpetuity? It’s not
as if the hack work of monumental sculpture ever has any artistic interest and
only rarely can it claim architectural merit. Without a protocol for removing
the upright monumental dead, our urban public spaces are simply doomed to become
more and more cluttered by forlorn figures, very rapidly forgotten by us and
attracting the interest only of dogs - the reason for plinths in part to
protect trouser legs - and pigeons.
Tuesday, 23 July 2019
The Bank Note Problem
In Ruritania, there are four denominations of banknotes.
The Ruritanian Royal Bank issues them in unequal quantities, according to
perceived need, and on a rotating basis changes the designs to make forgery
more difficult and less remunerative. One design is changed every three years,
and once changed the old notes for that denomination cease to be valid. So each
design has a life of twelve years.
In the past, the designs comprised abstract and complicated
backgrounds (so-called guilloché or burelage )
combined with unique fonts in mostly calligraphic styles, all designed to
defeat attempts at forgery. But at the urging of a modernising Ruritanian
government, some decades ago now, the bank changed its policy and all new
designs incorporate representations of dead people who are remembered for their
achievements. The modernising government wanted to see different kinds of
people and different kinds of achievement represented, but did not bind the
bank to any particular formula.
That posed the bank a problem. How many different kinds of
people are there? How many kinds of achievement? Without answers to those prior
questions it was very hard to know how to proceed. The Bank did not at first
identify this problem and started out without any clear answers, rather hoping
that obvious cases would present themselves, as indeed they did. Mr Shakespeare, Ruritania’s most famous and
acclaimed dead playwright, had his image uncontroversially placed on a twenty
pounds sterling banknote in 1970. It was true but irrelevant that there have
always been doubts about whether images of Mr Shakespeare look at all like the
man they purport to represent and, indeed, whether Mr Shakespeare wrote his
Works. Never mind, Ruritanian history has always been strong on fiction.
The lack of clear principles of choice immediately
encouraged subjects of Ruritania to come forward with humble petitions
addressed to the Governor of the Bank proposing that such and such a person, or
group of persons, or achievement, or group of achievements, should be
represented on the next banknote scheduled for replacement. In the common
parlance of the United States, these humble petitions - however worded in terms
of justice, fairness and representation not to mention Greatness - were
necessarily instances of log rolling.
Anyway, the Bank had a new problem. Should it now respond
to the biggest logs rolled its way or should it seek to establish some
principles of fair representation? The Governor decided that Principles should
be sought. A committee was formed to find them.
After the usual lengthy deliberations, the committee
proposed that two categories of person should be recognised (Male and Female)
and four categories of achievement (Arts, Science, Politics, War). The
committee pointed out that these numbers had been arrived at having regard to
the reality of four bank note combinations. All eight possible combinations of
the categories (which they summarised as MA, MS, MP, MW; FA, FS, FP, FW) could
be represented on four notes in just two complete banknote cycles. There would
be no awkward remainders to deal with.
As for the actual personages to be represented, the
committee concluded that (a) that they all be dead - there was no disagreement
about that - and (b) that it was up to the Governor to decide between several
possible selection procedures enumerated as follows: a committee of experts and / or the Great & the Good to
pick the person to be featured in any of the eight categories; a simple lottery the tickets for which would bear names
selected by some method or other; a weighted lottery
with the number of tickets for each name equal to the number of signatures on
humble petitions submitted in favour of that name - this was seen as a
concession to log rolling;
The committee also felt that a further accommodation of the
public was possible:
· A list of names, carefully selected by the Bank’s own
committee, could be submitted to public vote according to one of the recognised
procedures (first past the post, and so on). This proposal neatly
incorporated a guarantee against any possibility of an overwhelming public vote
in favour of Banky McBankface. The name would simply not appear among the
choices submitted for popular choice.
The committee did identify one unresolved problem. Since
banknotes of the four denominations are issued in unequal quantities, it might
be thought that the representational value of the image on them should be
weighted according to the number of banknotes on which that image would appear.
The committee noted that this would remove an element of simplicity from its
proposals and would require assistance from someone able to do difficult sums.
The committee then took cover.
When it learned of the committee’s recommendations, the
government of Ruritania was appalled. There were far too few categories of
person and it was not sure that “War” was any longer a category of achievement.
What about “Entertainment” or “Sport” - perhaps these could be combined into
“Culture”? If “War” was then added to “Politics”, that would
preserve the four categories of achievement. A neat counter-proposal.
But as for categories of person, the government felt it had
a duty of special care for the Ruritanian Minorities of which thirty nine were
currently recognised. How did the Bank propose to ensure that those minorities
featured appropriately on the four denominations with only its Male and Female
categories available?
The Bank replied humbly that it thought that it could cope
with the increased complexity demanded by the government but would need a few
extra mathematicians, a new computer, and an answer from the government to two
remaining questions: Are the thirty nine minorities to be represented equally
within the Person categories or in weighted form according to the number of
persons identified as being members of those minorities? And if the latter,
should the number be those actually living or the number who have ever lived
within the borders of Ruritania? The second question was given its point by the
twin facts that all Persons had to be dead in order to qualify and that today’s
Ruritanian Minorities were not distributed in the same proportions or same
aggregate numbers as the Minorities of yesteryear.
The government appointed a small committee of
mathematicians to come up with its reply to these two supplementary questions
and it is hoped that a Nobel Prize (possibly for Mathematics but preferably for
Peace) will result.
Saturday, 20 July 2019
Boys from Slade Green are Under-represented in Hollywood films
I was born in
Dartford’s West Hill hospital, which once provided maternity facilities for
those who lived in Slade Green. Slade Green was an area sandwiched between
Erith (which was a Borough) and Crayford (which was an Urban District), both
within the county of Kent. But by the time I was born, this part of
north-west Kent was really part of south-east London and is now legally so -
Slade Green is within the Northend ward of the London Borough of Bexley. In
other words, I lived in a place which had no real identity or boundaries.
I lived in Slade
Green from birth until the age of eight when we moved to Dartford. So you might
say that I passed half of my boyhood there, not quite a tenth of my
life. I could claim to be a boy from Slade Green which I think of as
some kind of outgrowth of Erith rather than of Crayford. The postal
address was “Slade Green, Erith, Kent” - I used it frequently to head Thank You letters to aunts and uncles - and
the nearest town for shopping was Erith.
Google can’t find
many people who claim to be or have been from Slade Green; Jade Anouka (1990 -
) was born there and that’s the only notable name I can find. For Erith as a
whole, there are well-known people who were born there including the humanist
and socialist comedian and writer Linda Smith (1958-2006) who joked that Erith isn't twinned with anywhere but it does have a suicide
pact with Dagenham - the giant red neon Ford sign prominent on the opposite bank
of the Thames. And another one:
Erith is in Kent - the "Garden of England" - I can only assume Erith is the outside toilet because it is a shit house.[1]
A 2014 post on Reddit in answer to a question from
someone thinking to move to my home territory has this to say:
“Erith is crime central, and Slade Green
has absolutely NOTHING going for it.”
That’s not untypical of what I can find
and I doubt it’s untrue. Now
to the point.
Would it make sense to say in some selected context that people from Slade Green are underepresented in that context? If you enlarged it a bit, would Erith or Crayford or even north-west Kent make sense as things which could be underepresented? I suspect not, because there are thousands of Slade Greens in the United Kingdom, thousands of places with nothing going for them and no special claim to be represented somewhere else. If someone from Slade Green became a Hollywood film actor ( Jade Anouka might) the fortuitous fact of coming from Slade Green would be of no relevance. If Jade Anouka got a part, no one would be asking the question, Are Slade Green actors under-represented (or over-represented) in Hollywood movies?
Would it make sense to say in some selected context that people from Slade Green are underepresented in that context? If you enlarged it a bit, would Erith or Crayford or even north-west Kent make sense as things which could be underepresented? I suspect not, because there are thousands of Slade Greens in the United Kingdom, thousands of places with nothing going for them and no special claim to be represented somewhere else. If someone from Slade Green became a Hollywood film actor ( Jade Anouka might) the fortuitous fact of coming from Slade Green would be of no relevance. If Jade Anouka got a part, no one would be asking the question, Are Slade Green actors under-represented (or over-represented) in Hollywood movies?
And yet if we generalise a bit more the
question no longer looks absurd. I borrow a sociological category from Trump,
D. 2018 and put it this way, Are actors from shithole places
under-represented (or over-represented) in Hollywood films? Cleaned up
to meet Sunday School sensibilities the question becomes, Are actors
from under-privileged backgrounds …?
I don’t know the answer to that question
for Hollywood, but do know that it is reckoned to make sense in many other
contexts and that the answer is that those from under-privileged / deprived /
poor backgrounds are often under-represented. Bankers, lawyers, politicians,
museum directors …. well, they don’t come from Slade Green-like places.
*
My country has a state broadcaster which
now has a website where every day there are feelgood stories of the form “
So-and-so becomes first X in Y” or (less satisfactorily) “first openly X in Y”
and “first X in Y since …” . These stories often irritate me because so many
assumptions are quietly smuggled in with the story. Why is it a good thing that
the Church of England now has its first black female bishop?
The Church of England is, from where I
stand, a small but extremely wealthy (the bishops all live in what are called Palaces)
religious organisation which attends to the needs of the highest in the land
for infant baptisms (a reprehensible practice), weddings and funerals. And
that’s about it. It has little to commend it. What is a black woman doing
selling her soul to this organisation, I wonder? Why isn’t she - let’s say - a
Quaker? (The BBC has not heard of Quakers; its website likes to keep things
simple. There are Roman Catholics - the BBC is very much in their favour - there
is the Church of England - the BBC doffs its cap - and nowadays there are Muslims - excellent chaps. But that’s it.)
The BBC would not feature a piece
claiming “First woman to head the Institute for Torturing Political Prisoners”
because it gets the point that torturing people is not very nice. The Church of
England is not very nice, but it doesn’t get that.
You can experiment with variants: Cardinals
elect first gay / first openly gay/ first…. since 1555 Pope.[2]
The context in
which I am writing this is one in which there is endless chatter about
representation, under-representation, diversity and so on but in which there
seems to be very little thought about the categories X and Y which matter and
what in the end counts as a satisfactory result.
Even at the
apparently simple level of male:female representation, there has to be some
thinking about what counts as “gender balance” though I prefer “sex balance”
since gender is a complicating factor. Fifty:Fifty looks like the right answer.
But for a large organisation which has to deal with changes in the available
labour force, the legacy of past training practices and so on, fifty: fifty is
not a reasonable target. It would force employers to take on less qualified
candidates just to keep the balance at a point in time. What might be a
reasonable expectation and aim would be to keep variation in, say, the 45 - 55 range,
either way, over a period of time. Affirmative action is then required if the
actual figures gravitate to the outer limits of the range but otherwise
everyone can just get on with their regular work.
Even then, there
are difficult cases to consider. I offer just three: midwives, coal miners,
primary school teachers.
Tuesday, 16 July 2019
Book Learning
How many books have you
read? I count in books per week rather than day or month and I reckon that my
average must be about two a week and that average probably holds up over sixty
years now.
Reckon a year at 50 weeks (easier math), then that’s three thousand
weeks and so, six thousand books. I don’t count books which I skim or abandon
early on and, in any case, I tend to be a dutiful reader who once started keeps
going to the often bitter end.
Anyway, six thousand. A
very small number. The best-selling among my own books in the Amazon ranking is currently in
position 560 353. Lot of books out there, most of them desperately seeking readers.
Six thousand. If you
locked me in a room for a week, instructed to write out the authors and titles,
I would struggle. How many could I actually recall even at the entry level of
author plus title? Maybe I could make a start with the books read in other
languages which I am sure would number no more than a few hundred, nearly all
in French. I have (for example) only ever read two books in Spanish, both by
Eugenio Coseriu and in historical linguistics - easy enough to understand since
all the technical vocabulary could be guessed via the very similar French.
Those six thousand
books have left me in possession of a great deal of book learning, though they have
not made me learned because I have
never been much concerned to achieve “chapter and verse” recall. I have never
read biblically, and can’t quote you Shakespeare or Marx or Virginia Woolf, let
alone the Bible. I don’t think of books as monuments onto which memorable
inscriptions have been carved, but rather as things which develop or express
ideas and feelings which can be put to use without it being necessary to recall the exact
words used. Sometimes the exact words matter, but not often. I’m an active reader, but
not a faithful one.
All this book learning
goes towards making me an educated person, and all this book learning dies with
me, if not before - I think it is already slipping away. It can only exercise
its effects in my conversation, in what I write, in how I conduct my life. And
then it ceases to exist at all.
Will the young people in the street now permanently attached to smartphones eventually turn to books and catch up with my kind of score, a score which must surely be common among older people?
Will the young people in the street now permanently attached to smartphones eventually turn to books and catch up with my kind of score, a score which must surely be common among older people?
Friday, 12 July 2019
A Niqab and a Panama hat
This week I was in Germany for a couple of days, in a city
very familiar to me. I was doing some works, describing a collection for an
auction house, but in my lunch breaks and evenings, I did my usual things.
I like to stroll, taking in the people. In a pedestrianised shopping
area, a woman appeared out of the crowd coming towards me: tall, slender
and dressed in an immaculately well-cut and seemingly brand new niqab, the first
I had seen on this visit. When I see a niqab, my habit is to look at the male
who will be walking alongside and, yes, there he was: considerably shorter,
hunched a bit over his smartphone, dressed according to the regulations: a bit
of stubble, tee-shirt, jeans, and trainers. My rapid visual profiling didn’t
manage to take in the logo on the trainers so I don’t know what brand he
favoured.
It’s very decent of Prophet to permit young men to dress in
ways which are practical for life in any European city. It means they can run
after a bus, vault a barrier to cross a road. They can pick up children with
ease, put them on their shoulders and, perhaps most importantly, kick a ball
around.
I just wish the Prophet had been a bit more permissive about
female dress. The niqab can look very stylish; so too can high heels. But both
are impractical. I guess the niqab can be very hot inside on a climate warming
summer day. More importantly, it is isolating. I will come to that.
I glance back at the woman. She is staring at me,
intensely, her eyes a perfect study in black and white, because those eyes are
beautifully picked out with expertly applied kohl.
But I can’t decode the look as angry or friendly or just
inquisitive - there is no mouth gesture to help out. I’m stumped to understand
why I should be worth a very frank stare. The stare is made possible, I
guess, by the fact that I’m wearing dark glasses (cataracts) and so, from her
point of view, there is no eye contact.
Then, as we pass each other, a penny drops and I laugh. I’m
old and male and pale and I’m wearing a Panama hat, a proper one with a broad
black band. Hitherto, I have understood the Panama as standard issue for
bald-headed elderly gentlemen on sunny days. But I realise that on my stroll
today I haven’t actually seen another Panama - I would notice. Maybe a Panama
is not a German thing, even for elderly bald heads. Perhaps it’s like this: she
is my first niqab of the day and I am her first Panama. I think it's the hat
which caused the stare.
People do sometimes call out to me when I’m wearing a hat.
Later, in the central park, a young woman on a bench making out with a
boyfriend called after me Bonjour though I was too slow
to turn, lift my hat, and reply - as I should have done - Bonjour,
Mam’selle. Anyway, it shows that there’s at least one other person in this city who reckons a Panama a notable and, indeed, a French thing.
That brings me to me to the point I skipped over. We are
often led to believe that in modern urban environments, people walk around as
if no one else exists, isolated monads who don’t interact. That is false. A lot
goes on, an awful lot. I give one example relevant to what I want to say.
If in the street I see a child behaving in a way which is
charming or delightful or just funny, I will almost certainly smile at
whichever person is doing the parenting. I think that is the norm rather than
an eccentricity. It is also the case that the parent will acknowledge the
compliment about the child which the smile implies - they will smile back. Some
who are more bold will end up exchanging a few words, not quite “passing the
time of day” but about things specific to the child, like the child’s age or
name. If I smile at a parent who happens to be wearing a hijab, as I do, she
will also smile back.
When women wearing the hijab began to appear at shop tills
in London and then where I live, I acted in a correct but very restrained
manner, as if attending a vicarage tea party. I didn’t engage because I
imagined that it might be unwelcome. Now I will pass the time of day, sometimes
crack a joke, encouraged by the fact that there is usually a smile on offer and
even a joke. I conclude that it’s quite a good idea for old white males in panama hats to behave as if
they might be ordinary human beings.
The woman in the niqab is pretty much excluded from this
small change of everyday life. It really makes a very big difference that you
can’t see a face and from the face gauge whether a compliment or a joke would
be appreciated or has gone down well. Leave aside that the man in tee-shirt,
jeans and trainers might not approve. Leave aside that she is not going to
initiate any exchange anyway. The face covering inhibits any exchange. I
suppose that is its purpose.
The exclusion is not total: if there are women wearing
hijab on the streets, they do engage with women wearing the niqab and vice
versa. (I’ve been watching this on my strolls elsewhere). Perhaps the best hope
for the future is that the women who wear headscarves enable the women fully
covered to change their style, at least for everyday street life. Maybe the
niqab would then become something reserved for special days, a reminder of the
past, like the traditional dress that jeans and trainers males put on for
formal occasions. It would cease to be a burdensome obligation of everyday
life.
In the same way, though I can't understand why anyone would want to wear impractical high heels for shopping or work - and most certainly should not be obliged to do so - I can understand why someone might want to wear them for special occasions, even if they often end up being kicked off and abandoned.
In that same lunch break stroll, a group of teenagers wearing hijab passed me. One has combined her hijab with bright yellow stiletto heels. It would seem that Germany is not equipped with the necessary police to promote virtue and suppress vice.
Wednesday, 12 June 2019
Girl or Young Woman With a Rose: A Nineteenth Century Painting from Finland
Click on Image to Magnify
I bought the painting
recently, bidding online in a Finnish auction on the basis of how it looked on
screen. Now it hangs to the side of the desk where I am typing this. When
shipping costs were added, it still cost me under two hundred euros. Those who
viewed it in the actual sale room would have seen that it is damaged - the line
which runs horizontally across the painting starting from the girl’s elbow
marks a repair.
On the back, a very
recent label reads “Luultavasti Aino Aalto” - “Probably Aino Aalto”. That
proves to be unhelpful. The most famous “Aino Aalto” was a Finnish architect
and designer, born 1894, died 1949. Google not only knows all about her work
and illustrates it profusely; it also reckons there is no other Aino Aalto
worth knowing about. All I get from Google is the new knowledge that Aino is a
first name for a female.
The label is ambiguous.
It most likely assigns a probable painter but could assign a name to the
sitter. From the style of the painting, the fairly crude wooden stretcher, the
style of the gilt frame, the dress and hair of the sitter - well, I think this
painting dates from before the advent of portrait photography, from the first
half of the nineteenth century.
I guess the age of the sitter at between
thirteen and nineteen. She’s not displaying a ring but then it’s
only her right hand that you can see. The rose is probably a conventional
symbol - the bloom of youth, romance - but one should remember that portrait
painters (and subsequently photographers) got sitters to hold things simply to
stop them fidgeting with their hands. The painter has solved the problem of the
other hand by simply chopping it off.
Aino is a Finnish name.
There were women painters in nineteenth century Finland, so there is
no obstacle to the painter being the Aino and a label on a painting for auction
is more likely to attempt to name the painter than the sitter.
In the nineteenth
century, someone who was Swedish-speaking was more likely to have been able to
afford a portrait in oils. That I infer from my general knowledge, not from
Google, though that probabilistic knowledge certainly does not exclude that the
sitter was Finnish-speaking. Likewise,
from general knowledge and from the sitter’s hair, dress and facial features, I
infer that this is not a girl from the Russian governing population - the Grand
Duchy of Finland passed from Swedish to Russian control in 1809. Her religion
will be Protestant.
To my eye, the portrait
is not in any way cute. Though she has been made to hold a rose, the girl in
the portrait looks seriously at the painter, with eyes which are unwavering. If
she is nearer to thirteen than nineteen, she may just be uncertain about
herself. Nearer to nineteen, then she is a determined young woman.
I can think of no way
of finding her name, her date of birth, details of her life, the date of her
death. It’s possible that no one anywhere now knows those details, or how to
retrieve them. It’s also possible that she figures in some family genealogy,
but that the link between the person in the genealogy and the person in the
portrait has been lost. After all, this nice portrait ended up in a public
auction.
I do think it’s a portrait, not a genre painting for which some
temporarily anonymous model has been paid to sit. The idea of the “genre”
painting is very convenient for art museums; it saves them from a great deal of
homework, and in this case would result in the title, Girl With A Rose or Young Woman With A Rose, depending on how you resolve her age.
And without a name for her, that generic title
cannot be improved.
A revised version of this essay appears in my book Between Remembering and Forgetting (degree zero 2020; hardback only £15) and the painting is reproduced on the cover.
Thursday, 6 June 2019
Motorway Service Stations: A Model for Universities?
This post from 6 January 2013 had a large number of readers; I'm not sure why. Maybe visitors who were looking for information on Brighton's club scene.
This week, The Economist has a very good piece about UK motorway service stations (5th January 2013, "Serviceable", page 21). If you want to open one, government regulations require you to keep it open 24/7/365 (and 366 in Leap Years). This seems like commonsense: people are on the move 24/7/365 and if they are on a motorway journey, they will need to stop for petrol, food, drink and the loo - and the loos (says the government) must also be open 24/7/365 and free of charge.
Of course, motorway service station workers don't work 24/7/365. Staff work rotas.
The other day, someone reminded me of a truth I used to know very well: at weekends, my local university campuses (there are two: Brighton, Sussex) are deserted and most of their services closed down. This ought to strike us as strange. Reading, writing, thinking, experimenting are 24/7/365 things. People's brains are on the move all the time. And since universities are supposed to be connected with - and supportive of - brains on the move you would expect this to be reflected in their opening hours. Universities are places where the lights should burn long into the night and all through the weekend.
Instead, the lights are burning in Brighton & Hove, the large town (or small city) which neighbours the university campuses. The pubs, the clubs, the cafes, the restaurants, the shops - some are open almost 24/7/365 but especially at weekends when Brighton fills up with students and other visitors arriving (often in tens of thousands) to sample its weekend delights (basically music, alcohol, drugs and maybe some sex though probably the alcohol and drugs are incompatible with much of that).
The only people missing from the Brighton late night and weekend scene are the majority of University staff, teachers and administrators who are busy doing Middling England kind of things: decorating the house, going for walks, giving dinner parties.
Innocent enough but the overall effect is to routinise intellectual life into some nine to five Monday to Friday office schedule.
Students - whatever they may think they are doing - are already living the kind of On / Off life their Middling England parents live - there's just more Off to it.
Academics have settled for attending their committees and meeting their Research Output quotas rather than pursuing the life of the mind which was once (perhaps) the vocation associated with their salary.
The life of the mind can of course be a troubling thing. Even what's left of my mind can have me sitting here banging away at the keyboard from 8 34 to 9 05 on a Sunday morning - almost a definition of Off time. But then I was always a bit defiant.
But I have learnt to compromise; the computer will go to Off and I will take a walk along the seafront.
Wednesday, 5 June 2019
Walking in Port Meadow, Oxford, May 2019

Oxford is one of those places which has big open green
spaces very close to the city centre. On a recent visit and taking advantage of
a sunny morning, I started my day with a walk into Port Meadow, an extensive
area of low-lying flood plain which has been common land for centuries. But
such walks always cause me a bit of anxiety. I make them without any props and
often find myself the only person out and about who hasn’t got the kind of
excuse which a prop indicates; I am just a solitary walker, without even the
cover which coupledom provides.
The dog-dependent are out at this time of day, their
presence in the meadow justified by the dog. A notice at the entrance to the
meadow tells me that to reduce the risk of dog faeces spreading parasitic
infections to animals grazing in the meadow, those faeces must be gathered up
and disposed of into a bin. In addition, a single person may not bring more
than four dogs into the meadow, perhaps to discourage those who depend on dog
walking for their livelihood and for whom the meadow would be a convenient,
unpoliced shittery. A more prominent notice tells me that one of the horses
which graze in the meadow has recently died in a savage dog attack and the
Meadow custodians would like to know whose dog.
This makes me a bit anxious and I guess does the same for
the joggers and runners who are out, mostly young women dressed in clothes
which indicate seriousness of purpose and justify their presence in the open
air on a sunny morning: I am here because I am keeping fit, though I rather
anxiously hope that my Lycra legs do not attract the attention of a savage dog.
Then there are cyclists, most heading south towards the
city centre and most, I guess, with the practical aim of getting to work or
class. They look rather intense, as if they might be late for an important
date. But the bicycle is the prop which legitimates their rapidly passing
presence.
A few of the joggers and the cyclists greet me but, of
course, there is no reason for them to stop and pass a time of day in which I
would tell them that I have just been watching a pair of young
goldfinches, feeding on dandelion clocks.
There was a time when, in response to anxieties about
walking alone, I used to carry a stick - an indication that I was a serious
walker, up there with the jogger or
cyclist. But I could never bring myself to don the expensive garments which
signify someone as a Rambler, garments made all the more signifying
by their binary contrast with the Naked version. Eventually,
and despite the fact that I was getting older, I gave up the stick and now
present myself, albeit uncomfortably, as that species of solitary walker who
pays some attention to what can be seen and what can be heard around them, but
with no real excuse for being there in a meadow on a sunny morning.
*
Later, I walked down to the city centre, a world crowded
with young people and, of course, seething with props: smartphones with their
own human beings permanently attached. Where are the flâneurs and
the flâneuses, I asked myself? Surely there must be other people
nearby, strolling and trying to pay attention to the viewscape and the
soundscape. But I don’t see many.
As for the smartphones, their human dependents would be so
full of the beauty of youth if they would but detach themselves, look up, look
around, pay attention, stroll or strut their stuff. This, after all, is Oxford and the young
people I see clearly have the benefit of good diet, good dentistry, and
effortless taste in the way they dress. They are quite unlike the young people
I see each day in the decayed south coast resort where I live. But, fortunate
or not, both rich and poor all now have in common that they are not looking at
the world around them, or listening to it. Especially, it seems, when crossing
a road.
But then I said to myself, In your day surely you must have
had your own props; and then I thought, yes, the smartphone has replaced the
cigarette. Back then, it was a cigarette which solved the problem of what to do
with your hands, or at least, one hand. The cigarette - mine were always Turkish
- gave you an excuse for your existence and a prop to navigate social life. If
not a cigarette, then maybe a handbag or even just a rolled up newspaper - the latter a common sight in the past.
Human beings are natural fidgets; so many of our problems stem
from our inability to sit, stand or walk quietly, without a prop to soothe. In
the days of portraits in oils and into the early days of photography it was a
big problem, partly solved by equipping the sitter with a fan, a flower, a
book, a riding crop.
*
I walk back to my guest house. A woman approaches, perhaps
a grandmother, pushing a buggy and addressing soothing words to its occupant.
She passes and I half turn to look at the baby: big-eyed, big-eyelashed, and
wide-open mouthed; an old-fashioned pink plastic doll.
*
This piece is now included in my little book Sample Essays, available at
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/search/author/Trevor%20Pateman
Thursday, 23 May 2019
Going to the Dogs: Alexander McQueen's Will meets Tullett Prebon
This Blog post from 26 July 2011 had hundreds of visitors presumably because it includes
the name “Alexander McQueen”; the real story is what follows on from that and it is still pertinent in 2019 where UK government policy (or lack of one) is making it even harder to
pay down debt:
.
All the papers report
that Alexander McQueen left his money to the dogs: £100 000 to Battersea Cats'
and Dogs' Home, £100 000 to the Blue Cross sick animal centre, and £50 000 in
trust for the lifetime care of his own pet dogs.
In a Will
worth £16 million, it's not a lot, just rather sad. Why didn't he leave it to the
Chancellor of the Exchequer?
Very few
people now leave money to the State, voluntarily that is, though they used to.
A Report out today indicates that we badly need them to.
Officially,
public debt stands at around £900 billion or over 60% of GDP. But lots of
things are kept "off balance sheet". In a report for the brokers
Tullett Prebon, Project Armageddon, Tim Morgan factors them in:
Add the final
costs of bank bail outs, of unfunded future public sector pension commitments
and of payoffs under Blair-Brown private Finance contracts and the debt figure
rises four times to £3.6 trillion representing £135 000 per household. [I am
using The Daily Telegraph's reporting]
It seems
inevitable that at some point, like when they die, the present generation (the
Baby Boomers - people like me) should be asked to pay and, failing that, made
to pay.
Only
yesterday, I took comfort in the £200 000 equity in my flat, the mortgage down
to a few thousand. This morning I have to subtract £135 000 from that - the
burden of public debt per household. Of course, if you shared out that figure
proportionately rather than simply dividing by households, it would be less.
For Sir Fred Goodwin it would be more.
However
unpalatable to the Tory faithful, Chancellor George Osborne is going to have to
look hard at inheritance tax. I make one suggestion.
At present,
there is an exemption limit and above that the State takes a percentage of the
value of an Estate at death. I would modify that to a variable percentage. Just
as the State imposes supertaxes on alcohol and tobacco in its attempts to
discourage them or make their users pay for the social costs of their habits,
so it should tax legacies it deems noxious at a higher rate than those it deems
benign. Ninety five percent on legacies to cats' and dogs' homes
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