Well done Boris

It is enormously pleasing to see that Boris Johnson declined an invitation to debate climate change on a fourth rate TV channel called Channel 4. Good for him.

Downing Street and Channel 4 are at war this morning after Boris Johnson snubbed an election debate and the broadcaster decided to replace him with an ice sculpture.

The Tories sent Michael Gove, the minister for the Cabinet Office and a former environment secretary, to represent them but Channel 4 insisted the event was for party leaders only and turned him away...

Beforehand, Channel 4 news editor Ben de Pear said: 'These two ice sculptures represent the emergency on planet earth, not in any human form but are a visual metaphor for the Conservative & Brexit parties after their leaders declined our repeated invitations to attend tonight's vital climate debate.'

To put this into some kind of perspective, Channel 4 currently has only one entry in the top 50 programmes on TV based on the size of their total viewing audience over week 46, November 11 - 17. Source.

Does it matter?

Neither the Conservatives nor Labour are offering "credible" spending plans ahead of the general election, an influential research group has said.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said it was "highly likely" the Tories would end up spending more than their manifesto pledges.

Labour, it warned, would be unable to deliver its spending increases as it has promised.

Does it matter though? St David of Attenborough and St Greta of Doomberg have reminded us often enough that we are doomed anyway. As the raging flames of climate conflagration are just around the corner, why not spend, spend spend? 

I am constantly surprised by the BBC. One would expect it to add some kind of standard caveat to such stories, pointing out that none of it matters because climate. Something both consistent and reassuring along these lines perhaps.

Readers should not worry about this issue as climate change will finish us off in the near future.

Obviously it could be shorter.

At least Adam Adamant is still around

We seem to have a minor spate of well-known people popping their clogs. Gary Rhodes and Clive James appear to be the latest but at least Adam Adamant is still around.

I remember the Adam Adamant show quite well but it ran for less than a year between 1966 and 1967. Strange how impressions sometimes stay with a chap for decades because I didn't think much of it at the time.

At the zoo

Interviewed by a machine

L'Espresso has an interesting and somewhat chilling piece on using an AI system called HireVue to screen people for job interviews. The original piece is in Italian - quotes below are Google translations.

Do you want to work? Convince the computer. The algorithm selects the personnel selection

The large US and multinational companies that select managers increase through interactions with a computer that "spies" mimics and tone of voice. Thanks to an application created by a twenty year old...

HireVue is able to monitor about 15 thousand traits of a person, including the choice of language, eye movements, response speed and stress level. Furthermore, it is a program that "learns" and by coding the traits of the talents that are selected allows you to find them in future candidates. Every company in this way refines its database for finding the best candidate.

The advantages are obvious but so are the dangers. For example, according to promotional material the system is capable of treating diversity as a positive hiring parameter. Other biases are easily imagined, as are other uses.

In Great Britain Vodafone has examined 50 thousand candidacies for "junior" positions but now intends to make use of the same program also for the selection of senior managers. Unilever thanks to Artificial Intelligence has evaluated 275 thousand applications, of which about half were stopped at the first step due to a series of online "games" designed to measure concentration ability under pressure and short-term memory. And only a third of the remaining participants were invited to the final video interview (always with HireVue). Mike Clementi, Unilever America's vice-president for Human Resources is enthusiastic: "With a portfolio of more than 400 brands we could no longer continue to hire in a traditional way".

Beyond the motive

There is insanity in absolute badness, something motiveless, or something that reaches out, with a longing arrogance, beyond the motive: Iago lusted after Desdemona a little and hated Othello a great deal, but beyond those tiny passions was a lust to possess the evil deed as a thing worth having in itself, a flower, a jewel of the mind, a trophy of the intellect.

Hugh Walpole - The Cathedral (1922)

As we approach the season of goodwill, suppose we compare Lenin and Jeremy Corbyn. On the face of it the two men are not obviously similar. Lenin was intelligent, capable and charismatic. Corbyn isn’t. Yet if we use Walpole's trophy of the intellect analogy there is more similarity between Lenin and Corbyn than we might initially assume. For example, what was Lenin’s ultimate aim in driving through the Bolshevik revolution? Political altruism? Hardly.

Supposedly Lenin’s ultimate aim was a dictatorship of the proletariat but every move he made tells us that his real aim was a dictatorship of the Bolshevik party. However one looks at Lenin’s political career, it is not obvious that he had a clear and unambiguous altruistic goal in mind, one which would ultimately benefit the proletariat.

There is no great reason to suppose that Lenin cared anything about the proletariat anyway. Certainly there is nothing to suggest that he thought the Russian proletariat capable of forming a dictatorship, whatever that might mean and whatever Marxist theory might require.

In which case we might use Walpole’s trophy of the intellect analogy. As an analogy it suggests that Lenin merely saw the Bolshevik revolution as a jewel of the mind , a trophy of the intellect. Like an Olympic gold medal it was a trophy to aspire to with fanatical dedication but that is all. A political victory as opposed to an Olympic victory - I knew I could do it and I did it.

The analogy works well if we compare Lenin to Jeremy Corbyn. Mr Corbyn’s totalitarian political ethos seems to have no genuine altruism embedded in it, nothing which could usher in a better world for ordinary people. Just the opposite if historical experience is any guide and all that historical experience has been readily available to Mr Corbyn for the whole of his adult life.

Yet as with Lenin, Jeremy Corbyn seems to have no interest in the political, social and economic damage his political goals are likely to cause. As far as we can tell, and the clues are abundant, the trophy of the intellect is everything to him. We are nothing.

The trophy of the intellect is merely an analogy of course, but fascinating and surprisingly apt. It has wide application too. Many people with radical ideas do not come across as selflessly altruistic. It is not at all obvious that they are striving for a real improvement in the human condition. It is more competitive than that. More murky. More sinister.

Instead they come across as people pursuing a trophy of the intellect and like an Olympic medal the trophy is an end in itself. Job done. Goal achieved. Altruism doesn’t come into it.

Maybe Victorians were smarter than we are

How did two people who had once filled each other's universe manage to hold together as the tide receded? Why, by the world-old compulsion of marriage, he supposed. Marriage was a trick, a sham, if you looked at it in one way; but it was the only means man had yet devised for defending himself from his own frivolity.

Edith Wharton - The Gods Arrive (1932)

It is worth remembering that by our standards almost all Victorians were poor simply because our general prosperity has increased so enormously over the past century or so. Victorian elites may have lived lives of pampered comfort but today, the majority of us live lives which are at least as comfortable as the most pampered duke or duchess.

This prosperity divide is important because it reminds us that Victorians were much closer to the edge than we are. Closer to infant mortality, childbirth mortality, hunger, disease, destitution, slums and a host of other horrors our prosperity and knowledge have mitigated or virtually removed.

Victorians were aware that life is uncertain and felt the precarious nature of life much more acutely than we generally feel it. Uncertainty was their lived experience. They knew nothing else and neither were they constantly persuaded that smoothing out life’s uncertainties ought to be some kind of human right.

In other words Victorians had an acute understanding of how important it was to defend themselves against a whole host of threats to their well-being. They understood why family life, thrift and hard work were the essential basis of an increasingly technical and urban population. From this it follows that they knew how vitally important it was to defend themselves, their families and their country against anything which threatened the basis of their existence.

Even by Edith Wharton’s time the threats were receding. Consequently social constraints were eroding as the consequences of frivolity became less appalling. Incompetence and a feckless life were less hazardous for a much greater number of people. But feckless is not smart.

Victorians understood how a sustainable culture remains sustainable, how it is defended and the compromises we have to make in defending it, how we have to sustain a restrictive bias towards our own culture because that is what sustains us now. In this respect yes - maybe Victorians were smarter than we are.