Emergent Hiatus

Good morning.

I've almost posted three entries in the last few weeks.

1. According to a chapter in an economic history book I read obsessively for a week [1], many of the most important technological innovations during the (so-called) Industrial Revolution weren't large, clunking pieces of machinery like steam engines, but improvements to small, every-day devices like buckles and screws. This made me think about the psychology of salience some more: do people tend to think louder, bigger, more visible things are more likely to be the causes of actions than quieter, smaller, more discreet items? I remember an interview in New Scientist [2] where it was suggested this is what (nominally) successful managers do, but selectively: successful managers are those which manage to attribute good events to themselves, but bad events to everything else! When people see 'leaders', to what extent are they actually just seeing 'selectively salient opportunists'?
2. According to another chapter in the same volume, China had a pivotal role in the growth of the British Empire's international trade network from (say) the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century. | The Chinese government wanted to stabilise their domestic economy, and had decided to do this by moving to a 'Silver standard': any item of value a traveller depositing at a bank in their own region would have it guaranteed against a fixed amount of silver. This written guarantee could then be taken to a national bank outlet elsewhere in the vast country and redeemed, or given to someone to be redeemed, thus allowing freer and more secure travel and economic trade within the nation, and ensuring that it stays in each region's social and economic interests to remain at peace with the other regions. China thus wanted a lot of silver, and the British Empire, having recently sailed over to the New World and coughed on the New Worlders, had a rich supply of the stuff. | A trade link thus became established: the British bought luxury goods, the Chinese bought silver. Originally, these luxury goods tended to be durables: the ubiquitous kitchen- and table-ware which became known as 'china'. Then, the British developed a taste for tea. | Unlike durables, consumables don't suffer from market saturation to anything like the same extent. Indeed, it seems the more China produced, the more Britain consumed. The taste for tea permeated downwards through the social strata (to the extent that, by the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century, tea-drinking had become an archetypal Working Class activity), until tea-drinking came to be seen as a ubiquitous part of the British national character. | However, the British liked their tea sweet: one unit of tea mixed with 14 units of sugar. This created a new scale of demand for sugar, which came from British colonies in the New World. This, in turn, exacerbated demand for cheap manual labour, who came - unwillingly - from Africa. The North Atlantic slave trade can thus be seen as a complex 'externality' of Chinese domestic policy. Together with tobacco - another product whose initial supply increases, rather than decreases, demand, and thus quickly changes consumer preferences - demand for sugar - predicated on a taste for sweet tea - generated much of the growth in the North Atlantic slave trade, by extension the British Empire, and by further extension the wealth and productive capacity of the post-independence United States. | I guess I found this kind of 'web' of social causal factors, and the fact such banal tastes and habits led to such wealth and power for some people, and such misery and exploitation for others, fascinating and sickening in equal measure.
   
3. Last week I discovered Desmond Morris' six-part TV series 'The Human Animal' (1994) and 'the Human Sexes' (1997) are both available in full on Google video, together with a one hour 2007 retrospective on the documentary called ' Watching Desmond Morris'. Within three days, I'd devoured all thirteen hours. I find Morris' approach almost hyponotic: he might try to present himself as 'the objective scientist', but the scientific approach he's using - the relatively qualitative, observational mid-Twentieth Century 'ethnography' approach - doesn't seem to have been the dominant approach within evolutionary biology for over thirty years, since 'The Great Synthesis', which combined ethnography with heredity equations and was popularised in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, swept the more naturalistic and speculative approach Morris still uses out of the discipline. In fact, the objectivity - the scientific 'rigour' - is an act, an interesting 'character' to play, but one that I suspect Morris would find suffocating unless annealed with some other worldview. | I think Morris' other interest and vocation - surrealist painting - seems to provide this, and if anything his approach seems more to be that of a 'scientific artist' than an 'artistic scientist'. The stories he tells about humans are pregnant with pathos and absurdity: we're all 'Naked Apes' who have accidentally locked ourselves up in an 'Human Zoo', living in conditions that have been made by us but are not of our own making, reproducing instinctual action patterns in ever more obtuse ways, converting the bestial and the carnal into the institutional and metaphoric. | I see nothing whatsoever 'reductionist' in this worldview - it's oddly, hauntingly, disturbingly beautiful - but I can see how it may become 'totalising'. Better to take this perspective as one of many: to the person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To the person with a well-equipped tool shed and art studio, however, the world looks like many things at once. In short, the world looks surreal.

If anyone would like me to expand any of these three embryonic threads into a full entry, let me know. (More generally, it's simply good to know that anyone reads this!)



[1] The book, not the chapter. I read fairly slowly but not that slowly...
[2] Annoyingly I can't find the article, as I can't remember many details about the interviewee. He wasn't a 'scientist', but someone who proclaimed to write into newspapers to offer a 'scientific perspective', and previously had a job in the City...