The Broad Swath

P for Price – The Unseen Sacrifice

In English, when we describe someone who talks a particular course of action after due contemplation, we say that they have made a choice. 

In other languages like Chinese, the description is more nuanced.  One word for decision/choice is particularly interesting.  It is a portmanteau of two words, 取 (meaning to take) and 舍 (meaning to give up).  取舍 therefore encompasses the entirely of one’s decision, in deciding on something, we forego other possibilities that flow from rejecting that very same thing.  The positive and negative aspects of freedom exist simultaneously, there is no one without the other. 

That is my preface for this section; an analogy for the type of society we live in and what we necessarily forego (i.e. the price).  

The promenade

A perfectly agreeable afternoon. Sun sparkling in the waters besides the long promenade. A channel of porcelain leading out to the westward sea.

Across the narrow channel, land reappears. Verdant hills leaning into a baby blue sky, the northern region of the UNESCO geopark. Dusk alights on the slope of nestled trees, now trickling gold. There are no buts. This is one of the most beautiful places in Hong Kong.

At the same time, I possess this amazing ability. I am always able to guilt-trip myself when partaking in any form of pleasure.  It is an eternal conflict with the contrarian in me.

As I edge forward to take in the sights and sounds, elbows on the promenade railings, I notice how clean and spotless they are.

Man-made structures do not renew themselves. Who maintains them? And the lights that illuminate the walkways? There isn’t a stray piece of garbage in sight, not even a fallen leaf.

The promenade goes on for kilometres.  Someone has to do maintenance, on a frequent basis.

They probably spend entire days doing this.

I head back soon after. Past parents with children. Retirees.  Strolling in the cool evenings, along well-lit and pristine walkways, delighting in the same sights as I have.

===========

Time is the foundation of any city. It is here, that some can have more than 24 hours a day.

But its conveniences come at a price.

I’ve mainly lived by myself since 2011. Living apart from family does mean a greater degree of freedom. But it also involves duties. Scrubbing the floor, washing the dishes. Laundry. Those of you who have studied abroad will have had similar experiences.

Initially, I found these chores to be an utter pain.  Back home, someone would iron the clothes, stack them nicely in the cupboard. All I had to do was dump my soiled clothes in the laundry basket. I don’t think like that anymore, but this provides a good segue into my first point: the tediums of life.

Let’s start from the basic unit: the individual. I enjoy cooking, but that is matched in equal measure by my dislike for washing the dishes. It is only bearable for me if I spend at most half an hour washing up every week. Such tasks, which we would rather someone else perform for us, can be described as “Tediums”.

Why don’t you outsource these, I hear you say. Sounds fair. So I locate a part-time helper by the name of Doxpudy. While Doxpudy does the dishes, I am free to engage in meaningful pursuits. My flatmate sees this and given our common hatred of dishwashing, he propositions Doxpudy to do his dishes too.

Doxpudy accepts. There’s only a marginal difference between washing the dishes of one versus two. Thus we have the beginnings of concentration (and subsequently specialisation) of labour.

Cities add another dimension to the basic scenario, through public infrastructure: means of transport, power, plumbing, telecommunications, public facilities/amenities ^[1]schools, hospitals, police stations, stadiums, parks.

These do not fall within personal spheres of responsibilities but contain their own share of Tediums. For instance:

I like to swim. And being able to swim indoors without being subject to the whims of inclement weather is even better. St George’s Baths, a precursor of the modern swimming pool, first opened on 1829, next to the port of Liverpool. With proper heating, this allowed people to engage in the sport all year round. Subsequently, the introduction of chlorination also reduced the risk of waterborne diseases (naturally residing in bodies of water or from other swimmers)^[2]https://www.liverpoolpicturebook.com/2014/04/StGeorgesBathsPierHead.html.

But swimming pools come with their own Tedium. Back in its day, St George’s Baths cost £43,659. In contrast, going for a run costs virtually nothing, be it two centuries ago or today. A pool has to be maintained. Pumps keep water levels stable, pool samples need to be sent for lab testing, earthing for lightning rods have to be checked, shower rooms have to be cleaned. The list goes on.

Pools are just one example.

Cleaners who work under twilight to dispose of municipal waste are often featured in documentaries, venerated as unsung heroes of a city. And it’s not just them.  Every city is propped up by people tackling Tediums, it is their preoccupation for an entire day. Year on year, their state of living suffers; hidden from sight, gradually consumed.

Yes I can see how specialisation has led to the development of the modern city. But there is an unseen price to pay. This is the sacrifice I speak of. We have consigned certain individuals in society to an insipid life for the benefit of others.

Consider the common attitude in Northeast Asia towards bringing up a family. Double income couple. They hire a domestic helper for the chores and to watch over the kid, while they continue with their careers. That is how Tediums are dealt with: outsourced and delegated. By buying the time of others. Buying the lives of others. To me, that is not the route that maximises human potential.

At base, this is really just a very roundabout way of saying that a city has its conveniences. But these conveniences are in fact built on the toils and labours of certain individuals whose holistic development is restricted as a result. We cannot buy time from other people.  There is a finite time reserved for each of us to live out on this earth, to wrest it from others who are compelled to bargain away their time for sustenance is neither just nor in their interests as rational beings.

Relational Race Unending

You’ve done your best. But what if your best isn’t enough?

The train

I take the train to work. On most days, I am party to a strange phenomenon.  As the escalator descends to the platform, I see that my train has already arrived. It may leave in the next few seconds, or the next minute. If I rush, I risk getting squished by the closing doors.  I choose to wait. It’s my pre-determined route to work and I’ve already added in a couple of minutes of buffer to cater to situations where I miss one train and have to catch the next.

Contrary to my position, upon seeing the train, masses of individuals in front and behind me who rush down the escalator and speed towards the train.

I’ve never understood this behaviour.  Sure a few might have missed their alarms and they are running late.  But is everyone else really in a hurry or do they just have an uncontrollable urge to take the first train they see?

It is not just about trains. I’ve seen this “fear of losing out” play out in various other settings as well. Government handouts. Panic buying of household supplies. And so on.

The certainty that there will shortly be another train keeps me at ease. I feel safe about my plans. And this need to rush I’ve observed, seems to stem from an opposing consideration: insecurity arising from uncertainty.

Relational qualities

Remember the hourglass. 

Any relational quality involves a dynamic equilibrium between its extremes. The tallest and the shortest; the wealthiest and the poorest. Sand interchanges in an hourglass; some grains will pad the bottom while others christen the top.

So long as our ability to attain our desired standard of living is relational to that of others, we will be locked in an endless race to stay ahead of the putative curve.

Over the years, I’ve received comments about my educational background and achievements. Most of the time the speaker means well and merely wishes to demonstrate their admiration. But I’ve always felt uncomfortable about such comments. Apart from a Stoic bent which eschews delight in the ephemeral nature of achievements, I find that much of the praise really has nothing to do with me. It has to do with the speaker’s impression of what it means to go to this or that school and what that implies about the prospects of these people.  But I am merely an itinerant traveller, who has passed a handful of enjoyable years under its venerable awnings. It is improper to bask in any honour which belongs solely to my school.

And so on one occasion, I got annoyed. It was in 2015, close to the end of the year. I was doing an internship at a small company and the team were out for lunch.

“With your qualifications, you are set for life, unlike people like us”, said one lady, whom we shall call Z.

Almost by reflex, I replied: “Educational qualifications are merely pieces of paper, what’s really important is the desire to learn and whether you take the time to feed this desire”.

To this day I remember Z’s response, which can be paraphrased thus: “it is precisely people like you who can say that academic qualifications are just pieces of paper, you are secure in your educational pedigree, you do not have to worry about the future”

I was stung. Z’s words have stayed with me for close to a decade now.

I certainly did not mean to come across as a snob. Nor was I trying to engage in humble brag.  And I stand by my view even today. 

But many years later, I can see why Z responded in that way. For her, academic qualifications are the gateway to social mobility, the lack of which has hindered her (and her children’s) prospects and the quality of life which she looks forward to.

Between the haves and the have nots, she falls squarely at the bottom end of the hourglass. 

It made me realise the emptiness of my view of qualifications as paper, of substance over form.

In order for anyone to take my view seriously, I would first have to show them that an environment exists, where individuals do not have their basic state of living determined by the level of education they have, or the type of academic qualification that they hold: that living well, does not depend on relational qualities.

When employment depends on your competence vis-à-vis other candidates, when access to commodities depends not on how much you have but also how much everyone else has, then the perpetual race is on.

Children are put through extra tuition so that they stay ahead of the bell curve. College students vie to enhance their university application statements with ever more exotic extra-curricular experiences in a bit to stand out. Potential employees must possess an increasing number of skills and qualifications.  Work performance involves rating employees into banded tiers with quotas so some staff will always end up in the lowest band even if they’ve conducted their duties to a satisfactory level.  So the hamster wheel continues to turn as we chase the bell curve.  

What meritocracy actually means

I confess that I too am very taken by stories of individuals going from rags to riches. And I think embedded in that is a belief founded on meritocracy (inculcated over the years and no doubt reinforced by our own anecdotal experiences), that those of ability should or eventually will have a position and quality of life in society commensurate with their effort.

And I applaud those who work towards this goal. I too was so minded.

But the hourglass returns to haunt me. You can flip it as many times as you like, make changes through reform or revolution, you can tweak the tiers, redistribute the holdings. But there will always be sand at the bottom.  That is what has been bothering me in the past decade.

Let us put aside malignance and intentional incompetence for now. What if you are truly less competent than your neighbour? You’ve done your best. Are you doomed to scraps at the bottom of the tank, struck by a form of cosmic inequality not of your choosing, ordained when you were born into this world? ^[3]in keeping with the focus of Prosaic Days, this phenomenon essentially arises in the context of cities without suburbia or hinterlands because individuals there no longer have the ability to support … Continue reading.

In reaching the zenith, we herald the coming nadir.

This is a theme with a large volume of literature dedicated to it ^[4]from Gibbon’s rise and fall of the Roman Empire to Das Capital etc, and I do not intend a lengthy exposition that adds nothing.

I merely observe that any human designed system (together with its institutions), has the potential to be gamed by its very creators, intentionally and in other cases, unwittingly.

It is a tale told over countless centuries and by countless societies. It starts with a social hierarchy which is fairly flat.

In time individuals, through ability, intrigue and other means, manoeuvre themselves into positions of strength.  From there they consolidate these positions, gathering more resources around themselves.  For the wish to provide for one’s family and leave a lasting legacy, is a very human one. The initially fluid tiers in society become increasingly stratified. To the point where social mobility is entirely stifled.

Like damming the mouth of a burgeoning river. It is the growing frustration of people of ability, unable to obtain social positions commensurate with their aspirations. There is but one eventual outcome.

Edifices crumble. They burn. A great conflagration sets the stage for rebirth, a pithy re-enactment of the Australian bushfires, where intense heat is key for the germination of seeds long dormant and compressed beneath the earth.

We observe these forms of destructive creation in our societies.  In the context of market competition, we even encourage it for good measure.

But I do not think that we would agree that civilisation as a whole has to perish in blood and fire at periodic cycles in order to start anew.  Unlike nature, we are unable to accept such loss of life and suffering.  There has to be another way.  But that is a separate topic ^[5]perhaps the cycle can only be broken when Man no longer has but one sense of self whose interest he doggedly pursues, when irrational bonds across bloodlines and ideology are broken, when there is no … Continue reading.

For now we keep the outfit going by poking holes in the dam so a little water trickles through now and then to relieve the pressure.

I think even those born into unfavourable circumstances are willing to tolerate such a state of affairs, as long as they are able to attain a desired standard of living through their own effort.

But once this core aspect of autonomy is denied, frustration turns to resentment.

I’ve said previously that consolidation of power does not necessarily have to be ill-intentioned. We see this in generations of immigrants, adding on to the efforts of their forebears to better their own lives and the lives of their descendants.  That is not objectionable in itself ^[6]I suppose one could advance a view that there is no general moral obligation to advance the interest of others; ie we only need be responsible for ourselves but on a systematic level, the actions of countless such individuals produces an increasingly stratified and immobile society.

Attempts to resolve this through wealth redistribution ignore the fact that distribution of money does not necessarily result in the distribution of communities (of social connections between individuals of a certain class), of knowledge, or of opportunities.

In this I see a parallel to Rousseau’s point about the educative effect of participatory democracy; it is not just about voting someone to pursue our interests but about each participant being put in a position where they have to balance the competing interests of different stakeholders and realising (this being the educative effect of democracy) that these tensions exist in every community in the course of making a decision.  And in this world of growing echo chambers, that understanding alone can be powerful.

We cannot achieve this state when the tiers of society are calcified and impermeable to each other.

–Every toilet bowl is a hero.

With one button, all your worries are flushed away–

It’s true. So goes the song “Toilet Bowl” from Andy Lau, one of the Heavenly Kings of Pop in Hong Kong during the roaring 90s.

“Every toilet bowl is a friend, you can’t live your life without.

My secrets are too many, my dreams too heavy, you will slowly understand, dear toilet”

Whimsical? Perhaps. But there is truth within.

I like to say to people that I have a toilet bowl mentality ^[7]no it does not mean that I like to take crap from people.

I tend to flush and forget.  For someone who has lived in a city all his life, there is nothing out of the ordinary about this.

But things changed a couple of years ago when I started thinking about living off the grid in the countryside.  Without plumbing, I had to confront the issue of dealing with wastewater from cooking cleaning, bathing and of course using the toilet. That triggered a chain of inquiry.  What’s in my waste? Does it degrade? How do I stop the smell? Can it be released to the environment? These were questions that I’d never bothered to ask in the past.

I find the toilet bowl mentality a useful description of how we have chosen to deal with the more burdensome aspects of modern life, the Tediums mentioned in an earlier section ^[8]see P for Price section.

Adopting such an attitude results in several deficiencies (and these are often interrelated). To demonstrate this, let us continue with our lavatorial excursion.

1. Absolving ourselves from responsibility

When you know that you don’t have to deal with the consequences of your actions, you are less likely to think things through.

Any model of behavioural motivation has to link action with consequence. The tragedy of the commons is one example of this mismatch between action and consequence.  There are other instances.

Let’s ask ourselves. Have you ever thrown things into the toilet bowl which you weren’t supposed to?

You probably wouldn’t throw things in which tend to clog the pipes.  But what about paint, turpentine or mud from your boots just because the toilet bowl was conveniently located nearby?

One flush and its all gone.

Out of mind, out of sight ^[9]see also, the discussion in the Disconnect section.

But your digested meal hasn’t disappeared with the push of a button. As you leave the washroom, it is being sent coursing through a complex chain of pipes to a sludge treatment plant. The mode of operation is pretty standard across countries. The waste of an entire city/municipality is concentrated, then treated to some degree before being discharged into the ocean or tributary.

If you had to clean the sewage pipes or plow through the sludge at its final destination, would you be more discerning about what you throw into the toilet bowl?

2. Bigger problems require more complex solutions, or do they?

Here we consider two different ideological approaches:

(i) correction at source vs (ii) correction in bulk

Cities have chosen the latter approach.  We accumulate our Tediums and allocate specialists to tackling them.  This we believe, brings efficiency.

But this also results in deficiencies:

a. Leaving a problem to fester means that more variables are introduced: this relates to the idea of dealing with issues at source before they actually become problems, in the same way that we do not wait to correct the ills of a man in the sunset years of his life when a gentle rebuke in his youth would have sufficed to prevent him from veering onto the wrong path.

b. Complex solutions require maintenance by specialists and the consequences of failure are magnified ^[10]this also brings out the issue of sacrifice discussed earlier, see P for Price.

c. The need for specialists means that not everyone can be a part of the solution although they are part of the problem, thus causing disconnect including^[11]see further discussion in the eponymous section:

• Complexity leading to incomprehension, dissociation and helplessness
• Lack of understanding as to the work and difficulties of others

d. Lost opportunity for local solutions to local problems. Suppose there are two towns which are adjacent to each other.  Town A produces cotton and generates textile waste.  Town B manufactures equipment packaging and generates plastic waste.  But waste collection is centralised so Town A and B are serviced by a common utilities provider, which also services Towns C to Z.  Waste is collected across different administrative zones, which do not distinguish whether Town A and Town B districts.

When waste arrives at the disposal facility, it contains waste from everywhere and sorting it is too tedious and inefficient ^[12]notice how we sometimes create inefficiencies in our bid to design efficient systems that work at scale.  So the solution is simply to combust everything.  But at the local level, textile waste from Town A could have been reconstituted into recycled paper for use in the growing eco-tourism scene (this being unique to Town A and absent in Town B).  The same is possible for Town B.  

But our obsession with scalable solutions leads to the abstraction of issues from their local environment (and containing their own community/region-specific idiosyncrasies) and the imposition of a standardised solution to these issues.  This ignores the potential to engage local communities in the creation of customised solutions to local problems.  Such engagement in turn feeds into the discussion about participatory democracy and reducing disconnect in urban societies^[13]see further discussion in the Disconnect section.

Illustrating the deficiencies above (2a to 2d) using a case study