One of my favourite pieces of orchestral music is Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. In my early teens, back in the days of vinyl long-playing records, which rotated on the turntable 33 times per minute, I was given a recording which I played regularly. The music is accessible and exciting, an ideal introduction to the classical tradition. The work had been written for piano in the 1870s, but fifty years later Maurice Ravel had produced an orchestral adaptation of the score, which was the music I knew. In 1986, I watched on television as Barry Douglas played the original version in Moscow, on his way to winning the Tchaikovsky Piano Prize. I still listen to his recording, released the following year.
My Philosophy: On how we live
My initiation into political work occurred when I was twelve. I spent several hours delivering leaflets for the local Liberal Party candidate who contested the parliamentary seat where I grew up, which in those days was reliably Conservative. On election day itself I helped collect voter numbers, cycling between several polling stations where other volunteers were keeping tally of those who had promised to vote for ‘our man’, taking this information back to the local committee room, where the agent’s assistant aggregated the data and identified those among our known supporters who had yet to vote. Other volunteers were dispatched to knock on their doors and remind them to hurry to the polling stations before they closed. The process was rather amateurish compared with the technology-enabled campaigning of the modern day, but it was also courteous and civic-minded. ‘Our man’ knew he wouldn’t win, but he sought to secure as many votes as he could, not least because the higher his tally the greater the pressure on the incumbent Member of Parliament to serve his constituents well.
My Philosophy: On what there is
In the European tradition, philosophy begins not with an agreed object of study, but with the introduction of a distinct method of thinking. In the poems of Homer and Hesiod, the standard causal explanation for any important event involves some reference to interference in human affairs by one or other divinity. Understanding the moods and methods of the gods was central to providing an explanation of why history unfolded in the way it did, and why the natural world was arranged in the way it was. What set the earliest philosophers apart from their predecessors was their desire to explain why things had happened and how they were currently arranged without recourse to the gods. To be a philosopher was to think differently: to study history and science (and other subjects) for alternate sources of explanation to the mythological tales that were prevalent in society.
My Philosophy: On leading a considered life
In the days when I worked in the financial services industry, from time to time someone would discover that my academic background was neither in economics nor finance (nor mathematics, nor physics) and would ask me whether I thought my training in philosophy was of benefit or of hindrance to my work. This question was usually asked in such a tone as to suggest that studying philosophy would – rather obviously - be inadequate as a preparation for a successful career in finance. I tried my best to make the contrary case.
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Provoked and distracted
I had planned to write about philosophy. To be precise, to write about my personal philosophy: what it is and how I came to it. I intended to approach my theme obliquely, by saying something about economics. I still plan to do this, but not today – and, therefore, not this year – because I have been distracted. Instead, in this text I will write more directly about economics, because that is now the subject at the front of my mind.