The Glove Song of J Eugene Stiglitz

In the world the tankers come and go
Talking of Michelangelo...

No longer apes and peacocks and brazen locks,
No longer ivory and resin, amber and socks...

Surely is underdevelopment the bane
Say the prophets of the ticker
We should pump it up, inflate the pain.
I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the garment of my mattress flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

No! I am no development framework, nor was meant to aid;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two;
Avulse the print and other media tools,
Deferential to the internet,
Politic, cautious, meticulous,
Incapable of sentence-making yet,
Most times indeed ridiculous,
Though from the best of schools.

But South America still lies stagnantly
Like seaweed floating in the listless sea.
I have heard the mermaids singing each to each
Their apocalyptic future on the beach.

Nekrognomikon

And it came to pass, on the twenty-first day of the seventh month in the eighth year of the Dragon's rule over Atlantis, that the historians and scribes came together. And one among them said, "It is with sadness that we remember the Gnome and all he did." Then the people said, "Amen," although for diverse reasons both good and ill.

But it was at the third hour of the day that the scriptorium echoed with the sound of many voices, and the book that the Wolf had been writing was complete. And the title of that book was Atlantean Responses to the System of the World as Shown in the Case of the Wyvern Citadel. Then the people said, "Selah," although for diverse reasons both good and ill.

Globe

In front of me sits a curious artifact. It is a sphere mounted on an indented plinth, both parts in shiny, reflective steel.

The sphere is, on closer inspection, a globe. It has a surface made from jigsaw fragments, which as my eldest niece once discovered, can be removed from the underlying sphere and treated as a magnetic puzzle.

It's not an easy puzzle because the crafty craftsmen distinguished land from sea, on this surface, by having the land in matt silver-grey and the sea in reflective silver. From some angles, it all looks the same.

I think of globalisation a lot. This artifact helps me think, sometimes. But just as the artifact is, so also the world. From some angles, many things look quite the same. From others, not so much.

The Transnational Capitalist Class

For some years now, this term has been used to describe the wealthy, those of status, and those who create and maintain such wealth and status, who also have high mobility. In the modern global era, these are the equivalent of the robber barons and colonial overlords of the previous era.

Nevertheless, the powers of that older era obviously took steps after the Second World War to ensure a place for themselves, but more especially, their descendants. Hence by the late 1960s, the rise of international schools to cater to diplomats and businessmen from the First World. This move thus ensured a continuing hegemony: Third World countries set up such schools or assist the founding of such schools so that they can continue to attract First World investment and patronage.

Atlantis was never immune to such blandishment, and it is in this era even less so. Which explains why you now have schools in Atlantis that offer 'international education for local students'. Ahem.

The Nexus and the Orchid Plant

In the ecology of the tropical jungle, the orchid is an interesting and sometimes apparently parasitical plant. Orchids, sprouting aerial roots and tendrils of all kind, take in material from the entire network of water and minerals that semi-visibly permeates the jungle. And they bloom frenetically and gloriously, lie fallow for a while, and then bloom again. It depends on whether the conditions are right or not.

The orchid is not a tree, that mighty and mightily obvious pillar of the jungle. A single tree can sustain an entire ecology on its own, if it is big enough. Even an ecology that includes orchids. A tree is a nexus for comings and goings — for trade in nutrients and life, for cycling and recycling; it can sometimes act as a gateway for the mass movements of populations, or a base for sudden bursts of fecund creativity.

The orchid can be a nexus too, but a very much smaller one. If it is fortunate, its location will make it a more important micro-nexus. But the orchid, as earlier mentioned, is not a tree. And the tree is not merely an orchid writ large, but something altogether different because of its scale and deep resources. The tree props up the jungle, and the jungle props up the tree. The jungle might be a less glorious place without the orchid, but it will probably survive.

So too the small glory of Atlantis, and the larger lands of the New World.

Three Faces

Atlantis has been a trading concern for nearly 700 years. In its time, it has seen many masters come and go. It has had masters from Albion and Cathay and Sind.

Atlantis is ruled by a creed that can be described by one of three main paradigms. These antedate any Machiavellian pragmatism that one might think of as one searches vainly for some way to quickly describe what it is that the masters of Atlantis really do.

First is the idea of commercial multiculturalism. In order to do business, it is an asset to have the kind of mind that understands other cultures. It is therefore to Atlantis's profit to have citizens that speak more than one trading tongue and are able to get along well with those of a wide range of cultures.

Second is the idea of tactical globalisation. In order to do business, Atlantis must appear open to all traders, while preserving its own core. It must show a face that is friendly to commerce and finance, while keeping its interests close and well-protected. It must score well in public, if not in private.

Third is the idea of strategic parasitism. In order to do business, a small state like Atlantis must be able to feed off the mammoths who move their ponderous bulk over the lands of the earth. This is done by bleeding off amounts of value that seem like nothing to those behemoths but are life itself to Atlanteans.

Atlantis, make no mistake, is adept at showing these faces whenever they are required. It is not so good at hiding them when they are not. Nevertheless, these three faces, supported by the skills they learnt from Albion, Cathay, and Sind, are enough to keep Atlantis afloat.

But for how long?

Who Coined 'Globalization'?

According to my friend at St Hilda's, who enterprisingly turned to the OED during my rant, the first use of the word 'globalization' was way back in 1930, by W Boyd and M M Mackenzie, and not by Theodore Levitt in 1983. However, a lot of American commentators (it seems a stretch to call them researchers under the circumstances) still claim that Levitt was the first one to use the term — this despite the fact that shortly after his death in 2006, the New York Times appended a correction to his obituary which denied this claim.

In this age of the Internet, I was able to find uses of the actual word 'globalization' at least as far back as 1959, with claims dating back to 1944, within ten minutes of beginning my search. When a key commentator in my field, such as Joel Spring, gets it wrong, it makes me wonder how on earth I am ever going to bulletproof my research. (In his defence, he cited this from another colleague, who cited the OECD. Ho ho.)

It is A G Hopkins's 2002 book, Globalization in World History (Pimlico/Random House), that I have found most useful so far. It divides the phenomenon into historical phases — archaic, proto-, modern, and post-colonial — tracing its origins back to the pre-industrial Chinese diaspora which first created a global economy and shook the foundations of the world.

Of course, the difference between Spring and Hopkins is that the former is an educationist and the latter is an historian. Educationists, unfortunately, are often so focused on the idea of education that they have been known to ignore the facts. Historians, on the other hand, have been known to obsess about facts so much that some have ignored education.

I do think, however, that all educators should be historians, even if not all historians educate. It is hard to think about educating anybody without knowing something about history — especially in this age of the globalization of knowledge-based disciplines.

Rebirth (or 'What Rough Beast')

I spent a couple of days reading Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. It's a very interesting book, written by a solid academic who actually used to be pro-testing and pro-choice. I'm going to be mentioning a few of her points. (It's also an interesting kind of book to read on the Easter weekend.)

In order to appreciate what Ravitch is saying, one has to have had a quick run-through on the subject of US education systems. Traditionally, each political sub-unit of the USA has had a lot of latitude in deciding what should be taught, how, and to whom. David Tyack's The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (1974) is a good study of the drive towards mega-systems at a state and national level, as people moved from the agricultural hinterland to the cities. Subsequently, Tyack and Larry Cuban's Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (1995) is an excellent crash-course that brings the account up to date towards the end of the last millennium. At that point, things looked pretty optimistic.

The millennial presidency, of course, went to George W Bush. In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, President Bush managed to come up with the 'No Child Left Behind' reforms. The intent was laudable, but the details were appalling. NCLB left it to states to set tests and then mandated action based on the percentage of students doing well in those tests. Not surprisingly, the temptation to lower test standards hit almost all the states, as subsequent research showed.

Students did better, test-wise, and proficiency levels fell. Mandatory tests covered reading and mathematics, and nothing else. In the famed New York 'Regents' exams, it was found that you could score 65 by obtaining 34.5% of the possible points. The graduation rate soared. This happened in Chicago as well; pass rates doubled and performance levels remained horribly flat from 2001 to 2008.

Meanwhile, tuition centres (test-preparation farms and suchlike) flourished. Students learned to game the steadily less rigorous tests at state level. Essentially, students were cheated of a good education while the administrators took credit for better results.

Thus Campbell's Law kicked in. In 1975, Donald T Campbell formulated this social science principle: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decison-making, the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." In this case, teachers and administrators were held accountable for better results, so they learned how to produce better results without producing better education — 'by coaching, cheating, or manipulating the pool of test-takers' as Ravitch puts it.

She continues, 'As long as the state or district superintendent continues to report good news about student performance, the public seems satisfied, and the media usually sees no reason to investigate whether the gains are real. State and local leaders want to claim credit for improvement, rather than determine whether the improvement was meaningful.'

It is instructive to read all those books and then compare and contrast the unfolding of such events with the considerably more controlled and politically well-directed development of the Atlantean education system. The Atlantean system makes no bones about its origin as a way to boost economic growth. The Gnome, who masterminded the economic expansion of modern Atlantis, was very clear about that.

The Gnome also said many things about the non-material aspects of education. They are very altruistic, very laudable things, these other things are. Unfortunately, these non-material ideals proved less robust than the drive for quantitative measures. It was as if the Gnome's architectural and cultural heirs lost to the Gnome's engineering and accounting heirs.

The resultant education system is fantastic. Local test scores are as high as the highest American test scores (normally from the state of Massachusetts). Actually, local test scores are often the highest in the world. This is a good thing, with the only caveat being that these performances are mostly in the quantitative disciplines — mathematics and science. I say 'mostly' because many detractors somehow fail to remember that local students also top the Commonwealth in English Literature and win numerous international debating and legal awards.

But that one caveat is a pretty serious one. It is a symptom that mechanistic learning is the main operating mode in Atlantean society. The country is riddled with the equivalent of American test-preparation centres. The situation has reached the point at which people are giving private tuition to university undergraduates. Most of these centres are cramming stations for the sciences, mathematics and economics, with basic language skills thrown in. Students are also taught mechanical ways of framing and writing essays.

All this means that Atlantean basic education is extremely solid. But it is also resistant to creativity. Since performance is primarily evaluated by test scores, most people get good at producing test scores in the most efficient possible way, not the most interesting, flexible, or adventurous possible way.

Nevertheless, the Atlantean system hasn't had the same kind of problems with testing or choice that the American system has. In the case of testing, this has been because the Atlantean test regime has a strongly centralised and rigorous testing bureau which tries very hard to measure process skills as well as product. It has its weaknesses, but not so many, overall.

But what about 'choice'? In the American system, this refers to students being able to change schools and courses at will. Private education service providers can compete with public schools in a free-market system. At this point in time, the jury is still out; no statistically-solid gains can be seen as an overall trend — although some of these providers have posted sterling results, some have crashed and burned with alarming alacrity.

In Atlantis, choice depends on your academic prowess (test-taking skill?) at the age of 12 or so. This allows you to pick a secondary school, which mostly admits on the basis of that score. The fundamental flaw in the system is of course that in the last 30 years, the best secondary schools have built their reputations on having had the best students and hence having posted the best results.

The market has failed because we can't determine how effective these schools really are except by a spurious measure known as 'rolling value-added score', which measures efficiency as a function of test scores (again). The market has failed even more drastically because the better schools are now allowed to admit talent even without looking at the test scores — and there is no public disclosure as to how this talent is selected or how much is thus absorbed.

Even worse, since test scores correlate well to socioeconomic status (SES), the better schools have developed an elite demographic character in which top earners predominate. The schools can of course disguise this by taking in foreign students without declared antecedents, or by reclassification (or secure classification) of parental SES. But it is pretty clear that the per capita cost of education in the elite schools is much higher than that in the neighbourhood schools.

Principals of such schools are now major fund-raisers and scourers of the hinterland for academic talent. They administer a test designed to discover proficiency in mathematics and language, skim off the cream from nearby countries and big states like China and India, and bring them to Atlantis for conversion education. Then they bask in the academic successes which such talented young people will inevitably produce.

In a sense, the Atlantean system has already had the rebirth that the American system needs. However, what has been birthed is not necessarily a paragon of educational virtue. Whatever it is, though, is pretty efficient at producing test scores. Scorers, not scholars, are the output of the system. Aficionados of W B Yeats might be right to wonder what rough beast slouches towards Atlantis to be born.

Glorious

Recently, an Atlantean sect proposed to build a most glorious temple with built-in eateries and other entertainments, for the goodly harvest of about 300 million Atlantean thalers. Not to be outdone was another sect, which purposed in their hearts to set up a project costing about 1,000 million Atlantean thalers in total.

Across the world came a horrendous earthquake. 200,000 people died. The Atlantean priesthood sent 50,000 thalers in aid. Some people protested at what they saw was a petty response.

I didn't think it was petty at all. For decades, the priesthood of Atlantis has said that aid is partly from the people and partly from the priesthood. If the people can afford to spend 1,300,000,000 thalers on temples, they can surely spend a few thalers on the disaster-stricken on the other side of the world.

I did some calculations. Even in rich Atlantis, it costs 20,000 thalers to build a classroom in a school. In an expensive school, it can cost 60,000 thalers — I should know, since my family overpaid for one and were never acknowledged for it. But this madness is even greater, because public housing costs about 2-300,000 thalers if you're looking for a reasonable size.

On the other side of the world, a few thalers will buy medicine, security, survival, life. The priesthood has saved at least a thousand lives, while the faithful have built temples. Glorious temples. Great temples. Money-spinning temples designed to entrap more faithful while creaming off their sinful gold. To build more temples. More glorious temples. Greater temples. (And over the years, many, many temples of all kinds, all over the face of the world.)

Temples that will wink from their golden eyes in their titanium faces, while the poor across the world lie dead in a muddy ditch. And one day, the Judge will walk the hallways of history, and He will see this, and He will strike the temples and their memory from the minds of men as He once promised — "I never knew you," He will say.

And the dead will rise. Glorious.

The World is Not Flat

No, contrary to what many learned men have said, and others have frequently parroted, the world is not flat. With inequity and inequality of all kinds everywhere you look; with barriers to information, capital, services, and materials; the world is only flat looking down from Olympus. As Chesterton said so well, "One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak."

It is tempting to use the quote blandly as it is, without context. But the amazing story from which it comes, one of the finest detective tales of the entire English canon, was Chesterton's 'Hammer of God', in the collection The Innocence of Father Brown. It is a tale that bears reading, that demands you take the time to have a look.

The lesson in it is clear. Moral forces are as much part of the universe as physical forces. One may be tempered by conscience or thrown awry by the lack of it; the other seems immutable but may be misperceived. Both are incredible miracles when closely examined. But one is more of a miracle than the other.

The world is not flat. It is capable of both rotation and revolution as an oblate spheroid that moves in space. And this is true both morally and physically.

Forgotten Lands

It's taken me a long time, but I've finally found my way through Parag Khanna's The Second World: How Emerging Powers are Redefining Global Competition in the Twenty-First Century. It's all about the new geopolitics and the new maps of the world.

Many amazing things that we've all forgotten come back to light; the fact of how big Xinjiang and Tibet are compared to the rest of China; the size of Brazil compared to that of the USA (8.5 million sq km vs 9.8 million sq km); how many pieces of desert with oil under them can be found in central Asia; the fact that on a clear day you can see Pakistan from Oman; the list goes on. It is a fantastic survey of all the world.

Quite often, in our obsession with the First World and the Third World, we forget that there was a Second World, once full of life and humanity, but drained by the First World over the last 150 years or so. As we head towards a new multipolarity, the mass of China, the European Union and the American hegemony will set these up as the new powers. True, the USA has a huge military edge — but what can it do with that edge?

Meanwhile, China and the EU chip and chisel away at the former Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact, Africa, west Asia, and even South America. It all depends on which way the remaining lesser powers of the First and Second World decide to go; huge Brazil, innovative Japan, massive India and its neighbour Pakistan, Mexico, Canada, Australia, and others. What a wonderful world!

East vs West

It seems as if this theme has been around for ages. But if you look at the maps and the histories, it's always been about the selective pressures that drove western Eurasian survivors, wave after wave, into a bunch of offshore islands. There, they would fight the previous wave, get smarter, and plot to take over the world.

And they've managed it, by a mixture of good fortune, opportunism, savagery, and public relations.

Up till perhaps 1800, the most powerful country, with the largest economy, and the highest production levels, was China. China's iron output in 1078 was about 125,000 tonnes; Britain would only hit 76,000 tonnes in 1788 — about 700 years later. Japan was pretty close; up to 1850, the standard of living in the offshore islands on the eastern Eurasian coast was higher than that in the offshore islands on the western Eurasian coast — in fact, the agricultural efficiency of Japanese farmers has never been beaten.

Other research has shown that India outproduced the West in quantity and quality of steel, cloth, and wood products before it became, and even when it was, part of the British Empire. In fact, 80% of the Empire's GDP was from the subcontinent. India made better guns, produced more iron and better steel — it was India that supplied the raw materials for the legendary Damascus steels.

So what went wrong?

John Hobson, in his 2004 book The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, makes the point that Western civilisation would have been impossible without the multipolar globalization that took place between 500 and 1800 AD. The major players were Africans, Middle Eastern Arabs, Persians, Indians, Chinese, Southeast Asians and Japanese.

Walter Russell Mead, in his 2006 God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World, tries to justify the present world situation by saying that the Anglo-American West had certain advantages. He attributes their success to a balance between respect for three things: tradition, revelation and reason. I think all he's saying is that these are Anglo-American traits; whether they are winning traits is to confuse causation and correlation.

Perhaps nothing went wrong. What we have seen is a brief oscillation of the globalization pendulum. China was the dominant power in most of the last millennium; it may yet be the dominant power for most of this millennium. A future footnote to the Anglo-American dominion might read: "A global empire, dominant from late 20th to early 21st century; not much remains."

We Now Need Opportunities To Think

Some of you will be aware that I've been working my way through the new CIE IGCSE course on Global Perspectives, preparing resources for teaching it. It's a pretty interesting syllabus, and it's spiced up with material that looks like it's been taken directly from the IB. For example, on page 5 of the 2010 syllabus guide, you'll find this:

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Young people in countries across the world face unprecedented challenges in the 21st century – not least in how they will come to terms with accelerating changes in that world, that will impact on their life chances and life choices.

The rationale behind this syllabus is to provide opportunities for enquiry into, and reflection on, those changes. A prime emphasis will be on developing the sorts of skills and dispositions of thinking that active citizens of the future will need.

This rationale accords not only with the international ethos that underpins all of the IGCSE syllabuses but also with the thinking expressed by UNESCO in its seminal reports on education:

Education must include activities and processes that encourage awareness of, and commitment to, the solutions of global problems. This should be done in such ways that people learn solutions are possible through cooperation at all levels – at the levels of individuals, organisations and nations. — UNESCO (cited by Walker, 2002)

It should be particularly noted that developing awareness of this sort is not a question of how to get everybody to think identically. On the contrary, it is a matter of opening minds to the great complexity of the world and of human thought, and opening hearts to the diversity of human experience and feeling.

Students undertaking this course must consider the themes and issues from local, national and global angles whilst developing their own personal perspective.

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It's obvious to me that this is nothing more than what internationalists have been saying all along, their voices now made more urgently commanding (some say 'shrill') by the weight of that huge and badly-defined phenomenon known as 'globalisation'. If the rationale behind this syllabus is indeed to provide opportunities for "enquiry into, and reflection on, these changes", then I can only mourn the fact that we live in an age when people need pre-packaged opportunities to think about life and the world around them.

Do we really need to have this syllabus? Or is it just a great sales opportunity thought up by the clever people who toil in that glass-fronted building along Hills Road in Cambridge? I used to pass by that building every day on the way to school, and wonder what these people did. I wonder no more.

It was at the last paragraph quoted, though, that I really began again to wonder about something. What are 'angles' and what is a 'perspective' in this context? If you consider all these "themes and issues from local, national and global angles", you are obviously considering them from someone else's perspective. This implies, therefore, that the students doing this subject have to learn how to synthesize their own point of view after examining other people's points of views.

And yet, here I am, synthesizing material from many different points of view so that people teaching this course will have a place on which to stand while shoehorning students into an acceptable frame of mind. It's one of life's little ironies, I suppose.

The World is Round and Very Small

Imagine a sphere about the size of a tennis ball. Imagine the thin film of adsorbed water molecules just barely clinging to its surface. If this sphere were analogous to our planet, that layer would be our ecosphere. We'd be living in that layer.

Now imagine the solar wind, a dry hot radiant blast of desert air, all ions, all heat, all light. It gusts suddenly with abnormal violence across the face of the tennis ball, and in one umbral sweep, the phosphorescence engendered by the dwellers in the thin film of water goes out.

Hah, not in my lifetime, everyone says.

I remember Chesterton describing the meditation of the heart as, "The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the year / The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear."

Sometimes we forget how small we are, and how great our smallness. Of course, man's reach must exceed his grasp, else what's a heaven for? But sometimes, we grasp too little, too late. Sometimes, our reach goes where it is of no bloody use at all.

Mulling

I don't know when I became one of those people who write peculiar treatises on the world as it is conceptualised by others. But I am quite sure it happened to me at some point within the last ten years. The other day I was looking at my notes:

Globalisation has been variously defined as ‘the closer integration of the countries and peoples of the world’ (Stiglitz, 2003: 9), ‘the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states and technologies’ (Friedman, 2000: 9), and ‘the conviction that a plurality of cultures… could be accommodated on terms of equality in a single society’ (Fernández-Armesto, 2004: 391) – always driven by the lowering of barriers to transport and the free flow of goods and services through technology and legislation. The first definition is general, the second specific, and the third idealistic.

You see? But all this is what I've come to call 'the new globalisation'. It's a very American free-market sort of idea. To elaborate, Americans believe free trade is good unless they're making a loss; then free trade is called 'dumping' or something like that. If your workers are paid less than Americans, then your crime is 'human rights violations'. In other words, globalisation is now a one-way street (as far as possible) from the New World to the Old.

But it was not always so. At some point before the 19th century, globalisation was a matter of equally mysterious traditions. As cultures collided, they were wary and yet intrigued by other cultures. It wasn't until Darwin's bastard children decided that you could classify other races as inferior or underdeveloped that they felt they had the right to impose without nurturing whatever crops had already been planted in faraway lands.

Take for example the fates of the Maoris and the Australian aborigines. Since the former had established agriculture, a very obvious culture, large buildings and fermentation, they were considered to be more civilised. The Maoris got a treaty with the White Man, the aboriginal peoples of Australia got short shrift and lost everything.

Fortunately, this age sees the rise of China and India as counterweights to the West. You won't see a sudden change, but it will be faster than expected. Eventually, the world will become more multipolar, and then globalisation will become something richer than the rapid onslaught of America-friendly memes and their subsequent integration.

I'm not knocking the USA for some sort of amoral colonial approach, though. I'm saying that a richer memetic inheritance benefits us all. The chance of human survival as a race rises in proportion to its adaptability, and memetic variation is part of that. It is better to have a mixture that is mulled than a stagnant pool.

The Global Achievement Gap

Just last year, Tony Wagner published a book with this title. In the book, he pointed out that the high school graduation rate in the US is about 70%. In most other developed countries, that's closer to 90%. 40% of those who do enter college need remedial courses, and 50% of those who enter college never graduate at all.

Wagner thinks that the US school system is not merely failing, but obsolete. If you've followed the figures, it means that only 35% of those who complete high school education make it out with a basic degree. The United States makes up for it by importing talent in huge quantities to fill up the great universities — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, Caltech, Stanford and so on.

But the point of all this is that talent is blossoming all over the world. And that talent can travel as fast as an aircraft, or alternatively, as fast as data can be moved for the people with the right talent to process it. In such a milieu, the country with the nimblest minds will make it big; the country with the artificial and unthinking conservatism will decay from the inside out.

The knowledge economy is of course not the only economy in the game. Raw materials and the performing arts, sports, games, and sociocultural structures are hard to shift around as quickly. But these too have economic rules bent out of shape by the warping of time and space called globalisation.

Take Skype and all the other forms of electronic communication for example. They have allowed for distributed family networks across the world. The debility of age is now less of a barrier for the wisdom of the ancients. Modernity has something to contribute to tradition and the idea of family. My parents can now afford to disappear to another country for three months while I handle their stuff by remote control.

Yet the plants still need watering. Even though my brother the plant genius has hooked up an automatic sprinkler system (and would probably add CCTV if he had the time and talent), plants need personal attention. In that respect, plants are like pople.

In this age of mass differentiation, the personal touch is required, and bespoke goods are the greatest of luxuries. Never mind that our ancestors all needed tailors and shoemakers in the narrow streets of the old city; now if you have a personal tailor, people think you must be of a higher social class. Cars are designed with the ability to remember your ideal posture (or lack of it), and perhaps do this for every driver in your family.

All this seems to be part of a world where opposing trends come into conflict, and the centre cannot hold. But that's nothing. What is the problem is that everyone wants to keep the past static and stagnant. What people are not doing is thinking about the past and what should be kept — and what should be discarded.

The global achievement gap is not a thing by itself. It is the manifestation of difference between people forced to discard some of the old stuff so that they can travel fast and light, and those who want to hold on to everything until they collapse under the weight of history. And the sad thing is that neither bunch knows what is going on.

Global Themes (Part II): Humans & Other Species

Our dealings with the other life-forms that share this world with us are tainted by the unavoidable biases we have. We are anthropocentric and anthropomorphic by nature; it is very hard, or even impossible, for us to put ourselves in the skin, scales, fur and/or feathers of another chordate species without basing the projected experience on our human template.

And this is where my adventure began.

Flu in a Time of Globalism

The shrinking of the world is not a good thing always. As the circle of our horizon seems to close in on us, as it takes less and less time to go from place to place, so also does the distance between threat and target, between danger and death.

Mutant H1N1 swine flu has now reached Canada, France, Hong Kong, Israel, New Zealand, and Spain.

I suspect everyone will be (if they're not already) at Yellow Alert by the end of today. To quote from CNN, "Keiji Fukuda, the assistant director-general of the World Health Organization, called the outbreak "serious" on Sunday. Researchers are still trying to determine how easily the virus is transmitted person to person and it's too early to predict whether there will be a mild or serious pandemic, said Fukuda."

Yeah, your choices are between a mild pandemic and a serious one. Way to go, mutant. You'll go far.

At the same time, what intrigues me is how long authorities take to decide this is bad. I'm waiting to see when Singapore Atlantis caves in. It's a sort of globalism benchmark, being an alpha world city and all that. The decision to declare an emergency status is a bit like a move in a game of chicken. If you chicken out too early, you might lose things like tourism revenues. If you chicken out too late, you might lose things like lives. Heh.

A Blue Ocean Strategy (Again)

It's interesting to see how some people have seized on Kim and Mauborgne's Blue Ocean Strategy to disguise their strategic flimsiness, enhance their fading looks, or baffle the outside world. Kim and Mauborgne are respectable researchers from INSEAD, and they have spent a lot of time looking at 150 case studies in retrospect.

As with any historical or psychohistorical research, it's possible to frame the past in a paradigm of our own choosing. That's why the Dark Ages never quite lost that sense of desolate misadventure even though they were never really dark. Of course, modern scholars try not to use that abused term.

The same thing seems to apply to Kim and Mauborgne. It is of course clear that a competitive approach accrues to the company (or state, or institution) which markets a product (or uses a process, or makes a tool) that nobody else does. It is equally clear that a 'blue ocean' — the conceptual zone (or area of knowledge, or way of knowing) in which one has no competitors — will one day turn red as multiple competitors appear.

So what is new? Well, the answer seems to be that you can publish old stories in 41 languages if you're from INSEAD and sell hundreds of millions of copies.

The problem, as I've said before (I think in two other posts), is that in this age of globalism, blue oceans are more like blue puddles. They turn muddy and then red in no time at all. But the heinous and subtle criminality of likening an educational institution to a company using a blue ocean strategy has serious consequences.

Why? Because if you run a school and say you are using a 'blue ocean strategy', it means that you are deliberately seeking to avoid competition and make profits from your monopoly. Anyone who has read the Kim & Mauborgne book would see that straight away. In some cases, we've come to accept that some institutions (like Harvard, for example) may indeed seem to want to become supreme players and thus suck even more capital out of their global 'neighbourhood'.

But only a vastly cynical person would run a high school with this kind of idea in mind, especially when one has already a superior brand. Rather, such an institution should go for self-sustaining excellence which doesn't come from doing the educational equivalent of manipulating dubious derivatives. Dressing up somebody else's wine in new bottles is not quite the same as a blue ocean strategy.

Belief (in) Systems (Part II)

This is a sort of thematic sequel to a previous post, in which I wrote about some fundamental underpinnings of worldviews. In that post, it turned out that the punishment-reward or scoring sub-system tended to trump the altruism sub-system in human individuals. Some people think that is natural (it's like the concept of 'original sin') and some people think it is unfortunate (it's like evolutionary biology going up a dead end).

The world today is messy, but the thing about history is that we could have seen it coming a long time ago. Right now, there are five key belief systems out of the thousands of belief systems there are. These five key belief systems may not be important to everyone, but their sheer size (in terms of numbers of adherents), ubiquity (in terms of geographic spread) and significance (in terms of people and policies affected by adherents) make them worth looking at.

The five belief systems I am referring to are (in alphabetical order): Capitalism, Christianity, Globalism, Racism and Secular Humanism. It is quite possible for a person to believe in more than one of these, but it is unlikely that any given person will believe in all five, especially since some of them don't 'play nice' with the others.

Why are these five systems so important?

Capitalism, to begin with, is the child of that long and painful era known as the industrial revolution. Descended from the merchant cartels of the 16th century, it eventually became the guiding economic philosophy of empire-building. Its assertions that people should strive to control the means of production individually, in an environment of free choice (the 'market') and thus create prosperity for all, have been tested and sometimes found wanting. Nevertheless, it has been the dominant economic belief system of the 20th and 21st centuries so far.

Christianity, an eastern religion which sprouted from Palestine about 2000 years ago, is now the world's most widespread and influential religion. Monotheistic and proselytizing, it has butted heads with almost every other belief system on the planet. Although Jesus and his followers seemed somewhat socialist (if not communist) in ideology, for some reason American Republicans seem to conflate extreme capitalism with empire-building AND fundamentalist Protestant (there's an oxymoron for you) Christianity. It blows the mind.

Globalism seems like a modern trend. But it is a venerable belief system espoused by most ancient civilisations; it believes in things like the unity of the world under a single integrated programme (philosophy, creed, religion, whatever) in which individual cultures and ideas can flourish. The Pax Romana and Pax Britannica were pretty supportive of this ideal; the Pax Americana not so much. The United Nations and other international umbrella organisations are all children of this belief system.

Racism, unfortunately, is the extreme and somewhat common response to the Other. In racism, a group of humans believes that by virtue of their narrowly-defined genetic pool, they are superior to all others. This genetic virtue, already a somewhat dubious construct, is supposed to provide intellectual, moral, and even aesthetic superiority. It often co-opts other belief systems to establish itself, and has been shown to have a neurobiological origin in terms of the way humans differentiate between like and not-like.

Secular Humanism (as opposed to other kinds of humanism) is a creed which believes that a rational human, free of all supernatural influences and ideas, is a happy human. Although there are many flavours of secular humanism, the core ideals are a) secular—i.e. without religions or non-rational constructs, and b) humanist—putting human life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness first. It is an ancient creed, often veiled by the fact that earlier societies tended to pay at least lip-service to the idea of the divine, and to frown on those who didn't.

All five of these will crop up as the shadowy or not-so-shadowy influences behind almost every piece of news you encounter, in every medium of communication. I think it is not possible to find any news source which isn't influenced by at least one of these forces. This means that an educated human must at least be able to state and understand the basics of these belief systems, whether he or she (or zie) believes in them or not.