11 things about the future I am contemplating

The future will be homemade

Life will be a niche in the future

The future will be human

A few big things will fail

The only agreed morality will be sustainability

The future will be opt in/sign up not opt out.

New forms of family and old forms of family will still be paramount

The future will involve fasting: food fasting and information/stimulation fasting. We’ve messed up our physical and mental digestion through over eating and we are stressed and distorted from too much information- people will regularly fast from both.

The future will be business not nation driven.

The future will tend away from either/or,  and, this/that

The future will be about growing things yourself

Time spent not driving/commuting will be seen as a major form of success

altitude

Here is a link to an article I wrote for the excellent essay magazine AEON on altitude and how it helps and hinders life...http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/altitude-sickness-keeps-us-grounded/

Interview with Alias Johnny Stiletto

This pic of Francis Bacon- his favourite portrait- is just one of the more famous photographs in Johnny Stiletto's genre defying collection of photos and mini-essays: Shots from the Hip

I found the book a fascinating and refreshing take on photography- very inspiring for anyone at all interested in street photography- unique and utterly memorable photos and far and away the best writing on the subject. Johnny kindly agreed to be interviewed- here are his answers to my questions...

Q1: Your unexpected and quite brilliant photographs in Shots from the Hip amount to a kind of intellectual autobiography; it becomes a revealing diary but also a series of autobiographical essays touching on the two wars, women, film, London, ageing. It really is 'another way of looking through the camera'- why aren't there more books like this? Are there any you can think of?

A: What I try and do with my photographs is tell stories, quite often the story isn't particularly clear at the time I take the shot, I might have a feeling, or the circumstances might be interesting or even exciting so I try and shoot as intuitively as possible. Afterwards the shots are there and the circumstances have settled into some sort of logic or story and that's the point at which I look at the shot, think about what was happening at the time, what I was thinking about and what I was going through and write round it and through it. Like most people I suppose my thoughts are all over the place a lot of the time. Shots From The Hip took over ten years to shoot, photographing on a very regular basis. Commissioning editors are quite brutal and they want to see a proposal of somewhere between 120 and 160 shots that exist now and not in the future. They want to see photographs that are immediate, original, or to put it another way photographs they like. They also want to see something you’ve written and had published. They don't buy hopes, maybes, bluff, excuses or it'll be alright on the night. The photographs have to be taken by one person, if you include other people’s photographs and describe how they shoot them, you’re writing fiction. You just have to be very focused to do these kind of books and you're rather held to ransom by the quality of the shots you get so this may account for the fact that there aren’t many or any books like Shots.

Q2.I notice you mention that you shouldn't be a slave of the camera- which is something Daido Moryama also says, were you influenced by his street photography at all? If so, how?

If I'm completely totally honest I don't know Daido Moryama so that really slices the top off the question. Sorry about that. All I can say, though, Don't be frightened of the camera, don't be in awe of it, it's just a machine, a technical slave, feel comfortable with it, press the button when you see something you like or interests you and let the camera do the work. Cameras aren’t children, they’re grown ups, they can look after themselves.

Q3. I'm interested in the way words and pictures work together- something that is really effective about Shots from the hip- how far into taking the pictures did you plan it is as an essay/manifesto?

A:It was always going to be about words and pictures and again, I think goes back to telling stories and I think pictures quite often need a bit of help. Also if you think about it, words and pictures slide naturally together. Think about press ads, films, posters, comic books, editorial. Words and pictures are working partners, words can do things that pictures can't like setting a scene and a time and pictures capture emotion. When you add words to a picture you quite often add a layer of excitement that isn't there in the picture alone. With words you can direct people into a photograph, get them to look into it, see it your way, linger, enjoy, I hope. Putting words and pictures together just seems a natural thing to do.

Q4. You used an OM SLR (I think) for 'Shots', digital makes it easier - or does it?

A:They're two different things and they're both brilliant. In practical terms shooting digital is much cheaper, no negs, no prints. Also you can shoot a lot more on digital and you don't really have to worry about reloading, flicking the winder or the noise of the shutter. Digital is faster and quieter, the only thing I'm very careful of is using small memory cards- if you get stopped or somebody gets upset about a shot you might have to hand over the card, (the Paris police are particularly excellent at this and 75% of them are plain clothes) so if you've got a weeks of work on a memory card you risk losing a lot. What I like about film is that you can force it to the limits and does some very interesting things by accident. In a way I'm always looking for small accidents in the shots I take. I don't like them fixed and perfect, again it goes back to the story telling thing, if everything's frozen and perfect there's nothing left to read into it. It's much harder to bend digital, it's do-able but more difficult. I think that’s the overall problem with digital, it’s often a bit too precise everything’s there and that’s not really how we see things, in reality eyesight is a series of slightly imperfect impressions. You can give digital a slightly more narrative filmic look by under exposing by two thirds of a stop, in other words by making the exposure slightly darker than the camera’s programmed to do and it’s forced into doing a bit of dancing in the dark. On balance, if I'm completely honest I think it's archaic in 2015 to be shooting film.

Q5. What other photographers are there that mean something to you and you have learnt from, and what you have learnt from them?

A:Robert Capa is the photographer who I really first became aware of and who influenced me most. He photographed the D Day landings and most of the film was destroyed in excitement by the lab, about 12 shots survived and one of them is a very blurred image of a GI in the water struggling to the beach, you know nothing about the detail or the man and everything about everything else. That for me is when photographs stepped out of the phone booth and became superman. If there's a point the point is that you don't need to do crisp perfect to tell a story or take a great shot, always try and leave something to the imagination.

Q6. What is the most useful encapsulated advice you have for street photographers?

A:Blend, be part of what’s going on and switch off the auto focus light.

Q7. The second most useful?

A:Shoot your life. The best photographer's photographs are all about them. Hello Me. They photograph the times they live in, the places they inhabit, the people they come into contact with the events that surround them. It’s a sort of universal rule, doesn’t matter what you’re shooting, interiors, fashion, war, reportage, it’s the personal bit, the interconnection with what’s happing in front and around the camera. Good photographs are autobiographies.

Q8. Anything else on mixing writing and photography that comes to mind?

A:Final last thing is a thought: if you're writing to a photograph it's often very nice to write to music.

Johnny Stiletto

Many Thanks.

Johnny Stiletto' s excellent website can be found here.

Shots from the Hip can be bought here on amazon

Look closer, don't try harder

Mulray was fitter and stronger than me by a long way. He exercised at the gym, he did weights and he ran. I was going through a period of doing no more exercise than walking and a little gardening. I wasn’t inactive, but I was far from being the fitness fanatic that Mulray had become. One day, we found ourselves at a children’s party. The father of the bithday lad- a class mate of my son and Mulray’s daughter- had rigged up a thick climbing rope from a high tree branch. The kid’s eventually tired of swinging on it and I saw Mulray make an experimental effort at climbing it. He got a few feet off the ground and seemed to get stuck. Then he dropped lightly to his feet. “It’s virtually impossible, climbing ropes,” he told me. I couldn’t help myself. Without a word I shimmied up that rope right to the top, hauled myself up to the branch looked around as if enjoying the new view (it wasn’t bad) and then slid hand over hand back to the ground. I hadn’t climbed a rope in twenty years. Mulray muttered that I must have ‘strong arms’. I told him that his were almost certainly stronger than mine. But that didn’t matter- climbing ropes is a matter of co-ordination, not strength. I said I’d show him. He watched, then he had a go. I then saw his problem. He didn’t realise you just gripped for a few seconds with the hands, enough to get a foot grip. Then you pushed, again for just a concentrated moment, so that your hands could slide up. You’re never in a static position, gripping with your hands and feet and PULLING yourself up as if doing a chin-up. Except that’s where he kept finding himself. His whole perception of rope climbing was that it was ‘difficult’- and that it looked like doing a pull-up, which is one of the harder things you can do in a gym. And each time he failed he told himself off for not having ‘enough strength’.

It was a challenge to try and teach him how to climb the rope. First I told him to lose any idea of hauling yourself up. Think of pushing yourself up with your legs. The hands are just to stabilise the procedure and to hold you in place for the brief moment when you move your legs up to a new gripping position. I then told him to imagine climbing as about switching as efficiently as possible with as little lag as possible between hands and feet. With these two images in mind- using legs to push and climbing as a dynamic switching from hands to feet and back again, he was – after a few days – able to learn how to climb a rope.

When we approach a new enterprise we often have a wrong perception of how difficult it is. We often compare it to something simpler else that looks similar- but may well be very different, may well be harder. We often get ourselves into ‘static’ situations. For example insisting that you have a clear guarantee of profits before starting a new business, when in fact all businesses are dynamic enterprises where results aren’t obvious until you are actually trading. This leads to all sorts of chicken and egg situations- but instead of avoiding these and sidelining them we should realise they are the NORM. People moan and say you can’t get a job without experience, and you can’t get experience without a job. This kind of seemingly closed loop describes real life, not some career guidance counsellor’s fantasy. Of course you can take a course to break the vicious circle, but that it is only one of many ways in- after all everyone else somehow managed to get a job despite the same handicap. One of the most successful people- in the wider sense- I know is a film location scout. This is a very specialised and fascinating job- and there are no courses and jobs are never advertised. He told me that after leaving university- where he studied English and got a poor degree because he wasn’t very interested- he decided that finding film locations would be a great job. He told me that he spent over a year finding the right person and the right way into the business- finding someone who would take him on as a ‘runner’, a menial assistant- yet also give him a chance later. He didn’t send off hundreds of applications- only one. But he did his research first- and he started from being an outsider with no contacts.

We are trained at school to look for static situations and identify them as ‘the truth’ or as a truthful representation. We are trained to sneer at or laugh at or raise an ironic eyebrow at closed loops- ‘you can’t get an agent until you’ve published a book, you can’t publish a book until you have an agent’, ‘you need confidence to make a sale, but only a sale will give you confidence’, ‘to make money you need money’- the list is long, maybe endless, because these closed loops are the closest we can get, without lengthy explanations like this one, of depicting the intractable and even mysterious nature of a dynamic situation from the static perspective of a short sentence or two.

One way of ‘trying too hard’ is to use a static representation as your guide- and then simply bust a gut ‘trying’. In the job/experience situation this would be sending out hundreds of applications. Instead, you have to embrace any ‘closed’ dynamic representation and use that as your starting point. That’s the REALITY. Then look for ways to get a small grip, a way to catch hold somewhere of the whirling embrace that is a dynamic situation. It often bewilders beginners in any field that the ‘turning up is 75% of success rule’ should hold. They think that ‘talent’ or ‘hard work’ should be pre-eminent. But these are static concepts. Turning-up is a dynamic concept. It implies performance over time. And that is what counts.

Mulray tried to climb the rope with a static image in his head. Instead of really looking closely at what people did when they climbed, he looked for a static image he could embrace. Looking closely at any human activity gives all sorts of clues to the dynamic reality. Once he had a DYNAMIC image he succeeded. By embracing contradiction, revelling in incongruity, seeing paradoxes, we can train ourselves to see dynamic reality more easily. You can then begin to work out a strategy to get on board whatever you seek to do. One very good source of stories and jokes that represent exactly this are the Mulla Nasrudin stories as retold by Idries Shah- all available on Amazon.

Polymathic Synergy #2

Polymathic Synergy is right at the heart of why polymathics gives you such an advantage over the inward looking specialist. I am not of course talking about the highly successful 'specialist' who, in order to appear normal, hides his multifarious sources of inspiration, is, in fact, a covert polymath. As Professor Robert Root-Bernstein has found:

“Almost all Nobel laureates in the sciences actively engage in arts as adults. They are twenty-five times as likely as the average scientist to sing, dance, or act; seventeen times as likely to be a visual artist; twelve times more likely to write poetry and literature; eight times more likely to do woodworking or some other craft; four times as likely to be a musician; and twice as likely to be a photographer.”

(Professor Robert Root-Bernstein of Michigan State University writing in the Journal of Psychology of Science and Technology Vol 1 No.2 2008.)

What's the use of specialising?

Formal and Informal views on specialisation

Most people moan about ‘specialists’ but they definitely want to boast about the ‘top specialist’ they are seeing for their particular health problem. Most people hate the boredom of studying one tiny thing- I read about a man who spent four years in the crown of a baobab tree writing his Phd on the micro-organisms living in just that one five square foot area- he rebelled in the end which seems a normal enough reaction.

The culture we live in has a formal appreciation of specialisation (whereas, say, Bedouin or plains Indian culture doesn’t).

The distinction between what is formally accepted in a culture and informally accepted is a powerful tool of analysis first used by the US anthropologist Edward T Hall. In the US it is formally accepted that one should be relaxed on a first meeting. Everyone is informally tense, but pretends to be relaxed. In Japan it is formally accepted that one will be tense and nervous on a first meeting. It is meant to be wooden. Even if you feel relaxed you should act a bit stiff the first time you meet someone- it shows respect. I was always shocked at the change between a first and second meeting in Japan- second time around you can be yourself and be relaxed.

In the UK the formal culture was far stiffer than the US- but it’s changing. In the US it shows you like someone when you are ‘relaxed’ around them and help yourself to food from their fridge. To raid a friend’s fridge usually requires invitation in the UK- but not everywhere- slowly the US notion of being relaxed equalling friendliness is permeating.

A formal appreciation means that it is the default you reach for when you aren’t sure of your social footing. When I was at school there was a ‘formal appreciation’ of watching the TV in the evening and talking about it at school the next day. Because I was banned from watching certain channels I used to listen to the general conversation, pick up the relevant stuff, and then recycle it as if I had actually watched that program. No one cared or noticed. Informally I was ignorant of the TV, formally I knew my stuff.

An ‘informal appreciation’ is what people do and say among their most intimate friends and acquaintances. They may even have never conceptualised the little ‘true’ observations they make. Comedians, in the UK at least, make a good living taking informally accepted insights and ‘formalising’ them by having the courage to deliver them to the mainstream.

In terms of (not especially funny) comedic observation the word ‘having a senior moment’ was an informal recognition of the widespread nature of cognitive decay in the late middle-aged. It’s part of the formal culture now after comedians used it for a while to get laughs.

Watching and liking football was something that men did until the 1990s- and only informally did women do it. Now we have female football commentators. Liking football has been formally accepted as part of the mainstream culture for everyone.

The ‘gap year’ was something a few people who applied to Oxford and Cambridge did (because the lateness of the entrance exams meant you had a gap before going up)– it was never mentioned outside the narrow culture of those universities. But once much larger numbers became students it was easier to defer entry to any university- the gap year became formalised into mainstream culture.

These examples are only included to get you thinking about the formal and the informal. Many people cleave to the formal. They want to ‘belong’ to the main group. This kind of person uses phrases current on television. Inevitably, whatever their age group, they are already behind the times. Things move on and the informal is always being turned into the formal while new truths, relevances, social practices evolve and emerge. Those who are more observant and less concerned about ‘fitting in’ live more in the informal world than the formal one.

Which brings us to specialisation.

Specialising has been thoroughly formalised for a century or more. The idea of a ‘well rounded man’- once a formal concept, probably would now be used by a mainstream comedian to signify a tubby chap. The formal culture has one agenda on experts and specialists: they are the final word on everything. Of course informally we moan about them, we love it when they are proved wrong. But the measure is: listen to the radio or TV- they always announce a pundit as ‘an expert’ or ‘specialist on X’. I’ve had it happen myself when I went on Radio 4 to talk about a dam in Africa (because I wrote a general book on the Nile) and the producer kept calling me Dr until I explained I wasn’t one. It diminished his program to have a non-specialist- irrespective of what I knew. Just like knowing the content of th TV shows as a kid without watching, we know that many ‘specialists’ have formal acceptance way beyond their competence. And vice versa.

Specialisation- what is it good for?

We know what- doing repetitive tasks. Everything we do has a start-up and wind-down time. If you have a sequence of tasks there is a lot of in between time starting up and winding down between each task. This is eliminated if you simply do the same thing again and again. Time is saved. Production rises. The job specialisation of the production line- first utilised in the making of needles in the 17^th century, but reaching its logical conclusion with the moving production line of Henry Ford- breaks every big job down into the component parts that can be most quickly and easily repeated.

Which is why we hate it. Anyone who has worked on a production line for any length of time is usually groaning with inner boredom. It’s one reason for industrial sabotage. Anything to have a laugh on a Friday afternoon. At the old BL plant in Cowley they would weld up banana skins into the subframe. The mysterious smell could never be removed.

From its very beginning everyone has known that increasing specialisation leads to boredom. And yet everyone still extols it- as long as it is other people actually doing the specialising.

And then we have non-physical specialisation. Professional class specialists- doctors, lawyers, scientists. Our complex culture has a place for all of them because it is commonly agreed that knowledge/information is so vastly expanded now that one man or women can only hope to really know a tiny area. What this actually means is that for most of a person’s academic career they are going further and further up an ever narrowing path that finally becomes the single-track that they themselves occupy.

Specialisation makes sense in many many areas. A lawyer who deals with tax problems more than marriage problems should be the go-to guy for a tax question. A mechanic who fixes lots of Daimlers should be good for fixing another.

Strangely this isn’t always the case. But the general principle seems to make sense.

Learning and specialisation

If you want to learn anything you have to focus. No distractions. Which implies specialisation. At least for a time. If you want to master anything you have to focus- perhaps for years- which implies specialisation. But once you’ve mastered, say, golf- which, if we are to believe the 10,000 hour rule, should, at 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year take five years- what then? Couldn’t you also master dentistry? And then flute playing? Using the five year rule, a normal 40 year working life could conceivably involve mastering 8 completely different subjects.

The fact is, when we focus, in our down-time we often just slack off. We do one thing a lot, and a lot of nothing too. Watching TV, drinking, playing golf without mastering it…Because doing one thing and only one things has risks- boredom, obsessiveness- we have to dilute it. So being a master takes longer than it should.

And once you are a master you have to sell yourself- you make it appear as a rare and difficult…specialisation.

But we should note that focus and learning, though they imply specialisation, and require it for limited periods of time, are not dependent on it in a broader perspective at all. One can focus, learn, use, and move on to another subject quite easily.

Philosophy and specialisation

But specialisation isn’t just about efficiency and focus- it also reflects a philosophical position. In the West man is an island, disconnected from others, generally, living and dying alone- even if he is embedded in a family or society- conceptually ‘being alone’ is a very Western concern. Descartes method of finding truth was to sit alone on top of a stove (or maybe inside it) and simply ignore everything and everyone else’s contribution. From this ‘lonely philosopher’ stance we get a straight line to the existential angst of the 20^th century. It may surprise many brought up in the western tradition that among nomadic people, for example, being connected is the starting point. It’s not even doubted. So that naturally leads you to a different place. Even before the marvels of technology blinded us, Western man was predisposed to making jobs lonely, repetitive, specialised, dull. When Bedouin change a tyre (or a lighbulb) they do it in twos, threes or even fours. It may or may not be more efficient but it sure as hell is more fun. As a doctor I was travelling with once observed- “I find it hard to conceive of a depressed Bedouin”. Nomads have many faults and problems- but suffering anomie isn’t one of them.

Where specialisation becomes mere dogma

What if you don’t want to do repetitive work? What if you want to be creative?

What happens when the start up time is actually useful? What happens when moving between different jobs actually improves productivity? By increasing perspective, creative ideas and an overall sense of the importance, or not, of each part of an operation.

Athletes warm up and warm down- it helps reduce injuries. Maybe doing the same task again and again not only causes repetitive strain injuries but also an equivalent mental injury…

Polymathics is about using specialisation as we have always used it- to focus and to learn. But it is also about curtailing the formal, dogmatic uses of specialisation. It is about seeing connection as the starting point, rather than a wistful, hoped for, end game.

The Border Guard effect

In bygone centuries when national borders were more vaguely defined than today, there was a natural merging across borders of cultures and peoples. Often nomads would traverse several countries. Once a border is well defined, the urge to police it is stronger. Territory is jealously guarded, any visitor is a potential invader. Therefore it makes sense to use border guards from the interior. This way they won't trun a blind eye to relatives sneaking back and forth. Over time, the country sealed by the border becomes very distinct from the 'other side'. There is a 'roll back' at the edges. Once they merged, now there is a sharp cut off.

This is not meant to be an idealised portrait, merely an analogy for the way we think about knowledge. Once we specialise we set up demarcation lines between subject areas- 'borders'- and this leads to policing of those borders by those with the highest incentive to make the subject distinctive- not those at the edge but those at the centre- the institutions and people who gain from the subject's independent existence. But in a global sense this doesn't serve us very well. Just as policed borders lead to cultural intolerance and ignorance, so, too, do borders in knowledge lead to a lack of creativity, narrowness and infertility. The 'roll back' at the edges emphasises the differences between this subject and others and this makes cross-fertilisation of new ideas harder. New ideas are seen as unwelcome immigrants, people to repel at the border.

What's more, the border guard effect guarantees a 'no man's land'- the machine guarded strip where no one goes- this dead zone is artificial, but it is actually the most fertile area for any sort of knowledge- where it comes into contact with something other and new.

To get funding or backing we need a label, a specialisation. We stop at the border and obey the machine gun logic. We follow an unnatural inward looking path, a turning-in, focusing on identity rather than seeking knowledge. Learning is about being open, and ignoring manmande borders.