Moral obligation and history

The spectacle of Putin, Xi and Kim Jong Un all chummy in Beijing fills me with revulsion and dread. 'Might is right' has triumphed. The boot stomping down on the human face.

My post-war generation grew up believing that the arc of history tends invariably upward – the 'Whig view of history', the notion that today is better than yesterday, and therefore tomorrow will be better than today. The inhumanity, the barbarism of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, had both been crushed; steamrollered flat by the Allies. But then both were helped to rebuild and invited into the circle of decent nations; within 30 years of the war's end, West Germany and Japan had overtaken the US and the UK in living standards.

But the seeds of the resurgence of old-style might-is-right can be traced back to the original sin which was treating Stalin's Soviet Union as another democracy. The founding charter of the United Nations from 80 years ago mandated its member states, including the USSR, "to maintain international peace and security, uphold international law, achieve higher standards of living for their citizens, address economic, social, health, and related problems, and promote universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion." 

If only those words carried some weight. Allowing the USSR in as a founding party, as well as one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, was clearly a mistake; the original sin. 

As deeply flawed as the Western democracies have shown themselves to have been, at least they are not led by leaders who consider putting human beings to death on an industrial scale as policy. 

Saying to Putin "I want this war to end, so you get to keep what you've stolen; you will not be punished and we can get back to working together" is exactly what the Prisoners' Dilemma tells you not to do. This game-theory thought experiment, played out millions of times, clearly shows that if the other guy defects on you, you hit him and do so repeatedly until he relents. Only then, and instantly, you return to the strategy of cooperation. And do so until the next time he defects. To cooperate with an aggressor is to invite future aggression from him. It is that simple. Look at history.

In 416 BC, the Athenians invaded the island of Melos and demanded that its people surrender and pay tribute to Athens or be annihilation. The Melians refused, so the Athenians laid siege to their city. Melos surrendered; the Athenians then executed its men and enslaved its women and children. In the Melian Dialogue, Thucydides' dramatised negotiations between the Athenians and the Melians, the Athenians offer no moral justification for their invasion. Instead they tell the Melians that Athens wants Melos for itself and that the only thing Melians would gain by submitting was not being slaughtered. The Melian Dialogue is still taught as a case study in political realism; the world is brutal, states are selfish, and that the only rational approach is based on power and advantage. The quote "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" is taken as founding statement of political realism.

So another 'life-in-balance' slider can be between utopianism and realism. Is it utopian to want Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine to end with the full withdrawal of Russian forces behind Russia's 2014 borders, and to see Russia punished for the murder and destruction it has wreaked upon Ukraine? Is it realistic to expect Ukraine to give up territory and its ambitions to join NATO and the EU in exchange for a ceasefire? 

Utopians have unrealistic expectations. Politically, they are naive and foolish. (That's utopians of the left and the right, by the way; Brexit was built upon utopian expectations.) Realists, on the other hand, are too ready to accept grubby compromises, to accept corruption, injustice and barbarism.

In my mind, there is an optimal path; it is guided by the solution to the Prisoners' Dilemma: always get on with your fellow (or nation), until they do the dirty on you. Retaliate immediately. Fight back with ruthless determination, until they return to the path of righteousness. As soon as they cease their egregious behaviour – flip back to cooperation and continue cooperating (until their next defection). The problem will then be how to define 'defection', and selecting the appropriate level of counter-strike.

Trump is not clever, he is weak; a pathological narcissist with ADHD. He will fall. But will America be able to pick itself back up? Europe has to take up the slack; I'm delighted that Poland at least is pulling its weight in terms of defence spending. That is a moral obligation.

This time last year:
Sunset's Trip Revisited

This time two years ago:
The Unbearable Pleasance of Flashedback Familiarity

This time three years ago:
The imperceptible end of summer

This time four years ago:

Another new bus stop for ul. Karczunkowska

This time five years ago:
Energy, focus and state of mind

This time six years ago:

50 years on – Gunnersbury Grammar school reunion

This time eight years ago:
All things visible and invisible

This time 10 years ago:
Work starts on Warsaw-Radom rail modernisation

This time 11 years ago:
Won't be long 'til summertime is through

This time 13 years ago:
It was a good year for the apples

This time 15 years ago:
Early-September moan about the commuting

More Questions than Answers (Pt I): Lent 2024, Day 40

I will use the last week of Lent to ask the questions that I am still struggling to make sense of, where I haven't yet found an answer that satisfies my intuition. Let me start then with the question of what is evil and why does a good God permit evil.

Comparing evil to chaos, disorder, things running down – entropy – the second law of thermodynamics, I ask whether evil can be seen as a natural rather than a supernatural phenomenon. We can equate good with ethical behaviour, health, growth, development. Building not destroying. Polar opposites. We know what good looks like. We know what evil looks like too. But do we?

In anger, for example, a manifestation of evil? Did Jesus show a flash of anger as he drove the moneychangers out of the temple? How many of our own human failings can be reasonably described as evil, or attributed to metaphysical evil forces?

And then there's the problem of how to deal with evil. In the physical, material world, evil needs to be stopped, for our common good. The prisoner's dilemma empirically proves that. Giving way to evil only emboldens it. Psychopathic killers, who intend to turn human life into non-life to further their material goals, need to be terminated with extreme prejudice.

That is the role of the state, to protect us from material manifestations of evil, internal and external threats. But in the metaphysical world? Can one pray for evil to stop? Or is our suffering necessary? The existence of evil as the price we pay for being alive and conscious? 

Or maybe evil will, slowly but surely, be squeezed out of the cosmos by spiritual evolution. We no longer torture people or animals to death as a spectator sport; ethically, humans are steadily becoming less barbaric. 

This is easier to understand if we reject the notion of God as being perfect with that of God as being a work in progress, unfolding along with the Cosmos. As I wrote in December, we can take the spiritual journey from Zero to One as encompassing everything in the Universe, including its Cosmic Purpose, including Big-C Consciousness, and accept a Divinity that's neither omniscient nor omnipotent nor omnipresent, but tending that way, with an Omega Point as the final destination; all in God, God in all.

But before we get there, is evil something we just have to put up with?

Or can you ward off evil (at least at the personal level) with the power of will? Not wishing evil upon yourself can keep it at bay?

Perhaps the individual can train their will to do that magic, to bring good fortune upon themselves – but can collectives, groups of people – nations even – bring down a metaphysical dome around themselves to ward off evil?

[An interesting notion regarding evolution is that our animal kingdom only evolved the way that it did was because we did so in parallel with viruses. What didn't kill us made us stronger. This theory suggests that life forms which don't coexist with viruses evolve far more slowly. Perhaps an answer to the Fermi Paradox is that complex life never got to evolve on planets where viruses didn't appear.]

Lent 2024, Day 40
How we lead our lives

Lent 2022: Day 40
Fasting and Temptation

Lent 2021: Day 40
Medicine, Mindfulness and Miracles

Lent 2020: Day 40
Coercion, Persuasion, Conversion and Faith

Dealing with Evil: Lent 2024, Day 25

On the one hand, there's Jesus's injunction to turn the other cheek. To love your enemy.

On the other hand, there's the Prisoner's Dilemma. And its empirically demonstrable solution: always cooperate with the other fellow until he does the dirty on you, then smack him back and keep on doing so until the moment he repents and returns to cooperation; at that moment, you do likewise and continue cooperating (until such times as he defects, then you return to counterstrike mode). 

Play the game a million times, and the optimal strategy turns out to be cooperate-cooperate, defect-defect, every time. Tit-for-tat, in other words. Continuing to cooperate, turning the other cheek while the other guy is smiting you repeatedly in the face, is a strategy for suckers. It only encourages wrong-doing (example: Obama and Merkel's response to Putin's invasion of Crimea in 2014).

The Prisoner's Dilemma model works well enough, but has two problems. The first is identifying what constitutes a defection. A colleague criticising your work at a meeting, or neighbours who habitually let their dog crap on your lawn – can either be classed as a transgression? The second problem is determining an appropriate and proportional response to what you judge to be a transgression. Start a vendetta against your colleague or neighbour?

In multinational diplomacy, judging where to draw the line as to the other party's egregious behaviour and choosing a proportional response is crucial. The quote, widely attributed to philosopher Edmund Burke, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing", applies to individuals as much as to collectives such as nations or treaty partners. Not sending the correct signals when red lines are crossed marks you out as a soft touch.

Let's return to Jesus. Does He mean loving your enemy literally, even as your enemy is herding you into a gas chamber?

How should we deal metaphysically with a murderous tyrant across the border, whose behaviour threaten your country, your family and you? Pray for his speedy death? Pray for him to fall victim to a brain haemorrhage in his sleep?  Or surround the tyrant with compassionate thoughts aimed at persuading him to see the error of his way? Both, I feel, are doomed to failure, even if millions aim such intentions at him nightly.

What does work then? Letting go, metaphysically at least, and let the material world deal with its material problem in the material way? Maybe the metaphysical works at the personal level. One's ability to will one's own fate works to a certain, limited, extent, but projecting it on a larger scale, to will the eradication of, say, malaria, or evil people, probably doesn't. Why not? 

We seek the truth underlying reality. We seek it scientifically, in the material realm, we seek it esoterically in the metaphysical realm. The process of discovering the truth is an eternal process. We are not destined to find out now, in this space and time, in this life. A world devoid of evil, because people willed it thus, is beyond our grasp.

I wrote on Day 14 of Lent this year about entropy as a physical explanation of chaos, the opposite of emergent complexity. Things breaking down, people dying – entropy. Making things, people being born – emergence. Blessed are the builders, cursed are the killers. But there's always tit for tat and the Prisoner's Dilemma. Do not kill, but if someone starts killing you people, your family, you are obliged to hit back physically at the source of that evil, and keep doing so until it backs away and gives in. But proportional response is key, as is final forgiveness.

Where metaphysics breaks down against the rocks of reality. 

Lent 2023, Day 25
Intuition and Dreaming

Lent 2022: Day 25
Writing It All Down

Lent 2021: Day 25
Faith and Knowledge

Lent 2020: Day 25
Chances, complacency and gratitude

The Ego, the Soul and the Individual: thoughts occasioned by my 66th birthday

As I age, the flame of my ego turns down from a 7 to a 3; then on towards a 1 before being inexorably extinguished. Yet the flame of my consciousness grows in strength from year to year, as does my understanding of the world. And with them I grow in wisdom.

To what extent are we egos, and to what extent souls*?

The body is the vehicle that contains both. Which one controls your vehicle? 

Two contrasting statements to ponder then:

1. "We live, as we dream - alone" - Joseph Conrad, from Heart of Darkness

2. {{ I am part of the continuous whole }} - an intuition I felt while walking in Jeziorki one day, probably sometime around 2004-5.

How to square the two? Are we individuals, or members of a collective? I have written about the existence in childhood of the conscious mądry Michaś and ego-driven głupi Michaś, and how the latter won control over the former in adolescence to rule uncontested until mądry Michał finally emerged victorious over the course of the past decade.

I can associate with both of those two statements above. Solitude is a comfort for those deep of soul. An ego alone is trapped - there's no audience to show off in front of. Or anyone to boss around. But the wise consciousness has no need to conform to the will of other egos, or to try to impose. You may wish to ascribe this to my 'low hierarchy status', a life lived upon a lower rung of the Ladder of Authority. That diagnosis, dear reader, is a mirage - an affect of the materialist worldview.

Yet the continuous whole - the cosmic consciousness - underlies space and time. Indeed, consciousness spawned space and time; space and time are the products of consciousness, and not the other way around. Increasing numbers of theoretical physicists and philosophers are now getting this.

To the materialist, there is only matter - there's no such thing as 'soul'. Consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon - a by-product of biological evolution, something found only within the brains of higher-order animals on our planet.

Whatever your worldview, the matter that is your body is subject - as is all matter - to entropy. 

Entropy. The second law of thermodynamics. Decay. The destiny of all matter is to break back down into a state of random atoms. The material wonders of this world, brought about by complexity, are short-lived; finite. To the materialist, who scorns the very notion of a soul, who considers consciousness to be a constructed illusion that lies beyond empirical measurement, the process of ageing is tragic. One's youth fades, and all that there's to look forward to is decay.

But Consciousness abides. It was there at the beginning of all things; it will be there after their end. And it is present everywhere. It survives matter. Grasp this, and ageing, and what comes after death, hold no fear.

In my own place, I am comfortable.

I can see now that I have been a slow learner (due to laziness? Lack of focus? Attention deficit?), but  I am a broad learner, a generalist, not a specialist. I am still learning. The constant chipping away at a rough-hewn block of stone from which emerges an exquisitely detailed sculpture. Our digital age has brought a wealth of knowledge to humanity - I wonder to what extent we're aware of that? Wikipedia, for example, is stupendous in terms of what it offers us all - for free! Plus the endless streams of podcasts, YouTube videos and TED talks covering every area of human knowledge - and our ability to plug into all that knowledge on the go via a smartphone. Ignorance is no longer the default state, but a conscious "can't be arsed to find out" choice. Curiosity, then, becomes the most important human quality after kindness.

[Kindness - cooperation and empathy - is the default setting of the winning strategy of the Prisoner's Dilemma - get on with your fellow humans all the time except after such occasions when they defect on you first (never, ever, be the first to defect!) - then retaliate and continue doing so - forcefully - until they relent, and then immediately return to cooperation. Should they defect again, retaliate again.]

Today, a year after reaching the Polish state-pension age, I have reached the UK state-pension age. I no longer need to work, but shall continue doing so for as long as it brings me fulfilment and sense of purpose. I should say 'slow down' to myself, but this is the busy time of year, with event after event galloping onward toward Christmas, it's not easy! I have long said that I shall work until Poland overtakes the UK in terms of GDP per capita (at purchasing-power parity). The gap between the two economies is narrowing each year (around 20% at the moment; it stood at around 40% ten years ago).

Below: back to the metaphysical. Prof Bruce Greyson from the University of Virginia, is one of the pre-eminent researchers in near-death experiences. In this YouTube video from 2012, he presents this slide, which I think squares with what a spiritual approach to life yields anyway, without the need to face death head-on. However, many of the subjects of his research had their near-death experiences at an earlier age than 66, so these may accelerate a change of worldview that might have occurred more slowly otherwise.

*I use the words 'soul' and 'consciousness' interchangeably, according to context, sometimes maybe using 'spirit'.

This time last year:
In which I reach the Age of Maturity

This time two years ago:
Golden Autumn, Golden Years

This time three years ago:
Last embers of summer

This time four years ago:
It's that Day of the Year again!

This time five years ago:

Decline and growth

This time six years ago:
Health at 60

This time eight years ago:
In search of vectors for migrating consciousness

This time nine years ago:
Slipping from late summer to early autumn

This time ten years ago:
Turning 56

This time 11 years ago: 
Turning 55 

This time 12 years ago:
Turning 54

This time 13 years ago:
Turning 53

This time 16 years ago:
Turning 50

Cooperate, cooperate / Defect, defect

I have written about the Prisoner's Dilemma several times on this blog over the years. The famous thought-experiment holds a useful life lesson for us all. I came across this excellent version (link below), using a coin game in place of the harder-to-understand dilemma put to the prisoners, but essentially working the same way.

It's you vs. another person. Do you cooperate for mutual interest, or do you try to cheat the other player? More importantly, in the long term - which strategy works best?

[Click through to the game, and have a go for yourself. See what works and what doesn't. It's worth spending a bit of time to understand it.]

Once you've done that, time for reflection. The strategy that is clearly victorious is the one whereby you start off trusting the other person, and continue cooperating with them until the very moment in which they do the dirty on you. Then you break off. Then you carry on retaliating - until the very moment in which they relent and go back to cooperation. In this version of the game, this is called the 'copycat' strategy. It depends on your copying of what the other player does, in the very next round. No need to initiate or think. Nothing smart about this strategy - there are others which depend on you trying to work out the other player's strategy (assuming they have one).

The results are clear - if you carry on cooperating even when the other player is abusing you, you're a sucker and deserve to lose, you deserve to be punished. And if you are abusive you will not get far either; people will work out that you play dirty and will start to hit back.

The 'copycat' strategy is essentially the one deployed by the US in the Pacific War. The Japanese bomb your fleet? You take the war to them. You hammer them at sea and from the air. Hard. Eventually, they surrender. Then you help them rebuild, grow their economy. But watch that they don't defect on you again.

The 'sucker' strategy? Appeasing aggression. Hoping the defector will come to their senses and change behaviour, unbidden. To quote Lenin again; "if you plunge in the bayonet and feel nothing but mush, keep pushing. But if you push in the bayonet and come across steel - stop."

So cooperate, cooperate / defect, defect is the way to go.

Would that it were so simple.

Define 'defect' and define 'punish'? Here is the problem. Is the fact that a friend of yours voted for Brexit or Trump or PiS a 'defection'? Is it reason to 'punish'? And what form should that 'punishment' take? If someone parks their car across the pavement so you can't push through with a wheelchair - is that reason to scratch the car - or is leaving a polite note under the windscreen enough? A house in your neighbourhood continues to burn crap, harming air quality for everyone. Call Straż miejska? Or heave a brick through their window and continue to do so until they switch to a cleaner fuel?

A thought-experiment that is binary in its policy-response choice (cooperate or defect) comes face-to-face with the messiness of reality, composed of an infinite number of shades and nuances. Here, that crucial word 'judgment' (a word so lacking in Polish! - osąd doesn't come close) comes into play. Response needs to be proportionate, balanced and fair; one needs to be alert to infractions and instances of the other player defecting - even when no binary border has been crossed.

This is Putin's strategy - avoid crossing the red lines (such as invading a NATO member), but pushing all the time through social-media trolls, agents of influence and useful idiots for a similar outcome - buying venal politicians and entire political parties, splitting Western societies. The West needs to take tougher action to send the message to Putin that this behaviour is utterly unacceptable. The balanced response would be to step up sanctions against Russian oligarchs who are in Putin's pockets and their assets, while at the same time launching an unattributable cyber-war against Russian IT systems. Cooperate. cooperate / Defect, defect. And keep on hitting back until the very second Russia relents. And should it then renege, return to hitting back. 

And so on until the end of time - the copycat strategy is the one that works best - something proven by millions of rounds of simulation.

This time two years ago:
The Becoming and the Magic that'll Re-enchant Us

This time three years ago
Short-haul musings 

This time four years ago:
Mind, matter and life

This time five years ago:
Compositions in blue and white

This time eight years ago:
Waiting for the change to come

This time nine years ago
A wetter Poland?

This time 11 years ago:
Heavy overnight snow

This time ten years ago:
Changing Jeziorki skyline

From the world of science to the social world

Lent 2018: Day Eight

From the world of Newtonian physics (working out trajectories of planets) and quantum mechanics (working out positions of subatomic particles), Stuart A. Kauffman moves on through the non-entailing, unprestatable laws of biological evolution, to the human world of economics, politics - art even.

Newton is prestatable. We know where Venus and Mars are tonight, and where they'll be ten years from now (although all those tonnes added to these planets' mass by Mankind might have some detectable long-term effect). We can observe the positions of those subatomic particles (but only if we actually do the observation - otherwise all we can do is speculate). The future evolution of the biosphere - entirely unprestatable.

The human world is not bound by entailing laws. Take economic theory. As we all know, the global financial crisis following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 was not something that economists forecast. Yes, some individual economists got it broadly right, but there was no consensus, such as that among astronomers who can forecast the next Transit of Venus in just under 100 years' time to within a day's accuracy. "We cannot mathematize... the evolution of the economy," says Kauffman. The same goes for political polling, or for seeing what uses we will find for a newly developed technology.

He touches on game theory, citing the famous prisoner's dilemma - cooperate or defect. Here, I'd take issue with Kauffman - over millions of rounds of playing this game, there is an optimal outcome. Cooperate with them that will cooperate with you, but defect on those that defect on you the very moment they do so - and continue to do so until the very moment they return to cooperation. [I wrote about this here in the context of international relations.] While the rule has been proven, what is difficult to define is 'defect' (A colleague leaves a mess on your desk? A friend insults you. A neighbour throws a brick through your window? A criminal steals your car? Murders your family?) and to define the response (Measured? Proportional?) Games have rules, but those are not the same rules as those that govern the motion of a body in space.

Unexpected consequences intrigue Kauffman as they show just unprestatable is the unfolding of human society. Every new law will have a loophole that the legislators did not expect. That is what lawyers are for. "Unprestatable new loopholes open unprestatable new opportunities and thus enable, but do not cause, new actions, strategies and behaviours. Laws both constrain some actions, yet enable other, often unforeseen, actions with unforeseeable payoffs. "No one designed English common law," he says. It evolved.

Kauffman shows how the chain of Actual->Possible->Actual->Possible unfolded from Alan Turing's first mathematization of 'mechanical computation' in 1933, to the world's first computer, ENIAC (1946), to mainframe computers; the invention of the microchip enabled computers to shrink in size and increase in power; word processing came along as the 'killer app' that would make the personal computer a household product; file sharing enabled - but did not cause - the world-wide web; the possibility of selling goods on the web enabled eBay and Amazon; the web also enabled social media to come into existence, and the increased power of mobile telephone allowed browsers to to move to smartphones.

"History unfolds into the possibilities it creates, new Actuals enabling new Possibles, enabling new Actuals." But this process is messy, sprawling, interwoven, confused. "We must live into the future and make it, structured by our past, yet not fully knowing what it is that we enable as we enable it," says Kauffman.

This time two years ago:
Music, mysticism and the human spirit

This time three years ago:
My first Pendolino journey 

This time four years ago:
Poland's universal panacea

This time five years ago:
Of taxis, deflation, crisis and strikes

This time six years ago:
Lent starts again

This time  seven years ago:
Art Quiz

This time eight years ago:
A month before Spring Equinox

This time nine years ago:
The beauty of winter
[some of my finest winter photos]

Language and politics

I wrote about the Hierarchy vs. the Networks the other day, and wish to return to an aspect of political discourse - again, this applies to more than just to Poland and the UK.

I wrote about Mankind's journey from barbarism towards civilisation; from brute towards angel.

Language is an important aspect of this.

The Language of Absolutes

Watching Donald Trump, in his use of absolutes, confirms this. He defines himself by decrying things he claims to be against in absolute terms. "The worst...", "always...", "never...", "everywhere..." etc. This is the language of the Hierarch, painting the world in simplistic terms to his followers.

The language of the networks is more nuanced. "Usually..", "in most cases...", "one of the better...". The board, or the committee, or the council, prefers precise terminology to sweeping generalisations.

The wilder the assertions, the better it plays with the unsophisticated, partially engaged voter. 'Post-truth politicians', says the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland of Trump and Boris Johnson. For politicians craving personal power for themselves, the truth gets in the way of a good line. "Pedants still hung up on facts and evidence and all that boring stuff are left for dust, their boots barely laced while the lie has spread halfway around the world," writes Mr Freedland.

Both hierarchies and networks have their narratives, but by their nature those spun by the hierarchs are simpler than the more complex, detail-laden narratives that the networks employ.

The Language of the Playground

Hierarchs are happier with the language of the playground. Insults bandied around by 15 year-old boys, designed to trigger aggressive behaviour, are the ritual of forming a hierarchy. Who's tougher. Who's the leader of the gang. Who's top dog.

As we grow up, name-calling is no longer seen as big or mature. Aggressive language is ineffective in the workplace as a management strategy, especially in a knowledge-based economy. Vilification of colleagues or subordinates does not move the business forward. Leaders stooping to such behaviour are merely revealing their weakness.

But in politics, where it's not a workforce that needs to be motivated on an everyday basis, but voters in a four- or five-year cycle. Voters are not as engaged or as knowledgeable about how the state functions compared to employees, who turn up each day and know how the business operates.

The language of anger and hate has no place in the modern political discourse. And yet it's there. How should civilised people react?

Fighting back

All around the world there are good guys and bad guys. The good side (in my book) tend toward networked solutions to human problems. The bad guys seek to perpetuate or re-establish hierarchical structures. The bad guys name-call and simplify complex issues to laughably basic levels. The good guys tend not to retaliate with aggressive language and will often point out that the issues being discussed are more multi-faceted than the hierarchs paint them. Illegal migration from Mexico? Simple! Build a wall. And make Mexico pay. Will calling Trump "a deluded egomaniac" put off swing voters from putting their X against his name? Or is it politically more effective to point out the many practical reasons why building a wall along the Mexican border, financed by Mexico, would be counterproductive?

How best then, to fight back against the powerful forces that hold back Mankind's slow journey towards civilisation? This is something I've not managed to get my head around yet. The Prisoner's Dilemma offers us a powerful algorithm that sets out how we ought to behave toward our fellow man for the optimal outcome. If he gets along with us just fine, we should never do anything against him. Co-existing with him in honest cooperation, we will both flourish. Win-win. Sustainable growth.

Yet what happens when he turns nasty on us? The answer is to punish him - instantly and robustly - and to continue to do so until the moment he asks for mercy, and decides to return to a policy of cooperation. And then cooperate with him, continuing to do so - unless there's a further transgression.

Played out on computers millions of times, the optimal outcome is always the same:
Cooperate - cooperate. Defect - defect. All well and good. But my problem with the Prisoner's Dilemma model is a) how to define 'defect' and b) how to retaliate. The simple answers are a) breach of goodwill and b) proportionately. But these two guidelines need further clarification.

In the political arena, should the civilised Networkers stoop to the level of the Hierarchs, the use the same simplistic language and name-calling back at them? Or fight the battle on a higher plane, appealing to the voters' better instincts?

This time last year:
Trafalgar Square, then and now

This time three years ago:
GM's city car for Europe fails to wow me

This time four years ago:
A biblical sky

This time six years ago:
The parable of the Iron-Filings Factory

This time nine years ago:
Got to get ourselves back to the Garden

Civilisation and barbarism

It's been a long time coming, but here it is, a post that starts with a banality and ends with a big question mark.

An important purpose to human life is continual improvement, striving to apply ever-greater standards of civilisation, moving away from barbarism. Sometimes the momentum towards civilisation is faster, sometimes slower, sometimes it goes into reverse (Today's Middle East in particular).

European civilisation briefly slipped back into the darkness of barbarism under Nazi occupation, but since then progress has been visible across the project known as the European Union, the western and central parts of his continent have enjoyed progress towards the light.

Civilised behaviour is evident, barbarism in its extreme form (murder on religious grounds, invasion for the sake of territorial gain). But it's the petty barbarism too. Egregious driving, dumping rubbish, mindless graffiti tagging...

What is the civilised response? Yes of course there are laws, by-laws, international tribunals, the mechanisms of imposing civilisation on those who prefer to behave barbarically. But does this work? To what degree? When I see scenes like these (ul. Sporna, Jeziorki), my gut instinct is to respond to barbarism like-for-like. Catch someone doing this - flog them. Publicly. Put them in stocks and have a supply of rotten eggs and tomatoes at the ready to have them pelted mercilessly by a jeering crowd.

But fighting barbarism with barbarism would only serve to lower levels of civilisation across society. Much as I would like to force whoever dumped this rubbish below to eat it - on prime-time television while a studio audience roars with laughter.

How does one deal with barbarism? The algorithm of the Prisoner's Dilemma (which I mention here in the context of Putin's Russia) offers a tried-and-tested answer: get on with people who get on with you. But should they step out of line, punish them - swiftly and hard - and continue doing so until they repent. Then instantly get back to getting on with them. There is no better way of getting a long-term win-win result than that. Proven by computers playing out the scenario millions of times. The only problem is with defining the terms "step out of line" and "punish".

Armed forces are the embodiment of institutional barbarism, ready to defend the state using barbaric means (putting enemies to death with bullet, shrapnel or high explosive). A civilised world would have no need of military force. Yet the planet that our consciousnesses occupy is not civilised in an equal manner. Barbarism, brutality, the notion that might-is-right, prevails in many corners of our globe and cannot be expected to contain itself.

Civilised societies need to be ready to impose barbaric solutions - such as putting fist-sized holes through the bodies of invading soldiers, or incinerating invading tank crews alive in their vehicles - so as to protect the civilisation that have been have built (or rebuilt) over the decades. Unless civilised societies can demonstrate a credible response against barbarism, they will be overrun, and civilisation will crumble, evil will take hold.

But what solutions should be used for those who perpetrate those little barbarisms - those who dump household waste on public land or in forests, those who insist on driving under the influence of alcohol, or those tagging graffiti on public or private property?

I'm convinced that a little bit of corporal (as opposed to capital!) punishment would be useful. Public mockery of those convicted under due process of law, via the social media, I'm sure would work.

Getting the balance right is crucial. A civilised person should not stoop to the level of the barbarian to defeat him (and it is usually a 'him'). But the barbarism of Imperial Japan had to be defeated by the incineration of hundreds of thousands of innocent women and children, the barbarism of Nazi Germany by the firebombing of civilians and a merciless war on all fronts.

The outcome of any conflict is determined by will. The side with the stronger will to win prevails. Civilised society should never lose the determination to defeat barbarism, whether it be the threat of barbarism on the international stage, or the 'small barbarisms' that we encounter in everyday life.

The Rule of Law is a great weapon in the hands of civilised society, along with transparency and trust. The Rule of Law depends upon enforcement and the wise interpretation of the law's regulations. And this requires vigilance of civilised people, who should identify themselves as such and be prepared to defend civilised values.

Finally, the question mark. We can see symptoms of barbarism large and small all around us. What can we as individuals do to ensure the continued progress of civilisation?

This time last year:
Ahead of the opening of Jeziorki's Biedronka

This time two years ago:
New views of Jeziorki

This time three years ago:
Motorway finally links (the outskirts of) Łódź and (the outskirts of) Warsaw

This time six years ago:
Kraków Air Museum

This time seven years ago:
Quintessential Jeziorki

This time eight years ago:
Little boxes, Mysiadło

Putin will not heal Russia's tortured soul

The tougher Putin plays with the West, the higher his popularity ratings soar. Why should ordinary Russians consider sacrificing their future prosperity in exchange for some intangible feelings of national greatness?

Is it that Russia desperately needs to believe in itself, beset as it is by so many intrinsic problems such as systematised corruption, substance abuse, demographic implosion, low life-expectancy, crumbling infrastructure, or a suicide rate among its young two-and-half times the global average? Is it that ordinary Russians can see so many of their educated countrymen emigrating for good? And so many of their wealthy countrymen investing their wealth, pilfered at home, in property on the Cote d'Azure, Cyprus or London?

Russia is a nation tortured by its history. From the Mongol invasion, Ivan the Terrible, the Times of Troubles, the Black Hundreds, the Okhrana, Lenin, Stalin - Russians have been brutally held down by aggressive forces for centuries. This is a nation whose soul was shaped by serfdom, Siberian exile, by the Gulags, by prison gang hierarchies. And today, Russia's intelligentsia is, to quote author Victor Erofeyev, marginalised, brushed out of the way, made to feel an alien, enemy element.

It's worth noting that when serfdom was abolished in 1861, 38% of Russia's population belonged to their landowner. By comparison, at its high-point just before the Civil War, 14% of the population of the USA were slaves. And it was Russians who enslaved one another, rather than people of another race, captured on another continent. Russia plundered itself the way other countries plundered their overseas empires. Communism then came along, played to the masses, promised them paradise on earth as the inhuman system decimated Russia's intelligentsia and crushed any tradition of independent thought.

After the collapse of communism, rather than embrace tolerance, good-will and openness, Russia carried on along the same trajectory as before. Communism's fall led not to the rise of an open, tolerant civil society, but to that of a plundering oligopoly, a kleptocracy of ex-KGB spooks well-versed in the techniques of deception; hungry for wealth as well as power. And the wealth was converted to power, the power back to wealth and so on.

Their Russia remains a deeply suspicious, untrusting nation. Much of the distrust that ordinary Russians bear towards the West stems from the propaganda they've been fed for the past 96 years. Propaganda bought by oligarchs' billions from pliant media owners.

Rule of law, balance of powers, respect for private property, distinction between private and public property, distinction between power and wealth, tolerance, fair play - the founding stones of Anglo-Saxon polity - are all nebulous concepts in the Russian mind. The Anglo-Saxon model is also based on the devolution of power from the individual to the committee, and the notion of checks and balances. And as such it is more accountable, more transparent, more civilised.

At the turn of the century, when I worked in a multinational publishing corporation, I met the country manager of its Russian operation, who happened also to be professor of printing at a Moscow university. With access to the its presses, paper and ink, he quickly came to dominate a lucrative publishing niche, classified advertising, before selling his business to foreign capital. Speaking to him after many fine French wines, I found myself staring into the dark, dark soul of a man who clearly believed in a hundred and one cranky conspiracy theories; a man who had total disregard for his fellow man, and thought everything meaningless because the world was going to end in seven years time in a cosmic cataclysm and everyone would die.

So how should the West see Russia? How should the West respond to Putin?

The solution to the Prisoner's Dilemma offers a powerful algorithm that sets out how we ought to behave toward our fellow man (or indeed nation) for the optimal outcome.

If our fellow man gets along with us just fine, we should never do anything against him. Co-existing with him in honest cooperation, we will both flourish. Yet what happens when he turns nasty on us? The answer is to punish him - instantly and robustly - and to continue to do so until the moment he asks for mercy, and decides to return to a policy of cooperation. And then cooperate with him, continuing to do so - unless there's a further transgression.

The Prisoner's Dilemma has been played out millions of times in computer simulations, using two responses to 'cooperate' and 'defect'. Carry on cooperating in face of defection? Or retaliate? Which strategy is most effective in this game? The scenario that consistently proves to be most beneficial in the long term is to cooperate with the other fellow until he defects, then defect back on him until he relents, then switch back to 'cooperate' mode.

Quoting from the Wikipedia article linked above, these are the conditions necessary for the strategy to be successful:

Nice
The most important condition is that the strategy must be 'nice', that is, it will not defect before its opponent does... A purely selfish strategy will not 'cheat' on its opponent, for purely self-interested reasons first.

Retaliating
However [...] the successful strategy must not be blindly optimistic. It must retaliate. An example of a non-retaliating strategy is Always Cooperate. This is a very bad choice, as 'nasty' strategies will ruthlessly exploit such players*.

Forgiving
Successful strategies must also be forgiving. Though players will retaliate, they will once again fall back to cooperating if the opponent does not continue to defect. This stops long runs of revenge and counter-revenge, maximising points. 

Non-envious
The last quality is being non-envious, that is not striving to score more than the opponent.

This strategy worked well for the Western Allies at the end of WWII; West Germany and Japan were created out of two nations that were crushed decidedly; they demonstrated genuine contrition and became close partners of the Western Allies. Note the 'non-envious' quality; within four decades of the ending of the war, Germany and Japan were economically more successful than America or Britain.

The end of the Cold War was rather like the end of WWI. The loser failed to show contrition for its past behaviour (be it invading Belgium or enslaving Central and Eastern Europe). Feeling itself unjustly punished, indeed persecuted, out of a sense of injustice visited upon it, the former loser rebuilt itself as the world's major trouble-maker.

What will heal eventually Russia's tortured soul is a genuine civil society; but this will only emerge after the majority of Russians have successfully built up and passed on wealth to at least two generations of their children, who will then have a stake in preserving it from upheavals - wars or revolutions. Charitable organisations, cultural activities, a vibrant, tolerant, free media; but above all an end to a paranoid vision in which the world's largest nation in terms of landmass feels that it is about to get invaded again and therefore has to compensate be seizing more land.

Russia is not about to get invaded. (At least from the west.) 

NATO leaders realise (even intuitively, if they are unfamiliar with the Prisoner's Dilemma) that 'Nice', 'Forgiving' and 'Non-envious' are the right strategies to deploy towards a peaceful Russia. They should also realise that 'Retaliating' is always the right strategy to deploy towards a belligerent, threatening, bullying Russia.

And Russia, like the educationally challenged classroom bully that, not knowing what to do to find popularity, instead seeks to instill fear into its neighbours, mistaking that with 'respect'.

* Non-retaliating strategies are a bad choice as 'nasty' strategies will ruthlessly exploit those who use them. A lesson for the EU and Barack Obama - being soft on Putin is mathematically, logically, strategically, doomed to failure.

This time last year:
A post from Opole

This time two years ago:
Raise a glass to Powiśle

This time four years ago:
Mud, rain and local elections (Mrs G-W gets a thumbs down)

This time six years ago:
There must be a better way (commuting woes, again)