Master Of A New Medium

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Gotta work it out

An interesting report in Saturday’s Irish Times examined the phenomenon of Irish graduates’ unwillingness to work at low-skilled jobs, and how the gap is being plugged by foreign workers. The overall impression was that many in Ireland would prefer not to work at low-skilled jobs when they receive the equivalent money from the dole, as many of the foreign interviewees noted. The information  was presented neutrally, and could be interpreted in any way, but the response of one of the interviewees indicated what response is expected from the public. Andrew, a postgraduate economics student, commented ‘Personally, I didn’t study for five years to work in McDonald’s’, and at the interview’s end requested that his last name not be printed. When asked why, he said: ‘I don’t want to be portrayed as a student stereotype who’d prefer to bum around rather than work.’ A later interviewee stated: ‘I’d rather be cleaning toilets than on the dole,’ indicating what is likely to be the commonest media and public reaction to the piece – that people should always work, in whatever jobs are available, rather than take social welfare.

The problem with this reaction is that it assumes that work – any kind of work – has intrinsic moral value. It can be argued that a job keeps people focused and helps maintain a healthy timetable – but it’s a bit of a jump from that to assert that cleaning toilets and flipping burgers is morally superior to staring at the wall. It seems strange that educated graduates should feel guilty for admitting that they think themselves too good for certain jobs. From an educational and experience point of view, they are too good – yet that is not the assessment they are perceived to be making. Instead, it’s seen as a moral question – do you think yourself too good for work, which in all its forms is inherently good? Such moralising seems to lose sight of the real issue – that a First World economy with a small population such as Ireland cannot provide jobs for its graduates.

It’s over 70 years old, but Bertrand Russell’s In Praise Of Idleness still has highly relevant things to say on this matter. The social rigidity of his England has loosened up somewhat, so it’s not the case anymore that the idle landowners preach the validity of ‘the Slave State’, but his statement that ‘….the necessity of keeping the poor contented…..has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labour, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect’ still rings true. Opinion makers and business people (and it’s not just the usual-suspect loudmouths like Bill Cullen and Michael O’Leary that pass judgement based on their own experience) may have spent the requisite years waiting tables and cleaning toilets, but nobody with aspirations to influence is prepared to make an unskilled job his or her career. The work experience of the currently well-employed does not validate their arguments in favour of the morality of work, because for them, low-skilled work was always a means to an end, while in the current climate it is the only option for the foreseeable future for too many people.

The argument that we are ‘palming off’ our menial jobs on foreigners because we’re too lazy and immoral to do them ourselves doesn’t carry any great weight outside of simplistic moralising. It avoids the key, difficult question – why do we still live in a world where there a yawning chasm between skilled and unskilled work, between the professions and the trades? Carpenters and painters often made big money during the Celtic Tiger, but without the advantages of higher education and connections many of them have come crashing back to square one. Foreign workers from poorer countries tolerate working in monotonous, uninspiring and difficult jobs here because they’ll make more money and enjoy a better quality of life than they do back home. Much is said about certain groups’ unwillingness to go on the dole and it’s implied that this makes them morally better than other groups. Yet surely the fact that trained accountants and lawyers from abroad work in Irish hotels and shops should be seen as a worldwide injustice, rather than a reason to celebrate moral worth?

Too many humans all over the world, even in 2010, still labour endlessly just to survive. Thousands flee the Indian countryside every year to live in the hellish atmosphere of city slums, just for a chance to escape the grind of subsistence living. Those people would consider western fetishising of work insane. Of course, the plight of Indian slum-dwellers and that of European graduates facing into a career making coffee are not the same at all; the latter is still infinitely more fortunate, but it’s objectionable to dismiss today’s graduates’ unhappiness with the current lack of work as expressions of their ‘pampered’ nature. Supposedly ‘pampered’ students often work two or more part-time jobs to put themselves through college, and university in Ireland and England has broadened immensely over the last couple of decades to include a wider cross-section of society than at any time in history. Graduates today are not the Daddy-fleecing sybaritic stereotypes of old.

The budget will probably see a cut in social welfare, which many comfortably employed people will welcome as an ‘incentive’ to get people back to work. The delusion that depriving people of welfare leads to a magic upsurge in employment shows no sign of dying out since the days of Norman ‘Get on your bikes’ Tebbitt. The dole needs some overhaul and savings could certainly be made by limiting the amount given to single people under 25, for example. But debate on unemployment and welfare, in the media and the public echo chamber at least, seems to be short on sense, compassion and practicality, and high on moralising. The government is frantically drawing up a budget which will improve the country’s standing in the eyes of the unelected speculators that control the international financial market, whose morality is rarely questioned, while on the ground easy answers are sought by passing judgement on what isn’t,. nor should ever be, a moral matter.

Ask anyone who works in a menial or low-skilled job, and they will not tell you that they think their work has moral worth. The foreign people interviewed in the Irish Times article had varying opinions on the issue of the Irish and work, but none indicated that they enjoyed the work they have to do to survive. Perhaps Russell summed it up best when he described how a menial worker should describe their work according to the morality of the rich, and added his own response:“’I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man’s noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.’ I have never heard working men say this sort of thing. They consider work, as it should be considered, a necessary means to a livelihood, and it is from their leisure that they derive whatever happiness they may enjoy.”

The magic number

Below is my review of a new book about Pythagoras. This review has also been published in Politico magazine.

World-changers don’t come around very often. Things can be chugging along just fine, adjusted to whatever level of development the human race is at, and then someone appears from nowhere with a whole batch of new ideas and abilities that leave the world different, forever. Whoever invented farming was one, whoever first mined metal was another. In recent years it’s the genome-sequencing and Big Bang-analysing scientists who get the main credit for these kinds of changes, but their work rests on the shoulders of those who first discovered the mathematical order in nature, who, like the first miners, found something beautiful and productive in the unlikeliest of sources.

The modern world owes more to the semi-mythical mathematician Pythagoras than most of us can even begin to conceive. Lucky then that there’s a recently published book that goes some way towards explaining the significance of this person (or people) in terms that even the most mathematically challenged can understand.

Science writer Kitty Ferguson has done an admirable job in presenting not just the famous theorem, but any number of mathematical concepts that seem to have been first laid down by a group of philosophers and scientists in the Greek colonies in Southern Italy in the 5th century. Her logical approach proves useful in breaking down the various different accounts of the life of Pythagoras, weighing up each account carefully for probability and plausibility.

A picture emerges of an unprecedented genius, a thinker made up of equal parts scientist and priest, who founded a long-standing cult based on the magic of numbers. This was a world where logic and mystery existed side by side, where there was little delineation between religion and daily life.

Pythagorean thinking saw fundamental patterns in the symmetry of numbers and equations, a viewpoint that strongly influenced the thinking of one Plato, who can be seen to be an inheritor of the Pythagorean tradition rather than a wholly original thinker.  Ferguson follows the Pythagorean legacy through the Roman and medieval periods, taking in a dizzying amount of information which tends towards factual overload, though she recovers pace somewhat when looking at mathematics and the 20th century.

The statements about faith versus science towards the end of the book feel tacked on and could easily have been left out. Without a doubt, the book is strongest on the Greek legacy of Pythagoras – if Ferguson ever decides to move away from science writing, a career in classics would be well within her league.

Pythagoras: His Lives and the Legacy of a Rational Universe by Kitty Ferguson Icon Books (Hardback), August 2010 £20.00

Builders of the future

‘Behind every great fortune is a great crime’. The old saying, traditionally attributed to Balzac, is as striking today as ever. In fact, in today’s atmosphere, it rings even more true. We may admire the wealthy, the powerful, the self-made, but deep down we can’t help but believe that a millionaire must be, if not quite a criminal, than at least criminally exploitative. It’s this assumption that fires the script of The Social Network, a movie about the events that led to the founding of Facebook and the gazillion-dollar lawsuits that followed. Mark Zuckerberg, the driving force behind the site, is the world’s youngest billionaire, and it is The Social Network‘s aim to uncover the crime(s) that led to those billions.

Based on the book The Accidental Billionaires, the movie portrays Zuckerberg as a Harvard-attending socially inept weirdo whose immense sense of entitlement causes him to react furiously to a girl’s rejection. After calling her a ‘bitch’ on his blog, he creates (with the help of his geeky roommates) a site called FaceMash that calls up random pairs of photos of female Harvard students with a ‘hot or not?’ button underneath. The site is an instant hit, and Zuckerberg is courted by uber-WASP twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss to help them build a Harvard dating site. Zuckerberg agrees, but after stringing them along for a few weeks, creates a more sophisticated version of the idea – the Harvard-based prototype for Facebook. The twins are furious and make the (frankly rather dubious) claim that he ‘stole their idea’. Meanwhile The Facebook (as it’s originally called) takes off like wildfire. Zuckerberg refuses to let co-founder Eduardo Saverin bring in advertising for the site, and on the encouragement of Napster founder Sean Parker, moves the operation to California. He freezes Eduardo out of the business altogether, leading to the second lawsuit that frames the story.

The plot is pacily executed, with the Winklevoss and Saverin trials against Zuckerberg used as a framing device. As the characters remember events the action jumps back in time and the story unfolds. There’s a lot of the kind of ‘lightbulb’ moments so beloved of film-makers trying to evoke a creative process, complete with shots of Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg dashing across Harvard towards the nearest computer to encode his latest revelation. Some of these revelations seem simplistic, but Zuckerberg’s assertion that Facebook is a viable idea because ‘anyone can look at pictures of hot girls on the internet – what they want is to look at pictures of people they know’ is bang on the money and exactly the reason Facebook took off in the way it did. What doesn’t ring true is the script’s constant assertions that Zuckerberg’s primary motivation in setting up the site was to impress girls and increase his social standing in Harvard, with its rigid hierarchies and elite clubs.  The real Zuckerberg hasn’t said much about the film, but he did comment recently that he particularly disagreed with the script’s interpretation of his motives. As he put it: “They [the film's creators] just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things”.

I believe that that is the film’s key weakness. Plenty of people are motivated by emotional damage, but the current idea seems to be that any great acheivement must be underpinned by some terrible lack within the achiever. It’s almost as though the modern world is suspicious of anyone who achieves ‘too’ much, who uses their gifts to their absolute limit and attempts to be the best they can be. Single-mindedness is seen to be the same as destructive obsession, pride in doing well at something is seen as being interchangeable with grasping ambition. After efforts are made to understand those who do things for the wrong reasons, a dangerous assumption seems to be rising in storytelling that implies that no-one ever does anything just for the sake of it. This ties in well with an era in which university courses are rated only on their ‘practicality’, and hobbies are something to enhance a CV with. If you’re not emotionally damaged, you’re nakedly seeking profit; either way, high achievement is suspect.

I don’t know if Mark Zuckerberg is a nice person or not; certainly you don’t get to his position without a tough hide and a willingness to make enemies. What he undoubtedly is is a programming genius and a hard worker. Is he emotionally damaged? He could be, who knows? Whether he is or not, it’s not the reason he invented (or co-invented, depending on who you talk to) Facebook. His statement that he built it because he ‘likes building things’ is the simplest, and therefore most plausible explanation. All over the world, people are creating, inventing, building, designing and investigating all manner of things simply because they are interested in them. People are working day and night, going without food and sleep, not because they are damaged, but because they passionately care about what they do and want to do to the best of their ability.

Most of us are average in our skills and our abilities, and undoubtedly that leads to an easier, more balanced life. But we shouldn’t pathologise geniuses and grafters; they are the ones who take the ‘giant leaps’ that help us all walk faster. Facebook has its good and bad sides, but it can’t be denied that it has changed the world. Even if Zuckerberg is as unpleasant and odd as The Social Network suggests, that’s not relevant to his role as one of its creators.

Construction no.128 (1920)

"There are so many interesting things to do in life. And we waste our time emptily and keep dreaming about something...And this dream isn’t worth anything. But what’s been actually done, even poorly – is worthwhile"

Aleksander Rodchenko

'Wherever you go, there you are'

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The Threepenny Opera

Image: Dada Rundschau by Hannah Höch, 1919.

(A review from last year of the Threepenny Opera in the Gate Theatre. Trying to get this post to nestle into the correct chronological space, but Tumblr seems to have a problem with that kind of reverse-scheduling. Hence this introductory note - this review was written in October 2013.)

Seeing the show in the flesh, in the theatre, after years of exposure to the myth, is a slightly disorientating experience. The expected, stunning musical set-pieces are interspersed with narrative-prolonging longeurs, while the most famous songs (Mack The Knife and Pirate Jenny) pop up at rather incidental points in the story. The political message is less a message than an announcement, clunking the audience over the head with the complaints of the oppressed in rags.  The show itself, as presented by The Gate and directed by Wayne Jordan, is both less strange and more wonderful than I’d imagined it would be. This is a production that takes the source material seriously, as shown by the 18-piece orchestra that starts playing as soon as the curtain lifts. From then on the show dazzles with pitch-perfect (and refreshingly unamplified) singing, choreography that manages to be challenging without being confusing and costumes and set design that convey just the right amount of ragged decadence.

The lack of subtlety and nuance in the original storytelling persists through a game reimagining by Mark O’Rowe, but the music and aesthetic for which the name Threepenny Opera is synonymous more than compensates. Allusions to the present economic situation are kept mercifully subtle. This production is no exercise in superficial window-dressing – it is the very sincerity with which the cast and crew present this musical and visual feast that gives this production its extraordinary power.

Highlights include Hilda Fay as Jenny, Mark O’Regan as Mr Beecham and the aforementioned 18-piece orchestra.

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