BY STEWART SLATER
Modelled on Jay Nordlinger’s “Impromptus” in National Review, for December I’ve written a piece which is a series of paras on various ideas:
- The highest, hardest ceiling remains unbroken. For, like all his predecessors, America’s once and future President has siblings. To the only son of an only daughter (yes, it is all about me. Why do you ask?) this is evidence of a burning and frankly shaming bigotry. As so often, the hidebound mother country is ahead of its putatively more progressive progeny, having elevated two of my tribe to the highest office. However, since they were Theresa May and Liz Truss, perhaps our cousins have a point…
- Americans often like to see their country as an experiment and the new administration certainly will be, one whose outcome will not be without importance. Giving cabinet jobs to a tech billionaire, a Fox News host and whatever RFK Jr. is, flies in the face of the core assumption of progressive technocrats – that there is some “science of government” which they, and only they, can apprehend. It may, as they gleefully predict, turn out to be a disaster. But what if it doesn’t? Will we not have to conclude that (as the Founders intended) governing does not need to be left to a governing class?
- Seeking to strike a blow against the eminence grise of “Dark MAGA”, many of them have decided that Hell is not other people, but other people who disagree with them, leaving Musk’s platform X for “the Other Place” where “the skies are blue” (phrases reminiscent perhaps of the euphemisms for euthanasia deployed by despotic regimes in dystopian sci-fi). I slightly question the wisdom of this move. Not only do echo chambers flout Mill’s dictum that “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that” but more pragmatically, if your opponents are in power why remove yourself from a forum in which you can interact with them and correct their errors? It is, as a movie character said, “a bold strategy”. Let’s see if it works out for them.
- I continue to lurk anonymously on Musk’s hell-site, recently coming across a lady of certain years (old enough to have a married child) whose bio told me she was an “Oxford grad”. Being educated among the Dreaming Spires (and even at the Other Place…) is certainly an achievement – out of the (roughly) 500,000 who go to university each year (roughly half of the age group), Oxbridge chooses (roughly) 6,000. But, of course, for those graduates who do not go on to accomplish a similarly rare feat, it will be their greatest achievement. I couldn’t shake the feeling that, in trying to impress, the lady was unwittingly giving her audience the impression that, like many (most?) of her peers, she had peaked at 17…
- As the philosopher Epictetus said, “everything has two handles”. Our status claims situate us not just in reference to the bottom of the pecking order, but also to the top. Take “luxury”, a term we use for things and experiences we either cannot afford or can do so only rarely. The host of a recent travel programme thought that being handed a glass of champagne on boarding his train was the height of luxury. Would Churchill (who was able to drink two bottles a day, amongst his other tipples) have thought the same? In our rush to elevate our status to some by displaying the high points of our lives, we forget that we lower it to others, our glamorous rarities merely being their mundane staples.
- For, we can never be certain that others will have the same regard for events that we do. Elon Musk’s recent vertical landing of a reuseable rocket did not, I confess, impress me much – Ernst Stavro Blofeld did the same thing in the sixties (You Only Live Twice). The androids were nice, but Will Smith had battled hordes of them in I, Robot. As for the Robotaxi, Arnie trashed one of them in Total Recall. Beyond this flippancy lies a (vaguely) serious point. Popular culture has, for decades, given us a vision of the future and Musk is creating the things which feature in it. The world he is inventing is a world which we have been led to believe was always going to be. Figures such as Stephenson and Brunel, by contrast, conceived and built things undreamt of by their contemporaries. We undervalue his achievements when (perhaps understandably) we see the inventor of the train and the steamship as posterity’s parents and Musk as a mere midwife.
- It is not just in technology that life imitates art. Sir Andy Murray has been announced as Novak Djokovic’s coach, bringing to mind Apollo Creed in Rocky III. Let us hope this is a limited engagement – none of us wants a remake of Rocky IV…
- Art, or at least its AI version, however, sometimes struggles to imitate life. Last year, being male, cheap and lazy, I decided that my Christmas card duties could best be served by getting an AI to produce a suitably seasonal image of London which I could post on social media (I justified this to myself as a personal creation delivered in a sustainable way…). After a few seconds, out popped an agreeably festive picture. There was the Palace of Westminster. There was snow. There were gas lights. There was a coach. And the Thames. But the coach was in the Thames and how it had got there was a mystery since it had no horses. I had wanted Dickens, but I had been given Conan Doyle… (I still posted it, obviously…)
- Artificial Intelligence, for whatever reason, really seems to struggle to replicate the real world. Every day I see countless images which, after a moment’s reflection, are not what they purport to be. Still, every problem is an opportunity. Not only do I now get to work out if what I see is true or fake, but I get to search for all the mistakes – a computer-generated spot-the-difference game for adults, complete with different levels of difficulty – seven Elizabeth Towers in one image is a bit of a give-away, but if you were looking at the Palace of Westminster from that angle, could you really see Portcullis House? It will not always be like this, of course. Technology will improve. We must enjoy our sport while we can.
- My blunderbuss approach to festive greetings may not, I realise, have been particularly praiseworthy but it saved me from the annual cull of the Christmas card list – they didn’t send one last year, so they’re not getting one this year. For those currently engaged in the process, we will sign off with a piece of Seneca – “the wise man, self-sufficient as he is, still desires to have a friend, if only for the purpose of practising friendship…”
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.