Otto Von Bismark and other Biographies

I was in Berlin the other week and realized that, aside from World War II, I really knew very little about German history, I knew the name Bismark and that it had some importance but I really had no idea who or why he was important, So in the airport on the way home I picked up a biography of the eponymous Bismark.

I enjoy reading biographies, I’ve read a few of Winston Churchill among others and this particular biography has not disappointed me. However, as I am reading this biography I have become distinctly aware of the process of creating biography. Much of what we know about Bismark, aside from the reported events, comes from the letters that he wrote, others wrote to him, and those that others wrote at the time. In the age before cell phones and internet people wrote letters. I remember that when I was young and went to live in France for a year I used to write letters home and to my friends. There was a weekly ritual whereby I went to the post and mailed a number of letters to my connections near and wide. I don’t think I’ve written a letter since 1995.

On one hand I have made the point with this blog about the permanence of what is posted on line (see post) and also about the fabrication of self (See post), but now without talking out of both sides of my mouth, there is also an alarming impermanence to communication today.  I have no doubt that every email I have ever written has already been deleted by the receivers or that they will be deleted in my lifetime, they are unlikely to be printed and stored in box to be discovered at some future date.

Now I don’t pretend that my life will ever be deemed worthy of a biography so the ephemeral nature of my correspondence is unlikely to seem that alarming and like thousands of other extras my life will be but a drop in the giant world bucket, but consider for a minute how sparse the biography of Otto would have been without access to his correspondence, or the fact that 100 years after his death a stack of letters were discovered and added to the collection of what we know. What would have happened if Otto only corresponded by email? Or even less permanent by text? We know and understand the intimate details of his thinking today because of what he wrote in letters. How will future generations make sense of the past when the only record will be that which has been allowed to be officially recorded and any and all personal correspondence or off the record emailing and texting is deleted.

There is a premise here that biography has value for it’s own sake. Perhaps that is the ultimate pretension; maybe biography is really just a form of entertainment and will be easily replaced by other forms of amusement.  I have always struggled with the value of history, since we rarely really learn from it, and no two events are really identical enough that taking the same course of action will lead to the same result. The march of history is not so rational as to be predictable. Is it interesting? Is it entertaining? Does it help us understand how we got where we are, yes, and that may be valuable itself.

But one of the most enjoyable things about reading biographies is at risk. What comes out in the letters and papers of a lot of these great men and women are their fallibilities. Otto was a hypochondriac, Winston drank a lot, and both were megalomaniacs. I have found great comfort in their imperfections, as much is in how they shaped and responded to the great events of history. How much of this will be lost in the digital age, when we are dependent on the media’s interpretation of their characters.

Perhaps even more pertinent is how much will the characters of public personas be shaped by the media and not a reflection of their true inner journey; if Winston lived today would he have drank so much knowing that the media was documenting every sip, would Otto have lapsed into fits of illness to control the King and the German parliament, if it would have been recorded for posterity. And yet these personal idiosyncrasies made them who they were and in part shape the history of their nations and the world.  While you can argue about whether their impacts were good or bad, the reality is they had significant impacts.

That said every generation has reinterpreted biography and history and the history we know of previous periods was sorely limited by the lack of recorded history and it can be difficult to discern the difference between fact and fiction. We really know very little about the character of Alexander the Great for example, other than what a few dubious sources have told us about him. Historians can’t even agree on his sexuality (although we do know he didn’t speak with an Irish accent except in the head of Oliver Stone). How much more we know about him if he had written a letter or two and then stuffed them in a shoebox.

The digital age has changed the way we view history not only our own story; but the story of our species and our civilization. We are stuck in this bizarre vortex of permanence and impermanence that will shape how the history and the lives of great men and women of the contemporary era and future eras are interpreted and understood. 

Lunching at the Savoy

I was in London a few weeks ago and I very pretentiously opted to lunch at the Savoy. It felt like a very posh thing to do, and like something Winston Churchill would have done in his day, and as a devotee of WC, it felt like the a propos thing to do. Besides all of that it is a Gordon Ramsay restaurant so the food was apt to be delicious, and it was.

As I was sitting there and lunching (not having lunch, I can’t imagine having lunch at the Savoy, when one is at the Savoy “lunch” is definitely a verb) and marveling at my grand surroundings I was contemplating of all things inequality. While the cost of my lunch was not outrageous, it is not something I or about 99% of the human race could afford to do on a daily basis, I was in it for the experience and I was on holiday so splurging felt appropriate, I may even make a habit when I am in London of Lunching at the Savoy, just so that I can say, “ oh pshaw, I always lunch at the Savoy”.

But getting back to inequality, what I struggle with is the two-sided coin that is inequality. On one hand I am a defender of equality to the point that I would take up arms to defend it and believe that it is the foundation for a just society.  On the other I can’t help but recognize that all of the beautiful things that are man-made that I love to visit and see were the result of gross inequality including in part the Savoy. It is all enabled by a great disparity in wealth. All of the palaces, castles, churches were built during a time of extraordinary inequality, most of the great art was the result of royal and wealthy patrons, most writers prior to the 20^th century were attached in some way to the aristocracy. It was only when freed from the quotidian tasks of survival does human culture reach its pinnacle.

Equality, at least of the economic kind that I am referring to here, is inherently utilitarian; functional and barren, it lacks flourish.  A king can build a castle, an emperor a palace, a bishop a cathedral, but a politician must build a concrete block with windows. It is hard to imagine building the palace of Versailles today; the outrage would bring down the best of intentions. We do tolerate the über-rich building mansions of epic proportions but they are monuments to our worship of the self more than they are contributions to collective culture. 

The flip side to this inequality; however, is that is not sustainable, eventually the people rebelled against the ostentation of the aristocracy. In spite of the belief by the noble classes that they were chosen by God to be better than others the people could only tolerate so much inequality. Now I know I am painting with a broad brush the period of revolution and there were many caused beyond inequality that caused the peasantry to rise up (there are probably a 1000 books on all the various causes) but there is still something to be said for that fact that the revolutions occurred at a time when income and wealth disparity was at its greatest. That is until the modern time.

At risk of quoting Aristotle it seems to me that there must be somewhere in the middle where there is enough inequality that there is incentive for great works but not so much that people are compelled to rise up. I still wonder if  the cultural greatness of the renaissance is compatible with a commitment to equality. I have not resolved this conundrum only to say that it is there, and while lunching at the Savoy I am quite enamored by the delights that inequality has brought me, but on the way out, while I stop at the toilet, I am reminded that we all shit the same.

Oh, and if you do lunch at the Savoy have the pumpkin soup with toasted hazelnuts and the braised lamb shank, it was superb.

What I am most Proud of

I got asked today what I am most proud of and I wasn’t able to give a great answer on the spot. What I said was that I am proud of my ability to build relationships. I was told that my answer was too corporate and not personal enough. So I came home and I did some thinking and this is what I came up with:

I am most proud of the fact that I do not have a bucket list. I choose to treat every experience in my life as an opportunity to achieve deeper connections with humanity and the world. To truly relate one must be fully open to be changed and altered by experience. When we live according to a list we are more concerned with checking things off the list than we are with being open to the change that the experience causes within us. In failing to relate the world becomes a giant fun fair where the candy floss has more air than substance.

I have a friend who has listed, “living with a family in India” on his bucket list; one thing that he needs to accomplish before he dies. People are not tourist attractions. If you live with people and relate to them profoundly it will change you! Everything on your list might change if you are open to the experiences that life throws at you. You might fall in love in India, you might decide to stay, you might never want to go back, but as long as it is something to endure to achieve a glorious checkmark on your list you will fail to experience what it means to live and connect with people.

If you saw the movie “The Bucket List” what you might remember is that for the main character it was easier to jump out of airplanes, hunt tigers and drive motorcycles than it was to walk up to his estranged daughter’s front door, ring the doorbell and say “I’m sorry”.

I’m most proud of the fact that I have rung that doorbell more times than I care to remember and had my heart broken too many times to count but I choose to connect profoundly with people and I choose to face the shadow side of my relationships with others and myself. It is better to mend a broken heart than it is to polish a perfect stone. Relating is hard work for me, possibly for everyone, but I only have my own experience to judge that.

I have jumped out of airplanes and climbed mountains and I have found that it is harder to face the reality of relating than it is to run a marathon. Life, for me, is not an endurance test.

This doesn’t stop me from having fun. I love to ski, to hike, to play classical guitar, listen to Opera, to play pirates with my nieces and nephews, deep intellectual debates and reading Russian novels. I love to travel and see new places but these are not the aims of my life. If I go nowhere else, if I never hear or play music again, or read another book, it will be enough to have risked loving and risked being loved.

So perhaps my answer is still too corporate, but I am most proud of my ability to build and maintain relationship and, for me, that is a deeply personal answer.

Forgetting that this blog is an Egregious Error

Facebook is launching a new feature called Timeline, that users can presently test in a beta version, that essentially allows you to turn your facebook page into a mini autobiography of your life. I have not yet signed up for the beta version nor am I certain when it will launch to the world at large, but what it got me thinking about was a little deeper about what I wrote about in my blog “The Internet and our Future Selves”, where I explored the idea of the necessity of taking very seriously what we post on the Internet about ourselves and others as it would be recorded for posterity. But aside from the notion of reputation management and our responsibility to our future selves, the concept of recording everything we say and do has implications not only on the way we think but on what we think and what we value. 

The inability to forget has far reaching consequences that was first realized at the dawn of the age of print. For the first time what we knew to be true was not what was passed on orally by others but could be recorded for posterity. Print had a sort of permanence that oral tradition lacked. We now have the permanence of the digital world where everything we do is not only recorded but easily accessible by anyone in the world, and even our facebook is a permanent record of our existence. 

The narcissist in me thinks this is wonderful, for surely my life is of fascinating and unusual interest for the masses and my facebook will continue to be perused long after I am ashes in a tomb. But the realist in me has to ask are there not things that I might rather forget. I have a feeling, that I am not the only one who has held an embarrassing opinion, done something or said something I regret, or generally made an ass of himself; and while I am undoubtedly a better person for all the stupid things I’ve done and the lessons that I have learned from those, I’m not sure I want them recorded for posterity. 

The act of recording things is a very specific and unique act, the adage that history is written by the victors, is not said lightly. For those who record events control how and what is valued by the author, the times, and the audience. I wonder if the great heros of the past would seem as great if they were written about today. the writers of those stories in the past were skilled at leaving out all the uncomfortable bits. 

I am reading Neil Postman “Amusing Ourselves to Death” right now (more on that in a future blog) but he provides an anecdote that fascinated me. He wrote about a sect of believers called the Dunkers who, to make a long story short, were reluctant to write down the tenets of their belief system out of fear that future revelations from the Almighty would change their current beliefs and they did not want to be held back from the new revelation by something that they had previously written down. This speaks so profoundly to the consequences of recording what we think at a given time, it can actually hem us in to an ideology or a thought pattern that an oral tradition does not. Recorded something gives it in an element of truth that then must be defended as it is written. 

It reminds me a bit of my philosophy classes in university where the better philosophers would argue about the meaning of the words while I was interested in the interpretation, but I always lost the arguments because ultimately what was written was what was written.  

My fear is that this blog itself is an egregious error, that by recording my thoughts I will be hemmed in by what I have recorded, unable to extricate myself from a box which I have built for myself. Perhaps in ten years or twenty I will read some of what I wrote and be embarrassed by it, but I can’t take it back, and while I can change my mind I can’t change the past. Perhaps I should be, and to be honest I wish I could be, more like a Dunker, always seeking the greater reveal about life, afraid to record what has been revealed to me so far, in the hopes of greater revelation later on. To write might be the height of egotism and an error of human proportions.  

Beware the Poet!

There is something about this time of year that makes me want to read poetry. Something in the fading of summer into autumn, the coolness in the air makes me nostalgic and want to read verse.  Truth be told I have found only two poets that I really like to read although I have tried others. Pablo Neruda, who writes love poetry like no one else, he profoundly understands that love is not in trite sentimentality but occurs in everyday things. and the second is Robert Frost who seems in every word to capture the feeling you get on a long walk in the country or the woods on a fall day when the afternoon sun is warm but you know that the evening will be crisp and at the end of your walk you will put on a warm sweater and sit by the first fire of the season. Frost to me is autumn. 

Perhaps it is just my nostalgia for the romantic autumns of my youth, I always remember being happiest in the autumn, the weather and the general collective mood always suited me best, the crisp weather, warm sweaters and whiskey by the fire. I even remember listening to the song “Puff the Magic Dragon” and thinking that he frolicked in the Autumnus, which was a place that I imagined where it was autumn all the time, with warm afternoons and cool nights, and the trees perpetually wearing their fall colours, I was disappointed as an adult to learn that the song was actually referring to the autumn mist and was a veiled reference to pot smoke. Nevertheless I still continue to believe that somewhere there is land called Honolee where it is autumn all the time.  

So why write about poetry? It seems anachronistic in our digital world. Is there time for poetry in the computer age, and is there time for poets. I think it would be hard to imagine sitting around with our friends and reading poetry to one another and debating Wordsworth versus Whitman and even if we did we would be unusual and our efforts would likely feel forced rather than a natural compulsion of our human spirit; even more so if we were to tackle any contemporary poets, which to be honest I am not sure I can name any, much to my sadness, (perhaps P.K. Page, or Leonard Cohen might redeem me). Poetry, it seems requires a certain languidness even when it is short, like a limerick or a Haiku (nobody loves a good limerick better than me, something about a man from Nantucket.....). For me anyway it requires time, it is forces me to slow down and relish the words on the page, to think about meaning that is not obviously stated.  I particularly enjoy reading poetry out loud, or having it read to me. I can imagine if I lived in India in at the height of the mogul empire being part of Urdu poetry circles, hard to imagine the same things these days. 

It’s equally hard to imagine a time when poets were considered revolutionaries and incendiary, the words they were the lightening rods of social activism and often imprisoned for the words they wrote on the page. Beware the Poet! Consider the recent 99% demonstrations that have been going on, there is nary a mention of the poets. 

But perhaps poetry is not as far from us as we might think. Facebook and Twitter are now the mediums of social change and we might argue that the 140 characters allowed by twitter is a sort of modern Haiku. Perhaps our facebook wall is a sort of Renga between ourselves and our circles of friends. Poetry is not about form but substance. Similar to the renaissance man who is not about style and from but of substance and character. Poetry is not something we create but something we seek. 

I asked a colleague to read this blog, shamelessly I might add, and after reading it she was both surprised because it was not the image that she had of me, but more relevant she asked me if I was a poet. I never thought about this blog being poetic, it does not follow any poetic form that I know of, this forced me to expand my notion of poetry beyond form and function. The lesson I learned of poetry is not to seek it in libraries or books but to look for it in the everyday to see it in my day to day. Poetry is a state of mind, and an expression of that state of mind, whatever form it takes. My blog doesn’t rhyme but it comes from my soul and hopefully speaks to yours; is that not Poetry? 

Malthus, Calhoun, and the Technology of Urban Design

I was thinking this week about condos, I was showing off my own and pointing out the design elements relative to the majority of condos that are being built in my city right now, which are largely all glass and have as a key design element that they are long and narrow, somewhat like bowling alleys and in the main have only one bedroom, perhaps with a closet masquerading as a den.  Now I am not an architect or a designer, but I have an eye for good design and what particularly interests me is the impact of design on human life and interaction. One of the many quotes that I have often admired from Winston Churchill is, “we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us”. Churchill recognizes how the design of our buildings impacts our social and political culture and how they shape us into who we are for good or for ill. What culture then do I live in where the buildings we are shaping are ones where people want to live in isolation and what future are we shaping where our primary choice of residence is alone narrow and exposed to the world through floor to ceiling glass? 

All this isolation got me thinking about my grade 10 biology class and a video they showed us when we were studying Malthus, the great granddaddy of population and demographic thought. The video concerned the Rodent experiments by John Calhoun, where he created an fixed space environment with ample food, water, nesting and protection from predators for as many mice as they could reproduce. There were some shocking findings; firstly the rodents never actually reached the capacity that had been provided and once overcrowding set in massive psychological disruption and significant socially deviant behavior occurred and rather than retreating to a place of greater equilibrium, the entire population died off They were not able to recover from the psychological damage. 

In the later stages of the experiment before annihilation of the population there was always something that struck me about the behavior of the rodents, there were some that became very aggressive, sexual deviancy became the norm and the majority of the rodents withdrew psychologically and lived highly isolated lives in the midst of massive population. (I am summarizing significantly the findings of the study, but I think the point is made). This brings me back to one bedroom bowling alleys in the sky, and the not insignificant statistic that single resident dwellings are the fastest growing dwellings in Canada and most of the western world. Part of me has always wondered if we aren’t entering the later stages of of Calhoun world.  

Now if I was a hippy and an “end of the worlder” I would latch on to this study as proof that world is coming to an end in our time, we need only look at the warnings of Calhoun. But I am neither, so I did some further research on Calhoun and found that he felt that his research was misunderstood, in fact most of his research was in the design of better systems to enable healthy population growth in situations of overcrowding. His objective was to demonstrate how over population would destroy the world but rather to show how design can actually make living in overcrowded populations not only possible, but possibly pleasant. What his research highlights is not the end of the world but one that is actively designed. 

For Calhoun there is no “invisible hand” that will always ensure that the world is hovering around an equilibrium, that markets will always be in perfect balance and distribute the goods of the world, both material and psychologically in a perfectly rational way. He is far from a socialist of government control, for it is through the elements of design and systems design that we must regulate our behavior, not through government ownership. But what I think he would argue is that through the design of our living spaces, our urban spaces we shape our future just as Churchill suggested, and to take an active role in such is not a question of ideology but of survival and if we don’t want to be as dramatic as to suggest survival let us say at least a pleasant existence. 

When we decide what condos to build, how to design our cities, our transportation, all of these are decisions about who we want to be as a culture, as a people, we can not leave these decisions to the developers alone to do so is to abdicate our moral responsibility for our role in the human development, for we are not independent of our structures, and human life exists in cities and buildings. The Chinese call it Feng Shui, we call it urban design but whatever you want to call it, it will determine our future