I dunno' nothin' about nothin'

There's a good article in today's Observer newspaper by Tim Adams about our anxiety over the current world financial crisis and society's ability to successfully assess risks. A passage towards the end of the article concerning a book called Expert Political Judgement by Philip Tetlock struck me as particularly interesting:

Tetlock's book is based on two decades of research into 284 people who made their living "commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends". He asked them simply to do what they apparently did best: predict what would happen in the world next in answer to specific questions. Would oil prices rise or fall, would there be a boom or a bust, would we go to war? And so on. When the study concluded, in 2003, Tetlock's experts had made 82,361 forecasts and the results were correlated with the facts as they had turned out.

The experts were less accurate in their forecasts than a control group of chimpanzees choosing entirely randomly would have been. Even specialists in particular narrow fields were not significantly more successful than reasonably informed laymen.

This neatly encapsulates a growing suspicion of mine that takes stronger hold as I grow older: that those in authority, politicians, managers, consultants, movie studio executives, advertisers, teachers, clerics, parents are as clueless as you and I, that the entire human race doesn't have real idea of what is going on, that we as a species are blagging it, making it up as we go along, grateful to blindly follow anyone who has the arrogance to stand up and say that they have figured it out and equally grateful to use them as scapegoats when it inevitably turns out that they have not.

As Stanley Kubrick once said, “If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.” If we believe that there is somebody out there who claims to understand what's going on then it provides false reassurance that the world in which we live is predictable, stable, safe and not a big bloody maelstrom of chaos. If somebody claims to understand how it all works then it absolves us from the responsibility of trying to understand how it all works.

This tendency makes us naive and easy to exploit. I'm as guilty of this as anyone. I am woefully bad at managing money and yet even an economical dunce like me can see the folly of the government trying to persuade the people to spend their way out of an economical crisis caused by public overspending. Does Gordon Brown really think that people whose credit supplies are rapidly disappearing and leaving them with huge debts in a time of dwindling confidence in job security are going to spend more money on unessential crap?

Even an economical dunce like me can grasp the notion that giving multi-billion pound bailouts to the people whose irresponsible lending fuelled the public's overspending is going to keep money flowing. Are the banks going to use that bailout cash to keep lending or are they going to hang on to it to cover the own arses until this crisis blows over? Gee, Gordo, whaddya' think?

Who is ultimately to blame for this crisis? Irresponsible lenders? Irresponsible consumers? Irresponsible advertisers? Irresponsible media? All of the above? Everybody complicit in creating a culture of superficial aspiration, consumerism and unfounded self-entitlement? Hasn't anyone read Madame Bovary?

There's another all too human trait for you right there: we never fucking learn.

People Like Chris Langham

I'm deeply saddened by the case against Chris Langham and its outcome. I have been a fan of this talented actor, comedian and writer for many years. His was a face than would often crop up in comedy shows and his deadpan demeanour stole many a scene from under the noses of the stars of those shows. He was brilliant in People Like Us (as the incompetent off-screen interviewer Roy Mallard), Help (with Paul Whitehouse) and, most recently, The Thick Of It.

Although acquitted of sexual abuse charges he was found guilty of making indecent images of of children being sexually abused. The argument that he bought and downloaded these images for "research" is disingenuous as is the notion that only looking at such images doesn't hurt anyone. If you purchase images of children being raped then you are complicit in the act by virtue of rewarding the abuser's efforts and providing the demand for such material. The purchasing of such images is illegal and Langham was well aware of that; having been found guilty he deserves to be punished.

Despite this, I won't be joining the "let the pervert rot in prison forever" brigade. In situations like this it is all too easy to succumb to simplistic knee-jerk moral indignation. I don't believe Langham to be bad person, a monster who gets his kicks from watching child porn but rather a man with long standing mental problems and a history of substance abuse who needs help.

Langham claims to have been abused as a child and an experience like that stays with you forever. You may eventually learn to cope with it and lead a "normal" life or it may overwhelm you entirely and drive you to insanity or suicide; or you may become obsessed with trying to understand how anybody could do such an horrific thing. That desire to understand may be what led Langham to buy those images of child abuse, to try and get inside the head of his abuser, to confront the memory and work out why it happened to him.

While this may explain his actions it does not excuse them. He crossed a line that he knew he should not have crossed and he will have to face the consequences. I only hope that he is given the help he needs and not simply left to rot.

Having said all that, I wonder at my ability to disassociate the art from the artist. Despite empathising with Langham, will I ever be able to watch People Like Us or those early episodes of The Thick Of It again without feeling slightly queasy? It's sad to think that all his great work will now be tarnished in the eyes of many by what he has done.