Graham – Page 11 – Graham Stull

In defence of free speech

United we chat; divided we shout at each other

I promised myself I would not write a post about the Charlottesville riots, the near universal condemnation of Donald Trump’s nuanced position and the taking down of Confederate-era statues. Yet a recent conversation has forced my figurative hand onto the keyboard. I’ll keep my promise nonetheless, by writing instead a post about free speech, and avoiding the specific reference to the recent events in Virginia.

In the conversation, I was accused of being a “white supremacist apologist”, a charge which I found hurtful not for its substance – which missed wide of the mark – but because I care deeply about the person who made it. It revealed to me on a personal level just how fraught are the fault lines that are emerging in this increasingly divided world, and the dangers they present for what I believe to be the finest part of Western culture – intellectual liberty.

Tearing down statues of people you don't like is easy and has a long tradition among intolerant groups. Building statues of people you like is much harder. — Tearing down statues of people you don’t like is easy. It also has a long tradition among intolerant groups. Building statues of people you like is much harder.

Tell me what I want to hear, or STFU

They say in war, truth is the first casualty. I think the first casualty is probably free speech. Wartime demands adherence to dogma. And for dogma to take hold, there must first be a climate in which dissent is not peacefully tolerated. Once dogma has control, it can structure the narrative in whatever way suits the agenda of those in power.

Against this it is often argued that free speech needs its limits. Indeed, the debate has been had in many forms and in many places. It’s not hard to put up a straw man which would appear to demonstrate that, after all, free speech must have its bounds: Shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre; slander; incitement to violence.

Yet in the current climate, it is the principle of free speech that is at stake, not the precise definition of its ultimate boundaries. Guaranteeing the right to free speech, by definition, means accepting a person’s right to say things – not only with which you disagree – but which you find utterly morally repugnant. Just as you cannot make peace with anyone except your enemies, you cannot acknowledge the right to dissent from anyone except those with whom you disagree.

Free speech – just grist in the Mill?

The principle of free speech comes to us from the Enlightenment, refined and perfected by the great liberal philosophers John Stuart Mill and Wilhelm von Humboldt. In a nutshell, it’s predicated on a belief that truth is something we arrive at through reason, and that reason is a faculty which humans innately possess. It follows from this basic principle that allowing the vile and deceitful to speak freely is not, after all, dangerous. This is because no argument of theirs, if weak and untrue, presents much of a danger, provided its opponents are also at liberty to proffer the (strong and true) counterargument. Like the edit wars of a popular Wiki page, those who spot Elvis pumping gas on the outskirts of Reno will eventually be overruled through an iterative process of argumentation. The truth will ultimately prevail, or at least that which prevails has the best chance of being true.

Those who would resist free speech in the name of an ideology tacitly acknowledge the weakness of their own dogma. They fear dissent either because they do not believe in the fundamental truth of their dogma, because they do not trust in the innate capacity for reason of their fellow man, or else (and this is perhaps the worst alternative) they do not believe at all in the concept of objective truth; leaving only the moral logic of ‘might makes right’.

The Age of Befuddlement is upon us

It saddens me that I should have to write a post like this. I would prefer to think that in the Western World – a place where mass education and universal literacy have existed for many decades – the principles of liberty and free speech would be universally accepted. To witness the barbaric hoards of left-wing dogmatists (I shall not call them ‘liberals’ for fear of making Mill turn in his grave) doxing, rioting and intimidating their opponents is not only saddening because of how self-defeating it is in terms of fighting racism, but also because it reveals their contempt for the greatest principle we have: Freedom of expression.

My Third Letter to You

Dear Daniel,

Just a quick note to tell you how much I miss you, and that I hope you are having a wonderful summer. The weather has been somewhat mixed, but I hope you have had a chance to get outside and enjoy it, as much as possible. Do you ride a bike yet?

I take mine almost every day. This weekend we went to a lovely place called Chateau de la Hulpe, where we ate a delicious picnic by the lake. There were frogs in the lake and even a turtle sunning himself on a log!

I miss you so terribly, as always. It breaks my heart that yet another summer is going by in which I don’t get to do fun things with you and watch you grow and learn and experience the world.

I can only renew my promise to you that I will continue to fight as hard as I can to d0 everything in my power to be in your life. You have the right to a dad.

Love,

Dad

An honest debate on gender equality? Men are dying for it!

A gap by Any Other Name…

The official website for statistics of the European Union is called Eurostat. If you visit their website, and I highly suggest you do, you will find among the many interesting databases one for the Gender Pay Gap, which measures the difference in average gross hourly earnings between men and women for all European countries (and a few other places too). The message you’re supposed to get from this is that men get paid more than women for doing the same work.

This measure is more than just a statistic, it is a political construct. Despite the fact that it doesn’t really mean what people think it means, the GPG is much quoted in the media, by feminists and even by mainstream politicians. It helps that it has become a sort of catch-phrase, earning its very own capital letters. Because we all know that when a concept becomes capitalised, it Must Be True. And so misread, the Gap sparks outrage, even to the point of politicians passing rather draconian rules to try and level the playing field.

Don’t let reality get in the way of a good story

However, when you start to take a closer look at the Gender Pay Gap in its crude and unadjusted form, for instance by taking into account differences in risk-taking, career choices and hours worked, the difference in pay falls dramatically. And then there’s the fact that the measure tells us nothing about household income distribution. True, men often opt for longer hours (at higher pay) than women because they have wives back home to take care of the kids, but these same men are bound by custom and by the law to share their extra earnings with their families. The value of interhousehold transfers far exceeds the earnings gap, and you can see this by looking at this handy spousal maintenance calculator, which tells us that when it comes to the divorce, a man in the UK earning £40,000 a year will be due to pay his wife, if she earns £30,000 a year, £5,000/year in maintenance. That difference wipes away the benefits he might be getting from the Gap in one fell swoop.

Another way of seeing this is by looking at differences in net disposable household income by gender (which pools household income, and takes into account the value of taxes, and transfers received from the government – in this way we can compare, say, a single female householder to her married male colleague who has two kids to support). This gap is much smaller than the GPG would suggest, and among younger households it is almost zero.

But don’t take my word for the fact that the Gap is meaningless. Consider the view of one group who rarely consider any ideology beyond the Almighty Dollar: Capitalists. Here we see that market researchers are not fooled by the policy bias. They know that women make up 85% of all consumers. Sure, a lot of this is spent on stuff for the family, but even for the pure luxury good market – leisure activities, fancy clothes, dining out, perfumes and chocolate – the gender bias is evident: Men earn the money, but women spend it.

Older women are more likely to suffer poverty than older men...because the men are already dead. — Feminists love to point out that older women are more likely to suffer poverty than older men. They rarely mention it’s because their male counterparts are already dead.

Mind the Gap

Yet that somehow doesn’t slow the narrative, nor dampen the outrage. The feminist policy lobby argues that even when you control for hours worked, career choices and risks taken, a Gender Pay Gap remains (admittedly then much smaller) . And this, they exclaim, is pure discrimination, and must be stomped out by all means necessary.

If you were to suggest the remaining gap can be explained by men – high on testosterone – being simply better at competing in high-value, high-stress work environments, you would be branded a male chauvinist pig. Fearful of this kind of branding, I’ll not dare to suggest such a thing myself.

Check your privilege, and then man the hell up!

Yet weirdly, testosterone is exactly the explanation which is tossed about whenever it comes time to discuss a far more pressing, far clearer gender discrepancy – the gap in mortality between women and men. Here, it is the very risk-taking which leads to higher rates of occupational accidents, which in turn kill off men at a faster rate than women. In other words, if a man takes risks and dies for it, he has only his toxic masculinity to blame. If he takes risks and gets paid more for it: INJUSTICE!

The Gender Mortality Gap is, as far as I can tell, a phrase coined by me. Normally I’m proud of being able to claim credit for stuff, but in this case I find it alarming that the most obvious, most enduring gender injustice on the planet needs a third-rate occasional blogger like me to invent its catch-phrase. No entry in Eurostat. No Barack Obama waxing lyrical about giving our men back their lives, from behind the Presidential pulpit. Just a guy with a receding hairline and a WordPress site.

Only the men die young

Yet the GMG is real. Though Eurostat doesn’t have a special table for it like for the Gender Pay Gap, but you can still go to their website and calculate the difference in average life expectancy for women and men: For the EU as a whole, the GMG for newborns is 5.4 years, though it varies from 3.3 in the Netherlands to 4.8 in Germany; 6.3 in France; and as high as 10.5 in Lithuania (the US is close to this higher number too). And unlike the figures for hourly pay, which don’t take into account self-employment or black market earnings, statistics on death are among the most reliable we have. There is no trickery here: If you’ve had the misfortune to be born with a penis, you’re probably going to die 5 years younger than your twin sister.

So while the policy world is busy imagining ways to force the free market to pay women more, nobody is asking about what policies are needed to help men live longer. Fortunately there is a clear answer: Spend more money on public health, preventative and curative healthcare for men. The imperative to do so is all the more striking when we consider the fact that men, as the majority taxpayers in countries that publicly fund universal health systems, don’t even get an equal share of the treatments they are shelling out for. The statistics are scant, but the OECD reckons that €1.12 is spent on women’s healthcare for every Euro spent on men’s (this excludes the cost of reproductive treatments such as maternity, pre- and post-natal care).

My Second Letter to you

Dear Daniel,

How are you?

I guess school is out now and you are off for the summer. From what I gather from the legal stuff, you and your mom are off for the summer. I hope you get out into the parks, go swimming and have a good time. Maybe you will even get to go to the beach? Of course, I wish I could take you there. Maybe one day I will, who knows?

It has been an eventful summer so far, with the birth of your new little sister, Daphne, during an awful heat wave. Naturally, it has not been easy for her to adjust to that kind of weather, and she’s quite the demanding little miss, I have to say.

Of course, only naturally it takes me back to when you were a baby. Almost automatically, I fall into the same patterns of speech, of carrying her around. I have different nicknames for her than for you, of course. (You were always known as ‘my main man’, or ‘Danko Panko’, or other such names…). I remember giving you your ‘biberon’ in the mornings, the endless diaper changes (!), but also ‘flying’ you around the living room Superman-style. I hope that somewhere, in your subconscious, those memories will remain embedded.

There has been more legal stuff, but I won’t bore you with that. Suffice it to say that I am still doing everything I can to remain in your life and be your dad. I will never give up on you.

Love,

Dad

Review of Daphne du Maurier’s “The Scapegoat”

In many fields of human endeavour – cookery or ballet, perhaps – lightness is considered a quality to be striven for. Even as a description of one’s mood, the adjective ‘light’ trumps all others. Yet in literature, the quality of lightness is decidedly dysphemistic. We might say of the latest airport thriller, “it was a light read”; when what we really mean to say was that the book in question was a pile of rubbish. This, I think, is a great pity, for it arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes literary quality.

Daphne du Maurier’s “The Scapegoat” is the quintessential light read, but it is far from being rubbish. True, her skillful plotting and razor sharp descriptions render characters and images with such stunning ease the reader find himself chauffer-driven straight into the French post-war village of St Gilles. In fact, it’s almost as if by the mere act of reading, we could step effortlessly into the clothes and skin of the local châtelain, the feckless and self-centred Count de Gué. Yet the lightness of style does not prevent du Maurier from delving deep into the well of the human soul, from which murky depths all great literature must draw its substance.

It’s not giving too much away of the plot to mention the key premise; that of Doppelgängers meeting by chance, allowing one man to enter into the life of another, whose complex and sinister history slowly reveals itself as the plot unfolds. This allows for much grimace-inducing comic light-heartedness, an opportunity du Maurier masterfully seizes throughout.

But it also allows for a deep exploration of the meaning of self. It asks the question whether any of us, if thrust into another’s world, with the full weight of that person’s past bearing upon us, could live his or her life any better. Are we, after all, victims of our circumstances? How much of the character we inhabit is the fruit of our free will, and how much sketched for us by the Great Novelist in the Sky?

These are deep questions indeed. And like all good philosophers, du Maurier is careful to treat them with delicacy, and without venturing too far down the road of the moral preacher. In this, one might say she takes on a very heavy subject. And does so with incredible lightness.

My first letter to you

Dear Daniel,

I am your father and this is my first letter to you, my six-year-old son. I’m writing it in a language you can’t read or even speak, on my website which you don’t know exists. It’s a sunny day in Brussels and I’m eating my lunch and thinking of you. You are – most likely – still at school right now, in your classroom which is not far from where I sit and write these words. But you don’t know who I am and certainly you can’t guess how often and how much I think of you.

As I write this, I have no idea whether you will ever read these words. I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again and if so, what you will think of me. Maybe you’ll be afraid of me? Maybe it will be in many years from now and you will hate me for not being a part of your life? Maybe that will never happen, and these words will remain unread by you forever. Maybe (but I doubt it) you will grow up strong and happy and never worry about the fact that you were denied a father, or wonder or care who I was.

The most important thing I want to say right now is that I love you. I miss you terribly, and I have missed you every day since the day, on the 18 January 2012, when you were taken out of my life.

But more than just missing you and loving you, I want what is best for you. If I believed that meant leaving you alone (not writing any letters and not fighting in the courts to see you) that is what I would do. But after everything that has happened over the past five years, I can’t believe that is true. I think you need me in your life, now more than ever. This is why I will keep trying to see you again.

The last time you saw me, you didn’t seem to recognise who I was. You pointed your finger and me and said ‘bad man’, because that is what you had been told to say. I want you to know that I am not a bad man. I am a man (with some bad bits, and some good bits, like all other men in the world), but I have never tried to harm you and I never will.

I’m going off now in a little while in order to attend a meeting with some people who I hope will try to help bring me back into your life. After all the meetings with all the different people, I can’t tell you that I am very hopeful. But doing my best for you means that I have to try everything possible.

Hope to see you soon.

Love,

Dad

Review of Philip K Dick’s “The Penultimate Truth”

The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Philip K. Dick is above all a writer of ideas. To him we are indebted for some of the most innovative concepts to come out of 20th Century sci-fi. For me the debt is also personal. With the release of the movie Bladerunner, his ideas began to go mainstream at roughly the same time as I was gaining literary and creative consciousness, and so I will forever associate his work with that delicious awakening.

But ideas do not a great novel make. For that, you need other elements, such as literary craftsmanship, compelling characters and good plotting. Taking these three things in order, I have to say this book does not rise above a good C+. Most of the prose is pedestrian, relying on an overuse of adverbs and needless jargon (why robots have to be called ‘leadies’ is beyond me). Where Dick’s prose does accelerate, it becomes torturously overwrought. (Example: “Anything which might mitigate the quality striven for, that of free and easy authenticity; this simulacrum, out of all which they, the Yance-men, were involved in, required the greatest semblance of the actuality which it mimicked.”)

The characters never evolve beyond mere props; wooden actors through which the events are channelled. They are a means of telling the story. So much so that in one instance, Dick himself seems to forget whose point-of-view he is narrating, and attributes the wrong train of thought to the wrong character; an easy mistake to make when they are all essentially the same soulless person.

This leaves the plot. [Spoiler alert] In theory, plot should be the element of writing which Dick, as an ideas man, would master most easily. And indeed, in some of his best known works this is the case. But sadly, he does only half a job in The Penultimate Truth. Although the pacing is excellent and the premise is brilliant (most of humanity forced to toil away in subterranean ‘tanks’ under a false pretext), for some reason he sees fit, about halfway through the story, to introduce devices (both figuratively, as plot devices; and literally, as devices of war) which overcomplicate the story, un-suspend the reader’s disbelief and disobey the internal logic of the world he has created. The most obscene of these is time travel – a spice so pungent it can spoil the best sci-fi soup if not added with extreme caution. To top it all off, the story finishes too quickly, and without a clear resolution of the key conflict point. We (or at any rate I) don’t even understand what the meaning of the title was supposed to be, and are left with the suspicion that it was merely chosen because it would look snappy on a bookshelf.

Whatever the penultimate truth was supposed to have been, for me the ultimate truth is that this book is a disappointment to the good idea from which it was born.

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Review of Buddenbrooks

Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It is an unfortunate consequence of universal education that the way we are exposed to the greatest works of literature is through prescribed school curriculae. Because no novel, no matter how good it might otherwise be, can be truly enjoyed when one has to finish writing a 1,000 word summary of chapters 12, 13 and 14 on the bus ride into school on a rainy Monday morning in February.

This, I fear, has been the experience of all too many teenage readers of Thomas Mann’s spectacular opus, Buddenbrooks, a staple of German ‘Gymnasium’ literature courses for decades. In one sense, the book does itself no favours, extending across three generations of a family of Northern German grain merchants, most of the Nineteenth Century and 750 pages. Even I, a willing reader well past his teenage years, with no exams to prepare for and no essay to write, found myself struggling at times with its length and degree of detail.

Yet there is so much to be enjoyed in Thomas Mann’s greatest novel. From a purely technical point of view, it is wonderfully crafted prose. Mann possesses that rare ability of writing third-person point-of-view narration so intimately the reader becomes immersed in characters with whom he shares neither gender, century nor social class; but with whom the bond of essential human experience generates a kinship and empathy that moves him to tears. The best passages of writing, as is so often the case in great literature, are bare, sparse, almost haphazard fragments, whose richness lies in that which they do not contain as much as what they do.

From the perspective of a 21st Century humanist, the merchantilist feudalism of the Buddenbrook family, with its disdain for social democracy and elevated sense of capitalist, Protestant morality, is anathema to our modern sensibilities, once we abstract ourselves from the narrative. But that’s just the point: Mann manages to turn you into a Buddenbrook. You care about their destiny and you feel the pain of their inevitable decline; you feel passionately they deserve their seat in the Senate of Lübeck. And you are just as envious and resentful as they are themselves, of the rise of a new generation of more vital, less traditional competitors.

There is not really much to give away in the plot which the subtitle has not already spoiled. Buddenbrooks is about the decline of a family. And yet it is about so much more. Economists and students of business studies will no doubt remember from their textbooks the reference to the ‘Buddenbooks Effect’, in which it is postulated that family businesses (or dynasties more generally) will inevitably decline over the course of a few generations. How this plays out – whether in the person of the hypochondriac Christian and his penchant for the good life, the superciliousness of his sister Antonie, the physical weakness of their brother Thomas, or the latter’s dreamy, timid and unhealthy son Hanno – teaches us not just about economics, but about our own strengths and weaknesses; or own hopes and fears of death; or own hypocritical self-righteousness and sense of family purpose.

Buddenbrooks should not be dismissed as merely a great work of German literature. It is also a damn fine read.

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Of car alarms, ugly facades & first aid courses – the wonderful world of ‘compound externalities’

Jargon is a nerd’s best friend

Economists love to talk about ‘externalities’. ‘Externality’ is a wonderfully complex-sounding word that makes you feel more intelligent just by saying it. It is especially useful when trying to pull the wool over the eyes of a non-economist, as in:

Community activist: “We’re outraged that our organisation has had its budget cut so the government can bail out irresponsible banks!”

Economist: “I understand completely your feelings, but your analysis of the cost of financial sector repair fails to take into account the growth-enhancing effects of the associated positive externalities resulting from the smooth operation of financial markets.”

Community activist: “I… well… uh… what?”

Economist: *smiles imperceptibly and adjusts knot on his silk tie*

Keep your market transaction to yourself, buddy

Yet the actual meaning of the word ‘externality’ is in fact quite simple. Here it is in a nutshell: For any transaction, there is a buyer and a seller. An ‘externality’ can be thought of as the effect of the transaction on someone who is not the buyer and not the seller.

exhaust — Pollution is a classic externality – a cost on someone outside the market which occurs through the operation of the market

So for example, if John buys a car from Volkswagen, this transaction has effects on both John and Volkswagen (John gets a new Golf in exchange for €30,000; Volkswagen gets €30,000 in exchange for a Golf). Because the transaction was voluntary, we can assume both John and Volkswagen are both strictly better off from having made the trade (otherwise, they probably wouldn’t do it).

But what happens when John tools down the road in his new Golf, kicking carbon emissions and particulates into the air, taking up public space and potentially running over grannies and cats? In that case, there is a cost born by someone who was not party to that transaction, arising from the transaction (pollution, traffic congestion, increased risk of an accident). This cost is a ‘negative externality’. There are many examples of negative externalities, but pollution is perhaps the most common one. In general, economists accept that the government should sometimes intervene in markets in order to correct for these negative externalities (through regulation or taxation, for instance).

There’s no such thing as a free ride…or is there?

We can also think of ‘positive externalities’, i.e. when the operation of a market has a positive effect on someone outside it. The pleasant smell of freshly baked bread on a street outside a bakery can bring joy to passers-by, even if they do not actually enter and pay for the bread. And if a person with a contagious disease pays to have himself treated privately, this is a benefit to all the people he has protected from potential infection, even if he was only acting selfishly.

But don’t let the name deceive you: positive externalities are not always a good thing. Sometimes they can stop markets from operating effectively. For example, if I invent a brilliant new machine and try to sell it, the ‘idea’ can simply be copied by someone who does not actually pay for my machine, leaving me with only a small reward for all the midnight oil I burned while getting to my eureka moment. Without some kind of protection, this risk might prevent me from bothering to invent the machine in the first place. This is why, just as in the case of negative externalities, the risk which positive externalities pose to production is a justification for the government to intervene, by granting patents and other forms of intellectual property rights.

Compound externalities – where markets depend on failure in order to succeed

There is a certain class of externality which I find quite interesting and which, to my knowledge, has not been written about by economists yet. It is the ‘compound externality’, which can be defined as the effect on someone outside a market arising from the operation of a market which only has value to the buyer and seller because of this negative effect. This sounds confusing, but it’s quite simple when we break it down: As before, we have a transaction, so we have a buyer and a seller. In addition, there is an effect from the transaction on a third party AND – here’s the catch – the only reason the transaction is valuable to the buyer / seller is because of this effect on the third party.

The most obvious example of a compound externality is noisy alarms. In this case there is a negative cost imposed on you when your neighbour’s house alarm goes off at 3 in the morning, even though you didn’t sell him the alarm and you sure didn’t buy it. But here’s the catch: the only reason he wanted the alarm is so that it would annoy and wake you, his neighbour, up, so that you would then look out the window at his house and – in this way – spot the burglar breaking in through the window (hence deterring the burglar!). If it didn’t create the noise pollution, the alarm would have no value.

Another example is the ‘ugliest façade’ project. Imagine you live on a historic square full of old houses with lovely façades. Your obnoxious neighbour from the above example – not content with his cacophonous alarm – has torn down his house and is building anew. He has an incentive to build the façade as ugly as he possibly can. Why? Because by doing so, he destroys the perfect appearance of the square as viewed from your house and from every other building… every building that is, except his own. All of the sudden he possesses the only piece of real estate with an unsullied view of the historic old square!

Quick, is there a positive compound externality in the house?

What about positive ‘compound externalities’? Are there any examples of markets which, in order to operate, depend on a positive effect occurring on someone outside the market in order for the market to exist? The only one I can think of is the market for first-aid training. Here, the only value to you in paying for a first-aid training course is that, should the occasion arise, you will be able to apply the Heimlich Manoeuvre to dislodge a chicken dumpling from the oesophagus of a third party (while attending a party…).

I’ll stop now because I can’t think of any other examples. Perhaps someone else can?

Things aren’t so bad … so let’s not make them worse

The People think they want change

Ok, there is a lot of anger out there. Some are angry because they fear the ‘other’ taking away what they have; others are angry because they want more redistribution and fairness. Some blame benefit-scrounging immigrants, others blame the global elites. But while the grumbles might be diverse, there is a common sense that the system is somehow ‘broken’ in a way it wasn’t before. Whether it means Trump, Brexit or someone like Bernie Sanders, a large number of people who previously would have been moderates now want – or at very least expect – to see fundamental change to the societies and political systems they consider have failed. Alarmingly, they seem prepared to topple long-established systems and political traditions in order to see this change happen.

And maybe they’re right. Who knows? The consequences of disruptive change are hard to predict in the short run, and ultimately may take a very long time to play out fully. When Nixon visited Beijing in 1972, he asked the witty and influential Chinese mandarin Zhou Enlai his opinion on what impact the 1789 French Revolution had had on history, to which Enlai is said to have replied that it was “too early to say”.

Nature red in tooth and claw

But it seems to me the risks are very much on the downside. To paraphrase John Lennon, if disruptive change means destruction, you can count me out . Our system may not be perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than nothing. To see how, consider what things would be like in the complete absence of society. Imagine an invisible hand picked any one of us up from his current desk, couch, bed, airplane seat … and carried him out of his man-made environment and place him, naked, in a

Without us around, Nature would reclaim cities within a few hundred years. Romantic? Or just plain brutal? — Without civilisation, Nature would reclaim cities within a few hundred years. Romantic? Or brutal and hostile?

theoretical primeval forest where other humans simply did not exist. This is the total absence of society. How well would he fare? He might last a week before getting eaten. A summer, perhaps, if he is particularly crafty and in good health. But come winter, he would freeze, starve or get eaten by wolves. The first major injury or illness would likely finish him off. And even if, by some miracle, he managed to carve out a niche (most likely literally) for himself, would his quality of life be even a fraction of what it is now? I remember an excellent article written by Alan Weisman in Discover Magazine back in 2005 which explored the world without humans. It was a romantic vision, full of evocative prose of species flourishing and cities crumbling. The descriptions made it clear a little bit of the author’s heart longed for such a thing to take place. Yet where is Mr Weisman now? Living in one of the few remaining wildernesses in Alaska or Russia which closely approximate his vision? I’m guessing not. Especially as he was sending pre-apocalyptic tweets as recently as 2014.

Creature comforts are better than creatures

This thought exercise is designed to remind us of just what a good job society does at shielding us from what is, in reality, a hostile physical environment. Such a good job, in fact, that we forget we are being shielded. Unlike the current political system, Nature isn’t just guilty of neglecting our interests and selling us a bit of Fake News. Nature actively wants us to die. It wants to dispatch predators to eat us, it wants to release diseases to sicken us, or else simply deny us food and watch us starve. The system, far from being broken, does an absolutely remarkable job of taming Nature and providing us with far more than what we could have on our own. What’s more, it is better at doing this now, than at any point in human history.

If we allow this system to be torn down, perhaps a better one will rise from the ashes and we will achieve some kind of Utopia. But that seems like a bad bet, given what we know from history and observing the physical world around us. Disruptive change is more likely to give Nature the opening she has been seeking for centuries. She might rub her hands in glee while we starve in our billions. Animals or bacteria could so easily overwhelm us, and in the ensuring mayhem we would likely turn on each other. Then, somewhere in the mud and mess, those among the living who were old enough to remember would regret that they so cheaply threw away a system they thought was broken, but in reality was only a little bit flawed.