Cogitatio

A combination of my interest in philosophy, my background in IT and a general dissatisfaction and continual disappointment with the ability for IT suppliers and customers to deliver an end product together has led me to start thinking what can be done about it. The key for me is in the thinking. My entire career has been in IT and yet, without exception, I have not touched a computer or done a design for a system myself for a single customer. When I put it in that way, 12 years in IT never actually getting my hands dirty seems a strange statement. So what the hell have I been doing?

The majority of my professional life has been spent teaching customers how to be good customers and suppliers how to do their job properly. The former on the whole being harder than the later. I have been lucky enough to see the practical birth of the internet (I helped install the TCP/IP client into Citibank PCs when I first started so they could use something called Netscape to look at the web. How far have we come since then? Well, no far. Although the IP stack now comes with the OS ready loaded. But I have also been unlucky enough to witness a burn out. A burn out of vision.

As new technologies promising new beginnings came to the market people gasped with wonder at what the new world would be for them as a result. PCs in every home, broadband, online banking, IPods, streaming video, online poker to name a few. While it would not be fair to say that these technology promises were not fulfilled and certainly have resulted in change we have not stopped to consider whether the change was improvement or just different.

Our expectations for IT were high. While we moved from a world of no IT to a world of widespread IT we had an expectation of a better life. Nowadays people are more sceptical. We have seen the future and the promises and we have been let down too many times before. The future is not bright, it is not orange. In fact, in many cases it is worse. The technology not only failed to deliver the change we expected, it made our lives worse.

Let’s look at the internet first. As a business I could set up a web site and trade. It was almost the American dream of opportunity. This is true. But is it better? My experience of internet business is simply that the problems are different but no less significant. In the good old days if I wanted to sell things I would open shop. I would pick my location to get the best footfall and I would do some, normally local, marketing. It is interesting to note that to get a professionally hosted and built web site (not talking cheap and nasty software) costs more than it does to open small shop and you still need the warehouse and product processing space. I hear you shout ‘but yes, you can trade throughout the world from the internet but only locally from a shop’. Sort of. And this is the problem. The problem of marketing your internet site to the world is not trivial and in fact no easier than marketing your shop to the world. Opening an online store to sell cameras for example is just like opening a camera shop on the moon. In fact it is worse than that. It is like opening a camera shop on the moon next door to ten thousand other camera shops. It’s not easier to set up online, it’s just different.

For the consumer, the world appears a more convenient place. You can go online and buy a camera. But for the majority of us we will trot off to the camera shop in the high street to have a look first and then save twenty pounds ordering online. We find the online supermarkets regularly deliver old product and the online travel companies all seem to offer the same flights for the same cost. There is only so much you can shave off a holiday and everyone can see everyone else’s prices. The number of middlemen in travel has exploded.

It is certainly a different place to live but I am not sure it is better. Meanwhile at work we spend gzillions on new IT to make us more efficient. More efficient than what? Than we were? If we look at government we note that there are more people working for the public sector now than ever before. One could argue that they deliver more but how much more? And is more better? With knee jerk reaction policies from ministers are we a demand led policy government or a supply led. Are we reacting to the ills of society with sticking plasters or do we have a vision for a future society, one which can be delivered over time.

For me, what it is coming down to is a lack of vision. Ill thought out policy or no policy at all is rife across government and the private sector. Where is the vision? We are on a treadmill of continuous change which is mistaken for the treadmill of continuous improvement. Where have all the thinkers gone? In IT terms we hear the old adage that we want business led IT but the business do not understand the art of the possible and the IT folk rarely understand the business. This leaves a significant dissatisfaction with the IT on the businesses’ behalf and a great deal of frustration on the IT folks behalf. Policy blames delivery, delivery blames policy.

We need the thought leaders back again. The social networking revolution was a damp squib in my view. Not that many did not make money at it but the real value is of significant question. Digital TV now gives us more channels of utter dross than ever. Now you can get your dross in high definition and surround sound. What is next? Where is IT going and what is it going to do for us? Are these even the right questions to ask?

The model for IT has to change. This will require a significant amount of education of the business and a new set of visionaries. The old ones have done their job and are retiring now. There is nobody in this space to do the job.

Any volunteers?

Nothing

The problem with nothing is that it is hard to imagine where to put it.

A theist or atheist

I attended my first debate run by the Institute of Ideas last night. A very entertaining evening all round. The debate was ‘Flogging a Dead Horse. Making a positive case for Atheism’. Those who read my stuff here they will have gathered that I have a fascination with the philosophy of religion. The challenge for the panel (at least one of which was an ex Anglican priest) was to find a justification for atheism which did not revolve around theist bashing. Quite a challenge and one which I believe they failed to meet. Not because they resorted to theist bashing but mostly because the best of them could only describe the process of justifying atheism rather the actual end point.

In fact, it may be an impossible task. One of the panel described two types of atheist, one which wakes up each morning and simply believes there is no god (note the wording, it is not someone who wakes up and does not believe it god) and another they termed as paramilitary atheists who actively go out hunting for theists and their beliefs. The debate mixed up a few things though which made it harder to make a solid argument. Firstly the distinction between belief in a creator (god) and religion. Not all religions believe in worshiping an almighty. Buddhists for example. So making a positive case for atheism is not one of making a positive case for the alternative to religion. And this is the crux of their difficulty. If the panel were atheists then they believe there is no god. From this they must believe that the majority of people who are religious are wrong to believe as they do. The atheist must therefore believe that as there is no god, that all of the doctrine of religion comes from man, even if declared that man wrote what god tells them. So why do we need to make a positive case for atheism at all? It can only be because an alternative needs to be found for religion which many of the paramilitary atheists believe is seriously damaging. They do not like the indoctrination of children or oppression of the followers and non believers.

But for the paramilitary atheist this is a difficult position to hold. For if they believe, as they must, that all religion is the work of man then what they oppose is the grouping together of people who follow a lifestyle set down by man which incorporates a set of moral and ethical standards to adhere to and that look to spread their views amongst others. Whereas the paramilitary atheists who form a group of people who follow a lifestyle set down by man which incorporates a set of moral and ethical standards to adhere to and that look to spread their views amongst others. Oops.

In other words, by trying to make a positive case for atheism to fight religion one suddenly becomes what one is fighting. They may be right and the damage done by religion may be higher than the damage done by the paramilitary atheists but there is no major evidence that the secular approach to anything is overall better than the religious version. There are good and bad in both.

One of the panellists rightly, in my view made some good practical points to this problem. He said that to bring a realistic alternative to theism one must look at what theism brings to the believer. Only then by providing an alternative to these things will you be able to loosen the spread and grip of religion in the world. One of the panellists featured heavily on existential angst for the atheist as the theist has none of that with God providing the meaning of life. He was countered by another panellist who said in his speech that he did not believe in existential angst but went on to describe how atheism provides none of the answers. The original panellist challenged him saying he did not think he suffered from angst. He replied he didn’t, just because he has no answers doesn’t mean he is worried about it.

If the atheists are right and there are alternatives to religion why are so many still religious? One of the panellists made the point that religion is a cop out from self accountability. I.e. you can always blame god or get forgiveness rather than take the responsibility for an action yourself. His point in some respects may be flawed though.

If you look at the places were religion is strong and where religion is weak we can see a trend which I believe demonstrates that the self accountability is not the driver. I believe it is one of control over your own life. In the west, religion tends to be on the decline both in numbers of participants and strength of belief and extremity of those beliefs. Whereas in more deprived countries we see stronger positions in all those categories. I think this is simply to do with the level of control one has over one’s life. When you are poor, living in hostile environments then many aspects of your life are out of your control. Weather, floods, war, disease to name a few. When your life is dependent upon things you cannot control then the ability to get support from a god is an attractive position. In the west of course we have less issues of control. We have less threats in our everyday lives and so less need to gain support from a supernatural being. It is not an personal accountability thing although I have no doubt that the religious do take advantage of this but it is not the driver.

So if there is a positive case to be made for atheism, a real alternative to religion without the need to follow a divine being then it must lie in removing the levels of helplessness and lack of control in people’s lives. We must make the lives of those in heavily religious countries, where oppression and rights issues remain, better. Only by doing so will the need to adhere to religious beliefs start to decline. If the atheist is to make the case, then it must be on these grounds.

Equality

When it comes to women’s rights and equality there is bucket loads of literature and articles and numerous celebrities all speaking out on the issue. But where are the speakers for men’s rights and equality. Many would argue that there is an imbalance in favour of men but this is not a position I subscribe to. Yes there are issues around equal pay, although I have yet to see convincing evidence of this, but there is more to equality than pay. The lot of the man and woman in the UK are certainly different. Does that make them unequal? Should one size fit all?

I was discussing this with my wife over the weekend. There were discussions on the radio which triggered my wife to comment on the pro life campaigners. She made a good argument on abortion that the decision of whether to have or not to have a baby was down to the pregnant woman and not a group of 3rd party campaigners. I thought she made an excellent argument for this position especially around the timeframe for the decision. Rather than look at it from the perspective of the maturity of the embryo in the timing, she said the decision to abort should be limited, excluding health reasons, to a reasonable period of say 4 months as she felt that was enough time for the woman to make the decision. What she was proposing was different to what we have today which, for someone against the pro life campaigners, actually reduced the time for abortion from where it stands today. In reality she was proposing a different approach rather than a single deadline we have now. You have a period of time where the woman can make a decision about to keep or not keep the baby for non health reasons (without due cause) after which you would not be allowed to terminate except for health reasons and even then only up to the current limit.

So what has this got to do with equality? It’s simple. The decision to have or not have the baby is down to the woman (legally). But what about the father? Currently, a father cannot stop a woman from having an abortion or force her to have one. This is a gross inequality. A woman may make a decision that she is not ready to be a mother, that she is unable to look after it, it will have an adverse effect on her life or for financial reasons. However, the father has none of those rights and if the baby is born the CSA will ensure that the father pays for the rest of the child’s life.

I am not for one moment suggesting that the life of the baby should be in the hands of the father, but like the decision period my wife outlined above where the woman is allowed to have an abortion ‘without cause’ then should not the man have a similar period in which to opt out of fatherhood from a legal perspective. Why can’t the father have 3 months after conception to make a decision as to whether they want to be a father. If the answer is no and the mother still wants to have the baby then the father should not have any legal father status and the mother can then make the decision on whether she wants the baby with that knowledge.

As with many of the discussions on my blog, this is a difficult issue. Inequality goes both ways. We should not expect only the positive things to be equalised for women. Retirement age, maternity leave, combat in armed forces are just a few of the places where inequality exists where a level playing field may or may not be desired. I would imagine that most people agree women should have more maternity leave than a man, most would agree that women should not be in combat on the front line. Many though would not agree with women having earlier retirement age, not least of which because they live longer on average.

So inequality is a tricky subject. But what is clear is that the roles in society of men and women are different. What is needed is a balance on the whole rather than picking specifics and equalising them. It would make an interesting metric. Every pro and con is scored and provided the men and women on average have the same score then we have equality while accepting that we also have difference.