The Sound of Silence

While on holiday in France last week I visited three public libraries - in Annecy, Reims (pictured) and Troyes - and was struck by how quiet they were. And I mean really quiet; not in the English sense of ambient chatter frequently punctuated by an 'RnB' ring-tone, which you find in our better public libraries, but quiet to the point of a cathedral-like silence. It's probably the nearest I have had to a religious experience since I became an atheist.

What is it about the French that their libraries are so quiet? Well, on closer inspection everyone seemed to be reading, which can only help. What's more, there were no computers. None of the clicking of index fingers on mice that represents the thin end of the noise wedge. The French are clearly not worried about the 'digital divide' to the same extent as the British are. No People's Network for them. Maybe the divide doesn't really exist, or maybe it does and the French authorities just don't give a shit. "Can't get access to your local council's website to complain about a missed bin? Tant pis. Why don't you try reading a book or journal instead?" Makes sense. The French intellectual culture has always concerned itself with the bigger, transcendental issues, while the British equivalent tied itself in knots over trivial detail. (OK - I know a missed bin is never trivial when it happens to YOU, but I'm talking about the grand scheme of things...).

So maybe silent libraries are not for us? Opting for freeze-dried information rather than oak-matured knowledge we Brits have invited the computer terminals in, and it looks like they are here to stay. Also here to stay are the AV suites, the group-working areas, the bean bags, the coffee bars, the clowns with the sausage-dog balloons, not to mention the GP's clinics, Citizens' Advice Bureaux, and the one-stop council shops. You can almost see the sound waves bouncing around. Anyone hoping to read anything longer than a blog-post faces an uphill struggle in such an environment.

If it's any consolation, I should point out that absolute silence is also an uncomfortable aural background when reading. Enter a sound-proofed room and it suddenly seems like your ears are not working properly, as if they need to 'pop' because of a pressure differential across the ear drum. And it's not just a strange physical sensation; it psychical too. The lack of all ambient noise seems to remove you from the world more completely than would any sudden plunging into darkness, and experiencing absolute silence reminds you that life and change are experienced as much through hearing stuff as they are through seeing stuff: we do like to hear something when we read. Even when we are wholly immersed in a book there is a little part of our brain that likes to anchor itself to the here and now, while our eyes are otherwise occupied. So although we might like to think we are escaping into the past or future when we read, really we are dragging the book's author into the present to make his case anew.

Low ambient noise in libraries is therefore a usable silence. It's like a comfortable but upright seat; it allows the reader to root himself and at the same time reach further into that other world that has been fashioned from the written word. The problem here in Britain is that provincial public libraries just can't do ambient: they are too small and so every sound is pretty much in your face, round the side of your head, and down your lughole. Without your local authority having adopted a Gallic attitude towards books these libraries are impossible to read seriously in.

The newer, larger libraries that have opened up in British cities in the last decade show more promise. With good acoustic design their reading areas can be positioned so that only low ambient noise is heard, but even this can be monumentally buggered up by other considerations such as the need to create a 'community space' (a good article on how acoustics seemed to play second fiddle to a whole host of other priorities in the construction of Norwich Millennium Library can be found here: http://www.adrianjamesacoustics.co.uk/papers/forumnorwich.pdf)

A particularly good example is the British Museum Reading Room, which is fantastic for low ambient noise provided that users are quiet in the first place. But a well-positioned mobile phone conversation could wreak havoc in there. Good job it's only a tourist attraction and not the real thing! Ultimately, therefore, these great-to-be-in spaces are never going to be any good for reading in unless their users actually are reading. So even in the best library buildings it's not so much that we need silence in order to read, more that we need to read in order to create silence. Silence is not the condition for reading but the reward for our efforts. It is a validation of our decision to not accept the world at face value and to start digging for ideas.

I really envy the French their libraries. I also envy their ability to read French. If I were French I'd be back there in a trice, enjoying the peace and quiet of their intellectual labours. But in the English-thinking world the aural landscape inside the library is quite different. We might enter a library to borrow a book, but probably not to read one. As a society we have largely lost the desire to uncover the world and to use ideas to get beyond first appearances. And so we have lost our ability to achieve a collective silence.

The obvious solution for anyone who cares is to learn to read French and move to France. For those of us who can't or won't, the alternative is to complain loudly about the noise levels in our public libraries, and to start dragging some important authors off the shelves and into the here and now.

Furedi is wrong about First Past The Post

It looks like the confusion surrounding proportional representation is going to be with us right up until Thursday's referendum and beyond, with Frank Furedi now echoing the argument previously used by spiked editor Brendan O’Neill that “In principle, the most democratic form of voting is some variant of proportional representation” (see The democratic case against alternative voting, spiked, 3 May 2011).

It is confusing because, if PR is a principle that Furedi adheres to, he says very little to flesh it out as a concrete alternative to the Alternative Vote (AV), which might have enabled his readers to see exactly how the current voting system could be improved. Instead, after announcing his support for the principle of PR, he goes on to highlight a number of practical weaknesses associated with it, such as its tendency to produce hung-Parliaments, or for political representatives under PR-regimes to be selected rather than elected. So where does Furedi's argument leave us? Well, if not wholly confused we are left suspecting that PR is one of those ideas which is great in theory but fails in practice – an entirely unsophisticated view that has been applied to everything from Robert Owen’s nineteenth century socialist factories to current plans for mining Helium-3 on the Moon.

It was Immanuel Kant who first confronted this view head-on in his 1793 essay “On the Common Saying: This May Be True in Theory but it does not Apply in Practice”, wherein he argued that, far from being a sophisticated understanding of a situation, the great-in-theory maxim represented nothing more than a failure of theory. "This maxim", he wrote, "so very common in our sententious, inactive times, does very great harm if applied to matters of morality". Such matters, he argued, demand more theory and better theory, not its abandonment. I do not doubt that Furedi is well aware of this, which makes it all the more frustrating that his article leaves us hanging between the apparently admirable principle of PR and its unfortunately impractical applications. Wouldn’t it have been so much better had he elaborated his principled view of PR and worked out a practical application of it that might work, thereby giving his readers something to go on, instead of all but asking us at the end of his article to vote for “the second-best system” (namely, FPTP) in the referendum?

Of course, Furedi (and O'Neill before him) did no such thing because such a thing is not possible. Proportional Representation is not great in theory because EVEN IN THEORY it requires lists of candidates from which election 'winners' can be selected, leading necessarily to backroom bargaining over the selection process. This makes PR inherently anti-democratic, and in practice much less democratic than FPTP.

It might sound strange but even the idea of proportionality has anti-democratic tendencies. Okay, one-man-one-vote is both democratic and proportional but beyond this principle the two elements part company and go their separate ways. This is because the drive for proportionality leads to an inadequate understanding of the one-man who has the one-vote. He might be black or white, young or old, rich or poor, gay or straight. He might belong to any number of categories that he himself thinks insignificant but which some statistician or sociologist considers significant. Even his preferred political party might be held against him as the decisive factor that characterises him. But it is just this sort of analysis that takes the initiative from the voter and hands it to the professionals and civil servants who frame the rules of proportionality in Parliament. In fact, under PR one could look at a general election not as a popular exercise in government of, by and for the people, but as something more like the decennial census which creates a valuable dataset around which future policies can be framed.

The only way to avoid people being side-lined and pigeon-holed like this is to allow them to vote - as they do now - for individuals under FPTP. I have said this before but I think it's worth repeating: a person can be represented politically only by another person. To preserve my autonomy in the political sphere I cannot allow myself to be represented by a set of socio-economic or demographic characteristics; I cannot even allow myself to be represented by a political party, no matter how much I may support that party. Only the process of placing trust in another gives your individuality the free-rein it needs in a democracy and provides a basis for collectivity. This relationship between a voter and his representative is the vibrating atom of political life, and it forms the basis for the chain molecules connecting the individual with the party and - ultimately - the government.

So, to anyone reading this blog prior to Thursday's referendum, go and vote NO to AV for all the reasons Furedi suggests, but knowing that FPTP is not some 'dirty little compromise' or 'the second-best system' that will have to do until public engagement picks up. Vote NO because FPTP is the only system that will allow the public to re-engage itself in politics.

Spiked-online - still pro PR

I cannot claim to have my finger on the pulse and know the will of the people but, whatever it is, I do not think it is something that can be measured accurately, as one would a probabilistic distribution. But this is what Brendan O'Neill concedes in this otherwise excellent article condemning the alternative vote system.

He says "Some variant of proportional representation...would more accurately reflect the will of the electorate overall, certainly more than FPTP does". But where are the crowds demanding PR, or even the rumblings in the workplaces and down the pubs about a lack of proportionality in Britain's voting system? The electorate overall hardly seems to be willing PR into existence.

I suspect what Brendan means is that PR would be a better tool than FPTP for gauging the will of the people, but would it? The people have a heck of a lot of views and opinions, not to mention the demographic characteristics that are supposed to influence these opinions; can these all be reflected proportionately? Or are some, for the sake of administering a general election, to be ignored? What happens if the body of MPs returned to Parliament by an election accurately reflects the people's views on Europe, but does not contain the correct number of women, or is grossly in favour of pulling out of Iraq? Should a commission tweak the results until it is broadly accurate?

Perhaps all this sounds facetious but the practice of accurately reflecting is best left to the statisticians. Democratic politics, on the other hand, is moved by weightier principles; for instance, the principle by which an elected Member represents even those of his electorate who didn't vote for him. There is more than magnanimity at stake here; implicit in this principle is a recognition by the 'disfranchised' that the weight of numbers matters, and that other things being equal a greater number of people is a more positive force and is to be respected more in the world of politics than a lesser number. And, on the other sdie of the relationship, any representative worth his salt will pay attention to all his electorate, especially if there is a sizable minority of non-supporters, if he wants to be re-elected.

To attempt to get around this political issue by allocating representatives to electoral minorities immediately calls into question the legitimacy of the majority, and says that other things being equal more people are not necessarily better than less people. Indeed, perhaps my personal views outweigh all yours because I have looked into such things and you're just going with your gut. Trust me, I'm a statistician.

The will of the people is not something that can be measured inertly, and so the desire for statistical accuracy should not apply. Rather, the will of the people can be experienced and known through engagement with it. And standing for Parliament in a FPTP election, asking the people to allow you to make decisions on their behalf, still remains one of the best means of engagement. Which is why, under certain political conditions in the past, some representatives have claimed not that they reflect the will but that they ARE the will of the people. Takes some Burkean balls to say that, but that is what we need; not some indifferent remarks about PR.