Airconditioning

Sitting in aircon drinking coffee and 

Singapore Coffee Shop
CC licensed. Click image to view source.

Hearing accents like my own 

I'm looking out through picture-frame glass 

At the local coffee shop across the road. 

The price of my coffee would have 

Bought me breakfast over there. 

I could say I’ve already eaten - 

Which is true - 

But I also wanted the comfort 

Of the familiar, 

Of a filtered environment 

Where I can breathe easy. 

In the humidity over there 

And the noise of passing traffic 

I'm a little less in control, 

A little less comfortable. 

Here, in my ubiquitous 

Coffee shop, 

I can quietly turn my back 

On the world I am colonising.

The Overstory by Richard Powers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This novel reads like an epic poem to the beauty and complexity of the natural world; an invocation to understand how little we know and to know how little we understand.

"Life will not answer to reason" Powers reminds us, "and meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it." In the understory of this wildly branching narrative are the humans who live within the systems of the natural world. Trees, and nature more generally, form a metaphor for human interdependence and the slow, primitive evolution of human reason.

Powers voice is clipped, precise, almost scientific, but unambiguously poetic. This is undoubtedly a text where meaning trumps reason - but never fails to acknowledge its debt.

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What price to pay?

Lin Biao
CC Wiki commons

Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it. 

Richard Powers Overstory Loc 2075

A foreigner with a little language

Is still a novelty in 

Hangzhou in the 90s.

So much so that I 

Bargain a pair of gloves, 

For a knock-down price.

My Chinese friend is

Miffed when he goes back 

The next night but

Can’t do so well.

“How come you sold it 

Cheeper to the foreigner?”

He asks and is answered

With a shrug.

I buy a plaque of Mao

But pass over a similar

Memento of Lin Biao -

The official villain of 

Modern Chinese history. 

It costs 5 times more.

Later that day we

Visit Lin Biao’s 

Holiday compound. 

Unused for years

It feels like a wealthy 

European suburb.

Acres of manicured 

Forest with several 

Two storied villas 

Dotted about.

Delightful in their 

Colours and porticoes

But eerie in their emptiness.

Entering one villa we

Go behind the stairs 

To find a metal 

Blast door and 

A passage.

The lights are on.

We descend

Into a network 

Of bunkers;

Choose the path 

That is lit; 

Walk down 

Concrete corridors 

And through rooms

Clad with iron.

30 million dead,

The price of Mao’s

Great Leap Forward.

Another 20 in the

Cultural Revolution

For which Lin and the rest 

Of the Gang of 4 

Took the fall. 

His last stand 

Wasn’t in this bunker 

But in an airplane 

Lost over Mongolia.

Mao took some blame too.

80% good, 20% bad

Is the official Communist 

Party valuation. 

The gentle dean of 

The department 

At my Chinese University 

Tells of primary school

When he shouted

To scare birds

Who flew until they 

Dropped exhausted

So he could 

Jump on them.

Scapegoats for the

Failed harvest.

Miscalculation of a 

Horrifying leap 

In the dark.

When the path ascends

We find ourselves 

In a carpark.

The occupant of the ticket box

Looks perplexed

And doesn’t charge us

For coming the 

Wrong way out of

A history that 

Isn’t easy to value.

Kindred: A Cradle Mountain Love Story by Kate Legge
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm always intrigued by the decision writers must make when they choose to tell history. Too much factual information and it reads like a tax return, too much narrative intervention and it loses credibility. And then there's the decision about which history - which facts and what version? Another dead-white-male tale of political domination or something more social and intimate and perhaps less academically respectable?

In this account, I think Legge treads the right path for her subject. This is a tale of both the political history of a very significant part of the Australian landscape (literarily and figuratively) and the intimate relationships that gave the project vitality. Kindred is filled with the facts and figures that show just how important the history of Cradle Mountain National Park is to the history of Australia but it is also threaded with the relationship and character of the two imposing figures who were so integral to making the project come to fruition.

The scientific and political history is important, but human endeavour becomes truly meaningful when we can see the passion behind the achievements. Legge's history brings the wonder and beauty of Cradle Mountain to life through her telling of the tale of two people who knew and loved it intimately.

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Football

Jabiz has been trying to explain to me why football matters. And I understand, a bit, and respect the passion, a lot, but I'm still not sure I'm persuaded.

Flickerd [CC BY-SA 4.0]

My vision is clouded, of course, and explaining the history of my relationship with football will help explain why I raise an eyebrow when Jabiz starts talking passionately about the latest game results.

In both the US where Jabiz grew up, and Australia where my values were formed, football, in its different codes, is god. Almost literally I suspect. For many young boys in our cultures, the Saturday afternoon ritual of sitting with Dad and watching the game is an induction into the divine, a process of hero worship where the gods perform marvels and set the standards to which we aspire.

My childhood relationship with football was a little different. I grew up in a little country town where my father was the only doctor. Saturday mornings he did his morning clinic and in the afternoon we would be out in the garden, mowing the lawn, running around, playing with the dog.

Until, usually just on dinner time, the phone would ring. While we were sharing some rare family time with Dad, the rest of the town was at an Australian rules football match watching the visiting team do battle with the locals. As is required in Australian rules football, after a series of carefully choreographed interactions, one of the players would break the arm of another. The traditional first aid was to ply with alcohol, massage the ego, and then, when an appropriate amount of time had elapsed for both elements to take full effect, ring the doctor. Family dinner was inevitably interrupted by a drunk footballer who thought he was god supported by a tipsy coach who knew he was. My father would return home to a cold dinner and tell us in colourful Australian colloquialisms about his view of football.

It is through this clouded lens that I look at football. On Mondays at Primary School, I would listen to friends idolising a local farmer who had kicked a winning goal and wonder why this person deserved more respect than my father who had put his arm in a cast and missed dinner. Or why, when the nightly news came on, politics and war and humanity at large got less airplay that the football results and updates on the football tribunal and its decisions about which players should miss how many matches for hitting each other.

When I grew up and became a teacher, I found myself unable to converse with 50% of the staff for 50% of the year as normally decent, articulate human beings reverted to childhood tropes, congregating in their football tribes and throwing provocations at their foes. I once alienated half of a Grade 8 class by writing on the board that "football is the rubbish tip into which we pour our social intelligence".

My history with football hasn't been pretty. With age, I have mellowed a bit. I admire the work that the Australian Football League has done to actively address racism. The AFL seems uniquely culturally positioned to challenge racism and other cultural illnesses and it is to their credit that they have begun to do so. The latent aggression in football still worries me but maybe this stylised conflict acts as a social catharsis and is protective against other forms of violence. Maybe.

I don't hate football, but I haven't yet found in it enough good to warrant the time and effort needed to read its stories. And if I want melodrama, politics is scripting better episodes.

Timefulness

These three powerful books have in common a concern for how we use reason to navigate the dilemmas of our times. Being “Timeful”, “Factful” and aware of “Deep Time” as we build the stories that make sense of ourselves, means stepping outside of our immediate reality and looking to see where we fit in a much bigger scheme of things. It means seeing ourselves as deeply embedded in myriad complex systems and working with humility and a little awe to understand and act.

Below I’ve copied my thinking about each book or you can read the original reviews here on Goodreads.

Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World by Marcia Bjornerud
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Part geology lesson, part teleology and part plea to take seriously our responsibilities to our children and the planet.

By taking the long view of history (that’s billions of years), Bjornerud reminds us that the human species is part of something very much bigger than ourselves. We are the product of evolutionary systems that have been - literally - millennia in the making and which wax and wane and twist and turn with startling complexity. Chemicals form and combine and are stirred by the revolutions of the planet, pounded by forces from within and without and heated and cooled into microscopic crystals and massive continents. It is a dance which is stunning to observe but built on a choreography we only dimly understand.

It’s too easy as a non-geologist to look at at the world and see stability. Rocks, after all, are rocks and the point of them is that they are stable. The seasons come and go according to an immutable rhythm and, whilst human history changes at an often dizzying rate, the physical world around us is the stability we need to “ground” our human experience.

This, however, is a profoundly dangerous delusion. Just as biological systems change and evolve, so too does the geological world; all that is different is the timescale. Bjornerud reminds us that ‘rocks are not nouns but verbs—visible evidence of processes: a volcanic eruption, the accretion of a coral reef, the growth of a mountain belt.’ (p. 8) As we enter the Anthropocene (the first geological time period in which ‘rates of environmental change caused by humans outstripped those by many natural geologic and biological processes’ p.128) shortsighted human timescales are compressing natural systems to create pressures that are potentially catastrophic.

The evidence is there in the geological record for what can happen when systems are this far out of joint. But if there is one message that is clear in Bjornerud’s description of geology, it is that things are complex. What exact outcomes human behaviour will have on natural systems through the Anthropocene isn’t clear: that we are having an effect and that that effect is already causing significant change is unambiguous.

How we respond to complexity seems to be one of the greatest challenges faced by humanity at the moment. Shortsighted political responses that put time into soundbites and reduce complexity to polarised binaries are not the answer. In contrast, the concept of “timefulness” is a useful tool because it opens a space for engaging with all the systems that act on our complex reality - both those within the timespan of a human life and those systems that function within the timespan of a planet. Bjornerud tells us that: 

In Greek, there is a useful distinction between time as something that simply marches on—chronos, and time that is defined within a narrative—kairos . Hutton [one of the founders of the discipline of Geology] gave us the first glimmers of planetary chronos , but the task of calibrating it, and adding kairos, has consumed geologists for the past two centuries. (p.26) 

It is in this distinction between chronos and kairos that I find the real heart of this book. Mechanical chronos measures reality, human kairos gives it meaning. “Timefulness” gives us a tool to help measure and understand our world and to write more just stories not just for our own time, but also for the time of generations yet to come.

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There are so many things to love about this book. Let me begin with a quote: 

"The world cannot be understood without numbers, nor through numbers alone. A country cannot function without a government, but the government cannot solve every problem. Neither the public sector nor the private sector is always the answer. No single measure of a good society can drive every other aspect of its development. It's not either/or. It's both and it's case-by-case." (p. 201) 

Rosling is a master statistician but statistics is not his master. Part psychologist, part storyteller and part researcher, Rosling's pragmatism describes a world full of hope and possibility without hiding the challenges and the dangers. He points out that humanity is achieving great things even if our instincts cause us to miss much that is happening. This is a book about bias as much as it is about statistics and a book about the importance of context and navigating through the realities of a complex world with an open mind and a generous spirit.

The world lost a great man when Rosling died in early 2017. This book is an important part of a powerful legacy.

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A remarkable book. It strikes me that it reframes history to focus less on the social interaction of humans and more on the way humans fit within systems. It's not so much a history about the political interactions of humans, but a history of the way, throughout time, systems have evolved, thrived and sometimes died. Although humans are central to the story, we are not the most powerful players and, in our dance with entropy, we have a lot of steps still to learn.

One of the key ideas I found myself reflecting on was that the binary “human/nature” is simplistic and unhelpful. It sets too narrow an historical vision and sees humans only in the political context of a few thousand odd years of history. A better historical vision sees humans as a part of nature, recently evolved and acting within a complex system which may or may not be sustainable. Whether we are responsible for climate change is not the most important question; far more important is "can we use our skills and understandings to act within the natural systems of our biosphere to make it sustainable?" And just to be clear, a non-sustainable system is one that dies. Christian reminds me that, whilst my lifespan may be too short for the timescale of systems sustainability to have too detrimental an impact on me, the next half dozen generations to follow will be severely impacted. This impact can be positive or negative and decisions we make now will be decisive.

One last observation: for my colleagues at United World Colleges, this is an important book also because it reads almost as a manifesto for the teaching of history with a UWC agenda. No accident perhaps given that the author is a graduate of UWC Atlantic College. The Big History Project is well worth a look. And Christian's dedication says it all: 

"I dedicate this book to my family, to my grandchildren, Daniel Richard and Evie Rose Molly, and to all students everywhere as they embark on the momentous challenge of building a better world."

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And lastly, a different, glorious, take on timefulness:

The Clock of the Long Now from Public Record on Vimeo.

The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing by Merve Emre
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is not an easy book to quantify. Emre begins with a critique of the Myers-Briggs test but, having explained that the test in not valid in the scientific sense, she goes on to write a book which is far more interesting than a simple critique. Her project is to explore where the Myers-Briggs test comes from - a fascinating slice of 20th century history on its own - and how and why it has become so deeply embedded in modern society.

It was in Emre's discussion of Michel Foucault's concept of the "laboratory of power" that much of the power and danger of the test emerged - for me at least. Foucault argues that in framing the world in particular ways, the scientific project limits understanding to those dimensions. In the case of the Myers-Briggs, the 16 dimensions based on 4 binary constructions subtly define and confine the insights of test-takers. Subjects become "introverted" or "extraverted" because those are the only options. And the insistence of the MBTI organisation that personalities never change means that the possibility that individuals behave in different ways at different times in different contexts is completely discounted. There's a fatalism to the test which can provide stability in a complex world but also injects an unsettling simplicity.

Emre's book provides an alternative to that simplicity. Hers is a complex exploration of identity embedded in historical context. The personalities she describes change and evolve as they intersect with others and with happenstance. Most certainly there are themes and consistencies that emerge across the text, but these understandings recognise the meaning that comes through contradiction and the poetry of personality which provides a humanity beyond type.

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