20110207_R4

Source: BBC Radio 4: Start the Week

URL: N/A

Date: 07/02/2011

Event: Andrew Marr interviews Margaret Heffernan and Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

People:

• Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Astrophysicist and Fellow of the Royal Society
• Mike Figgis: Film director and composer
  • Margaret Heffernan: Entrepreneur and author
  • Andrew Marr: Journalist and political commentator

Andrew Marr: But certainly, the question of suspending disbelief connects to Margaret Heffernan's book, which is a sort of survey of the phenomenon of wilful blindness, right the way through from kind of quite small day-to-day activities through to the activities of corporations and government and so on. Margaret, some of the evidence that's been accumulated by social researchers in your book just completely had my jaw on the floor. For instance, the connection between the first lesson of your name and products you buy. Or indeed your birthday and people that you are more or less likely to be sympathetic to.

Margaret Heffernan: Right, so, part of Wilful Blindness starts with our brains' preference for what's familiar. And what's familiar to us is us. So we tend to marry people who look a lot like us, talk a lot like us, are about the same height, about the same hair colour, about the same eye colour, about the same background. Um, Peter likes Pepsi, Carol will drink Coke. Dentists are over-represented with the first name D.

Andrew Marr: This is just astonishing, I'm amazed by this.

Margaret Heffernan: So we're very attracted to the things that we know. So even if you ask people for no reason at all, choose any letters from the alphabet, they'll almost always choose their own initials. Um, this is what we call a bias, it means we like things that make us feel good about ourselves, and what makes us feel good about ourselves is us.

Andrew Marr: And just one other example of this, because we love them so much, tell us about the Rasputin... case.

Margaret Heffernan: So if you tell people that they share a birthday with Rasputin, their view of him will be modified, they will start to think that actually perhaps, he wasn't such a mad monk after all. Because now there's a connection, we think better of him. Um, so we like things that make us feel comfortable, and what makes us feel comfortable is what's familiar, and what's familiar is us. So that's one source of wilful blindness. Another source of wilful blindness is love, you know. Our love of ideas or individuals really gives meaning to our life and we will defend that meaning against tons of evidence.

Andrew Marr: A good example, um, Speer, the architect. It's at some level - loved Hitler.

Margaret Heffernan: Absolutely:

Andrew Marr: Hitler was a father figure for him when he was a young man and a very vulnerable man, and he couldn't quite see beyond the father figure.

Margaret Heffernan: That's exactly right, and Speer talks about Hitler in purple prose of romance, really. And it was clear that Speer loved Hitler but also Hitler had an idea of Speer which was Speer's idealised sense of himself, and so he had to believe in Hitler in order to believe in himself.

Andrew Marr: And if people think that's a rather abstruse or abnormal example, presumably in almost every organisation and in families, there are people fixated or admiring or loving of bosses or lieutenants or spouses or children, and for that reason can't see the obvious flaws and faults.

Margaret Heffernan: That's right, any marriage guidance counsellor will tell you that when your adultery is discovered, what the wounded spouse feels is: oh, there were all those hints all along, and I never saw them. Why did I never see them? I never saw them because I didn't want to see them, 'cause I couldn't afford to see them, 'cause I desperately wanted for the hints not to be true.

Andrew Marr: Classic wilful blindness.

Margaret Heffernan: Yeah.

Andrew Marr: And there are some other, um, more technologically relevant examples right now, because we are all now told that we can multitask. We can be on the mobile phone, we can be checking our laptop or our iPad, we can be doing all sorts of things at the same time. And in a sense, we just got cleverer. Our brains are able to cope with much more. And you would argue that this is absolutely untrue.

Margaret Heffernan: It's an urban myth, really. The fact is, the brain has very hard limits. There's a certain limit to how much we can take in and therefore we have to edit, we have to load-balance. And so what you find is that if you are driving in your car and talking on the phone, there's too much information and some of it gets left out, which is why you're deemed to be mentally as incapacitated as if you're over the alcohol limit. The same is true if you miss a night's sleep, which is if you look at the cognitive performance of people after missing a night's sleep, it is worse than if they are over the limit. Which explains a lot about a lot of the deals that are done in the City, mergers and acquisitions, very very bad decisions, which is simply everybody's too tired. You remember looking at Gordon Brown during the banking crisis? You know, you need to worry about this, because these are people whose brains aren't functioning.

Andrew Marr: So there is a macho culture in business, and certainly in politics, parliamentary politics, which says the longer the hours, the more exhausted you are, the more impressive you are.

Margaret Heffernan: Yes, and in fact, you know, the more exhausted you are, the longer hours you do, what goes first is critical thinking. Most of your brain energy and glucose is going to the effort of staying awake, and what you're losing is the capacity to discriminate. And that is why tiredness is always, always implicated in major industrial accidents, like BP's explosion at Texas City. You have a lot of people who've been working long hours for too long without decent sleep. And, you know, we have this notion that our brain has infinite capacity. It really doesn't.

Andrew Marr: One other example, which I can't resist, of wilful blindness, which is what you call "money blindness".

Margaret Heffernan: Right.

Andrew Marr: Now this is, um, can be many things, including an excessive reverence for people who have large amounts of money, and the assumption that they've got money because their decisions have been better, which - perhaps it's an illusion which we've broken with a little bit over the last couple of years. Um, but there is a very good example that you use about childcare, showing that it's much more to do with daily life than I've [?] suggested.

Margaret Heffernan: Right, so there's a famous experiment where a childcare centre had difficulty with parents being late for pickup. And they thought: oh, we're sick of hearing all the apologies, what we'll do is we'll impose a fine, that will make the parents behave better. In fact, the fine became a price. The parents felt: well, we can now pay for being late - we will. The really important thing about this experiment is once the daycare centre realised, well, this doesn't work, we'll go back to the way we were, they couldn't do it. Once money had entered into the relationship, it blinded the parents to the moral nature of the relationship, and they couldn't go back. And in my opinion, this is why the Big Society won't work. We've just come out of a phase, in which there was a price tag on everything, and now we want to go back and resume these moral relationships, which have been fundamentally shattered. Money blinds us to our relationship to each other, because it appears to offer us the ultimate freedom, which is buying our way in anything...

Andrew Marr: A neat arithmetical ticket...

Margaret Heffernan: That's right. And therefore, of course, you've got a measurement, which I think is a phase we're living through now, where everything is measured by money, and we're blinded to the moral, social, ethical consequences of who we are and what we owe to whom.

Andrew Marr: How important do the rest of us think wilful blindness is? Jocelyn.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: What resonated for me, and it's a subject I'm quite passionate about, so I mustn't go on too long, is what you were saying about the recruitment of women, and the very graphic example, I've heard elsewhere, about the recruitment of women to orchestras. Once candidates for orchestras started playing behind a screen, suddenly the number of women in orchestras went up.

Margaret Heffernan: Right. And orchestras run by men tended to recruit men, and they always maintained it was because men were better players. Of course, they wanted the best players, put them behind screens, and you can only listen to the sound, it changes the decision. What's extraordinary is the Vienna Phil still has not hired a single Asian musician. They still insist that somehow Asians can't produce the right Germanic sound, though I suspect Yo-Yo Ma might disagree with that.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Do they do their auditions behind a screen? Can they genuinely tell the difference?

Margaret Heffernan: Well, it's interesting because they have sort of, hiring a lot more women. But they won't audition Asian players.

Andrew Marr: If wilful blindness runs right the way through society, and we haven't even talked about some of the big corporate examples that you use, is there any cure for it? Is there any way of understanding...

Margaret Heffernan: Well, I think this is really important because they have also looked at people who have managed in very difficult circumstances not to be blind. And what's so important, and I think inspiring about those people is they don't have fabulous IQs, not in elite groups, there's nothing remarkable about them. What's fantastic is they're very ordinary. What unites them is they see through the eyes of the disempowered, so they see different things, they ask hard questions, they connect dots, they do what Hannah Arendt calls thinking without banisters. But I think what's inspiring about them is that because they're ordinary, what they say to us is: we could do that too. If we understand what makes us blind, and we understand how to see more, and someting we could do if we...

Andrew Marr: Standing back, constantly standing back and looking at ourselves, as it were, and give us a good example of somebody who broke through wilful blindness.

Margaret Heffernan: So a classic example is a fantastic woman in Montana whose job was to check electricity meters. And she kept seeing that every house she went into was a 50-ish guy who was at home, early retired, on oxygen. And she thought: there's something going on here. How come all these guys are at home on oxygen tanks in their mid-50s? It took her 25 years but she proved the entire town had been poisoned with asbestosis. Nobody wanted to ask those questions. The available - the information wasn't available. But, you know, she wasn't a scientist, she wasn't an environmentalist, she wasn't a doctor. She just kept thinking: this doesn't make sense.

Andrew Marr: Applying common sense...

Margaret Heffernan: And she had the moral courage not to be dissuaded.

Andrew Marr: Now you talked then about joining the dots, but there are of course lots of examples of people who join the wrong dots, or who join dots in the wrong order. We're going to come onto that now with Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Um, you are an astrophysicist and you're going to be giving the Faraday Lecture at the Royal Society. Um, and you're going to be talking about the end of the world, which is going to take place on the 21st December 2012. Er, that is according to people who are obsessed by the Mayan calendar, which runs out at that point. But it's not just that, let's talk about the Mayans first of all. It is true that the Mayan calendar runs out then, isn't it?

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: The Mayan calendar reaches the end of a cycle.

Andrew Marr: Right. Which is not the same thing.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Which is not the same thing. Our calendars reach the end of a cycle on the 31st December each year. Okay, and we have centenaries and millennia as well, bigger ones. This is one of the bigger ones. Every 5,000 years...

Andrew Marr: Right.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: ...ish.

Andrew Marr: It's - it's a piece of Mayan maths rather than a forecast or a prophecy of any kind.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Yes. There's a little bit of astronomical background, in that the Earth's rotation axis moves around in a circle. Cones... And that cone takes about 26,000 years, and the Mayans decided to divide that into five chunks. Curiously, the Mayans, the ancient Sumerians, the Babylonians all knew about this 26,000 year cycle, which I find quite amazing. They must have been very good astronomers. And they gave different amounts of significance to it. And as I said, the Mayans divided this into five sets, this cycle, and we're coming up to the end of one of their five chunks in December next year.

Andrew Marr: And so is that connected to all the planets being in alignment, at all? Because that's another thing that's swirling around the internet.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Well, there's a lot swirling around the internet to do with the end of the world, it's fascinating. The Mayans predicted the end of the world. You then have to say: how's it going to be accomplished? What's going to happen? And planet alignment is one of them, and things crashing into the Earth, and big solar storms, and earthquakes and typhoons...

Andrew Marr: And the missing planet, tell us about the hidden planet then, that's been kept from us all.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Yep. Well, this was apparently seen by the ancient Sumerians. It's called Nibiru, and it's a very long-period planet, which means it's a very long way out, about seven times the distance of Pluto. Now in Sumerian times, they didn't have telescopes, so they've seen this with the naked eye, albeit in darker skies than we have. With the naked eye, we can't see the planet Uranus, the planet Neptune and the planet Pluto, let alone something seven times the distance of Pluto, so it must be very very big, very bright this thing, if you're suddenly going to be able to see it at that distance. For some reason, this planet has moved in, and it's now hiding behind the Sun. We're sitting around a round table. Andrew happens to be absolutely opposite me. Imagine there's the Sun in the middle. And as I move round the table, you move round the opposite side, so I never see you, you're hidden.

Andrew Marr: Strange, strange game with you there, Jocelyn, yes.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: In fact you're 50 times bigger than the Sun. Um, so you kind of frame the Sun...

Andrew Marr: That's just my ego. That's just my head...

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Er, that's good. And on the 21st December, you're going to come zooming round and crash into the Earth. For no apparent physical reason. Apparently NASA and the governments know about all this, and they're keeping it secret. Paranoia is part of all this.

Andrew Marr: We've - we've bust their game, in the last couple of minutes...

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: No, no, reason doesn't reach all sorts of places, you know.

Andrew Marr: What's interesting - I mean, so, just to be absolutely clear for all those listening, um, of all those theories about the imminent end of the Earth, and the Earth's going to change on its axis and rotate in a different direction - there is no scientific evidence for any of this, as far as you're concerned, absolutely none.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: No. And what's interesting about all these theories is they start with a little bit of correct science. Yep. There probably will be more solar storms around 2012, 2013 but not that many more. And then they build on this and they turn it into something scary. We're seeing the same thing with some of the climate deniers, starting with a grain of good science, build on it, turn it into something scary. And with climate deniers, you can see that there could be a motive.

Andrew Marr: Well, you say scary, because presumably part of the motive there is to remove fear, because we are, you know, the climate change thesis can be as scary as anything you like.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Yes.

Andrew Marr: And it's the sense that perhaps it's not going to be so bad, that maybe motivates people there.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: You mean it's all going to end in a year and a bit, and therefore it'll all be okay.

Andrew Marr: No I was thinking of the climate change argument more, the climate change deniers, so called, um, their motive may be to, as it were, remove scare, you said they were going to make things scarier but actually it might be the other way, it might be...

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Yes, the climate deniers would assert that actually climate change isn't happening.

Andrew Marr: Because there is clearly something in the human psyche which likes, or is attracted to, the notion of collapse, devastation, doom...

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Yes.

Andrew Marr: ...the end of time. There's all the religious groups, throughout time, lots of religious groups have said that time is about to end.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Yes, there's a whole string of these doomsdays. You know, every five or ten years we have another one, over the horizon. Clearly it sells.

Andrew Marr: Is it a sort of transferred version of the, you know, the human struggle to comprehend the idea of individual death? That could be part of it.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: I can see two reasons for it. Either life is so hellish that the thought that there is an end is actually a relief. Or the opposite. God's going to come, carry us off, the rapture, it's going to be wonderful... And oh, incidentally it's happening in our generation. We're a special generation. Oh, and we're special, because we know we're going to be carried off into heaven by God. So there's adding significance and meaning to life, as well.

Andrew Marr: And that produces the sort of closed intellectual system which appears in your book, Margaret, in terms of wilful blindness.

Margaret Heffernan: Yes, in my book I talk about Marion Keech, this amazing woman who prophesised that it's the end of the world, and that the good people are going to be taken off in flying saucers, and on a particular day and time. And of course, on that day at that time, when the saucers don't arrive, there's a huge conflict between faith and reality. And the way that Marion Keech and her followers dealt with this, was to take a deep breath and say: it hasn't happened, because our faith has saved us. This is where the theory of cognitive dissonance comes from. And what's so frightening about this is that disconfirmation makes their faith greater. And as a scientist, for you this must be unbelievably frustrating.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: I think you have to accept, particularly if you're someone who's into communicating science, that there are human attitudes that even rational thinking won't penetrate. You know, David Hume: reason doesn't address passions. Er, that's part of human nature and glory for that. The problem is sometimes too many people of similar thinking get together and it kind of resonates.

Andrew Marr: Mike Figgis.

Mike Figgis: What do you think? What's the root problem here? Why are these theories so common and what could we do to address that, I mean, what are we doing wrong as a culture, that allows - I mean, global warming is an issue...

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Yes.

Mike Figgis: There's also economic issues. It's not so popular, in that sense, you know. The irony seems so obvious, but - you know, if these things are so obvious, why aren't we doing something about it and why are people still believing this absolute...

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Why are we so stupid...

Mike Figgis: ...why are we so stupid?

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Well, we may be not typical. I think part of the issue is indeed poor communication of science, poor science teaching. So that people will believe this fantastic science, that is built on a small nugget of truth. There is an issue there. But I don't think that's the only thing, we won't solve the world that way. I think it is partly human nature. I think some of it is profit motive. If you look on Amazon, you find that there are 44,000 books for sale about the end of the world in 2012.

Andrew Marr: Wow.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Yeah. Prophecy profits people.

Andrew Marr: Well, that - there is an astonishing statistic. We're going to talk, finally about statistics...