How Broken is the USA?

The USA can be an exasperating place, but also an exhilarating one. We hear all the time of systems being broken and of gridlocked politics, yet somehow New York can work rather well. Further, people still want to come to live here. There is an immigration problem because people want to immigrate. Russia and China don’t have immigration problems.

But it is still possible that things are broken, perhaps beyond repair. A great company can be doomed a generation before it actually goes bankrupt, and smart analysis can reveal how. A great brand and strong legacy can mask problems for a long time. The same can be true of countries.

The USA certainly has a wonderful legacy, and some enduring strengths. The land is vast and fertile and blessed with natural resources, yet under-populated and located with natural defences. Its people are largely immigrants, people who have chosen to come and displayed the drive to follow their dream, hence energetic and optimistic. The time of colonization enabled a first class constitutional and justice system. Good choices were made in long-past wars, leaving a legacy of influence and wealth. Many of these advantages will endure.

But look a bit more closely, and much of the key structure of society really is broken, and that portends ill for the future, especially because few of the broken elements appear easily fixed.

Start with health and welfare. The USA remains the only advanced country where basic health care is not a right. Virtually the only thing that the Obama administration was able to enact was a partial fix for this, but even that is being unwound. Healthcare costs the economy double what it does in key competitors, yet outcomes are worse. Life expectancy has lagged other nations for many years and is now actually declining. The recent UN happiness report partly attributed the poor ranking of the USA to three related epidemics, of obesity, opioids and depression, yet almost no public policy effort attempts to counteract these. Incentives remain skewed – a visit to a medical practitioner can resemble that to a bank. This is one broken system, and not one that can be fixed easily.

Next, take education. US universities are lauded around the world and indeed generate influxes of talent and innovation. But their costs are out of control, and increasingly access is restricted to the wealthy. Meanwhile, public schools resemble jails and produce results among the worst in the developed world and let down the disadvantaged most of all, because funding is local and hence skewed to richer areas. Public policy is a proxy battle between unions and greedy entrepreneurs, fought over charter schools and common testing, but for goals other than fixing the broken system.

Justice is little better. The court system is good, but public policy has led to dogma and disaster. A third of black men will see the inside of a jail, a huge multiple of the share in any other developed country. Violence is endemic, including by police, who kill a large but unmeasured number of citizens each year. By contrast, in Norway or Germany or Japan the number of bullets fired annually by police is in single digits, and each one leads to a public outcry. The cost of justice excludes most citizens. The effects of all of this will take generations to heal, even if public policy were to become more enlightened.

Infrastructure, another key fuel of the economy, is crumbling. Roads are more potholed than in any advanced nation. Bridges collapse, water systems poison people, and public transport barely exists outside of a few large cities.

The national balance sheet has a vast and growing deficit. Enabled by having the world’s reserve currency, debt is allowed to grow and competitiveness to progressively decline. Many key programs, such as social security and public pensions, will soon become unaffordable. Yet imposing taxes even to stabilise the situation becomes politically impossible. Locally, many declining cities and states have unsustainable finances too.

The banks were incentivised to create one crippling crisis and appear headed towards another one sooner or later.

Defence appears rather better, at least superficially. The USA certainly has a lot of firepower, and key global assets such as military bases. But look more deeply. Since 1960, almost all key decisions have been deeply flawed, and execution has been poor, constantly outflanked by more agile adversaries. And they are addicted to money, with precious little scrutiny. This is not a recipe for sustained success.

Foreign relations are broken as well. Even before the calumny of the current administration, most of the world’s citizens and many of its governments actively disliked the USA. It is tolerated because of its power and its money. Most Americans live in blissful ignorance of this uncomfortable fact, and make little effort to understand the needs and motives of others.

Business policy is similarly broken, notwithstanding the great success of some USA companies. Arguably, a lot of these successes are riding on the back of defence spending and legacy advantages. But most industries have less competition and hence less innovation than they did, with trends heading in the wrong direction. Protectionism will only hurt competitiveness.

The USA has many wonderfully generous people and strong communities. But there are deep tensions and resentments as well, notably along race and class lines. The ugly history of suppressing the indigenous population will become divisive soon too. These attitudes infect politics, yet public policy tends to exacerbate rather than ameliorate. As an example, housing for the poor becomes progressively less affordable, creating a vicious cycle of eviction, despair, illness and resentment.

Culture is a rare bright spot, at least in the bigger cities. And culture will become more important as communication becomes ever easier and lives cease to be dominated by work. Once the current ugliness over immigration dies down, demographics will once again work in the USA’s favour. The USA does not have the ageing problems of Japan and Germany.

Overall, this is a depressing scorecard. Indeed, most public services are broken or close to breaking point, with adverse trends and almost no legislative progress. Instead, Congress talks about walls and monuments and distant enemies and making rich people even richer. With gerrymandering, lobbying and the dominance of money in politics, this will not improve soon. Meanwhile, the current administration is destroying the civil service, along with its other sins.

A well-run country would be making incremental progress on all the items above. None are actually difficult. It would then be spending serious time contemplating the more difficult issues that are around the corner. Even climate change luddites will have to respond to its effects. The ageing of society, the end of the work-dominated society, artificial intelligence and the impact of autonomous vehicles will all need a response sooner rather than later. Good luck with that, congress.

I don’t want to portray things as worse than they are. Some strengths are enduring. Trump will pass. The next generation are wonderful humans. But I think if the USA were traded on a stock market, it might have a share price like that of GE or Ford or even IBM – great past, reasonable present, but no future. Read Lionel Shriver’s brilliant The Mandibles to get an extreme idea of what that might turn out like.

Fasten your Seat Belts, Driverless Cars are coming soon

The Economist published a large special report on the subject of autonomous vehicles a few weeks ago. As usual, it was comprehensive, well researched and thought provoking. It laid out all the actors involved in the adoption of this new technology – manufacturers, technology firms, regulators and consumers among them.

My main takeaway from the report is that suddenly this change is really upon us, and that it may be one of the most significant global game changers. Five years ago this all seemed like something geeks talked about but with practical application only in the far distant future. Well, the future is now. The technology works, car companies and technology giants are scrambling, and the benefits are too great to be held back by governments for very long. The result will be the best business case study ever, played out in real time over the next ten years; it will be absolutely fascinating.

While there will be losers, such a taxi drivers and truckers, this change is overwhelmingly positive. Roads kill people, and so does pollution. Logistics adds cost and reduces supply of welcome goods. The adoption of autonomous vehicles can make a big dent in the damage from climate change. Easier travel can encourage diverse communities and reduce prejudice. Transport also discriminates against the old and the young and the disabled and the poor – if getting about was as easy as using electricity then all that could be changed.

The special report went into impressive depth. Yet I still wonder whether its mindset was too much stuck in the present. This will change so quickly that many assumptions will prove unreliable. But the report certainly informed, and it set me thinking. I have been drawn to a number of stories, each of which might contain a relevant lesson.

First, look at Uber in New York. One consequence has been stark but rather predictable, that is the demise of the taxi driver, including traditional cab drivers but also Uber drivers. No one is making much money. The yellow cab drivers are up in arms, but I have little sympathy – they abused their monopoly over many years and typically provided poor service. But there has been a second consequence, an unintended one. Uber has hastened the trend for fewer people to own cars and to drive in the city. But it has not reduced traffic, but in many places has increased it. That is because now the streets are clogged with empty Uber cars awaiting business. The takeaway – unintended consequences are everywhere.

Now consider a journey, say from New York to Boston. If I have a meeting in Boston at noon, I will probably leave home at 6am. If I take the fastest transport, a plane, then of the intervening six hours, the actual journey takes about forty-five minutes. That will be the time when the plane is steaming between the two cities. The rest of the time goes on driving to and from airports, ticketing and security and loading, and taxiing in the ground and the air. It may be quicker to drive. The lesson is that the key technology, that of flight, doesn’t drive the journey time. If the plane went twice as fast, it would only save twenty minutes out of 360. Rather, look at bottlenecks and transfers – that is where the time goes. Runways are few, airports fewer, and ground handling obsessed with security over speed. No matter how smooth autonomous vehicles will travel, it is the bottlenecks and transfers that will define the experience.

Next, travel with me on an NYC bus. Now I live in an apartment, I use the bus quite a lot when I go shopping, because I can’t reliably park my car near the apartment. Everyone knows that buses travel slowly, and most blame traffic congestion, especially from double parking. They are correct, but that is not the main reason buses go slowly. The bigger issue is loading and unloading. Most passengers are old, disabled or loaded down with kids or shopping. It takes a long time to get these people from the stop to their seat via the metro card swipe. The lesson is about who the passengers are. They are not just elegant, fit single unencumbered travelers. The new transport has to be for everyone in every situation. Look at car designs and ads and see how those companies have spent a hundred years failing to heed that message. I have no confidence whatsoever in car manufacturers during this transition.

Next, consider my business career at Shell, at lot of it evaluating locations and investments for petrol stations. We used to look twenty years ahead. That won’t work now. This is just one of many ancillary businesses that will be disrupted out of existence. So will dealerships and mechanics, both big employers, and both big users of suburb space. With shopping malls dying already, it is not just the need to alter roads that will complicate urban design. Land value will be very hard to predict, making some rich and others bankrupt.

Next, here is a brilliant anecdote from the Economist report. I drive on the Southern State Parkway occasionally; it is a road that leads to Long Island and in particular its beaches. I have noticed it has many low bridges, more than most parkways. Now I know why. It was deliberately designed that way, so that buses could not use it and hence poor people, especially blacks, would have less access to those beaches. Isn’t that disgusting? But such outcomes are frequent, and happen every time power and money and special interests outweigh civic benefit. Now look at US society generally. Almost every major public service is broken, and Congress struggles to unblock anything. I have no confidence at all in the US generating good civic outcomes from autonomous vehicles. Instead, I will look to Singapore, Beijing, Dubai and Stockholm. AV’s might accelerate the decline of the US as the predominant global power.

On this subject, I remember a book from the 1980’s by Martin Amis, where he described a dystopian future of outcomes driven only by money. To a great extent, this novel has been quite prescient. One vignette described travelling on a motorway where each lane carried a separate toll, with the outcome that the rich travelled smoothly while most sat in endless jams. That outcome is all too possible with autonomous vehicles.

So I think The Economist did a great job at consolidating the existing debate, but that others will have to take their work forwards. These thinkers will need to be smart, connected and agile. It will be great theatre. The end game should be almost cost-free and hassle-free travel. But there will be missteps and perhaps some poor choices if other interests outweigh civic ones. And missteps can take a long time to fix. Infrastructure is costly to develop. New York has just opened its first new subway line in a hundred years.

I somehow envisage a system with three elements. There could be pods for the last mile, with low capacity but rapid frequency, a hop-on, hop-off service that you call and arrives in seconds and takes you anywhere local. These can also serve rural areas, with longer response times. This connects to a series of hubs in a city, linked by larger pods with higher capacity and using dedicated routes at fast speed. Then even faster vehicles would connect cities in shuttles; these can also be used for freight. The key to making this work would be the ease of transfer between the three elements; it would need to be rapid and seamless.

That would be one possible outcome. The hub connectors could be publicly developed and operated and almost free. But there are other outcomes, more sinister ones. We could see the wealthy running around in designer pods, while the poor are still struggling on buses.

Over the last ten years I have taught three kids to drive, and considered it an essential life skill. Thankfully, I can still drive relatively safely, but the day will come when my reactions are slower. So I look forward to an old age without the need to drive or to walk long distances to subways carrying shopping. And I suspect those three kids will not need to teach their own kids to drive. How marvelous that will be.  

A new 4-box model to explain Trump and Brexit

Four-box models are everywhere if you look for them. This week I think I discovered a new one. I’m rather proud of it. It seems to explain many things in life.

It concerns deals, or transactions, or any human interactions, really. For any interaction, the bottom axis plots its value to you, the vertical axis the value to the other party. So you can call the top right corner win-win, the bottom right win-lose, top left lose-win and bottom left lose-lose.

For negotiations, the concepts of win-win and win-lose are well established. We are taught to look for win-win outcomes, for many good reasons. They create the most value and progress overall, and they are sustainable, in that two happy partners are more likely to do business with each other again and to provide testimonials to other parties. There is also a more cynical reason to understand win-win. By looking at things from the point of view of the other party, trying to get into their shoes, you can get a better deal for yourself. That is because you know what the deal is worth to them and how willing they should be to negotiate, and you can also work to concede items that matter a lot to them and not much to you, and vice versa.

Most everyday transactions between people who are not emotionally connected are win-win. If you buy something in a shop, you get what you want and the shopkeeper makes some profit, so both parties are happy. Most transactions are rather trivial, but some can create huge value, such as major trade deals. That way comes development for humanity.

Win-lose is common enough too, and we all practise it from time to time. In some situations there is no value to create so one party must lose, and in others, perhaps where we don’t like our counter-party much and expect never to see them again, we will drive a hard bargain. But extreme win-lose as a strategy is common enough too. Think of Bernie Madoff. And of course we have a classic example in Donald Trump. The idea of doing a deal with a contractor, then failing to pay what is owed for the last 20% once the work is completed, and then lawyering up and bullying, is classic win-lose. War is usually win-lose, with the perpetrators a narrow group of decision makers with vested interests (who usually lose as well once the dust has settled).

Then we have the other boxes. I would contend that for most of us the box we employ most often in life is lose-win. We use lose-win every time we give a tip or a donation or a gift. You see lose-win every time two couples go to a restaurant and argue over which will pay. Parenthood is all about lose-win. It is the box of love, generosity and charity. Whereas proponents of win-lose tend not to end up terribly happy, those who can learn to be generous receive their reward in seeing the success of others and in the joy of giving. Giving is even seen as one of the six key indicators driving national happiness.

Lose-win does not have to be touchy-feely either; it can drive progress. Look at the Gates foundation. Here we have a couple with so much money that the “lose” involved in giving it away feels trivial, but where the benefits to recipients can be transformative. Any interaction north east of a line from 10.30 to 4.30 on my box creates overall value. That includes all win-wins, and many win-loses and lose-wins too. The lose-wins are typically more sustainable and more prevalent. After all, a lot of us are parents.

That leaves lose-lose, which always destroys value overall and therefore does not make logical sense. But for one party, that is almost the point. There are many situations where the motivation of one party has little to do with their own benefit, but is all about creating losses for the other side. Think about protests or vandalism, or about disruptive children in a school class. A few years ago I had to undertake a direct negotiation with an addict, someone who had lost hope and with impaired intelligence, not concerned with avoiding further self-harm but only of obstructing me. Such a process, especially with someone I loved, was almost impossible. Agreements were reneged on, process disrupted and delayed, new disputes opened up at will. That is the classic lose-lose situation.

This brings us to current politics. The Bagehot column in the Economist has improved recently, since top writer Adrian Wooldridge started authoring it. In February, he focused on a book from 1957 by a writer called Michael Young, an influential socialist of the time. Young made an immensely prescient claim about the future of politics, dividing society into the elite and the rest. At the time grammar schools were a political discussion point, and there was growth in an educated class Young termed meritocratic. He argued that inevitably this group would contrive to tilt the rules in its favour. They would become intolerably smug, while the rest would become dangerously embittered.

It can be argued that this is precisely how the next sixty years have turned out. After a burst of altruism immediately after 1945, and despite occasional well-intentioned attempts and lots of contrived argument, the educated elite has consolidated its advantages. After 1980 it became more blatant, reducing progressive taxation, giving more power to corporations and lobbyists, increasing the premium for education and ensuring such gains could be passed between generations. And indeed, this group has become smug and the rest have become bitter.

We see the results in Brexit and the rise of populists. To the bitter, this has become a lose-lose. Most Trump voters don’t like him but they can see that the smug elite will like him less. They are not aggressively racist or anti-immigrant, but resent being condescended to by people undermining norms. They may respect gay people, but not those demanding ever more initials behind LGBT. They probably know Brexit will cost a bit of money, but agree with Michael Gove that we have heard more than enough from so-called experts. As Bagehot notes, this also explains why few Brexiteers or Trump voters have since changed their mind despite mounting evidence: they can’t possibly admit that the other side was right. This is lose-lose in action. It is destructive, ugly, and hard to escape from.

Escape will be hard, short of war. It requires rebuilding trust and respect. It will help that Trump will be exposed for what he is. It will help if more Trudeau’s and Obama’s appear. It will help if the policy pendulum moves back towards progressive causes. But in the end when you have little tangible to lose and even your self-respect is taken away, your own lose in the lose-lose becomes ever more irrelevant while the lure of giving the elite another bloody nose only gets stronger.

The Economist has started to argue for stronger public services and other policies to counter elites, such as seriously addressing cross-border fraud. That is to its credit, but ultimately it is hard to see the Economist as anything but smug, and Mr. Wooldridge as its epitome (he would readily accept this, I believe). Macron is unbearably smug, so I predict he will last but one term in office. It is hard to become un-smug. In 2016 I wrote a blog “a speech for Hillary”: it conclusively demonstrated both my own smugness and my uncanny ability for missing the point. That horrible lose-lose negotiation cast a similar uncomfortable self-reflection.

In my smug way, I fancy this new four-box model might have legs. You can even personalise the quadrants. Gates, Obama (and Jesus) in the top left, Buffett or Jobs top right, Trump or Putin bottom right and Farage or Le Pen bottom left. I think it helps to explain our motivations in many situations, as well as offering some ways to be better people.   

The Crown and other Faction

History is a wonderful subject to study. It has almost endless scope and massive capacity for generating both interest and insight. We can all benefit from a greater exposure to it. I have an ambition to devote more of the next phase of my life to studying history, and I fully expect to enjoyment and learning to result. Luckily, there are many and growing ways to pursue this goal, though there are also some pitfalls.

I remember school history rather vaguely. I think in the early years history was dominated by appealing stories such as the Pharaohs or Aztecs, with more focus on providing visual images than anything else. I can hardly remember any history from middle school, apart from lots of maps of the world with countries coloured pink to show the rapidly diminishing British Empire.

I have greater recollection from High School. In early grades there was some depth of focus into various eras of British history, including the Tudors. Then my GSCE history course covered European history from 1970-1945, encompassing revolution in Russia and two world wars. There was even a module of British domestic history of the same era, looking at things like the battle for universal suffrage, labour power and the general strike and the immediate post-war era with Beveridge and Butler reforms of welfare and education and the creation of the NHS. But 1951 was the far limit of study. At sixteen I dropped history for a focus on just maths and economics.

School history taught me a lot of facts (all the English monarchs from 1066 and their dates, for example), and, more usefully, served to offer some context for current affairs. I think my history teachers were quite good and even took a few risks – I remember one class discussion about the merits of capital punishment, which usefully served to challenge prejudices.

I think I was fairly lucky. My syllabus was more relevant by being fairly modern. My teachers were good and took some risks. And in Britain at the time history was taught with less dogma than in other countries or in earlier times. I can be grateful that my study did enough to ignite an interest much later in life.

But it still missed many opportunities. A curriculum with history retained up to age eighteen would have been better. The focus on facts was limiting. And there was still too much dogma and prejudice and even propaganda involved. This manifested itself in gross oversimplification. Lenin had some good ideas but turned bad. Hitler was the devil incarnate, so any discussion about how Germans came to support him or whether any policies had merit had to be stifled.

A great example of subtle propaganda was the Munich agreement and the portrayal of poor old Neville Chamberlain. Hitler had to be only bad, and Churchill all good, so Chamberlain must have been weak. Appeasement became a bad word on the back of it, which very much suited the military establishment and politicians trying to sell a MAD policy against the Russians. Of course, the reality of Chamberlain and Munich was much more complex, and I’m delighted that Robert Harris will soon be publishing a novel about that moment in time. Harris is always entertaining and well researched – I love all his writing. I still recall the first article I ever read of his, in the Observer, which introduced me to the concept of the elephant in the room with such elegance that I became an instant lifelong fan.

Harris often uses a technique that some have called faction. His novels are neither fiction nor documentary but some sort of blend. Usually some minor characters are elevated to the centre of the story, and their role embellished creatively to make an entertaining backdrop to real historical events. The major characters are portrayed rather accurately, at least as Harris perceives them.

This is a fresh way to look at history, and others have used the same technique. Perhaps the most masterful of all so far has been Hillary Mantel with Wolf Hall and Bring out the Bodies, in which the events are seen through the lens of a middling character, Thomas Cromwell. I am delighted that PBS has just started repeats of the TV series based on those great books – I could watch it again and again.

Another example is the Netflix series The Crown. A common factor is the wonderful Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn and Queen Elizabeth, two queens of England five hundred years apart, one reigning barely a year and the other at sixty-five not out.

The Crown is inherently more risky and more edgy, dealing as it does with events and characters still alive and fresh in the mind and suffused with images laden with dogma and propaganda. My Tudor history studies may have been rather superficial, but at least no one was trying to use them for propaganda purposes. Wolf Hall makes neat points about the benefits of trade and research, but The Crown careers headlong into all manner of minefields.

And the writers do it brilliantly. As faction, they choose to focus only on events that are both entertaining and revealing, and it has to embellish known fact with some supposition. But it all feels very believable, and we get to understand the main characters in some depth, sharing their dilemmas. My mum would have hated it. To her, each royal had a character described by one or two words provided by the Daily Mail. She was part of the fawning crowd in the rain at the 1953 coronation, and the royal family formed a crucial part of her unthinking patriotism.

The Crown offered entertainment, knowledge and food for thought. I did not know that MacMillan was knowingly cuckolded through his professional life, that Anthony Armstrong-Jones swung both ways, that Edward VIII actively betrayed the war effort, that Wallis Simpson was probably sleeping with the Russian ambassador, and many other pieces of gossip catnip. Worthy of deeper thought are the portrayal of three successive transfers between prime minister with no democratic content whatsoever, the hypocrisy surrounding the treatment of women just two generations ago, or the enduring power of shady crown advisors.

Best of all, Foy portrays the contradictions at the heart of the role wonderfully. To succeed, a part of her has to accept the nonsense that her authority comes from God, while another part accepts that she must refrain from expressing an opinion in almost all circumstances. And we also observe the contradictions in the lives of close family, born to be entitled yet fatally caged. I found it great TV, and a better course of history than any I received at school or in books.

But that resounding success leaves a few concerns about the genre. The makers of these new faction series have a lot of power. They need to balance entertainment, knowledge and opinion, but what will regulate which knowledge and which opinion prevails? Are we replacing schoolbook propaganda with another sort? Because progressives tend to make these series, I find myself drawn to them, but am I really just feeding my own biases, creating yet another echo chamber? Will this field become the next political battlefield, with Fox sponsoring all sorts of other series with rival subliminal messages?

Of course, faction is not a new invention. Shakespeare's histories set the tone. The power and risks of the genre were apparent even then. Richard III is portrayed very negatively by Shakespeare, but my history teacher contended that England's two finest monarchs squared of in 1485 at Bosworth Field.

The age of mass communication has wonderful opportunities. Faction series are just one example of many. The next generation has a chance to embrace history in ways that were tough for me given the media and material available at the time. But it is yet one more fraught field, ripe for abuse and polarisation.  

Progress begins at Home

Recently, I was thinking about my family history, specifically regarding mental health and addictions. It was quite a sobering process.

My dad died at 66. That was probably partly because of a lifetime addiction of smoking, and another one for alcohol that he held in check for his last twenty years. I suspect he was also a problem gambler. His sister was a lifetime alcoholic. She had a dysfunctional relationship with her husband that might have been abusive, and they did not have kids. Dad's earlier marriages ended in divorce, with at least one child suffering from multiple addictions for most of his life.

My dad’s parents did not have addictions that I know about. However, my grandfather had an affair with his secretary that led to a child. Everyone knew about it, including his wife, and hushed it up.

My mum did not have addictions, unless you count an addiction towards money. But I believe she was abused as a child by her mother, and that her mother also abused her father. It is possible that my grandmother was abused by her own parents too. My mother’s sister did not suffer addictions nor abuse, as far as I know, but she seemed to me to live a rather unfulfilled life, short of money and drive.

My ex-wife suffered from an addiction for more than half of her life, her behaviour masking depression and self-loathing. I am pretty sure that she was abused by her own father a a child. Her father left her mother, and in the thirty years that she lived after that her mum refused to acknowledge his existence.

None of these marriages appear to offer conducive situations for bringing up well-balanced children. My own parents certainly loved each other, but their affection was rather platonic; I understand that my mother had a fear of sex as well as a puritan attitude towards its enjoyment, and that she chose to live a celibate life for over 75 of her 82 years. 

Then there are childhood influences at school to consider. I attended various private schools. From one, one teacher ended in jail for abusing boys, a least one other demonstrated unhealthy affection towards young boys, one other was alcoholic, one took an unhealthy interest in corporal punishment, another committed suicide and various others had sexual hang-ups, in some cases due to closet homosexuality. These are just the examples obvious enough to be noticed by an adolescent.

Despite all this, somehow my sister and I, and all our children, seem to have forged a path avoiding addiction or other mental trauma.

I relate this history not in order to seek sympathy or to be sensationalist. In fact, my intent is rather the reverse. I believe I have had a very privileged life. I was born male into a rich, peaceful country, with relatively wealthy parents who prioritized my education. I have never had to cope with the trauma of losing a loved one long before their natural time, or of serious illness. Perhaps most serendipitous of all, the barking of my mother led me to a decision forty years ago to eschew alcohol during lent, something which I have kept to ever since as a check against any alcoholism risk. Mum was convinced such things were hereditary, in which case I would have been almost doomed.

There are three pieces of context behind this tale. The first is the new book by the marvellous Steven Pinker. I have so far only read reviews, but I will surely read the full volume, and probably blog about it as well. His theme is one of my favourites, of rapid and relentless human progress, obscured by the drumbeat of the news cycle. If we think in terms of days, or months or even decades, we tend to see problems and setbacks, but the reality is that humanity continues to march forwards. This thought is a great antidote.

The second context is a simple quotation from a PBS Newshour report, one that I have not been able to substantiate but feels correct. The reporter stated that the strongest indicative factor for addictions, by far, is having had parents or other close influencers with addictions. So mum was right after all!

This insight might go a long way as a root cause of Pinker’s progress. We tend to think of things like technology and medicine and human mingling and emancipation as drivers of progress. These are all important, but perhaps it all starts at home. The more of us that are comfortable in our own skin, the more we have an ability to drive progress. Living in addictive and abusive families, or families with secrets or out-dated dogmas, people are less likely to develop to their potential. If each generation can address these inhibitors better than the one that came before, humanity will progress more quickly.

This is where my own family history comes in. Even in a privileged setting, few of the people in my back story could have felt fully comfortable in their own skin, though each generation may have found it easier than the one before. Then I look at my children, and at the kids I interact with in choirs, and I see relaxation and respect, people equipped to drive human progress. All of them will have something in their background that might hold them back. But reducing abuse, reducing addiction, reducing prejudice, and learning to talk openly about such things have removed some of the burdens. Progress begins at home.

Then the third context came to me as a gift while composing this blog, when I attended a mass yesterday. The gospel was about the two summary commandments, loving God and loving our neighbour as we do ourselves. I have recently taken to turning the second half of this around. For some of us, we have to learn to love ourselves as we love our neighbours.

In his homily, the priest, God bless him, followed this theme. He stated that when he was growing up he was ordered to devote all his love to God, to use any love left over to look after his neighbours, and be to careful about loving himself. He had learned to turn this hierarchy upside down. Only by loving himself, by taking care of his health and his habits, would he become effective in loving his neighbours. And loving himself and extending this to his neighbours is how he can show love to God.

I can’t imagine any priest offering such a homily even fifty years ago. I could have stood up in my seat and cheered. It shows how we have progressed, even in religion, and also how we can continue to progress. Imagine successive generations, each with humans better equipped to love themselves, each progressively more free from abuse and addiction and mental illness. That is precisely what is happening right now, if we look beyond the crassness of some people in power. Further enabling this should be our prime personal and policy goal.