I have been working on a project called Spielzeug for some time now, and gave a short talk on the subject for ROAM last week. Laura Barton mentions it in the Guardian today. I thought I’d put the talk up here because I’m keen to see if anyone thinks it’s interesting, or has their own take on it from their own experience.

I had lots of nice comments from people after the talk - and quite a few emails. Considering there were only about 20 people at the talk (it took place in a mobile library in Haggerston Park in Hackney last Friday) I consider that a fairly good hit rate. If anyone has any thoughts please drop me an email and I will add them in (without editing) at the bottom.

Spielzeug –
How can you live in an immeasurable world?

By Dan Kieran

ROAM

Haggerston Park

9th July, 2010

world?

Hello everyone. My name is Dan Kieran and I have written and edited ten books including, most infamously, Crap Towns. For which I got my first, second and third death threats. I also did a book with Ian Vince called Three Men In A Float about the month we spent with our mate Pras driving across England in a 1957 electric milkfloat. Before that I did a book called I Fought The Law, which was an investigation/expose of how New Labour mis-used anti terrorist legislation to undermine and criminalise political protest.

I am also associated with a magazine called the Idler. The Idler is essentially a magazine that has coalesced around people who are determined not to be pushed into a life and a job they don’t want, and who yearn for the freedom to think and live for themselves.

I’m here today to talk to you about how to live in an immeasurable world. Now this talk drifts into areas of science and philosophy that I have no official qualifications entitling me to speak about, beyond the pursuit of my own curiosity. I deliberately avoid the professional world when it comes to learning. Essentially I’m an enthusiastic amateur when it comes to science and philosophy, so if anyone wants to pull me up on something go ahead. I’m very happy for this to be a dialogue because I want to understand these ideas much more than I want to be right.

So, as an introduction into the immeasurable world I’m going to start by telling you about something called Spielzeug.

Spielzeug is a German word that means literally ‘play piece’ or more conventionally ‘toy’. But it has another meaning too. A meaning we have no equivalent word for in the English language – much in the same way that we have no word for Schadenfreude (enjoying the misfortune of others) or Zeitgeist (something that captures the spirit of the times).

The best way for me to explain Spielzeug is for me to tell you a story about a man called Andy, someone I met while writing this book about machine enthusiasts. Andy is incredibly passionate when it comes to tanks and guns.

I went to see him in Oxfordshire where he lives in a mobile home that’s parked next to a gold painted Sherman tank. Andy is a retired soldier who spent a large part of the 70s and 80s in Northern Ireland who now gives tank-driving lessons. When he left the army he did a bit of work organising music tours  - he spent many years touring with Elton John across Europe. Then he was a mercenary in Darfur and in his words ‘all sorts of other unsavoury places’. To make sure you have the right physical picture of him in your head, he had long flowing curly hair and looked like a diminutive Robert Plant.

He welcomed me into his caravan and I immediately spotted various firearms on display. We began chatting about why men love machines and he asked me if I’d ever heard of Spielzeug. I told him that I had not. “Follow me” he said, and proceeded to lead me through a barn with four other tanks before coming to a door bolted with six padlocks. A few clunking minutes later he led me into a long room with literally hundreds of guns and machine guns hanging on the far wall. We were standing in an armoury. He stood in front of it and grinned like a small boy.

Andy paused for the effect to take hold, before telling me to close my eyes and hold out my hands. I was now even more nervous. He tried to reassure me. “You’re going to tell me which of the two guns I’m about to hand you is the most well made. Even though you know nothing about guns and will have your eyes closed.” He raised his eyebrows urging me to comply. I was fascinated, so I did.

What happened next is very hard to explain, but he handed me something first that felt wonderful in my hand. At first I thought it was a combination of the weight and the shape that might account for the feeling but it just felt ‘right’. Just as I was enjoying holding it Andy took it away and immediately handed me another one. This one felt awful. I could tell it wasn’t right and shook my head. “The first one is the best” I said with an unfathomable confidence, and then opened my eyes.

Andy grinned again. “You’re right. The first one was a Walther PPK, James Bond’s gun in every movie from Dr. No to Tomorrow Never Dies. The second one was a Japanese copy of another famous gun made with inferior materials.” He paused while my face contorted back into its normal state.

“What’s all that about then?” he pondered, smiling broadly.

It was rather compelling, but surely it was just fluke. I don’t know anything about guns. I told Andy it was a bit weird but surely nothing more than that. He said, “Let’s try it again with some others then.”

We repeated the experiment again and again. By the time I’d guessed correctly six times in six attempts he’d made his point and I was paying attention. I could just ‘tell’ which guns were made properly by the way they felt in my hand. I know it sounds insane but I promise you it’s true.

After that he took me out to drive some tanks, which was brilliant fun, but has very little to do with this talk.

On the way home I began to think about this Spielzeug thing again. It was utterly bizarre but there was no doubt in my mind that this feeling was real. What finally convinced me that Andy was on to something rather profound was what happened next. A flurry of recollections reached a tipping point in my head. I began to remember loads and loads of instances in my life where I’d felt Spielzeug before. I’d just never had a world for it until now.

The most recent example at the time was when my wife and I were looking to rent a house.

We knew what we were looking for. A 3 bed house with a large garden (we were moving from an upstairs flat) a large kitchen and parking outside the house. Preferably backing onto countryside.

Having spent months trawling through many perfectly nice places with the required large garden and parking space we were hoping for we happened upon a small house with a tiny, gravelled garden on a road in the middle of a town where the nearest parking was half a mile away. But as we walked in the front door, before we’d even been through to the kitchen or glanced at the rooms upstairs, Rachel and I just looked at each other and began to smile. Now I recognise that we spotted the house had Spielzeug. We just knew it was perfect. More to the point we just knew we were supposed to live there. We’ve been living in that house for 2 years now, and I can’t imagine ever moving. Until we find another house with Spielzeug perhaps.

I also get this feeling about Spitfires. Martin and Co acoustic guitars, surfing and the Tiger Mahogany shelves I have in the room where I work that my father in law made for me. My five-year-old son thinks Lego has Spielzeug, and I think he could be right.

So that’s what Spielzeug is, it’s that indefinable, immeasurable quality some things have that you can tell deep within yourself are exactly the way they are supposed to be. Your response to Spielzeug is not something you debate or have to think about, it’s almost as if you can identify it unconsciously. Spielzeug is a ‘quality’ of rightness about something. It can be anything. A piece of music. A car. A desk. We’ve all been in the presence of these things. Moments in life or objects we’ve encountered that just hit the spot for reasons we can’t rationally explain. This is where the word ‘quality’ comes from. But now the brand men have been let loose on the term it doesn’t have the same kind of value in our heads as a word for Spielzeug that it used to. Incidentally I have a friend who does lots of consultancy for brand development and he says the job of marketing is to conjure this indefinable Spielzeugy quality into whatever it is they are trying to sell. Perhaps that’s why we’re don’t trust this feeling as much as we should, because we’re so used to being told things have spielzeug when they don’t that we don’t think about using this sense to guide us in our lives more often. The big question is whether these things do have Spielzeug, or whether we impose spielzeug on to them. There’s a social Philosopher called Pierre Bourdieu who would say it’s just a bourgeoise way of describing personal taste, but I think there’s more to it than that because Spielzeug takes you completely by surprise.

Spielzeug or quality, has an interesting lineage from the point of view of Philosophy too.

The word ‘quality’ is very important in this context, because that was the term coined by Plato to explain how you should best live your life. Plato argued that the most sensible way to interpret the meaning of life was to rely on your thoughts and your thought processes rather than the information gathered by your senses. Your senses, he argued, could be tricked. He considered thoughts and how you think and feel about the world to be much more reliable. Plato’s attitude was more like what we would now call the Zen approach to life – to make sense of the world you need to pursue a kind of inner truth.

Plato has an interesting take on what I call Spielzeug too, the idea of things being just as they are meant to be. He had what’s known as the theory of forms – essentially that in a divine place somewhere are perfect examples of everything that exists in our world. So in this divine place there is the perfect table, and all tables in our world are attempts to recreate this perfect table. There’s also a chair, tree and so on.

In the realm of philosophy it’s often said that everything considered or discovered since his time is a mere footnote to Plato. Plato is the man when it comes to Philosophy. So what happened to his idea of “quality?” well to cut an incredibly complicated and long story short, essentially it fell out of favour in a battle against Aristotle’s ‘Truth’.

Aristotle, Plato’s pupil, thought Plato had it all the wrong way round and they had a bit of a row about it. He believed that it was only by analysing the physical world with your senses that you would ever have any hope of being able to make sense of what life is all about. Rather than ponder great questions, Aristotle though you had to get out into the world and take things apart to see how they were made. Aristotle’s approach is the forerunner for our modern scientific method because for him it was all about materialism – in the sense that he was only prepared to trust and regard as ‘True’ things that could be broken apart and examined with his senses. He practiced dissection to try and learn how the bodies of frogs and animals worked for example. Aristotle took the first steps along the path of what we now think of as the materialist worldview that would be re-discovered during the Renaissance and inform the thinkers of the Enlightenment – only what is observable and testable can be said to be real. Remember – this was in response to the Church and their use of faith and divine law to strangle what they saw as the scientific attack on their religion based worldview. This way of interpreting the world is reflected in modern science’s use of experimentation and peer review as opposed to superstition and faith. It is the basis of the scientific method and it came about to save us from the indoctrination and misuse of religious teachings to prevent people from asking awkward questions that undermined the word of God. Today we’ve gone over to this mode of thinking completely. Ironically, we cling to it as desperately in much the same way that the Church clung to God in the pre-enlightenment past. If something cannot be measured, then it simply doesn’t exist, and anyone that tells you that something immeasurable does exist, is some kind of superstitious crack-pot.

Modern Materialism takes this even further. People like Richard Dawkins for example, (assuming I understand him correctly) will tell you that consciousness doesn’t exist in the way we think it does. In order to fit it into his material worldview he and materialists like him, say human consciousness is simply a by-product of biology, which is a physical and measurable thing. And also according to him, if you don’t agree about this you are kidding yourself, and one step away from being a religious idiot.

So, whether we’re aware of it or not most of us today side with Aristotle and the scientific method. Our education system is based on it for one thing. For us his approach is the approach of the ‘real’ world. Ever since the Enlightenment the harnessing of industry to scientific discovery has brought forward a constant stream of new technologies. Our attitude to measurement now permeates every aspect of our lives. The materialist worldview and our fixation with physical things has led to the materialistic society. We now understand value only in terms of things that can be measured. That’s why most people seem to want to have more than they have of everything they need. While this has happened everything that is not observable, recordable, countable, measurable, has drifted further and further back in our priorities – and I believe we are suffering the consequences for this now.

Now this is not intended to be a rant against science or technology. I’m very grateful and very happy to have benefited from the advances science and technology has brought us. But for me they are only half of the recipe when it comes to living a happy and contented life, but they have taken over everything. Now the immeasurable world doesn’t get a look in. It’s religious mumbo jumbo, it’s laughed at, even though it informs everything we most care about in our lives. Just take the House of Commons for example. They spend a great deal of time in there discussing the minutiae of policy and arguing about small differences in monetary, education and health policy, and always, you notice, in largely measurable terms. But can you imagine anyone standing up at Prime Minister’s Questions and asking

“Would the honourable member inform the house of his thoughts on how the threat of the eternal void is effecting the population of this great land? What steps is he going to take to help my constituents come to terms with the concept of life and death in a world that seems intent on stuffing the most important questions of existence under the carpet?”

They’d be heckled and be told to ‘join the real world’, which would be supremely ironic.

A good way of examining these two vital ways of appreciating the world is to look at the two Greek Gods of time. We only know about one of them. Chronos - who informs our only concept of time. He is the God of chronological, measurable, equal, scientific time. One second after another. Time is an arrow that comes from the past, goes through the present and off into the future. That’s Chronos. We all wear watches in honour of him. But there is another Greek God of time too. The Greeks knew all about him, but in the same way we have no word for Spielzeug we have no name for this kind of time either, and as a consequence we largely only see him when it’s too late. This other God of time, the one I imagine Plato would have been far more interested in, is called Kairos. He is the god of divine time. He is the God of those moments in life when you have to act with courage or lament your inaction forever. Kairos looks rather odd. He has winged feet – because he’s so fast – and a big quiff of hair on his forehead but the rest of his head is shaved completely bald. This is because when you see him coming you have to grab hold of his hair to stop him and embrace the fleeting opportunity he brings. If, on the other hand, you dither, and you don’t act, there is nothing to grab hold of once he’s passed you by and he is gone forever.

Chronos is the only time of the material, scientific world, but Kairos is literally the time of your life. But we don’t live with Kairos in mind. Well, we do, but most of us are too busy worrying about Chronos to notice when Kairos appears on the horizon. Kairos can’t be dismissed as having something to do with faith. He’s a God but not in the sense we think of as a God. For me, Kairos has given me everything I hold most dear. He’s the reason I first kissed my wife. The reason I dropped out of University and started working at the Idler. The reason I drove across England in a 1957 electric milkfloat with Ian, who you’ve just met, and our friend Pras. Kairos is the reason I accepted the chance to come and give this talk today, and write this stuff down in a way I would not have done had Robin not asked me if I would. These are the moments that make life what it is, but in the measurable world Kairos simply doesn’t exist at all.

While we’re on the subject of time, another philosopher called Boethius also has an interesting take on a kind of Spielzeugy time. He was imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Ostrogoth King Theodoric around 480 AD and while waiting for his punishment wrote a book called the Consolations of Philosophy, which has come to be seen as one of the classics of philosophy. Dante has Boethius as an Angel in the final part of his Divine Comedy. Boethius’s book is essentially a dialogue between him and a lady called Philosophy who visits him in his cell and in the course of their conversation she counsels him to try and conquer his fear of death. Towards the end he describes the occasional glimpses you get in life of things as they are meant to be,

“…there exists the more exalted eye of intelligence which passes beyond the sphere of the Universe to behold the simple form itself with the pure vision of the mind.”

That sounds a bit like Spielzeug to me. He likens this to a kind of divine sight where for a fleeting moment you experience something so perfect that it is, in fact, a glimpse of eternity.

Now I’m not religious at all, but I think that idea is rather awesome. It certainly feels very profound. But anyway, I might be getting a bit carried away.

But when you look at the way we live today, measurement is not just the mechanism that dictates what we think of as science or time. This materialist worldview governs almost everything about the way we live. Whether it’s the ‘quality’ of care we get from the NHS that instead of being assessed by talking to people about their experiences and asking staff what ideas they might have about improving care, we get assessment using statistical analysis and league tables instead. Or the way we all seem to unquestionably conform to the idea that the more measurable money we have the more successful that means we are. Every aspect of every structure that dictates how we live our lives is governed and ordered using this obsession with measurement. Of course it is appropriate sometimes, but not as the blanket approach it has become. We use it as a matter of course - even though all the most fundamental and beautiful things about being human are utterly beyond the comprehension and classification of any measurement system. You can’t measure love, hate, anger, curiosity, true learning, wisdom, humour, passion, meaning, intent or courage. Everything you most care about in your life is beyond measurement, so it is completely absent from the processes of power that organise the way we live. You can see it in Primary school league tables. Because of the culture of measurement schools now focus almost entirely on teaching things that are measurable. If you can’t measure something to prove that you’ve taught it then why bother teaching it in the first place? So all the fundamental qualities of being human that I just reeled off are lost and replaced by testing for things that can be measured instead. It makes you wonder whether ‘Being a human being’ will eventually slip out of the curriculum altogether.

What’s most fascinating to me is that over the centuries this obsession with materialism and measurement has spread into wider political ideas about how we should live. As we speak our Government is sacrificing everything in order to stimulate and reactivate our economy. All our lives are being organised in such a way that feeds and maintains an economic process of constant measurement and growth regardless of how it will drastically and negatively change our lives. Even though it’s fairly obvious to most people that it’s ridiculous to think anything can consistently grow forever without it one day collapsing into nothing. But that is what all the major political parties have unquestionably signed up to. That’s not some kind of pseudo anarchist point either, if you go back and read the so called debates about what is best for the long term interests of the country they are always and only framed by a debate about what’s good for the economy, even after the result of doing that for the last 30 years has almost bankrupted us! They still think this is the right approach. It has to be. That’s how the materialist thinker will always think. They are incapable of framing the discussion in human terms.

Still. I’m an optimist. I’m hoping materialist science will be the thing that actually leads us out of this mess. That might sound counterintuitive but the hallowed halls of materialist science are having to deal with some rather uncomfortable discoveries at the moment. Measurement in the quantum world is, in many ways, impossible. There are lots of excellent books now hypothesising that the fundamental building blocks of life in terms of quantum mechanics have much more in common with Eastern Mysticism, or Plato’s Qualitative approach, than anything remotely measurable. Materialists are having to take a back seat to people who deal in multiple dimensions and utterly baffling and paradoxical theories about time and space.

Take me for example. If you look at me at a quantum level there is no way of telling where I end and the particles of air that surround me begin. Materialists are always trying to look in closer and closer detail at the way everything in the world is constructed, but when they get down to looking at the atoms we are all made of they are discovering that 99.9% of those atoms – i.e. what we are all made of - is actually empty space.

Then there’s the human genome. Materialists have always cited the unravelling of the human genome as the day we really get to understand what we are made of. It’s the ultimate answer to the Aristotlian method of taking things apart to see how they are constructed. Once you’ve got the ultimate building blocks of life and you can’t get down any smaller then according to the materialists we’ll have the blueprint for life itself. The only trouble is that when you get down that small the answers aren’t there. Now the results are in and it seems that a single grain of rice has more genes and a far more complicated genetic structure than human beings do. The materialists have gone down as small as they can and the answer is no answer at all. It’s just another immeasurable question.

So, in the same way that our adherence to the materialist world view led to materialist principles being applied to the cultural, social and political context of how we live. My hope is that one day - once we’ve had a new kind of immeasurable enlightenment thanks to quantum physics that frees immeasurable phenomena from the cul de sac of superstition and religion - a new kind of wider political and social philosophy based on the wonder and beauty of the immeasurable world might emerge too.

Perhaps then instead of making our children obsessively rehearse multiple choice SAT tests that can be marked by a computer at school we might spend a little bit more time teaching them how to recognise Kairos the next time he comes into view.

So to answer the original purpose of this talk – how can you live in the immeasurable world?

The simple rule is if you can measure it, then it’s unlikely that whatever it is will ever make you happy.

To truly live in the immeasurable world all you have to do is learn how to ignore the cacophony of voices that are desperately trying to persuade you not to.

dan@bookvestor.com