The airbag moment
September 14, 2009
It is Monday morning and you are heading into work, late for an important meeting. Traffic is banked up on the freeway, moving at a snail’s pace, and by the time you hit the city you’re ready to burst. Every muscle in your body is focused on that meeting, five minutes in the future. You are blasting through town like the proverbial maniac. Nothing is going to stop you now.
Until a woman with a baby stroller steps out onto the road in front of you.
You hit the brakes and swerve across the centre line – straight into the path of a bus! Hauling the steering wheel about – it’s too late! You slide to your doom in a chorus of tyres. At the last moment, the bus swerves – CRASH! – you are spinning like a top across the street. You bounce off vehicles, sideswipe the kerb, THUD! The car vaults to forty five degrees before slamming its tyres back on the bitumen.
You’re wedged behind the airbag, staring back up the street. Someone raps on the side window. You burst into tears.
If you’ve experienced a car accident, you’ll know how, in the blink of an eye, your whole sense of being can change. One moment you are homing in on a temporal target – a definite event in the future. The next moment you are alive and that’s the whole story. The shock of the event wakes you up. You find yourself at existential ground zero.
You might call it an airbag moment. Heidegger calls it a moment of vision.
Simple but important things come to mind. You realize that you are someone’s mother, father, sister, brother, husband, wife, daughter, son. You want to call these people and tell them that you love them. You tell yourself that, from now on, you’ll put more effort into these relationships, for they are your most valuable assets in life. And for a brief, all-too-brief moment, you have the sense that all your powers and capacities, all your hopes and dreams and plans and visions, all the possibilities and opportunities and stuff that you take for granted on a daily basis – all of it is a gift. If you’d hit that bus you’d have lost it all and never appreciated the fullness of the gift. But you saw your death coming and lived to tell the tale.
Congratulations! You’ve had a moment of vision.
It happens in an Augenblick, says Heidegger – the blink of an eye. Suddenly, everything has changed. It is not that you are transported out of your concrete situation. On the contrary, you find that you are very much in the situation, but the situation itself has changed. Now it is your situation – the situation of a living individual taking stock of him or herself at a precise moment in life.
Heidegger describes this as an experience of fate. In the moment of vision, we come face to face with the ’simplicity of our fate’.
Beautiful things: a Stoic cure for consumerism
June 30, 2009
The Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius was used to being surrounded by beautiful things. But all too often, the affairs of the Empire would take him away from Rome, to defend the borders against the Goths, the Parthians, or the Persians. For the greater part of his life, Marcus was forced to endure the rigors of the battlefield, where beauty was rare and brutality the order of the day.
To maintain his composure through these years of hardship and toil, Marcus sought to transform his perception of the objects he desired. Rather than think of beautiful things – clothes, jewelry, food, art and architecture – in the manner that they were commonly perceived, he sought to see them as simple material objects and evaluate them accordingly.
In his notebook, Marcus presented this as a simple technique:
‘When we have meat before us and other food, we must say to ourselves: “This is the dead body of a fish, and this is the dead body of a bird or of a pig, and again, this Falernian [wine] is only a little grape juice, and this purple robe some sheep’s wool died with the blood of a shellfish” … so that we see what kinds of things they are. This is how we should act throughout life: where there are things that seem worthy of great estimation, we ought to lay them bare and look at their worthlessness and strip them of all the words by which they are exalted. For the outward show [of things] is a wonderful perverter of reason, and when we are certain the things we are dealing with are worth the trouble, that is when it cheats us most’ (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.13).
Learning how to love
June 24, 2009
I caused some confusion (and a little consternation) at my brother’s wedding when I announced, in a speech before family and friends, that I didn’t know what love is, but I had always been interested in learning. It was supposed to be a Socratic gesture, but it backfired. I had forgotten, of course, that weddings are places where the idea of love is not called into question. Fortunately, no one made sense of what I was talking about and I was duly ignored.
In my defense, I was simply recounting one of my favorite of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas about learning how to love. This comes from The Joyful Wisdom (Die Frohliche Wissenschaft) of 1882. I hope you come to love it as much as I do.
‘One must learn how to love. — This is what happens to us in music: First one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearances and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity. Finally, there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing; and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.
But that is what happens to us not only in music. That is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way; for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned’.
Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom (also trans. The Gay Science), aphorism 334.
Definition of innovation
May 12, 2009
Here’s my proposal for a definition of innovation. Tell me what you think:
An innovation is anything new that is applied in the context of a practical system that changes the system, either [1] expanding what is possible within the system or [2] transforming the system, making what was previously impossible possible.
Watchmen in times of change
March 8, 2009
I’ve been a fan of Watchmen from the early ’90s, when Mark Pollard let me read his sacred twelve. I’ve since then purchased the graphic novel myself, read it several times (it requires several readings), and generally developed a love of the work. I approached Zack Snyder’s Watchmen with mixed feelings. I had heard we were going to get the real Watchmen – not some hosed-down version of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s creation, but the whole beautiful, dark, gritty, brutal, angry, sad animal. I also knew that the movie ran to 160 minutes, so some stuff would have to go. But something inside told me that even a diminished version of Moore’s Watchmen could have a massive impact on the big screen.
I was impressed by the movie. I think that it has lots of flaws, but also some big ideas, and lots to say about how we should understand change.
The Watchmen, for those not in the know, are a loosely-affiliated group of costumed vigilantes who live in an alternative 1985. There is a Cold War backstory — a sort of hyped-up version of the real 1985, shown mainly in shots of Richard Nixon (in this universe in his third term), a poorly made-up Robert Wisden, suffering under a prosthetic nose, sweating while he calculates the fallout should America launch a preemptive strike on the Russkies. I’m not sure if the anxiety and dread of this backstory really permeates the rest of the movie — much of which seems to take place in a relative detachment — though it is obviously supposed to be reflected in the action of the characters, and turns out to be important for the narrative. But we’ll come to Ozymandias his final solution in time.
I’d like to reflect on the characters of this movie in relation to how change figures in the arc of their stories. How are the Watchmen agents of change? How do they understand, anticipate, deal with, and rationalize change?
The idea of the mask, and what wearing costumes and masks can do to people, is a constant theme in the movie. The Watchmen are costumed vigilantes. The conceit of the story is that these (bar one exception) are ordinary people — with excellent training but without any genuine superpowers — who take it upon themselves to wear masks, go out on the street at night and beat up criminals. What kind of person would do this kind of thing? Moore provides us with the psychological profiles. There is the disturbed seeker of vengeance, Walter Kovacs, a.k.a. Rorschach. Rorschach is a cross between Sam Spade and Jason Voorhees. At the end of the movie, we are supposed to see him as a blinkered hero. Eddie Blake is the Comedian. The Comedian was a member of the original costumed vigilante group, The Minutemen. He soon became disillusioned with street work and started doing operations for the government (including acting as second gunman on the grassy knoll). The Comedian is murdered by a mystery assailant at the start of the movie.
Rorschach and the Comedian both use masks to establish secret identities. Rorschach discovers the Comedian’s secret identity soon after his murder. This sets him on the trail if the ‘mask killer’, whom he thinks he must track down and bring to justice — for ‘an attack on one is an attack on all’. Rorschach hates his life without his mask. It is the mask that makes him Rorschach, or enables to become Rorschach. When Roschach is captured by the police and his mask ripped off him, he screams: ‘Give me back my face!’
Moore’s narrative is a masterclass in the deconstruction of the superhero. The Watchmen, for the most part, are driven by weak and selfish motives — anger, resent, lack of self-esteem — or violent ends, which are ignoble even when they’re fueled by the desire for justice, or the desire to change the world.
This brings us to what I think is most interesting feature of the Watchmen movie. To appreciate this, we need to reflect on how Watchmen implicitly resonates with the climate crisis of today. (The following discussion contains what are commonly called ’spoilers’, which means the revelation of important details of the plot of a movie, so those who have not yet seen Watchmen may wish to stop reading now). A lot has been made of how Watchmen recreates (or fails to recreate) the paranoid Cold War atmosphere of 1985. But the Cold War is over. Cinema audiences today no longer experience the mortal dread of nuclear annihilation that MAD left hanging above our heads from the ’50s to the ‘80. Instead, the plot of Watchmen resonates with present day concerns over climate change. Adrian Veight, or Ozymandias, the ’smartest man in the world’, is an environmentalist. He used to be a member of Watchmen. But after the Keene act of ‘77, outlawing masks, he made a huge profit from exploiting his ex-superhero status. He is now a billionaire environmentalist, determined to free the world of its dependence on oil and coal through the production (with Dr Manhattan, a nuclear physicist transformed into a buff, glowing, blue man at an accident at the Gila Heights research facility in the 1950s) of clean energy reactors based on Manhattan’s superpowers. It turns out that Ozymandias is preparing to frame Dr Manhattan for the blitzkreig annihilation the great cities of the world, killing millions of people. The double twist is that his ideals are noble ones. Ozymandias, who models himself upon Alexander the Great, aims to unite the world to save it from impending nuclear war. He does this by convincing the world that it’s being attacked by the wrathful, God-like presence of a rogue Dr Manhattan. At the end of the movie, we are left to assume that Ozymandias’ massive act of murder has succeeded in uniting the world in peace. Some critics find the ending ’saccharine’ — as if the world would take the bait? — but as the Comedian would say, this is all part of the joke.
It is interesting to reflect on Ozymandias as a psychological type of our times. I think Ozymandias is a provocative and thought provoking figure. I imagine that a number of people may leave this movie thinking: ‘Isn’t that what we really need today? Perhaps Ozymandias is right: perhaps we need to find a way of forcibly convincing the world that massive social, cultural, political, and infrastructural changes are necessary?’ These are unsettling questions. But they are basic ethical questions for our time. I wouldn’t condone Ozymandias’ actions. But I’m not entirely sure I’d want to condemn them. Ozymandias is, after all, saving the world. Doesn’t that make him a hero? What do you think?
My personal feeling is that the moral weight has to lie with the negative case. A utilitarian response to the climate crisis, exterminating millions for the sake of saving the world, is morally untenable. If Watchmen makes it appear tenable, this is on account of the svelte charisma of Matthew Goode, who portrays Ozymandias. We must remember that fascism has many faces. Adrian Veight is as much a fascist as Rorschach or the Comedian. This, I think, is one of the most subtle and interesting points that Watchmen makes — and perhaps the movie makes it even better than the novel. It provides us with a new face to be afraid of. The friendly face of fascism.
If Ozymandias represents more than just a figure from an alternative 1985, but a genuinely disturbing figure for our times, then Watchmen may turn out to be more than just another Hollywood feature. It may be that rarest of things — a genuinely provocative, intelligent blockbuster.
Innovate to change the frame
February 19, 2009
Making any genuine change in life calls for innovation. Sure, you can throw yourself into the cut and thrust of changing circumstance, see what happens. But the play of events can only change you so much. There comes a point where you have to take an active role — re-imagining life and acting to redefine it. That’s a moment of personal innovation.
At the same time, innovation implies change. The great innovators are powerful agents of change — they aspire to change the world. Even if one only intends to transform the order of practice in a restricted domain, the same rule applies. Innovation is an aspirational pursuit. The will to innovation says: ‘Aspire to change the frame’.
I’m developing a perspective on innovation as an aspirational pursuit. By ‘aspirational’, I mean that innovation can be more than just a tool of entrepreneurship but a dynamic catalyst for personal empowerment and elevation. The following theses indicate the direction that the ideas are taking. These theses aren’t intended to describe every act of innovation. They are provocative ideals intended as spurs to thought.
Thesis #1: The logic of innovation is: change the part to change the whole. Innovate to change the frame.
Innovation bears upon a specific aspect of the whole. But it should aspire to transform the whole as such. The initial thing is to develop a conception of the whole that you intend to transform. Perhaps this is the set of styles, approaches and techniques employed in your creative discipline. Perhaps it is a restricted set of techniques comprising a creative method. Perhaps it is a commercial market, or the order of practice in a institution or a business unit. It could be a traffic system, a military strategy, or a political culture. Whatever the whole, an aspirational innovation should seek to transform the frame of reference on this context completely. Innovate to change the frame.
Thesis #2: Identify what’s empowering about transforming the whole.
Challenging the order of things is hard. Our thinking is couched within habits and rituals that stifle creative thought. Innovation requires you to break out of all that. It is usually necessary to prepare yourself first.
Think about how the innovation stands to empower you. How might it boost your spirit, kindle new energies, heighten your capacities to act and exist? How might it open up new time-lines and existential possibilities, freeing space on the horizon and reinvigorating life? You’ll need to be fired up and hungry for change to take that soaring leap of imagination beyond the limits of convention. Innovation shouldn’t only transform the whole — it should transform you in the process.
From this I get a third aspirational thesis:
Thesis #3: Innovate to transform your life as a whole.
Commit your person to the process of innovation. Step into the fires of creation — emerge renewed. Innovators shouldn’t lack for ambition.