The Marmite Science of Statistics

If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t have the correct data.

(Paul Hawken: Blessed Unrest, page 4)

Statistics is the marmite science. You either love them or distrust them. They’re either the high road to true understanding or more damnable than lies. Hans Rosling loves them, and sees evidence of humanity’s progress everywhere in the data, unlike Hawken in the quote at the top of this post. (I have taken the quote completely out of context and his position is really more complex taking full and hopeful account of the hosts of people seeking to move civilisation in a positive direction in the manner of the Cultural Creatives, but I’ll come back to that in another post I hope.)

Rosling’s ardour is infectious as his recent programme on the BBC demonstrated. Unfortunately it’s not available anymore for downloading, but the video below, which he did for TED, is on YouTube and makes for a good substitute.

There’s something about lovers of data strings that seems to make them extravagantly optimistic. I’ve been looking at Matt Ridley‘s book, The Rational Optimist, which is riddled (1) with facts on every page I’ve read so far, and to say he wears rose-tinted spectacles would be an understatement. His opening chapter is called ‘A Better Today’ and starts with a quote from Thomas Babbington Macaulay (page 11):

On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

I wasn’t reassured by this, remembering Matthew Arnold‘s remark that Macaulay wrote in a style in which it was impossible to tell the truth. Maybe this kind of optimism is a left-brain thing as McGilchrist suggests (The Master and his Emissary: page 306), Bolte Taylor‘s euphoric right-brain ‘lala land‘ notwithstanding. I can enjoy it but it doesn’t convince me – too much right-brain melancholy perhaps, in my case, if McGilchrist is correct.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of it all, it’s an enjoyable video that shows how statistics can be used to make presentations more enjoyable and the complexities of difficult issues far more accessible. It’s important not to lose the dark side of these figures though, as the case of China illustrates as one example. A recent article in the Sunday Times (Great Mall of China: 2 January 2011) shines a small torch into the murk of it:

[Randt] pointed out the terrible price [China] had paid for growth – a ruined environment, 656,000 deaths a year from pollution-related diseases and 95,600 deaths from poisoned water.

Note (1): I did notice the accidental pun but thought it worked OK

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Relieving the Sorrow-Laden Heart

Pilgrim’s Progress

Remember the saying: `Of all pilgrimages the greatest is to relieve the sorrow-laden heart.’

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Selections 52)

‘Who is my neighbour? My neighbour is all mankind.”

(Seamus Heaney: The Spirit Level,  page 28)

For those who might have been holding their breath since my last post on the subject, I did in the end manage to finish Jonathan Stedall‘s Where on Earth is Heaven?

The last chapter was particularly resonant. It looks at how gloomily the world is portrayed in the news and seeks to redress the balance. He believes our ‘capacity for empathy is stirring’ (page 532). He refers to books that I feel I will be buying in due time.

Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken is the first one. He sees the current burgeoning of a network of non-profit organisations as ‘humanity’s immune response to toxins like political corruption, economic disease, and ecological degradation’ (ibid.) He quotes, on the same page, Bill McKibben‘s comment on the book:

The movers and shakers on our planet aren’t the billionaires and the generals – they are the incredible numbers of people around the world filled with love for neighbour and for the earth who are resisting, remaking, restoring, renewing, revitalising.

He refers (page 535) to an equally interesting book – The Cultural Creatives by Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson. He describes cultural creatives (page 536) as sharing ‘what are often described as feminine values in relation to family life, education, relationships, responsibilities and caring in general.’ They constitute, in the view of the authors, about 25% of the population they studied.

What is currently lacking, he feels, is a way for such people to combine their energies together without compromising their creativity.

I’ll resist the temptation to expand on how much this, for me, is uncannily in synch with the ideals and developing practices of the Bahá’í community. Posts dealing with this are to be found throughout this blog. In this vein, though, Stedall also speaks of a zeitgeist that may be helping us shift in this direction, and, in a fascinating parenthesis, suggests that this effect would be more powerful ‘if the zeitgeist is an actual being and not an abstract concept’ (page 534). And in the end there is a quote (page 357) that could almost have come from a Bahá’í pen:

Today many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself – while something else, still indistinct, were rising from the rubble.

(Václav Havel: 1984)

If we look for them we can find examples, not just of the downside of our predicament, but of the uplifting aspect as well.

Examples of the morally blind side of our nature can carry the seeds of the more positive vision, of course. An example of that is a hit of the moment – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I don’t think I am wrenching the implications of its exploration of the blind side completely out of shape by saying that it is a compelling study of where absence of empathy and compassion can take us. It is powerful and effective, if a touch melodramatic in places.

There are also many places where we find a sense of positive potential which does not shirk the reality of the darkness. Blind Side is a good example, a film based on real events. It illustrates perhaps one of the best ways of protecting ourselves against the worst effects of our blind side.

If The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo managed to avoid the worst excesses of melodrama (I’m not quite sure where to place the savagery of the rape scene in this: in terms of the film’s moral balancing act, it triggers the ‘girl’s’ revenge while, at the same time, helping us empathise with her rage: I felt manipulated emotionally though), Blind Side is only tinged and not spoilt by the occasional hint of sentimentality. It shows us the power of empathy and how much it can accomplish in the hands of people flawed in many ways as we all are. Our flaws are not a reason to evade this challenge.

And so, finishing Jonathan Stedall’s book, after a few other detours into film, has brought me back to a book I set aside many months ago – another book that inspired and irritated me in about equal measure. This book is Jeremy Rifkin‘s The Empathic Civilization which I think I will now attempt to read right to the end. Where I left off (pages 314-315) he is beginning to tackle the duality Iain McGilchrist explored from the point of view of brain structure:

When it comes to consciousness itself, one is struck by the fact that the human being is both a feeling and thinking animal [I'd prefer the word 'being' but there you go - that's what makes reading Rifkin a bit of a switchback]. Therefore, one of the critical questions in the modern era has been which of the two – feeling or thinking – is the most relevant to understanding ‘human nature”?

How could I possibly resist another bite at this cherry?

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