Professor Singer's Drowning Child

In the movie Examined Life the philosopher Peter Singer gets to rehash that parable of the drowning child. Here's how it goes. You're walking through a public park and you see a small girl drowning in a shallow pool. You could save the girl easily enough, but you're going to ruin your shoes. What do you do? Well, gee whiz, I bet you said you'd save the little girl. Singer then points out that there are children dying every day who could be saved for the price of a pair of shoes – so why aren't you giving? Feel a little guilty now?

He really should have worked on Madison Avenue. Because as a philosophical story, this one is awful. So you get a feel for just how manipulative the example is, here are some other ways of looking at it.

There's no need to ruin your shoes. Just kick them off. A woman in high heels would do so without even thinking about it. Doesn't take three seconds. So where's the dilemma? You have to force it: it's not genuine.

How is a child drowning in the six inches of water usually found in a public fountain? Kids are really good at getting out of places they don't want to be if they have the slightest chance, and they make enough noise protesting. So who took all the little girl's chances away? Did she fall and hit her head? What did she fall on and might you do the same, with worse consequences since you weigh more and are falling from a greater height? Maybe she's so heavy she can't move herself, and you might not be able to either. Maybe someone's holding her down, and you've got a fight on your hands. Or maybe someone dumped her there, drugged, and is watching to make sure she dies, and you still have a fight on your hands.

Aid is the same. It's not enough to toss bags of rice out of an aircraft. You have to make sure the rice isn't appropriated by warlords or sold to buy gee-gaws or hoarded by the Big Men. You have to make sure that the money you gave is matched by the country's government, or they may just buy a nice trip abroad with the money they would have spent on rice but now don't need to because you bought the rice instead. See why my suggestion that the little girl was being held down isn't so silly?

When you rescue that little girl, she's not going to die of famine, civil war, disease, ethnic cleansing or drought next year. She's going to go on to live a good life, albeit with ups, downs and the odd traffic conviction. The little girl you save today through your charitable donation has much longer odds against surviving past, oh, next year. Which is why newspapers love stories about the one girl in the village who made it to Oxford University and don't tell you about the five others who died before they reached sixteen.

I know you think Professor Singer is “just saying we should think of others and we should give more”. No. He's really not. Read his books. He says you should give ten percent of your post-tax income to charity. Not because he's about good works, but because he's about playing on your middle-class liberal guilt with specious arguments to build a reputation.

The way you know he's not about the good works is that he doesn't insist that you should make sure you don't waste your donation. He doesn't say, anywhere, that you should examine the aims and activities of the charity, its organisation, track record and expertise, and give if you think it will be successful. I say, if you don't do this, you are being irresponsible, because you may be giving money to an organisation which will achieve nothing with it, when you could be giving to one that will make your money matter.

Names for Relationships

On hearing the phrase “friends with benefits” recently, my sister snorted something about silly pretentious phrases. Why can't they say “boyfriend”, she asked. I thought the phrase was a tad silly until I discovered that there is an episode of Sex and the City actually called “The Fuck Buddy”, which is a phrase I had only heard once before used by an ex-girlfriend to describe a relationship in her life at the time. I didn't like it then and I think it's an ugly phrase, but it describes something real.

The name from an earlier time were all linked to an overwhelming assumption of marriage as the only legitimate means of (hetero-)sexual relations. An “affair” was a long-running sexual relationship between two people at least one of whom was married. If neither party was married, it might be a “casual fling” if marriage was not on either parties' mind. If at least one party was married, and the relationship was casual, she was his “bit on the side” if he was married, and vice versa if she was. A boyfriend was just that: a boy-friend. If there was sex involved, they were lovers. She was a girlfriend in either case, because a mistress was in it for the money as much as the sex. A mistress knew he wasn't going to leave his wife, just as a male lover knew she wasn't going to leave her husband. Marriage was the context and the reference point.

Well, that ain't so now. People still get married, but much later and often after they have had children. An “ex” is the divorced or separated mother of your children. If there are no children, she's not an “ex”, but a former wife or old girlfriend. Before she was an “ex”, she was a wife or a partner or in certain contexts, “the mother of my children”. Before that she was your fiancee, and before that, your girlfriend. “Significant other” is an affectation, like calling women "the distaff side".

What's new are words to describe relationships that involve sex but not the assumption that you will start along the route to marriage or children. If you're having sex and living together, you're partners. When you're having sex, going to the movies, not living together and not intending to get married or move in, that's when you need “boy / girl friend”. If you both accept that you're still looking for Mr/s Right while in the relationship, that's “friends with benefits” unless you are both grown-ups, when you can call it “an affair”. Do not talk about “girlf's” and “boyf's” unless you are as cute as Susie Bubble. And if you're having sex regularly, but only sex, and then getting back to your lives? In the old days that was called “having an arrangement” and personally I think that phrase is preferable to “fuck buddies”. The phrases “fuck buddy” and “friend with benefits” both, to me, speak to a certain shallowness, and even callowness. Which is probably what my sister was really objecting to.

Normal People - Again

For reasons too complicated to explain, I found myself over the weekend needing a serious definition of the phrase “normal people”. The flip definition is that a normal person is anyone who protests that there is no such thing as a normal person: genuine misfits, weirdos, addicts and head-cases know damn well that they aren't like everyone else and that normal people exist, even if they are defined negatively. As not having substance- or activity-abuse issues or a DSM IV-strength Personality Disorder – a group of people colloquially known as “screw-ups”. That's the strong sense of normal. The underlying claim is that you simply can't have much in common as regards background, upbringing, specific developmental abuses and personal attitudes with screw-ups without turning into one yourself. There are very few shades of grey between being a screw-up and normal.

There's a slightly weaker sense of the phrase, as it used in such as examples as “Windows 7 boots fast enough for normal people” or “normal people don't read postgraduate mathematics textbooks as culture”. Normal people, in this sense, are not at either end of the Bell curve: neither dumb beyond belief, nor smart enough to actually use LISP in daily problem-solving life. Normal people can do anything that clever or dedicated non-normal people can do, but just not as well. Doing anything really well – from cultivating a garden to chess - requires an amount of dedication, application and practice that is incompatable with a couple of pints with the gang after work, playing with the kids when you get home, paying attention to your partner when (s)he talks about, well, anything that isn't on your agenda, putting in time at the local church, visting friends and family and of course wasting hours watching reality TV (which is what normal people really do with their lives). Channeling Ambrose Bierce for a moment, in this sense, a normal person is a mediocrity whose motives elude you.

Then there's a judgemental sense of the phrase, as in “normal people don't do X”. Normal people don't blow themselves up on a crowded bus, they don't suddenly shout out a word-salad in the middle of supper, nor do they get fall-over drunk on the second date. They don't have mood swings, collect train numbers and they always notice when their lady partner has had a haircut. A “normal person” wouldn't do or say something you've just done or said that the person you're with wishes you hadn't. We can dismiss this sense of the phrase as nothing more than a fancy insult.

The converse compliment to that insult is as in “gee, (insert name of famous person here) was just like a normal person”. As in having no airs, false graces, attitude, extravagent demands, stand-offishness or distance. They said hello and goodbye and helped you carry your shopping to the car because they could see you were struggling.

For me, normal people live in the world but don't feel it under their skin. They can tune it out, let it in one ear and out of the other, and have most things pass them over like water off a duck's back. Occasionally something will rankle with them for longer than they know is healthy, but not often and not for much longer. As a result of this temperament, normal people generally have enough skills to do their job, but don't acquire any more for the sake of it. They don't stick at exercise regimes past three months (except Marathons – running Marathons is very normal as long as you take longer than three-and-a-half hours to do it), they can't play a musical instrument with facility and don't have maths, science or philosophy degrees. Barristers are not normal, nor are musicians, soldiers and athletes. To adapt the only phrase of Tolstoy's that everyone knows: all normal people are normal in the same way, non-normal people are each non-normal in an unique way.

Sonera, Helsinki and London

This is Helsinki Cathederal, taken, I think on a June evening in 2002. Back then I was working for Sonera, the Finnish telephone company responsible for international traffic (Helsinki and many other parts of Finland have their own phone companies). Every now and then, I would be deputed to attend the monthly meeting of all the subsidiaries: London, Stockholm, Frankfurt and New York. We would meet during the day and the Finns would use it as an excuse to go drinking in the evening. Being tee-total, I would head down to the excellent Nevski restaurant by the harbour for supper. That far north, it doesn't really get dark in June, though the quality of the light changes. In the afternoon, it's a regular summer day, but by 22:30 hours it feels like three o'clock on a sunny November afternoon. My inner clock and calander was seriously confused by the whole experience.

Sonera was at the time embroiled in a series of financial and management scandels and the Finnish government sold it to Telia, the Swedish telephone company. In the summer of 2003, Telia closed the overseas subsidiaries – despite being offered over £2m for the business – and made us all redundant. Our sorrow in London was mitigated by the fact that our CEO, Cliff Derbyshire, had put very generous reduandancy settlements into our contracts. So a quick shout to Shaza Rahhal, Peter Davidson, Jessica Henley and Paul Woolley, who were the team in the London office. Cliff retired, Shaza went to work for Telia, Paul Woolley went to work for his local police as a CSI, Peter went on to run a local business for BT and Jessica went chasing City boys. It was a terrific team.

Revisiting A Home

At the end of October I went back to the house where I was a child. I don't remember the very first place I lived in: I'm told it was a cottage in Yorkshire. My parents moved from God's Own County to Bexleyheath, Kent, on the south-east edges of the London sprawl, sometime in the mid 1950's. This is the house, 5 Hyde Road, with that steep roof. My bedroom was the dowstairs room on the left, until may parents swapped my sister and I over, and I had the upstairs room with a little door to the under-roof attic space.

I did the walk from Bexleyheath station to Hyde Road without thinking. What I hadn't remembered was how short it is compared to the marathon walks I've had to stations since. Every street name seemed to have a ready-made slot in my memory. I realised that I haven't bothered to remember street names since I left Bexleyheath. I get around by landmarks, habit and some kind of internal map, not by knowing that Acacia Grove leads to Black Street and thus to White Crescent, which is what I used to know.

In the Nineties, the difference between have and have-not High Streets became more marked: Kingston, Richmond, Guildford and their ilk get Waitrose and Bang & Olufson, while Hounslow, Bexleyheath and their ilk get Aldi, Western Union and T K Maxx. And those High Streets make Dalston and other such places in east London look like third-world parades.

Maybe it was just too long ago, but I didn't feel any emotions. Boys between the ages of five and eleven pretty much live in the present and their emotions are transient. The scars get left by the cruelties of adolesence. What struck me was how small it was, and how cosy it seemed even if it is a farily uniform post-war suburban development.

While I was taking photographs, one of the three young lads messing around on their bikes – just as I used to – asked me if I was photgraphing for the internet. If I was, I said, I'd be a van with a whirling camera on top. I told them I used to live in that house. One of them told me that his mother lived in three houses: one on Hyde Road, two in other places I didn't understand. I have no idea what you say to that.

One-to-Ones and Conversations

My preferred conversational mode is the informal discussion, that just starts up around a subject and then stops because someone's phone rings or you have to get back to work. I can handle conversation round a supper table if I know the people, but if I don't, I tend to let the practiced talkers do their thing. At the other end are meetings at work, where I only speak if called on, and then keep it short. In between is anything arranged, from “let's have a chat and a pizza” to a one-to-one with a manager. These invariably turn into me listening and the other person talking, and when I do say something, it just launches the other person off again about half-way into my first sentence.

When I was a young lad, people used to say that the important thing was to be “a good listener”. You sat there, seemingly entranced, while the other person went on about... anything. Well, maybe that works if you're the young Marcel Proust and the other person is whoever the original for the Duchesse de Guermantes was. Since I'm not and neither are you, “being a good listener” is not a good deal. Why not? Because it turns me into a nodding donkey and a lot of the time I zone out. After all, I don't need to hear what the other person is saying if they don't need me to say anything substantial in reply.

If it's work, I have to listen, because I need to catch the subtext. Or not so sub-text-y, sometimes. I mean, if your manager says things like “If I didn't want you, I could get rid of you” and “I've been impressed by what I've seen” and “I need you to do ….”, how much interpretation does that need? I've lost count of the number of times he's used phrases like “engage with the stakeholders” and hasn't used phrases like “the sooner we start using the forecasting facilities of SAS, the better”. He needs me to do good work so he can “re-position me and help me get to where I want to go”. Except I told him where I wanted to go and he told me why that was the wrong answer. If he had just said “I need you to do this and in return I will sort out that”, he would have come across as honest. Now he's just come across as insincere. In a one to one, the manager tells you what he needs you to hear and you tell him what he wants to hear. Only a psychopath would think that's a good setup.

A large number of philosophers and psychologists will state without so much as a reservation that we gain a sense of our identity, indeed, that we become aware of our identity, through our interactions with other people. Well, that just ain't so. Almost all dealings of people with each other are instrumental, and since that includes the surgeon who saved your daughter's life, “instrumental” ain't always bad. Almost everyone either doesn't need to interact with us at all or is looking for someone to fit into their plans and fantasies. All you learn from them is that you're so not what they hoped you would be.

I suggest we get most of our positive sense of identity, and certainly I get all of mine, from our interaction with culture: from reading, listening to music, looking at art. (Those are produced by other people, but I'm not interacting with Ed Ruscha or Igor Shaferavitch, I'm interacting with their work.) There are a small number of people with whom I can have a meaningful conversation from time to time, and a slightly larger number of people with whom I can gossip, talk about movies, bullshit about the state of the world and who is and isn't fanciable. That passes the time of day, but it doesn't fill my world.

Bad Transport

The A316 is one of two major westerly arterial roads from London: it turns into the M3. It is surrounded by rabbit warren suburbs where cars are parked both sides of the road and buses can barely pass. If there's an accident on the A316 and they close the road, that's it. You're taking four lanes of heavy fast-moving traffic east- and west- bound and dumping it on two-lane side roads bristling with right turns, traffic lights, mini-roundabouts, traffic-calming and bus lanes. Ain't gonna move. Which it didn't this evening. I left Richmond at six o'clock, saw that the A316 wasn't moving and tried every back street I knew. All of them. Jammed. It took seventy minutes to make a journey that takes ten minutes when the road is clear. I thought I was going to run out of petrol. It was the kind of journey that reminded me of why people arrive home and pour themselves a stiff drink.

The traffic was made worse, and I was only driving in the first place, by the fact that the trains on the Reading and Windsor lines through Richmond aren't getting any further than the western edge of Hounslow Heath. A one-hundred year-old tunnel to take the River Crane under the railway had its foundations washed away by the recent heavy rain. No trains may safely pass. I've been driving to within walking distance of Richmond and catching the trains or tubes. It adds twenty minutes to the commute either way. If I took the emergency buses, it would add forty-five minutes. Which you really want, to be stuck on an emergency bus, stinking of desiel fumes, crawling through school-run SUV hell, at 07:45 in the morning. That would make my day. I'm glad this week is over.