Living in the future

So here we are in the future. No shiny silver suits, levitating trains or gas turbine powered cars, but we're here nonetheless. How do I know? Because the things I see around me, and the things I do everyday are beyond any rational extrapolation of the things we had in my youth.

I remember in the early seventies at school having to write an essay as if I was looking back over 25 years - so I guess I was imagining looking back from the late nineties. I don't remember much of what I wrote, except I that I wrote that "motorways were the forgotten roads of the 1980s". This was because, at the time of the essay, there was an oil crisis going on (sparked by the Yom Kippur War of 1973), and I made the classic mistake of all futurologists, I assumed (rationally) that the future would be the same as the recent past, only more so. Oil was getting more expensive, it would obviously become unaffordable so there would be no car travel, therefore no need for motorways. What is really required for accurate futurology is to (irrationally)predict things that appear to be impossible!

I started in IT (it was called Data Processing in those days) in 1977. I wrote computer programs on a coding pad, with a pencil; then someone else made a deck of punched cards of the program and made a listing for me; I had a desk-top punch to make changes to the program (new lines of code, corrections, etc). Writing any program took weeks! (By the way, the diagonal line on the edge of the card deck was there so you could easily put the cards back in order when you dropped them).

The first mainframe I worked on in 1977 (an IBM S370/158) had 1.5MB of "main storage" (RAM to you), had one processor and boasted 28 x 317MB disks (that's what...8GB!).

I remember reading articles in the trade press saying that one day we would all have a computer on our desks. I had no idea out why you would want one on your desk for your own personal use -how would you use your own computer to do finance and stock control? (Ethernet and TCP/IP hadn't been invented).

It seemed irrational to want to have computer just for yourself, never mind the amount of personal computing power I now have at my disposal. My laptop (two CPUs, 320GB disk, 6 GB memory) would have run a FT-30 company (as the mainframe I worked on did). I also have a Kindle and an Android tablet (that guy’s only got 32GB memory – I bet there wasn’t that much electronic storage in the world in 1977!).  Now, I have about my person at any one time at least half-a-dozen devices that execute stored software programs – not to mention the computing rich environment that is my car or home! My phone has more processing power and storage than that IBM mainframe I worked on all those years ago. How could anyone except the fiction writers of “Star Trek” have imagined that?

Edison's Telephonoscope (transmits light as well as sound).
(Every evening, before going to bed, Pater- and Materfamilias set up an electric camera-obscura over their bedroom mantel-piece, and gladden their eyes with the sight of their children at the Antipodes, and converse gaily with them through the wire.).
Paterfamilias (in Wilton Place). "Beatrice, come closer, I want to whisper." Beatrice (from Ceylon). "Yes, Papa dear." Paterfamilias. "Who is that charming young lady playing on Charlie's side?"
Beatrice. "She's just come over from England, Papa. I'll introduce you to her as soon as the game's over?"

My favourite image of the future comes from this cartoon published in “Punch” in 1879 – another non-rational leap of imagination. It is a magnificent piece of futurology, predicting Skype at a time before there were moving pictures, sound recording, television or radio (the telephone had been invented in 1876). Of course, the cartoonist thought he was depicting something that was impossible – he was satirising the latest invention from Thomas Edison. When I worked in Paris in the early 1980s, I had a weekly, expensive telephone call home every week. When I worked in Australia in the 2000s, I had a Skype video call home every day, for nothing! What had been science fiction in 1984 was free only twenty years later!

The wildest thing of all, and the reason I really know I’m living in the future, is that this year I have been prompted to give serious thought to retirement. When I started work 38 years ago, being old enough (and wealthy enough) to retire was unimaginable. Now, what seems like a very short time later, I’ve worked out, if all things go to plan, that I could stop work when I’m sixty, only three years away! I don’t know whether I will stop then (many a slip twixt cup and lip), or continue – God willing, we shall see.

Lance and Sir Jim OBE! Who’d a thunk it?

Well, just about everyone, it seems (if the news is anything to go by). I didn’t know of course, but it looks like everyone they ever met knew, or thought they knew that Lance was a cheat and Jimmy Savile was a paedophile. To be fair, some tried to warn us of their misdeeds (see this video about Lance Armstrong's cheating from 2010,

and this on Jimmy Savile:   http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/culture/2012/10/when-louis-asked-jimmy-about-being-paedophile )

I had hoped Lance was innocent of doping, because it is very upsetting to see a great man brought low. It does not surprise me (and should not surprise anyone) to find that he is not the most likeable character. Great men don't have to be likeable; but is it the case that we have a right to expect them not to cheat (at least when it’s less than a matter of life and death), otherwise they are no longer great?

Anyone who has even cursorily followed professional cycling knows that there has always been doping. And there have always been more or less high profile scandals about it. We expect athletes to harm their bodies and change their metabolism to achieve feats of super-human endurance, strength, speed and skill. Then we expect them to stop short of taking drugs to do it. What's the difference between eating 4lbs of steak a day and exercising it into muscle (or whatever unnatural act is required to get the kind of bodies these guys have) and injecting yourself with steroids to enhance the process? I think I might be persuaded that there is no moral difference. If you are trying to find who is naturally fastest over 100 metres, is it not "cheating" to have practised at all?

For me, answer turns out to be simply that there are things allowed within the rules, and things that are not. The use of performance enhancing drugs is not the question here; its the promising to abide by a set of rules, and then not doing so. His fans have been lied to, and his sponsors and the organisers of the races he won have been lied to and defrauded. I’m sad that Lance has turned out to be a cheat, because I think in a clean sport he would have won anyway. But I can't be outraged - all the people involved were grown ups and should have known they were fishing in a murky pond.

Jimmy Savile looks like another kettle of fish. His public persona was as an odd man, but he appeared to be (relatively) harmless and, like Lance, raised millions for charity. He made no secret of liking young women (I can remember him saying as much on radio in his “Savile’s Travels” days).

When the news first started to surface that he had had sex with under-age girls, I thought perhaps this might be a case of 15 year old groupies; criminal, of course, because you're not allowed to have sex with people under the age of consent (16 in the UK), whether they agree to it or not, but essentially unfortunate and sad, not tragic. The whole concept of "under-age" is a bit problematical anyway. Even within Western Europe the so-called "age of consent" varies from 13 in Spain to 17 in Ireland.

Can a 13 year old really give informed consent? Perhaps. But I don't think that's the issue. The issue is that Savile lied, and used his celebrity to sexually exploit vulnerable people - whether they were 13 or 30 makes little real difference. I'm sure some of his "conquests" took it in their stride, but for many his actions were toxic to their personalities and mental health. He was in a position of trust, and he betrayed it and lied about it. He deserves our contempt and distaste.

In one sense, the two are not so far apart. They both betrayed the trust of people who had a reasonable expectation that they were trustworthy. They both lied to mislead people away from the truth. Lance lied and defrauded his sponsors and others of money, and betrayed his many admirers. Sir Jim lied and betrayed  many (often vulnerable) young people with his criminal behaviour, and betrayed his many admirers.

In another way they are far apart; Lance stole only money and glory; Savile stole lives.

What are men for?

What indeed? I have struggled with this post for months. And got no where. But I think I have it straight in my head now.  I want express my concerns about the position of men in society, without being accused of being a misogynist or squealing “it’s all gone too far” like some Daily Mail  leader. My thought is that the original intention of feminism was to bring men and women into a state of equality, by freeing them both from society’s expectations. What has actually happened is that the position of women has improved at the expense of the position and self-confidence of men. We wanted win-win and we got win-lose, and we need to complain; we need to get back to at least wanting win-win.

I was brought up in a single-parent household. My mother was no respecter of men; her father was, as far as I can tell, a domineering bully who kept the women in the family in a constant state of fear. As an adult, my mother had a bad history of abusive and dysfunctional relationships. I learned early on that men were a bad lot.  My mother firmly believed that a man’s job was to go out to work, deliver his pay packet unopened on Friday, not drink or gamble to excess, carry heavy things and do jobs around the house. She really didn’t see men’s role in the family extending much beyond that.  She said to me on several occasions that she didn’t want to be equal to men; she was happy to be an apparently second class citizen, while actually ruling the roost with cunning, manipulation and bloody-mindedness (my paraphrase). I don’t think her view was untypical.

My mother’s idea of a man’s role in life was not at all attractive, and I can remember being very resentful that (according to her view of life) my future was to be a meal-ticket for a woman who would see me as a necessary encumbrance to be kept sweet so she could get what she wanted for herself and her children.
Times change, but have society’s (and women’s) expectations of men really changed? What does society think of men?

Advertisers obviously think that women don’t think much of men if their output is anything to go by. Men are routinely the butt of sexist humour in advertising aimed at women. Men are portrayed as stupid, imperceptive lumps only interested in football, beer and leering at women; the ideal husband in this scenario is one who does the bidding of the real head of the household, even though that compliance may have to be won by subterfuge and manipulation. Women are thus shown as cleverer, better at planning and knowing what’s best for their loved ones, more perspicacious and caring.

Society thinks that men are violent. “Our lads” are lauded when they are getting killed in some crazy foreign war that our forefathers bequeathed to us, but otherwise young men are feared and worried over as a potential  army of yobs on a drunken rampage; physically threatening; risk taking; unruly, irresponsible and dangerous.

Society thinks that men remain children. From the age of about 12, girls are included increasingly in the lives of adults and achieve an adult role. At the same sort of age, boys are excluded from polite society and enter a long (increasingly long) adolescence, isolated in a world which values self-reliance over co-operation, conflict over conciliation, arrogance over self-confidence and competitive sports over education. Is it a surprise then that by their early twenties, girls are young women, ready for adult life and boys are still boys, but with bigger toys?
Women have increasingly had the educational playing field levelled, with the introduction of modular courses and examined course-work. These needed reforms and the changing attitude of society to the economic resource that women represent has led to huge strides for women in education and the professions, where women now make up the majority of new entrants. Success has been less apparent in the competitive worlds of business and politics, but that’s coming I’m sure – but at what cost?

My generation was promised increasing leisure time, but that has turned out to mean poverty and unemployment for many, and overwork for the rest. Everyone works now – men and women equally. Nonetheless, women remain the locus of life (relationships, children, caring, emotions, social relations, co-operating and making things nice) and men have got stuck with being the curators of machines (bridges, computers, ships, aeroplanes). Even this position is not static, women are more and more encouraged to enter technical, scientific and engineering fields.

If the sisters can do it all for themselves, what, is it that men have that is their unique contribution to society? Men are no longer able to claim superiority in mechanics and engineering, science, art and poetry while leaving child-rearing and domesticity to women. For every advance in the position of women, men take a step back and have a smaller and smaller space to stand. The more men withdraw, the poorer and poorer role models boys have to work with. Eventually, I fear, men’s role in society will become ever more un-valued, and the position of men will become more of problem.

Maybe, we need to clearly understand what men are for, and that needs to be an important job, otherwise we risk coming to the conclusion that men’s unique contribution is as a sperm-donor – in which case the long-term outlook for men is no better than it is for bull-calves!

Of course I have an answer, and one which may be forced on us by economic circumstances. Observe that men and women  are increasingly overburdened, and their quality of life suffers, and the quality of life of those around them suffers as well. This stress is caused by the relentless pursuit of economic growth, even though we already have more than plenty.

So why not stop chasing after more stuff and start living a little bit more like we used to? Take our time and not rush everywhere – may be think about how we can use technology to reduce travel. Maybe work fewer days per week, and spend more time with the children – and I mean both men and women; OK, our standard of living may be lower, but our quality of life may be higher. Of course, any one who wished to drive themselves into the ground would be welcome to, but  should society encourage that as a life choice?  Enough is enough, after all; and too much is by definition a bad thing.

We could enable men and women to return to a place where they were living fulfilled lives, and the real promise of feminism could be delivered. I’m not arguing that women should get back to the kitchen and men should get back to the office; I’m saying that they should both spend time in the kitchen and the office! Then we will know what men are for – to be part of society, valued for their contributions, that they will then (because they have the skills) be able to make right to the end of their lives (how many men these days retire one day and are dead six months later, when women go on making a contribution to the family into their nineties?)

Being rich means having enough without having to work for a living; by this measure rethinking the role of men enriches both men and women. If we start now, maybe we won’t need to get to a point where men feel disenfranchised, rebel and start the pendulum swinging the opposite way (like women did in the sixties). Wouldn’t that be nice for a change?

How to apologise by saying sorry

Another week, and another non-apology: this time it’s the Prime Minister not apologising for offensively suggesting that facing Ed Balls across the floor of the Commons was “like having someone with Tourette’s permanently sitting opposite you", according to the Daily Mail Online.  This is the casual cruelty that you might expect from a school-boy, rather than someone with a responsible role in society (or “our country” as I’m sure he’d call it – by which he means the country that belongs to him and his mates). Of course, the offense caused was to Tourette’s sufferers, rather than the aggressive politician with a lisp and a growing waistline who was actually in Cameron’s thoughts when speaking! (I wonder whether the PM would have got into more or less trouble if he’d called Balls “a big fat-tho”?)

Last week, it was Diane Abbott (just for political balance), who didn’t apologise for this Tweet:

And before that, it was the king of non-apologisers, buffoon and professional troll, Jezza Clarkson, who didn’t apologise for saying that striking public sector workers should be shot (Telegraph online)!

But hang on! Didn’t all these people issue apologies later? Well, yes and no. What they said, respectively, was:

“If I offended anyone, I’m very sorry about that, it wasn’t my intention at all” (Cameron)

"I apologise for any offence caused.” (Abbott)

"I didn't for a moment intend these remarks to be taken seriously -- as I believe is clear if they're seen in context. If the BBC and I have caused any offence, I'm quite happy to apologise for it alongside them." (Clarkson)

I think  I know quite a lot about apologising because I have had to do quite a lot of it. In my opinion, an apology has three elements: an acceptance that harm has been done and done by you; an expression of contrition; and a request for forgiveness. By that definition, none of the respective “apologies” come close to the mark.

First of all, notice that none of them accept that offence has actually been caused: all three seem to believe that it is possible that offence has been caused, but none of them accept that it actually has been caused. If no harm has been caused, then they don’t need to accept that they did the harm. What Cameron and Clarkson said was offensive, but I’m not sure that Abbott’s Tweet was other than fair comment. Maybe that’s why her apology is, well, such an apology of an apology!

Next, is there an expression of contrition? Cameron seems to come closest (“I’m very sorry about that”); Abbott’s attempt is miserable, she doesn’t seem to think that the issue has anything to do with her at all. Clarkson’s effort is a masterpiece of avoidance – in effect he says, “if  offence has been caused and if  the BBC apologises then I would apologise as well, but I’m not going to say I’m sorry because I was obviously joking”. When apologising, everything after the “but” is bullshit – it doesn’t help if you get your “buts” in before the apology!

Lastly, there is the question of asking for forgiveness. It is true that, when you ask for forgiveness, there is nothing you can do if the person from whom you request forgiveness refuses to give it. But that’s what you have to do  - it requires humility, courage and trust to subject yourself to the judgement of another. Not surprisingly, none of these three asks for forgiveness, they seem to think it sufficient to say that they would apologise if it were demonstrated that offence had been caused. Well, it may be sufficient, but it isn’t an apology!

Apologising is simple – but like lots of simple things, it isn’t easy. You need to have enough humility and honesty to see that you have been in the wrong, you have to care enough about others to want to put the harm right by an expression of contrition, and you have to be brave, humble and trusting enough to accept the judgement of others, even if that is going to be at further personal cost. It’s not only the Camerons, Clarksons and Abbotts who have difficulty with it, we all do. We are all too arrogant, dishonest, self-centred, faithless and cowardly to apologise properly. It’s a shame really, because it really is good for the soul.

So next time you get caught out doing something wrong, instead of pretending it’s not a problem, or that it’s someone else’s fault, why not try saying you’re sorry for the thing you have done, you regret the harm that it has caused, and that you would like the person harmed to forgive you. At least you will be free from being accused that you didn’t apologise properly!