A gentler way

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  • A wise government

    A new PM. A new cabinet. Who are these people? The BBC helpfully informs us, with a brief sketch of each key individual.

    Take Kwasi Kwarteng, for instance. The BBC’s Lora Jones tells us he is not lacking in “intellectual firepower”, has a “double first from Cambridge University and a PhD in economic history” and, in the same gushing paragraph, is a “past winner of notoriously tough BBC quiz show University Challenge”. Notoriously tough? It’s hardly deep.

    When I was younger, I might have been impressed by this description. I’d have thought: here’s a well-educated and clever individual, the sort we want running the country. But experience has shown – albeit I was typically slow on the uptake – that there is no reason to suspect someone who is ‘well-educated’ in our culture to have sounder judgement or more wisdom than someone who is not. What our education system does do is make people more skillful at arguing a point-of-view, be it reasonable or perverse.

    If we simply filled the cabinet with twelve adults selected randomly from the street, would the resulting government make worse decisions? As for expertise: our leaders might not know much about their respective briefs, but that wouldn’t be a change. As for wisdom: it seems to me that it would make no difference whether or not someone has finished school and attended university, because our education system does not teach it.

    In Religion for Atheists, Alain de Botton describes the failure of education to help us navigate our way through life. He set up his School of Life to address the failure, but is battling against centuries of practice. Not even that charismatic social reformer, Charles Dickens, who railed against the education system’s obsession with “facts” in books such as Hard Times, apparently achieved much of a breakthrough.

    A wise education might address questions such as:

    • what is the purpose of your life?
    • how does fear of death affect our behaviour?
    • why do I feel the need to acquire lots of stuff?
    • how can we live in harmony with nature, and each other?
    • why do I repeat the same mistakes?
    • do you act in ways that make you and others happy?
    • do we inherit the Earth from our parents, or borrow it from our children?

    Even without conclusive answers, it might help us learn about ourselves and how to survive and enjoy life.

    A common rebuttal is that children need to learn basic skills first. What skills? Numeracy and literacy are most often cited. Yet the majority of us adults are pretty innumerate, unable to estimate quantities without resorting to a computer, and easily swayed by numbers taken out of context in the media. The teaching of this “basic skill” largely fails, a failure that undermines the pre-eminence it is given. Even if it were more successful, are we any happier than the Munduruku, an indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon that have no words for numbers bigger than five? I love maths, which is usually misrepresented as arithmetic, but cannot see any compelling logic for the latter’s preferred status.

    Isn’t wisdom “basic”? Isn’t it more important to have a government that leads us wisely, than one which might perform well on a quiz show?

  • Freeze-preventing freeze

    As Liz Truss takes charge, and presumably introduces a freeze or revised cap on energy prices, in order to protect millions of people who would otherwise be unable to keep warm this winter, numerous questions arise. How will her scheme work? How will it be paid for and by whom? How will energy suppliers be protected from a wave of bankruptcy that far outstrips what we saw a year ago? Will future generations be left with an even greater debt burden than they already have to shoulder? Will the government attempt to recover some of the high profits of upstream producers and power generators? Will consumers who have recently signed up to new contracts be reimbursed – and if so, how? How will back-to-back contracts and hedges be treated: there is scope here for any reimbursement going to the wrong recipient. Any reimbursement would surely have to be after the fact as future consumption levels are unknown, so will there be cashflow issues? How will tenants be treated?

    It all feels potentially very messy. A better approach would be handouts to consumers. Apart from being simpler, the handout approach wouldn’t mess with prices, which help us wake up to the value of energy. And any revised cap level is arbitrary.

    Based on indications so far, it seems the Truss government will not be rushing to encourage people to use less energy. Its apparent reticence matches the national mood. The EU might be talking openly about a 15% reduction in consumption, but in the UK the idea is anathema. Here, we become indignant if anyone suggests – as is occasionally reported – that we have “short showers” or turn off “unnecessary lights” (education failure: a few lights are not really the issue, compared to heating and hot water, fridges and freezers, cooking, video streaming, let alone private transport …).

    In fairness, it’s patronizing to tell the less well-off to cut back consumption. Cutting back consumption should be done by pretty much everyone, regardless of wealth, with exceptions for the physically vulnerable.

    Our sense of entitlement to energy is, alas, so strong that even nature’s warnings of recent years go largely unheeded.