̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Festival of Ideas

We ask the experts: does society really care about the old and the vulnerable?

sj387 — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 10:00:00 +0000

Care of vulnerable groups is an emotive topic, often seen through the prism of crisis, scandal and rising costs. Funding is indeed a critical issue. According to Alzheimer’s Research UK, there are more than 820,000 people in the UK living with dementia: on average each one costs the economy more than £27,600 per annum. But discussions about how the ‘burden’ of care should be met, and by whom, also reveal much about our value systems and how we feel about each other. We asked three people some fundamental questions about care.

Charlie Cornish-Dale is a freelance journalist and editor. As part of his postgraduate research in social anthropology (St Catharine’s and King’s Colleges, Cambridge) he volunteered as a carer in a care home for the elderly where many of the residents had dementia. Dr Gail Ewing is a senior researcher at the Centre for Family Research, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. After training as a nurse, she later moved into research where she has focused on palliative and end-of-life care, particularly from the perspective of unpaid carers. Dr Claire Nicholl is Consultant Physician in Medicine for the Elderly at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. She is a practising clinician and advises on the interface between primary and secondary care as a champion for older people's services.

How do we think about care – and could we think differently?

Charlie Cornish-Dale: As someone trained to think as an anthropologist, I would say that care is a fundamental aspect of human relationships and of societies more generally. Care is something we all must do for each other at some time, through pregnancy, childhood, illness, disability and old age. It’s not something which happens only in institutions; care did not suddenly become a concern with the arrival of the care home. Kinship is care: whether we are brought up in an archetypal nuclear family or as part of an extended lineage or clan, we have obligations and duties towards defined groups of relations (sometimes even including the dead), which we must learn to fulfil. In talking about obligations and duties, we are, of course, entering the realm of ethics.

As different societies think about and do ethics in different ways, so it is with care. But what we think about care, and how we care, has changed, as our own society has changed, over a span of many centuries. ̽��ֱ��progress of individualism has profoundly changed the way society is organised and with it the structures — kin-based, religious and economic —for organising care. ̽��ֱ��celebrated anthropologist, Alan MacFarlane, in ̽��ֱ��Origins of English Individualism, traces individualism back to the 13th century, by which time England, unlike other medieval nations, already had a social structure based around the unit of the nuclear family; this, he claims, was a prerequisite for England’s emergence as the first capitalist industrial power, allowing for rapid industrialisation and urbanisation.

Gail Ewing: Care is part of everyday life for most people; whereby we care about others, not just care for them. From day to day, care is the practical stuff we do for each other as the result of our emotional bonds. We’re cared for within our families and we go on to care for our families. When our children are young we care for them in a hands-on way but as they grow up we move out of that physical sphere of caring. There are, of course, exceptions: some people need life-long care. When care is mentioned, our first thought is care of the elderly – but there are other groups who need care too. When someone develops a long-term condition, he or she may need increasing care over many years. Cancer can progress rapidly, in which case family members find themselves thrown into a caring situation with no preparation. Care is something many people find themselves doing to varying degrees.

Claire Nicholl: I chose to specialise in medicine for the elderly because of the huge variety it offers you as a physician in terms of a career. Most of the time, I absolutely love my job: I now work mainly on the wards and in outpatients clinics, I teach student doctors and train and examine postgraduate doctors. I ‘m also Trust co-lead for dementia services. I see lots of elderly frail people; each has different needs and often there is a chance to make a real difference to their lives. ̽��ֱ��negative media about the NHS, which I hear when I switch on the car radio, is depressing. Some terrible things have happened and urgently need addressing. But we mustn’t lose sight of the excellent work that goes on or launch an attack on the thousands of people who work in caring roles.

Nevertheless, I do feel that as a society we have moved backwards in terms of how we look out for each other. We tend to stand back in situations where in the past we might have got involved in reaching out to someone in need: if a child falls over we feel nervous about helping them up in case we are accused of touching them inappropriately. In many communities there’s been a loss of reciprocity – the idea of people coming together to help each other. On a more positive note, many of the elderly people I meet do have wonderful families and neighbours.

In terms of what the state does to look after people, there’s been a rise in public expectations of what the NHS can provide. For example, people who experience infertility, now expect to have IVF treatment into their 40s; people diagnosed with cancer want access to the best drugs and treatment which can be very expensive for very small benefits. ̽��ֱ��NHS doesn’t talk about rationing healthcare, it talks about prioritising – but in effect there’s a finite pot of money and it has to make decisions about who gets what and how much.

Who should be responsible for care?

CCD: What’s interesting is how we, in the west, categorise people and treat them accordingly, and, in particular, how we order lives into distinct stages, each having its own distinct expectations, responsibilities and mode of experience. This affects not only how we experience and understand our own lives but also how we treat others and, in turn, are treated by them. But our categories aren’t the only way of ordering a life. One of my favourite books in anthropology is No Aging in India, by Lawrence Cohen. Cohen considers the idea that, until very recently, there wasn’t such a thing as ageing in India. This might sound like post-modern nonsense; but what he means is that there wasn’t “ageing” as a distinct stage of life, as an irredeemable descent towards death in the way that we understand it. ̽��ֱ��elderly weren’t sent to liminal environments away from everybody else, but remained a central part of their communities.

It would be a typically anthropological gesture to say there is no ‘natural’ way to care; that there are many possible dispensations for caring for children, the vulnerable, the ill and the elderly, and that these are demonstrated by different cultures. This is all well and good, but it tells us little about what we should do in this, our, situation, other than that we shouldn’t believe our way is or was in any way inevitable. Cohen’s book is provocative, but it isn’t a guide in any meaningful sense. We have very specific problems. For instance, I worry that the terms of the care debate are solely economic. ̽��ֱ��‘burden of care’ is always monetary, never moral. But the question of responsibility is a moral question. We have the resources to have a moral debate, but lack faith in them. All too often, moral debate is silenced by somebody who says, “Well, that’s just your opinion”, the implication being that moral opinions are just subjective; we feel confident when we talk about facts, because they have ‘substance’ we can get our teeth into, but we don’t feel the same about values.

GE: Historically, care has been something that families undertake and, when it’s good and families are well supported, nothing can substitute this kind of care. It’s always been the case that most carers - both unpaid and paid – are women. When larger numbers of women spent their lives at home rather than the workplace, care was something they built into their other activities. But families have changed: most women have jobs as well as family responsibilities and they find themselves juggling their roles. Despite these changes, women undertake the overwhelming responsibility of care. And it’s women who more often than men find themselves alone and needing care at the end of life.

CN: As Gail says, care falls largely to women, whether they are paid or unpaid. And in both these cases, women are generally juggling a number of roles. Families are often geographically dispersed and women are likely to be working. So women face all these pressures. Paid carers get minimal training, their work is low status and poorly paid: yet they work they do is demanding, both mentally and physically, and they are in roles that carry a lot of personal responsibility. This isn’t something easy to fix because for people paying for care at home, or for a place in a home, the costs are already high. Those people paying for places in care homes are effectively subsidising the care of those in the same homes who are paid for by their local authorities. So society does face some really big challenges in this respect – and there are certainly no easy answers. And the pressures on families, and on the NHS and other services, are inevitably going to get greater.

Can caring be taught?

CCD: My research focused precisely on the question of learning to care. One doesn’t just walk off the street into a care home and start caring: I had to shadow experienced carers as they worked and learn from them. They told me that in order to care I had to “turn off” my emotions, to dissociate doer from deed and ignore provocations from the residents. Because residents were seen as lacking the necessary stable mental state to be responsible agents, you couldn’t blame them for bad behaviour, and reproaching them would only upset them and aggravate their condition. All this might sound rather different from the official line on caring, but this is exactly what new carers were doing: learning to see the residents as being irresponsible and undeserving of blame. This account of care’s necessary work on the self comes very close to a famous philosophical account of attributing blame. In his essay Freedom and Resentment, PF Strawson argues that attributing responsibility has nothing to do with an objective measure ‘out there’ in the world, but is about the emotional stances we take towards each other.

When we see someone as irresponsible, we suspend our habitual emotional responses, adopting what he calls an “objective attitude” and making that person no longer a full player in our moral games. This was something I had difficulty doing at first, being completely unused to interacting with elderly people with dementia. I had never been in a care home before and my family has been blessed with remarkable longevity: at 94 my great-grandmother Winifred was still taking a restorative Guinness daily and leaning over the banister to pop money in the electricity meter. Though some of the residents seemed to me as close to dead as it is possible to be when alive, others were less obviously incapable, and yet their behaviour could vary quite dramatically from day to day, or even within a single day, making it unclear what to expect of them and how to respond.

GE: I trained as a nurse at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and I can clearly remember being shown by the ward sister how to bathe a patient. She demonstrated to me, by the way she went about her this task, just as much as by what she said, that washing someone was not a lowly task but something quite vital. It was an opportunity to assess the patient, observing how they were, talking to them, while the care was provided. When it came to serving meals, there was the same attention to detail: food was selected from the trolley for its suitability to individual patients. We were taught to make a note of how much patients ate and drank, and help them if they needed help. Basic nursing care was something seen as valuable and skilled. I found the example of this sister inspirational; she taught me a tremendous amount about taking a pride in your work and upholding standards of care.

As for learning to “turn off” your emotions, I think that you do need a level of professionalism but I think this can be overdone. It’s not appropriate to be cold – but on the other hand it’s not appropriate to be too matey either. Niceties such as how you address a patient – by their first name or as Mr, Mrs or Miss if that is preferred – are so important to the dignity, and self-esteem, of the patient. All these apparently small things add up to create an environment that is either caring or not.

CN: I think the ability to care generally goes back to how you were brought up – and whether you were encouraged to be kind to people and animals, to think about others, and to respect other people’s space. Communication skills can be taught and improved on through tips and strategies to raise professionalism. But it’s very hard to teach caring from scratch. ̽��ֱ��extent to which someone feels empathy, or a sense of compassion, varies from person to person. If you don’t feel empathy for the people you’re working with, and paid to look after, you really shouldn’t be working in a hands-on caring role. ̽��ֱ��reality is, however, that if you’re unskilled and looking for a job, then the jobs readily available to you are likely to be in the care sector. As for how you go about caring, your personal style, it’s also true that everyone has a different way of doing things: an approach works with one patient won’t necessarily suit another. That’s a fact of life we can’t avoid.

Is there a crisis of care?

CCD: I think how the idea of how a care crisis is framed in the media and the public imagination, is as interesting as the question of whether it actually exists or not. Clearly, the economics of care are frightening, and made even more so by the current political and economic dispensation. But we need to make sure we are asking the right questions and looking in the right places. ̽��ֱ��general idea of a “crisis” might itself be a problem, smuggling in certain assumptions which cloud our thinking or make us favour certain lines of questioning over others.

We should be alert to the fact that we seem only to have economic crises today. ̽��ֱ��care crisis is no different, being presented as an economic, not a moral, problem. Even a major study like Dementia 2010 sticks to the facts (the figures) and avoids the language of values. It’s the same in the newspapers, more or less. In a recent piece on Labour’s care policy, for instance, Polly Toynbee used the word ‘fair’ essentially to mean ‘distributed along more economically equitable lines’; she did not question whether there might be a way to care for the elderly which not only takes into account the distribution of the cost, but equally asks what they deserve and are due from their loved ones and from society.

When we do discuss morality, usually in cases of abuse by carers, what’s often emphasised is its singularity— there are only individual scandals involving individual care homes and individual carers (Winterbourne View, Mid-Staffs, Hilton Gardens, etc). ̽��ֱ��French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu famously said that Watergate wasn’t a scandal, because for something to be a scandal it had to be individual or unusual; how many Watergates had there already been, and how many were there to come? American politics itself was the real scandal. He could just as easily have been talking about care today.

GE: ̽��ֱ��scale of need created by the growing elderly population has been well documented. Many paid carers working in residential homes and in the community do an exceptional job – but they receive minimal training and are rewarded by minimum wages for caring for some of the most vulnerable people in society. This doesn’t give carers – or the public at large - a good message about the importance of their role. It’s shocking that carers paid to support people in their own homes are generally not paid for the time they spend travelling between visits – and sometimes not even reimbursed for their travel costs. Some paid carers are on zero hour contracts which give them no job security. This situation urgently needs addressing.

There is another less immediately visible problem too: a crisis of individual people not recognising the situation they are in. Carers looking after family members or friends start out by providing one level of care but it often escalates so they continue to provide care with no service input – and often no knowledge of what support they could access. This can lead to cases of crisis – especially when one elderly or frail person is looking after another.

CN: I fear that this winter, and if not this winter then next winter, could be a really difficult time for the NHS. In my opinion, we have had far too much political interference and reorganisations which have led to a loss of staff morale and affected the ways in which people feel a sense of ownership of their jobs. In the case of recent scandals, which are inexcusable, most of those involved were not ‘bad people’: they were let down by the system and slipped into struggling to meet targets and jumping through hoops rather than looking at the care provided to patients for whom they were responsible. A system in which one Trust has to compete with another, and is judged on the bottom line, is not a system that is putting compassion first: it’s a system that prioritises targets over people.

Is there a solution to this crisis?

CCD: I think we need to be certain what the nature of the crisis is. There clearly are economic problems. But even if we solved the immediate economic problems— if more funding were made available for dementia research, diagnosis and treatment, for instance — then the structure of care institutions, if it remained intact, might still make abuse and mistreatment inevitable.

As long as the elderly and the vulnerable are treated as objects to be administered to, in a better or worse way, then I think the moral problem will remain. ̽��ֱ��question is whether we can find ways to allow the elderly and the vulnerable to exist actively, rather than passively, within, rather than outside, society. This is the provocative message at the heart of No Aging in India, that we don’t have to do things this way — that the elderly don’t have to be passive and that their existence and experience can be profoundly meaningful, both to themselves and to those around them. But moral questions barely register at the moment. Making them register won’t be easy.

GE: We certainly need a much better career structure for carers to encourage them to develop and move forward – the introduction of NVQs is a valuable first step and must be encouraged. Care is unpredictable by nature: this is at the crux of the challenge. As the journalist Jackie Ashley, wife of Andrew Marr, has pointed out in interviews about their experience of Andrew’s stroke and recovery, paid-for care is organised to pre-planned time slots. Andrew’s carer would arrive at 7am – but he wanted to get up at 6am which meant that when the carer arrived assistance was no longer needed. This is just a small detail but it reveals so much about a crisis facing not just one family but many others too. Jackie Ashley has also raised the question of whether family leave could be broadened beyond maternity and paternity leave to include a range of situations and scenarios. There is no substitute for quality family care – and we can strive to help families to make that care possible.

CN: Caring for the frail older people whom I see, many of whom have cognitive problems, takes a lot of time and this puts real pressure on staffing budgets. People with dementia don’t necessarily feel hungry at meal times and feeding them takes time, skill and patience. We’re now seeing an increase in the use of volunteers to undertake these tasks in hospitals. At Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Giles Wright, Voluntary Services Manager, is working on a programme to ensure that all volunteers in the hospital have basic training about dementia and those who express a particular interest in working with older people have additional training and on-going support.

There’s a lot of talk about assistive technology and how it can play a role in care. It’s a term used to describe not just devices that allow people to do things like close the curtains, switch the radio on and heat up food remotely, or ways of monitoring people at home – for example whether they are walking around and have opened the fridge – but also covers the development of robots as companions in the home, something that’s been explored in Japan. I’m sceptical about a lot of this: essentially people need people, not gadgets. Pets can provide companionship and a new development is the training of dogs. Dogs can enhance the quality of life of a person with dementia – but once again dogs need people to look after them.

With the number of very old people increasing dramatically it’s likely that attitudes to euthanasia will eventually change. At present, there’s a lot of skirting around the issue in professional circles. Many people, especially older women, tell me that they are worried about becoming a burden on their families, and are really frightened about losing their independence and dignity. These people tell me that they would like to have the choice of going to Dignitas but are concerned that when they might want to end things they will not able to make the journey.

To purchase tickets (£6) for the Festival of Ideas talk ‘Melvyn Bragg in discussion: dementia narratives – the art of care’ phone 01223 353053 email mindsarts@gmail.com or visit www.artsminds.org.uk

For more information about this story contact Alex Buxton, Office of Communications, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk 01223 761673

Inset images from top: Vinoth Chandar, Sceptre Publishers, Jess Golden, Magnus Franklin, Phil and Pam, Marmotte73, Melvyn Bragg

On November 1 Melvyn Bragg will talk about his book Grace and Mary at the Festival of Ideas. ̽��ֱ��novel is based on Bragg’s own bitter-sweet experience of his mother’s dementia. Looking back across three generations, it raises fundamental questions about social attitudes and how they shape our lives. Three people discuss some of the big challenges that face us.

Care is a fundamental aspect of human relationships and of societies more generally

Charlie Cornish-Dale

Gene Han

Steel Dust: Young and Old

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Why do we read (and write) novels?

sj387 — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Stories have been told for as long as we have been able to speak. From the epic narratives of the Middle Ages to the latest 3D horror movies, the telling and retelling of stories is an important aspect of being human. ̽��ֱ��enduring appeal of the novel – which takes the reader into a parallel universe - has been boosted by the advent of digital readers and proved resilient in the face of the multiple distractions that bombard us. Book groups flourish and creative writing courses have never been so popular. Just why we continue to be gripped by the make-believe is the subject of a panel discussion at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Festival of Ideas on 31 October.

We asked four people questions about the reading and writing of fiction. Dr Sarah Burton is the Director of Creative Writing Master of Studies Course, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, a new programme run by the Institute of Continuing Education. Her latest book ̽��ֱ��Complete and Utter History of the World According to Samuel Stewart Aged 9 (Short Books) was published in September. Trevor Byrne is author of the novel Ghosts and Lighting (Canongate) and many short stories and essays. He is also co-founder of Hyland & Byrne Editing Firm with author MJ Hyland. Both Byrne and Hyland will be taking part in the Festival of Ideas debate. Dr Malachi McIntosh is a Fellow of King’s College. He is interested in representations of migrant and minority groups in contemporary Caribbean, British and American literature. Helen Taylor is a literature consultant. Her latest project, ‘Thresholds’, brought leading poets into Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� museums to create new work and inspire young people and the wider community to engage with the collections.

How did reading and writing shape your childhood?

Sarah Burton: My mother taught me to read and write when I was four. She also read all the time, so reading was simply a natural activity. There were lots of books at home and we regularly went to the library. I also had a fantastic godmother who weaned me off Enid Blyton and onto writers like Clive King and Nina Bawden, and I remember the surprise of reading about ‘real’ children, rather than the Famous Five or Secret Seven, who didn’t speak, behave or look like me. Then I discovered Kurt Vonnegut and that revolutionised my idea of what writing could be. Vonnegut’s writing was surprising yet somehow familiar – it had a humanity and an irreverence that had me devouring as many of his books as I could get hold of. It was the first time I recognised and identified with a writer and I think that’s when I started to think that writing was something I wanted to be able to do. At about this time our teacher asked us to write what we thought happened after the end of Watership Down, which we’d been reading in class. My effort filled two exercise books. I’m a better editor these days.

Trevor Byrne: There weren't a lot of books around when I was a kid, but my mother read to my brother and sister and me from what I think were Enid Blyton books, just the same one or two. ̽��ֱ��only character I remember is a very bold doll ('bold' in the Irish sense – 'naughty', you'd say in England) called Emily Jane. ̽��ֱ��stories were dull and so my mother added expletive-laden dialogue. Some bleeding heart pixie might say, 'Oh Emily, you're so selfish!' (this would be Blyton's dialogue), to which Emily would reply, 'Ah fuck off, you! Get a life!'

At age 10 or so I stole ̽��ֱ��Hobbit from school, which was the first book I read on my own. My other great early experience with words was the Fighting Fantasy series of 'choose your own adventure' gamebooks. A few years ago I was in the attic and looked at them again and said, 'Oh, it's all written in second person!' This is what university does to you.

It was about this time I wrote my first story, which borrowed for its cast of characters the Irish national football team, and detailed the squad's adventures trying to reach Italy in time for the 1990 World Cup, as for some reason there were no planes or boats. In the end the Irish proletariat constructed a massive catapult and shot the team across Europe – total deus ex machina ending, that.

Malachi McIntosh: Maybe bizarrely, this is a question I’ve never been asked or asked myself. I suppose I read a fair amount as a child, partly because I was an only child and partly because I spent a good chunk of my childhood in hospitals for one reason or another. Like Sarah’s, my mother was an avid reader and some of my best childhood memories are of her voices for characters from the Chronicles of Narnia. Around age nine or so I discovered comic books and spent the next 13 years living with the hope that I’d suffer some grievous accident that would give me either a superpower or a laser beam someplace. I started writing around the same time, maybe inspired by the comic books or just following the path of many people who begin reading at a young age.

I wrote my first ‘novel’ at maybe age nine or ten or so, and gave it to a teacher who never gave it back. After that I wrote comic book after comic book, stories mostly filled with superheroes named after randomly selected words from the dictionary like ‘Trilobite’ and ‘Enervate’. My mother was an avid churchgoer and we went to the type of church where everyone contributed something, so I started writing about, speaking about and trying to interpret the Bible as well, an experience that I think served as good preparation for a career of literary analysis and lectures long after I left the church. Writing was then, and still is for me, a way for me to understand my own ideas. Often it’s not until I’ve seen my thoughts take concrete shape that I realise the implications of what I’ve been thinking.

Helen Taylor: As a child, reading was a sanctuary and an escape from the boredom on Sundays and the long hours awake after my sister and I were made to go to bed when it was still light and we could hear life going on outside. We had a few books at home, classics like Anne of Green Gables and Heidi but then like Sarah, I discovered Enid Blyton and the Malory Towers series which led me on to the Narnia books and I became an avid reader. One of the highlights was being allowed to borrow six books from the library when I reached the grand age of 12 and having the safety net of a selection of books to read every week. Discovering Alan Garner’ s novels and studying D H Lawrence at school was the gateway to reading more widely and thinking about the actual writing rather than just turning the pages. A Scottish primary education gave me a love of the act of writing, whether it was summaries of books or crafting stories and essays.

Where does the power of fiction lie?

SB: ̽��ֱ��power of fiction is released, as I see it, by two processes. First, writers have to recruit or seduce or beguile us into their world – only then do we trust them to take us on this journey. ̽��ֱ��books we put down after only a few pages have failed to make that connection with us (and different writers, of course, connect with different people). Then there is the journey, and that’s where the power is most obvious. That’s where the reader and writer have made a compact, where a point of view is shared, where common responses are exploited.

TB: Until some neuroscientist cracks it, it's an open question. We're evolutionarily hardwired to look for patterns, for meaning; we crave narrative. This is a hindrance when unchecked but it's also an incredible gift. Fiction brings you to places, emotionally and imaginatively, which you never otherwise would have visited. ̽��ֱ��psychologist Steven Pinker wondered once that, maybe, fiction is a kind of empathy technology. I like that. In its construction I think fiction is a skilled dreaming, and the story we construct in and from the dream is presented as a subtle thesis: given this set of people and this set of circumstances, this will happen. It's a claim by the writer about the nature of some aspect of humanity, and that's no small thing. ̽��ֱ��audacity of that is arresting; if you stick with me for the whole story, then it's probably because you agree with me, you think, 'Yeah, that's how it is, you've told me the truth.' And the truth is powerful.

MM: I suspect there are almost certainly as many answers to this question as there are people to answer it. My current favourite answer is the one given by Albert Camus in his book ̽��ֱ��Rebel [L’Homme revolté]. Camus says that all artwork is a demand for unity, a ‘reconciliation of the unique with the universal’, an imposition of order on our chaotic, closed and very limited experiences of the world. His core idea is that narrative art organises life in such a way that we can reflect on it from a distance, experience it anew and deny the transient nature of the everyday. Following Camus, I think fiction lets us press pause, rewind, zoom in, zoom out; it creates a space for us to think ourselves and our world in novel ways – to be titillated, frightened, disgusted, amused and surprised – often at ourselves – and meaningfully and distinctly from television or film, have significant control over that experience, to work with the author rather than be worked on by the author.

HT: Yes, I agree with Malachi and with Camus’s answer. Someone once said to me that it’s easy to recognise the people who don’t read fiction as their outlook on life is narrower and less imaginative, and they find it hard to put themselves in other people’s shoes. A generalisation, but with elements of truth. ̽��ֱ��power of fiction begins with fairy tales, nursery rhymes and picture books giving children ways of looking at the world and outside themselves. As we grow up, ‘the compact between reader and writer’, working with the author, is a powerful personal and shared experience, and in recent years a more public experience with the meteoric rise of book groups. ̽��ֱ��poet Billy Collins puts it well I think. On reading fiction he says: “I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow...”

Is it important for readers and writers to read the classics?

SB: What are ‘classics’? It should almost be a human right that people have access to Shakespeare, Hemingway, Golding, etc (and everyone will have their own list, which proves the point that there is no agreed canon). But it won’t kill them if they don’t. As long as high quality fiction is available to them, it needn’t have the endorsement of the literary establishment. ̽��ֱ��establishment is usually way behind, or narrowly ahead, or talks airily about ‘the common or general reader’, as if these were not the readers who first endorsed the Brontës, Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, etc. There are also truly outstanding writers who time has forgotten, such as Mary E Mann (1848-1929). Her short story Little Brother is just astonishing.

TB: Depending on what kind of book you want to write it might not be important at all, and as a reader you should feel no more pressure to finish Don Quixote than 'Salem's Lot if you don't fancy it 50 pages in. If by 'classics' we mean the Russians, Proust, Hardy etc, then my own reading is patchy. I love Chekhov's stories, but will never finish Sense and Sensibility, even though Austen will soon be on the ten pound note. Martin Amis said that the only way we have of judging the quality of a book is whether it retains a readership. I think that's fair enough, though it's imprecise, as all things literary tend to be (in her answer to the same question, Sarah mentions Mary F Mann, for example – I've never heard of Mary F Mann). Apparently Kazuo Ishiguro hardly read at all growing up, then gobbled some 'classics' like Popeye does spinach and won the Booker in five minutes. But classics come in all kinds, as everyone else has pointed out. ' ̽��ֱ��Call of Cthulhu', though it's about an extra-terrestrial Great Old One and was written by a troubled weirdo who was an anti-Semite but then married a Jew and ended up shedding his crackpot views, is a classic. So's ' ̽��ֱ��Lady with the Dog', written by a doctor who spent years writing goofball vignettes for Russian tabloids before he evolved like some literary Pokemon into the best of the best. Both stories move me. Like Lovecraft and Chekhov, like writing itself, nothing is straightforward.

MM: My answer is probably inevitable based on my field of focus – but echoing Sarah, I think important questions are ‘whose classics’ and ‘the classics of which era’? It seems relatively clear that most writers immerse themselves in the ‘classics’ as they are understood at their time and in their place, but Dickens’s classics weren’t Eliot’s classics and Eliot’s classics were likely not David Foster Wallace’s, Shani Mootoo’s or Chinua Achebe’s classics – although there might be some interesting overlaps. It’s always useful, in all fields, to know what people think is good and why – but we should never confuse ‘a’ good with ‘the’ good. ̽��ֱ��book I would always tell anyone to read is ̽��ֱ��Life and Times of Michael K – a Booker-winner, but very much hated by some of my colleagues. It’s a classic for me because of what it says to me about loneliness and the difficulty of living against the day; to other people, it’s just a bit boring and the main character doesn’t speak enough. As Sarah says, we create our own canons.

HT: I agree with both Malachi and Sarah – what classics, whose and which era? However, one can’t escape from a need for shared references and reading experience. It can be useful and enjoyable to make connections and know if something is Dickensian, Woolfian, Chandleresque etc, etc. My children (now grown up) would put the Bible in the classics section. Going to local state schools, they had little Bible education apart from nativity plays, the Easter story and carol singing, which means as adults, a reading of say T S Eliot’s ̽��ֱ��Wasteland, or Grahame Greene is a shadowy experience. ̽��ֱ��‘classic’ children’s book I would tell children (and adults for that matter) to read would be Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, and for adults, well it changes, at the moment I would say To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, a book I abandoned at 22 years old after the first chapter.

Is some literature better than others – and what makes it better?

SB: Is Heart of Darkness better than Fifty Shades of Grey? Undoubtedly, if you’re looking for a literary masterpiece. But it’s not ‘better’ if you’re looking for a certain sort of escapism. What makes fiction that tends to deserve the title of literary fiction different from other forms of fiction can be pinned down to a certain extent by critical analysis of the literary techniques deployed by the writer. Yet a huge element of its appeal lies in something almost ineffable – the brilliant, original idea; the insight that, once written down, seems the only way to say something.

TB: It's difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove objectively that one book's better than another. Still, I defend my right to say something's bad, and that, if it were treated this way, it could be made better, even just better on its own terms (ie, a better, more engaging, exciting, heartbreaking, swoon-inducing romance than it was in the previous draft). This is the editor in me speaking. All writing can be honed in such a way that the final experience (for the reader) is enhanced, and this fact must say something about the theoretical (if not practical) possibility of stating that this is better than that.

With respect to book versus book (rather than draft versus draft of the same book, which is an argument about the improving power of craft), we now shuffle into the maddeningly bureaucratic headquarters of experiential relativity. Here I leave my science hat at the door: while I can't prove that a single copy of All That Rises Must Converge is a greater gift to the world than a million Mills and Boon books (or that a single Tom Waits more deeply enriches the human condition than a million Justin Biebers), I'm gonna go ahead and say it's so anyway, Mills and Boon (and Bieber) be damned.

MM: I think, too, that we can never stress too much that categories like ‘literary masterpieces’ and even ‘literature’ do not exist independently of their assessors, assessors who are bound in an era and see value in part with that era’s eyes. As Sarah said before, schools – from compulsory education upward – set borders on and mould expectations of what is and isn’t literature, but over time those boundaries break. It’s difficult for me not to recall Thomas Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Indian Education’ of 1835 where Macaulay, a historian and colonial administrator, declared, that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’. Or recall the many books banned which had to assert their right to be called literature and not pornography, like Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. For those reasons, I find it near impossible to make claims that one work is better than another. I can describe what makes it better for me, or why it might be worthwhile to study it, but I think that’s all I can do.

HT: This is an impossible question for all the reasons Malachi and Sarah give. It also misses out the experience of reading and how it is different for everyone depending on the time, place, mood, purpose and so on. Going back to Sarah’s earlier comment about being weaned off Enid Blyton, I’m not sure I agree about ’weaning’ children off particular writers, if children want a staple diet of Famous Five and Harry Potter, that’s fine as long as they have the opportunity of reading a wide range of books throughout their lives and mixing old friends of books with new ones. These opportunities can come through family members, teachers, friends and libraries, who can create the reading landscape and encourage children and adults to look wider and further.

What are you reading now and what will you be reading next?

SB: I am currently reading my own latest book, as it has only just been published and I am still learning to love it as a real, physical hardback I can hold in my hand and admire from a variety of angles (and also because it is so utterly hilarious). Unfortunately, that only takes about an hour, so I’m having to read and reread books we have chosen for the reading list for our first cohort of students on the MSt in Creative Writing. That, in itself, is a huge, unmitigated treat. Both Michael Holroyd and Wendy Cope are coming to talk to our students this week and it’s been a sheer delight to have a reason to revisit their earlier work and discover their more recent writings.

TB: I just finished Abominable Science! by Donald Prothero and Daniel Loxton, which is a great sceptical look at the mad, fascinating world of cryptozoology. For the past couple of months I've been slowly working my way through the mammoth Collected Poetry of Ted Hughes (I'm an atheist, but that tome gives me some understanding of what a holy book might feel like to a believer). I go through phases, sometimes months at a time, when I don't feel like reading fiction at all, and instead read nonfiction and watch lots of documentaries, and I'm just now beginning to emerge from such a phase. I'd intended to read ̽��ֱ��First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times, by Adrienne Mayor, but instead, next up will be Donald Ray Pollock's tough, sad, funny and just plain great story collection Knockemstiff, which I've already read, but found myself flicking through again this morning, before I got back to work on a story of my own. I'm hooked all over again.

MM: I’ve just started Sunetra Gupta’s Memories of Rain for a paper I’m working on. It tells the story of a very young Indian woman who marries a British man, is almost immediately betrayed by him but remains faithful. So far, it’s excellent; its stream-of-consciousness style fuses and mutates sentences and slides in and out of perspectives in a way that really propels me through it. I’ll also be doing a fair bit of re-reading in the coming weeks in preparation for the start of term. ̽��ֱ��text I’m most looking forward to going through again is Zadie Smith’s NW, a book whose central section, on the character Natalie, was, for me, like reading a mirror.

HT: I’ve just finished Stoner ‘the undiscovered masterpiece’ because I felt I ought to read it. Not a good feeling to begin a book with. I’m half way through re-reading ̽��ֱ��Leopard by Giuseppe de Lampedusa because I’ve just come back from Italy and wanted to recapture the wonder I felt when I first read it in my 20s. I’m also re-reading a lot of Seamus Heaney’s poetry, “I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing”, and his Oxford lectures The Government of the Tongue. I’m looking forward to starting NW because I like Zadie Smith’s style of writing and the latest Donna Leon just because it’s set in Venice which I know well; I enjoy her plots, I like the main character and also local detail which walks me through the city as I read.

Inset images from top: TooFarNorth (N), Gwydion M. Williams (Hobbit), Ann Bowler Calton, ̽��ֱ��Royal Freemasons’ School for Female Children (O), John Shepherd (Camus), TooFarNorth (V), Gabriel (Dickens), TooFarNorth (E), Jvoves (books), dumbledad (L), Chris Drumm (Heaney)

For more information about this story contact Alex Buxton, Office of Communications, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk 01223 761673

On the eve of the Man Booker prize, our insatiable appetite for fiction (and fascination with those who create it) comes sharply into focus. According to the Publishers Association, sales of paperback fiction rose by 3% in 2012 to £502 million, while sales of digital novels soared by almost 150%, reaching £172 million. What’s the magic of reading and writing?

Visit Britain

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Yes

Catch some Hay fever online

tdk25 — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:36:31 +0000

A selection of talks from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s series at this year’s Hay Festival, which ended on Sunday, are now available online.

̽��ֱ��collection can be found on iTunesU, or via Soundcloud by clicking here.

This was the fifth year that the ̽��ֱ�� has run a series of talks at the famous literary festival as part of its public engagement work. Thousands of people attended the Cambridge series, which covered subjects as diverse as domestic service, women’s equality, US politics, nanotechnology, and smart drugs.

Alumni including Chris Blackhurst, editor of the Independent, and Gaby Hinsliff, author of Half a Wife: ̽��ֱ��Working Family’s Guide to Getting a Life Back, also took part in discussions with Cambridge researchers. ̽��ֱ��Cambridge Alumni Relations Office meanwhile held an event which was addressed by Peter Florence, the Festival’s director and a Cambridge alumnus.

Professor Martin Rees’ talk on a post-human future drew an audience of about 1,000 people, Professor Simon Blackburn ‘s discussion with Chris Blackhurst on the nature of declining trust in institutions pulled in about 750, and several other talks and sessions had to be moved to bigger venues because of their popularity among festival-goers.

Dr Alex Jeffrey, who spoke on justice and recovery in Bosnia with Guardian journalist Ed Vulliamy, said: “It was superb! It was a welcome change from more scholarly styles of discussion and forced me to think differently about my work.”

A total of 16 researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� took part in the Festival’s Cambridge series. Elsewhere, a further six Cambridge academics appeared as part of the broader Festival programme.

Nicola Buckley, Head of Public Engagement, said: " ̽��ֱ��audience reaction to the Cambridge series at this year's Hay Festival was fantastic, and the question and answer sessions were thought-provoking for speakers and audiences alike. We met a number of people at Hay who had chosen to go to several of the talks in the Cambridge series because they enjoyed them so much. We are grateful to Peter Florence and the team at Hay and all the speakers for taking part."

Eight of the talks from the Cambridge Series from this year’s Hay Festival are now available for users to stream or download online.

It was superb! It was a welcome change from more scholarly styles of discussion and forced me to think differently about my work.

Alex Jeffrey

Hay Festival.

Reading at the Hay Festival.

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Yes

Digital records could expose intimate details and personality traits of millions

fpjl2 — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 18:49:49 +0000

New research, published today in the journal PNAS, shows that surprisingly accurate estimates of Facebook users’ race, age, IQ, sexuality, personality, substance use and political views can be inferred from automated analysis of only their Facebook Likes - information currently publicly available by default.

In the study, researchers describe Facebook Likes as a “generic class” of digital record - similar to web search queries and browsing histories - and suggest that such techniques could be used to extract sensitive information for almost anyone regularly online.

Researchers at Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre, in collaboration with Microsoft Research Cambridge, analysed a dataset of over 58,000 US Facebook users, who volunteered their Likes, demographic profiles and psychometric testing results through the myPersonality application.

Users opted in to provide data and gave consent to have profile information recorded for analysis. Facebook Likes were fed into algorithms and corroborated with information from profiles and personality tests.

Researchers created statistical models able to predict personal details using Facebook Likes alone. Models proved 88% accurate for determining male sexuality, 95% accurate distinguishing African-American from Caucasian American and 85% accurate differentiating Republican from Democrat. Christians and Muslims were correctly classified in 82% of cases, and good prediction accuracy was achieved for relationship status and substance abuse – between 65 and 73%.

But few users clicked Likes explicitly revealing these attributes. For example, less that 5% of gay users clicked obvious Likes such as Gay Marriage. Accurate predictions relied on ‘inference’ - aggregating huge amounts of less informative but more popular Likes such as music and TV shows to produce incisive personal profiles.

Even seemingly opaque personal details such as whether users’ parents separated before the user reached the age of 21 were accurate to 60%, enough to make the information “worthwhile for advertisers”, suggest the researchers.

While they highlight the potential for personalised marketing to improve online services using predictive models, the researchers also warn of the threats posed to users’ privacy. They argue that many online consumers might feel such levels of digital exposure exceed acceptable limits - as corporations, governments, and even individuals could use predictive software to accurately infer highly sensitive information from Facebook Likes and other digital ‘traces’.

̽��ֱ��researchers also tested for personality traits including intelligence, emotional stability, openness and extraversion. While such latent traits are far more difficult to gauge, the accuracy of the analysis was striking. Study of the openness trait – the spectrum of those who dislike change to those who welcome it – revealed that observation of Likes alone is roughly as informative as using an individual’s actual personality test score.

Some Likes had a strong but seemingly incongruous or random link with a personal attribute, such as Curly Fries with high IQ, or That Spider is More Scared Than U Are with non-smokers.

When taken as a whole, researchers believe that the varying estimations of personal attributes and personality traits gleaned from Facebook Like analysis alone can form surprisingly accurate personal portraits of potentially millions of users worldwide.

They say the results suggest a possible revolution in psychological assessment which – based on this research – could be carried out on an unprecedented scale without costly assessment centres and questionnaires.

“We believe that our results, while based on Facebook Likes, apply to a wider range of online behaviours.” said Michal Kosinski, Operations Director at the Psychometric Centre, who conducted the research with his Cambridge colleague David Stillwell and Thore Graepel from Microsoft Research.

“Similar predictions could be made from all manner of digital data, with this kind of secondary ‘inference’ made with remarkable accuracy - statistically predicting sensitive information people might not want revealed. Given the variety of digital traces people leave behind, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for individuals to control.

“I am a great fan and active user of new amazing technologies, including Facebook. I appreciate automated book recommendations, or Facebook selecting the most relevant stories for my newsfeed,” said Kosinski. “However, I can imagine situations in which the same data and technology is used to predict political views or sexual orientation, posing threats to freedom or even life.”

“Just the possibility of this happening could deter people from using digital technologies and diminish trust between individuals and institutions – hampering technological and economic progress. Users need to be provided with transparency and control over their information.”

Thore Graepel from Microsoft Research said he hoped the research would contribute to the on-going discussions about user privacy: “Consumers rightly expect strong privacy protection to be built into the products and services they use and this research may well serve as a reminder for consumers to take a careful approach to sharing information online, utilising privacy controls and never sharing content with unfamiliar parties.”

David Stillwell from Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� added: “I have used Facebook since 2005, and I will continue to do so. But I might be more careful to use the privacy settings that Facebook provides.”

For more information, please contact fred.lewsey@admin.cam.ac.uk

Research shows that intimate personal attributes can be predicted with high levels of accuracy from ‘traces’ left by seemingly innocuous digital behaviour, in this case Facebook Likes. ̽��ֱ��study raises important questions about personalised marketing and online privacy.

Similar predictions could be made from all manner of digital data, with this kind of secondary ‘inference’ made with remarkable accuracy

Michal Kosinski

Cambridge Psychometrics Centre

Graphic from mypersonality app

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Yes

Are we being sold online?

fpjl2 — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 08:00:06 +0000

One in every nine people on Earth is on Facebook and the average Briton devotes an entire day to the site each month. Personal information, much of it volunteered, has become so prevalent and readily available that for many it constitutes the most powerful marketing tool in human history. ̽��ֱ��question is, how is this information being used, and by whom? And, should we be worried?

Listen to the debate here:

From 3:30pm on Saturday afternoon (27 October) at the Faculty of Law, a panel of experts will explore the questions that surround the dream of global connectivity, and the nightmare of human commodity, as part of this year’s Festival of Ideas.

From social interactions, entertainment, shopping, and gathering information, almost any human activity you can think of is now mediated digitally. As such, these behaviours can easily be recorded and analysed, fuelling the emergence of personalised search engines, recommender systems, and targeted online marketing.

This raises highly sensitive questions about privacy and data ownership. Who should have access to such an extraordinarily powerful reservoir of information, and where it should be stored?

“ ̽��ֱ��widespread availability of extensive records of individual behaviour, and the desire to learn more about customers and citizens presents serious challenges to future society, particularly in relation to trust,” says Michal Kosinski, Director of Operations for the ̽��ֱ��’s Psychometrics Centre and Leader of the e-Psychometrics Unit.

“Trust between consumers and corporations, governments and their citizens, families even can be seriously harmed once people realize how exposed they are in the digital environment. It can all still seem quite innocent, with Facebook ‘likes’ and photos of friends, but new research is starting to show that this seemingly harmless information can be used to make very accurate inferences of highly sensitive traits.”

Kosinski, one of the panellists, spends much of his time cultivating and analysing the increasingly immense tracts of data in order to show the precision with which estimations can be made about personality traits, such as openness, extroversion and stability.

“Never before have we had access to such comprehensive behavioural data about consumers,” says Kosinski. “A marketing revolution is upon us, a completely new dimension is added through the combination of scientifically robust personality tests and other demographic information.”

̽��ֱ��other panellists are William Dutton, Professor of Internet Studies at the ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford’s Internet Institute, Nick Pickles, Director of the civil liberties and privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, and Mariam Cook, Senior Digital Consultant at PR firm Porter Novelli.

“ ̽��ֱ��web connects us more closely than ever before, giving organisations and brands the capability to understand us, target us, and to fulfil our needs and desires in increasingly sophisticated ways,” says Cook. “This presents many fantastic opportunities for marketers, and potential delights for those formerly known as the audience, but it also means great responsibility lies on our shoulders.”

“This presents a challenge - how to balance the apparently conflicting ideals of privacy and openness in all of our data dealings.”

But for Nick Pickles, the increasingly heard motto ‘if we're not paying to use a service, then we're the product’ is at the very core of this issue: “Our personal data is the oil of the internet age and yet we have grown oblivious to how our every movement is being monitored and analysed for commercial gain.”

“As an entire generation outsources it's privacy to social media companies, I believe strengthening individual privacy will soon become a social necessity and a commercial imperative.”

Panel discussion ‘Are we being sold online?’ starts at 3.30pm on Saturday 27 October at the Faculty of Law. With Michal Kosinski, Cambridge's Psychometrics Centre; Professor William Dutton, Oxford Internet Institute; Nick Pickles, Big Brother Watch; Mariam Cook, Porter Novelli and the Chair, Spencer Kelly, Click presenter.

A panel discussion for the Festival of Ideas examines whether social media giants are profiting from our willingness to share the most intimate details of our lives online, and whether we should be worried by this compromise to our privacy.

Never before have we had access to such comprehensive behavioural data about consumers.

Michal Kosinski

Ed Yourdon from flickr

Thinkin' about the code

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Yes

Old suspicions remain after the Arab Spring

mjg209 — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 12:19:25 +0000

Western hopes that the Middle East's new democrats will be grateful for their support in ousting dictatorial regimes is misguided, a leading researcher will tell a debate on the aftermath of the first wave of the Arab Spring.

Glen Rangwala, lecturer in the Department of Politics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, will be speaking at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas debate Where Next for the Arab Spring? on 25th October.

He says: "Old suspicions in the region of Western powers have not ended with the Arab Awakening - this was seen most obviously in the 'video riots' last month. Many politicians here and in the US assume that because Western governments are helping with democratic transitions or participated in the ousting old rulers, this will bring closer relations between the West and the Middle East. That is wrong: democrats throughout the Arab world saw the West as supporting the old autocrats until the very last moment, and even then remaining only lukewarm to the prospect of democratic revolution. ̽��ֱ��idea that the Middle East's democrats will be grateful to the West is misguided; old suspicions remain."

Rangwala will argue that despite the fact that many of the countries that experienced popular revolution, particularly Egypt and Tunisia, are currently going through large-scale economic change and seeking external investment this will not necessarily bring closer relationships with outside powers. In fact, economic problems mean many are seeing new waves of migration to Europe, and the rise of nationalist and leftwing parties that challenge more vocally than the Islamists the alliances with Western countries.

He will also touch on Western suspicions about popular political forces in the Arab world, particularly the Islamic parties, even when they are not totally justifiable. He says: " ̽��ֱ��Arab Awakening has the potential to perpetuate, even deepen, the awkward relations between the Arab world and the West, even as their political systems come to resemble one another all the more."

Also taking part in the debate, which will be chaired by Ed Kessler, Executive Director of the Woolf Institute, is Paul Rogers, Professor of Peace Studies at the ̽��ֱ�� of Bradford. He will argue that the Arab Spring promises much that will prove difficult to realise.

He says: "Continuing resistance from autocracies, high expectations of reform and deep societal divisions all make the process fraught. If the Arab Awakening does succeed it will also serve to marginalise radical Islamists. If it fails their power will be renewed."

Other speakers include writer and commentator Nesrine Malik, who will talk about the impact on women of the Arab Spring, and Dr Toby Matthiesen, Abdullah al-Mubarak Research Fellow in Islamic & Middle Eastern Studies at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He will be talking about how the Arab Spring protests affected the Gulf states, particularly Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, and how these states responded to protests both at home and in the wider Arab world.

̽��ֱ��debate is one of many at this year's Festival of Ideas, a 12-day celebration of the arts, humanities and social sciences.

̽��ֱ��biggest free festival of its type in the UK, it takes place from October 24-November 4, and features more than 170 mostly free events in and around Cambridge.

With a theme of ‘Dreams and Nightmares’, this year’s festival features talks and presentations from a range of leading academics, journalists and thinkers, including renowned BBC correspondent Kate Adie, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, Radio 4 Controller Gwyneth Williams and Executive Editor of ̽��ֱ��Economist Daniel Franklin.

As well as discussions and debates on some of the biggest issues facing mankind, this year’s Festival of Ideas includes opera at the Fitzwilliam Museum, real ghost stories at the Scott Polar Research Institute and ‘Just a Minnow’ at the Zoology Museum.

It will also feature dozens of events and activities for children, including a performance by children’s poet Benjamin Zephaniah and a talk by Charlie and Lola creator Lauren Child, as well as live graffiti demonstrations, storytelling and print workshops.

̽��ֱ��Festival of Ideas is supported by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press, Arts Council England, Barclays, Cambridge City Council, Anglia Ruskin ̽��ֱ��, ESRC Festival of Social Science, Irwin and Joan Jacobs, Heffers and Darwin Anniversary Festival.

*Where next for the Arab Spring? takes place at the McCrum Lecture Theatre in Bene't Street on 25th October from 7.30-9pm. More information: www.cam.ac.uk/festivalofideas/

A debate at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas asks What next for the Arab Spring?

" ̽��ֱ��idea that the Middle East's democrats will be grateful to the West is misguided; old suspicions remain."

Glen Rangwala

Hossam el-Hamalawy, Creative Commons

tahrir

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Yes

̽��ֱ��politics of speechmaking

sjr81 — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 15:51:24 +0000

Phil Collins, Tony Blair's speechwriter until 2007, said because the media picked up on any dissent, politicians have to be wary of how their words might be interpreted.

“ ̽��ֱ��incentive to be dull is very serious,” said Collins.

He added that great speeches were rare nowadays. This was partly because the writing was poor and drew on a lot of jargon, particularly from business.

̽��ֱ��pace of political life was much faster too, which meant modern politicians gave far more speeches than ever before, most of which were instantly forgettable.

Collins added that mass education had had an impact with politicians now aiming speeches at a mass audience rather than an elite. This meant they couldn't make literary references and that their language was narrower.

There were also fewer great injustices to rectify due to medical and other advances and those that there were were complex, such as the financial crisis. There was also more focus on pragmatic issues rather than big ideologies, like capitalism and socialism, which were more worthy of grand styles of speech.

He denied that the focus on soundbites was a factor. In fact, having a good argument was central and this could be encapsulated in a soundbite. He urged speechwriters to start from the soundbite which was really a summary of their argument. “If you don't know from a sentence what you are trying to say you don't know at all,” he said.

Speechmakers also needed to fit their language to the occasion and the audience. Churchill's speeches were not as successful early on his career because he was talking about things “that did not warrant that degree of poetry”. “You have to get the language in the right register,” said Collins.

Author Piers Brendon, a former Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre, told the packed audience at Churchill College's Wolfson Theatre that Churchill was an old-fashioned speaker who worked hard on his words and had studied and learnt by heart the great speeches of the past. Indeed his most famous 1940 speech – “Never in the field of human conflict...” - had been gestating since 1899 and he had tried out phrases from it five times beforehand.

He said the cadence of his words were like that of blank verse. “His speeches were old-fashioned, ornate, musical performances full of outdated terms,” he said. They were also, he added, pieces of cunningly fashioned propaganda, but he said propaganda was only effective if it reflected what people thought. Churchill was “booted out” after the War because he was out of time with a post-war world. “Speechifying is not good if it is not in tune with the times,” he said.

David Runciman, reader in political thought at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said politicians nowadays were anxious to come across as “real people” due to the growing distrust of politicians and spin, but often their attempts to come across as real seemed clumsy and didn't work.

He highlighted three successful recent speeches which were game changers and which did have a ring of authenticity. First was Obama's 2004 speech to the Democratic Convention in which he used his personal narrative to make wider points about the story of the US and harked back to the great presidential speeches of the past.

Another successful speech was David Cameron's 2005 speech to the Conservative Party conference which overnight turned him into the frontrunner for leader of the Party. Unlike Obama's speech, it was not full of historical resonance and is mainly remembered because he spoke without notes. However, he looked “comfortable in his skin”, unlike his competitor David Davis. This made him seem more authentic, even though Davis had a more interesting personal story.

̽��ֱ��last speech he highlighted was George Osborne's 2007 speech to the Conservative Party conference on inheritance tax. It was a “boring speech”, said Runciman, but it was the audience's response which was key.

They gave a “bark of enthusiasm and approval” which surprised even Osborne. “It put the fear of God into Gordon Brown,” said Runciman.

Michael White, the Guardian's assistant editor, has sat through many a political speech. He reeled off his impressions of the best.

Thatcher was “not eloquent”, he said, but was “a force of nature” and “beat you into submission”. Blair was good at talking both to the two audiences at party conferences – the people in the hall and the people at home. Clinton was good on empathy. As an actor delivering lines written by a good writer, Reagan did well. Both Bushes were “awful”. Kinnock was good in the right circumstances, but a bit verbose.

Jesse Jackson was the most memorable speaker he had heard. Obama was good at high politics, but not so good at “the arm-twisting, fixing low politics”. He highlighted too David Cameron's recent speech to the Conservative Party conference, saying it was “an attempt at Churchillian optimism”, trying to rally the country to face the economic troubles ahead. “He deserves praise for that,” said White.

̽��ֱ��event was chaired by Allen Packwood, current Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre, which put on an exhibition of past political speeches to accompany the debate.

Modern politicians are too stuck in a 24/7 media bubble to make the kind of grand speeches associated with past leaders, a debate on political rhetoric at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas heard last week.

̽��ֱ��incentive to be dull is very serious.

Phil Collins

Microphone - NFSA Australia via Flickr CC

̽��ֱ��Politics of Speechmaking at the Festival of Ideas

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Yes

Will the English language ever die?

sjr81 — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 11:30:50 +0000

These cultural conventions are indicative of how a language impacts the worldview of the people who speak it. In Martu, an Aboriginal language from Western Australian, black and all dark colours are maru or maru-maru while in Vietnamese both green and blue are xanh. ̽��ֱ��Saami of northern Scandinavia have hundreds of words for different types of snow like vuož’že (wet snow), ritni (crusted snow) and chiegar (old snow dug up a reindeer).

Language is not just spoken words but also a gateway into a culture. UNESCO estimates that there are over 6,000 languages spoken around the globe today, half of which are under threat and face dying out. Could this ever happen to the English language?

̽��ֱ��threat to the world’s languages and the eventual fate of English are the driving force behind the work of four researchers: Dr Stephen Pax Leonard, Dr Jon Fox, Dr Andrew Dalby, and Nicholas Oster. They will be discussing their research on Saturday 22 October at the Festival of Ideas, the UK’s only arts, humanities and social science festival which runs this year from 19-30 October (www.cam.ac.uk/festivalofideas)

Dr Leonard, an anthropological linguist at the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, has recently returned from living for a year with the Inughuit people on the remote Herbert Island, northwest Greenland. At the Festival of Ideas he will debut a short film about his time in the arctic and his experiences of living in the community.

̽��ֱ��Inughuit are a semi-nomadic people whose knowledge of their land and culture is based on oral tradition, stories and mythologies which have very rarely been written down. But this traditional way of life is being doubly threatened - both globalization and climate change could prove to be the downfall of this unique society.

Sitting around a TV watching Danish-language shows has replaced listening to the stories of their ancestors. ̽��ֱ��drum-song, or piheq, and story-telling were partially entertainment during the sunless winters and nightless summers but perhaps more importantly says Dr Leonard, “a pool of indigenous knowledge regarding ice systems, weather systems, place names and the habits and movements of the sea mammals on which they depend.”

̽��ֱ��Inughuit world is one of extremes - during the winter three and a half months pass without the sun rising over the horizon as they live only 800 miles from the North Pole. Now it is changing. ̽��ֱ��hunting season is now halved as the ice, which used to form in September, is only thick enough between December and March.

̽��ֱ��effects due to climate change, unsurprisingly, are having a detrimental effect on the traditional way of life of the Inughuit. “Now, nobody knows when the sea ice will come or how long it will stay for,” says Dr Leonard. “ ̽��ֱ��glaciers are melting at a faster rate than anybody ever expected and the movement of the animals has become less and less predictable. ̽��ֱ��Arctic hunters believe that we have not listened to nature and now we are paying the price. They think it is time to use our knowledge wisely.”

It is becoming harder for the Inughuit to survive traditionally based on their hunting prowess. New legislation also makes it more expensive to hunt marine mammals and many Inuguit are resorted to buying expensive, imported food.

̽��ֱ��Inuguit are not the only Arctic occupiers who are struggling in this new, warmer climate. A polar bear entered the town one night in search of food and was shot and killed in front of Dr Leonard’s cabin. It had no blubber - it was starving due to the effects of climate change on its normal hunting and migratory habits.

But many Inuguit do not believe the transformation is a result of human impact - and this too is endangering their language, culture, and perhaps even their lives. Dr Leonard explains that “they believe that the weather changes in cycles. That is what their ancestors told them. If the sea ice disappears, only to return 50 years later, that crucial unrecorded knowledge bound up in the stories will have been lost forever and to the detriment of future hunters.”

Only 770 speakers of Inuktun, or Polar Eskimo, remain although this number grows ever smaller. There are less than ten people left who are able to sing the traditional drum song of their ancestors.

While Inuktun provides over 20 ways of referring to ice and 18 different types of wind young people, according to Dr Leonard, are unable to remember more than a few. ̽��ֱ��youths are finding the traditional hunting life too difficult and leave the community in search of employment. In order to do so they must learn to speak Standard (Greenlandic) and run the risk of isolating themselves, no longer being seen as real Polar Eskimos by those who follow the traditional way of life.

̽��ֱ��threat to language is not isolated to the Northwest Greenland. With about one language disappearing every two weeks, Dr Dalby, author of Language in Danger and honorary fellow and the Institute of Linguistics, predicts that that the 3,000 languages currently in danger will no longer be spoken by the 22^nd century.

Europe alone has 50 threatened and severely endangered languages. In the United Kingdom ten languages are considered endangered: Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Manx, Irish, Welsh, Cornish, Guernsey French and Jersey French. ̽��ֱ��eleventh, Alderney French, has become extinct.

However it is possible, with concerted and deliberate effort, for languages to “be raised from the dead.” Cornish became linguistically extinct in the 18^th century until a campaign to revive it two hundred years later. Now there are over 2,000 fluent speakers.

Eastern Europe also has a list of languages and cultures which are in danger of becoming immersed into a larger, Euro-centric identity. Hungary has five threatened languages while Romania has eleven. Yet again these languages can form an integral part of the identity of their speakers, especially for nationalists.

Yet do everyday speakers of language find their identity bound up in the words which they use? Dr Fox will explore the different usages of language, from those for whom it is simply a method of communication to those who see language as a unifier - identifying, embodying, and constituting the nation.

Dr Fox explains, “Nationalists are the self-appointed guardians of national languages: they do everything in their power to prevent the demise of or changes to their languages. But ordinary people are somewhat more sanguine about changes to their national languages. For them, national identity can simply evolve with language. Whilst the demise of a national language sounds the death knoll of the nation for nationalists, ordinary people are better at rolling with linguistic changes.”

English is the language of globalization that has, in many ways, become an enemy to other languages. Will it ever need to be resuscitated from death’s door? Oster, author of ̽��ֱ��Last Language Franca, doesn’t think so. He also believes though that the current dominance of English in the world is nearing its end. Globalization might have helped the supremacy of English to continue long after the fall of the British Empire but economic and technological development, trade and migration will change the ways which people access and use language.

Yet neither does Ostler believe that another language, Chinese for example, will become the new global leader. He reckons that by 2050, a mere generation, the reign of any single global lingua franca - a language used between people who do not share a common mother tongue- will have met its demise. We are apparently heading towards a diverse, multilingual future in which technology will allow people to communicate efficiently and effectively without resorting to learning a completely new language.

This in some ways may actually be good for English - lingua franca languages often lose their cultural worth as people no longer value the language for its own sake, but rather for what can be attained by using it. Perhaps by recognizing that languages are more than words we can appreciate the necessity to save both the threatened ones, but also remember the heritage of our own language.

Why do languages die will take place on Saturday October 22 at the Faculty of Law, Sidgwick Site, 2-3pm as part of Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Festival of Ideas. Pre-booking is encouraged. Suitable for ages 14+. www.cam.ac.uk/festivalofideas

Imagine a world in which there is no difference between blue and black or green and blue. A world where there are hundreds of different types of snow.

̽��ֱ��Arctic hunters believe that we have not listened to nature and now we are paying the price. They think it is time to use our knowledge wisely.

Stephen Pax Leonard

Greenland

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