Before I Forget…

Reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, the political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil”.  Eichmann, responsible for the slaughter of millions of Jews, had the appearance and even the mentality of a petty bureaucrat or administrator, crunching numbers and logistics that could have concerned widgets but happened to involve the mass murder of human beings.  The former employee of the Vacuum Oil Company was examined by a team of psychologists who pronounced him perfectly “normal” – “more normal at any rate than I am”, as one of them said with black humour, “after having examined him”.  When Arendt wrote, humanity was still reeling from the first total war in history, from the revelations of the Holocaust, the pitiful starvation of inmates at Belsen, the aftermath of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Evil loomed large and dramatic on the face of the planet, and it was something of a shock to find its incarnation in such commonplace, trite human beings as Eichmann and the thousands of others who were simply “obeying orders”.  Evil has not disappeared from the planet in the intervening years, but in most of Europe and in North America it has retreated from the limelight.  If finding banality was surprising for Arendt, it is now what we expect and what everywhere surrounds us.  We might feel grateful for small mercies and rejoice that today’s politicians do not stage Wagnerian rallies and line the streets with 100ft-high banners.  We find it reassuring to hear commonplaces uttered and we watch television programmes that are engineered precisely for that purpose (anyone caught saying anything difficult or original gets short shrift from Big Brother). 

But I am beginning to wonder whether Arendt’s formulation might not be reversed, and whether we should not concern ourselves more with the evil of banality.  One petty example is sports commentary.  At this time of year I turn couch potato for an hour or two each afternoon to watch tennis or listen to the cricket (I used to watch that, too, until it was sold down the river to Sky).  Cricket in particular has produced its fair share of poetic commentary, from the burred Hampshire lyricism of John Arlott to the bone-dry crispness of Richie Benaud.  But poetry, whimsy and originality are every day less in evidence.  Tennis commentators (apart from the admirable Frew MacMillan and the ever-more elusive John McEnroe) seem to be chosen for locker room bonhomie rather than any gift for language or analysis.  Commenting on the tattooed quotation from Dostoevsky that the maverick Serbian Janko Tipsaverich sports on one arm, the ever-trite Andrew Castle joked to the equally uninspired John Lloyd: “Oh, he’s intelligent too – that wasn’t what we used to read, was it Lloydy?”  The idea, it seems, whether you are a player or a commentator, is to be “one of the lads”.  Test Match Special, one of the truly great English eccentric creations, the one sports programme that comes into its own when play is suspended during breaks for rain, has been steadily losing its unique flavour, reminiscent of the genteel English surrealism of the Ealing comedies.  “There’s really nothing to say,” opined the New Zealand commentator Jeremy Coney recently – not a sentiment that could ever have passed the lips of the great Brian Johnston.  The most popular purveyor of classical music in the UK is Classic FM, the radio station that treats classical music as if it was chocolate – and not even good chocolate, but the kind of milky, sugary nothingness that should have been banned long ago by the EU.  The early evening offering on Classic FM is called Smooth Classics, as if the music of Beethoven and Schubert should slip down the gullet like baby food.

So the effect of banal commentary, and banal thinking in general, is to turn everything into undifferentiated pap.  What is banal is what has already been chewed over, a thousand times, by someone else, or thousands of others.  What is wrong with that?  In the 1950s, the Gestalt therapists Fritz Perls, Ralph Hefferline and Paul Goodman explored the connection between physical eating and spiritual nourishment: as adults, it turns out, just as we need to engage in an active process of selecting our food, biting, chewing and digesting, so “we need to be able to ‘bite off’ and ‘chew’ experience so as to extract its healthy nourishment … to the extent that you have cluttered your personality with gulped-down morsels of this and that, you have impaired your ability to think and act on your own.”  The danger of banality is an insidious one.  Banality weakens our intellectual, spiritual and ethical muscles, rendering us flabby thinkers, unable or unwilling to chew over the difficult matter of experience and make it part of us.  The connection between the banality of evil and the evil of banality is the danger of a surrender of our human powers of discrimination.  We always need to be discriminating, and we always need to be working on refining our powers of discrimination, or one day we might find we can no longer distinguish between a human being and a widget.

Reference : http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0f455350-43ea-11dd-842e-0000779fd2ac.html

One of the most brilliant FT cartoons in a while -

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Unintentionally hilarious article in last weekend’d FT.  Classic line : “He hasn’t said an interesting sentence in his life”.  Ouch.

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I am sure I am going to dislike Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  In his books on the importance of the improbable – Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan – he adopts an unpleasantly sneering tone towards the fools who just don’t get it.  He spreads his contempt around liberally.  But he is particularly dismissive of economists, businessmen, the French and financial journalists in suits.  As a financial journalist in a suit, I am spoiling for a fight…..After working on Wall Street for 20 years, Taleb is scathing about its risk management and forecasting models which are more “therapy” than anything useful.  This is because they rely on past experience, like the Europeans who thought all swans were white until they discovered black swans in Australia.  Taleb, 48, who has studied at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the University of Paris, goes after some big targets.  These include Myron Scholes, the Nobel prizewinner behind the Black-Scholes model, a cornerstone of mathematical finance.  Scholes’ lofty response to the attacks was that he did not want to “glorify” Taleb by refuting what he said…..Although most attention tends to focus on “bad” Black Swans, there are also good Black Swans, he says, for instance in scientific research and drug discovery.  “There is a lot more randomness in biotechnology and any form of medical discovery.  The role of design is overestimated.  Every time we plan on trying to find a drug we don’t because it closes our mind.  How are we discovering drugs?  From the side-effects of other drugs.”  Researchers very often “change their story” when they discover something by accident to give the impression it was by design.  “The biggest discovery in cancer came from a mustard gas accident in Italy, not from the 130,000 compounds systematically tested by the National Cancer Institute.  They were not looking to improve the lives of older men when they discovered Viagra.” 

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As a Wall Street trader, Taleb focused on arbitrage, making money by exploiting tiny pricing anomalies between different markets.  He became convinced that the financial markets systematically underestimated the risk of big improbable events and says he made a fortune for his then employer – First Boston – when the stock market crashed in October 1987…..Taleb says his scepticism was influenced by the cultural complexity of his childhood. His parents were Greek-Orthodox, French citizens living in Lebanon, where he grew up during the civil war.  “If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades – one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.”  This triggered a very simple idea that he has been thinking about all his life.  “That is that things in the real world are far messier that in recorded history or in memory.”  But we find it hard to live with such messiness so we tend to look for causes and patterns that do not exist, what he terms the “narrative fallacy”…..His heroes are “erudites”, those who want to know more.  “The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.”…..So what has he got against…journalists?  “Lots of my friends are journalists,” he says with a straight face.  But they are under constant pressure to clarify a chaotic world.  The real villains are those whose refusal to admit the limits of their knowledge can cause serious damage.  These include economists “predicting 30 years of social security deficits when we don’t know what we are going to have for lunch tomorrow” and the doctors who thought they knew more than they did and killed their patients.  “Until the 20th century, the risk of dying was increased by going to a doctor, particularly in a hospital.”  Some of his critics have claimed that, taken to its logical conclusion, Taleb’s scepticism would lead to a kind of passive nihilism.  Not so, he says.  He is not arguing that all forecasting is pointless, for example.  “I am saying that we should first know the error rate and then make the prediction.  Because the error rate is far more relevant that the prediction.”  I ask how his views have shaped his life.  The key is to separate “the domain of the empirical and the domain of the sacred” he replies.  “I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic.  But I want to be fooled by randomness in art.  I want the ceremonial of religion, we are made for it.”  Taleb is conducting experiments to test his theory that we can only cope with so much scepticism and that people who are sceptical about religion are gullible in other ways.  “Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.”  He admits his extreme scepticism can lead to extreme conservatism.  “I believe it is dangerous to mess with complex systems and traditional things, such as religion or the environment.”…..By this stage I have been completely won over if not completely convinced…..

Reference : http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2855f64c-f976-11dc-9b7c-000077b07658.html

Tim Toles in The Washington Post on Mar 26th 2008.  Brilliant.

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