Protests and Consequences

I was caught in a traffic jam on my way to the office yesterday morning. My route to work skirts Heathrow Airport and it seems that protesters against the putative new runway had blocked the tunnel that leads to the central area. I was inconvenienced a bit. It probably added twenty minutes to my journey time, meaning that I had to park in the far reaches of the car park along with the other late arrivals. People with flights to catch were inconvenienced quite a bit more. Still, twenty minutes extra in the car gave me time to ponder and I came around to thinking about actions and consequences.

The protesters at Heathrow have two distinct issues. They believe that aviation is a uniquely harmful kind of greenhouse gas generator that is contributing a large part of the climate change we are undergoing. They also believe that it is immoral to demolish houses to make way for a new runway. Both viewpoints are worthy of consideration.

Thinking about the airport expansion first. I have lived in the general area of Heathrow for over 25 years. This is not a coincidence. With the amount of travelling I do it is really quite convenient to live just 15 minutes from terminal five – that’s on a good day of course. When my wife and I bought our house we were completely aware that the world’s biggest international airport was just up the road. In fact it was part of the attraction.

Just as an aside, when we had been in the house just a few months a friend came round. This friend was a keen aircraft spotter and had a radio scanner to listen to the chat between the pilots and air traffic control After a couple of hours of this his face was lit up with exhilaration and he asked us how much extra we had had to pay to get a house so close to the glide path. But I digress.

The air transport industry is growing fast. In my professional life it is my business to track that growth and when I started to do this in 1999 there were about one and a half billion passengers carried on commercial flights per year. The equivalent number for 2014 was very nearly 3.5 billion and all projections say it will continue to grow for the foreseeable future. London has long been one of the main international hubs for air transport. If it is to retain that position it needs more airport capacity. That much is clear. The position of the protesters is that London should take a principled stance and decide not to participate in the expansion of air transport.

The obvious challenge is that there is a pretty strong correlation between the availability of effective air transport and economic success. There is at least a plausible risk that if London’s position as an air transport hub declines then so too will the economic prosperity of the city and indeed the country. Among those most concerned with the problems of climate change this may be thought a price worth paying. It’s true that in the short term all that will happen is that traffic will shift to Frankfurt, Amsterdam or Paris but eventually the citizens of those countries will also demand a reduction in air traffic and perhaps this will lead to a global reduction.

Well, it might. But in the meantime Boeing and Airbus have order books for over 12,000 new commercial jet airliners. Barring the sort of political change that is vanishingly unlikely the vast majority of these aircraft will be delivered and put into service. If they don’t operate into Heathrow they will operate into Beijing, Shanghai, Jakarta, Almaty, Mumbai and other points East. I've been to some of these places and I'm pretty sure that they will welcome growth in aviation for quite a time to come.This will add to the momentum that already exists for the eastwards shift of the economic centre of gravity of the world. Asia will become more prosperous and Europe relatively less so.

And if that were to happen, perhaps those houses that don’t get demolished to make way for a new runway will be worth a lot less than they are today. The area around Heathrow is rather prosperous, mainly because of the presence of the world’s leading international airport. If Heathrow became a backwater on the aviation map maybe some of that prosperity would go away. We have all seen pictures of the villages where the pit closed and houses lost all their value. Heathrow is the coal pit of west London. It drives the prosperity of the region. Most of the people who live nearby depend on it for their livelihood directly or indirectly.

So the protest yesterday morning inconvenienced a lot of people whose livelihood would be threatened if the protesters got their way. This doesn’t seem to me like a strategy for winning friends and influencing people. The argument that people will lose their homes to support airport expansion and this is a very bad thing seems to me to be a weak one. Unless we are prepared to live in an environment that is frozen at some arbitrary stage of development then there will always be such dilemmas. Charles Dickens wrote about the suffering of Euston and Camden Town where homes and communities were cleared to make way for the coming of the railway in the 19^th century. Those people really were sacrificed to the developments that made the modern world and they were very badly treated. In the modern world we do a bit better. Those displaced by the new runway will be compensated for financial losses and assisted with relocation. And if that doesn’t work as it should we have political processes to address the problem. In any case I am not sure that yesterday’s protesters were all that invested in this side of the argument. When they gave their names and addresses to the beak this morning it turned out that none of them lives within a hundred miles of Heathrow.

But what about the other problem, that aviation is such a big part of the climate change problem and if we don’t fix that the disruption of a few outer London villages will seem like a vicarage tea party? It’s a serious question and it deserves serious consideration. I’ll come back to it in another post. All I’ll say for the moment is that last time I looked the whole of world aviation was emitting about 15% of the greenhouse gasses currently produced by cow farts.

Enlightened Stories

I’m a big fan of the Enlightenment. I would happily wear a t-shirt with the image of Denis Diderot or David Hume. For a while I actually did have a t-shirt with the likeness of Jeremy Bentham on it but that was more to do with him being the “spiritual founder” of University College London, my alma mater. Having said that, Bentham’s "fundamental axiom" - the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong" seems to me so self-evident that I struggle to understand anyone who argues against it.

Apart from academic ancestor-worship, what is it about the Enlightenment that captivates me so much almost three hundred years after the event?

The Enlightenment was many things to many people but for me it was a period of time in which rationality came to be prized as a guiding principle in human endeavor. This enabled an explosion in scientific thought as well as huge developments in political and moral philosophy. Rationality didn’t come easily. It took enormous intellectual effort on the part of some of the greatest thinkers of all time to set aside existing preconceptions and build it from first principles.

At the risk of offending any neuroscientists who may be passing I’ll try to explain what I think was going on. The primitive brain that still exists at the base of your skull is hard-wired (this is a metaphor of course, there aren’t really wires inside your head) to deal with the environment at the time humans were living precariously on the African savannah. It perceives the world in terms of agency.

“Is there a sound behind that bush? It might be a lion waiting to eat me. I’d better run away”.

The sound is perceived, it was caused by an agent that may well be dangerous, the response is pretty automatic. The problem comes with perceptions that are not so easily attributed.

“The top of that mountain just exploded and I am about to be engulfed by molten rock and poisonous gas. That wasn’t a lion. There must be something even bigger and nastier at work”.

Or a bit more prosaically,

“There are great flashes of light in the sky followed by frightening loud bangs. Still not likely to be a lion. I bet it was the bastard that blew up the mountain the other day”.

And in today’s terms,

“The biggest typhoon in human history just decimated the Philippines. It must be that mountain-exploding, light flasher getting mad about gay people marrying”

The primitive brain has a theory of agency and seeks an agent for those phenomena. It comes up with the idea of a god or a spirit and runs with it. From there it is a direct line to organized religion and the divine right of kings. Stories and myths grow and circulate. They meet and cross-fertilise creating a web of belief that spans the human experience.

Thousands of years later the brain has evolved higher functions. It is much more sophisticated. To use another metaphor, the brain is now capable of running complex software processes that allow reason and logic to be applied. The great achievement of the Enlightenment thinkers was to harness this capability and to look at the world afresh with evidence and reason as their guides. And that’s where the story of modern human development begins to accelerate. The intellectual tool kit developed by the Enlightenment philosophers has shaped the succeeding centuries. It has allowed science to uncover many (though by no means all) of the workings of the universe. Science has led to technology and that has enabled economic development. It has allowed civil societies to develop so that the benefits of economic development are shared across all sections of the population. You will almost certainly live longer and more healthily than your ancestors because of the advances in science, technology and even politics that stem from the Enlightenment.

But nothing in life is ever completely unambiguous. There are certainly people who see the rationality of Enlightenment thinking as undesirable. Some of them are obvious. In 2010 Charles Windsor, heir to the British throne, said

''I was accused once of being the enemy of the Enlightenment. I felt rather proud.”

It’s not hard to see why a privileged member of a family granted a “divine right” to stay top of the heap might take that view but it can be very difficult to understand why some who have benefited hugely from the Enlightenment would take the same approach. Why, despite all the enormous advantages brought about by a rational view of the world are so many people ready to reject rationality?

I think that the answer lies in that primitive brain that seeks agency in every situation and is driven more by stories than by analysis. There is a very old joke that goes:

“Why did you take an instant dislike to Donald Trump?”

“It saved time”.

As with many old jokes it is funny because it reflects a deep truth. Gathering evidence, evaluating it, putting it in context and drawing reasoned conclusions is time-consuming and difficult. How much easier to make a snap assessment of the way a new phenomenon fits with the existing narrative that is already deeply engrained. If you grow up in America with a  world view that incudes tales of rugged western pioneers with six-guns on their belts you might resist all attempts to control the use of firearms in that country. Never mind the overwhelming objective evidence that thirty two thousand of your fellow countrymen die each year due to lack of such control. If your world view includes a deep fear of the outsider you might respond to recent terrorist atrocities by excluding refugees despite the evidence that most terrorists in recent years have attacked their own native countries.

This is bad enough when it is just unintended consequences. When it is used quite deliberately and cynically for political gain it becomes more frightening. The lies told by Donald Trump, Ben Carson and George Osborne are not random errors. They are not even sophisticated or hard to refute. They are deliberate ploys to reinforce a narrative that already exists within a section of the population at the expense of rational consideration of evidence. These three politicians, and there are others, would almost certainly reject Jeremy Bentham’s fundamental axiom. They are not interested in the greatest good for the greatest number. In their world it is quite acceptable to condemn sections of the population to sub-human status  just so long as their own tribe stays on top and grants them positions of power.

So in this bleak picture where is the hope for the children of the Enlightenment? Are we condemned to see the gains of the last three centuries unpicked before our eyes? I don’t think so but the way forward is difficult. We need to tap into the same primitive brain functions as Trump and the rest. We need our own stories. We need our own narrative web that makes rationality the hero. We need legends that reflect what it means to achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number. There are people around the world already doing this but we need more. For every Donald Trump we need a Carl Sagan. For every Charles Windsor we need a Malala Yousafzai. For every George Osborne we need a Nelson Mandela. Yes I do realize the irony that two of my three heroes are already deceased. Speaking of which, maybe I should get that Denis Diderot t-shirt made up.

A Religion of Peace?

Is there such a thing?

Most religions have a pretty patchy record when it comes to spreading brotherly love. Christianity has certainly had its moments, from the Crusades to the Spanish Inquisition to present-day bombing of family planning clinics. Hinduism has fuelled the inter communal strife in India that killed many thousands of people before and after partition in 1947. Even Buddhism, which usually gets a very good rap for non-violence and love of all creatures has its ugly side as recent events in Myanmar have shown. And then there is Islam.

In 2015 Islam features at the top of the charts for religious controversy. Groups claiming to act on behalf of its god have been responsible for massacres, bombings and destruction of historical artefacts all over the world. There has been an inevitable backlash, some of it very nasty, some of it very stupid, much of it both. Muslims have been told that they must speak out against the Islamists, whether they be called ISIL, Boko Haram, Al Shabaab or something else, and many Muslims have done just that. They say that Islam is a peaceful religion and that the actions of the Islamists are forbidden by their god. They probably believe it too but I think that they – and the self-appointed guardians of whatever are missing the point completely.

Religion is the oldest form of politics. It is used by elites to exercise control over the masses. Always has been, probably always will be. It is infinitely malleable. Bronze age shamans claimed to interpret the commands of the spirits who caused the lightning to flash and the thunder to roll.

“The gods are angry. You must sacrifice a goat. And by the way I happen to have some goats for sale”.

Down many generations populations have been kept in line by commands from unseen deities interpreted by their selfless agents on earth.

“You must not eat this type of food or consume that kind of drink”

“You must conceal that part of your body at all times”

“God will not love you unless you have your head dipped in water”

“You must abstain from food/drink/sex/pleasure of any kind for arbitrary periods of time that I shall disclose to you”.

These are all mechanisms by which the powerful maintain control over the rest. They have existed since the first human societies sprang into life and they continue to exist today.

The leaders of ISIL and the rest are driven by the desire for power and/or liberation from the power that someone else has over them, which algebraically speaking is the same thing. Religion is merely the tool kit they use to manipulate their followers.

I have lived and worked in an Islamic country. Its laws placed some restrictions on my freedom that I accepted because I was a foreigner in the land and anyway the money was good. Friends and colleagues who lived and worked there with me were mostly believers in god but recognised that many of the rules made in his name were entirely human constructions. They went along with them because that was the culture and that was what the powerful people in the state demanded of them. In Kuwait in the 1980s this was a relatively benign set of conditions but it is not hard to see how a different and more fanatical type of leader could use those levers to altogether more malevolent ends.

So, is Islam a religion of peace? How about Christianity, Buddhism and the rest? Not really. It’s a cultural construct that can be used to manipulate behaviour. Depending on who is in charge it can be used for good or evil. It wasn’t a supernatural being who shot down 130 people in Paris ten days ago or blew up  40 in Beirut the week before. It was human beings who had been directed to do so by other human beings. Religion was just one of the tools used to make them do it.

There is absolutely no question that the vast majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are peace-loving people who just want to create a happy life for themselves and their families. The same is true of the members of all the other faiths and we would do well to remember that. However as long as people are willing to surrender any part of their autonomy to the supernatural some of them will always be open to manipulation by the powerful, the unscrupulous and the plain evil.

Why write yet another blog?

They say that travel does it. Broadens the mind.

I always knew that I wanted to travel. From the age of I don’t know when, my life’s ambition was to visit the USA. This was the 1960s when it wasn’t all that achievable. So when I found myself walking down 42^nd Street in Manhattan at the age of 19 in 1975 I felt quite smug. Obviously I had to set my sights higher once that goal was achieved.

Since then I have managed my life and career with a view to experiencing as much as I could of the world in all its variety. I have been around the world a few times. That is I set out travelling in one direction and continued moving forward until I arrived back where I started. I have visited every continent except Antarctica and clocked up more than 90 countries in the list maintained by the Travellers’ Century Club. Despite all that, I am not trying to write a travelogue here. Rather I want to write about the state of the world as I see it with a perspective that is informed by having visited quite a lot of it over the years.

Today I am thinking a lot about recent events in Paris, a city I have visited many times. But I am also thinking about Syria, Lebanon, Mali, Nigeria, Yemen and the good old USA where 130 people shot dead wouldn’t even represent two day’s worth of business as usual.  Of course even in the USA it would be unusual to see 130 deaths in such a short time and so close together. Is that the reason Paris is so shocking? Or is it just that it happened close to home?

That’s one of the questions I will be considering. Mostly I am writing things down to get them straight in my own mind but if anyone should read what I write and want to comment that would be interesting.

Travel probably does broaden the mind, provided the mind is prepared to be broadened. Discussion and argument can do it too so long as at least some of us remember the golden rule. It needs to be a two way process. Listening is not just waiting for your own turn to speak.