Business design for the visionary within

Roger Martin almost beats a fine idea into submission in this thought-provoking look at the importance of “design thinking” in business. But, as the recent travails of his own client case-studies shows, in large organisations, appeals to visionary thinking tend to fall upon deaf ears.

This is a short book with some big, and very good, ideas. It could have been yet shorter: I felt I’d got the concept from the first chapter, and thereafter Roger Martin does very little with it. This is partly because the idea is self-explanatory, and it’s something you’ll either take to instinctively (if you’re disposed to “design thinking”), or won’t, if you’re not.

Martin’s thesis, broadly stated, is that there are three main “phases” any business proposition:

• Mystery: when an intuition nags at an inventor: the germ of a problem (and, more to the point, its solution) suggests itself and there is no orthodox means for solving it - here is the maximum opportunity for those who can (think of a young Ray Kroc thinking “how do I build scale in my hamburger joint?”);
• Heuristic: when you’ve figured out a potential solution that does the job, but you don’t necessarily understand the full implications, possibilities and boundaries of your solution; and
• Algorithm: where you fully understand both the problem/opportunity and its solution, and you are able to commoditise and automate it and the only remaining question is efficiency. 

Roger Martin’s presentation is a convincing as far as it goes: I dare say the boundaries between the three phases are porous, and Martin is convincing that there is a reflexive quality to the propositions: the more they are solved, and the more the richness of an offering is stripped to its essential superstructure, the lower the barriers to competition, the slimmer the margins, and the more compelling is an entrepreneur’s need to look for some more mysteries to solve.

It won’t do, in other words, to solve your mystery, drive it down the “design funnel” as hard and fast as you can, and relentlessly and mindlessly tweak the algorithm to make it run faster. Your own behaviour, if successful enough, itself will present opportunities for others: witness MacDonald’s versus, say, Subway or Starbucks. 

MacDonald’s algorithm stripped away “extraneous” considerations like healthiness, “coolness”, freshness and so on. So Subway was able to differentiate itself on food quality, and Starbucks on the delightful hipness of actually visiting the store (it seems extraordinary in hindsight, doesn’t it!) MacDonald’s was forced by its competitors to reverse back up the funnel to consider other offerings.

The idea is intuitive and makes a lot of sense. Particularly in large organisations there is a tendency towards “backward looking” data, regression analyses and the tried and true: “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” was a truism when I was a youngster. But the passage of time illustrates the corollary of that truism as well: no-one revolutionised their business by buying IBM either. And that, says Roger Martin, is what design thinking makes possible.

“ ‘no one ever got fired for buying IBM’ was a truism when I was a youngster. But the passage of time illustrates its corollary: no-one revolutionised their business by buying IBM either.”

It is certainly my experience that large organisations tend to “reliability” rather than “validity” thinking, and are so keen on moving to algorithm stage that they are inclined to skip the “heuristic”.

So some gripes: Firstly for a short book with an attractive big idea, it was rather hard to keep focussed on it. Something about Roger’s writing style is disengaging. I’m not entirely sure what it is: partly I think he takes a simple idea and beats it to death with self-serving examples (there are extended case studies of Proctor & Gamble, Target, and Research In Motion, all of which he was closely involved with). RIM in particular seems a poor example: yes, they had a big idea and commoditised it (isn’t that what all successful businesses do?) but their subsequent performance has been underwhelming, as they’ve been unable to withstand the march of the smart phones, and while they’re still the dominant player in the business market, they seem to be slowly but surely withering on the vine in the consumer space. (Talk as I write is that RIM is all but a goner, simply awaiting takeover).

On the other hand, Roger’s take on the underlying philosophy of design and business development is polymath enough to take in pragmatists like Dewey and Charles Sanders Pierce. Being a fan of Richard Rorty and other post-modern philosophers this went down well with me: It is a solid basis for the common sense contained in the book: in a contingent, ironic and pragmatic universe, where priorities, economic conditions, consumer preferences and political orthodoxies change like the wind, big, fast, dumb, inflexible machinery seems like a poor suit to be long in. The relentless preference for algorithms (mechanical, reliable) over heuristics (logical, but requiring interpretation and judgment) seems so blindingly obvious that it’s a wonder so much of corporate enterprise is so blind to it. Then again, being a design thinker is not easy: translating your unorthodox point of view to an anally retentive business analyst requires powers of persuasion not all of us have (“use lots of analogies!” Martin cheerfully advises) and you wonder whether design thinking - utopian an idea though it might be - is one that will generally get nowhere near the beating heart of your average multi-national.

Pity.

Apocalypse/Nirvana

When the universe wakes up, will it smell the coffee? 
Not everyone is as certain as Ray Kurzweil that the End of History is at hand.

L'observatoire de St-Véran by Сергей'

JULIAN JAYNES rounds out his wonderful The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind with a sanguine remark that the idea of science is rooted in the same impulse that drives religion: the desire for "the Final Answer, the One Truth, the Single Cause".

Nowhere is this impulse better illustrated, or the scientific mien so resemblant of a religious one, than in Ray Kurzweil's hymn to forthcoming technology, The Singularity Is Near. For if ever a man were committed overtly - fervently, even - to such a unitary belief, it is Ray Kurzweil. And the sceptics among our number could hardly have asked for a better example of the pitfalls, or ironies, of such an intellectual fundamentalism: one one hand, this sort of essentialism features prominently in the currently voguish denouncements of the place of religion in contemporary affairs, often being claimed as a knock-out blow to the spiritual disposition. On the other, it is too strikingly similar in its own disposition to be anything of the sort. Ray Kurzweil is every inch the millenarian, only dressed in a lab-coat and not a habit.

Kurzweil believes that the "exponentially accelerating" "advance" of technology has us well on the way to a technological and intellectual utopia/dystopia (this sort of beauty being, though Kurzweil might deny it, decidedly in the eye of the beholder) where computer science will converge on and ultimately transcend biology and, in doing so, will transport human consciousness into something quite literally cosmic. This convergence he terms the "singularity", a point at which he expects with startling certainty that the universe will "wake up", and many immutable limitations of our current sorry existence (including, he seems to say, the very laws of physics) will simply fall away.

Some, your correspondent included, might wonder whether, this being the alternative, our present existence is all that sorry in the first place.

But not Raymond Kurzweil. This author seems to be genuinely excited about a prospect which sounds rather desolate, bordering on the apocalyptic, in those aspects where it manages to transcend sounding simply absurd. Which isn't often. One thing you could not accuse Ray Kurzweil of is a lack of pluck; but there's a fine line between bravado and foolhardiness which, in his enthusiasm, he may have crossed.

“Kurzweil seems to be genuinely excited about a prospect which sounds desolate, bordering on the apocalyptic, where it manages to transcend sounding simply absurd. Which isn’t often.”

His approach to evolution is a good example. He talks frequently and modishly of the algorithmic nature of evolution, but then makes observations not quite out of the playbook, such as: "the key to an evolutionary algorithm ... is defining the problem. ... in biological evolution the overall problem has always been to survive" and "evolution increases order, which may or may not increase complexity".

But to suppose an evolutionary algorithm has "a problem it is trying to solve" - in other words, a design principle - is to emasculate its very power, namely the facility of explaining how a sophisticated phenomenon comes about *without* a design principle. Evolution works because organisms (or genes) have a capacity - not an intent - to replicate themselves. Nor, necessarily, does evolution increase order. It will tend to increase complexity, because the evolutionary algorithm, having no insight, is unable to "perceive" the structural improvements implied in a design simplification. Evolution has no way of rationalising design except by fiat. The adaptation required to replace an overly elaborate design with more effective but simpler one is, to use Richard Dawkins' expression, an implausible step back down "Mount Improbable". That's generally not how evolutionary processes work: over-engineering is legion in nature; economy of design isn't, really.

This sounds like a picky point, but it gets to the nub of Kurzweil's outlook, which is to assume that technology evolves like biological organisms do - that a laser printer, for example, is a direct evolutionary descendent of the printing press. This, I think, is to superimpose a convenient narrative over a process that is not directly analogous: a laser printer is no more a descendent of a printing press than a mammal is a descendent of a dinosaur. Successor, perhaps; descendant, no. But the "exponential increase in progress" arguments that Kurzweil repeatedly espouses depend for their validity on this distinction.

The "evolutionary process" from woodblock printing to the Gutenberg press, to lithography, to hot metal typing, to photo-typesetting, to the ink jet printer (thanks, Wikipedia!) involves what Kurzweil would call "paradigm shifts" but which a biologist might call extinctions; each new technology arrives, supplements and (usually) obliterates the existing ones, not just by doing the same job more effectively, but - and this is critical - by opening up new vistas and possibilities altogether that weren't even conceived of in the earlier technology - sometimes even at the cost of a certain flexibility inherent in the older technology. That is, development is constantly forking off in un-envisaged, unexpected directions. This plays havoc with Kurzweil's loopy idea of a perfect, upwardly arcing parabola of utopian progress.

It is what I call "perspective chauvinism" to judge former technologies by the standards and parameters set by the prevailing orthodoxy - being that of the new technology. Judged by such an arbitrary standard older technologies will, by degrees, necessarily seem more and more primitive and useless. The fallacious process of judging former technologies by subsequently imposed criteria is, in my view, the source of many of Ray Kurzweil's inevitably impressive charts of exponential progress. It isn't that we are progressing ever more quickly onward, but the place whence we have come falls exponentially further away as our technology meanders, like a perpetually deflating balloon, through design space. Our rate of progress doesn't change; our discarded technologies simply seem more and more irrelevant through time.

Kurzweil may argue that the rate of change in technology has increased, and that may be true - but I dare say a similar thing happened at the time of the agricultural revolution and again in the industrial revolution - we got from Stephenson's rocket to the diesel locomotive within 75 years; in the subsequent 97 years the train's evolution been somewhat more sedate. Eventually, the "S" curves Kurzweil mentions flatten out. They clearly aren't exponential, and pretending that an exponential parabola might emerge from a conveniently concatenated series of "S" curves seems credulous to the point of disingenuity. This extrapolation into a single "parabola of best fit" has heavy resonances of the planetary "epicycle", a famously desperate attempt of Ptolemaic astronomers to fit "misbehaving" data into what Copernicans would ultimately convince the world was a fundamentally broken model. 

If this is right, then Kurzweil's corollary assumption - that there is a technological nirvana to which we're ever more quickly headed - commits the inverse fallacy of supposing the questions we will ask in the future - when the universe "wakes up", as he puts it - will be exactly the ones we anticipate now. History would say this is a naïve, parochial, chauvinistic and false assumption. 

“Assuming there is a technological nirvana to which we’re inevitably headed is to suppose the questions we will ask when the universe “wakes up” will be same the ones we ask now. History would say this is a parochial and chauvinistic assumption.”

And that, I think, is the nub of it. One feels somewhat uneasy so disdainfully pooh-poohing a theory put together with such enthusiasm and such an energetic presentation of data (and to be sure, buried in Kurzweil's breathless prose is plenty of learning about technology which, if even half-way right, is fascinating), but that seems to be it. I suppose I am fortified by the nearby predictions made just four years ago, seeming not to have come anything like true just yet:

"By the end of this decade [i.e., by 2010] computers will disappear as distinct physical objects, with displays built in our eyeglasses and electronics woven into our clothing"

On the other hand I could find scant reference to "cloud computing" or equivalent phenomena like the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing project which spawned schemes like SETI@home in Kurzweil's book. Now here is a rapidly evolving technological phenotype, for sure: hooking up thousands of serially processing computers into a massive parallel network, giving processing power way beyond any technology currently envisioned. It may be that this adaptation means we simply don't need to incur the mental challenge of molecular transistors and so on, since there must, at some point, be an absolute limit to miniaturisation, as we approach it the marginal utility of developing the necessary technology will swan dive just as the marginal cost ascends to the heavens; whereas the parallel network involves none of those limitations. You can always hook up yet another computer, and every one will increase performance.

I suppose it's easy to be smug as I type on my decidedly physical computer, showing no signs of being superseded with VR Goggles just yet and we're already two yeasrs into the new decade, but the point is that the evolutionary process is notoriously bad at making predictions (until, that is, the results are in!), being path-dependent as it is. You can't predict for developments that haven't yet happened. Kurzweil glosses over this shortfall at his theory's cost.

 

Vanquishing magic by sleight of hand

Douglas Hofstadter’s essay on the incompleteness of “loopy” logical systems starts out brightly, but makes a disappointing and strangely unimaginative resort to reductionism in the end. Pity.

Philosophy, to those who are disdainful of it, is a sucker for a priori sleights of hand: purely logical arguments which do not rely for grip on empirical reality, but purport to explain it all the same: chestnuts like “cogito ergo sum”, from which Descartes concluded a necessary distinction between a non-material soul and the rest of the world.

Douglas Hofstadter is not a philosopher (though he’s friends with one), and in I am a Strange Loop he is mightily disdainful of the discipline and its weakness for cute logical constructions. All of metaphysics is so much bunk, says Hofstadter, and he sets out to demonstrate this using the power of mathematics and in particular the fashionable power of Gödel’s incompleteness theory.

Observers may pause and reflect on an irony at once: Hofstadter’s method - derived a priori from the pure logical structure of mathematics - looks suspiciously like those tricksy metaphysical musings on which he heaps derision. As his book proceeds this irony only sharpens.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, for I started out enjoying this book immensely. Until about halfway I thought I’d award it five stars - but then found it increasingly unconvincing and glib, notably at the point where Hofstadter leaves his (absolutely fascinating) mathematical theorising behind and begins applying it. He believes that from purely logical contortion one may derive a coherent account of consciousness (a purely physical phenomenon) robust enough to bat away any philosophical objections, dualist or otherwise.

Note, with another irony, his industry here: to express the physical parameters of a material thing - a brain - in terms of purely non-material apparatus (a conceptual language). In the early stages, Professor Hofstadter brushes aside reductionist objections to his scheme which is, by definition, an emergent property of, and therefore unobservable in, the interactions of specific nerves and neurons. Yet late in his book he is at great pains to say that that same material thing cannot, by dint of the laws of physics, be pushed around by a non material thing (being a soul), and that configurations of electrons correspond directly to particular conscious states in what seems a rigorously deterministic way (Hofstadter brusquely dismisses conjectures that your red might not be the same as mine). Without warning, in his closing pages, Hofstadter seems to declare himself a behaviourist. Given the excellent and enlightening work of his early chapters, this comes as a surprise and a disappointment to say the least.

Hofstadter’s exposition of Gödel’s theory is excellent and its application in the idea of the “Strange Loop” is fascinating. He spends much of the opening chapters grounding this odd notion, which he says is the key to understanding consciousness as a non-mystical, non-dualistic, scientifically respectable and physically explicable phenomenon. His insight is to root consciousness not in the physical manifestation of the brain, but in the patterns and symbols represented within it. This, I think, is all he needs to establish to win his primary argument, namely that Artificial Intelligence is a valid proposition. But he is obliged to go on because, like Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, the Strange Loop threatens to operate like a universal acid and cut through many cherished and well-established ideas. Alas, some of these ideas seem to be ones Douglas Hofstadter is not quite ready to let go. Scientific realism, for example.

The implication of the Strange Loop, which I don’t think Hofstadter denies, is that a string of symbols, provided it is sufficiently complex (and “loopy”) can be a substrate for a consciousness. That is a Neat Idea (though I’m not persuaded it’s correct: Hofstadter’s support for it is only conceptual, and involves little more than hand-waving and appeals to open-mindedness.

“Perhaps, rather than slamming the door on mysticism, Hofstadter has unwittingly blown it wide open. After all, why stop at human consciousness as a complex system?” 

But all the same, some strange loops began to occur to me here. Perhaps rather than slamming the door on mysticism, Douglas Hofstadter has unwittingly blown it wide open. After all, why stop at human consciousness as a complex system? Conceptually, perhaps, one might be able to construct a string of symbols representing God. Would it even need a substrate? Might the fact that it is conceptually possible mean that God therefore exists?

I am being mendacious, I confess. But herein lie the dangers (or irritations) of tricksy a priori contortions. However, Professor Hofstadter shouldn’t complain: he started it.

Less provocatively, perhaps a community of interacting individuals, like a city - after all, a more complex system than a single one, QED - might also be conscious. Perhaps there are all sorts of consciousnesses which we can’t see precisely because they emerge at a more abstract level than the one we occupy.

This might seem far-fetched, but the leap of faith it requires isn’t materially bigger than the one Hofstadter explicitly requires us to make. He sees the power of Gödel’s insight being that symbolic systems of sufficient complexity (“languages” to you and me) can operate on multiple levels, and if they can be made to reference themselves, the scope for endless fractalising feedback loops is infinite. The same door that opens the way to consciousness seems to let all sorts of less appealing apparitions into the room: God, higher levels of consciousness and sentient pieces of paper bootstrap themselves into existence also.

This seems to be a Strange Loop Too Far, and as a result we find Hofstadter ultimately embracing the reductionism of which he was initially so dismissive, veering violently towards determinism and concluding with a behavioural flourish that there is no consciousness, no free will, and no alternative way of experiencing red. Ultimately he asserts a binary option: unacceptable dualism with all the fairies, spirits, spooks and logical lacunae it implies, or a pretty brutal form of determinist materialism.

There’s yet another irony in all this, for he has repeatedly scorned Bertrand Russell’s failure to see the implications of his own formal language, while apparently making a comparable failure to understand the implications of his own model. Strange Loops allow - guarantee, in fact - multiple meanings via analogy and metaphors, and provide no means of adjudicating between them. They vitiate the idea of transcendental truth which Hofstadter seems suddenly so keen on. The option isn’t binary at all: rather, it’s a silly question.

In essence, all interpretations are metaphorical; even the “literal” ones. Neuroscience, with all its gluons, neurons and so on, is just one more metaphor which we might use to understand an aspect of our world. It will tell us much about the brain, but very little about consciousness, seeing as the two operate on quite different levels of abstraction.

To the extent, therefore, that Douglas Hofstadter concludes that the self is that is an illusion his is a wholly useless conclusion. As he acknowledges, “we” are doomed to “see” the world in terms of “selves”; an a priori sleight-of-hand, no matter how cleverly constructed, which tells us that we’re wrong about that (and that we’re not actually here at all!) does us no good at all. Neurons, gluons and strange loops have their place - in many places this is a fascinating book, after all - but they won’t give us any purchase on this debate.

The hero of a thousand phases

I wrote this the week leading up to the Rugby World Cup Finals. Never quite finished it, but it seems a pity to waste it. Substitute Beaver Donald for Cruden for Slade for Carter, and it wasn't a bad shout!

A hero laid low

It is rugby world cup time. When ace All Black fly-half Daniel Carter was felled by an unexpected groin strain, I wrote to a friend:

I think this is going almost perfectly to the script - literally, the monomyth script, formulated by Joseph Campbell out of thousands indigenous of myths and legends, and used as the basis for many of Hollywood's greatest blockbusters. In it, a callow youth, let us call him Colin, wishes to escape the drudgery of life on the home planet. But then he receives the call ... his at the critical point his talismanic leader is laid low, the team suffer near fatal reverses ...

For my trouble, I was accused of smoking something. Undeterred, I elaborated:  

When, with one minute left on the clock, and six points down, camped on his own try-line, the said callow youth Slade intercepts a carelessly flung pass by a French fly half, glides between two colossal Catalonian oxes, flees like a demon horse over the advantage line, the ten metre line, the half way and surges into the French twenty-two, cuts in towards the posts only to unexpectedly confront the ogre Imanol Harinodoquy (who had been slow to pick himself up out of a ruck on the French 22 in a prior phase, and is accordingly well out of position, but happily for the French is perfectly placed to save the day) and then Slade fleetingly catches a glimpse of his fallen hero Carter, hovering ethereally in the stands, urging him on, and so hardened, with a sublime inside step, a heavenly outside step and then, on the five-metre line, with the great Gallic flanker still miraculously shading him, the most brutal fend ever to be delivered by a flyhalf to a forward, Slade crosses the try line under the posts, and converts his own score to finally return the Rugby World Cup to its permanent home - then you'll understand, my friend.

Maui snares the sun

I based my plot on Joseph Cambell's "monomyth", as revealed in his mighty The Hero With a Thousand Faces - in which Campbell distilled a common heroic storyline underlying the mythologies of hundreds of ancient peoples from Gilgamesh and Agamemnon to the Maori myth of Maui snaring the sun. These days, the monomyth is now pressed into the service of Hollywood screenwriters, but it applies to the drama of sporting conflict as well, as the fanciful passage above illustrates. (Fanciful? substitute Cruden for Slade and it might yet be next Saturday's script!)

Why do men find sporting conflict so compelling? Because it affords us the chance of just such a drama: a compelling morality play but with a grim and irresistable advantage: It is real: uncontrived, there is a real chance that the hero will lose; a good man may die: the elaborately woven narrative of myth may be rent asunder.

Welsh Warrior laid low

We have already seen just such a sequence: an outstanding Welsh Warrior, lain low early in the game by the harshest of Old Testament judgments and sent ringingly from the theatre of conflict.

Yet in their desperate hour his men did not yield, and gave no quarter: Without complaint, without rancour, the remaining warriors regrouped and redoubled their efforts, flew into every tackle, drove their opposition into the ground and nearly - so achingly nearly - pulled off the most heroic upsets of the tournament, losing by a point, and even then half a foot low and half a foot wide.

And so to the New Zealanders. What of their heroic record? Firstly, just look at photographer Mike Hewitt's wonderful image to the right: drink it in, for ten seconds, and try then to persuade yourself that this is a live sports photograph and not a Caravaggio altarpiece. Look at the composition, the heroic lines - the diagonals - the enraptured faces turned towards their quest.

Evolving Technology

Brian Arthur has trouble seeing where innovation and technological progress fit into the view that the “discovery” phase of Scientific knowledge is all over bar the shouting. 

If the evolutionary account is right, it doesn’t work like that, and we’re the better for it, he says.

B

rian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology is somewhat ponderous in its beginning (and in truth, throughout) but all the same is most encouraging in its epistemological disposition - assuming as it does the recursivity of society and technology, rather than toting the (conventional) view that one is strictly a product of the other. This points you towards a path-dependent model for not just technology, but society and indeed knowledge itself. 

But for some, this is dangerous stuff. It leads in turn to uncomfortable conclusions (at least for the neo-enlightenment brigade) which open the door to all that crazy post-modern stuff. 

Because he doesn’t have to, Arthur doesn’t go there, but he does cast a kindly glance at Thomas Kuhn. (I like people who cast kindly glances at Thomas Kuhn: these days they’re few and far between). 

Arthur doesn’t have to go there (at first) because technology, as implemented, is almost by definition infra-paradigmatic: if “science” is its philosophical principle, technology is its practical implementation - very much the sort of thing Nancy Cartwright would call a “nomological machine”: a construction designed to give a dependable result in a constrained set of circumstances, where the machine not only prescribes the parameters for a “successful” result, but constrains the environment and operating circumstances in which outcomes are generated to ensure the result is within those parameters, and then, reliably, forces that outcome. (A technology that is unable to force an outcome within its own parameters for a successful result is simply a machine that doesn’t work). 

But this leaves a gap. If technology is merely the practical implementation of “normal science”, it has a hard time explaining innovation. As Arthur puts it: 

“Combination [of existing technologies] cannot be the only mechanism behind technology’s evolution. If it were, modern technologies such as radar or magnetic resource imaging ... would be created out of bow-drills and pottery firing techniques, or whatever else we deem to have existed at the start of technological time.” 

“If technology is merely the practical implementation of “normal science”, it has a hard time explaining innovation.”

The problem, which Arthur specifically sets out to address, is how to account for the “onward” development of technology. Arthur is clear that it is path-dependent (“had we uncovered phenomena over historical times in a different sequence, we would have developed different technologies”) but even this insight, I think, risks undercooking the importance of the narrative conversation: it is not just that combinations of technologies through time let us further uncover existing theories and give us better and more powerful and enabling answers to our original questions; they prompt completely new questions: they afford new ways of looking at the world. New ways of looking generate new opportunities, and new problems. 

This is a significant point. 

For example: prior to the digital age, categorisation of information was a difficult and inherently limited (and, actually, biased) thing: the physical nature of information storage (books) dictated a single taxonomy and a single hierarchy, and required commitment to a single filing taxonomy (without owning more than one copy of a book, you can’t file it in two places). Digitisation changed that forever: the Dewey Decimal system - brilliant in its design though it undoubtedly was - solves a problem we no longer have, but at the cost of forcing our hand in a way we no longer need. Digital technology has enabled us to entirely re-evaluate what information really is. 

As he goes on, Arthur explicitly keeps in mind two “side issues” that constantly recur in writings about technology: the analogy to Darwin’s program of evolution, on one hand, and the analogy to Kuhn’s theories of scientific revolution on the other. But these are, to my mind, different articulations of the same idea: that “questions” and “answers” (whether you characterise these as “environmental features” and “biological adaptations which evolve to deal with them”, or “observational conundrums” and “scientific theories which purport to explain them”) are, to a large extent, interdependent: something is only a conundrum if it appears to contradict the prevailing group of theories. What both Darwin and Kuhn suggest is that “linear progress” - insofar as it implies a predetermined goal to which an evolutionary algorithm is progressing - is a misconceived idea. Evolutionary development is better characterised as a move away from the status quo, rather than a move towards anything (in hindsight, both will seem the same; to confuse them is a fundamental error).

Yet, and while Arthur clearly recognises this, he does continue to frame his explanatory theory in terms of “forward progress”, as if that is the “conundrum” to be solved. The thing is, even our traditional conception of it has this the wrong way round: “the invention of the jet engine” wasn’t what was going on; it was “the invention of a way to fly in thinner air”. The jet engine was the first solution arrived at that met that purpose (as, in a totally different context, Richard Susskind elegantly points out, when you shop for a Black & Decker, it isn’t a drill you want; it’s a hole). Technology (and science, and biology) isn’t an end, it’s a means. The more means you have, the more ends are available to you. 

“The implications of this are striking. They completely undermine the idea of technology as a “forwardly moving” phenomenon.” 

I had therefore wondered whether Arthur had missed a trick in his account of technology - the fact that any novel solution to an old problem creates new questions that we did not think - or need - to ask previously. But as his book closes and he views technology through the prism of the economy (on his theory the two are independent; the former is not merely the handmaiden of the latter), he nails this, too: 

“The coming of novel technologies does not just disrupt the status quo by finding new combinations that are better versions of the goods and methods we use. It sets up a train of technological accommodations and of new problems, and in doing so it creates new opportunity niches that call forth fresh combinations which in turn introduce further technologies - and further problems.” 

The implications of this are striking. They completely undermine the idea of technology as a “forwardly moving” phenomenon. It recalibrates to our changing needs and perceptions, just as we recalibrate to the changing perspectives and vistas it affords us. That is a million miles away from Ray Kurzweil’s carefully plotted (and in your correspondent’s opinion, absurd) logarithmic charts of technological progress that will see machines - and, on Kurzweil’s account, eventually the cosmos itself - “wake up”. 

Even if there were no other reasons (and there are many), one reason for favouring Arthur’s less ambitious (but actually more radical) view is its humanity. Arthur closes the book with a neat bit of lit crit: the forces of good and evil in Star Wars, he observes, can be differentiated by their relationship with technology: the Empire’s clinical, cold, efficient, androidal heartlessness - against the temperamental, jury rigged, cantankerous and fallible technology of the rebels: in one case technology is our weapon: it relies on us, on our skill, on our judgment and our humanity: we are the necessary homunculus; in the other the humans are, more or less, the “necessary evil” - the impediment to the technology achieving its ends.
Recognising that the special sauce in technology is, for the time being at least, the bit supplied by the meatware, is a comforting thought.

The vampire at the spring, and beneath the Apple Tree - წინწყარო

Apropos nothing, except the burning need to share this. Here is cinema and music combined in the most haunting of ways.

The film is Werner Herzog's 1979 Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht, itself a remake of FW Murnau's silent classic Nosferatu, Ein Symphonie des Grauens.

The music is a Georgian Folksong, spelled variously Tsintskaro/Tsintsqaro/Zinzkaro/Winwyaro, which means "at the spring", and it is performed by the Georgian vocal ensemble Gordela.

The lyrics translate as:

I was passing by the spring.

There I met a beautiful woman with a jug on her shoulder.

I spoke a word to her and she left, offended.

I was passing by the spring.

The juxtaposition of this scene, in which Isabelle Adjani walks in disbelief through a town square where plague-infected locals engage in final, silent, danse macabre to the accompaniment of this extraordinary music is one of the most haunting scenes in all of motion picture history.

The music is hard to track down, but with the internet it's possible: Hamlet Gonashvili, until his death one of the most influential teacher and performer of traditional Georgian music, has a recording which is now available on Amazon.

Wikipedia records that Gonashvili died in 1985, at the height of his fame, as the result of a fall from an apple tree, which somehow fits with the song, and indeed Herzog's scene, with its implications of the fall of man and a loss of innocence!

Here is a link to a poorly copied rendition of the scene on YouTube.
The original Nosferatu is public domain, and you can watch the whole thing on Youtube if you like (but do yourself a favour, and get a DVD).

Passionsspiele 2010

The Ammergau Mountains lie an hour south of Munich and form a verdant prelude to the Bavarian Alps. Amongst them, in a deep valley, nestles the mediaeval village of Oberammergau. On a hot summer’s day storms can form quickly out of the clear blue sky: sunbeams scatter and burst from behind darkening nimbi, and majestic thunderheaded anvils roil behind the iron cross high on Kofel, the rocky spire that dominates the village. Even nowadays it doesn’t take much imagination to apprehend the Almighty near at hand.

If it feels that way today, it must have seemed all the more like it in the seventeenth century. In 1633, the villagers of Oberammergau faced dark times. Black Death was sweeping the continent, visiting even the sleepiest backwaters of Bavaria. The Burghers of Oberammergau assembled in their Lord’s house and prayed for deliverance. They proposed a deal: spare our village from this plague now and, for the hereafter, it will glory your name by performing a passion-play, once a decade.

From that day, so legend has it, no further lives were lost and, ever since, the locals have kept their side of the bargain (with some additional centenaries thrown in, and the odd war years skipped), and 2010 sees the forty-first production of the “Passionsspiele”. As per the original sacred covenant, the production remains entirely local: to be even a stage-hand you must have been born in the village or lived in it for at least twenty years.

That’s the story, and it has been handed down, embellished and retreaded through the centuries to the point where it is certified folklore, and those of its oddities which don’t bear close examination generally don’t get it. It isn’t sporting to ask questions like, why only once a decade? Does the bargain not seem a pragmatic, faithless and rather un-Christian compromise? What would happen if the villagers stopped doing the play? Would an avenging cloak of Black Death envelope the town?

In any case, times move on. At some point the imposition represented by the covenant was eclipsed by the commercial opportunity it presented, and you fancy that, these days, they’d stage the play whether or not they feared a plague on their houses. For every ten years Christians and fellow travellers from around the world make the pilgrimage to Oberammergau in their hundreds of thousands. Jerome K. Jerome wrote a
droll account of his journey in 1890. Cardinal Ratzinger (as he then was) visited in 1980. And a certain German chancellor, best not mentioned these days, visited and declared himself very satisfied with the play’s reflection of his own vision for the good people of Germany (not to mention those of Jerusalem) in 1934.
But Oberammergau is by no means just for the great and (or) good or devout: My mother (a curious but un-energetic Presbyterian from Auckland) visited in 1960 as a twenty-two-year-old, returned again twenty years later with my father (an equally unenthusiastic Anglican), and returned thirty years later still, this summer, with her son and his wife (both enthusiastically none of the above).

Undeniably, there is something very special about the place and the play. To be sure: this is no church hall nativity nightmare of amateur dramatics: Nearly all of the townsfolk are involved in the production in some capacity or other; the cast numbers in the hundreds and features real donkeys, sheep, horses, camels and poultry, a full orchestra and fifty-strong choir. Oberammergau’s men abstain from shaving and cutting their hair for a year leading up to the performances. The dedicated theatre seats 5,000 and is rammed, five nights a week, continuously for five months of the season in any weather (until 2010 the stage was open-air; now it has a retractable roof), and each performance, not counting a three-hour meal break, lasts five and a half hours. It’s in German, but has a solemnity and magnificence of scope which transcends the language barrier (and with a translation of the script to hand, it’s not that much of a barrier in any case).

Over its season Oberammergau welcomes upwards of half a million visitors. To cope with the proverbial “dramatic influx”, the locals open their houses to visitors.


And here, too, it seemed to us that the Almighty might be taking an interest. In 1960 my mother was billeted with Benedikt Stükl, cast as Caiaphas, the high-priest (his son Peter being in the chorus). Twenty years later, on her return she stayed, quite by chance, with the same family, Benedikt now having been elevated to play Annas, the elder priest of the High Council and Peter, with a teenage daughter of his own in the choir, now playing Caiaphas. This year, again quite by chance, we found ourselves staying with same family again. This time Peter’s daughter, now 47, was running the Gasthof and appearing with her own children in the chorus, her brother Christian directed the play, father Peter was a white-bearded Annas, and grandfather Benedikt is now (one hopes, having portrayed the villain so many times) in an altogether better place.

Oberammergau, and its passion play, pose questions for the Bavarians and their way of life: maintaining a four-hundred year-old tradition participation in which is limited to village lifers, is a symbol of the conservatism and insularity for which the locals are notorious. The demographic of the hordes that flock to see the play is singular: they’re mostly German and in the latter half of life; they’re generally well-to-do, and they’re absolutely all white. This much is characteristic of the region which is stunningly beautiful, well-tended and maintained: to preserve those surrounds, attitudes require buildings (and, on a Sunday, dress) to conform to styles a hundred or more years old, defiantly despiting Anglo-Saxon sniggers at grown men in leather shorts. There is little appetite here for modernity, and while this makes for a refreshing, stunning, peaceful escape from the city, you fancy the cost for the young folk is a stultifying and oppressive existence. There’s an undeniable tweeness about the place.

Yet curiously not a hint of tweeness makes it into the production itself. It is stylish, grave, emotional and, in its current iteration, modern. It also conveys entirely the strong community bond of the village. When the play opens with Jesus’ triumphant entry to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and the full cast, from grandparents down to a three month old baby, you get a real sense of this being a presentation of the whole community. When a mother in the crowd reins in her errant children, you know these really are their own children, and she really is reining them in.

The orchestra, choir and the music were consistently impressive: without being an expert I would put the music in the German style of a Mozart mass – possibly not as histrionic, and it was dealt with serenely by the orchestra and a large choir dressed in androgynous ankle-length smocks with headdresses which invoke Virgil when accompanying Dante in his divine comedy. The sight of these nearly fifty angelic beings arrayed across the massive stage was striking and solemn.

While this might be still a most conservative Catholic Christian town, the 2010 production, in a gentle way, has its revolutionary aspects. Jesus is portrayed as a political revolutionary and not, even remotely, as a supernatural being. The scriptwriters have taken some notice of recent cause célèbres of Christian revisionism: There’s a hint – though nothing more – of a “thing” between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Post Dan Brown this seems an almost orthodox idea, but would have been sacrilege even thirty years ago.

Yet, Jesus’ aim is still the conservative one of returning to the literal word of God; he casts aside the pragmatic accommodations that Caiaphas and his coterie have tolerated such as the money-changers in the temple. In a way, this is as conservative a reading as you could ask for. Here the Passionplay’s famous “tableaux vivants” – living still lives, interposed with the acts of the production – add to dramatic punch, and tie in this “progressive” aspect to the tradition from which the revolutionary New Testament sprang: the Old Testament itself. Of course, one has to be selective to find Old Testament tableaux which are consonant with any reading of the New Testament, but the producers have been careful, and the tableaux do make a point. Lord only knows, the money-changers have been running riot since Oberammergau last staged its play, and in its way the values this event represents, both explicitly through its message and through its very existence at all, stand as a bulwark against our commercial predilections.

Nonetheless, modernity, as with all compromises, has its price. The jettisoning of the mystical might appeal to the contemporary secular (not many of whom were in evidence in the crowd), but the play lacked a little of the “spiritual” wonder which sets Jesus’ story alight in the first place. Reduced to low political intrigue, the Passionsspiele omits something important. The Sanhedrin’s human motivations might drive the narrative, but they’re not what makes it special.

In its eagerness cater for modern pluralism and to give a better account of the Jewishness of the story, the production redeems Judas a step too far: in the first act he is the dominant and most fervent disciple – shading even Peter and Simon, who usually fill that role. Later, even when his commitment wavers, he has to be tricked by Caiaphas into betraying Jesus, and when he realises what he has done, he tries directly to undo it, producing the most public and defiant defence of the arrested Jesus from any of the disciples. Indeed, the “redeemed Judas” resembled the one from C.K. Stead’s recent novel “My Name Was Judas
”. Peter, meanwhile, denies all knowledge, as we know he must, but when he is thereby outdone in his fidelity by the traitor, someone’s got their theological wires crossed.

In his time of death, Judas even outdoes Jesus. Wracked with remorse, Judas soliloquises earnestly and lengthily before hanging himself. By contrast Jesus says very little in his second act, whilst Caiaphas, Nicodemus, Pilate and others trade voluble insults without really achieving anything.

The resurrection is handled quickly, and again somewhat secularly: Jesus does make a final appearance, silently - but it’s more in the nature of a pre-close curtain call than an inspirational visitation, and as the cast and choir finally file off the stage at the conclusion, all that remains to receive the applause was a flickering flame.

As the applause dwindled, the house lights came up, and the massive theatre emptied. No curtain call: that sort of triumphalism would be to miss the point. And as we stepped out into the crisp evening, some eight and a half hours after it had started, the almighty again seemed near at hand: the universe twinkled down on this deep mountain valley, and mighty platinum clouds fringed a gibbous moon.