Think fast

Think fast
Back at Tescos on a Sunday with my two daughters choosing sausages.
Approached as we sit by a large lady in a paper hat "would you mind filling in a questionnaire?" she asks rhetorically as I take from her the card-sized form.

Almost as soon as I open it up, it occurs to me that I have nothing to write with. I turn, expecting to be able to ask for a pen, but she is gone. The following happens:1) I think that it is thoughtless to hand out a questionnaire in a cafe without offering pens as well. Fortuitously my daughter's BBC magazine has crayons attached to the cover, so I casually remove the green one without her noticing.2) I see that the questionnaire, though printed on quality paper, has completely incongruous fields: 'department' and 'extension'. I comment to this effect on the form.3) I write in the 'suggestions' box "I suggest that Tescos limit the number of fatty food items to people who are clearly overweight.' I liked the last bit because it meant I could envisage conversations like this:

"I'm sorry sir, but you can only have two sausages""Why?""Because you can only have three fatty foods and you have a piece of fried bread""But she's got three.""Yes sir, but she's not overweight -""Are you saying I'm fat?""Your stomach is hanging over your trousers, sir""They're tight trousers...you want me to wear baggy trousers?""No sir"etc.,etc.
One of the trends that I have noticed - and I guess you have noticed - is a shift in the nature of peoples' thinking. Their thought patterns are regressing at a cultural level, increasingly taking the fom of short, crude, selfish, scripted exchanges -typically emotive responses to concrete events. One American commentator has summed this up by saying we are 'thinking shorter'. Wittgenstein has famously said that the lits of our labguage are the limits of our world - and I suppose that as our language tends more and more towards the stunted txt form used on mobile devices, so our thinking follows suit. I don't think it was always this way - I think that as our world becomes more complex, the interface with it necessarily becomes simpler, and our cognitive structures correspondingly so. The previous day I was reading a famous passage from David Hume to a friend:

"Suppose a person, though endowed with the strongest faculties of reason and reflection, to be brought on a sudden into this world; he would, indeed, immediately observe a continual succession of objects, and one event following another; but he would not be able to discover anything farther. He would not, at first, by any reasoning, be able to reach the idea of cause and effect; since the particular powers, by which all natural operations are performed, never appear to the senses; nor is it reasonable to conclude, merely because one event, in one instance, precedes another, that therefore the one is the cause, the other the effect. Their conjunction may be arbitrary and casual. There may be no reason to infer the existence of one from the appearance of the other. And in a word, such a person, without more experience, could never employ his conjecture or reasoning concerning any matter of fact, or be assured of anything beyond what was immediately present to his memory and senses."
His basic point - that there is no such thing as cause and effect - he makes over and over again, emphatically. But as I read the words out loud it stikes me how much like complete gibberish they would sound to most people today. I find that quite a few things in modern life are counter-intuitive in this way; we are working far harder than our hunter-gathering ancestors (who probably only put in a couple of hours hard graft each day), and we are becoming increasingly unhealthy, selfish, and incapable of complex thought with each passing day. Just look at any ancient greek text for confirmation. On a more positive note, can I be the first to propose that we have a target duration for all BBC meetings of just 10 minutes? Just think how much more we could get done...

Whatever. I finished filling in the questionnaire (obviously I omitted the David Hume piece, in consideration of the fact that I was armed only with a green crayon) and then noticed that there were no instructions on the questionnaire regarding what to do once you had completed it. The lady had gone, there were no return boxes. It remains in the back pocket of my jeans.