Interregnum

In my youth, there was a wise ruler who was treated harshly. Yet he had a successor, and he praised his successor, who took on the burden in a hard time, to his own ill, and was not fully rewarded in the bearing of it. And for both men, the people above and below gave thanks for firm rulership in times of struggle. The wise ruler was taken into a larger kingdom, though he never forgot his own, and in time, he became the keeper of the past in the house of his youth.

In my middle years, there was a kind ruler who was treated harshly. And he had a successor, whom he had treated well and whose career he had advanced. But this successor was ungrateful, and conspired mightily, and brought a poisoned dagger to the table. And yet, those who valued silver and gold and the wisdom of the world valued this successor greatly, and the kind ruler was forgotten for his goodness, while the evil of the successor was equally forgotten by many.

Yet there are times when there is enough time, and both the evil and good that men do live long enough to return upon them. This too I have seen.

As the Preacher said, "Cast your bread upon the waters, and you shall receive it again after many days." I have cast my bread away for years, and I am thankful that it has returned to me in measure greater than I could ever have expected. There is now enough to keep me going a long while.

I never was in it for the bread though. I remember that ever since I taught my first batch, I knew that leaving this life would be easy if only I could be sure that I had made some lives better, and made more lives better than worse. That has been my goal.

Non nobis Domine, sed nomini tuo da gloriam.

Qoheleth's Defence

The slim Book of the Preacher runs to only twelve chapters. We moderns call it Ecclesiastes, and it is the most entertaining defence that the ancient world ever put up against anomie, mainly because it starts by facing it head-on.

Here is the first chapter, eloquent in its best-known version. That one chapter has donated to the English language a wealth of idiom — 'all is vanity', 'earth abides forever', 'there is nothing new under the sun'. The eponymous author points out that people forget history, that psychology is nonsense, that attempting to use quantitative methods on abstractions doesn't work. He also points out that all the wisdom in the world will not save you from anomie, and that humans are forever going in circles.

And that's just the first chapter. In fact, it goes on like that a lot. It goes through every major philosophy of human existence (you should read his stuff on Epicureanism and hedonism, for example), and trashes the whole lot with fatalism of some sort — 'but time and chance happen to them all'.

Yet, in the final analysis, he points out that one major thing might be good to try: be at peace with your Maker, in the assumption that there is one. After all, if you are a Making, then your entire purpose revolves around your Maker. And if you are a Making, it is unlikely you can understand all the doings of your Maker.

That is why the wisest man on earth realised that the circle of human knowledge will never encompass the answer to, "What is the point of it all?" unless you assume there is a point and that you can't know it. Humans are never satisfied, and having a Maker who refuses to satisfy them on their terms is a great pain.

It is from this that humans get most of their angst and intellectual suffering. You can find a lovely illustration (tongue-in-cheek) of that here. The day ahead is All Hallows' Eve. It is a day full of related significance.

Annual Infarction (Part I): What Is Known

In every human appraisal system, a complex net of checks and balances must be woven so that a fair appraisal is guaranteed. This is not as easy as it seems.

Here are a few questions that a young civil servant should ask before being appraised.

1. Do I get to know everything that is said about me?
2. Do I have the right to publish a reply to what is said about me?
3. Can I take legal action for defamation of character if my appraisal looks as if it defames my character?
4. What is the theoretical basis for this method of appraisal?
5. Does it work when converted into a ranking system?
6. Do the practitioners of this appraisal system understand a) the difference between qualitative and quantitative data, and b) the idea of reification leading to loss of accuracy?
7. If the data about me are presented to a neutral third party who uses this appraisal system, will the same grade be awarded?
8. If my reporting officer presents the complete appraisal to the countersigning officer, will amendments be made?
9. If I present an argument for adjustment of my appraisal, will it be answered point by point before a neutral arbiter and will it be taken into account if it cannot be rebutted?

The first three points speak about social validity, the next three speak about scientific validity, and the last three speak about the reliability of the system.

There are a lot more questions, but these will do for Part I of this interesting subject. In fact, this part is titled 'What Is Known' because the only thing about an appraisal system that is known is the documentation produced about it and produced by it. The exact thought processes that go through the mind of the appraiser or reporting officer are never recorded and impossible to access. The final outcome is never in doubt. This falls far short of the rigour which is obtained, for example, in mathematics or good science, where the working-out of the process leading to a conclusion can be examined step by step for error.

In fact, although many systems have tried to compensate for it, the only system that can be said to really work for social situations is one of massive peer review, or so-called 'open appraisal'. In such a system, everyone gets to debate the outcome, and their thinking is recorded for posterity. When the final appraisal is produced, the signatories are clearly identified along with their comments. In addition, contrary opinions which arose in the minority population are also recorded in full. This is the system used by the Supreme Court of the United States.

One might argue that this is too much a burden of time and effort. Yes, I agree.

Why do I agree? In my previous employment, I realised that such a system indeed takes up too much time and effort if the people administering the system have one or more of the following problems (not necessarily in order of importance):

1. Limited resources: that is, insufficient processing power, time, clerical assistance and/or administrative ability.
2. Mediocrity: that is, an insufficient interest in a just outcome, lack of intellectual rigour, lip-service to excellence while not actually being concerned about it.
3. Lack of transparency: that is, an incidental or a deliberate need to conceal a) a minority opinion which cannot be defended, b) interests which ought to be irrelevant to the case but are influencing the outcomes, c) personal ideology or other traits which cannot be publicly enunciated, d) a ranking outcome which looks invalid despite the validity of the appraisal, and/or e) irregular manipulation of reward systems (such as bonuses and awards).

These are not the only problems, but they are the more common ones. I have seen with my own eyes the maladministration of appraisal systems to take into account any or all of these factors.

So what advice, at this stage, do I have for a young civil servant? Well, to be honest, if you want to succeed you will need to work like a dog, remain civil at all times, show unswerving loyalty, never speak your mind no matter how much people claim they value your opinion or intellectual approach, and remember that you are a servant first and foremost. Even when they tell you that you are a leader, remember that you are also a follower of some other leader. Remember that you can be head of the civil service, but unless you have strong personal ties with many other nodes of power, you will merely be chief servant.

As such, your duty (even though it does not make me happy to have to say it) is to be perfectly obedient and close-mouthed. Before you come up with an opinion, make sure at least one superior will also have this opinion in mind. Before you write anything, remember that exceptional brilliance is a threat to your superiors and will catch their eye. Above all, never try to take credit for your own work if credit is due. That will come much later; for now, it is all to your superiors' credit that they have cleverly employed you.

I've heard many times at very high levels the exact opposite of all this. Very senior and powerful people have said that this kind of civil service behaviour is reprehensible and slows progress. They are right. But unfortunately, the majority of civil servants will need to behave this way in order to survive and prosper in their jobs.

For me, I have always tried to be my own man. I am not beholden to special interests or the need for whatever dangly bits have been offered to me as incentives. I don't travel gratuitously overseas at government expense or place personal considerations foremost when dealing with colleagues. I have never bothered with attempting to manipulate my appraisal, and for whatever appraisals of my subordinates have been manipulated against my intention, I have kept copious notes in a sealed archive. Since those notes constitute my own opinions and contain no official documentation, I think they are happy to remain sealed up.

If you, a young civil servant, have read all this carefully, then you can probably figure out that 'what is known' is a rather hazy and ill-defined construct. You may well be someone to whom all these ideas of mine do not apply. You may be right as well. The history of mankind shows that the wisest of thoughts may have the most unintended of outcomes, and that no one is really wise. One of the ancients had this opinion. It makes a good conclusion, and I'm sure he intended it that way.

Global Geometry

When Thomas Friedman says that the world is flat, it puts one in mind of an alluvial floodplain, so flat and silty that it poses no obstacle to the relentless spread of water, again and again, redistributing the chemical wealth for those inclined to take risks. And indeed, the major civilisations of the world have lived, died, spawned, suffered and spread by the dangerous wealth of the floodplains.

Globalisation, as Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and others have pointed out, is a phenomenon that has its roots in the human past of about 60 millennia ago. Humans spread. They move and bring culture, community, commerce and conflict. Where a dominant group meets one less dominant, the less dominant group learns more. This ensures that civilisations endure cycles of boom and bust; except that larger ones tend to go bust more slowly. The corollary to that is that when they do go bust, they tend to go bust with a boom.

For Atlantis, our small city-state whose insignium of the Lion of the Sea has spread to places like Venezia and Londinium, globalisation reared its head at least 700 years ago. Yet we treat the phenomenon as if it is ultra-modern, a thing of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in this age of humanity.

There is a kind of secret that the Masons knew and which is also hidden behind the warning on the gateway to Plato's Academy. That warning reads, "Let no man enter here who knows no geometry."

That secret is this. The world is not really flat; neither is it really round. It is not an oblate spheroid as the geographers have it, nor an odd polyhedron as the geometers and cartographers require. It is a lump of rock, physically. But memetically, in terms of the ideas that drive the world of humanity, it is a furious and irregular tempest that is subject to no laws that humans have yet been able to discern.

As Qoheleth says in the book known as Ecclesiastes, "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but time and chance happen to them all." The marketplace of ideas is not dominated by the swift or the strong, or even the durable or diffuse; it is an agora where millions cry out and not all is understood, and even when anything is understood, it is sometimes understood too late.

Blake wrote about a 'fearful symmetry'. This is true to life. The symmetrical, the neatly-ordered ideas of MBA school and the human sciences of politics, economics and sociology — these are dangerous because they are not entirely true, but true enough to lead to disaster.

It is like a stack of bricks, each one placed slightly out of true; each is almost exactly in place, but not quite. That stack will eventually fall as the centre of its gravity is displaced further and further away from the centre of the foundation. Eventually, it will hang over nothing; as it says in the book of Job, "He hangeth the world over nothingness." What an image! What an idea!

I just wonder how true a description it is.

Unchanging

The theme of that book is that nothing really changes, that randomness and chance are dominant in the world of real things. The book says that the only place in which this is different is the place of the mind, where one can think about why this is so, and why the world is nothing but the vanity of illusion.

That book is the book of Qoheleth, which a younger civilisation now calls Ecclesiastes. As we look towards a change in paradigm come November 4 this year, a change which seems profound in the world of men, it is instructive to read this old book.

Here is Ecclesiastes 8:8-9:

There is no man that hath power over the spirit to retain the spirit; neither hath he power in the day of death: and there is no discharge in that war; neither shall wickedness deliver those that are given to it. All this have I seen, and applied my heart unto every work that is done under the sun: there is a time wherein one man ruleth over another to his own hurt.

Perhaps this is one of those times, in which those who have power over others, or who gain that power, will find that it is bitter indeed in the end. But as the Preacher said, there is nothing new under the sun. The change that we can believe in is fleeting unless it is a change in the hearts and minds of men; our historical awareness tells us that overall there will never be such a thing.

In the end, it boils down to the audacity of hope; a generation must desire to believe that things can be made better even though the institutions of the world have failed, are failing, will fail or are themselves 'epic fail'. Yet even this belief may not save us from the near-certainty that somehow, some people will screw things up, and that will balance the books of life.

All Is Vanity

Vanity is a curious kind of failing. It strikes in unexpected places, at unexpected times. Very few are immune to it, no matter how wise. There is always the little voice in the head that says, "There but for the grace of God go I," and immediately, we stumble. Today I was reading from one of the books of the wise, and mourning the fact that so many of us are like this, so many things are like that, and everything in the end is indeed vanity.

Sometimes, we read things into events and into writings that are just not there at all. Recently, some controversy arose about whether President Bush was pointing a subtle finger at Senator Barack Obama when he spoke about appeasement before Israel's Knesset. To some, it was obviously so and a terrible thing to have done; to others, it was not so obvious, especially since the obvious reference was made about a Republican Senator and not a Democrat. All of that was quickly put into a more human perspective (although it may very well come back on the global front) by the news of Senator Ted Kennedy's malignant brain tumour. I observed all this through the daily updates of the New York Times.

The whole course of events reminded me about the much older controversy surrounding Carly Simon's (in)famous song, You're So Vain. In that song, she says the immortal lines:

You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you.
You're so vain, I'll bet you think this song is about you...
Don't you? Don't you?

The problem is of course that the answer to those lines might be, "Yes," and that answer might be true for at least one person. It is interesting though that people interviewed Ms Simon over a 35-year span to actually find out who the true subject of the song was. I think that's a valid approach; if the song's originator can't tell you, who can?

To this day, remembering Ms Simon's song and its lyrics, I try very hard not to 'read myself into things' when someone writes something that would offend me if I were indeed the target of those writings. I try to be a skeptical empiricist about it. And perhaps, that kind of thinking is indeed the lesson to be learnt in the book of the Preacher, who was King in Jerusalem.

Word Of The Day: Meliorism

The Latin word 'melior' means 'better'. 'Meliorism' is the belief that the world can be made better by human effort. It is a pretty positive belief; the catch lies in the single word 'human'. Unfortunately, human endeavour has often been associated with failure: "human weakness", "human frailty", and other such phrases tend to support the idea that to be human is to be flawed. The idea of human shortcoming ('falling short of the glory of God') is an old one, and obviously a true one. Despite our claims to being the high point of creation (or of evolution, if you are so inclined), we are not particularly perfect.

In my study of the old Latin Vulgate text of the Bible, I came across three instances of melior ('better') or its equivalent in the fourth chapter of Ecclesiastes, which was my reading for this morning. They are interesting statements. I am meditating on each one of them today. They do seem to hold out hope for meliorism as long as that is approached with God-fearing prudence. I have much to learn.

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Note: there are actually four instances of melior in the Vulgate text for Ecclesiastes 4. The fourth instance is found in what the modern Bible calls Ecclesiastes 5:1, which used to be Ecclesiastes 4:17.

A Room In The Heart

In every heart there is a room, and it sometimes has more than one nature. To Chesterton, in his epic poem Lepanto, it is

The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.

Chesterton, of course, speaks of the Pope in his chapel, at the centre of the storm that rages as the forces of the Caliphate collide head on with Don John of Austria's Christian navy at the Battle of Lepanto. But on a different level, he speaks of the place in our inmost being from which we look out and see that the world is beautiful and fragile. From this place, we see that the people we love, the things we delight in, the activities which are life to us, are all easily reft from us – and we learn to pray that we are protected from the fearful pain of their loss.

To Billy Joel, this place is also a sanctuary – but of a different kind. It is a refuge from that pain, not a window upon it; it is a place of healing in between the hurts. Perhaps he and Mr Chesterton were more alike than we can ever know. Here is Mr Joel's take on that room:

In every heart there is a room
A sanctuary safe and strong
To heal the wounds from lovers past
Until a new one comes along

I spoke to you in cautious tones
You answered me with no pretence
And still I feel I said too much
My silence is my self-defence

And every time I've held a rose
It seems I only felt the thorns
And so it goes, and so it goes
And so will you soon, I suppose

But if my silence made you leave
Then that would be my worst mistake
So I will share this room with you
And you can have this heart to break

And this is why my eyes are closed
It's just as well for all I've seen
And so it goes, and so it goes
And you're the only one who knows

So I would choose to be with you
That's if the choice were mine to make
But you can make decisions too
And you can have this heart to break

And so it goes, and so it goes
And you're the only one who knows.

For me, that place conceals both the painfully beautiful and the beautifully painful. I remember old roses of all kinds, their smiles, the planes of their faces, their curves of mind and body; I remember sexuality and spirituality and somatic intensity. For these some of all the kinds of beauty that have been given to mortal men doomed to die; and God has made all things beautiful in His time.

Why did He give us all this beauty, these things that we have died for, or felt like dying for, or felt that we have died from? It is clear that there are two gifts of doom (in the Anglo-Saxon sense, I suppose) – the two Trees in the Garden were of moral knowledge and eternal life. But in Ecclesiastes it is written that firstly, God has made everything beautiful in its time; and secondly, God has set eternity in the hearts of men. The two things to be contrasted are not beauty and eternity, but time and eternity. All beauty has been given to us to enjoy in its time, regardless of variety – but the enduring foundation of our secret room is eternity.

And so, now older and a little wiser, when I see the brightness – the beautiful intellect and power and grace and strength (and so many other wonderful things!) in each of my students – I think of eternity. I think of how each aspect, each attribute might decorate the vault of infinity, and I thank God that He has made us all beautiful.

Midnight

I've had a hard year, and so have many of you. I would like to think I've made the world a better place for each of you who have stopped by here. Yet, I'm fully aware that I have not; in fact, that I have made the world more confusing, more exasperating, more enraging and less pleasant for some of you. I wish that it were otherwise, and I wish I were wiser.

Nevertheless, anonymity notwithstanding, I still have to thank many of you, in groups and as individuals, for doing things which made me a better person (or at least, feel better). I suppose I shall have to do this personally, but here, I am going to do it by pseudonym and cryptonym, by synonym and by euonym.

Three rings for leaders of the first elect
Seven for the others in that room of stone
Nine years might not a better crew select
One now has the privilege of choice alone
One ring to serve them all and set the tone

Three stars for thinkers of the atrament
Intellect and silliness in equal part
Some added spiciness a sacrament
Passion and emotion burning from the heart
Still unresolved is science over art

Three cheers for a genesis of wonder
Seven points for chronicles of dire sense
This whole year like judgement day of thunder
Drowning the ceremony of innocence
In cold-forged steel of shining excellence

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I am glad that I have had the privilege of serving you all. And here, as my anonymous friend also does, I can think of no better message to leave you than one of time, and the prospects thereof.

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Ecclesiastes 3

A Time for Everything

For everything there is a season,
a time for every purpose under heaven.

A time to be born and a time to die.
A time to sow and a time to harvest.
A time to kill and a time to heal.
A time to tear down and a time to build up.
A time to cry and a time to laugh.
A time to grieve and a time to dance.
A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones.
A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.
A time to gain and a time to lose.
A time to keep and a time to throw away.
A time to tear and a time to mend.
A time to be quiet and a time to speak.
A time to love and a time to hate.
A time for war and a time for peace.

What profit is there for the one who labours? I have seen the travail that God has given to us all.
He has made everything beautiful in its own time. Yet He has planted eternity in the hearts of men, that they might not see the work of God from beginning to end.
So I concluded there is no good but for a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life. And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, for it is the gift of God.

And I know that whatever God does is final; nothing can be added to it or taken from it - this is done that people should fear Him. That which has been is now; and that which is to be has already been; and God requires an accounting for all things.

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I wish all of you a most enlightening new year. May God help your burden, your shadows, the darkness of your times, the gravity of the days, and the heaviness of your hearts all seem lighter. For all our troubles are light and momentary ones, leading in the end to the light of His presence. Amen.