A Theory of Everything

When I was at school, it all seemed so simple.  The physical world, at the smallest level, was made up from atoms.  Atoms were like the solar system, with electrons whizzing around a nucleus, and this was a system just like the world we knew at the macro level, where planets whizzed around the sun.  Now, we knew there were some complications.  Electrons had their orbits, and they could jump from one orbit to another, and it appeared that those jumps were carefully scripted, so they could only go from one defined level to another, as if you were going from one level of a building up to the next.  And, yes, there was another complication, as it turned out that in the nucleus there were two things:  neutrons and protons.  The protons had a positive electromagnetic force, while the electrons travelling around them had a negative force:  the only reason the electrons didn’t hurtle down towards the protons and annihilate each other is because they were travelling in their orbits at speed: just like an aeroplane not falling to earth because it travelled fast enough to ensure it created lift?  Well, not quite like that, but it would do.  Those other items in the nucleus were neutrons, and they were called that because they didn’t have an electric charge.

There was more.  In a way I found exciting at the time, this model of the nature of the physical universe also made sense of lots of chemistry, and from there on to many other things.  Atoms could be linked together to form molecules.  Some molecules were ‘stable’, like oxygen, which in our daily lives compromises two oxygen atoms linked together to form the O₂ molecule (and later I learnt these was another stable form, O₃, ozone, which was the reason you could smell something funny by the tracks of electric trains in the London Underground).  Then we went on to compounds, like hydrochloric acid, which was a combination of hydrogen and chlorine, and this was interesting because it was really in two parts.  Part of the molecule could break away and link up with another substance, and that would lead to other combinations like sodium chloride (the sodium element combined with the chlorine bit from hydrochloride acid.  It was like the parts in a Meccano set!

Of course, it all got complicated, and eventually scientists were taking substances apart and discovering they were made up of very complex combinations of atoms, often several, sometimes even scores and even hundreds of atoms.  However, it all made sense.  However, I think all that was falling apart long before I was at school, although I didn’t know it at the time.  Although it was somewhat beyond my schoolboy science classes, at least until I reached the final years of secondary education.  Somewhat later I was to confront the science of what’s truly fundamental, and the amazing world of theoretical physics.  At that point all my schoolboy knowledge was cast aside, and I learnt that our physical reality is shaped by a bewildering and complex world of particles, fields, together with many laws and rules that nature played by.

Where was all this leading?  I was off on a different path by the time I was well into my university studies (I’d abandoned science for social anthropology), but even back then I was aware and know much more clearly today, our understanding of ‘reality’ remains limited and incomplete.  Despite this the animating hope of many scientists today and throughout history) is that we will be able to formulate a ‘Theory of Everything’, (with that marvellous acronym TOE) where one set of universal equations and one framework will describe literally every aspect of our physical reality.

When most of us think about science, we don’t often think about something very fundamental to the enterprise: what the goal of it all might be.  Clearly reality is a complicated place, and the only tools we have to guide us in understanding the nature of our world rely on what we can observe, measure, and test through experiments.  When we take account of that huge body of observational and experimental knowledge, we have a record of all the phenomena that we know exist. The enterprise of science, then, seeks to make sense of the huge body of empirical data, and then seeks to explain it in as simple and conclusive way as possible, to maximize our predictive power concerning natural phenomena, doing so with as few assumptions which seem absolutely necessary.

As many writers today remind us, we have seen incredible advances in our understanding of the physical world when compared to what we understood when I was at school.  Now it appears we can analyse just about everything we can directly detect and measure, and do so precisely, even exquisitely. The ‘Standard Model’ of elementary particles lists four key influences that underpin our world, the electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces along with general relativity and gravity. Then there is the inflationary Big Bang which describes our cosmic origins, when those four key forces first appeared, only to evolve and become independent. It makes for a compelling story.  Unfortunately, current mysteries like dark matter, dark energy, and the baryogenesis puzzle to do with asymmetry together hint that there’s more to the Universe than we currently understand.

The elusive goal that motivates many scientists is the belief tall of these key forces can be brought together into a ‘Theory of Everything’.  However, despite its fascination, some argue that there is not a Theory of Everything out there to be found at all, that the goal is an illusion.

The modern idea of a Theory of Everything goes back more than 100 years, to the early days of general relativity. Einstein was able, starting in 1915, to successfully describe the observed phenomenon of gravitation. The presence, distribution, and motion of matter and energy through spacetime determined the curvature and evolution of that spacetime fabric, and then the curvature of that spacetime fabric determined the future trajectories and fates of every particle that exists within that spacetime. Put simply, general relativity took the idea of special relativity and unified it with the idea of gravitation, creating the powerful framework that many would argue was the most important of Einstein’s astonishing accomplishments.

When I was learning about science at school we were being taught about science prior to Einstein, with some brief references to what he had concluded.  Before his theories there had been a different approach, Maxwell’s classical theory about electromagnetism, with four central principles:

• the speed of light was the ultimate speed limit at which anything could travel,
• particles and interactions could be described in terms of fields and charges,
• electromagnetism vs relativistically invariant, and
• energy and momentum were always conserved.

Maxwell’s (classical) theory put the previously distinct notions of electricity and magnetism together into a unified footing.

Within four years from the publication of Einstein’s theory of general relativity scientists were working to unify this theory with Maxwell’s principles.  However, it turned out that despite some similarities the two theories also exhibited several fundamental differences.     Despite this, it was the first 20th Century attempt at a Theory of Everything.  Einstein’s general relativity was already a four dimensional theory (adding the dimension of time to our familiar three dimensional view of matter in the world), but Maxwell’s electromagnetism required four separate degrees of freedom in addition, meaning that the same four dimensions used in Einstein’s theory would be insufficient to hold general relativity and electromagnetism together in a single, unified framework.

Theoretical physicists weren’t discouraged, and attempted to solve the mismatch by taking a dramatic leap into a fifth dimension, allowing general relativity and electromagnetism to be unified.  Alas, in a way that has become familiar with integrating approaches since then, there were some new inconvenient problems.  The postulated fifth dimension couldn’t impact anything in our four-dimensional spacetime; it must somehow ‘disappear’ from all the equations that impacted the observable physical world.  Moreover, scientists knew the universe didn’t merely conform to Maxwell’s classical electromagnetism, but required more, especially it required a quantum description for electromagnetism (at least), and other limiting postulates.

However, this was merely the beginning of formulating what would turn out to be many proposals that drew on extra dimensions. In one sense this was unproblematic, as in theory there could be more than three spatial dimensions to our Universe so long as those ‘extra’ dimensions were below a certain critical size that experiments had already explored. However, as soon as scientists began to talk about the notion of a Theory of Everything, their suppositions almost always required the addition of new entities — particles, fields, interactions, etc. — whose existence was already either ruled out or highly constrained by observations, measurements, and experiments by known results.  If there is a fifth dimension, it had to be so tiny and its effects so weak that it would not affect the body of data scientists had already collected and which revealed no evidence for its existence.

The quest for a Theory of Everything was to lead to enormous advances in physics during the 20th century, in nuclear physics, quantum physics, and particle physics. The combination of novel experimental results and new theoretical developments has helped us understand what appear to be the full suite of particles that exist in the Universe, what rules they followed in interacting and binding together, and how the forces that governed them behaved.  The result today is the Standard Model of elementary particles, simultaneously simple and contradictorily, full of complexities.

As a schoolboy I learnt about atoms and their building blocks, the trio of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Rather, now the electron is just the lightest of three generations of charged leptons: along with the muon and tau lepton. Then there are their antiparticles, plus a species of neutrino (and antineutrino) that is the corresponding ‘uncharged lepton’ to each of the charged leptons.  Confused?  What’s more, protons and neutrons are no longer considered fundamental particles, but are composite particles composed of quarks and gluons. Guess what:  there are three generations of quarks, with the up-and-down quarks (making up the first generation) having charm-and-strange and then top-and-bottom quarks as their heavier-generation counterparts.  Getting even more confused?  Hang on …Meanwhile, there are eight massless gluons (mediating the strong nuclear force), one massless photon (mediating the electromagnetic force), and three very massive W-and-Z bosons (mediating the weak nuclear force), plus the Higgs boson to complete the Standard Model.  Yes, it does seem confusing, but despite this veritable zoo of particles, every particle-based experiment performed, and every detector set up to observe particles ever concocted has only found evidence of these particles and these particles alone, with the properties given to them by the Standard Model framework.

It’s not surprising to read that many have sought — and are still seeking — the elusive Grand Unified Theory, a theory of everything, one that includes gravity, string theory and additional symmetries, additional dimensions, additional extra particles, or additional unification frameworks. It seems in confronting these ideas there’s an enormous amount of trouble. All of the new ideas necessitate adding further ingredients to our reality: ingredients which can lead to new interactions or decays of the particles we already know about.   However, we already have masses of data on how the known (Standard Model) particles interact and decay (or appear forbidden from interacting or decaying), we have to take extreme care that any attempt toward a Theory of Everything doesn’t conflict with already-existing data, particularly with the data we have from particle physics experiments.

One popular approach is string theory (and positive geometry). Instead of one extra dimension, there are many: at least six and as many as 22 in addition to the four we know about. Instead of relying on such esoteric behaviours as magnetic monopoles, extra Higgs sectors, superheavy bosons admitting proton decay, and left-right symmetric features, they have even more. Instead of space, there’s superspace; there’s supergravity; there’s not just the conventional ‘for every Standard Model particle, there’s a superpartner particle’ version of supersymmetry, leading to suggestions there are four new super symmetries and hundreds of additional new particles.  It seems as though, by adding more and more and more and ingredients, ingredients that aren’t reflected in observations we grow and worsen, the puzzles we’re facing when it comes to the Universe today.

From the outside, and looking at this confusing array of developments, there’s one obvious question that haunts the scientists: do our theoretical ideas line up with reality? When we formulate attempts at a Theory of Everything, it is important to remember the goals of science are working “to maximize our predictive power of nature’s phenomena with as few assumptions, parameters, and variables as are absolutely necessary”  Our current big scientific mysteries compel us to keep seeking truths about the Universe, given many aspects of reality that we cannot yet, fully explain. But relying on loose, superficial analogies and mathematical ingenuity is more than dissatisfying; it’s an approach that loses a fundamental connection with observable, measurable reality.

Unsurprisingly, there are many critics.  Paul Davies, (in Schrödingers’s Cat Flap, The Monthly: December 2026) offers a nice if quixotic comment on this state of affairs:

“In a famous remark, Albert Einstein once asked whether the Moon continues to exist when nobody is looking.  This startling comment stemmed from Einstein’s deep distrust of a branch of physics called quantum mechanics, the mind-bending theory that brilliantly describes the atomic microworld.  Now celebrating its centenary, quantum mechanics is the most successful scientific theory of all time.  It accurately explains the behaviour of matter from subatomic particles to stars, and has given us the laser, the transistor, MRI machines, superconductors, AI and much more.  Although quantum mechanics underpins much of modern technology, the foundations of the theory make no sense, shredding our everyday notions of reality and defying intuition. A century on, scientists remain deeply divided over what to make of it.”

What is this powerful theory that brings such practical benefits yet appears perplexing and paradoxical? In the mid 1920s scientist found the quantum microworld is riddled with uncertainty.  In itself, that is not so troublesome.  We are, after all, familiar with uncertainty in daily life.  Suppose you toss a coin and keep it concealed between your hands:  will it show heads or tails?  It’s fifty-fifty: you can look to find out which.  The fact that you didn’t know before looking which side of the coin faced up doesn’t affect the fact that it must have already been either heads or tails. Your observation merely uncovered a pre-existing reality.  Quantum uncertainty, however, denies that there is a pre-existing reality. Instead, atoms, molecules and subatomic particles don’t actually possess well-defined basic properties, such as position or orientation or speed, in the absence of an actual observation. You can measure, say, the location of an atom and find it to be somewhere. But that doesn’t mean the atom was already there before you looked.  Quantum mechanics says asking where the atom was an instant before inspecting is not only pointless, it’s meaningless.: “there is simply no fact of the matter of where the atom was located – a philosophically startling assertion.

In exploring the world of quantum theory and its applications, Davies ends with more philosophical problems.  “Is there a real world out there after all, even among atoms and molecules? Or is the unobserved microworld suspended in a state of existence limbo? There are a dozen or so rival attempts to make sense of quantum weirdness, ranging from invoking consciousness to adding new physical processes that collapse superpositions spontaneously into a single reality. But the most widespread attempt to make sense of the theory is to treat the alternative realities in a quantum superposition as “really real” parallel worlds. … Outlandish though the multiverse idea may seem, many distinguished physicists buy into it. … So, does the Moon exist when nobody is looking? A many-worlds advocate would answer yes, but with a vengeance: not only does the Moon exist, but there are also countless versions of the Moon, each existing in a separate branch universe amid an infinity of parallel realities. It is a conclusion that would have Einstein spinning in his grave.”

Are you resolved?

Here we are at the beginning of the year, the time when convention suggests we should begin again by wiping the slate clean and setting a new agenda.  This is justification for that strange annual activity: the proposal and implementation of New Year’s resolutions. The idea of using the start of the year as a time to make an explicit commitment to a series of future actions is an old one.  It can be dated back by at least 4,000 years to the time of the ancient Babylonians, who made promises to their gods during the Akitu festival (starting in March) to return borrowed items and pay debts for good favour.

Given the importance of making promises to the gods, we can see this approach was one which almost inevitably was going run into trouble, the kind of trouble that comes from making future promises given humanity’s persistent failing to keep them.  Despite the evidence being against them, this hopeful practice has continued as a aspiration and a target for many groups since then, evolving through a series of similar activities, including the Roman tradition of honouring Janus (the god of beginnings) right through to the time set aside for Wesleyan Christian covenant renewal services and finally continuing right up to today’s largely secular focus on establishing future targets for the coming year largely comprising self-improvement plans on a variety of topics including health, finance, and personal habits.

Well, that’s what we are advised is the case when we read the relevant article in Wikipedia which adds the somewhat salutary observation that people still continue to make New Year’s resolutions despite overwhelming evidence that success rates have and remain rather low.

Apparently, it has always been the case that these personal commitments seldom last longer than the end of January and very few resolutions are sustained to the end of the year.  I couldn’t find much about the success rate for promises made by Babylonians or Romans, but John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church, recognised more success in sustaining future plans could be achieved by making these resolutions public.  He developed the institution of “Covenant Renewal Services” on New Year’s Eve/Day, involving Bible readings and hymns, influencing later watch night services. That was one way to increase commitment as there is a lot of evidence that embarrassment has a better chance of working than private commitment.   However, the level of achievement for covenant renewals hasn’t been revealed, so the success of that particular approach isn’t known.

Today the commitment to New Year resolutions has become victim to it having been made into yet another ‘business’. In the 21^st Century there are a plethora of schemes and systems to be discovered (and paid for) to ensure commitments made at the beginning of the year are recorded and monitored, even though in recent decades the focus is increasingly secular, having shifted from religious vows to individual targets concerned with personal self-improvement goals like tasks and recurrent practices related to health, career, and relationships.  It is claimed around 40-45% of people today make resolutions, but only about 8% succeed, in examinations on the success of focusing on goals like weight loss, finances, and exercises.  Those figures come from various studies reported in a variety of popular magazines including Psychology Today and Forbes.

Those figures seem rather hopeful, however.  If resolutions are personal, there is little to encourage adherence. Those Babylonians understood the importance of public commitment when they tied their future plans and commitments into the celebrations in honour of the new year, although it should be noted that for them the year began not in January but in mid-March, when the crops were planted.  During a massive 12-day religious festival known as Akitu, the Babylonians crowned a new king or reaffirmed their loyalty to the reigning king. This was the time when they also made promises to the gods to pay their debts and return any objects they had borrowed. If the Babylonians kept to their word, they believed their (pagan) gods would bestow favour on them for the coming year. If not, they would fall out of the gods’ favour—a place no one wanted to be.

There is another perspective on this, one which is less about the importance of offering a goal to be achieved as evidence of commitment – and to impress a leader.  To some degree New Year’s resolutions can be seen as one part of our attempts to lead a good life.  However, a good life is concerned with a great deal more than annual promises. The idea of aspiring to live a good life has as long a history as committing to some resolutions for the coming year, but trying to live a good life is concerned with a process that is far more demanding than developing and failing to sustain annual resolutions.

I have written on the task of leading a good life over the course of many years in articles, books and talks. However, they have only been exegeses and elaborations on the thoughts of great philosophers, and especially the Ancient Greeks. Among these, Plato remains supreme.  Some 2,500 years ago he explained his view was that the good life involved achieving inner harmony by aligning your soul (your reason, spirit, and your desires or ‘appetite’) with the demands of virtuous living, using “reason to understand the importance of the virtues of wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice, and at the same time mastering your desires”  Plato explained that following this path would result in leading you toward true happiness (eudaimonia) rather than focussing on the short term, pursuing fleeting physical pleasures.

Plato was advocating an approach that required self-knowledge, moral reflection, and living virtuously, with reason guiding actions towards truth, not just external rewards or sensory gratification.  As he explained it, living a good life is one in which ‘Reason governs, while allowing your Spirit to support you, and your Appetites to be satisfied appropriately, creating a life of inner balance between these three practices’.

Plato went much further and argued that Virtue is based on Knowledge, and that understanding the ‘form’ of “the Good” comes through reason which leads to wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice, which are essential for well-being.  However, while Plato’s perspective rested on a carefully articulated philosophical framework, he noted that this approach wasn’t just about a complex set of ideas about ideas, but that it also requires Self-Mastery by overcoming and controlling impulses and desires to act in accordance with reason.

Plato was really demanding. True happiness he suggested comes from within, not pursuing extrinsic rewards like wealth, power or fame.  For me, one of his most telling concerns was with meaning and purpose, with the intention and the feeling you are making real progress, and you are working toward goals aligned with your values.  Nor is this just about nurturing relationships, but it also requires a commitment to personal growth through continuous learning, exploring new ideas, and developing resilience.

There is a problem in all this in the 21^st century which is that in our ‘modern’ world we are easily distracted and eminently distractable. Web sites, television programmes and other broadcasters work hard to grab our attention. The clamour of the news, the allure of the new and the babble of the world around us all conspire to pull us away from a commitment to upsurge a good life. Why not just enjoy what is happening around us?

2025 was a demanding year for many people.  Given that, it might be sensible to recognise the best thing they – and we – can do is to abandon ineffective striving, and settle for some modest goals, but not for anything more than that. If we follow that approach, then perhaps it is a good idea to have a few New Year Resolutions after all.  They are unlikely to prove onerous, especially as they will almost always be forgotten by the middle of the year:  lead a good life by some voluntary work;  make some donations to worthy causes. Sadly, that is the easy and inadequate approach we tend to adopt.

To do more than that is to take our lives and our responsibilities seriously. One determined and persistent guide is Peter Singer.  He makes it clear that doing good is essential and demanding work. In an interview with Graham Reilly in the Sydney Morning Herald back in 2015, he explained his views on living a good life which he explained is “trickier and yet simpler than you might think”. In his book The Most Good You Can Do, he suggests we haven’t really thought properly about how we can do the most good it is possible to do in this life.  He calls his approach “effective altruism”. How do you live your life in the most ethical way to make the world a better place and in a way that benefits the greatest possible number of people, most of whom you don’t know?

As an example of his approach, Singer aims to get more people to change their ideas about world poverty and what we as individuals can do to alleviate it through his proposal for pursuing effective altruism.  He describes his approach as a growing philosophy and social movement which applies evidence and reason, rather than emotion, to working out the most effective ways to improve the world. This is not about donations that give you a “warm glow”. This means living less selfishly, living more modestly and embracing a culture of giving to people less fortunate than you are.

“I think a lot of people do have a sense that they want to make the world a better place. And then you have to think about how I am going to do that. Not only how can I make it better but how can I do as much good as I can with the resources that I have.”. Singer says being a bystander is not an option. “It’s not an ethical option anyway. If we don’t do this, we are doing something wrong. We have an obligation to act.”

In his book, Singer writes of the ways people become effective altruists. He writes of those who deliberately choose to pursue careers that are highly paid, so that they can give more money away and help the most people they can over their lifetime.

In the chapter aptly titled ‘Giving part of yourself’, Singer discusses those effective altruists who donate one of their kidneys to save a stranger.

In his article, Graham Reilly wondered if this might be going a bit far? He responds to Singer by asking if an approach like this wasn’t putting your own life at risk? Singer ‘s response is telling.  He notes that it’s been calculated that there’s just a one in 4000 chance that a person will die as a result of giving away one kidney. But even at those odds he says he is not prepared to do it himself, although he admits it would be the right thing to do. I tell him I also prefer my kidneys to remain as a pair.

“I would do it if my daughter needed it and I think many people would,” Singer says. “But to give it to a stranger, nup. I don’t know if I can really defend that decision except to say I don’t like going into hospital and having operations. But that’s not a good reason.”

It is an important, yet challenging reservation.  Here, Singer makes a further distinction between what he advocates as a reasonable approach to helping people in need and what he is prepared to do himself.  “I see morality as not a black and white thing that either you do what’s right or you’re to be condemned for being a terrible person. I see it more like being on a grey scale and virtually everybody is on that scale.

He firmly believes everybody can and should be on this scale. The rich give more, the less rich, less. You can do a lot of good without earning a lot. You could use public transport instead of owning a car, stop buying stuff you don’t really need, stop measuring your success as a person by how big your house is. “The most solid base of self-esteem is to live an ethical life, that is a life in which one contributes to the greatest possible extent to making the world a better place.”

Crucially, he says, effective altruism needs to use the heart and the head and to be well-directed to be successful.  “Many people who give to help poor people in poor countries sponsor individual children, a practice that indicates the need to focus on a particular individual who they can get to know in some way. But it is not as likely to benefit as many people.”

Singer is a powerful advocate for the importance of living a good life and sets a standard most fail to achieve.  As he explores in his book, The Most Good You Can Do, (published by Text Publishing in 2015), there are many ways in which we can lead a good ethical life and pursue important and demanding resolutions.  It might be a good New Year’s resolution to read his book (and some of the others he has written) as a way to encourage a fuller examination of the life we lead and the value we create for others.

Obviously, not all of us have the determination to match Peter’s standard and adopt his specific approach.  At times, it is hard not to think he sets an impossible standard, but at least his comments are provocative and can help his readers rethink and reconsider, even if in only small ways.  That doesn’t mean we should abandon making a commitment to leading a good life.

At the beginning of this year, I have been thinking about doing good. As it happens, I have an excellent opportunity to explore this further. The theme for Canberra’s Philosopher’s Cafe in 2026 is identity. In the two groups that meet over the year, we take part in a series of interesting discussions but ones without real consequences, sometimes examining issues that could have real implications for the way we live, even suggesting possible resolutions.  However, our focus is on ideas, philosophical topics to consider as the year progresses.  They are rewarding, sometimes even provocative, but we could do more.

Given this, could the two groups in 2026 ask ‘How can we, individually or together, take our examination of the philosophy of identity further, to be more than academic, but instead to help each one of us develop insights and practices that will have a real impact on our lives?’  Should we do more than this?   Perhaps we could shape our discussions to include adopting Plato’s approach where “Reason governs, while allowing your Spirit to support you, and your Appetites to be satisfied appropriately, creating a life of inner balance between these three practices”.

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Histories of Time

There are two ways we tend to think about time.  One has to do with the way we cut up time, so that we can refer to moments of importance, or of interest, or of necessity.  This is the topic Leofranc Holford-Strevens explores in his book, A Short History of Time (published by OUP in 2005).  The other is the nature of time itself, and the way this has been re-examined in order to see it as a key in helping us understand the nature of the universe.  This is the topic of Stephen Hawking’s brief (and exceedingly difficult to understand) book, A Brief History of time.  Two approaches to the history of time, and yet they couldn’t be more different.  If Holford-Strevens uncovers the various forms of the calendar, the ways in which we slice up the year into weeks and seasons, and other ways of ‘marking the year’, Hawking happily tosses all that aside, and suggests the real issue is the nature of time.

Holford-Strevens is disarmingly honest.  In the Preface to his short book includes a quote from St Augustine “So what is time?  If no one asks me, I know; if I seek to explain it, I do not.”  He continues to make it clear that he is not going to address whether time has a beginning for an end, if it proceeds in a straight line or in cycles, nor is he going to delve into the idea that time is the fourth dimension of the universe.  He explains that he will “concentrate on the methods by which its passage is and has been measured”, the way the ‘man-in-the-street’ might consider it (pages ix-x).  It is for that reason that Chapter 1 focusses on ‘the day’, the period of time determined by the rotation of the earth.

A day:  so simple and clear a concept.  However, like most things, it isn’t quite as clear as you might think.  After all, when does a day ‘begin’?  Is it determined by daylight (which, inconveniently gradually appears at different times in many parts of the world, especially the further we are away from the Equator).  In most senses, of course, a day is determined by agreement not a physical sign, a day which Holford-Strevens describes as a ‘civil day’.  Given the changing time at which the sun rises and sinks, it isn’t surprising to discover that for many societies and at many times, the day would begin when the sun was at its highest point, at noon.  That has the incidental benefit that nightly observations by sailors and astronomers are all doing so during ‘the one day’, given our rather inconvenient separation of the hours before and after midnight as belonging to two separate but consecutive days.  However, we seem to be happy with the convention that the day extends through the daylight hours, and the change from one day to another occurs during the night.  With advantages in either direction, the determination of when a day begins is clearly a matter of convention.

If convention has shaped our views of days, what about hours?  Holford-Strevens reveals that the idea there were 12 daytime and twelve night hours can be traced back to the ancient Egyptians.  However, the length of each days varied through the seasons, but they had defined there were twelve hours of daylight in the summer and in the winter – in other worlds, daylight hours were long in the summer.  He reveals that was common practice in Europe up until the later part of the Middle Ages, and hence various references to twelve hours in the day.  Incidentally, a mid-day rest is often referred to as a ‘siesta’, which happens to be the old Spanish word for sixth …. Once the day was defined as beginning in the middle of the night, that led to another convention to be established, which is whether the hour after noon is the 13^th hour, or if you start again, and distinguish it as 1 pm!

It goes without saying, once we get past hours, things get far more complicated.  In Byzantine Greek times, the hour was divided in 5 leptá, each leptá into 4 stigmaí, and each stigmé into either 2 rhopaí (or 1½ minutes), 3 endeixeis (1 minute), or 12 rhipaí (15 sedond interbals), and each rhipé was 10 átomata.  In the Medieval Latin period each hour was divided into 4 puncta, and each punctum was 2 ½ minuta:  a minuta was 6 minutes in our time scale.  However, there was an alternative where there were 5 puncta per hour, 2 minuta per punctum, and each minutum could be broken down into 4 momenta (1 ½ mutes) or 6 ostenta (1 minute), each momentum into 12 unciae (7 ½ seconds), and each uncia was 47 or 54 atoimi.  Then there was the Hebrew calendar, where each hour had 1080 hâlãqîm (parts), and each heleq had 76 rega’îm (moments).  Confused?  So were the users, and variations were common.

Then came clocks, and now there was a need to displace apparent solar time with mean solar time (the time shown on a clock).  The two can vary by as much as 10 minutes over the course of the years (with the greatest variations late February and late November in the UK.   By the Eighteenth Century time, standardisation was becoming a key issue, and when solar time became the legal definition of time, as it did in the UK in 1792, variations still occurred as a function of the local meridian.  Eventually, Greenwich Mean Time was adopted in the UK, and in 1880 enshrined in a statute.  However, Holford-Strevens adds “So completely has local time been forgotten so that the practice still observed at Christ Church, Oxford, that one is not late until five minutes past the appointed time, that is to say till one is late by local mean solar time (longitude 1° 15′ W of Greenwich), is a tradition regarded even in other Oxford colleges as no more than an amiable eccentricity.”

Almost there, but not quite.  Thinking about time in the Nineteenth Century, countries were busy standardising their time across their regions.  However, that left unresolved one other question, which was how to standardise time between countries, and, in particular, around the globe.  In 1884, an International Median Conference in Washington, DC, adopted a US proposal that the prime meridian ((0°) should pass through the “centre of the transit instrument at the Observatory of Greenwich”.  This has remained the case since then, although the French persisted for some years in showing 0° as passing through Paris.  In the end, they agreed, but with the concession that another French proposal be adopted, that researchers use decimal measurements of angles and times.  Almost finished, but for one final twist which was that time zones should be along the lines of meridians – but with some exceptions.  Iceland wanted to use Greenwich mean time, with France and Spain one hour ahead of it (but not Portugal!);  China and India imposed a single time zone of their huge territories, but Russia accepted having time zones spread over 11 zones.

If all of that was resolved, one puzzle remained.  This was when a date changed.  The convention was established that “an eastbound traveller crossing the meridian 180° east of Greenwich needs to give back the gained day, a westward-bound traveller to regain a lost day: ships therefore repeat the day when eastward bound, and suppress a day when westward bound” (and the same for air travellers – a real issue for those with watches that show dates!).  He goes on to discuss the tricky issue of the year being slight longer than 365 days, with conventions of leap years, atomic clocks and the like.  However, despite all the tiny adjustments, the 20^th Century seemed to have sorted out most time matters for travellers.

Ah, but only ‘most’ time matters!  That takes us to Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time.  Published in 1988, it takes us into hitherto unimaginable twists and turns in the story of time.  In just 13 pages, Hawking takes us through Holford-Strevens history.  In that first chapter, having arrived at the generally agreed theories of time up to the 1930s, he ends by suggesting that it is very difficult to draw together all the threads of science to offer a single theory that describes ‘the whole universe’.  Instead, he takes us past Holford Strevens summary, and into the strange world of time as it is being examined in the 21^st Century.  He suggests there are two basic but partial theories that confront us.  “The general theory of relativity describes the force of gravity and the large-scale structure of the universe, that is, the structure on scales from only a few miles to as large as a million million million, million (1 with twenty-four zeros after it) miles, the size of the observable universe.  Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, deals with phenomena on extremely small scales, such as a millionth of a millionth of an inch.  Unfortunately, however, these two theories are known to be inconsistent with each other – they cannot both be correct”.  He might have added they also push to one side the nice story about time that Holford Strevens had written.

Hawking did start with familiar ground, reminding the reader about Aristotle, Galileo and Newton, before moving on to the 19^th Century.  This was when great discoveries about the nature of light and the speed of light were made.  There was a snag, which was that, however you measured it, and in whatever direction, light travelled at a fixed speed, irrespective of whether the observer was at rest or moving.  It was the Mitchelson-Morley experiment that presented us with this puzzle, and which remained unsolved for 28 years.  Then in 1905 Einstein presented his theory of relativity, of which the fundamental point was that the laws of science should be the same for all ‘freely moving observers, no matter what their speed’.

As with so many other revolutionary theories, the implications of Eistein’s theory were, to put it simply, astonishing.  In particular, it dispensed with the idea of absolute time.  This was illustrated by some challenging observations (even though the proof was to come many years later).  For example, two observers, one on top of a mountain and one at the bottom, might compare the performance of the clock each possesses (they are assumed to be very accurate).  The clock nearer the centre of the earth would run more slowly than the one at the top of the mountain.  Sounds slightly crazy, but it is true, and in the age of satellites it is very important:  given that time runs faster above the earth as compared to on the surface.  Calculating the position of the satellite would be inaccurate if you assumed time runs at the same rate for both, and such predictions of the satellite’s position would be wrong by several miles.

At the same time as the implications of Einstein’s theory were being considered, another challenge to our view of the universe emerged.  This was the result of the work of Edwin Hubble.  The starting point for this was consideration of the well-known Doppler effect.  If you are driving along the road, with an emergency vehicle coming towards you, the siren  is at a higher frequency than when it has passed and is travelling away.  Realising this was true for light waves as well as sound waves, Hubble found, by measuring the shift in the spectra of galaxies, that most appeared to be moving away from us, and the further away the galaxy, the faster it was moving away.  This revealed that the universe is expanding!

However, that has led to yet another extraordinary observation.  If the universe is expanding, then there must be a point in the past when everything was closer together.  Indeed, there must be a point, some 13.8 billion when the universe began, supposedly from a very small, hot, and dense state, one from which it has been expanding and cooling ever since.  This theory agrees with several pieces of evidence, including the abundance of light elements in the universe, and the existence of what is known as cosmic microwave background radiation.  But if we accept this, we’re left with yet another puzzle: what, if anything, existed before the “Big Bang” which is considered the beginning of space and time?

Hawking goes on to describe some other findings from the physical sciences.  These include the ‘uncertainty principle’, the continuing arguments about the nature and number of elementary particles, and the almost inconceivable topic of ‘black holes’.  However, having covered these, A Brief History of Time ends on two even more challenging topics:  the fate of the universe and the ‘arrow of time’.

In his chapter on the ‘Origin and Fate of the Universe’., Hawking quickly explains views known as the ‘standard model’, which are that the universe started as a very small, hot and immensely dense object, nearly 14 billion years ago, and started to expand very rapidly – the so called Big Bang.   As it expanded, it began to cool, and from that point on many observations at distant (and hence very early) objects have been the basis of a relatively robust model of what happened all the way from those first few thousand years after the Big Bang and change began.  However, Hawking points out there are some challenges:

1. Why was the early universe so hot?
2. Why is the universe so uniform on a large scale, as appears to be the case when you are looking at points of space in every possible direction?
3. How did the universe expand at the rate it did – if the rate of expansion had been smaller (by even one part in one hundred thousand million million), it would have collapsed?
4. Although the universe is so uniform at the large scale, there are many local irregularities (stars, galaxies), and so we need to explain how these emerged.
5. Finally and not on Hawking’s list, we might add a fifth puzzle: what was there before this time?  That’s a question for lay readers, even if it doesn’t bother astrophysicists.

Hawking asks that we think of the anthropic principle: “we see the universe the way it is because we exist’.  He distinguishes two versions of this.  The weak anthropic principle is that the conditions for intelligent life will only be met in some regions of the universe, the inhabitants of these regions should not be surprised if they observe their locality meets these conditions.  You might say we exist because we were in the right place at the right time.  If that isn’t odd enough, the ‘strong’ anthropic principle proposes there are many different universes, or many different regions of a single universe, each with its own configuration, and possibly its own set of laws of science.  We happen to be in one of those places.  If we weren’t, we wouldn’t exist.

How can all this make sense?  One dominant idea is that the early universe might have gone through a period of very rapid expansion.  Very rapid?  In an early iteration of this model it was suggested that the radius of the universe might have increased one million, million million million times in a fraction of a second.  More to the point, it has been hypothesised that there was a point of singularity at the beginning of the universe, where all the laws of science as we know them were not in place.  If that isn’t enough to give a non-scientist a headache, a further element is Einstein’s idea that “the gravitational field is represented by curved space time:  particles try to follow the nearest thing to a straight path in curved space, but because space-time is not flat their paths appear to be bent, as if by a gravitational field.”  Indeed, Hawking goes on, “time is imaginary and indistinguishable from directions in space”.  As if that wasn’t enough, Hawking goes on to postulate that “space and time may form a closed surface without boundary … but if the universe is really self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end:  it would simply be.”

As Hawking remarks in the last chapter of his Brief History “We find ourselves in a bewildering world.  We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe?  What is our place in it and where did it and we come from?  Why is it the way it is?”  This is the desire to find a ‘unified theory’.  So far, that eluded us.

The End of Time

Nearly a quarter of a century later, it is hard to recall all the excitement – and angst – that surrounded the impending millennium in 1999.  Eventually, attention focussed on a rather unlikely problem, although it seemed very real at the time.  This was that electronic calendars and timers all had not been designed to deal with year 00:  many were operating on the basis that the only year identifier needed was the last two digits.  But if we hit year zero, what would happen.  This was seen as a computer flaw, described at the time as the ‘Millennium Bug’, all the result of the fact that when complex computer programs were first written in the 1960s, engineers used a two-digit code for the year, leaving out the ‘19’.  As the year 2000 approached, many began to believe that these automated systems would not interpret the ‘00’ correctly, and as a result there would be a major glitch in many systems.

It was considered possible that banks could face real challenges as interest rates might be affected:  instead of using the rate of interest for one day, the computer might calculate interest for minus 100 years!  Others worried about transportation which also depended on knowing the correct time and date. Airlines were considered at risk, especially as there were no airline flights in 1900!  As a result of these and other concerns, companies worked to fix the ‘bug’ by developing ‘Y2K-compliant’ programs. The simplest solution was the best: the date was simply expanded to a four-digit number.  In the end, there were very few problems.  Given the lack of dramatic disasters, many dismissed the ‘Y2K-bug’ as a hoax.

Panic over a Millennium Bug was the modern world’s example of an apocalypse, a catastrophe that marks a significant moment in the history of mankind.  In The End of Time, Damian Thompson gives a detailed analysis of millennial thinking and predictions of disaster.  It is one situation where the modern world offers a poor version of something the ancients did with far more verve and drama.  Before turning to his commentary, I should point out that we do have some fine contemporary apocalyptic movements, however, with a number of  predictions over the past 25 years.  At this point, I should add that I consider 2001 the last year of the second millennium.  New post-millennial predictions commence from 2002!).

In terms of forthcoming disasters, I might mention that we can look forward to 2026, when the Messiah Foundation International predicts the world will end when an asteroid collides with Earth in accordance with predictions in The Religion of God.  If that seems rather close we can go back to Newton writing at the end of the Seventeenth Century who predicted that  the world would definitely not end before 2060.  One Sunni Muslim theologian Said Nursi, has offered 2129 as the date for the world’s demise.  That leaves one more key source, the Talmud, which indicates the Messiah will come within 6000 years since the creation of Adam, with the world  destroyed 1000 years later, so that the period of ‘desolation’ will begin in 2239, and end in 3239.

Actually, we’ve survived some narrow squeaks already.  Starting with the most recent, an American religious leader, F Kenton Beshore had worked out that Jesus would return in 1988, before realising the definition of a biblical generation was incorrect:  on this revised basis  the second coming of Jesus would take place between 2018 and 2028 and the final rapture by 2021 at the latest.  Many predictions of the end face revisions of this kind, so that David Meade first chose 2017, but revised it to 23 April 2018; Ronald Weinland told everyone the end would come in 2011, and then changed to 2012; and Jeanne Dixon initially explained the world would come to an end on 4 February 1962, and then revised her prediction to 2020 (better vision, I guess).  Out of many others, I must acknowledge 2011 as a bumper years, with Harold Camping joining with Ronald Weinland in going for 2001, accompanied by a whole group that became convinced that Comet Elenin, travelling between the Earth and the Sun would cause massive earthquakes and tidal waves, or even collide with Earth (on October 16).

It is clearly time for me to get back to Damian Thompson’s book.  Part One deals with history, and especially event around 1000 AD.  Perhaps one of the early and clearly exciting forerunners was the Secular Games in Rome in AD 248, which were held to celebrate the one thousandth anniversary of the founding of Rome.  Rome was already in decline, and the emperor, Philip, saw the need for an exercise in restoring self-esteem and traditional Roman religion.  All the more interesting in that Philip was an Arab!

“Along the Tiber he burned lambs and black she-goats to the Fates, who caused men to proposer or fail.  He sacrificed white bulls to Jupiter the Best and the Greatest, king of gods and patron of Rome; a pregnant sow to Mother Earth, who gave the empire food in abundance or held it back and made men starve.  He offered cakes and burned incense to Ilithyia, goddess of childbirth, without whose assistance the empire’s population dropped.  Matrons knelt to Juno, in supplication for blessings.  Twenty seven aristocratic youth and twenty seven highborn young virgins, their lives unpolluted by the death of either parent, chanted ancient hymns to Apollo and his chaste sister Diana.”  (from G C Brauer, The Age of Soldier Emperors, 1975)

In his chapter The Mystery of the Year 1000, Damian Thompson pulls ff a great trick.  We read the “population of Christendom lived through the year 999 in a state of mortal fear, convinced that, with the completion of a thousand years since the birth of Christ, history had run its course.”  People fled cities and countries, building were abandoned, debts were revoked, prisoners freed, and terror was rampant.  If you think this sounds rather like the predictions of Donald Trump assuming the US Presidency in January 2025, you’d be right.  Just as we have no idea what will happen, with the result imaginations take over, so the same is true for AD 1000.  Current historical research has discovered there were no ‘Terrors of the yar 1000’.  As Thompson observes: “It is a romantic invention, dating back no further than the sixteenth century”.  How did this happen.

Historians have identified some small number of decisions and plans that centred around the end of the first millennium, but one reality is uncontested and critical:  in 1000 AD the vast majority of people didn’t know what year it was.  For almost everyone, 1000 was ‘a year like any other’.  Not everyone, however.  Recent work by historians of the tenth and early eleventh centuries do offer accounts and evidence suggesting gloomy presentiments about various misfortunes about to affect the population.  It seems that Princes and preachers used the date as the basis for offering warnings, while at the same time planning celebrations to shake off fears and a sense of danger.

As in so many things, we are using the past, in this case, the turn of the millennium, as a canvas on to which to focus our current fears and uncertainties.  It seems that telling a story what ‘happened’ is also a way to offer a warning about what might happen now.  We often give space to accounts of unsuccessful peasant uprisings in medieval times, to reassure ourselves that contrary views do emerge, and, at the same time, to recognise they almost always fail.  If there are stories about the year 1000, they both illustrate the power of religious belief, miserable existences and that ‘audacity of hope’ that can motivate us.  At the same time, they are reminders that nothing really changes.

The second part of A Brief History of End-Time takes us to the end of the 20^th Century.  Prior to 2000 were a series of events at the end of the 19^th Century, associated with image of fin-de-siècle.  That term was a modern invention, first appearing in France in 1885.  There were many odd but memorable episodes at the completion of eighteenth century.  There’s the story of Miss Agnes Ozman, (unrelated to the Wizard of Oz), a student at Bethel College, a Texas bible school.  On January 1, 1901, she was heard speaking in tongues.  She explained:

“During the first day of 1901, the presence of the Lord was with us in a marked way, stilling our hearts to wait upon Him for greater things.  It was nearly eleven o’clock on this first day of January that it came into my heart to ask that hands be laid upon me. …. As hands were laid upon my head the Holy Spirit fell upon me, and I began to speak in tongues, glorifying God.  I talked several languages.  It was though rivers of living water were proceeding from my innermost being.” (Recorded in a 1964 book on the Pentecostal movement)

Little has been written about Agnes Ozman and consequences of this episode. but it has been attributed with starting the modern Pentecostal-Holiness movement in the early 20th century.

However, Agnes speaking in tongues was unlike most stories about events associated with the end of the twentieth century, if not so different from so many other curious episodes recorded at the turn of previous centuries.  Today, we seem to have become rather more interested in technology that spiritual ad religious happenings.  If the general public still believed in ‘miracles’ back then, our capacity for such beliefs has declined – unless, of course, you consider Donald Trump winning a second term as US President as similarly miraculous, together with the extraordinary ability of certain foods and cures to make you instantly attractive.  Have we have decided to ignore warnings about the ‘end of time’ and the like?

Perhaps in an increasingly secular world, we are likely to be concerned about rather more prosaic problems.  Attention on many peoples’ minds is given to threats of having our computers or mobiles phone ‘infected’ by a virus, by which means our personal life is known, manipulated, our cash savings stolen, and our thoughts replaced by scurrilous texts sent to people in our address book.  That isn’t all.  We also worry about banks failing, the cost of living continuing to increase, Covid returning in some new and horrible form, about what the government is going to do next, and how conflicts in Europe Asia and the USA will spill over into disastrous confrontations here.  This isn’t apocalyptic thinking, nor is it millennial fervour, it is stubbornly pedantic and ‘here and now’.  It isn’t about ‘the end of time’, it’s about personal financial obliteration:  in the 21^st Century it is our financial presence that takes precedence, rather than religious or spiritual concerns.

However, apocalyptic thinking has remained.  In Thompson’s book we are reminded of all the crazy cults and concerns about a ‘New Age’ that emerged in the latter part of the Twentieth Century.  Some were interesting, some were odd, and some were – well, bizarre.  How about the 11:11 Doorway Movement. They claimed, “mankind had entered a twenty year period of opportunity to end the earth’s period of conflict between light and dark”.  The ‘doorway’ would open on 12 January 1992, and end on 31 December 2011.  The groups leader, Solara, explained the 11:11 symbol of the group was precoded in our memory banks ‘long, long ago’.  Ah, but here’s a further key point “this numerical revelation came to Salara, incidentally, while he was staring at a digital clock”.  I always new that digital technology was a problem!

It is easy to make fun of many of these movements, but some had very serious consequences.  There was the amazing case of Aum Shinrikyo in Japan.  This was a sect led by Asahara, where, after a great deal of confusion, the police discovered the group was manufacturing the deadly sarin gas.  Rumours swirled for some time, following sarin gas outbreaks in Kamikuishiki and Matsumoto.  Eventually, the investigators found, under a Buddha sculpture in Kamikuishiki laboratory packed with vats of foul smelling chemicals.  Eventually, they revealed that Aum was planning a war on society (!), using whatever weapons it could acquire or make.  The more the investigators dug into the details, they found Aum was “developing biological weapons, trying to secure uranium, assembling guns and rifles, , manufacturing LSD and using truth serum on its followers.  The initial gas attacks in Tokyo were intended as the precursor to a terrorist war.

If the sarin gas attacks had been alarming, it was almost chance that led to two vinyl bags being found in Tokyo’s busy Shinjuku station.  The two bags were close to being broken open by a fire, and if that had happened the result would have been the production of enough hydrocyanic gas to kill an estimated 10,000 people.  Quite what Aum was seeking to achieve, and how far the cult was responsible for all the apparently related attacks and other events remains unclear.  What was clear was the Aum Shinrikyo was a violent millennial cult, seeking to deal with (and perhaps promote) a coming apocalypse.

Another series of equally disturbing events took place in America, a place famous for ‘fights for the soul of the country’.  One of the more famous was back in 1993, when a group of fundamentalists built a compound, Mount Carmel, just outside Waco, Texas.  In February of that year, US federal agents raided the compound, in the belief if held a cache of illegal arms.  Four occupants were killed, but that was the precursor to a fifty-one day siege.  The siege came to an end with impatient government agents decided to send in tanks and CS gas.  A fire swept through the building, and eighty of the apocalyptic believers died.  The group of believers had been led by David Koresh, who had managed to persuade them the ‘end of time’ was imminent, drawing on a variety of complex – and bizarre – views centred around the breaking of the seven seals in the Book of Revelation.  Bizarre or not, his views had led his followers converting rifles into machine guns, the development that had precipitated the raid; it remains unclear how the fire started that killed the sect members.

In many ways, Waco can be seen as just one example of the many so-called ‘culture wars’ that were rampant as the second Millenium was approaching, wars that pitted right-wing extremists, seeking to save the American state from totalitarian plots devised the government and its various secretive and repressive hidden institutions.  Another of these events to receive worldwide attention was the Oklahoma bombing by Timothy McVeigh.  McVeigh wanted revenge against the government for the Waco siege, and the 1992 death of several people at Ruby Ridge.  In a way that was to become increasingly familiar, he was concerned about ‘the rights of US private citizens, and agencies like the FBI.  He wanted to inspire a revolution, and in 1995 he masterminded and carried out a bombing of the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing  168 people, including 19 children, injured 684, as well as partially destroying the building.

Especially in a country where incidents of these kinds abound, the Second Millennium is characterised by many instances where it is the role of government, not religion, that attracts fears about the end of time, global catastrophes and the need for violent uprising to save the nation.  Just as had been true a thousand years before, there are disaffected people who are easily motivated to ‘restore’ their country or their group to the way it had been before government intervened.  The dates of the millennia may seem arbitrary, but they offer a focus for those who fear their world is being overrun.  The only change over 1000 years is that todays’ apocalypses are more likely to be focussed on earthly politicians, not cosmic beings!

Rage On

Recently, my eldest daughter sent me a link to a talk given at the Margaret River Readers and Writers Festival on 17 May 2024, when Andrew O’Hagan, author, essayist, and editor-at-large of the London Review of Books gave a compelling defence of literature and truth in the age of the machines (https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/bigideas/andrew-o-hagan-a-defence-of-literature-and-truth/103997464).  It’s an outstanding talk.  At the end, he quoted one of my favourite poems, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, by Dylan Thomas.  I won’t retreat from quoting the whole piece, especially as part of its power are poetry comes from that repeated, anguished line at the end of several stanzas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,   

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

As far as I’m concerned, Dylan Thomas’ words address two concerns.  The obvious and explicit message is that we should never feel we have finished our tasks, even as we are getting close to death.  At the same time, as I read the poem I also read it as relevant to us at any stage of our lives, urging us to stay alive, awake and focussed, to abandon any sense of having done enough, to believe we have achieved what we can, and to set aside thoughts of giving up or retirement.  Living in an increasingly soporific world, it is easy to allow the world to slip by, to succumb to being cocooned by social media.

As it happened, I listened to Andrew O’Hagan just after I had read an article about Hannah Arendt, and in particular her last unfinished book, The Life of the Mind (in Beyond authenticity, by Samantha Rose Hill, Aeon, July 2024).  It was one of those moments when serendipity strikes.  Like Dylan Thomas, Arendt was asking us to rage against the dying of the light, but her target was rather different from giving up in the face of impending death:  it was asking us to abandon a fascination with the satisfaction of ‘authenticity’ and, instead, to return to the importance of acting in the world rather than turning away from engagement.  A second clear call to remind us to keep doing things.

As Hill explains, “Arendt turned Heidegger on his head and argued that all thinking moves from experience in the world, not from Being.  By arguing that thinking was a function of Being, Heidegger had tried to divorce thinking from the will in order to argue that it was one’s true inner Being that determined ultimately who they became in the world.  But for Arendt, this was an abdication of personal responsibility and choice. It was a way of handing over one’s decision-making power.  And for her, it is only the choices that we make in real time when confronted with decisions that determine who we will become, and in turn determine the kind of world that we will help to shape.”  Arendt wanted us to rage, but do so throughout our lives, and to rage against the subversion of personal responsibility and choice.  She wanted us to engage in ‘willing’, which she saw as is the mental activity that goes on between thinking and judgment:  willing is about action, something one has to do.

Hill contrasts willing with authenticity:  “unlike authenticity, there is no sense of comfort in ‘the will’.  Authenticity promises certainty, whereas the will promises uncertainty. And in times of turmoil, it is all too human to prefer that which promises predictability to the unknown.”  However, she notes that “for Arendt, the will was the means to our freedom, it was the promise that we can always be other than we are, and so to the world.  The will is a space of tension inside the self where one actively feels the difference between where they are and where they would like to be.”  Don’t allow rage to be a merely intellectual perspective but translate what you can see is needed into action; it isn’t enough to know what is at stake, you also have to do something to bring about change.

If that were not enough, serendipity struck yet another time, and alongside Dylan Thomas and Hannah Arendt, the other author whose work seemed determined to become involved in my thinking was an essay by scientist Philip Ball, writing on post-genomic biology in Aeon, on the topic We are Not Machines (July 2024).  If Dylan Thomas wanted us to (maintain the) rage, and Hannah Arendt wanted us to keep focussed on bringing about change rather than slumping into lazy acceptance, Philip Ball wanted to reassure us about our capacities, disabusing us of believing we are nothing more than complex machines.

The article explains that the central idea that underpins post-genomic biology represents an approach that is recent, a rethinking of the roots of how and why we behave, and a liberation from the feeling that what we do, the very nature of life itself, is determined by our DNA.  We aren’t just simple biological machines, we aren’t the passive recipients of predetermined sequences and systems.

Can you remember all the excitement when the structure of DNA, the true nature of genes and the genetic code itself were discovered in the 1960s, to be followed by the Human Genome Project, launched in 1990 and first ‘completed’ with a preliminary announcement of the entire genome sequence in 2000.  Philip Ball reminded me of Bill Clinton’s comment  when the draft sequence was unveiled: ‘Today we are learning the language in which God created life.’ Wow.  If those words seemed prophetic, then the Human Genome Project (HGP) transformed genome sequencing, to the point today you can have your genetic information unveiled for a few hundred dollars.  This data, and comparison of individual variations, has become a critical yet everyday resource for biomedicine, used to help address diseases and traits.  We saw that dramatically realised in the use of sequencing to study the SARS-CoV-2 virus during the COVID-19 pandemic, and from that to identify treatments.

Where does serendipity fit into this?  How does gene sequencing relate to the need to keep raging, to keep wanting to make changes?  The answer Philip Ball provides is somewhat surprising:  “copious genome databases haven’t yet produced the flood of new treatments and drugs that some had predicted from gene-based medicine, nor delivered on the promise of therapies tuned to our own individual genomes. Despite the COVID-19 vaccines, drug development as a whole has stagnated or even slowed over recent decades, becoming ever more costly. And most drugs are still found by old-fashioned trial and error, not by leveraging genetic data. The outcomes have been particularly disappointing for understanding and treating cancer, long thought to arise from changes (mutations) in the sequences in our DNA that are either inherited or accumulated through age and environmental wear and tear. Despite the genetic data glut, biology seems to have settled back into a long, slow slog.”

Ball explains that what he describes as the transformative advances of the post-genomic decades are revealing “nothing less than a new biology: an extraordinary and fresh picture of how life works.  And ironically, those advances turn out to undermine the skewed view of life …  in which the genome sequence of DNA was (in the words Watson put into Crick’s mouth) the ‘secret of life’”.  Why isn’t there more discussion of this?  Ball points out that science is inherently conservative: slow to change its narratives and metaphors.  He suggests we do need some new stories to replace what considers “at best a partial and at worst a misleading picture”, while we remain stuck on explanations.  As he puts it, a model based on the ideas of our genetic blueprint, of selfish genes, and the like have given us a narrative that’s deeply embedded in biological science today, a conventional and established narrative that is proving challenging to abandon.

I have to quote from Ball once again, as he has a way with words!  “[I]t seems astonishing that, at least in biology’s public-facing image, it can seem as though nothing much has changed in the narrative of genetics since the 1960s. It is rather as if cosmologists, having discovered that all known matter makes up just 5 per cent of the Universe, being outweighed by a factor of five or so by the mysterious stuff dubbed dark matter while the remainder is the even more mysterious dark energy, were to say: ‘Nothing to see here! It’s still the same story!’”  So, what is the view that is emerging?

Ball explains that it appears that we may have misunderstood genetic programming in complex organisms because of the widely held assumption that most genetic information is transacted by proteins. This is turning out not to be the case in more complex organisms, whose genomes appear to be dominated by RNA.  We’re told that scientific expert Mattick explained it this way:  it is RNA and not DNA that is ‘the computational engine of the cell’.

In simple, single-celled organisms, like bacteria, transcription is controlled by a process where one gene can (via its protein product) switch on another.  That’s not the norm for complex organisms, and it certainly isn’t true for human gene regulation.  We have layer after layer of regulatory processes, and to date we’ve little understanding how it all works together.

The emerging science is complex.  “The same transcription factor can act on several different genes and can have different effects on the same gene in different types of cell, so that the result depends on some higher-level contextual information. Genes are also regulated by how the physical material of the chromosomes called chromatin – a composite of DNA with attached proteins called histones – is packaged up, which is a poorly understood matter. …  We don’t understand the language of these histone modifications – why they sometimes suppress genes and sometimes activate them, say. But we do know that they matter: mutations of genes that make histone-modifying enzymes, for example, have been implicated in some diseases.  What’s more, our genes tend to be regulated not by individual molecules but by whole gangs of them. Transcription factors act together with other molecules (especially that regulatory ncRNA) and with regulatory segments of DNA called enhancers, insulators and so on, in vast teams that gather into loose collectives that some call condensates, which emerge like blobs of vinegar in the oil of salad dressing. No one knows how all this works, but it looks weirdly messy and analogue – think not of the digital computer but of knobs and dials for controlling old electrical circuits – given that our health and perhaps our life depends on it working reliably and accurately.”

Ball continues “The temptation is to throw up one’s hands and conclude that, for humans at least, how life works surpasses all understanding. … But I don’t think that is so. On the contrary, it’s not hard to see why, the more complex the organism, the fuzzier its molecular mechanisms have to be.  A huge machine that works only if all its countless components interlock in precisely coordinated ways is far too fragile – especially if those parts are, like molecules, constantly moving about randomly in a warm, wet environment.  By the same token, if life relied on the accurate readout of innumerable genomic instructions in exactly the right order, it would be far too vulnerable to errors. It’s for these reasons that we are not machines – not, that is, like any machine humans have ever built.”  It’s a far better and more robust solution to find principles that work over many hierarchical levels, with the operation at one level being not too sensitive to the fine details of the levels below. Gene regulation by rather loosely defined condensates rather than by specific molecular switches, say, means that it can still work without every molecule having to be present and correct.

He concludes that the best narratives and metaphors for thinking about how life works might come from life itself, rather than machines or computers.  Some biologists now argue that we should think of all living systems, from single cells upwards, as cognitive agents, analysing and integrating information to achieve some self-determined goal.  “Our biomolecules appear to make decisions not in the manner of on/off switches but in loosely defined committees that obey a combinatorial logic, comparable to the way different combinations of just a few light-sensitive cells or olfactory receptor molecules can generate countless sensations of colour or smell.”  He concludes “And shouldn’t we have seen that all along? For what, after all, is extraordinary – and challenging to scientific description – about living matter is not its molecules but its aliveness, its agency. It seems odd to have to say this, but it’s time for a biology that is life-centric.”

Let me be clear.  The are hundreds of thousands of people doing good work based on dated assumptions.  There is excellent work being undertaken in laboratories around the world seeking ways to address diseases using what is now proving to be an inadequate model.  That’s nothing new.  It has always been the case that a dominant paradigm in science, and in life, can continue to provide improved understanding and outcomes.  However, we need to move forward, to overthrow outdated ideas, we need paradigm change, we need to want to confront the easy acceptance of existence, and, above all, we need to ‘maintain the rage’.

We need people to rage against complacency.  We need people to rage against misplaced priorities and behaviour.  We need people to rage against mistaken scientific models and assumptions.  While rage can be misplaced, it is only through raging at what is that we find what might be.  It is raging against the dying of the light that makes us human, and the light is always dying, whether you are young or old.  Andrew O’Hagan, Hannah Arendt and Philip Ball are addressing the same theme: keep pushing to change for the better. Rage on.

Boom and Bust

I might have mentioned that I love Alice in Wonderland.  In fact I might have mentioned this several times.  If you know the story (which I hope you do) it begins in Chapter 1 with Alice daydreaming, then seeing a white rabbit checking a pocket watch, a possibly slightly odd sight!  She follows the rabbit, and as it disappears into a rabbit hole, she follows it, falling a long way down, ending up in Wonderland.  It was a memorable image to introduce a story set in another and quite strange world.  Today, the term ‘falling into a rabbit hole’ has been used in many ways, but it can still refer to ending up somewhere unlike where you had intended.

Every so often, I find myself falling down a rabbit hole, especially when thinking about topics for this blog.  I can find myself reading more and more about colour blindness, the physical kind, when I meant to write about colour blindness in terms of relationship between people.  I can find myself reading more and more about bird migration, and then find I’ve moved on to different sensory skills.  I can find myself getting more involved in trying to understand gravity, which leads on to trying to understand the universe, which leads on to trying to think about the origin of the universe, which leads on to … usually, leads on to confusion, and a sense that much of what I’d read I simply didn’t understand.

However, another kind of rabbit hole which temps me is new technologies.  I am a sucker for reading about a new device on the market, and developing a desire to acquire it, to be one of the early adopters.  So it was with video recorders.  Back in the 1970s, in 1975 to be precise, Sony announced the first digital video recorder, the Betamax.  It wasn’t pushed hard in Australia for the first couple of years, but soon after that and with some money in my pocket, along with a state of excitement, I bought a Betamax recorder.  This was at the cutting edge, a device that could record television programs, as well as give access to pre-recorded material you could buy, and play and play again.  The recording medium was a ¾” magnetic tape cassette called U-matic, a now-obsolete format that was developed by Sony.  It was the kind of technology designed to appeal to a moderately technically inclined person like me, and I loved the idea of being in the vanguard.  Oh, and the recording system was brilliant:  played back on a television, it was hard to believe this was only a copy.

Today, the Sony Betamax is lost to history, a great device that disappeared, almost completely forgotten.  When working with groups at Cisco in California a few years ago, I had the opportunity to visit the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.  There I could indulge my desire to look at examples of Babbage’s Differential Engine, parts of the first computers life EDVAC, and more.  On one visit, I decided to look at objects from the recording side of the industry, like tape decks and massive disks.   I couldn’t find a Betamax there, but there was a description of what had happened.  I knew JVC had released the competing VHS format in 1976, a year after Sony’s Betamax, but I also remembered that, at the time, Betamax was higher quality than VHS, if also somewhat more expensive. VHS machines could record a full movie, while to begin with  the Betamax was limited to only one hour.   More to the point, Sony refused to license their system format to other manufacturers, but JVC built an ecosystem of partners and offered a greater selection of films.

Sony’s Betamax was in trouble.  By 1980, VHS had proven favourable among consumers and was successful in controlling 60% of the North American market.  By 1981, sales of Beta machines in the United States had sunk from 100% in 1976 to 25% of the VCR market. As movie studios, video studios, and video rental stores turned away from Betamax, the combination of lower market share and a lack of available titles further strengthened VHS’s position.  What Sony hadn’t considered was what consumers wanted. While Betamax was believed to be superior format in the minds of technologists and press (due to excellent marketing by Sony), consumers preferred an affordable VCR (which often cost hundreds of dollars less than a Betamax player.  By the middle of the 1980s, VHS had won the war.  Sony saw what was happening and redirected its efforts.  Building on the technologies they’d learnt with Betamax, they were to lead the field in camcorder development by the end of the 1980s.

So much for the Betamax.  However, my interest in that technology was part of what me led, many years later, to teaching innovation. Indeed, that was the reason I was contributing to some courses at Cisco, encouraging staff to think carefully about innovation (at the time I was discovering the Betamax video recorder didn’t even rate a mention in the Computer History Museum – yes, I know because it wasn’t a computer!).  My focus was linking innovation to entrepreneurship.  Innovation is the task of finding something new, and while it can be rewarding to be an inventor, success comes from application.  Entrepreneurs are the people who see there is a gap or an opening in a market that is being ignored or missed, and who are able to identify ways to exploit that gap.  Unlike innovators, entrepreneurs are driven by business or organisational sense: take a promising and innovative idea and create a business.  Most are in startups, but without getting too technical, there is an in-company variant of the entrepreneur, the intrapreneur, who does the same thing:  sees opportunities and finds ways to meet those gaps but does so within the organisation.

This is an area full of rabbit holes.  When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, she had an adventure, courted with disaster, and eventually returned back above ground in one piece.  Multiply her experience a thousandfold, most new products fail or end in disaster, and that is a simple summary of the life of entrepreneurs.  Leaving on one side innovations that never got off the ground (there are so many of them), history is full of innovations taken up by entrepreneurial individuals and organisations that have seen limited success.  However, what makes this especially curious feature of this is that there are successful innovations that do build businesses, but many of them will still eventually collapse or disappear.  The timescale for the Betamax might have been shorter than several others, but the path is familiar.

What are some major innovations in the 20^th Century?  We are well aware of successes.  I could mention prescription drugs, cars, or plastic.  Actually, that was a bit sneaky, because these are innovations that have lasted, but have brought with them all sorts of problems and challenges.  Prescription drugs continue to see innovations, although now most new drugs are simply tweaking existing treatments, and often with unfortunate side-effects for users.  We have become a drug-dependent society, and we live with the problems they cause in the rather odd hope that the drugs are good for us:  some are, but many bring as many problems as they solve.  Drugs exemplify the Betamax problem:  when the innovative product doesn’t work as hoped, then a competitor will come up with one that is ‘better’.  Remember, too, that VHS replaced U-Matic tapes … until it no longer did so.  Now we record on solid-state interfaces, originally laser discs, and now thumb drives and the like.

Perhaps cars are a better example.  The motor car has been around from some 140 years and must be seen as a successful innovation.  Thank you, entrepreneurs, like Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan and more.  I suppose it would be churlish of me to point out that the motor car has transformed how we live, where we live, and how we use our time, and not all of this has been positive, with suburbia, motorways, interstates, ubiquitous fuel outlets, drive-in stores and more, with the additional ‘downside’ that people continue to die in traffic accidents, and many more are permanently injured.  It is easy to forget that the internal combustion engine wasn’t the only key factor, it was the creation of a massive private transport network.  Although there is some small evidence the young are not as enamoured of cars as previous generations, it still seems the case people want to own their cars.  I could make similar comments about the ubiquity of plastic, which has highlighted a problem at that motor cars also present, which is the challenge of getting rid of either when no longer wanted.  Scrap metal yards full of squashed cars are obvious; millions of tons of plastic gathering in the oceans are less easily noticed.

Some innovations have been successful for a long time, and then suddenly recognised as dangerous.  Some well-known examples of this ‘boom and bust’ process are leaded petrol, DDT, or chlorofluorocarbons.  Now we know these were disastrous technologies, and only if we had known more at the time they should never have been adopted.  Actually, I shouldn’t have included leaded petrol as an example, as we knew the dangers of lead right at the start, but leaded fuel allowed cars to run smoothly and efficiently.  There are others where we are still having a challenge in recognising they are dangerous.  Nuclear fission has to be the outstanding example here.  It has been deployed commercially and does generate electricity, but most countries allow only it to provide a small share of energy, and just in case we forget its limitations, we suffer a different kind of ‘boom’ as a plant goes wrong.

All this is by way of an introduction to a current boom, that of artificial intelligence.  Will Lockett, in Freemium this month, has given an important assessment of AI in his review AI Is Hitting a Hard Ceiling it Can’t Pass.  A lot of what follows comes from that article, which he introduces with the observation; “There has been an insane amount of hype surrounding AI over the past few months. Supposedly, Teslas are going to entirely drive themselves in a year or two, AI will be smarter than humans next year, and an army of a billion AI-powered robots will replace human workers by 2040, and that is just the AI promises made by Elon Musk so far this year. The entire AI industry is awash with predictions and promises like this, and it feels like AI development is on an unstoppable exponential trajectory we humans simply can’t stop. However, that is far from the truth.  You see, AI is starting to hit a development ceiling of diminishing returns, rendering these extravagant promises utterly hollow.”

To explain his perspective, he starts with looking at how AI works.  Basically, despite all the hype, AI uses what are called ‘deep learning algorithms and artificial neural networks’.  These software tools look at data, masses of data, to identify trends and links.  To be clear, they are not intelligent in the way we usually think of the term, they are merely identifying that an item of data is frequently and significantly associated with another piece of data to identify trends in the data.  Provide enough data, and what seems amazing becomes easy.  Scan enough tagged photographs of people, and the AI system can identify each person in new photographs.  Scan enough Google queries and answers, and the AI system can ‘answer’ a question from you, by finding examples of the question and the answers that have been provided.  This is, of course, why many interrogations of AI systems lead to foolish or dangerous answers, because there are enough crazy people out there providing silly answers to questions on the internet, all of which will be scooped up and used by an AI system.

Lockett notes that AIs have become significantly more capable recently.  He points out that this “has been partly due to better programming and algorithm development.  But it is also 90% thanks to the fact that AIs have been trained on significantly larger datasets. … But there is a problem; we are seeing drastically diminishing returns in AI training, both in terms of data and computational power needed.”   He provides an example: lets “build a simple computer vision AI designed to recognise dogs and cats, and we trained it using images and videos of 100 dogs and cats, and it can correctly identify them 60% of the time. If we doubled the number of training images and videos to 200, its recognition rate would improve, but only marginally to something like 65%. If we doubled the training images and videos again to 400, its improvement would be even more marginal, to something like 67.5%.”  This is because as a dataset grows, “finding new and novel trends and connections that work for the entire dataset becomes harder and harder.”

It’s more than that.  AI is very resource hungry.  AIs are  trained by comparing each individual point of data to every other data point in a set to find connections and trends, so that for each bit of data you add to an AI training database, the amount of computational work it takes to train that AI on that database increases exponentially, and with that the amount of physical computing power and energy required grows rapidly.  Lockett suggests “there is evidence that we are at a stage where both the diminishing returns of training dataset growth and the exponential increase in computing power required to use said datasets are enforcing a hard ceiling on AI development. … Take OpenAI’s flagship AI ChatGPT4. Its improvement over ChatGPT3 was smaller than ChatGPT3’s improvement over ChatGPT2, and even though it was more accurate, it still had the same problems of hallucinating facts and lack of understanding as ChatGPT3 did.”

He reports investigations have shown ChatGPT3 used a training dataset about 78 times larger than ChatGPT2, and ChatGPT4 uses a dataset 571 times larger than ChatGPT3.  Despite this, ChatGPT4 still has significant flaws that significantly limit its use cases. It can’t be trusted to write anything remotely fact-based, as it still makes up facts.  “Some estimates put ChatGPT4’s raw training dataset at 45 TB of plaintext. This means that for the next iteration to be as big of an improvement as ChatGPT4 was over ChatGPT3, the training dataset would need to be tens of thousands of TBs.”  Accessing and preparing that amount of plaintext data, together with using this dataset to train their AI could use so much energy that it’s unviable.

Guess what.  I think we are on the edge of another boom to bust cycle.  What AI does is collate a whole lot of information – unthinkingly.  It would be like students writing their essays by simply quoting anything they see in books, with explanations or analysis.  Oops, that’s what students do now!  Seriously, AI is faster at retrieving data than a person can, even in a very good library.  However, it can’t think about the data, which requires human skills, making judgements, considering evaluating, and even rejecting  what is discovered.

Understanding AI’s ‘unthinking’ process also helps us see its limits.  The danger is simple.  Unless we are very careful, we are about to go down another rabbit hole, just like those that existed for DDT and chlorofluorocarbons, and should exist for motor cars.  We will suffer from reading the results of unthinking AI collated data and believe what we are told.  If humans are often foolish, this has the potential to make us foolish slaves to data.

Perhaps a final word should come from an educational perspective.  Good teachers know that

real learning doesn’t come from lectures or essays.  They can help put come building blocks in place.  However, if you want students to gain understanding, insight and creativity, that comes from interaction.  Send the students off to read, get them to put ideas on paper (knowing full well it might well be parents or AI that does the work).  However, when that initial work is done, sitting round a table and talking about the topic, finding out what was learnt and what was challenging, that’s the process by which we acquire understanding and wisdom.  Think of AI as a new and (possibly) better encyclopedia:  print versions of those tomes went boom and then bust.  I think AI may be heading in the same direction.

Self-Employment

Several years ago, the Australian Institute of Management would hold regular one-day briefings on the economy and future trends.  Many of us enjoyed contributions from what became a familiar trio, comprising Neville Norman, from the University of Melbourne, Alan Carroll, an international management consultant running his own business, and Phil Ruthven, the head of IBIS, a data analysis company.  Each would contribute to painting a picture of the changes they could see.  Neville Norman would examine the economy, and the various actions the government was pursuing or proposing to keep growth on track.  It was always growth back then!  Alan Carroll would then set this within an international context, his analysis always combining strategic insights with witty insights into and quick portraits of international leaders.  Finally, Phil Ruthven would summarise the changing situation with a series of graphs and tables showing areas of growth and decline.

Could we have guessed back then how the apparent story of never-ending overall growth was heading for a shock?  Ruthven’s charts showed us the patterns of change in the economy.  His interest was in the longer trends the data revealed.  However, none of the three could have predicted the emergence and impact of Covid.  Years later, we can look back and check if any of the trends outlined have continued.  In their day, Australian was described as “a quarry, a farm and a hotel’.  Manufacturing was dying.  Also experiencing a slow death, the media hung on, largely through overseas ownership and overseas content.  The hope for the future was in innovation and entrepreneurship, especially in medical devices and products.

Little has changed.  The quarry remains central, even if it is gas and some rare earth metals that now contribute as much as iron ore and coal once did.  The farm has had a tough time in recent years, with restrictions on international trade, and spectacular growth in agricultural products from other parts of the world.  The hotel is re-emerging after the Covid downturn, but some of the facilities look shabby today, and threats to such natural phenomena as the Great Barrier Reef have left the industry with a sense the best days are clearly over.

However, a focus on the big trends that Normal, Carroll and Ruthven documented might have taken attention away from some other changes.  If, like me, you are older and a working hours walker, you will have been struck by the numbers of small businesspeople you see today:  there are local builders, air-conditioning repairers, dog-washers, people contracted to mow lawns and clean up gardens, as well a plethora of delivery trucks, meal services, and so the list goes on.  This is the ‘gig economy’ at work:  and it seems self-employment is growing at the same time as larger companies are shrinking their employee numbers.

Who are these ‘gig workers’.  They are self-employed, independent contractors, and contract firms with on-call teams and temps.  Gig workers are the people who are employed through formal agreements with on-demand companies to provide services to the company’s clients.  Are they employees?  It’s a contested area.  Companies prefer to classifying their gig workers as ‘independent contractors’, whereas workers’ advocates (unions and other membership organisations) push for them to be classified as ‘employees’, to pressure the companies to provide the same employee benefits their fulltime staff possess, like overtime, paid sick leave, employer-provided health care, bargaining rights, unemployment insurance, and more.

Gig work began to grow around the middle of the 20^th Century.  Back in 1952, Jack Kerouac was the first to use the term to describe a form of employment when writing about his time as a brakeman for a US railroad company.  This was in his book On the Road, a novel, but perhaps better described as a ‘faction’, as it charts of evolving impact of the Baby Boomer generation on themselves and on others.  Initially described as a book charting youthful exuberance, it has become seen as an account of “gloomy middle-aged disillusion” (as David  Brooks was to describe in the New York Times, 2 October 2007).   Brooks saw the emerging gig economy as possessing a reckless and youthful confidence that was to slowly decline as those same gig workers became more and more absorbed into the economic system.  Of course, Kerouac wasn’t interested in analysing economic trends:  his focus was on the characters in his novel, who sought to assert their independence, replace the traditional model of manhood with a model rooted celebrating conquest and self-discovery, affirming male brotherhood and the freedom of the road as primary measures of male identity.

Kerouac was a novelist, but he was addressing something that was to grow in salience:  being a worker, but not in the sense of not being the employee of a major company (a theme of many academic studies for the next few decades), but with ‘being your own boss’, free from managers and bureaucratic controls.  Also, it offers a contrast with the traditional model, where employees seek an employer for the long term, to be paid by the hour, week or month,  earning a wage or salary. Gig work tends to be temporary or project-based, often with the workers hired and paid to complete a specific task or for limited period of time.  The lack of traditional benefits is balanced against the fact these workers have greater flexibility around their work hours.

In recent years, the growth of online work has taken this further, allowing some gig workers to become ‘digital nomads’.  Digital nomads have acquired a mobile lifestyle, combining work and leisure though possessing transferable skills and equipment.  For them, gig work offers flexible, location-independent opportunities that can be performed remotely, typically accessed through using digital platforms, allowing many of these people to live a lifestyle combining travel and work, all enabled by internet connectivity.

Reading various reports extolling these changes, you discover gig workers may have high levels of flexibility, autonomy, task variety, and complexity.  However, the gig economy has also raised concerns. First, these jobs generally confer few employer-provided benefits and workplace protections.  Second, technological developments occurring in the workplace have come to blur the arrangement between ‘employee’ and ‘employer’ to the extent these gig alternatives can result in low pay, social isolation, working unsocial and irregular hours, overwork, even sleep deprivation and exhaustion.   The downsides are not trivial.  A 2021 report by WHO and ILO suggests the expansion of the gig economy appears to have been a significant factor for the increase in early age deaths for gig workers.  The study also suggests there’s evidence of gig workers experiencing relatively poor mental health outcomes.

Inevitably, national legislatures have proposed and often adopted regulations intended to protect gig economy workers.  The overall approach tends to be one forcing employers to provide gig workers with some of the benefits previously reserved for traditional employees. Critics of such regulations have asserted that these obligations have negative consequences, with employers almost inevitably reducing wages to compensate for increasing benefits or even terminating employment when they have no leeway to reduce wages.

It’s not just pay.  There are gender differences in participation in the gig economy.  In the United States for example, female gig workers making up 55% of the gig work population, often earning at a rate less than their fulltime equivalents.  The figure for Australia is around 43%.   Gender differences are revealed in the ‘platform economy’, another aspect of gig work, segregating some areas of employment, and a way to allow women to participate in paid work without disrupting social hierarchies, as many are still being expected to manage household and childcare responsibilities. Well, perhaps that was concept, but it’s not the way many see it.  It seems the advent of home service providers and beauticians within the gig economy has not so much been about ‘platforms’ as it has led to the formalising and feminization of casual labour, an area dubbed as “pink collar work”.

How does this look today?  A 2023 McKell Institute study of worker perspectives on the gig economy, Tough Gig, found that “Workers face abuse, assaults and injuries.  One in seven experienced sexual harassment, while over a third have been physically injured while working. While women only made up one in ten survey respondents, they experienced over twice the rate of sexual harassment as men – at 26 per cent compared to 12 per cent. 55 per cent of total respondents have experienced threatening or abusive behaviour, with 43 per cent noting the risk of being abused by a customer as a significant concern.”

Instant job loss through ‘deactivation’ is common. 79 per cent of respondents use ‘multiple apps’, 74 per cent of them doing so to receive adequate jobs and money, while a third said they use multiple apps for job security in case they are dropped by a business.  More than a quarter have had their accounts deactivated or suspended, and half listed this ‘deactivation’ as one of their top three concerns.  Low pay is a health and safety hazard.  51 per cent of all respondents have felt pressured to rush or take risks to make enough money or protect their job, which puts both worker safety and customer safety at risk.  Over half of the respondents have experienced work-related stress, anxiety, and mental health issues.

Looking at the data, the major factor cited in workers’ concerns was income:  low pay, followed by no income while sick or injured, unpaid time waiting for jobs and uncertainty of income.  45 per cent of gig workers have struggled to afford everyday items like groceries and household bills, with the same proportion reporting earning less than minimum wage. If this finding is reflected across the gig economy, it would mean 90-112,000 Australian workers are earning less than minimum wage.  Drivers working longer hours are worse off.  Of those working over 40 hours a week, at least two thirds earn less than minimum wage.  Food delivery workers were the most likely to report earning less than minimum wage.  Delivery workers must work long hours to make enough money.  81% of respondents depend on the money they earn from rideshare, food delivery, or parcel delivery to pay bills and survive, and 41% of workers reported working overtime (gig workers don’t earn overtime rates).  Overall, 74% of workers reported working long hours to make enough.

The gig economy is ostensibly less gender-segregated worldwide than the traditional labour market. However, women across the world continue to protest against gender gaps such as lower wages and working hours and the lack of flexibility. Gig workers want reform, and almost all responding to the McKell survey supported government regulation of the sector.  The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for worker protections for women who work in the gig economy for supplemental income.  The platform economy has attracted female service providers due to the flexibility it offers. 80% of women on one food delivery service said that flexibility is the main reason they pursue gig work, (Axios, 26 August 2021), mainly  many women need to balance work with familial responsibilities (surprise!!) and are therefore more likely than men to participate in gig work due to scheduling reasons.

Given this, there has been a recent rise in women joining the platform economy as gig workers.  Women now make up just under half of the delivery people on Uber Eats. There are other issues aside from the flexibility.  Women tend to prefer delivery work to ride-sharing work because of safety concerns if you are a female driver offering ride-sharing services. There have been proportionately more sexual harassment claims filed by female Uber drivers.

These issues with gig work lead to an obvious question:  how big has been the impact of the gig economy?  The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), like most national statistical organisations, has begun working to expand its statistics on relatively new and emerging forms of employment, including digital platform workers.  It has developed measures of this area of activity, with an initial survey module of digital platform workers collected through the agency’s Multi-Purpose Household Survey during the 2022-23 financial year.   That first survey revealed the proportion of people who reported undertaking digital platform work (in the last 4 weeks) was relatively small, at just under 1% (0.96%), of the employed population, (these results are similar to those seen in other OECD countries).

In the ABS data, not all digital platform workers considered themselves employed. Only 87% of digital platform workers reported their Labour Force Status as employed, with the remainder reporting they were either ‘Not In The Labour Force’ (10%) or ‘Unemployed’ (3%).  This reveals some see this work as a ‘side hustle’, rather than a ‘job’. This has also been found in other countries, such as Finland, where surveys have found under-reporting of multiple jobholding by employed people.  However, as digital platform workers are a very small proportion of the employed population, it’s been challenging to obtain detailed data.

What did this initial survey tell us?  For those undertaking digital platform work:

• the majority were male (66%), representing a higher proportion of males than in the total employed population (52%)
• the average age was 38 years for males, compared to 36 years for females
• there was a large proportion of people between the ages of 25 to 34 years (30% compared to 23% in the total employed population).

In 2022-23, the most popular digital platform tasks undertaken included:

• food delivery (35%)
• personal transport (27%).

Of all digital platform workers, males were more likely to undertake transport and goods delivery tasks (46%) and females were more likely to undertake food delivery and other work (18%):  ‘other work’ includes a broad range of tasks beyond delivery and transport, such as conducting voluntary surveys and market research.

For those undertaking digital platform work:

• 53% undertook this work in addition to their main job, though only 11% reported that they were multiple job holders in the Labour Force Survey
• that proportion of multiple job holders is higher than the multiple jobholding rate reported by respondents in  the employed population.

It seems to me Phil Ruthven had it right.  Labour force changes take place slowly, and, despite all the hype, gig work and the platform economy remain a small part of the overall picture.  It may grow, but articles about ‘new ways of working’ are largely imaginative projections.  I think I am observing a very different and new economy on my morning walks, but I’m wrong.  Little has changed; for most people, there’s nothing new:  Same old jobs, same old employers, same old worries about keeping a job, and not earning enough.  What’s that phrase again:  plus ça change …

Here and There – California

I think it was L P Hartley in The Go-Between who wrote that wonderful line ‘the past is another country”.  It’s a comment that pops into my head whenever I visit California, not because the Golden State is about the past, but it is ‘another country’ compared to the rest of the USA.  It’s a place I have visited many times, and it has always been ‘different’, linked by land but nothing else to those other bits of the ‘real’ USA like New York and Washington (let alone those strange places like Texas and Idaho, to be found in between).

It is not just that it is different from other places, but with a population of some 40m it is big, stretching from the Mexican border along the east coast of Pacific for nearly 900 miles.  The world of California includes cliff-lined beaches, redwood forest, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the Central Valley farmlands and the Mojave Desert.  Like any decent country, it has its special places, ranging from the wine growing areas in and around the Napa Valley down to San Francisco, with its Golden Gate Bridge, rolling afternoon fogs and wonderful ice cream, all the way down to Los Angeles, still the heart of the western world’s entertainment industry.  Yes, I know it has occasional earthquakes, too many cars, too many crooks, and too great a divide between the ultra-rich and the working poor.  Fascinating, flawed, drawing newcomers and tourists towards it through a strange form of magnetism.

I first went to California at the end of the 1960s.  Still a student, married, I had met two professors.  One was Edward Shils, a sociologist, who took a break from Chicago for a few years to live in Cambridge, first at King’s College and then Peterhouse.  It was my first confrontation with a really smart American academic (although I was to meet many more over the following years).  A little dour, and a man who didn’t suffer fools gladly (or at all, for that matter).  His research focussed on the role of intellectuals and the ways they interacted with those in power, and public policy.

If I thought he was interesting, I wasn’t prepared for the second professor I met, Anselm Strauss from the University of California.  If Shils was bold, patrician and somewhat autocratic, Anselm Strauss came over as everyone’s kind uncle.  Short, slightly overweight, thoughtful, and a wonderful listener, he taught me a skill which I have sought exercise ever since, aspiring to do it as well as he did.  He showed me how to ask questions, and to do so in such a way that both the questioner and the person being questioned learnt.  Later it was to lead him to write a book on ‘grounded theory’ with a colleague.

However, it was because Anselm had returned to San Francisco that saw me heading over to California.  I’d been to New York, Boston and Washington, and I was totally unprepared for the lifestyle of Russian Hill.  Anselm and Fran lived in a small three level terrace home off Union Street.  The surprises were immediate and delightful.  A significant part of the largest room in the middle level was taken up with a ‘mini’ grand piano, which was covered in scores, as was the surrounding floor.  We went outside for a cup of coffee (possibly the first really good coffee I had drunk in my life) and sat in a small patio area, one level up, surrounded by kinetic sculptures:  collecting them was one of his passions.

When it was time for dinner, we went out.  I can’t be sure now, but the restaurant was tiny, and I think it has since been replaced by a coffee house:  Saint Frank?  At the time, I doubt there were more than four tables.  Anselm and Fran were well known there, and the meal was fabulous.  You’ve heard of instant religious conversions?  Well this was an instant urban conversion.  Sadly, San Francisco today bears little relationship to the place I visited and fell in love with around 1969.  I still love the city.  I suspect it’s a bit like my feelings about London.  In both cases the world that captivated me is long gone, but the affection remains.

Let me move on to another visit to California, a few years later (although I had already been to San Francisco a few times, and once to Anaheim).  This was around 1976.  I was planning on inviting two US professor over to Adelaide to work on a federal government review of medical schools in Australia.  One, Ivan Mensh, was at UC Los Angeles, and I went to meet him.  Some 6 miles or so from the airport, I travelled up Westwood Plaza, and found myself at the UCLA Medical School.  Another shock.  If visiting Anselm Strauss was visiting a warm and comfy home, going to see Ivan Mensh was like entering some kind of crazy industrial complex, with vast towers and building everywhere.  Talk about striking contrasts.  Anselm Strauss wasn’t interested in showing me his office at UCSF; I never saw Ivan Mensh’s home in Los Angeles.  Totally different people, but both were a delight.

I found Los Angeles a much harder city to love.  Initial work visits were discouraging.  Eventually I got beyond the university and Disneyland.  However, Los Angeles has never matched up to San Francisco, as far as I am concerned.  I think that’s enough background on my initial visits to California’s two major cities.

Many years after those initial visits, I started going to the Getty Center in Los Angeles, which had opened in 1997.  One of the two centres for the J P Getty Museum, even to visit is an experience.  The Center extends over 24 acres (in fact, the total site is 110 acres).  There is a seven-story deep underground parking garage with some 1,200 parking spaces, but I have always taken a bus there and been whisked up to the museum in the automated three-car, cable-pulled but hovertrain operating ‘tram’.  The top of the site is 900 feet above sea level.  More to the point, weather permitting you can see downtown Los Angeles, the San Bernadino and San Gabriel Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.

The collection is largely focussed on pre-20th-century European paintings, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, sculpture, and decorative arts; and photographs from the 1830s through present day from all over the world.  Famously the acquisitions include van Gogh’s painting of Irises.  Earlier art is housed at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisade, north and west of the Center.  The Center’s buildings cost around $750m (but are now worth many billions of dollars), and the value of the collection is – well, let’s settle for ‘huge’.  With no charge for entry, and a number of places to get food and drinks, it is easy to spend a day there, enjoying a kind of indulgent escape.

The architect had created a work of art.   Richard Meier based his design on two naturally occurring ridges (which diverge at a 22.5-degree angle), which were used to establish the framework for the galleries and the administrative buildings. Meier emphasized these two competing grids on the ridges by constructing strong view lines across the Center.  Although most of the museum is aligned along these two axes, a section of the exhibitions pavilion and the east pavilion are set on a true north–south axis.  The construction was meticulously ‘mathematical’:   the primary grid structure is a 30-inch (760 mm) square; most wall and floor elements are 30-inch (760 mm) squares or some derivative thereof, and are made from concrete, steel or travertine.  Among the building are numerous fountains.  If all that weren’t enough, the Center includes a set of complex earthquake and fire protection systems.

In case you were wondering, the collection is a compelling as the architecture.  If I’ve already mentioned van Gogh as one highlight, there are equally famous pictures by Gaugin and other impressionists, as well as some more contemporary artists.  Getty Images are well known, but you can explore Getty’s extensive photograph collection on the lower level of the west pavilion.  The museum is not just paintings and photographs, as there are many sculptures, as well as illuminated manuscripts and furniture.  Even the main garden is a sculptural delight.  It was designed from the start for visitors, with programs for families, workshops for school visits, along with performances, talks, and tours.  There even a  scavenger hunt for exhibits and art throughout the museum (which adults like me were desperate to follow!).  I had been to Disneyland in previous years, but I never returned to Anaheim once the Getty opened.

However, in this strange large city in this country called California, there is one other, equally wonderful place to visit, The Huntington.  If the Getty Center is new, daring, exciting in only the way things in the city of Hollywood can be, there are many other striking LA places, of course.  Take the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown:  completed in 1976, it was wonderfully described by Edward Soja in Postmodern Geographies (19189):

 “a concentrated representation of the restructured spatiality of the late capitalist city: fragmented and fragmenting, homogeneous and homogenizing, divertingly packaged yet curiously incomprehensible, seemingly open in presenting itself to view but constantly pressing to enclose, to compartmentalize, to circumscribe, to incarcerate. Everything imaginable appears to be available in this micro-urb but real places are difficult to find, its spaces confuse an effective cognitive mapping, its pastiche of superficial reflections bewilder co-ordination and encourage submission instead. Entry by land is forbidding to those who carelessly walk but entrance is nevertheless encouraged at many different levels. Once inside, however, it becomes daunting to get out again without bureaucratic assistance. In so many ways, its architecture recapitulates and reflects the sprawling manufactured spaces of Los Angeles”

I know, you can hardly wait to visit.  However, back to The Huntington.

Founded in 1919, The Huntington is educational and research institution in San Marino, greater Los Angeles. In addition to the library, it has an extensive art collection with a focus on 18th and 19th century European art and 17th to mid-20th century American art.  On the occasions I’ve been to The Huntington, it’s the gardens as much as the Library that are the attraction.  The buildings are set in 120 acres which include a number of  specialized botanical landscaped gardens, including the ‘Japanese Garden’, the ‘Desert Garden’, the ‘Chinese Garden’, and, somewhere amongst several others, the ‘Australian Garden’.  Yes!

However, the centrepiece of The Huntington must be the Library, with its substantial collection of rare books and manuscripts, mainly on British and American history, literature, art, and the history of science, ranging from  the 11th century to the present.  It’s not huge, but it does have 7 million manuscript items, over 400,000 rare books, and over a million photographs, prints, etc.  It has a Gutenberg Bible, one of the eleven vellum copies known to exist, a Chaucer manuscript, and valuable stuff from just about anyone else you’d care to mention.  Quite apart from manuscripts and first editions from people likes Shakespeare, Pope, Blake, Wordsworth, and Newton, there’s a lot more from US authors. However, for me one highlight was the Dibner Hall of the History of Science’s permanent exhibition on the history of science with a focus on astronomy, natural history, medicine, and light.  Perhaps it is another example of the US philosophy that ‘big is best’, but, who cares, it’s glorious.

If Los Angeles has its improbable gems, and San Francisco its obvious attractions, I have spent more time in Silicon Valley than I have in either of those two towns.  For work reasons, I must have visited Milpitas several times, staying at the Hilton Garden Inn, and then going off down East Tasman Drive to spend a couple of days in one of the then many Cisco buildings.  I am confident you don’t want to read about days at Cisco, but fortunately there is a place worth discussing nearby – the Computer History Museum (CHM).

CHM is just off the main highway that runs from San Francisco to San Jose, in a building on Shoreline Boulevard in Mountain View.  After investigating the wool, jute and flax industries in Scotland (don’t ask!), my first major research area was looking at the careers of people working in the then very new computer service industry, especially the programmers and systems analysts, many of whom were based in ‘computer service bureau’.  It was all very new, and the computer I used at the university was laughable in today’s terms:  it has precise 64K of CPU, and all the data was on punch cards, fed onto magnetic tape.  To go to the Computer History Museum was a return to my earlier life, and certainly not a historical tour.

I suppose that’s a bit of an exaggeration.  CHM did have some real and very exciting history on show.  It’s ‘Timeline of Computing History’ reached back to 1933, and the appearance of the Telex machine.  Hey, that was modern!  The museum does acknowledge 2,000 years of computing, however.  For me things got exciting when I saw one exhibit, on Charles Babbage’s ‘difference engine’.  From 1847 to 1849, Charles Babbage designed ‘Difference Engine No. 2’, an automatic computing engine, but failed to build it. He died believing future generations “would prove his idea was sound”. In 1991, the engine was built to his plan and functioned exactly as predicted.  ‘This modern construction of Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2 is the second of its kind, the first being the Engine housed at the Science Museum, London, completed in 2002… Difference Engine No. 2 consists of 8,000 parts of bronze, cast iron, and steel. It weighs some five tons and measures 11 feet long and 7 feet high. The Engine, cranked by hand, automatically calculates and prints tables of polynomial functions to 31 decimal places’.  I loved it – it brought out the worst of my nerdy tendencies.

Forget that:  it is time to move on to Ada Lovelace.  Augusta Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, was born on October 13, 1815 (I wish I’d been at the museum on her 200^th birthday).  Ada met Charles Babbage when she was 18, and it was his first calculating engine, the Difference Engine that captivated her. She was so curious that she asked Babbage’s son for the blueprints and attended lectures about the machine. She was present on a rainy night in late 1834 when Babbage revealed that he had an idea for a new machine, the ‘Analytical Engine’.  By 1843 the letters between Ada and Babbage led to Ada to move beyond learning about the nuts and bolts of the Analytical Engine to developing a broader vision of what it might and might not do.  Living during the height of the Industrial Revolution she saw how Jacquard’s punch cards were to be used by Babbage to input information into the Analytical Engine.  Eventually she wrote a table with instructions to calculate Bernoulli numbers, using a complicated algorithm which she had been studying with her tutor. This table is sometimes referred to the first program.  Ada Lovelace was beautiful and clever, a muse for Charles Babbage, and I confess I’ve been pretty smitten by her ever since!

I could continue for pages, but I think these few places give you a sense of the extraordinary nature of California.  It’s not just the home of Hollywood, which seems to be declining in importance right now.  It also houses the most amazing museums, some with collections of great art, some astonishing buildings in their own right, and some temples to modern technologies.  Come on Australia:  California has set a standard, a target if you like, and we need to get moving an ensure we also have our museums to wine, sheep, mining, marsupials and more.  Australia is a country of astonishing inventiveness and stories, from tens of thousands of years ago to modern industrial developments.  It’s time to tell more of our story.

Here and There – Prague

Prague is an unusual city, at least as I see it.  I’ve been there a few times, and it seems to be made up of a set of dissonant parts.  There’s the Prague of the Castle, up on the hill, overlooking an old part of town.  There’s the Prague of the city centre, packed with shops, pedestrian areas, and tourists.  Finally, there’s the Prague where people live, with trams, shops, and vistas of not particularly inspiring blocks of flats and houses.  Looking at it now, from thousands of miles away, why does it conjure up this odd picture?

In part it has to do with the visits I’ve made.  I’ve been lucky, as I’ve stayed in a beautiful luxury hotel, south of the city centre and the river.  Tucked away in the ancient neighbourhood of Malá Strana (Little Quarter) on the left bank of the Vltava River, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel is located on part of a complex dating back to the 14th century.  Formerly a Dominican monastery, the hotel building incorporates part of the outer wall of St. Mary Magdalene, one of the oldest churches in Prague, which had been built around 1330.  A setting surrounded by history.

In the way you would hope a leading hotel group would, the hotel retains and highlights its distinguished heritage, with its carefully preserved architectural features such as vaulted ceilings, archways and original staircases.  During the rebuilding guests are told, care was taken to protect the artefacts of historical significance that were uncovered.  The most striking find was some of the remains of the church, revealed during the renovation and rebuilding process and now preserved under a glass floor.  It’s a way of showcasing the hotel’s strong ties to Czech history and culture.   In 2007, the hotel was awarded the prestigious “Building of the Year” award presented annually by the Czech government and professional organisations. The hotel was singled out for its especially sensitive and creative approach to reviving and adapting its historical architecture to new use as a luxury hotel.

The hotel’s location is ideal, with its peaceful atmosphere close to the river, only minutes away from the 650-year-old Charles Bridge and a short walk to the popular and historic Old Town Square.  It’s relaxing to meander along the cobbled streets, to goggle at the romantic scenery and passing galleries, and to be tempted by several busy cafés and some of the very best of the city’s elegant restaurants and night scenes.  The hotel is surrounded by palaces, gardens and towers of old Prague, all under the ever-watchful presence of Prague Castle.  Hm, this reads like an advert for Mandarin Oriental!

Ah, Prague Castle.  I think it might be better called the Prague Castle Complex.  There is a castle, but there’s also St Vitus cathedral, the Basilica of St George, and several other smaller palaces, gardens, museums.  All in all the ‘castle’ is the largest ancient castle in the world, covering an area of almost 750,000 square feet.  The site is around 1,870 feet in length and an average of about 430 feet wide.  Surprisingly, from down by the river, it doesn’t look so huge, but once you’ve toiled up the hill to have a look at the various buildings, yes, it is huge.  The complex is packed with wonderful sculptures, impressive buildings, and even the requisite collection of crown jewels that every historical venue must include.  I don’t mean to sound cynical:  it is great place to visit.

Below the castle complex, you can walk to the beginning of the Charles Bridge, a medieval stone bridge that crosses the Vltava River, and takes you into the historic centre of old Prague Its construction started in 1357 and finished in the early 15th century.  The bridge is 1,693 feet long and nearly 33 feet wide.  It is decorated by a continuous alley of 30 statues and other constructions, most in a baroque style originally erected around 1700, (although I recently discovered that now all of them have been replaced by replicas).

The castle and bridge are complemented by another historic object: The Prague astronomical clock, which is one of the walls of the Old Prague Town Hall, was first installed in 1410, making it the third-oldest astronomical clock in the world and the oldest clock still in operation. The clock mechanism has three main components – the astronomical dial, representing the position of the Sun and Moon, as well as displaying various astronomical details; statues of various Catholic Saints, which stand on either side of the clock face; and, finally, “The Walk of the Apostles, an hourly show of moving Apostle figures and other sculptures, including a figure of a skeleton representing death, striking the time. There’s even a calendar dial with medallions representing the months. According to local legend, the city will suffer if the clock is neglected and its good operation is placed in jeopardy; a ghost, mounted on the clock, was supposed to nod its head in confirmation. According to the legend, the only hope for the future was represented by a boy born on New Year’s night.  It appealed to the scientist side of me.

I guess I have been setting a scene, telling you about the long, rich history of Prague.  However, for me that is interesting, but nothing more.  My principal focus is on a man born in 1936 into a wealthy Czech family, which had made its money in real estate development.  The product of a bourgeois family, his background was to have a fateful impact on his life.  His education was circumscribed, and in the early 1950s, he began a four-year apprenticeship as a chemical laboratory assistant.  In what had become a communist country, his privileged background ensured he was not able to enter into any post-secondary school to pursue his interest in a humanities program.  He ended up studying in the Faculty of Economics of the Czech Technical University in Prague but dropped out after two years.

After finishing two years of military service, he managed to get a position as a stagehand in Prague’s Theatre ABC.  Theatre drew him.  He studied dramatic arts taking a correspondence course, and in 1969, his first full-length play was performed in public, The Garden Party, part of a series on the Theatre of the Absurd, winning him international acclaim. Others followed, including The Memorandum (which was taken to New York).  However, from  1968, his plays were banned from the theatre world in his own country, and he was unable to leave Czechoslovakia to see any foreign performances of his works. To remind you, 1968 was the year of the Prague Spring, when Alexander Dubcek introduced reforms to liberalise an oppressive communist regime.  For a brief period,  it seemed reform might be possible in Czechoslovakia, only to be crushed later in the year by more than 500,000 Soviet soldiers.

I am, of course, describing the early career of Vaclav Havel.  If theatre was his great love, circumstances made him a leading dissident.  That reputation was consolidated in 1977 with the publication of the Charter 77 Manifesto, written in part as a protest against the imprisonment of a Czech ‘psychedelic rock band’. Havel co-founded the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted in 1979.  His political activities resulted in multiple imprisonments by the authorities, and constant government surveillance and questioning by the secret police, including almost four years in prison from May 1979 to February 1983.

I don’t want to write a biography, however.  There are well written accounts of his life already.  What I do want to do is to explain why his essays, especially The Power of the Powerless, are, for me, so important.  While Prague is a great city, a historical treasure trove, each time I went there it was with Havel on my mind.  I loved the city, but I was never able to forget the man and his impact.

Havel wrote ‘The Power of the Powerless’ in October 1978.  It was originally meant to be the basis of a planned book of Polish and Czechoslovak essays on the nature of freedom. Each of the contributors of this book were to have received a copy of Havel’s essay and then to respond to it.  That plan was foiled, but his essay was published.

If you haven’t read it, I recommend you do.  It is a clear and determined critique of totalitarianism.  Once read, you won’t forget the opening lines:  “A specter is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent’” This is, of course, a deliberate play on the opening sentence of the Communist Manifesto (‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism’).  Havel continues, “It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the system it is haunting.”

The essay goes on to analyse the Soviet system of the time, and the way in which it had completely embraced the lives of people under the regime.  In a famous section, he explains the significance of a sign on a shop window:

“The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?

I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise head-quarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life “in harmony with society,” as they say.

Obviously the greengrocer is indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan on exhibit …  The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: “I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.” …  if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient; he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?” Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology.

I could continue to quote from Section III of Havel’s paper.  Actually, I’d like to think you will want to read the whole essay.  Havel manages to be both analytical and yet frightening, demonstrating how completely the communists had enveloped Czechoslovakian citizens in a degrading and demeaning system, but almost without their being aware this was the case.  Later, when writing about being a dissident, Havel said, “we never decided to become dissidents.  We have been transformed into them, without quite knowing how, sometimes we have ended up in prison without precisely knowing how.  We simply went ahead and did certain things that we felt we ought to do, and that seemed to us decent to do, nothing more nor less.”  From his perspective, change had to come through ideas, throwing off an ideology, rather than from fighting in the streets.

Havel’s Civic Forum party was central in the revolution that toppled the Communists in 1989, the ‘Velvet Revolution’.  He appointed President once the communists were booted out and was  re-elected in a landslide the following year.  Havel was a change agent.  He played a key role in dismantling the Warsaw Pact, and in enlarging NATO membership.  Some of his decisions were less popular in the Czech Republic than they were overseas, especially his opposition to Slovak independence, and his criticism of the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II.

After a ten-year spell as president, Havel retired from a political role.  However, he continued as a public intellectual, and wrote and spoke on humanitarianism, environmentalism, civil action and democracy.  Among other awards and recognition he was awarded the US Freedom Medal in 1994.  His speech on receiving the medal was titled In Our Postmodern World A Search for Self-Transcendence.  It begins: “There are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born.  It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, arises from the rubble.”  It ends: “Politicians at international forums may reiterate a thousand times that the basis of the new world order must be universal respect for human rights, but it will mean nothing as long as this imperative does not derive from the respect of the miracle of Being, the miracle of the universe, the miracle of nature, the miracle of our own existence.”  It must have been a shock for his American audience. As far as I am concerned, he was one of the great 20^th Century political intellectuals.

Visiting Prague always made me think about the contrast between the Czech Republic and Australia.  In one sense, there is no basis for comparison.  Prague is a demonstration of the amazing history of more than one thousand years that Czechoslovakia has experienced in its varieties of ‘nation’.  Our recorded history is briefer, and far less colourful:  our rich indigenous history is lost.  That’s not the issue, however.  Rather, the comparison is about intellectuals.  As we appear to be failing to address the need to take a major step in our relations with Indigenous Australians, I ask myself, where is our Havel?  Our leaders seem skilled in taking a few steps, not always forward, before slumping back into party politics and blame.  We’re not looking back over a millennium, but we do have nearly 250 years of embarrassing history.  Will we ever have our ‘Prague moment’?

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Here and There – Australia

We are very privileged living in Australia.  Down at the bottom of the world, and a long way from Europe, Africa, America and much of Asia, we might be rather isolated, but we enjoy a lifestyle that must be the envy of most other people.  There is crime, violence and poverty, but in international terms it is relatively low key.  Despite economic challenges in recent years, the standard of living remains high.  It is getting hotter, water is becoming at something of a premium:  most of the country lives on the edges of the subcontinent, and most of the rest is desert, rocky desert.  Nonetheless and in spite these challenges, most Australians enjoy life in a way that is the envy of many others.

How did we earn this privilege?   Sixty years ago, Donald Horne published The Lucky Country.  The wry title came from the opening words of the book’s last chapter:  “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.”  Wry title?   The Lucky Countrybecame a nickname for Australia, and it was mistakenly used favourably as a reference to the country’s natural resources, weather, history, its early dependency of the British system, distance from the problems of the rest of the world, and its supposed prosperity.  However, that wasn’t his intention.  Donald Horne sought to portray Australia’s climb to power and wealth based almost entirely on luck rather than the strength of its political and economic systems, which, like its leaders, he believed were ‘second rate’.

Horne suggested other industrialised nations created wealth through technology and other innovations.  Australia did not.  Rather, its economic prosperity was largely derived from its rich natural resources and continuing  immigration.  Horne commented that Australia “showed less enterprise than almost any other prosperous industrial society.”  In his 1976 follow-up book, Death of the Lucky Country, he clarified what he had meant when he first used the term ‘the lucky country’: “When I invented the phrase in 1964 to describe Australia, I said: ‘Australia is a lucky country run by second rate people who share its luck.’  I didn’t mean that it had a lot of material resources … I had in mind the idea of Australia as a [British] derived society whose prosperity in the great age of manufacturing came from the luck of its historical origins … In the lucky style we have never ‘earned’ our democracy. We simply went along with some British habits.”  He must have continued to have misgivings about choosing that title, given it was so often misunderstood and used as a term of endearment for the country.  Later in his life he commented, “I have had to sit through the most appalling rubbish as successive generations misapplied this phrase”.

The Lucky Country had a subtitle:  Australian in the 1960s.  It’s an unnecessary specificity.  Today, just as back in 1964, the Australian economy remains dominated by mining, farming and tourism.  As aptly summarised a few years ago by Alan Carroll, a business commentator: ‘Australia is a farm, a quarry and a hotel’.  To be ‘lucky’ has proved to be a real disadvantage.   It makes you lazy, incurious, accepting and expecting the riches of a good life.  It makes you complacent.  Criticism is muted, while people get on with pursuing a lifestyle that adds gambling and sport to the other more familiar attributes of a pleasant way of life.  If you live in one of the major cities, then sport tribalism is evident, but seldom aggressive:  follow Carton or Penrith, wear their colours, and enjoy the matches shouting yourself silly.  There is plenty to enjoy.  Lots of sunshine and outdoor activities, and in the evening you can while away the time watching second-rate television!

There is an egalitarian streak running through this.  The land ‘down under’ is a place where “she’ll be right, mate”.  We claim to give everyone a “fair go”.  In that laid back world, it is easy to ignore social problems.  Despite many strengths there are gulfs, especially between city and rural areas and between the bulk of Australia and the north.  There’s poverty.  There are significant numbers of disenfranchised and aimless young people.  And there’s racism.

There are two kinds of racism.  The first kind is the racism typical of immigrant countries like Australia.  This comprises the racist attitudes and behaviour that unsuspecting arrivals face, especially those coming from a new source country.  Seventy or more years ago, it was racism shown towards post-war Greek and Italian migrants, as well as refugees from several other Eastern European countries.  By the 1970s, the new group to suffer from racist slurs, abuse and attacks were the Vietnamese (as well as others from south-east Asia).  Sadly, a lot of that abuse came from the earlier arrivals, as if, having vacated the bottom of the pile, they were in a position to attack new arrivals.  That cycle repeated itself towards the end of the 20^th Century when another batch of new immigrants, the Sudanese and others, arrived.

This form of racism is generally low key, half-joking taunts in the school playground, and muttering in the shops, but seldom violent.  There have been exceptions, and there were some serious incidents a few years ago, partly driven by stupid behaviour by right-wing adherents, and partly driven by the fear arising from falling living standards.  By and large, the ‘fair go’ mentality has prevailed, however, and while attacks on people from different ethnic groups do occasionally flare up, they usually collapse fairly quickly.

I don’t want to exempt or ignore episodes like those.  However, they’re not new.  Throughout history new arrivals to a country have been subjected to the same occasionally vicious and certainly unforgiveable behaviour we’ve seen over the past seventy years in Australia.  I have also seen how, slowly but certainly, those same ‘outsider’ groups are slowly absorbed into the mainstream.  Not through a process of assimilation in Australia, however, but through the acceptance of multiculturalism.  By and large we accept people from different backgrounds as long as they adopt our language, laws and values:  within that framework, we enjoy and often celebrate the other cultural differences that immigrants bring, differences that make our society richer through diversity resting on some key fundamental principles.

The other kind of racism is much deeper, persistent, nastier and divisive.  This is the kind of racism that rests on an (often unspoken) belief that ‘these people’ are fundamentally different from us and can never be full members of our society.  This is the persistent racism we see being expressed against Indigenous Australians.

Henry Reynolds recently summarised the background to the situation we’re in today:

‘After the Second World War racial science and sociology had been totally discredited. Decolonisation was redrawing the world and the fledgling United Nations had launched the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Post war governments returned to what was still seen as the problem of finding the appropriate place for the indigenous minority in white Australia. Assimilation became the central policy platform constructed by Paul Hasluck who was Minister for Territories in the Menzies government from 1951 to 1961. In parliament in June 1950 he declared that ‘we have on our hands a serious but not a frightening problem.’ The Aborigines were a group within but not of the community. They could be ‘and must be managed.’ But Australia’s race relations problem was eased by the big disproportion in numbers between the two races. There was, he declared, ‘no uncertainty about who will swallow whom.’ In a speech he gave to Melbourne’s Wesley Church in 1957 he observed that it was probable that the policy of assimilation would mean that’ after many generations the Aboriginal people will disappear as a separate racial group.’ (from Assimilation re-emerges, Pearls and Irritations, 20 September 2023)

It seems Indigenous Australians are proving hard to swallow.  In a recent address to the National Press Club Jacinta Price resuscitated the seventy-year-old policies of Paul Hasluck, as Paul Kelly explained in a long and fulsome account in The Australian.  Her vision, as Kelly summarised it, was that “Indigenous people must be joined together in the wider nation, that they must not be seen as separate, that the long-run goal must be phasing out of separate indigenous institutions and special policies.”  For Kelly it was a revelation.  Price’s vision of an assimilated nation he declared, “was a unique position, we haven’t seen it before.”  Really?  Yet another illustration of the biased perspective of The Australian.

Well, perhaps it is a perspective we haven’t seen promoted to a marked extent for seventy years. While Kelly sees Jacinta Price as pointing the way forward to an era which would see ‘an end to separatism’ it is actually a plan which would return us to the Australia of the 1950’s, ignoring the important contributions of succeeding generations.  It would be a return to a time which could only be considered if we ignored the past sixty years of evolving global opinion and international law relating to the status of the world’s 500 million indigenous people.  Back in the 1950s Paul Hasluck had a vision of an Australia where ‘the Aboriginal people will disappear as a separate racial group’.  In that vision there was no uncertainty as to who would swallow whom.

Surely assimilation (obliteration?) could only be considered if we ignored the stuttering but nonetheless positive series of changes that have taken place in Australia.  Somewhat late in the day, the Commonwealth Electoral Act was amended in1962 to give all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults the right to vote in federal elections, and within three years the franchise had been extended to cover every one of the states.  Land rights have seen major steps forward, especially with the  High Court’s revolutionary overturning of terra-nullius in the Mabo Case in 1992.  Multiculturalism is the right approach for immigrants arriving over the past 250 years.  Full recognition of the rights of indigenous Australians is the only approach for those who’ve spent 50,000 years inhabiting Australia.

If you don’t live in Australia, it may be hard to realise how deeply entrenched current racist attitudes are towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.  In part this is a function of invisibility.  It is quite easy to live in Melbourne, Sydney or Canberra and almost never see an indigenous person.  You can probably do so in Adelaide, Perth or Brisbane, too, but you’d have to be a little more diligent, as urban Aboriginals are a more numerous group there.

Moving north, there is one curious place, Alice Springs.  It is in ‘the Red Centre’, and close to the McDonnell Ranges and Finke Gorge National Park, and some 200 miles northeast of Uluru.  The town and these places are a major tourist attraction.  For some visitors, this will be their first time to see and talk to Aboriginals.  By and large, it is a well-managed occasion.  There are nice places to stay, even a G’Day Mate Tourist Park!  Shops for local artefacts, and several enjoyable places to eat.  Alice Springs is a cleaned up half-way house between ‘their world’ and ‘ours’.  Partially cleaned up.  A visitor could venture down to the Todd River in the late evening (it’s a dry riverbed much of the year) and see the homeless or drugged locals under the bridges, scenes remarkably similar to those late at night in centre of Sydney.

The other way most Australians will see Indigenous Australians is on television.  There have been many programs and news stories recently, as debate over legislating The Voice has been a hot topic.  It is a curious fact that there are two categories of people we will see.  There are the children, having fun, looking like children everywhere.  Then there are the adults, and unfortunately there seems to be a conspiracy to show us a distinctive ‘type’, comprising overweight men and women, the men with prolific bushy white hair and often hard to understand, the women looking sad and overwhelmed.  Spokespeople are articulate, but images are powerful.  However, they are also misleading.  Aboriginal people are from the tropics, and as variable as the rest of us.  Some look like Dravidians, some like Melanesians, some are light skinned, and many are far from overweight.

We are also treated to shots of townships, with dusty roads, old cars, dogs and dilapidated houses.  Stock images to remind the viewer in Melbourne or Sydney how unlike us are these people from up north.  We’re often treated to a lingering shot showing nothing much happening.  Perhaps we will see inside an old school classroom.  Almost certainly, the camera will pull back to reveal that this small settlement is in the middle of ‘nowhere’, with the arid Australian bush extending to the horizon.  Recently we saw the Prime Minister taking part in some collective meetings on The Voice.  However, even then the broadcast focus was largely concerned with shots of unexplained ceremonies and native dancing.  Almost everything was ‘foreign’ to a Europeanised eye.

I’ve given up on trying to explain my visits to the Northern Territory and the diverse groups I met there.  Culturally different?  Yes.  Suffering from poor diets and infrastructure?  Yes.  Despite these challenges, great people.  Against this, the dominant view is they are ‘not like us’, primitive, backward even, and despite the enthusiasm of some to absorb them into our society (swallow them up), most believe that it isn’t possible.  If we forget about them, won’t they just disappear?  That’s the passive side of deep racism:  highlight the differences and do so with an underlying sense of danger.  A few stories about murders, violence and rape help.

The active side of deep racism is the level of physical beating, high rates of incarceration, and continuing misallocation of resources.  The Aboriginal Affairs portfolio has always had a reasonable level of funding, but much of it goes to staff dealing with indigenous people, (yes, many of whom are Aboriginal).  The Commonwealth officer who took me to visit some communities was informative and helpful, but it was clear the people we visited saw her as being with me, not them.  It must have been an uncomfortable situation.  The same is true for local police, who spend much of their time dealing with robbery, fights, and alcoholism.

The persistent racism shown to Indigenous Australians is shameful.  It convinces many overseas that Australians are fundamentally bigoted, and it’s a perspective that’s hard to counter.  It has led to 250 years of appalling treatment, only lessened by some slow and grudging alleviation.  Sadly, it is reinforced by the images we broadcast of overweight drunks and substance abusers.  It is shameful because it is driven by shame.  In 1788 we turned up at Botany Bay and laid claim to what we chose to see as vacant land for the taking.  Reconciliation is about admitting these shameful acts in the past and addressing ways to give the traditional owners of this land the respect, support and services they need.

Today there’s only one dominating, pressing question.  How much longer are we going to allow racist attitudes and discriminatory policies towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to persist?  Surely we can move forward, and at long last begin to eliminate the image of Australians as unrepentant racists.  It’s time, even if it is very late.