Downtime Day 0

It is Thursday morning and you turn on the machine that is amanuensis and secretary, in altogether too many senses of these words. And... there is a terrible lack of response.

This then is Downtime Day 0, D-Day, the day dedicated to the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, who comes upon you riding a blue horse, with the vagaries of electromagnetic chaos in his hand. This is not what you were brought up to believe, but is what you have learnt while walking the narrow corridors of invisible light.

And thus has D-Day come, and the last trump has sounded for your trusty hard disk drive of a decade's faithfulness. For at the heart of every HDD is MTBF — the buried seed of betrayal that always sweeps away the faithful history of duty. MTBF — Mean Time Between Failures. MTBF, which stands for many other things best not said here.

This is D-Day, and where Hell is, there we must ever be, Faustian in all our downfall, lost without our digital dominion. Or so the playwrights would have it.

Yet this is not altogether true:

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?

I decide to take the day off. I will remember — these days were made for man, not man for such days. And I will be at peace.

Milton's 400th

This day marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of John Milton in 1608. Milton was a famous poet whose Paradise Lost is one of the seminal works of the English religious literature canon. In a literary sense, he was a precursor to Shakespeare; whereas Shakespeare was the first writer to consistently give his characters psychological dimensionality (intention, motivation, character and complexity), Milton did give it a shot, especially in his diabolical exegesis of the character of Satan.

But Milton isn't literature that every student of English comes across in this day and age, although I am sure many traditionalists would prefer it. It is sadly far more likely that the advice given to the unknown Terence should hold true:

Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.

One wonders, however, if seeing "the world as the world's not" would do us any lasting mischief – or whether a little bit of fantasy might indeed be a useful coping strategy, profitably deployed as we build castles in the air as templates for an ideal future.

Small Change

It only takes a little bit of change to make a system run better. Sometimes, we get disgusted with friction and stiction and other reasons why things don't work or work slowly. But often these factors require just a bit of polishing or lubrication. The one thing that cannot be so easily overcome is inertia, which is an innate property of all matter regardless of surface condition.

The only way one can overcome inertia is to develop control over the moment associated with it. There are two plausible and applicable definitions of inertia: 1) the tendency for something to maintain a particular momentum, and 2) the difficulty of altering the direction or other quality of that momentum.

These definitions are particularly plausible and applicable to human institutions of various sorts. Accordingly, the idea of inertia is now in frequent use within the economic, political, social and cultural spheres. The problem in many of the areas within these overlapping spheres of humanity is that free action tends to be opposed by mass action, or by hierarchical control.

Accordingly, inertia can be the product of random mass action or the irrational purposes of hierarchies. As Quentin Skinner writes in his analysis of Milton and what it means to be a free person, "If you are to be your own master, two conditions must in turn be satisfied. You must first of all succeed in mastering your self. By this Milton means that you must be able to control your passions and act in accordance with the dictates of reason at all times. If you instead allow yourself, as he puts it at the beginning of The Tenure, to be governed by blind affections, then your actions will not be an expression of liberty but of mere licentiousness."

Unfortunately, in the absence of a proper research programe, analysis, reflection and careful deep self-examination, institutions can obviously remain ungoverned by the dictates of any reason except affectation – and not admit to it. And the consequences for the system are dire in the extreme. I will end by quoting Skinner's piece on Milton (from the London Review of Books, 30(10), p.16; 22 May 2008) at length:

...he [i.e. Milton] does not in the least dispute that your standing as a free person will be lessened or taken away if you are impeded in the exercise of a choice. To be a free person is to be able to act according to your autonomous will; if you are constrained from exercising your will by force or the threat of it, then your liberty will to that degree be lost. Of greater importance, however, is the fact that it is equally possible according to Milton for your freedom of action to be curtailed even if no one subjects you to the least degree of interference. The reason is that, if you fall into a condition of dependence, your mere awareness of this predicament will have the effect of limiting your choices. This claim admittedly sounds strange, and has often been dismissed as confused. But Milton is making an important point about one of the ways in which liberty can be lost. He is asking you to reflect on what will happen if you come to realise that you are living at the mercy of someone else. As soon as you recognise your condition of dependence, he claims, this will be sufficient to cause you to censor yourself, thereby setting limits to your own freedom of action. You will now take care to do everything, however abject, to minimise the risk that your master or ruler will intervene in your life in a detrimental way, and you will at the same time take care to do nothing that might arouse their envy or rage.

These contentions about the psychological impact of living in slavery are also classical in provenance. Tacitus had illustrated them in a number of passages, always with the implication that servitude can be expected to breed servility, and that servility helps to entrench servitude. Sallust in his Conspiracy of Catiline goes still further, pointing to the baleful implications of the fact that rulers tend to be especially envious of their most outstanding subjects. The opening of Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates echoes the passage so closely as to be almost a translation of it. ‘Tyrants are not oft offended, nor stand much in doubt of bad men, as being all naturally servile; but in whom virtue and true worth most is eminent, them they fear in earnest, as by right their masters; against them lies all their hatred and suspicion.’ The consequence, as Sallust had stressed, is that such subjects find themselves condemned to curbing their most valuable talents for fear of what could happen if they were to display them too visibly.

This is one reason, Sallust goes on, why the citizens of republics always outperform the subjects of monarchs in the glory of their deeds as well as in the originality of their thought. Kings prefer flatterers and time-servers, whereas in republics the most creative spirits can soar unchecked by any craven anxieties. A further reason, he adds, is that there are few civic duties to be performed under kings, with the result that their subjects readily slide into a state of lazy and torpid acquiescence.

Indeed. Perhaps this is why we should read the classics from time to time; not because they are old, but because they remind us that certain things never change about the human condition, its rights, freedoms, and failings.

The Greater Trumps: (22) The Accuser

Here is a high mountain or perhaps, by trick of perspective, a deep abyss. Whatever it is, it enthrones a bat-winged entity of gross but compelling aspect. Around it are strewn chained human beings engaged in all manner of debauchery. This is an unpleasant image altogether.

In Christian symbology, the Accuser, le Diable, il Diavolo, el Diablo - this is Satan, the proud angel who was thrown out of Heaven. In pagan symbology, this is Pan, the all-power, the force of nature given free reign. To many, this is the same thing, and so the image represents Violence and Randomness. The Mayans of old worshipped a bat-god, Camazotz the Night Stalker; in some ways, the modern image of the Batman is parallel.

But what does this image mean? On closer approach, it can be seen that the people at the Accuser's feet are chained by their own chains, their own desires. It is by their lusts and urges that they are forced to remain in his presence. And the odd thing is that he seems as much a prisoner as they, unable to break out of the cycle of natural forces because there is no higher authority present to free them - or him.

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The trap of freedom leading to slavery is a subtle one. I've often pondered the paradox that when limitations and constraints are given to creative people (for example: choice of medium, size of work, colour selection), they transcend these constraints and produce more creative work than when they are not given any constraints at all. The same is true for many disciplines - creativity can best be seen against severe discipline and constraint.

As often the case in this particular matter, it is John Milton who best portrays that frame of mind which is the reverse - that freedom must be won at all costs from such restraints:

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost—the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome.
That glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deify his power
Who, from the terror of this arm, so late
Doubted his empire—that were low indeed;
That were an ignominy and shame beneath
This downfall; since, by fate, the strength of Gods,
And this empyreal substance, cannot fail;
Since, through experience of this great event,
In arms not worse, in foresight much advanced,
We may with more successful hope resolve
To wage by force or guile eternal war,
Irreconcilable to our grand Foe,
Who now triumphs, and in the excess of joy
Sole reigning holds the tyranny of Heaven.

It's common to humans that the quest for freedom of expression leads us to disdain the idea of hierarchical sovereignty. None of us likes to have a master, and all of us sometimes think that expression without constraint is good. This is what the image of the Accuser teaches us - not all that gleams in this way is gold. A heavy price will be paid for abandoning free will for 'freedom'. I remember saying some things related to this matter a few years back.