Derailed by Passion
16th May 2009
Once upon a time passion was confined to the bedroom, now it’s everywhere. No, I’m not talking about sex; I mean passion with its trousers on.
Passion stalks the land. It is no longer enough simply to be enthusiastic about a job, or to have strong convictions about an issue. Today we must be passionate about these things.
In my job of running a school I am bombarded by passion. I must be passionate about teaching, passionate about learning, passionate about making a difference, passionate about keeping the toilets clean. Oddly, the one thing it is not wise to say I am passionate about is children.
As any young lover finds, when passion strikes the first casualty is reason. Being passionate about one’s job is fine as a private obsession. I can harmlessly devote my life to teaching and learning and not trouble a soul, but in a world that demands we be publicly passionate we are at constant risk of making fools of ourselves. When we use passion as the basis for spreading a cause or convincing others we almost always over-sell the idea and turn people off.
Take the motivational speaker as an example. These curious by-products of the modern age, these walking egos who strut the boardrooms and function centres of the land, are always so passionate about themselves and their achievements that they kill the message. Their success inevitably boils down to a unique combination of personality, providence and power that crushes the motivation of the audience or, at best, leaves us pursuing a model of excellence we cannot possibly realise because it is not our own.
Admittedly there are times when passion can light a flame in others. Winston Churchill famously inspired England to resist Hitler on little more than a talent for impassioned oratory. Hitler of course was doing the same in Germany. Both had the rare talent of making people feel like their actions could make a difference. It is the dream of every small town politician and civic grandee.
Locally, there has been some passion evident around the Ashburton District Council’s draft community plan. This excellent document appears to have accomplished its purpose of inspiring debate over a couple of contentious projects, particularly the new sports stadium and swimming pool complex.
The council’s proposal to push this project back ten years has its advocates passionately crowding forward in its defence. I don’t need to repeat the arguments in its favour; they have been well aired at public meetings and through the pages of this newspaper.
We have been invited to share the passion of the project’s advocates. How? By sending in a submission form to the council to let them know that we want the stadium and pool built within three years.
What has been the result of all this passion? Well, by Thursday the council had received only a couple of hundred responses to the draft plan. Unless the last 24 hours before yesterday’s deadline brought a late rush of submissions, all the passion seems to have failed in its purpose.
Personally I support the idea of building the stadium and pool sooner rather than later, but if its backers fail to gather enough support to convince the Council they may have only themselves to blame.
They oversold the idea. They overstated the benefits. To some people they made the project sound too good to be true. The rest of us they convinced to the point where we thought their plan was so obviously a no-brainer we didn’t need to make a submission in its support – the council couldn’t help but see things their way.
Let’s hope they’re right, but I suspect the Council’s processes will not bend so readily to an outburst of passion.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Swine flu teaches old lessons
2nd May 2009
In 1665 Daniel Defoe, merchant and writer, chose to remain in London during an outbreak of the plague that killed 100,000 of his fellow citizens. Defoe had the means to leave: he was wealthy and well connected. He stayed to protect his property and, he admitted, with a desire to observe the human condition in extremis.
From that experience Defoe wrote A Journal of the Plague Year, and as an account of how to ride out a pandemic it’s as coherent as anything you’ll find today. Defoe, sensibly, stuck to the facts, meticulously chronicling the efforts of public health officials to turn back the plague by closing the ports and quarantining early cases (along the way he reveals the origins of the word ‘quarantine’ – the French for ‘forty’, the number of days an infected person was to be kept out of circulation).
He recounts the many strategies used by the populace to ward off the plague or to treat the infection. He is fascinated by the symptoms and progress of the disease: from the first tell-tale blotches to the lolling corpses with blackened limbs and swollen tongues. He is shrewdly critical of quacks peddling opportunistic treatments and clergy who fled at the first sign of trouble.
But it is Defoe’s fascination with statistics that makes his account seem thoroughly modern. Time after time he returns to the daily death tolls collected by parish officials (that there was a functioning bureaucracy in 1665 is startling in itself). He pores over the figures, lining them up in tables and columns, discovering trends, mining the data for cause and effect, striving to get to the bottom of things.
Defoe’s behaviour may have been unusual in its day but he would have slotted right into this week’s swine flu story. What is it about human nature that makes disaster so compelling? All our instincts are programmed towards survival and yet at the smallest opportunity most of us will run towards a fire or chase a tornado.
So it is with swine flu. We are drawn towards it like moths to a flame, creeping closer, wide-eyed and fearful, reaching out a finger to prod the fleshy mass that may turn and bite us at any moment.
We cannot resist flirting with mortality. We want to observe every blotch appear on every forearm, every blackened corpse cast into the pit.
Thanks to Defoe’s heirs we can. The media allows us to indulge our fascination from the relative safety of our armchairs. This week we’ve been served swine flu by a thousand breathless reporters. The numbers affected, miniscule by any standards, are nevertheless polished up to impress. Is it 14 cases confirmed, or 16?
Everybody who can stand upright and speak is interviewed; from the perky Northcote College student to the mayor of Greymouth. The only player in this story whose voice is missing is the swine who started it all.
In the midst of all this our public health officials stick to the story and so far they’ve been brilliant. In interview after interview they resist the media hype. Calmly and firmly they describe their actions and options. If this was part of their pandemic training it’s working well.
Health officials know that in the public’s eye they will lose whatever the outcome. If by their efforts we avoid a full scale pandemic they will be condemned for exaggerating the risk. If they cannot stop the disaster they’ll be damned for doing too little.
Whichever way it goes, will swine flu teach us anything? What Defoe could not have realised was the plague he lived through was the last of its kind. Within 15 years plague had vanished from the globe.
Like Defoe we cannot know what lies ahead. But we may note his wry observation that when the plague had passed, the gratitude and goodwill of the survivors barely outlasted the disease. They simply became caught up in the next awful story.
2nd May 2009
In 1665 Daniel Defoe, merchant and writer, chose to remain in London during an outbreak of the plague that killed 100,000 of his fellow citizens. Defoe had the means to leave: he was wealthy and well connected. He stayed to protect his property and, he admitted, with a desire to observe the human condition in extremis.
From that experience Defoe wrote A Journal of the Plague Year, and as an account of how to ride out a pandemic it’s as coherent as anything you’ll find today. Defoe, sensibly, stuck to the facts, meticulously chronicling the efforts of public health officials to turn back the plague by closing the ports and quarantining early cases (along the way he reveals the origins of the word ‘quarantine’ – the French for ‘forty’, the number of days an infected person was to be kept out of circulation).
He recounts the many strategies used by the populace to ward off the plague or to treat the infection. He is fascinated by the symptoms and progress of the disease: from the first tell-tale blotches to the lolling corpses with blackened limbs and swollen tongues. He is shrewdly critical of quacks peddling opportunistic treatments and clergy who fled at the first sign of trouble.
But it is Defoe’s fascination with statistics that makes his account seem thoroughly modern. Time after time he returns to the daily death tolls collected by parish officials (that there was a functioning bureaucracy in 1665 is startling in itself). He pores over the figures, lining them up in tables and columns, discovering trends, mining the data for cause and effect, striving to get to the bottom of things.
Defoe’s behaviour may have been unusual in its day but he would have slotted right into this week’s swine flu story. What is it about human nature that makes disaster so compelling? All our instincts are programmed towards survival and yet at the smallest opportunity most of us will run towards a fire or chase a tornado.
So it is with swine flu. We are drawn towards it like moths to a flame, creeping closer, wide-eyed and fearful, reaching out a finger to prod the fleshy mass that may turn and bite us at any moment.
We cannot resist flirting with mortality. We want to observe every blotch appear on every forearm, every blackened corpse cast into the pit.
Thanks to Defoe’s heirs we can. The media allows us to indulge our fascination from the relative safety of our armchairs. This week we’ve been served swine flu by a thousand breathless reporters. The numbers affected, miniscule by any standards, are nevertheless polished up to impress. Is it 14 cases confirmed, or 16?
Everybody who can stand upright and speak is interviewed; from the perky Northcote College student to the mayor of Greymouth. The only player in this story whose voice is missing is the swine who started it all.
In the midst of all this our public health officials stick to the story and so far they’ve been brilliant. In interview after interview they resist the media hype. Calmly and firmly they describe their actions and options. If this was part of their pandemic training it’s working well.
Health officials know that in the public’s eye they will lose whatever the outcome. If by their efforts we avoid a full scale pandemic they will be condemned for exaggerating the risk. If they cannot stop the disaster they’ll be damned for doing too little.
Whichever way it goes, will swine flu teach us anything? What Defoe could not have realised was the plague he lived through was the last of its kind. Within 15 years plague had vanished from the globe.
Like Defoe we cannot know what lies ahead. But we may note his wry observation that when the plague had passed, the gratitude and goodwill of the survivors barely outlasted the disease. They simply became caught up in the next awful story.
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