I’d like to explore two interrelated themes.
First theme. One of the “1066 and all that” historical
factoids from my childhood was that King Canute commanded the tide to about
turn. As presented to us in school the intended
message was about hubris, about the folly of the arrogance and stupidity that
accompanies absolute power. Later on I learned that the situation was
completely otherwise, and it was actually the king making a bit of a song and
dance about admitting his powerlessness against God and nature, showing off his
humility to his courtiers. Not such a juicy story of regal silliness after all.
Oh, and another thing about him. Back in the day, his name
was spelled Canute, which was more obvious to pronounce and less
typographically risky than the later preferred spelling.
Which leads us directly to the present day and first of all
to Nicholas Nassim Taleb, author of such popular works as “The Black Swan”
(2007) and “Antifragile” (2012), both highly pertinent to the present crisis.
Our current black swan is not so much the coronavirus itself – we’ve had pandemic
viruses before - but the almost unbelievable effects it has had on the entire
planet, the deaths, the suffering, the destruction of livelihoods and of
economies. I wonder, did anyone foresee the ramifications, the scale?
The most powerful man in the world, Donald J. Trump, some
time ago declared that the US will be over the worst by Easter. I really hoped
he was right, I really did, and at the most optimistic estimate he might just
be, although the situation in parts of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and
other states strongly suggests otherwise. Thus entirely voluntarily he invited
his own Canute moment. He has since claimed that his comments were “aspirational”,
that a false victory would be worse than no victory at all, and that it’s going
to take rather longer. Perhaps, at last, he has realised that he is danger of
being revealed as an emperor without clothes, no more powerful than the rest of
us. Not good in an election year.
Second theme. Trends in recent times have been towards what
Taleb calls fragility. A couple of instances. (1) Orthographically, Canute
becomes Cnut – not important in itself, but symptomatic of a tendency; errors
become less forgiving, more dangerous. (2) The massive (and some would say
massively ugly) Forth rail bridge, built in 1890, continues – as it were - to
go forth, while the slimline road bridge next door, built in 1964, has had its
day. A startling physical representation of the issue; progress of a kind, but
the result is that with the newer construction less is needed to go wrong
before disaster or decay overtakes. Cleverer engineering; more style, less
substance; added vulnerability. Take your choice.
OK, some drastic over-simplification with some random
examples, but the common theme boils down to more or less the same thing -
unwise parsimony as summarised by the expression “don’t put all your eggs in
one basket”. In less colloquial language, in “Antifragile”, Taleb says “We have been fragilizing the economy,
our health, political life, education, almost everything … by suppressing
randomness and volatility”. So another angle on antifragility is that,
while there is often a single most efficient way of doing something, to
deny variety is to damage one’s survivability if things turn hostile. We adore
efficiency, especially when it equates to profit. We plump for what seems the
best option. Natural, but not entirely wise.
The trend is towards unwise slimming down, towards false
economies, to corner cutting, to a loss of the robustness that comes with spare
capacity, built-in redundancy, and adequate fail-safe mechanisms.
There’s a trend also towards guaranteed obsolescence and
waste. When I was growing up, if something broke, you (or your dad) mended it,
after a fashion, and you could continue using it. Some small thingummyjig could
be purchased from the local shop and inserted. Today, when something breaks, when
– perhaps because it’s sealed in a plastic module and its workings are as
incomprehensible as they are invisible - it cannot be repaired, it is
completely and irretrievably broken, the whole thing, totally knackered, even
if it’s just one tiny component that has failed – as, perhaps, it was designed
to. So, it all gets thrown away - ultimately, we have learned, in many cases, providing
something for marine creatures to get their teeth into. Then we buy a
replacement, and so it goes on, same old mistake.
Until one day when a replacement can’t be had for love nor
money.
As the coronavirus crisis worsens everywhere, here in the UK
the demand for ventilators and other life-saving equipment highlights the folly
of making ourselves so vulnerable. Not, perhaps, that this particular
requirement could realistically have been anticipated on this scale, and it’s
probably unfair to pick on this, but more generally. Spreading things too thin.
For strategically crucial items – not just in healthcare but in all aspects of
our lives – there should never be a single source, a single supply chain, a
single technology that permits of no alternatives or easy work-arounds. If any
of these sources and systems fail, for whatever reason – disease, economic
collapse, political hostility, criminality, warfare – the results can be
catastrophic. Crudely, one thing buggers up everything else, the much derided
domino effect. We should have learned that by now, the hard way. I hope so.
When we eventually recover from this terrible predicament we
must reconfigure our economy and our industries to encourage greater
self-sufficiency, to enhance robustness, and - to use Taleb’s word - to
increase anti-fragility. Or, to use more familiar words, to be guided by safety
and common sense. We must avoid dependency upon a single supplier, whether of
raw materials, intermediate components, or finished products.
The same proviso of robustness goes for all kinds of
infrastructures and technologies, including those contributing to our
intellectual, social and cultural lives. Never believe that the internet or
some of its principal applications couldn’t have their black swan moment, their
own version of the coronavirus.
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