Free The Blind Giant by Nick Harkaway Page A

no issue occurs in isolation. Issues which are themselves complex and require complex solutions are connected to others which appear to pull in the opposite direction: political programmes inevitably have to be paid for, creating what appears to be a budgetary zero-sum game in which a positive must be measured against a corresponding negative – the hope being that the consequences of the first will leverage the consequences of the second and we can all go up a level. More often they seem to drag one another down.
    At the same time, some or all programmes will have unforeseen and unforeseeable consequences, good or bad. In
Freakonomics
, economist Steven D. Levitt and author Stephen J. Dubner trace the unexpected consequences of incentives and apparently unrelated social policies. The paths they follow are convoluted, but the lesson is that everything is connected – according to
Freakonomics
, the failure of the ‘urban superpredator’ to appear and make the streets of American cities unsafe in the 1990s can be traced not to programmes of education or tougher juvenile sentencing, but to the legalization of abortion in the 1970s – and while the connections are often unexpected they are powerful and close. The human world is not a loose-knit bundle of strands from which one can be plucked out, but a snarl of cross-connected threads woven together by centuries. Our social systems, after all, are not created by a design team but evolved to cope with changing conditions and forever struggling to catch up.
    The only way through the maze might seem to be to go back to the source and try to build your comprehension from scratch, but that’s almost impossible; quite often you’d need years even to understand the questions, let alone acquire a full understandingof the opposing positions. And yet without that understanding, how can you decide whether you believe in – for example – proportional representation voting systems? The pros and cons of a flat tax, the national need for a nuclear deterrent, or membership of the European Union? The stakes are so high, and yet the answers seem to be utterly mired in complexity. The broadcast television news was bad enough, but now every social networking site includes feeds and miniature party political broadcasts, debates and opinions about issues local and global which seem to have a direct connection to our lives – indeed, they seem to propose our personal complicity in decisions of which we greatly disapprove. There’s an obligation upon us, surely, if the information is there, to inform ourselves about our moral liabilities and act.
    And yet, you could spend a lifetime doing so. From fish to cocoa to cars to wood, everything has a narrative, and not all of those narratives are happy ones. That was fine while we could imagine ourselves isolated from ill-doings far away, but nowhere is far away any more. The chain of connection from our homes to the war zones of the Middle East and Africa is horribly short. Once more, the hearth is touched by things which belong in other spaces. The television news brought the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s to the living rooms of Britain. Images of starvation in another hearth space came home to the fireplaces and buttered crumpets of the UK, and the response was huge. But now it seems everywhere is broken, and it’s too much to take in, because the net of connection implicates the lifestyles of the industrialized nations in the suffering of others. The hearth itself, which is supposed to be a place of refuge from the world, seems to be purchased at the cost of pain in the world. Every decision – even what fruit to buy, what brand of tea, or whether to eat beef or chicken, what it means to buy from a given supermarket – is part of every other, and all of them seem to have disproportionate knock-on effects in unpredictable places. The simplestquestions have acquired nuance, controversy and multiple interpretations. We are at sea.
    And the ship