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First, an apology. This edition of Happy Friday is one week late. The delay was caused by my getting bogged down in my subject matter. Which, I admit, is not a good excuse! However, it is goddam interesting - to my mind, anyway. Let me explain.
In Happy Friday #13 I introduced the topic of trying to identify fundamental changes in human behavior. Specifically, are we currently experiencing a once-in-a-very-long-time fundamental change in human behavior?
This, I hope you’ll agree, is a more then averagely-challenging goal - and a genuine mystery, to boot - so I thought I’d enlist the help of Dean Fleming P.I. who I introduced back in Happy Friday #7. If you missed that intro all you need to know to get started is that Dean styles himself a Corporate Private Investigator and works for McNifty, a global management consultancy.
The Mystery of The Global Shift
A Dean Fleming Investigation, Part 1
Dean looked up from his laptop, leaned back in his office chair, raised his arms, interlinked his fingers behind his head and exhaled.
- Whaddya think? The question came from Jewel, Dean’s new assistant, seated opposite him at the desk.
He nodded. Impressive, he said. I’m not religiously-minded but it feels like there’s some truth in that argument.
The topic under discussion was an online article titled Our Godless era is dead by a chap called Paul Kingsnorth.
- What’s this weird bit about a gyre or something? asked Jewel.
- Yeah, that’s interesting, isn’t it. ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre.’ It’s Yeats, said Dean.
- The poet?
- Exactly. William Butler Yeats. Irish poet - 1865 to 1939. Won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. He paused, then, Have you ever heard the line, ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’?
Jewel’s face lit up. Yes, I have - I remember it from school and uni. Something about anarchy, isn’t it?
- That’s the one.
Dean got up and walked over to the bookcase, scanned the spines and picked out a large volume which he took back to the desk and placed in front of Jewel.
She read out the title - Civilisation, a personal view1 - and thumbed through the pages which were richly illustrated with images of Western art and architecture of the last two millennia.
- Lovely book, she commented.
- Yeah, nice, isn’t it. The words in it are actually the assembled scripts of a TV series. It’s from 1969 and the guy who wrote and presented it was an art historian called Kenneth Clark - Baron Clark, no less.
Jewel looked unimpressed.
Ancient history, huh? he said, smiling. Dean thought She’s in her mid-20s so anything more than a few years ago sounds really old. I’m twenty years older than her but what a difference that makes!
Jewel shrugged.
- I know. said Dean. Fifty years ago. That’s a long time, but it’s nothing in the great scheme of things. And I hope to convince you, as we go ahead with this work, that some human essentials don’t change much over the centuries or, even, the millennia. Plus, of course, you’re a STEM graduate. You’re amazingly good at mathematics and I can’t do that stuff - not to anything like the level you can, anyway. I came into this work more from the social perspective, to try and crack problems in a business setting. That’s why I became a corporate private investigator.
Jewel nodded. Dean continued, But I’m telling you, this work needs both our skill sets. This project we’ve been tasked with is possibly the most important strategic work McNifty will undertake in decades.
Jewel raised a quizzical eyebrow.
- Honestly, said Dean. Look, the success of a consultancy like McNifty is absolutely dependent on our ability to keep track of changes. Economic changes, certainly, but also social changes. And, right now, there’s a feeling that we’re in mega-change territory. But it’s all foggy. The question is, can you and I glimpse through the fog?
- Oh, I like the sound of that, said Jewel.
- Okay, said Dean, encouraged. I tell you what - turn to the back of that book - he pointed to the copy of Civilisation - and, if you would, please, read the last three paragraphs.
Jewel pulled the book closer, found the end text and read it out loud:
I said at the beginning that it is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs. Fifty years ago W.B. Yeats, who was more like a man of genius than anyone I have ever known, wrote a famous prophetic poem.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Well, that was certainly true between the wars, and it nearly destroyed us. Is it true today? Not quite, because good people have convictions, rather too many of them. The trouble is that there is still no centre. The moral and intellectual failure of Marxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism, and that isn’t enough. One may be optimistic, but one can’t exactly be joyful at the prospect before us.
- That’s interesting, she said and then, questioning, Heroic Materialism?
- That’s the final stage of Clark’s dissertation, responded Dean. The point where the modern industrial age took off. And he talks about a point where science ‘took off’ independently, so to speak …
[F]rom the time of Einstein, Neils Bohr and the Cavendish Laboratory, science no longer existed to serve human needs, but in its own right. When scientists could use a mathematical idea to transform matter they had achieved the same quasi-magical relationship with the material world as artists.
- Oh, that’s interesting, said Jewel, I need to think about that.
- Indeed, there’s a lot to think about here. Clark makes no bones about his disapproval of major aspects of this ‘heroic materialism’. But, then, we have to put the whole thing in context with its successes.
From a desk drawer Dean produced a copy of an old McKinsey Quarterly and read out loud:
Life isn’t drastically better for billions of people today than it was in 1800 because we are allocating the resources of the 19th-century economy more efficiently. Rather, it is better because we have life-saving antibiotics, indoor plumbing, motorized transport, access to vast amounts of information, and an enormous number of technical and social innovations that have become available to much (if not yet all) of the world’s population. The genius of capitalism is that it both creates incentives for solving human problems and makes those solutions widely available. And it is solutions to human problems that define prosperity, not money.2
- Heroic materialism enabled these developments which, in turn, enabled the human population to grow eightfold to eight billion people. But, you know as well as I do, these factors are considered by many to have been achieved by treating other humans oppressively, and by harming other species and the planet itself. There is even a constituency that argues we must undo much of what has been done, even to the extent of reducing the human population by 75 percent or more.
- Well, said Jewel, I don’t know about dramatic population reduction but I do have sympathy with some of those points.
- Fair enough, said Dean. Whatever the truth of it all, there is a sense that, for the West, the Sun is dipping below the horizon. Was what we once thought of as a period of discovery, invention and heroic success actually a period of unfairness and abuse? Was the West’s dominance achieved at the expense of everyone else? Those are issues we need to consider.
- Cool, said Jewel, I think I’ll maybe enjoy this project after all. But I still don’t get that thing about ‘the gyre’.
Dean smiled: I’m just beginning to get my head around it. You’ll be up to speed far more quickly than me because there are some mathematical elements, but here’s my understanding so far. First, to get a context, as you’ve just seen, Clark quotes six lines of Yeats’s poem - it’s called The Second Coming by the way - but there are two lines just before those six. The poem actually begins with …
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Then it goes into ‘Things fall apart…” So, ‘gyre’ - what is that? Think of a whirlwind, a maelstrom, a cone of energy that, at its inception, is tightly packed and ultra-powerful but, as time passes, weakens so that the cone spreads wider and wider, with the dissipating energy becoming thinner and thinner, weaker and weaker. It’s more complicated than that but will that do for starters? You get the idea? Periodically, a new life concept arrives as a force, apparently out of nowhere, to overthrow an existing concept and cause significant change to the way that people think of and relate to their very existences.
- There’s got to be a detailed explanation somewhere? said Jewel, enquiringly.
Dean reached for a paperback on the desk. Here it is, he said, passing the book over to her.
- A Vision3, Jewel read out the title.
Dean nodded: Yes, first written, 1925. I’ve been trying to get my head around it. Some of it is straightforward enough but a lot of it is really weird. And there’s 400 pages!
- Sounds like fun, said Jewel.
- That’s one way of putting it. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Jewel nodded.
- In the meantime, while it comes to mind, continued Dean, let me just mention Gustave Flaubert.
Jewel laughed: Flaubert? Are you telling me we’re going straight from a mystical Irish poet to a sexy 19th-century French writer? I read Madame Bovary years ago. Great book.
- There you are then, said Dean, cheerfully, you’re halfway there. In Yeats’s book you’ll find that he references Flaubert because, apparently, Flaubert talked about writing a story called ‘La Spirale’ which is related to the gyre phenomenon … but he died before he got round to it.
- Careless, said Jewel.
- ‘Twas rather, wasn’t it. Dean was searching once again among the papers on his desk. Anyway, it prompted me to look up any other stuff I’d got by Flaubert. He triumphantly held up yet another book. And I found this: an edition of The First Temptation Of St Anthony. And, in it, there’s an introduction by a British journalist, author and editor called E.B. Osborn (1867-1938). He wrote that Flaubert …
… had already in his inexorable young mind, contemptuous of others’ experience, divided the world’s history into three periods: Paganism, Christianism, Asinism. He insisted that the age into which he was born was Asinism: an era in which science so-called tramples on the old dogmas with a far more fatuous dogmatism of its own, when the scientific dogma of equality is killing aristocracy, that perfected culture which is the rare and precious flowering of mankind’s efforts since memory’s morning began.4
- Wow! Fascinating! exclaimed Jewel. “The scientific dogma of equality”! One suspects that, if they found equality - equal opportunity - so problematic, Messrs Osborn and Flaubert would have been horrified by today’s Equity - equal outcome.
- Yes, interesting to see quite how dramatically ideas change, isn’t it. So, you’re happy to get involved with the project? asked Dean.
Jewel, thumbing through Civilisation, looked up with a smile. Yes, she said, but I think we should take note of one of Kenneth Clark’s points.
- What’s that?
Jewel read out …
We have no idea where we are going, and sweeping, confident articles on the future seem to me, intellectually, the most disreputable of all forms of public utterance.
Dean laughed: Copy that.
Thanks for reading.
Clark, Alan. Civilisation, a personal view (1969) (The Folio Society 1999)
Beinhocker, Eric and Hanauer, Nick in Redefining Capitalism, McKinsey Quarterly (September 2014)I am currently
Yeats, W.B. A Vision (1925), Volume XIII of The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats. Edited by Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper (2008)
Flaubert, Gustave. The First Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874). In the limited edition published by John Lane The Bodley Head (1924) Translation: René Francis. Illustration: Jean de Bosschère. Introduction: E.B. Osborn.