On second nature

What a smile in the mirror tells us about our challenges We move around in our modern environments with great ease. We talk the language of economic indicators, nutrient scores and opinion polls; we inhabit a world saturated by scientific and political language. And yet somehow we are left feeling stuck on an in-between level. Despite the reams of available data, we are left with a vague suspicion that we're not saying everything. The fact is, our lives are governed by the dynamics of relationships. Just look around you, status symbols from shoes and cars to the more intangible, a casual holiday photo on social media, or a passing reference to vegan cheese; they all tell you something about the person and how they regard themselves in relation to others. One of the philosophers that inspired me over the years, Rüdiger Safranski, called this our second nature. Whilst our evolutionary landscape, the African savanna was our first nature, today's glittery urban skylines make up a habitat in their own right. We are tied up in organisational and societal structures yet the challenges we face are of first nature - climate change, forced migration, loss of biodiversity, ecosystem degradation. So how do we reconnect? Well, I will argue that we need to develop a proficiency at moving back and forth, learn (and perhaps relearn) to shift our focus back and forth from our abstract tools to our nature – or first nature as I will here call it. We need to develop a poetic fluency, in other words, in moving from the aggregated and theoretical to the lively concreteness of a smile on a face. Mirrors everywhere I fondly remember the first crack of a smile on my little one when I held her in front of our bathroom mirror. Her smile was genuine yet with a hint of mystery. Was it herself she was smiling at or someone who just happened to smile back? Perhaps it was simply a mark of her emerging personhood? Either way, it felt more meaningful than what can be put into words. A first glimmer of joy in her young and innocent life. Her face lit up and I immediately wished her so much more of it. There was something teasing me to take it further though. I always like how the flow of experience gives way for one isolated thing to stand on its own in the mirror. As we take a step back to see what is happening, the smile in the mirror is no longer an expression on a face, but an image on a surface, like the Queen on a coin. This distinction between the immediate and the reflected is deep. A recent string of philosophers explained how products mirror our desires. We are constantly tempted to lose the boundaries between ourselves and the desires anticipated and embedded in the products we use, to such an extent that the mirror also serves as a metaphor for how we get consumed by our desires. Like Narcissus in the pool, we reach out to our mirror image. And in the moment of enchantment we lose our very selves. Like a psychic reading runes, we are to divine underlying assumptions and unspoken norms, to find work, satisfy bosses, find life partners, make life decisions, and with some luck, to navigate a route into today's glittery urban skylines. Removed from the senses, but not exactly abstract either Nowhere more than in a city like London you can see these forces at work. Sleek towers reaching up for the sky, along with its people and all their worldly ambition in it. High finance is a thoroughly abstract world, far removed from the real world they impact on. It follows a logic of its own, with buttoned-up suits and polished heels. It is a world that is so majestic that critical questions bounce off as sunrays from their reflective facades. Social pressures to find conformity in their perceptions cast a shadow long and wide. From the first job interview to a board meeting in plush room overlooking remnants of London's grand medieval past, there is plenty of polite and humble language, the steady process of establishing rapport, building trust, an inevitable game of posturing and imitation. It is a delicate ritual where the powerful see their ways, down to the minutiae of their gestures, repeated and imitated in their subordinates. How all this simulation would benefit from a critical look in? Why is it so hard to achieve? It is down to our cognitive psychology; the way we process information from the world around us. We gravitate to a sense of coherence. In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman explains the psychological processes behind this. In contrast to a slow, reasoned approach (what he calls System 2), our intuition (System 1) simply asks itself: does it form a good story? And whatever information it is served up, our mind fills the gaps. It sacrifices detail for narrative coherence and cognitive ease. Like in the movies, the hero of the story is handsome; yet, in reality handsome heros are about as rare as handsome baddies. The handsome suits of high finance are equally at the mercy of an intuitive sense of coherence. Indeed, playing to narrative coherence is useful when promoting ideas that confirm a certain worldview; not so much when they diverge, question or clash. There's a long list of cognitive biases and fallacies that trick us into confusing what we say and who we are. Our first nature is wrapped in layer upon layer of repetition and artifice, and the more we ensconce ourselves in mimesis, the more our passions and our truths shape themselves to fit the mirror. Traders in futures and abstract financial instruments may be living a life that is profoundly detached from the many lives affected by their decisions. And yet they too run a marathon for charity, or experience the rush of a sense of urgency after seeing a David Attenborough's documentary. In a passage that felt slightly out of character, Kahneman describes how he broke the results of one of his studies to a senior investment manager. He had concluded that this financial firm was "rewarding luck as if it were skill." Unsurprisingly, the financial expert dismissed this. The experience on the ground was simply too different. The executive simply couldn't accept this portrayal. In this high-status world many believed in these abilities. It was incoherent with his worldview to argue that they owed billions to sheer luck. "The illusion of skill is deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry," Kahneman wryly concludes. A damning verdict. I was impressed to read this in what is, after all, a Nobel Prize winner's book. It turns out these gleaming towers carry in them a self-deception reminiscent of Narcissus' pool. Nevertheless, it isn't without its own wholesome sense of belonging. After all, the financial sector adds more to GDP than most sectors. Embodying abstraction better But don't get me wrong, the mirror is still a vessel for truth. We can lose ourselves in our reflections, especially as they become contrived, with the sole aim of enchanting us. Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Monkey, 1938. © Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Albright-Knox Art Gallery. But contrast this with Frida Kahlo's mantra, "I paint myself because I'm the one I know best". She painted herself in a mirror. What struck me most when we recently visited an exhibition of her work is how she sought the most truthful and honest reflection of herself in her self-portraits, whilst simultaneously dedicating her life to, well, the Communist Party. It appears to me she revealed her insecurities (ie. her iconic unibrow) to hold them up as universal traits of humankind. Showing herself was a way to inspire ordinary people to in turn reveal themselves and make visible the injustices that befell them, so that they would feel compelled to join the Revolutionary struggle. I do not want to take this much further. What I found touching was the valiant openness with her vulnerabilities. In a perhaps surprising parallel, Goethe too sought a candid reflection of first nature. A scientist and a poet, he strove to study things in their completeness. Every detail of an appearance had to be noted. Goethe developed a craft of caring perception. He found that science's inductive thinking and generalisation didn't do justice to reality. I have an image in my head of how he, much like his intensely romantic young Werther, looked at the petals of a flower one by one. He didn’t take it back to his laboratory to place it under a glass bell; he didn't fill his consciousness with an analytical “this is a flower of genus x and species y”. Instead, he drank in the experience in all its layers and complexities: the gentle movement in the wind, the smell and consistency of the soil beneath, the path of the sun above, acknowledging the rich complexity of processes within, allowing the phenomenon to manifest itself as it is. To see the interconnectedness, the relationships, the dynamism, we must come to understand how the flower rises up from the soil, how it transfers nutrients to its petals, draws on the sun for photosynthesis, etc. All at once. Like Frida Kahlo seeking universal truth in her intimate gaze, Goethe too sought to find abstraction in nature; both ventured back and forth from the abstract to the personal, from the heights of the theoretical ideal down to the gritty imperfections of here and now. And while Kahlo's confidence in Communism's historical materialism may seem silly in hindsight, and Goethe too, may have pushed the boundaries of scientific enterprise a bit too far for today's rational minds, they did show how their individual reflections mattered. A care that extends into the heart of things Ultimately, the wisdom to solve today's problems does not sit either one end or the other. We cannot simply turn our back on technology and hope for the best. Most of you will have seen Into The Wild and saw where that ends. We are a social species, bound together in our language and our tools, and condemned to live with each other - or to die eating poisonous berries. Born into today's society, we are thrown into a world of imagery and intently designed objects, directing our gaze like blinking signposts. Our needs and desires are enmeshed with our built environment in ways that our language cannot yet fully accommodate: as architecture redrew the lines of space; clocks shaped our perception of time; 24/7 news and cheap flights changed how we perceive distance; a global division of labour changed how we value and reward work: second nature is the reality we know. As we fail to gain a vantage point that overlooks markets - with its millions of independent actors, its clever pricing mechanisms, and its unabated variety in supply and demand - we fail to make note of that what lures us, what drives us, and ultimately, that what holds sway over us. We develop a numbness to value, both the economic kind - what we add by improving a product - as the broader human sort. Value risks becoming unwrenched from our humanity, shipwrecked as it were, in a sea of scam incentives and fabricated needs. In extremis, it is not so hard to imagine a world where we're led astray by renegade algorithms, mind-numbing and addictive; anger and fear are mobilised to spread distrust and divide countries. By contrast, imagine a world where social values are reasserted in their many voices, an economic system that is recalibrated to reintegrate its negative effects on people and the planet. It offers openness to playful experimentation and innovation, cross-cultural exchanges of ideas, as well as an aspiration for ever higher standards, governance codes, regulation and taxation - levelling up a playing field with carbon taxes, nitrogen permits, water rights, etc. From here on, this second nature we've grown so used to is but an image in the rear-view mirror. To summarize, a wise gaze doesn't fall prey to the mirror. Instead, it pendulates back and forth: between the general and the specific, between the abstract and the concrete. It tells the story of its most-valued lived experiences but also listens to the findings of others and aggregates them. Much like the poet Goethe, it nurtures a care that extends into the hearts of things.