When I was a teenager, one day during a history lesson my teacher quoted Lord Acton, the nineteenth century British historian: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I was of an impressionable age and this was exactly the sort of epigram that appealed to me: short and poetic in form, but deep and insightful in meaning. I made a mental note to remember and apply it in my thinking. For someone disposed to play the intellectual rebel – as I was then and am now – the quotation has much to offer, since the authority figures who disapproved of my free-thinking could now be dismissed by me not just as reactionaries, but as corrupt reactionaries. Fathers, teachers, ministers of religion: all are men of power and, drawing on Acton’s sharp observation, it was easy for me to assert that to the degree that they were powerful they were also corrupt.
A year or so later, I saw a paperback copy of Acton’s essays in a second-hand bookshop, which I bought (obviously: the habits of a lifetime, by definition, start when we are young), brought home, and then started to read. I was surprised, indeed disturbed to discover that I had been seriously misled by my teacher. What Acton had written – in a letter, as it happens, the text of which was included in the book of essays – was this: power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. He had qualified the abrupt and striking claim in the first half of his sentence by two words that significantly changed its meaning. Not power corrupts but power tends to corrupt.
A tendency is not an inevitability; the universal cannot be presumed but requires reference to the particularity. In future, before dismissing the utterances of the powerful as the voice of corruption, I would have to assemble some actual evidence for such a claim: it might tend to be true in general but was it also true in this specific case? Knowledge, I had discovered, is not the same as pithiness. A good lesson to learn young, for sure, but one that is not always ready at hand, not always the mind’s preferred approach, because the world is easier to deal with when it can be described in simple terms, using straightforward intellectual constructions that can be applied – lazily, if we are being honest – to any and every example that comes to mind.
We are readily disposed to make use of general categories into which we can gather all cases. It is instinctive; perhaps an instinct cultivated by our determination to survive. In a recent conversation, driving north from Boston (MA) to Scarborough (ME), Peter mentioned Stephen Jay Gould, the famous Harvard palaeontologist, who wrote many popular books about evolutionary biology. I once heard him give a public lecture in London (UK) on the question, Is there such a thing as human nature? His answer: the human brain has evolved to deal well with type-type recognition (“she ate red berries and was buried; these berries are red so I better not eat them”) but deals poorly with statistical analysis (“of the twenty types of red berry in our local habitat, only one is poisonous to humans; so most red berries, including this one, are unlikely to harm me”). Thus, he concluded, while it is not clear that there is such a thing as human nature, it is clear why humans are predisposed to think that there is: we tend to think in types.
Whether or not we have an evolutionarily acquired disposition to classify everything and everyone into groups, at the very least it seems clear that in our speech we are prone to adopt the short-form unqualified generalization. In part, this is because the rhetorical force of brief, bold statements is much greater than longer, subtle ones. Slogans are better able to mobilise minds, both for the personal and the political. Benjamin Franklin – also of Boston (MA) – was adept at crafting pithy sayings, which are easily remembered because they pay no account of the occasions on which they don’t apply: an investment in knowledge always pays the best interest sounds so much better than an investment in knowledge of certain kinds, will likely provide a better return than many other forms of spending, but not in all cases and not over all time periods, despite the fact that the latter is true and the former is not. Likewise, the claim that the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it could be made much more accurate through further elaboration but would almost certainly lose its appeal and become less memorable in the clarifying process.
I am tempted to say, “always avoid unqualified generalizations”, except that this warning is itself an unqualified generalization, and thus to be avoided. Instead, I recommend acknowledgment that, “carefully qualified statements about specific cases are more likely to be true (and, therefore, more likely to be helpful) than unqualified statements about general cases; although this is not always the case, because every general rule has important exceptions, thus demonstrating that rules are mostly derived from statistical norms rather than universal truths, except in those very rare cases when they are universally true”. I hope that is clear.
To summarise, as pithily as I am able: error tends to brevity, but accuracy tends to prolixity. But please note well, as Acton did, the important qualifying role of tendency.
My recent visit to the US provided two illustrations of this point. What might the weather be like in New York City during the fourth week in September? Nowadays that’s an easy question to answer, since the Internet is awash with meteorological data. A brief search provided me not only with the average temperatures, both highs and lows, plus daily rainfall (all very useful information) but also data on the range of cases that might be encountered. In other words, not just the mean for heat and precipitation, but also how far the extremes in both directions might stray from that mean. I could therefore predict not just what was likely but what was possible. All very interesting as a summary of general weather history for the city, but for me, visiting specifically during the fourth week of September in the year 2019, and wondering what to pack – should I bring sun-glasses and sun-cream, or a raincoat and a hat? – the more pertinent question was, What will the weather be like in NYC next week? That the mean temperature ranges between 16 and 25 Celsius is interesting, but not what I most cared about, for which I needed an accurate weather forecast, rather than rich data on historical averages. (As it happens, the city enjoyed higher than average temperatures, closer to 30 than 25 most days that week.)
En route to New York, as Peter drove us from Scarborough (ME) to Boston (MA) to catch the Amtrak train to Penn Station (NY), we talked about our time working together at the investment management subsidiary of a global financial firm, back at the start of this century. It was a pleasure to reminisce. Later that day, staring out of the train window at the New England countryside, I thought about my last couple of years of employment there, when I was asked by the CEO to set up and then chair a Diversity Committee for the European office. As part of this process, I interviewed the (mostly male) members of the Senior Management Team, to solicit their thoughts about the current state of diversity within the firm (very simply: dire) and what should be done about it (very disappointingly: not much).
I remember well a conversation with one senior manager, who told me, with no hint of embarrassment, that the reason why there were no women in his investment team (to be clear, none at all: not just fewer than 50%, but actually 0%) was because to be in his team required a high level of competence in mathematics and – alas! – women were just not as good at maths as men. This from a Managing Director of a firm which insisted that all its investment strategies should be thoroughly evidenced by data and implemented with care, to achieve good performance and avoid the concentration of risk. In other words, his team only bought assets for our clients after they had taken account – at great expense of research time – of the detailed characteristics of each asset, its likely performance and how it would help to diversity the existing portfolio. When we hired staff for our business, however, the firm paid almost no attention to well-documented evidence of skill acquisition and learning potential, relying instead on the intuitive judgments (also known as the prejudices) of the senior managers. Rather than ensuring that new hires brought diversity to the existing team, as a matter of deliberate choice we concentrated our risk by repeatedly hiring in our own image.
This story is neither unusual nor surprising: it reflects how the finance industry was, and in many cases still is. For all its sense of being at the cusp of innovation and change, it remains – mostly – a place of conservatism and embedded privilege. As Stephen Jay Gould explained, we tend to think in particular ways, because as a species we have evolved to give precedence to type-type recognition ahead of a rigorous statistical examination of the data. We tend to think in ways that proved very successful at an earlier stage of our evolution, but which might not be so helpful for our next survival challenge; and we find it hard to abandon what worked well last time around. However easy this is to understand, it is impossible to excuse. Sloppy thinking is sloppy, irrespective of its evolutionary pedigree. And not just sloppy, but also dangerous, wrong and unjust. Knowing the average tells us nothing about the individual. The mean is not the best.
We need to remind ourselves regularly that many red berries are edible and that some are delicious; we need to acknowledge that some women are not just good at mathematics, but better than most men; and, based on recent experience, I can assure my readers that sometimes the last week in September is the perfect time to visit NYC, when the sky is bright blue and the sun is warm, and Manhattan becomes – as Ella sang – an isle of joy.
