Roberts makes himself small, curving his back and drawing his arms in tight to his body, and turns away. Eye contact is a threat, so he doesn’t let it happen. The horse takes a few steps closer. Roberts doesn’t seem to notice. He’s still, and calm, and not interested. The horse comes closer, and still, Roberts waits. Finally, the horse nudges him on the shoulder: ‘Hey, you!’ Roberts makes a fuss of him, very quietly, scratches his forehead again, then takes a step away. The horse follows as if on a rein. Roberts keeps walking, and the horse follows. They go around the paddock a few times, Roberts abruptly changing direction, zig-zagging, and the horse follows.
Inevitably, because the paddock is not large, Roberts eventually arrives near the horsebox. He slows. The horse slows too, peering at the old enemy. Roberts makes no move towards the horsebox, wanders off again, and the horse ambles after him. Then he goes back. Then away. Each time they get a little closer to the box, and each time the horse spends some time checking it out. Roberts walks towards the box, and the horse comes too. Roberts walks up the ramp. The horse stops. Roberts stops, reverses the horse away from the ramp and away. They loop around the paddock, then come back. This time, the horse puts his front hooves on the ramp. He doesn’t like it very much, but he wants to follow Roberts. He pokes at the ramp, and it clanks. Roberts repeats the reverse, and comes back for a third time.
When the horse follows him all the way up the ramp and into the horsebox, Roberts barely seems to notice. He turns right around and walks out again. The crowd, on the other hand, has absolutely noticed. Many of them have been down this road, and they know that what they’ve just seen is spectacular, bordering on spooky. The owner has her hand over her mouth. This simply doesn’t happen with non-loaders. It’s so unlikely that even though his methods are reproducible – and reproduced successfully by thousands of trainers and owners around the world – people still accuse Roberts of fakery. Roberts walks the horse around the paddock, back into the box without breaking step. This time they stay for a while. The horse investigates the box a bit. Whatever he thought was in there clearly isn’t.
Roberts walks him out again, then once more round the paddock, and this time the horse doesn’t even need to be led. He’s in the habit. When Roberts stops, the horse walks past him, right up the ramp and into the box, turns around and peers out, as if to ask what all this fuss was ever really about. The whole process has taken less than half an hour.
Roberts makes everyone wait until the horse is well away before they applaud, but I imagine you can hear the sound from the next county.
Monty Roberts is at pains to say that what he does isn’t magic. He hasn’t used a Blacksmith’s Word. He’s just made a connection with a confused animal. It’s something that – demonstrably – anyone can do, given the appropriate training and practice. The part of what he does that is more difficult to teach is the human side: he works an audience with the same facility he displays with horses, a trick that is even more impressive because he can actually do both at once. He’s also keen to point out that the horses he works with in his shows in the UK are horses he has never seen before, and they’re not suddenly turned into something different by what he does. Put them in a stress situation and miscommunicate and they can go right back to where they were. The conversion from non-loader to self-loader requires maintenance at home, an ongoing reassurance and instruction in the simple body language horses use among themselves and understand.
It seems to me that we are like a horse – and like Monty Roberts – at the same time.
Roberts’s achievement is not leading. It looks that way because the horse ends up following him around the paddock, but looks are deceptive. What he’s done is the ultimate in a very handy digital skill: following. He’s derived his method of helping horses to understand what’s required of them – and that is what he does – by following their lead. He watched the interactions of wild horses, taught himself the body language and the pattern of their engagements, and worked out how to insert himself into the loop. The result is absolutely remarkable.
And – up to a point – it’s possible to do something similar with the self. We know an ever-increasing amount about our own behaviour, and as I’ve tried to point out, much of it is irrational. There’s no particular need to be worried about that, unless you have constructed your way of life on the notion that humans are at root a profoundly rational bunch – in which case, to be honest, I have to question your skills of observation. But it’s also true that as information on how we as individuals and as groups behave becomes more widely available and understood, we are apt to find those behaviours being used to lead us about by the nose – unless we make an effort to take charge of ourselves. At the same time, to get along with digital technology – to use its advantages in beating the modern malaises we created it to defy, without in turn being changed in directions we would not choose, or perhaps worse simply made unhappy – we need to be aware of how we live and use our tools.
The following list may make some people a bit uncomfortable, because it includes things that are not generally thought of as serious or important. That’s partly because the rational/professional ethos that most of us grew up with defines ‘serious’ and ‘important’ things as those that are instrumental and effective in making money and achieving concrete results, and doesn’t make a lot of space for play, or for the hearth. In fact, its area of competence is bounded by those things, so it tends to dismiss them. As that ethos increasingly tries to claim our attention through the extended hearth, so we have to push back and assert their importance. (It’s like the pressure suits doctors wear in biohazard zones, which are inflated from within so that any puncture will cause air to flow out rather than letting infectious agents in.)
The idea that you might choose a path that meant you got less rather than more stuff done is alien to many of us, but the need to do more is where the sense of time slipping away comes from. There is, after all, a finite limit to the amount one person can do in one day, and it’s not clear that doing more makes you happier. Sometimes, happiness is about sitting still for …
How long would you say? Ten minutes? An hour? A day?
Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement in Italy, told Carl Honoré: ‘Being Slow means that you control the rhythms of your own life. You decide how fast you have to go in any given context … What we are fighting for is the right to determine our own tempos.’ It seems to me that you cannot possibly know what your tempo should be if you’re always flat out. You have no idea what you, yourself, look like at another speed. We as individuals and as a society have to choose who we want to be. Refusing to do so is no longer a neutral posture, if it ever was. We are surrounded by forces that will influence us, some of them actively working to do so using information and tools created by interactions with massive numbers of individuals, constantly being refined. Being inert means being washed away by this current, and trusting that governments, and large technology companies and the institutions that hire them to influence us, know better than we do how the world should be and have our best interests at heart.
Like most people, I suspect, I don’t believe that’s the case; the pace, priorities and nature of modern life in the industrialized world create an environment that is not ultimately a human paradise. The unease people report as information overload or future shock is not a product of digital technology; it predates even the mobile telephone. It comes from the way we live, the division of time and the emphasis on getting more done, and our naïve (in the sense of inexperienced rather than careless or foolish) use of abstract systems in the form of government bureaucracy and commercial companies to take advantage of our collective strength and to attempt to ensure fairness; we have come to see these systems as external objects, and are only now beginning to understand them as re-editable products. Digital technology is one of the coping strategies we have evolved to deal with a sense of disconnection, of being out of control; a treatment for the symptom rather than the disease, but whi
ch has enabled us to see our own reflection and to understand the situation.
Technology is not born pure, however: it is the result of a commercial design process. In other words, there was a demand for something to manage time and space, to connect us, and the society we have gave us mobile phones and the Internet. The revolution was – as all revolutions are – hijacked before it was born. The technologies of reconnection have been incorporated into the structure of the world and have become in some ways part of the problem, but how we use them and respond to them is up to us.
We’re not used to thinking that we can change the big things. We habitually accept that governments and leaders will behave badly, that companies will offend and receive risible fines or no punishment at all, that prices will rise and what appear to be deals will come with strings. We accept this last so absolutely that we become suspicious if we can’t identify a catch. And yet these are contingent truths, truths that are created by our collective actions rather than being inherent in the world. We have come to see ourselves as separate from our environment and the technologies of the mind we have created to reduce the number of impossible decisions we have to make in a day. We have seen and to some extent continue to see our governments and our corporations, even the nations of which we are a part, as something bigger than us: huge, alien, imponderable forces that crush us and which we cannot stop. It isn’t true, and we’re remembering that.
If the revolutions in the Middle East, or the Velvet Revolutions of the late 1980s and early 1990s, or even the bleak, depressing events in the UK in the summer of 2011 show us anything at all, it is that government takes place by consent, because these things are made up of individual people. We know this: we have come to an understanding that our law is text, and that text can be edited. What we now have to accept is the responsibility that goes with that. It’s not enough to say ‘I want’: that just gets you bills you can’t pay and a raft of purchases you could have done without, whether you’re an individual or a state. We have instead to make the wise choice, which is hard. And that requires a way of understanding the world, a culture of being present for the big decisions – a culture of engaging.
And that is the habit we need to acquire above all others: the habit of paying attention, of making our own decisions and interrogating the choices with which we are presented: ask why the Economist pricing system includes the redundant print-only option at the same price as the combined print-and-digital package, and you’re on your way to the kind of behaviour that will improve the way we live. Ask the question online, and compare your perceptions with those of others, and you begin to construct a wise crowd. Keep doing it, day after day, and that’s the start of a society that can work as a democracy, rather than one that merely exhibits the trappings but functions as an oligarchy. And as we know, habits are more than just behaviour: they change the brain. These changes are a part of (and perhaps the actual physical expression and location of) expertise as we develop it. Neuroplastic changes are less than absolute; there are limits to their depth and scope – even constant use of the Internet will not turn you into a machine any more than endless free-diving will turn you into a seal, although both may make you different, and therefore separate you from people who live a more balanced life.
But within that limit, we can collectively and individually become experts in living intelligently and well, if we try. There are skills we can develop – simple ones which we already possess to some extent, not involved ones which require great commitments of time and energy and thought – that will help. John Gabrieli, an expert in cognition, memory and emotion at MIT, recently found that the brain naturally enters a preparatory state before taking in information, and measured a 30 per cent improvement in memory when the state was observed over when it was not. The preparatory state was surprising: in MRIs taken by Gabrieli and his team, the parahippocampal place area, a region of the brain known to be highly active during learning, seemed to be very placid. Gabrieli speculated that this might be a ‘clearing of the decks’ before taking on a heavy load of information1 – presumably cleaning out the working memory, ditching any current cognitive load so as to be able to take on more. If so, it’s all the more important, when you really need to engage with something, that you be able to ditch any other concerns and concentrate on one subject without others interfering.
In other words, your brain takes time out to have tea and a biscuit before starting work. There may well be real value in doing nothing for a moment (ten minutes, or an hour – or more). Perhaps predictably, given the way we live, Gabrieli’s observation has led some to wonder whether it might be possible to trigger the preparatory state artificially, by using electrodes to stimulate a given area of the brain – or with drugs. No doubt something in this area is achievable, but why bother? If the ability is present in us already, we just need to practise it.
Back to Monty Roberts: if you don’t train a horse to move in all the available directions on command, the ones you leave out will become its escape route. Some riders don’t like to teach their horses to walk backwards. That’s what they’ll do when they’re unhappy, Roberts replies, because backwards belongs to them, not you. In the digital context, and the wider world, I think the same is true. You have to own your own directions. Addiction counsellors, I understand, will tell you much the same thing, albeit rather more pithily: ‘You have to own your own shit.’ This means doing things to retain a perspective on what is humanly important, and connecting with the simple, human, analogue self, while at the same time taking ownership of the extended self and the digital technologies we use. Digital is not an enemy; it is a powerful tool. The question is not whether the tool is wicked, but whose tool it is, and part of the way to make sure it’s ours is to know that it is just another aspect of life rather than a replacement for everything.
The way we experience life breaks down into a variety of perceptions and understandings. We make assumptions because that’s how we live. We model the world because it’s too vast to know in detail and because we learn, as we get older, to focus our attention on matters that are of immediate relevance and screen out those that are not. It always seems to me that creative people are the ones who are able to see, or indeed cannot avoid seeing, multiple interpretations of the same situation, from the prosaic (a businessman walking home with a newspaper under one arm) to the unlikely (a weary detective bringing his last case home with him) to the positively baroque (the last of the Knights Templar carrying the original pages of the Virgin Mary’s diary).
In any case, our assumptions are often fairly sound and we can work happily within them, but in some cases they betray us. A perception of the world that is accepted by everyone around us seems the most obvious and likely, until we check it and it turns out to be simply untrue (a topical example might be the sub-prime crisis. Everyone knew the bonds based on sub-prime loans were okay, because the ratings agencies said they were Triple-A. Then people like Michael Burry looked at the fine print and saw that in fact the situation was not okay at all). In the less dramatic everyday world, we learn to accept external perceptions of time – the digital clock and the chargeable unit – which can come to dominate not only our working hours but our entire lives. The single sense of time that is set by our employers and the people around us, by a general rush and bustle that implies somehow that if one is not too busy one must be slacking, can be offset by engaging with other perceptions of time. So, for example, you could:
1 Read a novel
Yes, well, I would say that, but it works. My advice would be to get hold of a copy of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. It’s short, which makes it feel approachable, but the prose is stacked and demanding. It requires your attention; you won’t be able to read it at all if you aren’t concentrating. Obscurantism – the deliberate act of making a text more difficult than it needs to be in order to force the reader to pay attention – was a policy of the German critical theorist Theodor Adorno. Adorno was one of the banes of my life at university, a
nd I cursed him for his ridiculous posture on clarity. Of course, I remember more about his work than most of the other people I had to study, and recently I found out why: obscurantism actually works. To my enduring irritation, it turns out that making something hard to read – for example by using a nasty typeface – makes you pay more attention to it: ‘You can’t skim material in a hard-to-read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully.’2 (I’m curious as to how this tallies with Nicholas Carr’s concern about deep reading: does it force the state, or jolt you out of it to parse difficult sentences? And if the latter, how does the outcome – greater uptake of information and greater engagement – square with Carr’s position that the absence of deep reading entails a lesser interaction with the material?)
Reading books will also, of course, re-establish the reading skill in your brain, if you’re concerned that you’re becoming too focused on the creative, participatory style of reading we do online, or if you are simply eager for a rest and want someone else to drive the narrative train for a while. Read linearly, in the old-fashioned way, and trust the author to take you where you need to go. It may even be better to read a novel that is plot-centred rather than one that wants you to stop and consider its deeper meaning all the time. Follow the path of the story rather than trying to define it. Let the text be fixed for a few hours – but let yourself be a bit more fluid. Engage with the book, allowing it to change you, or, at least, to transport you. The experience is immersive, to the point where you can miss your stop, so I find it’s often better to read on the sofa, but it’s certainly a good way to rid yourself of a dull commute.
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