Omnes Generationes

The rather pretentious title is Latin for “all generations”. It is a quote from the prayer of Mary in Luke’s gospel known as the Magnificat, a prayer that inspired much music over the years. And Omnes Generationes is the title and the entire text of my favourite movement of perhaps my favourite piece of music of all, Bach’s Magnificat.

And last week I was blessed with the chance of singing that movement again and again, in a fantastic choir with a great director, and then to perform it in Princeton along with another wonderful piece, the Requiem of Herbert Howells. Each time I am part of the Westminster Choir College summer choral festival I come away in awe and refreshed, somehow feeling like I have gate-crashed a really cool party.

Bach’s writing is always brilliant but also always meaningful in a religious sense. In this movement he is, as usual, glorifying the wonder of God and His endurance across all human generations. The movement is an exciting cacophony of choir and instrument parts running up and down in harmony, anchored by a phrase of four repeated notes that call out from within the texture.

Bach makes two separate points about God’s endurance. First, the repeated notes appear in different voice parts, but always on the keynote or important note of the scale, like a fanfare. Here he is announcing God’s endurance across the generations. After having established this, he then writes the repeating notes progressing up a scale, so each voice part is part of a mounting story. His message here is one of progress. Under God’s guidance, each subsequent generation can rise to greater heights than the one before. Musically, it is as exhilarating a piece as any I know.

So JS Bach is making precisely the same point as Steven Pinker. In Bach’s case it is inspired by God, and in his thoughts overseen by God. In Pinker’s case God only gets in the way. But both see the progression of humanity and glory in it.

Where better for me to better understand this optimism that at Princeton at the Choral Festival? For me the enduring memory of the week is the wonder of the emerging generations. In a choir of 60, there are usually only about four of us over 40 and the median age might be 28. And these folk are simply impressive.

I try to compare them to my peers at the same age and I see progress before my eyes. They are generally at ease in their own skin, they relate very easily with each other, but are respectful and curious. Increasingly they are proud individuals, pursuing their own tastes and passions without being overly concerned with what others may be thinking. And they are usually happy. This cohort is not representative; it is a rather privileged elite observed at an ideal time. But I can see similar features in all the groups of young people I find, and my comparator group is a privileged elite from an earlier generation.

One little exercise this year was to see if I could spot differences even within the short period of four years since I first visited the festival. I had to be careful, because often I was just noticing things that were always there but obscure to me before I had more familiarity of the group.

I think I see an improvement in musicianship even within four years. More of them are more natural musicians and conductors. Concepts that took a while to embed before now seem to be accepted immediately.

For sure, I see more originality. Each festival, we are asked to introduce ourselves via a short anecdote. I often fail to pick these up owing to my less than perfect hearing. But this year the stories I did hear well were remarkable for the variety of passions within the group, and the willingness of everyone to follow their own passion without heed of any societal expectation. This generation is specialising like none before it. You can even see it in how they dress – remember it was just 20 years ago that anyone not wearing identikit jeans was considered weird.

Linked to the originality, I see even more sexual freedom. There was always plenty of variety within the group; what is new is its growing openness and acceptance. On a less positive note, I observed an increase in obesity.

While it is hard and may be unreliable to look for change over four years, a longer timescale shows undeniable progress. Take the field of choral music.

Perhaps fifty years ago, there was little quality choral singing outside English cathedrals and Oxbridge colleges. The people leading the sound in these places had either inherited positions, or were posh kids who could sing. Usually they could not really conduct or teach. Kings Cambridge became a bit of an exception. But recordings were few and far between, and few took the trouble to develop practices or learn. It was a posh boys club.

In the USA and elsewhere, slowly people started travelling and realising there were different ways of doing things. In the USA, one man, Robert Shaw, brought discipline and practice to choir singing. He gathered a few disciples, but many of these lacked his talent or were poor conductors or coaches, so things developed, but slowly. Still, a qualification to conduct a choir was usually an ability to sing or conduct an orchestra or research music, none of which are particularly relevant.

At the same time, there was the explosion in communication and in research. We learned how Bach’s choirs and instruments might have sounded. It was instructive in Princeton; we were played a recording of Bach from the 1980’s that would be unimaginably staid today, even from a community choir. It was by Leonard Bernstein, so the problem was not raw talent but knowledge and choral practice.

Only in the last twenty years has the exploration of musical styles flourished, together with the development of professionally run courses, all spread by extensive communication. Students can record themselves now, on audio and video, and learn from thousands of examples from many countries. As a result, quality has exploded. I would go so far as to say that generally the most inspiring choir directors I work with nowadays are the younger ones; immediate training has overtaken experience in value.

This must be typical of many specialist fields, and it shows progress in action and accelerating. I can only be excited by how brilliant the students of the people I was at Princeton will become.

Yet progress can accelerate still further. Looking around me at Princeton, it was obvious how. As an arts specialism and one requiring some training at high school, white kids with rich parents dominated the Princeton choir, plus a few Asians. The faculty were all white and taught rather rigid methods in a similar style. Imagine if accessibility to education would develop so that in 20 years time the class would reflect society more evenly? Imagine the opportunity to create new styles by fusion with existing methods. We have moved beyond the posh kids of Oxbridge, but we haven’t reached full potential yet, far from it.

I will make one prediction though. No matter how fast progress accelerates, no matter what wonderful new compositions become available to us, Omnes Generationes will remain peerless. There will only ever be one Johann Sebastian Bach.     

Driving in the USA

Last week I visited Princeton for the summer music course I usually attend, a marvelous week once again. Princeton is about two hours away, though very dependent on traffic, so I find it too far to commute but not so far to justify spending the entire week away from the family. So typically I stay over alternate nights, which results in me driving one direction each day.

Even so, this becomes the week with most time I spend driving my car. It wears me out somewhat; especially hacking through Manhattan and in lines approaching bridges and tunnels. And each year, I reflect on the millions of people for whom this is a daily experience through their working lives. I am so lucky that this has never applied to me – one of life’s blessings that is easy to overlook.

When not distracted by a few mechanical issues and near misses, my driving thoughts this year were mainly about car insurance. We are with GEICO, initially chosen as a result of awareness from their huge TV advertising budget. To be fair, their ads are pretty witty.

I’ve started to learn a bit more about how car insurance is priced in the US. GEICO initially charged us quite a bit, but the fees went down quickly after we built up a clean US driving record. But then our kids turned 17, and we had to decide whether to include them, even though they hardly drive. We include the child who will continue to reside here, hoping that he will eventually benefit from his own clean record. But putting an 18-year-old boy onto the policy, even as an occasional driver, more than doubled the premium.

So I shopped about a bit, including online firms. That was interesting. Initially I just submitted for an e-quote for my wife and me, and it came out at about half of Geico’s equivalent quote. Then I included the 18-year-old, and that multiplied the quote by six, so substantially more than Geico.

So I tried to make sense of all of this. Car insurance didn’t vary so wildly in price when I was younger. What has happened is the power of the market, with more competition and better information. Algorithms have taken over.

Car insurance in the US is certainly a competitive market, just judging by the number of firms with TV advertising budgets and offering discounts. But it is also something of a special market, because it appears that all firms seem to have access to similar basic information. It is uncanny how much Esurance knew about me and my car and my driving habits, even before I had given them any information. It seems that this information is pooled.

So the companies try to gain competitive advantage by employing smarter algorithms, attracting customers whose likely cost in payouts would be less than their income from premiums. And, as we can surmise, the claim likelihood from an 18-year-old boy is a massive multiple of that from a 50’s couple. Indeed, factor in age, gender, type of car, address, annual mileage and driver history and you can model very different risk scenarios and price accordingly.

At first glance, this is great, because a competitive market is doing its job and offering the correct incentives and rewards. But the outcomes can be crippling for those who can least afford it, like so much in the US. Imagine if our 18-year-old was in the South Bronx, and maybe had some criminal convictions and poor credit, and perhaps drove something less staid than a Volvo, and then had a smash?

Well, we don’t have to imagine, we can already see what happens. Note that insurance is a big part of the cost of driving in the US. Leases and gasoline are cheaper than Europe, but insurance has to cover higher legal and medical risks. Those mega-payouts earned by those other TV-hogs Cellino and Barnes have to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is our insurance premiums.  

So I had often wondered why there were so many Pennsylvania and Florida registered cars on New York roads. I had thought it might be something about sales tax, but now I think it is insurance. These people are telling their insurance company that they are based somewhere with lower premiums. Of course, the ruse will be very vulnerable if they have a major claim in New York and their insurer starts to research their driving history.

Next, our kid in the South Bronx decides to dispense with insurance. Who can blame him really? He probably needs to drive to be employable, yet insurance alone would cost most of his income. Of course, then he has a smash, and he is really screwed, perhaps for life.

The Economist, alert as ever, researched exactly this story in Detroit and other poor towns in Michigan. Because the local legislature added in even more potential medical liabilities, car insurance there has become progressively less affordable; so most people drive without, making it even more unaffordable for the rest. Like city rents and employment penalties, it becomes one more catch 22 for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and one more part of the cycle of doom for their cities.

So markets and algorithms have done their job, but the consequences are not all good. It can work the same with things like medical insurance, and indeed many seemingly unrelated fields like recruitment profiling.

What about solutions? Well, we can’t go back to a world with worse information. So the only immediate solution comes through taxes and benefits. It is hard to defend politically, but if we really want to create a level playing field of opportunity, these kids and these towns need to be given some extra help.

In the US, it would also help if accident chasers and medical firms did not succeed so often in their lobbying, and medical and compensation bills became more reasonable as a result. We can whistle in the wind for that one. 

In the medium term, this problem will get worse, because information will become ever more available. It won’t be long before the Florida registered brigade will be foiled by sensors in cars, whereby insurers will know their habits, and price them, even before there are claims.

But, at least for car insurance, there is potentially a happy ending. In twenty years time, we won’t need cars at all, but can glide about in ubiquitous autonomous vehicles. No doubt lobbyists will find a way to favour corporations over kids from the South Bronx in this area too, but we can at least expect the playing field to become a bit more level than it is now.

If the course will still accept my application, I expect to visit Princeton again next summer and expect to drive once again, and to become even more familiar with the bottlenecks of the belt parkway or Lincoln tunnel approach. Credit where it is due, this year the situation around some bottlenecks had been improved. Probably my car insurance bill will be little changed in a year’s time. But some of those musicians are younger than I am, so must have hefty bills to pay. Perhaps they have wealthy parents, or mysterious second homes in unlikely states.

Love Pinker

I have just finished reading Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker. I recommend it highly. 

It is a long book and not always an easy read, but made worth it by its optimistic tone and quality of reasoning. Pinker is a scientist, and one of his main points is to argue based on data and logic, so we should not be surprised that sometimes the data itself can feel overwhelming, almost too much. Yet the data is so positive that we can read through those chapters quickly and feel the waterfall of data without getting bogged down in detail. The harder chapters are those at the end where he tries to argue about root causes and policy, and here the text can seem lugubrious.

The overall thesis of the book is that the enlightenment values of reason, science and humanity have made humanity vastly richer and happier over the last two hundred years, and continue to do so at an accelerating rate, despite what we read and feel based on daily headlines and setbacks. In several wonderful chapters, he runs of graph after graph of positive outcomes, globally and regionally, for each cohort and gender, for any universally good indicator you could think of, from healthy life expectancy to material wealth and happiness.

One of the takeaways is never to trust claims of a crisis ever again, at least not without great evidence. By putting many so-called crises into a broader context, Pinker shows that most are just small blips along a path of progress, and indicate readily solvable problems. An obesity crisis can hardly survive reference to the malnourishment that blighted the planet only a generation or two ago. A teenage mental health crisis is really just a product of rapid change, better measurement, higher expectations and exaggeration.

Pinker gives credence to a few crises. One is the environmental challenge, which he accepts as real but solvable, were politics not to continually get in the way of logical approaches. Another is nuclear war, where he does not accept the dominant logic that the cold war was “won” with nuclear weapons nor that such weapons have any place in global society. Authoritarianism and nativism are real enough challenges, but most likely they will fizzle out from their own inconsistencies and lack of defensible logic.

Rather than trying to review the whole book, I’ll try to focus on a few other takeaways that gave me pause for thought.

Pinker has no time at all for organised religion. I have often mused over whether religion has been a net benefit for humanity, based on its community values perhaps outweighing its human failings and blockage of progress. Pinker thinks the values would have shone through anyway, perhaps more quickly, because fundamental forces of evolution and sympathy and reason support them. The best that can be said for religion is that sometimes it can be vehicle for good. But that is hardly a defence against the large tally of destruction, superstition and tribalism engendered. I buy Pinker’s argument. I’ll continue to go to church for its peace and community and the way in brings out a better me, but I’ll be even more cynical than before about much of the doctrine and be alive to less flawed ways to secure the gains.

Another takeaway is about the risks of belittling science. Pinker writes with passion about what he calls second culture people, arrogant snobs really, and recounts some history starting with CP Snow with which I had only a passing familiarity. Pinker has obviously suffered from this sort of thing himself, and maybe overplays its significance, but I recognise his point. Some erudite artists see themselves as possessing deeper culture and meaning than poorly dressed scientists, and hence can try to relegate science to a nerdy sideshow. Often this attitude comes from envy, or fear of something they don’t understand, or trying to protect their privileged life.

I am prone to this, perhaps in a different way. I read the Economist and love deep, human movies and niche music, and can look down on people who watch cartoons and visit shopping malls. OK, perhaps these folk are less likely to drive major scientific breakthroughs, but they are not inferior, just different. And, especially since they are in the majority, who am I to say they are wrong?

Another takeaway is about democracy. Pinker feels we tend to expect too much too quickly from democracy. He acknowledges that elections can be random and corrupt, and that many people will vote in a direction that all logic would argue against. But he demonstrates that slow progress happens despite this, and that in any case democracy usually succeeds in its basic purpose of avoiding chaos while offering a bias towards liberty and creativity, and hence progress. Strong, centralised, alternatives might feel tempting, especially when leaders use scientific approaches (such as in China today), and at least strong authority is usually less destructive than anarchy and chaos, but in the end most such regimes become corrupt and they stifle progress long before that point. This links with another bête-noire, Nietzsche. Pinker sees him as something of a root for fascism and tribalism – with one group claiming superiority over others.

Pinker writes extensively about the many biases that humans suffer from, often a sort of by-product or bug with evolution. It is bias, and journalism, that makes us believe that everything is getting worse and that crises are everywhere. One bias that piqued my interest was the danger of weakening logic once an issue has been politicised. We might think we are objective, but we tend to give positions of our own team something of a free pass.

So while Pinker has nothing positive to say about Trump or the current Republican positions, he was also pretty scathing of the left. I tried to take extra note of these criticisms. It started with deriding knee-jerk positions against capitalism and markets, pointing out that these have been a key driving force behind progress, progress that has eradicated diseases and dragged billions out of poverty. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. He also pointed out historical sympathy for Russia, Cuba and Venezuela. More prosaically, he pointed out that the arguments for gun control have less support in data than many of us assume. I resolve to challenge my own positions more strongly in future, against the benchmarks of science or available data.

There are many other takeaways. Pinker often tries to distinguish progress between cycles and cohorts, and generally concludes that successive cohorts tend to be more progress-friendly, and to maintain these positions as they age. I found this perhaps the most optimistic conclusion of all. It suggests that the laggards of my own generation truly might be a dying breed, and that the marvellous young people I’ll spend the next week with, during my annual Princeton choir festival, really will drive another acceleration of progress.

When I thought about that, I allowed myself to ponder what accelerated progress might look like. One example might be in mental health, based on a deeper understanding of the brain. Another might be economics, a discipline that feels as though it ought to be almost solvable by experience and data and if politics can be minimised. I believe that economic things we argue about today, such as measures for economic progress, optimal taxation and monetary policies and behavioural incentives, could all seem solved twenty years from now. And wouldn’t that lead to a still better world?

So, Steven Pinker, thank you for a marvellous, attitude-changing, uplifting read. You have helped me already and will help me more, each time the president makes an utterance or a crisis appears to be looming. Enlightenment now is great medicine: I recommend a dose for everyone.