Curatorial Talent

Last month I went to see Lygia Pape in SoHo at Hauser&Wirth. The whole exhibition consisted of but two installations, a video and a handful of drawings. It was refreshing. The headline work, Ttéia 1C, stood out in our minds stark and unobstructed. Indeed, my friend remarked, it is a remarkable curatorial talent to be so intelligently selective. To know what to leave aside.

Our acting instructor said it another way: if you try to do too much, the audience will get sea sick. If there is too much going on, people won't know where to look. They will feel overwhelmed. Improvisation theatre is to make choices. Be decisive. Do one thing. Be consistent.

Consistency is another key aspect of improvisation. On stage you must be consistent otherwise your fellow actors will have no idea how to interact with you, there will be too much happening and audiences will get sea sick. Note - consistency not predictability. You need not be rigid, only clear. Steady rather than chaotic, even as you change. Call it a personal brand.

Design too provides ready examples.

Simplicity is clarity. Clarity - the intelligence to distinguish signal from noise. Urgent from trivial. Relevant from inconsequential. It requires a certain neatness of understanding and an imperative economy of thought.

This is hard.

I for instance have poor curatorial skills. My mind is like the contents of a miscellaneous drawer. Only this morning I wanted simultaneously to write about: relativism and the grounds for making moral claims; originality and opinion as an organising principle; focus and the creative process; intrinsic motivation; enacting change in a bureaucratic society; Tolstoy, war and freedom - how settled societies are also more regimented ones; Kurt Vonnegut on why happiness is to want the inevitable; Sartre's No Exit and people as mirrors; and finally of role models and Renaissance Men based on a book by Studs Terkel I finished last month. What an incongruous mess.

Simplicity. Clarity. Consistency. A personal brand.

Yet choosing is hard. Doing so rapidly and decisively - harder still. This is because the choice between what to keep and what to leave aside is an act of definition. According to Oxford Dictionaries, the word comes from the Latin definire which means to limit, determine, explain. It is a fusion of de- (expressing completion) and finire (expressing boundary or end). To define is to cut an identity out of the indeterminate fabric of existence. To choose is to bring into being.

Herein lies the difficulty. Any time you decide what book to read, what job to take, what event to attend, what friendship to pursue, what hobby to practice - at the expense of every other - any time you choose what to keep and what to leave aside, some doors will get closed forever. This is terrifying because who to be is just another way of asking where can I belong since people don't just want to be, in a vacuum. If nobody goes to see Lygia Pape, who cares? There will be other exhibitions. You, on the other hand, only get to live once.

Then again, perhaps choice is an illusion, and we should all grow to fill the space allotted to us by nature, nurture, culture and sheer chance. You are who you are. You choose a book from the few that happen to come your way. You take the job you get. You belong simply where you happen to be.

Freedom is a blessing and a curse.

Listening Is A Willingness To Be Changed

Every so often I will hear someone say something that substantially changes my perspective. The other day, our improv instructor explained that the chief requirement in improv is to listen. People, he would say, always try to appear interesting - but you cannot make yourself interesting. However, you can make yourself interested. And if you are interested then you are interesting. To be interested, though, you must listen.

Later, he said this: listening is a willingness to be changed.

I think herein lies something crucial. We are fond of our identities. We are not willing to allow just any odd person to change us in just any odd way. An article in the Harvard Business Review lists among reasons people resist change: fear of losing control, a resentment of the person suggesting the change, a simple bias in favour of habit. Unsurprisingly, we learn more from people we like. We are generally defensive about our beliefs when offering a new perspective often carries the implication that the old one (the one we are currently holding) is in some way deficient. Perhaps we may also fear a domino effect: that changing our minds in one regard will force us to change our minds in another. Then, before we know it, we might become someone else.

However, conversations can and often do change us. If we listen properly, we may learn, perhaps in quite a striking way, something about another person's perspective. We may experience what it would be like to 'climb into [their] skin and walk around in it' (as Atticus Finch tells Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird). We may, in consequence, become more sympathetic to their values and less suspicious of their beliefs. Their motives may come to seem less alien, less, selfish, less perplexing. In short, by listening, we may become - if only in a small way - a little more like them.

That is terrifying. Why would anyone want to become - even in a small way - more like someone unpleasant, weird or beneath contempt? Humans everywhere, liberals as well as conservatives, have a certain instinct for purity. This may have evolved as the urgent reflex to recoil from contaminants, but a similar drive may be observed in our moral behaviour. If listening to someone detestable can make you more sympathetic to them, perhaps this is because you have already allowed their values and their worldview to "infect" you. A later endorsement would merely come as the natural symptom of such a contamination. The process need not always be negative: when we like someone, we may just the same hope that, by talking to them and spending time with them, we too can become a little better. In a way, this is one of the principle fantasies of love: that by getting close to this person, we may be lifted and refined into a better version of ourselves.

Listening really is a willingness to be changed.

This year has been a highly polarising time in politics. Many people lament the breakdown of communication, the isolating effects of social echo chambers. We all, it would seem, wish everyone listened more to everyone else. However, listening is a willingness to be changed. Perhaps then, the problem has more to do with an exaggerated attachment to our own identities, to our values as they currently stand. Listening is easier to preach than to practice:

In the end, however, societies are only possible among people who have agreed to have certain things in common. That is: to be, in some fundamental ways, a little bit like each other.

In Praise of Popular Philosophy: Great Thinkers

Why would anyone not read Great Thinkers, the encyclopedia from School of Life which curates and summarises for busy working people famous philosophical ideas still urgent and relevant to modern life? It has high production values (just holding the volume and turning its pages is a treat), each entry is no more than a few pages long (making it an ideal coffee companion) and its contents are compelling, insightful, practical and consoling.

One reason, I would propose, is a certain rigid aversion many thinking people seem to reserve for anything popular or easy. 'Popular science' and 'popular philosophy' have a peculiarly derogatory ring, implying such content might be suitable for children or the masses, but surely no self-respecting intellectual. I'm thinking for example of this 2013 review in The Guardian for a series of books on philosophy by School of Life (the closest I could find to an actual review of Great Thinkers), in which the writer deemed it necessary to maintain throughout the entire evaluation a tone of unrelieved, if benevolent and sympathetic, condescendence. Smart people don't require summaries or simplifications, clear prose or - if such an absurdity even bears consideration - pictures in their books. Most of us, it seems, hate nothing with as much bitterness and knee-jerk outrage as we hate being patronised. This article in The Independent has Alain de Botton reporting that "Simon Blackburn (...) sells lots of copies, but he has to be careful not to reveal how many to his colleagues at Cambridge because it's seen as not quite acceptable." This is very intriguing.

However, I do not think one should dismiss this attitude as simply snobbish, elitist, incomprehensible or fuelled by status anxiety. It must signal some legitimate concerns. For instance, oversimplification. To take an example from history, saying that the Second World War was "caused" by Hitler is to dismiss the wider historical, cultural and socio-economic causes of that war in favour of a jauntier if probably misleading Bad Guy narrative. Reality is never that simple. "In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events" Tolstoy would argue. Another valid concern might be dilettantism. People who think they understand things even when they do so only superficially can do more harm than those who recognise their own ignorance and agree to defer to experts. "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter" quipped Winston Churchill, an observation which must sound accurate and bitter-sweet to anyone in the aftermath of an election - regardless of side. Finally, there is the concern over actual deception. How can you really trust that what you are being taught is valid, comprehensive, balanced, accurate, sensible and free from ulterior motives without yourself becoming an expert in each field? This is the wider issue of trust (in experts or authority), a singularly modern malady. Since God has died and Science is becoming increasingly specialised and inaccessible, what can be the rational basis for accepting anyone's point of view, ever? These and many others are valid and entirely sensible concerns.

Computer science is intimately familiar with a version of this problem, which it calls ranking. Google's PageRank famously proposed a ranking system based on counting the number and quality of references for each site (the problem of calculating relevance or how well a set of sites matches a user's query, is closely related but separate). Everyone is all too familiar with the failings of technology on these issues, from the ills of click-baiting to those of social echo chambers.

With all this in mind then what can be said in defence of reading something like Great Thinkers?

In a recent entry on how to get the news when there is far too much of it, I was arguing that what helps with choosing between 75 types of salad dressing helps here too. Brands exist to advertise consistency and to help people choose and find their way back to helpful and high-quality products reliably. School of Life is a brand as is its founder, Alain de Botton. Getting to know the brand a little, you can generally guess what are its blindspots and agenda. So you might conclude that the good people of School of Life are neither stupid or evil, cynical or deceptive, but in fact genuinely convinced by and invested in their brand's mission statement.

Here is George Orwell: "Today, for example, one can imagine a good book being written by a Catholic, a Communist, a Fascist, a pacifist, an anarchist, perhaps by an old-style Liberal or an ordinary Conservative: one cannot imagine a good book being written by a spiritualist, a Buchmanite or a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The views that a writer holds must be compatible with sanity, in the medical sense, and with the power of continuous thought: beyond that what we ask of him [her, they] is talent, which is probably another name for conviction". Great Thinkers is sane, logical and honest. Add to that the beautiful and fluid prose, the genuinely interesting content and (let us not forget) the pictures (:O) and you have a book worth reading.

How To Get The News

To learn about the world beyond their direct experience, even cave dwellers would have had to sift relevant facts from self-interest, gossip, speculation and delusion. Yet modernity did manage to invent its very own challenge - volume.

Relevance used to be a simple function of proximity (‘The farther it is from Kansas City the less it is news’). Stories were about individuals nearby, politics, war and celebrity gossip featuring the upper classes. Yet for people in a globalised world there is no ‘nearby’ - politics halfway around the planet might cost them their jobs. This world is also far more complicated. Numbers, to take just one example, which are relied on heavily in any modern society, can bewilder and deceive without appropriate context; ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’ quipped Mark Twain. Nowadays news serves not only to inform, but to make the world intelligible. It is more abstract, more reliant on data and expertise and more concerned with context, explanations, trends and making predictions. Storytelling about the individual is now the ‘anecdotal lead’ and journalists, too, have had to specialise (‘Senior Conceptual Art Correspondent’ would not have been funny a century ago). Many act themselves as commentators (think ‘we turn to our business editor to see why’). In 1985 the Pulitzer board awarded its first prize for explanatory work. Meanwhile, critics worry that news has a tendency to turn audiences into consumers and citizens into spectators, cynically feeding people the brain equivalent of deep fried Mars bars: power, fame, scandals, accidents, disaster, sex. And since advertisers moved online, where news sources are two a penny and stories bounce around in social echo chambers, a certain visibility system has replaced the old authority system. How is the news you care about to be fished out?

One idea is to get to know the brands - what helps to decide between 75 types of salad dressing helps here too. Anyone operating in the public space will have a brand and brands, by definition, advertise consistency: it is no likelier to read about the release of Overwatch in The Economist than to find praise for Hillary Clinton in Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. Being consistent, brands can act as handy abstractions over large chunks of ongoing reality. You need discover which brands are best for which information. A well curated Twitter feed of niche, trusted brands may serve better than a single news source of general interest - the larger the audience needing to be satisfied, the less room left for nuance and specific concerns.

Another strategy is learning to spot what Alain de Botton calls ‘archetypes’. The world does not change at the pace of headlines. In reality, there are relatively few primary ideas, like colours, that news stories circulate. Some archetypes might be that all establishment politicians are corrupt or at any rate incompetent, that in a bureaucracy nothing ever changes, that work and romantic love alone can lead to happiness, that everyone is free to achieve anything, that human life is precarious (most stories of accidents, disasters, terrorism and disease fall under this last headline), that nevertheless science and technology are gleefully employed in bringing about the end of history. Or you may discover your own. The point is only to notice that there are far fewer narratives than there are individual news stories. This reduces cognitive overload. Asked to memorise a chessboard in seconds, grandmasters consistently recall the board better than novices because, rather than individual pieces, they notice their commonly occurring configurations.

A third idea is to use persistence, rather than proximity, as an indicator of relevance. If something keeps coming up it might be worth investigating. Anyone ignorant of Brexit, Syria or the US election has more interesting concerns than a lack of skill in keeping up. Important stories linger. The most important move from newspapers into history books, true to the notion that news is a rough draft of history.

Yet in a world of ubiquitous information what may matter most is the ability to make people care. It can be hard to regret tragedies that befall people you never knew existed or engage, without a narrative, the dry facts of modern economics. Human psychology still requires art and storytelling to file away the deluge of information about the world beyond. Longform and other types of realist news can lay the ground for better news absorption, as can books, comedy and other people. If prisons and retirement plans sound dull, try first to learn about them from comedian John Oliver. If foreign lands bewilder, make an immigrant friend. Facebook feeds not only filter news, but filter the ability to care. Heed the cave dweller within and get the news, at least sometimes, by talking to someone you wouldn’t normally talk to.

Lygia Pape: Ttéia 1C

A brief but vivid encounter with a physical sense of wonder at Hauser&Wirth London.

It is a dark, still, windowless gallery. High ceiling. Concrete floor. The only sounds: steps, shuffles, an undulating hum of ocean waves from a video installation in the adjoining room, murmurs, the thumping throb of traffic outside. The only light: white recessed downlights casting faint shafts of cold white at various angles. In the middle, ten square feet, a dark gray platform: a sort of stage whence spring or whereto land, in neat square bundles, the silver threads of Ttéia 1C. They could be sunrays piercing through a handful of abandoned vents in the roof of a derelict silo, or holes in the deck of a disused submarine. The whole space feels subterranean, mysterious, sequestered, yet peaceful - like a lost world. The light shifts softly from one vantage point to another, at a single stroke revealing and concealing, and at every moment transforming what is seen.

It is a peculiar but intensely satisfying illusion. The still silver threads are at once solid, firm, tangible - and ethereal. They appear and disappear against the unreflecting darkness. The visual deception is stark and satisfying, manifest yet unspoiled by the clarity of deception.

It is a peculiar way of experiencing, feelingly, how something can be two things at once. It rather reminded me of Simon Blackburn discussing sentences in everyday language which, unlike those of formal logic, do not carry a clear, binary truth-value. In Anton Chekhov's Lady with Lapdog, he points out, Anna Sergeyevna tells her husband that her regular visits to Moscow are to see a doctor about an internal complaint - "and her husband believed her, and did not believe her". How many a thought exhibit this duality. And here is Lygia Pape's Ttéia 1C giving a physical reality to this odd, illogical, quantum way of being.

Besides this, there is also a sense of wonder at the strangeness of what is usually perceived as boring everyday physical reality. A glimpse at the uncanny absurdity of the world, but also its exciting versatility. The physical reality of cities is normally very plain, familiar, normal and boring: dull the entrance gates to the Underground, dull the seats on the train, dull the cars and the buses, dull the uniform buildings, dull the people, dull the shops. No encounter with the sublime on a daily commute into central London. Yet here is wonder: simple, unassuming, still. A very honest trick, no less effective for its honesty. I was very glad.

How To Have Better Conversations

First, be more attractive. Second, earn more money. Third, accrue more power and/or fame. Whatever the strategy, try always to convince others that you hold the higher-status position in every interaction. Then, naturally, they will listen. Fail and you'll find yourself browsing self-help titles in a bookshop at the other end of town. Or reading this blog post in incognito browsing mode, placing all your hope in the effectiveness of strategy number four: be more philosophical.

Here is how.

Step one. Remember that fear is the quintessential human emotion. As Hermann Hesse might put it, fear looms large over the life of man. Everyone is afraid, paranoid or anxious more or less always. There are two broad categories of fear. First, there is the fear of sheer bad luck - plane crashes, house fires, cancer, old age. It stems from our awareness of the Universe's majestic indifference to human affairs and our susceptibility to accidents, disasters, illness and the melancholy passing of time. Second, there is the fear of people. This is at heart the point of Halloween, a festival celebrating our deepest darkest fears: that everybody else is a monster and that at any point they are liable to turn up at our doors, unannounced, demanding things under the threat of repercussions. Worse still, we need the little gremlins because we have evolved to require affection, love, validation and esteem.

Step two. Realise that the knee-jerk reaction to fear is control. Every superhero story ever is at its core a form of power porn. It is our number one fantasy: that we control our environment, that we exercise agency and self-determination, and that those we love behave how we expect them to. We have evolved a whole sleuth of psychological tricks that enable us to exercise control upon one another: shame, infatuation, intimidation and so on. There are two broad categories of control. First, there is control by seduction. By attempting to seduce people, we inadvertently attempt to control them: to make them be nice to us, stick around, offer us their time, attention, energy and genes. If this person is infatuated with me, the logic goes, then I have some measure of control over them; and if I can control them, then they can't hurt me. This also applies to lesser degrees of seduction, such as when we merely attempt to make ourselves liked or popular. Second, there is control by status play. This is where status anxiety comes in. Earn more money, accrue more power, gain more fame and, the logic goes, people will do what you want them to. They will offer you love, affection, validation and esteem, or leave you alone, or listen to you without interruption. That is the high-status strategy, though it is worth noticing that a low-status strategy can be just as valid: if we look frail, insecure or poor we may obtain the desired outcome by signaling that we are happy to concede the high-status position, or that we are happy to receive love, attention etc as a form of patronage, or are not worth troubling with and ought to be left alone. High-status people might be better respected, but low-status people are better liked. The point is only to notice in what ways we try to control people: do we try to seduce them, intimidate them, appease them?

(One method of control that I think is worth noticing, chiefly because it is so subtle yet so pervasive, is the tendency not to listen to people, or to listen to them but not take their words at face value. In doing this, we essentially substitute our own image and interpretation (read: prejudice) for the actual human before us. Instead of believing them when they say they didn't want that job or that promotion, we imagine they're lying to us or to themselves in order to avoid admitting failure. Instead of treating them like individuals, with their infinitely unknowable otherness, with a rich and deep experience of existence, we reduce them to single dimensions: their job, their social status, their accent, their family and friends, their relationship, their hobbies, their political leanings, whether they're a cat or dog person, whether or not they read the same books or favour the same ideas. Everybody does this. Very rarely, if ever, do we try to imagine ourselves walking around in their skin or feel curious about their real needs, truest values or most defining experiences. This is probably only natural, since that level of empathy costs time and energy which we simply don't have enough of. Yet we could do better. At present, it seems to me the only person whom we offer this level of empathy to is a lover  -and even then for a limited period only. This I think is why most people seem to have lost faith in "just" friendships achieving anything like a meaningful connection. This is a pity. It both puts too much pressure on that single romantic relationship and deprives us of a certain richness of experience that can only come from empathising with a diverse number of people. But back to the main point.)

Step three. Become self-aware. Now that you know how fear looms large over the life of man and that the knee-jerk reaction to it is control, pay attention to yourself in every interaction. Breathe. Relax your shoulders, let your shoulder blade carry them (it is what they are for). Bend your knees slightly to remove pressure off the knee caps. Balance your head on your shoulders. Breathe again. Be aware of your body language: are you signaling high-status (body stretched into the surrounding space, neck and torso exposed, steady eye contact) or low-status (constant jerking of head and shoulders, asking for permission, apologising for no reason, making self-deprecating remarks) or a combination of both. Are you trying to seduce or intimidate? How does this person scare you? Are you secure in your own sense of self? Do you feel certain of your own values? Is imagining yourself through their eyes causing you to cringe or feel proud? Do you consider the "lense" through which they view you or the world superior or inferior to your own? And breathe. Again breathe. Always breathe. It's the only thing which will stay with you forever.

Step four. Become aware of others. How are they breathing? What is their body language signaling? Are they trying to seduce you or intimidate you? What are they likely to be afraid of? What are they actually saying? Are you listening to them and believing them or substituting your own interpretations for what is being said? What do they look like? How do they see themselves? What do you suppose they do first thing in the morning? How do they make you feel? Above all, be curious. You will be surprised how effective that is. Some of the most appalling words and behaviours can be deflected if met with curiosity - why do you suppose they are checking their phone while you're in the middle of making a sensitive point? what could they be afraid of? what might they be concerned about?

And now, for the fifth and final step, the secret ingredient to having better conversations. Ready?

Step five. Stop trying to control them. This might sound simple but in fact requires an astonishing level of intellectual and emotional maturity. To make it easier, imagine you're God: you want everyone to love you and worship you and maybe not have any other Gods besides you, but you must accept the existence of free will. Imagine you could force them into a sense of love, loyalty and awe (you are after all God), yet at the same time realise that unless they are offered willingly, these offerings would be pretty meaningless. You don't just want these people to love you, you want them to choose to love you. Otherwise, it doesn't count. Right there is the necessity for a certain level of intellectual and emotional maturity. You must bow before others' right to their own agency. No matter how firmly you believe it would increase their own happiness and bring about their own utmost good, no matter how painful to watch them mistakenly ignore you and single-mindedly pursue their own destruction, in the ideal world the only person you should ever desire to control is yourself. Not your loved ones, not your enemies, not your children. Think of it like the free-will defense to the problem of Evil, but with the nice upshot that it isn't a fallacy on account of how you are not, in fact, omniscient/omnipotent. Now, of course this is a fantasy - we will always try to control one another, that is just what members of a social species do. Yet it is a useful notion to bare in mind.

How does this lead to better conversations? Well, I think the ultimate goal of disinterested conversation (when we are not pursuing other ends) is to feel - if only briefly - connected. It is to be seen, really seen - heard, really heard - understood, really understood - and accepted. It is to escape the narrow confines of your own person.  It is to feel the thrill of another free intellect focus its own independent mind upon your separate and inevitably lonesome existence and relieve some of that loneliness, even if just a little. It is to have your own sense of self confirmed and your particular experience of existence recognised. It is to feel together. Yes, it takes two to tango, but someone has to make the first step.