Chess player Magnus Carlsen has said he is an intuitive player rather than a meticulous calculator of moves and consequences. He calculates of course but he has said that calculation mostly confirms the move he has already chosen intuitively, the move which best fits the pattern of the game.
Outside of chess we are all like this to some degree. We see the latest political appointment take a quick look at the person’s history and like Magnus Carlsen we intuitively know if it’s a good, bad or indifferent appointment. We may flip back to bolster the intuition with reasons, but intuition doesn’t work on nothing. As with chess and many other areas of life, it’s what we sometimes call pattern recognition.
We accumulate a vast repertoire of experience, but the vastness of experience isn’t something we trawl through in search of reasons, instead we recognise patterns. Ideology though - that’s another matter. Ideology imposes patterns which are not drawn from our own experience, so neither are the reasons.
Anyone unconstrained by ideology has known for some time that UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is too limited, too ideologically motivated and too evasive to be an effective political leader. Knowing this from an early stage was partly due to the pattern recognition that is intuition. The reasons came later when the painfully obvious incompetence kicked in.
For example, one problem our intuition spotted in Keir Starmer, a pattern we unerringly recognised, is not dissimilar to that terrible lack of frankness Arnold Bennett wrote about in the quote below over a century ago. Bennett depicts a very different situation, but the pattern to be recognised, that’s much the same. Different relationship, same pattern, just as damaging.
His terrible lack of frankness, that instinct for the devious and the underhand which governed his entire existence, struck her afresh and seemed to devastate her heart. She felt that she could have tolerated in her husband any vice with less effort than that one vice which was specially his, that vice so contemptible and odious, so destructive of every noble and generous sentiment. Her silent, measured indignation fed itself on almost nothing — on a mere word, a mere inflection of his voice, a single transient gleam of his guilty eye. And though she was right by unerring intuition, John, could he have seen into her soul, might have been excused for demanding, ‘What have I said, what have I done, to deserve this scorn?’
Arnold Bennett – Leonora (1903)
7 comments:
The only Bennett novel I remember reading in my youth was The Card. It was a splendid thing, mind.
dearieme - the 1952 film with Alec Guinness is worth watching too as I remember.
I read 'Anna of the Five Towns' when I was young. It was very atmospheric and rather sad.
Tammly - his books tend to be atmospheric, perhaps because he wrote about what he knew, but the details add to that. He's very quotable too.
Starmer also lacks that intuitive capacity, and doesn't recognise patterns. There is a strand of Tory thinking that says that good political action is based on character, and the ability to intuit which way the political wind is blowing. Starmer is without it. As you say, he thinks ideologically, using learned concepts that don't fit reality. Many left-wingers are like this because of the awful legacy of Marx the theoretician.
Starmer rose to power by purging the anti-semites and Corbynites from the Labour Party. That's got to give a chap some long-lasting habits of subterfuge and dishonesty.
“Anyone unconstrained by ideology has known for some time that UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is too limited, too ideologically motivated and too evasive to be an effective political leader. Knowing this from an early stage was partly due to the pattern recognition that is intuition. The reasons came later when the painfully obvious incompetence kicked in.”
Well put.
Sam - I agree, Labour political gravity is a pull towards learned responses as opposed to what we know is going on and what behaviour indicates. It's weird in that it creates situations where politically convinced people seem to know what is going on but will not say so until political fashions change, as they seem to be doing now Trump is stirring things up.
Anon - thanks, that's encouraging.
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