David Bennett

It’s All Connected

First published 31 Jul 2013

I remember sitting by the side of a field years ago and gently unfurling a leaf. Inside the curled up leaf there was an orange, slightly translucent earwig with nasty-looking pincers.

I opened more leaves and there were more earwigs. Some leaves had several earwigs tucked inside them.

Wriggling, segmented, translucent orange insects with big pincers were not top of my list for beauty and I remember thinking that the earwigs were invaders. That was in the days when I saw everything as disconnected.

And yet I saw myself as a keen nature lover. I often went out and looked at birds and trees and plants and fungi and insects, and at just about everything from the clouds to the sea to the earth and the rocks. I could see myself as a keen nature lover and yet dislike certain parts of it.

That wasn’t so strange, was it? After all, some parts of nature are definitely unpleasant for humans if they come in contact with them. But reflecting on how I saw things it is also true that I saw nature as disconnected.

Now, over the years I have come to see that the leaf depends on the earwig and the earwig depends on the leaf. I see that there will be something – a microbe, a bacterium, a process – something that dictates that the balance is preserved as long as there are leaves for earwigs to curl up in, and earwigs for leaves to curl around. It’s a connected world.

I see that the balance will be broken if there are no earwigs. If that happens then somewhere down the line there will not be any leaves.

All of which leaves me with another question, which is to wonder how finely balanced the balance of nature is. We see every day that nature is resilient and able to recover. But maybe it has weak points where a small change would tear it apart. I shouldn’t walk around fearful of that tear in the fabric of nature, but we humans do seem like the kid with a stick, poking at something and surprised when it breaks.

I Wailed At The Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem

In about 1996 I went to Yad Vashem – the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem.

I queued for a ticket, and in front of me there was a young couple. Neither was Jewish but from the conversation I made out that the young woman’s father or maybe her grandfather was one of the righteous gentiles who had helped Jews during the war.

Apparently he was commemorated in the museum and the woman in the ticket booth explained to the young woman where she should go to find the records.

While I was waiting, I saw a postcard on a shelf in the booth. It was a photograph of an installation in the grounds of the museum. It was few railway boxcars on a piece of track built into a hillside and leading up into the sky.

When it was my turn to buy a ticket, I asked about the railway cars and the track.

The woman in the booth explained that the railway cars had been ‘rescued’ and brought to the museum and that yes, those very cars had been used to transport Jews to the death camps during the war.

I said that the image was terrible, and the woman said with a sympathetic tone said ‘Yes, this is Yad Vashem.’

I felt a wave of sympathy; it was so sad.

I walked on towards the buildings and started to walk along a path between rows of trees planted to commemorate the righteous gentiles who had helped Jews during the war.

I suddenly had an image in my mind of a thin woman with a headscarf standing near an old stove and holding a frying pan and I saw in my mind’s eye German soldiers marching with shiny helmets.

The woman wasn’t someone I recognised specifically, but how shall I say it – In principle, it could have been my great grandmother.

I don’t why that image came into my mind.

I had been to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam years before and I had touched the frying pan on the stove in their hiding place – or perhaps it on the floor below.

I remember that I imagined that Anne had touched it, although perhaps it was just a frying pan brought in to put on the stove for visitors to the museum to see.

And on TV programmes like The World At War, I had seen German soldiers marching,

But the woman holding the frying pan that I saw in my mind’s eye as I stood in the sun at Yad Vashem – I didn’t know who she was – only that I was connected to her.

I mention about the Anne Frank House and the TV programmes I saw because my rational mind is trying to explain what happened.

What happened next was that I reeled and almost fell against a large rock in the garden and I wailed.

I felt my insides opening up and I wailed. I didn’t cry – I opened like a dam. I said, almost shouted, complained – into the air – ‘They killed them all: They murdered them all.’

Even as I was wailing, I thought it must be all too common for people to break down in Yad Vashem. I realised that I didn’t care whether I was making a scene, or causing some kind of embarrassment in pubic. I just didn’t care. I was not crying. There was nothing in me that was intentionally pushing or letting out the wailing – it just came out of me.

I was truly wailing.

It was a revelation to me. I felt that I didn’t know myself. Where had that wail come from?

It made no sense – I wasn’t even born then when it all happened.

Audiences, Culture, and Rubbish In Cinemas

Rubbish in cinemas bugs me. There, I said it.

So here’s what happened.

Tamara and I like to watch a film to the end of the credits, so we are often the last to leave.

Seeing the room after the film has ended is like seeing a room after the party has ended – rubbish (‘trash’ in American English) and detritus everywhere.

Call me a fuddy-duddy (actually don’t), but I can’t believe the mess that a gathering of human beings can leave after being in one place for two hours.

Popcorn, discarded cans, boxes, wrappers – the popcorn sometimes looks like someone decided they didn’t want popcorn after all, and scattered the contents of the box on the carpet.

One night we went to see Coco Before Chanel – a French film with subtitles, with Audrey Tautou in the lead role.

As we were leaving, I noticed that the floor was clean.

A cleaner came in with her black plastic bag to pick up the rubbish, and as we passed her I commented that the room was unusually clean.

Oh yes, she said this one and Screen 3, which was also showing a French film. I asked whether this was always so, and she said yes, audiences at foreign language films always left very little rubbish.

So now we know.

Recommendations And Looking For The Group

We all know that Netflix and Amazon use ratings to make recommendations.

Recommendations tap into the force that the public relations counsel Edward Bernays wrote about in the 1920s in his book Propaganda, through to what Chris Anderson wrote about in his 2006 book, The Long Tail.

That is, that we look to others whom we respect to guide us to what we want. Therefore what we want is often a product of the groups with which we want to identify.

Opinion leaders, peer recommendation, group identification, tribes, niche markets, the wisdom of crowds – recommendations and ratings are the life blood of all of them.

Google depends on it, Amazon thrives on it.

There is more going on than simple numbers when I read that 900 people on Amazon have all rated a particular camera highly.

I am swayed by the numbers because I attribute characteristics to a significant majority of those people.

I assume that a significant proportion are familiar with cameras and are level-headed and intelligent. In fact they may all be complete idiots who only take occasional happy-snaps.

I don’t read all 900 reviews, nor even a significant sample. Instead, I distill those reviewers into a mirror image of the reviewer I want to be convinced by.

Chris Anderson makes an interesting point in The Long Tail when he points out a problem that eBay has.

eBay wants to recommend products to us, but the users define their own products when they write their ads. So eBay simply does not know what it is selling. Therefore it cannot recommend the products for which it acts as middleman.

It’s a plausible explanation for why eBay has started to specify criteria and characteristics that sellers must use for certain branded products – such as cameras.

Edward Bernays
Edward Bernays set himself up as a propaganda consultant – or public relations counsel as he described himself in Propaganda, the book he wrote in 1928.

He was Freud’s nephew and because he was well connected he had access to the industrialists of the 1920s – with whom he found common ground.

Having seen the slaughter of the First World War he believed that the majority of human beings had to be controlled and that without something to divert them they would, if given any excuse, tear each other limb from limb.

He believed that men follow leaders and that their sense of identity and identification with the leaders and the groups was generally more important than the underlying truth or falsity of what they believed as individuals.

Sometimes, without the group mind the individual was lost.

Bernays believed that as a consequence, men would often rather sacrifice the truth than lose the fellowship of the group.

Therein lies the power of ratings and recommendations. The individual is not looking for the best book, film, or whatever. He or she is looking for the group.

Whoa! But not me. (say we all).