How to Pay Attention in a Turbulent Distracted World

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Transcript

Rob Johnson:

Welcome to Economics & Beyond. I’m Rob Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

I’m here today with a man of long, known for quite a while and admired for every minute of it. Christian Madsbjerg, originally from Denmark, a co-founder of Red, has worked with people as a consultant, the private sector as an innovator. Subsequent to that, became a professor at the New School of Social Research and he’s got a new book out. And the new book is going to make my top 10 list in this time I have on this planet, for sure. The name of the book is quite simple. The name of the book is Look, and I’ll let him tell you why and what it’s about. But I want to first welcome you, Christian. You’ve come to INET, you’ve made videos, you’ve influenced me behind the scene. And many of my colleagues, Chris Canavan, who spent some time as our board chair, and I imagine that we’re just at the starting gate. Because there are thousands of people now in our Young Scholars Initiative.

And boy, are they going to like this book. I’m playing with you today with all kinds of grins inside because of my earlier experience with the book, The Paragon. And maybe we’ll talk about that towards the end, but it illuminates now things that have been, how would I say? That book has been echoing in my mind throughout my entire adult life. Any rate, welcome, Christian. And I guess we start off with, what inspired this project? Where did it come from? I mean, I understand your experience, but shifting gears, the writing of this book, where is that inspiration?

Christian Madsbjerg:

I mean, thank you for the introduction, Rob. That’s too kind, and it’s great to be back. I think we’ve done a couple of these by now and it’s very enjoyable. I had students for eight years, I think in a row where I did the same class once a year at the new school in Manhattan. And it was students from all over the school, so we have the philosophy students and sociology students, some of the business students, but also jazz, opera, musicians and performing artists. And all of them wanted to learn how to look, they wanted to learn how to pay attention. And that class became an iconic thing. It became something that people talked about and wanted to be part of and had difficulty getting into. Because there was only so many who could take in. And after that class ran, so many of these students came back and said, “Shouldn’t you take this class and make it into a simple, comprehensive sort of picture in a book or in a film or something?”

And I just, because I write and wrote a book about it. And so it’s basically the reaction of the students and seeing them find help, finding the tools that I try to teach helpful that made me want to write it. And then of course, the examples in the book, all the stories I have in the book come from the people and the artworks and the literature and the music and the philosophy that inspired me along the way. Because I’m in a way auto-detect observer, but professional observer nonetheless. That was really the reason was to see the eyes of my students once they started to get it, I thought I’d bring that to many, many more people.

Rob Johnson:

Well, I think you’re on the, how do I say, you’re on the takeoff ramp and maybe we’re going to the sun. Well, I’m interested in the … Let’s talk a little bit about the process of looking. You have some basic ingredients that you put together about what’s necessary to do that in a way that illuminates things for you and for you to better understand the context in which you live and operate.

Christian Madsbjerg:

Right. The sky has just opened where I am right now. If there’s a rumble in the background, it’s nature, but-

Rob Johnson:

The birds are flying again.

Christian Madsbjerg:

I know, yeah, I’m scared right now. But what are the tools? Well, I think first you need to learn to see yourself seeing. Most of the time we’re just drawn through life, which there’s nothing wrong with. Actually, it’s quite magical if you think about how we do that. And see that you are seeing the world in a particular way. Seeing yourself seeing is the first part. And the examples I use for doing that are the early 20th century gestalt psychologist from Germany who said, “We don’t see anything, any particular atomic piece of information. Any piece of information that we see, color, shape, distance is always on the background of something else.” There’s only a foreground because there is a background, and vice versa. And so everything is seen as what they call gestalts. Gestalt as a whole, and we humans see things as wholes. If you go into a room, you don’t just see that’s a blue chair, that’s a table and so on. You see room with tables and chairs and all the activities that’s involved in that.

We humans, when we see, we see things in wholes, not in parts. And what even counts as a part is defined by the whole. Whatever’s seen as relevant is because it’s part of a whole, that makes sense to you. If you go down, I live on 13th Street in Manhattan. If you go down 13th Street, you that’s school. And we immediately know what a school is and we know that it has students and blackboards and projectors and chairs and teachers and so on, homework. And that whole world is meaningful to us and we understand that. And we don’t need to see every single optimistic piece of information to do that. We see the whole thing bam as one. Seeing yourself seeing is to see how you see wholes and why you see those wholes. And for instance, a camera or a robot can’t do that because they don’t see wholes like that. Seeing yourself seeing is the first step. Then of course, the second step is seeing others see. So-

Rob Johnson:

Let me just ask you a question.

Christian Madsbjerg:

Okay.

Rob Johnson:

Seeing yourself seeing is something that I’ve, when I read about whether in psychology or classics is hard to do, because sometimes because of pain of previous episode, you don’t want to see what you see. Or sometimes you want to see a subset of what you see. The human observer has to be very disciplined not to be a refractory influence on what it is that’s being observed is my understanding.

Christian Madsbjerg:

I agree. I’m not a psychologist, so I have a hard time commenting on the world of pain, but I would imagine it has the same structure as the rest of it, which is you enter the world with judgment of some kind, or with preconceived notions of some kind. And you see this is a man, this is a woman, even though it might be in between. This is our church, this is our house, and so on. We have these preconceived notions and unfortunately often judgments about what the world looks like. That then becomes the reality we see. And seeing through that, seeing what’s really there is very difficult. And I would imagine if you have a traumatic background, your attention would snap into place in terms of what you want to see in a way that would protect you from what’s really there. I don’t know, I’m just speculating.

But for the rest of us, our attention works by almost like a panoptic attention that pays attention to everything and nothing. It’s not focused attention, but it knows what’s there, yet seeing what actually is there penetrating through that judgment or those preconceived notions is what observation is. The kind of observation I’m interested in is to wait with the judgment, to wait with opinion about things. When my students would come in to the class in the beginning, we had to excavate all those opinions, so the students would have a lot of opinions about the world. And they were almost taught to have opinions often in the case of the new school, very political opinions. And I’m sure they were all reasonable, and I’m sure they all had reasons to hold those opinions.

But that just wasn’t relevant in a class that was about observation. With observation you arrest those opinions and you don’t see the world as through a neoliberal or a socialist or whatever geological framework you have. You don’t see the world through that. You see it first before you start applying those frameworks. And that is very, very difficult for humans. But it’s just like exercise. It’s something we can do, it’s something we can learn, and it’s something that we can practice as a daily practice to see what’s truly there. And it sounds mysterious. It’s not mysterious at all. We all do it all the time. We could just all be better at it as well. And it would help us in so many ways if we were.

Rob Johnson:

And then I guess, and we’ll get onto this, because this is just at the first part of observation, once you observe something, you’re probably aware of what a variety of audiences will think of what you see or what you say. And that can also have an refractory influence.

Christian Madsbjerg:

Exactly. And it’s basically an ontological condition of humans is that we are with others. We’re not withdrawn subjects looking at objects. Except, I mean, scientists can look at bacteria or planets or something, and they can have subjects looking at objects, and we can do that and we should once in a while. But our fundamental ontological position is that we are within the midst of things with others. Even if we were alone on an island, we would still fundamentally experience the world as with others, because even though they weren’t there. You’re right that we see through the generalized experience that we have from the place we live, and that often becomes a filter between us and what’s really there.

Rob Johnson:

Even Robinson Crusoe, whether it was Friday or no, he might go home someday, is influenced by the, what I’ll call the human context of observation.

Christian Madsbjerg:

His experience. Yeah, Robinson Crusoe’s experience of the world was full of people, even though there weren’t any.

Rob Johnson:

Yes.

Christian Madsbjerg:

Actually the absence of them made it even more pressured that he was certainly, yeah. So ontologically we are in the midst of things and amongst others.

Rob Johnson:

Well, I took you a little bit off course, but after you said there are three parts. After the first part, what are the second and third parts of cultivating the ability to observe?

Christian Madsbjerg:

Well, the second thing I think is seeing others see. If you understand how you see and that you see things in wholes and that those wholes have a structure and that you can see through them, then you can start observing how other people see. And if I may go back to the 13th Street example, so the first level of observation or the first level of attention is just walking down the street without any necessary any language processing, any thought, any intellectual process, you just walk down the street, you know the whole of the street and how to maneuver in it. That’s a fire truck, that’s a electric bike, that’s two children going to school. If you walk down the street, you have that. And that’s panoptic attention. Then there’s the second type of attention, which is the one everybody wants, and that is focused attention. That is a type of attention that’s more like a spotlight.

It’s not a floodlight, it’s a spotlight on something where everything else disappears. And we can do that. That’s what science heals. That’s what we ask our children. When we say pay attention, it means all these other things has to go away, you have to put your spotlight on something. And I think that’s a small part of what attention is. And helpful, but not the most important. Let’s say that’s second or first order above panoptic attention. So panoptic attention, focused attention. And then I think there’s a second order, which is the one the whole book is about and the one I’ve practiced my whole life, I call hyper reflection. And hyper reflection is seeing the patterns of how people move and why they’re moving in the way they’re moving. Seeing how they see based on what do they see what they see. Based on which assumptions do they move through the street like that, or move through life, or understand society, or teach, or whatever people do, based on what are they doing that?

It’s a meta skill of observation that is the theme of the book and so on. And I think learning to do hyper reflection, this is not a word I came up with, it’s Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French phenomenology, genius philosopher of the 20th century. Hyper reflection is the ability to see other people see. And we can all do that. We do it all the time. But being organized, systematic, disciplined about it is something you can use. If you only stayed in that situation, you would probably not be in a good place, but you can turn it on and off and you can see what other people see in a walking down the street. But also thinking about how economists see the world and why they’re doing what they’re doing. And that skill of hyper reflection to me is the highest order of observation.

Rob Johnson:

I’m here in Buffalo Springfield for what it’s worth in my mind right now.

Christian Madsbjerg:

Okay.

Rob Johnson:

There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear. And you’re here to clarify it.

Christian Madsbjerg:

Well, I’ll try.

Rob Johnson:

I think this is very important because particularly in a time of change, you’re describing observing, it requires a certain discipline, but it also requires a certain courage. And it’s also just, it requires to be effective, a certain empathetic nature that when what people believe is disrupted, like say climate unsustainability. It is disorienting. It might, depending on your perspective, inject a lot of fear into your system, make you more self-protective, change your ability to be an observer and being constructive about the whole process when you know other people are unsettled. It’s a different but very challenging dimension. But what I love about what you’re doing is, if you will, disaggregating to the many things that come into that whole so that you can see, if you will, how to help.

Christian Madsbjerg:

Yes, I think, I mean, change is of course the most interesting state of a foreign observer, seeing how people make sense of change. One thing is the change itself, that would be panoptic attention. Another thing would be focusing on variables, that would be focused attention, but focusing on how people experience the change, how people try to make sense of that change is hyper reflection. And seeing change. There are different tools, and I lay out a couple of them in the book, but seeing formations of ideas that are somehow stitched together for people to make sense of the world is, I mean, even humorous. Through which lens are people trying to get a grip on the world and get in the right position to understand it? In order above what they are in terms of just trying to figure out what’s going on.

And I think the pandemic was a good example of it, because we were all so confused and there was so much change and information came by, changed every day. Seeing how people tried to make sense of that was interesting. What I do usually is in those situations is seeing which words are people combining in order to create a lens through which they can understand what’s going on. And words or notions you could say. And how are those combined? And the fundamental idea is that there’s nothing stable about it. There’s nothing eternal about it. It’s just notions people have put together in order to understand what’s going on. In the case of the pandemic, there were lots of symbols that were put together. Of course, there were vaccine, not vaccine, mask, not mask, government, not government, medical science, not medical science. And then a lot of social aspects. Who was this hitting the hardest and so on.

And those notions were put together, the same notions were put together by different groups to understand the world in vastly different ways. There was nothing intrinsically truthful about any of those notions. It’s the way they were put together that gave an I ideology that people could then look at the world to try to understand it and figure out what they should do and what they should think about it. For me, it is the observation of how those notions are put together, how people do that. That’s interesting. And that’s for me hyper reflection. That’s a way to figure out what on earth is going on and why people reacting and behaving the way they’re behaving. And I think that’s a beautiful thing that humans can do that.

Rob Johnson:

Well, clearly from, how do I say? I’m a student of your recent writing, but my sense is that what you’re doing is creating a depth of awareness that allows you to navigate these treacherous waters more constructively, more artfully. And how would I say? It’s needed right now. And I can see the disorientation. Many of the groups, Rethinking Economics, the Post-Crash Society, INET’s Young Scholars Initiative, they began by saying, “What is this stuff? It doesn’t explain what’s happening in my world.” But then to move from that to who are the leaders of tomorrow and how do they navigate, I think you’re teaching at that next level, which is very, very encouraging.

Christian Madsbjerg:

I remember doing Econ I long time ago, and I remember the force that the teacher had to, the way the teacher had to enforce the assumptions of economics on us. They were so bonkers. If you just came in and heard it the first time, you thought, “Who would think like this?” Those are obviously not the case. Which is why the teacher had to be very, very forceful and strong handed with us to force us not to observe, to force us to not do what I’m talking about here.

Rob Johnson:

Yes.

Christian Madsbjerg:

And it’s the same, if you were a scientist and the hypotheses were already defined, and all you could do was to test hypotheses against data sets, and not define new hypotheses or adjust hypothesis based on something. And what is that something? Well, it’s observation like, great, if you take Akerlof’s lemon paper for instance, the Market for Lemons. He’d done some observation before that and he’s hailed as this very organized, structured scientist. But there is some serious observation happening before that. And James Peirce called that abductive reasoning. But it is what happens before the hypothesis. And that-

Rob Johnson:

Well, you were-

Christian Madsbjerg:

That, oh, go ahead. Go ahead.

Rob Johnson:

You were hitting the nail on the head. The Akerlof family, I just came back from Paris and they have a group called Economic Research on Identity, Norms and Narratives. And it spun out of a book that Rachel Kranton and George Akerlof wrote, called Identity Economics. But Robbie Akerlof, a young, really extraordinary and now tenured professor at Warwick University in England, essentially has said, “What if those things called preferences are interactive? What if when you go to college, your fear about your credentials affects what you choose to learn, how you express yourself, who you hang out with, et cetera?” All of these things become a feedback loop, which upends standard normative welfare economics, which acts as though the market just serves the desires of the people, as opposed to the desires being a reaction to the outcome of the market. But watching them, I’ve known them for years and I’ve watched Robbie grow up through undergraduate, graduate, everything, their capacity, and as you know, George’s wife is the treasury secretary of the United States former Fed Chairman.

But their capacity to reflect might be the best. If I came to the table and I said, I got to find one, or in this case, three examples, all in the same family of who best, how do you say? Best examples of what you’re trying to teach, they’d certainly be at the front of the line I would nominate. And so your Market for Lemon’s insight goes back to the starting gate where he broke away from the core tradition. And by the way, he once said to a group of our leaders that he did not want to be accused of creating assisted professional suicides. He was very concerned about how his ideas as a noble area affected graduate students who might not be treated the same way as he was, if that’s what they worked on. Real deep consciousness there.

Christian Madsbjerg:

Yeah. And worrisome that someone with a Nobel Prize would have to hide the true technique and the true uncertainty that he’s seeing from his students in order to have them have jars like that, you couldn’t make that shit up.

Rob Johnson:

I think, George-

Christian Madsbjerg:

It’s pretty nuts.

Rob Johnson:

I think George went one step further, which is he agreed with them and empathized with their curiosity, but he warned them about what the pathway to career success and left it to them to decide whether to, what you might call, wait till you get tenure before you demonstrate your courage, or if you start right at the get go while you’re writing your dissertation. Because a lot of people think being an innovator should make them desirable, because they’re going beyond where we’ve been as a profession.

Christian Madsbjerg:

Right? Yes, yes, I agree. But it just says something about scientific insight, that true scientific insight doesn’t come through running the models based on the assumptions of others. It comes through careful, organized attention to a social phenomenon. And then you can do all your athletics, all your mathematical athletics afterwards, but if you like, but it has to start with observation. And that’s also the case for making things. If you make cars or TV sets or hotel services or hospitals. Using observational skills to identify how people think about this, and how people operate, how people pay attention to something, can make you see what you can make for them. It can be used for innovation, for innovation in services, or products, or ideas in some way or another. And I think we do way too little of it. I think the news media, there’s too little observation of what news means in people’s lives.

I think university administrations spend way too little time observing what’s it like to be a student trying to find your footing? I think hospital administrators and regulators spend way, way too little time figuring out what’s it like to be a nurse, or what’s it like to live in a family where mother has diabetes? If you don’t have that attention to the actual lived life of people in an organized, structured way in order to formulate hypotheses that you can then test. Then you end up leading an abstract life and you lead a very abstract relationship to what you’re doing. And for me the antidote to that abstraction and that distance and feeling languishing and stuck that I think a lot of us do is observation, is direct observation of the phenomenon at hand as an inspiration and as a critique of your own assumptions and whatever field you’re in. The field’s assumption about what’s important and not important, what’s meaningful and not meaningful. These techniques are, I think, applicable to a lot of things. I think they’re also healthy, I think they’re good for you.

Rob Johnson:

One of the things that I enjoyed in the early part of the book, just the reaction that I had, was you were saying, “People will get together and talk about innovation, but if you don’t observe what’s really out there, you don’t know what the innovation is or how your notion will affect the world, et cetera. And to be a successful innovator is enhanced tremendously by being a deep observer.”

Christian Madsbjerg:

Exactly. And it feels luxurious to go out and spend a lot of time trying to figure out how people experience something, how people see something, but it’s actually extraordinarily effective. I’ll give you an example. I worked with a big automaker that made big trucks and cars and so on for a long time. And maybe 10 years ago it wasn’t so obvious that electric vehicles would be a big deal. It was still a fringe elite phenomenon on the coasts in America. If you owned a Tesla, you were probably and fairly wealthy, probably very concerned about climate change. And it was sold on climate. Then we were asked by this automaker, if we’re going to change our entire fleet of cars, our entire innovation pipeline towards electric, it’s very expensive. And if we get it wrong, lights are out, it’s the end.

They said, “What’s the relationship for with electric vehicles for people in the Midwest, or in the South, or in the other places where climate change is an abstract thing?” Climate change is a graph published by the UN. And you can then try to understand it, but it’s a very abstract idea. It’s long, it’s complicated, it’s scientific, it has all kinds of problems with it in order to understand it. But then we spent, instead of just judging the Midwest and the South and saying they don’t understand climate change, that they don’t care, they’re against it, we spent some time with them. And a lot actually, in order to understand what’s the truck, what’s a pickup truck to them? And what’s their relationship to nature? Because climate change is part of nature, it’s just a very abstracted version of it. And it turned out that when you spend time with these people that should not be interested in electric vehicles at all, should be against it, should be loving burning gasoline in the opinion of people on the coasts.

It turned out that no, actually they love nature even more than we do. They just call it the outdoors. They don’t call it climate change. And their relationship to it is very concrete. It’s fixing a river or engaging with the sheep population or something like that. And it’s as deep and as rooted in nature as anyone else. And we agree, we all agree that it’s important. And electric vehicles is, if it’s as simple of doing things in nature that’s helpful and practical and that doesn’t create an air you don’t want to breathe and doesn’t have all these other effects, then actually we can all agree that it’s a good idea. That meant that we could electrify the entire fleet, because we all agreed, we just had different words for it and different notions for it. The innovators at this company spent time out and had a complete epiphany that was, “We thought that electric engines was a lightning rod, political lightning rod.”

And it turns out when you look at it, the way they think about it and the way they observe the world, it didn’t have to be it. It could be something we all agreed on. And now it is. And it meant that you can then make quite large bets on the future if you do this hyper reflection type observation of how do these people see the world? How do they look at the world? And are we misunderstanding on each other in some way or another? And in that case, we were on misunderstanding each other and we could do something. That’s maybe an example of more practical world example where the techniques are helpful.

Rob Johnson:

I grew up in Detroit and still have a lot of friends in Michigan. And there’s a group called Homecoming Detroit, which gets together every year about how we can help and how they can evolve. And I’ve seeing them moving forward in the electronic vehicle world, albeit some would say belatedly. But one of the most interesting experiences I’ve had was I was in West Virginia about a year ago, and I gave a talk and somebody came up to me afterwards and said, “We’re not against climate change, but you’re from Detroit. You should understand that when globalization, automation and machine learning came in, you guys got disrupted and nobody gave you adjustment assistance. We’re afraid, we think the end game of climate transformation and ending the use of coal is important, but we’re not ready.”

And the guy says to me, “And you probably have a lot of friends who have suburban homes that commute 55 minutes to work. If we are really energy conscious, the price of those homes is going to go down because they’re not going to be connected to the workplace anymore.” This was before the pandemic, by the way, so the idea of remote work hadn’t moved to center stage. But it was fascinating for me this, it was a learning experience to go in, talk about issues related to transformation and energy. And experience the enthusiasm that you underscored, but a different chapter of where the hesitation or resistance might emanate from.

Christian Madsbjerg:

And that’s where we can start solving problems together when we start doing that. It’s when we try to understand people that we should dislike based on our ideology. In looking through our own ideology and the window or filter we have in front of us that is judging the world is one way or the other. And if we for a little while try to put that aside and try to observe. And I think it’s quite important that it’s not just accepting what everybody’s saying, it’s not agreeing with anything. It’s just looking and listening. And if we do that and record what we see and then make up our mind, we can end up having the experiences you have, which is, “In fact, maybe we can work together on these things. I just need to get in your head. I need to get in your body in order to see how do you orient yourself to the world.”

But that means you have to go to Virginia and spend some time, which is of course, inconvenient if you live in Manhattan and then you have to, and so on. But the way to do it is to go observe whoever you’re working for, whoever you’re serving, whether you’re a politician that serve a constituency or a hospital administrator that serves up patients and nurses and doctors, or if you are a automaker and you serve the people that are using the cars and vehicles that are on the road, what does that mean to them? And if you do that, you can innovate and you can create bridges and you can solve a lot of problems. It sounds banal, but it’s really hard to do. It’s really difficult to do.

Rob Johnson:

Yeah, well, when you go to places that collect data, like Annenberg, or World Economic Forum, or Richard Edelman who does work for them. You see so much hostility towards expertise in governance now. And what I think is that like I heard in West Virginia, people act like, “You’re going to roll me and you don’t care how I feel. You don’t represent me.” Acknowledging their costs is part of alleviating the theory and inspiring their participation in transformation. But we have to represent them too, not do it to them. We have to do it with them. And I really think that some of the tensions that we see right now are from what you might call the wrong reaction to the challenge. Because the resistance, an empathetic person would say, “I’m not surprised you’re resistant. It could be very painful.”

How would I say? The question that’s in my heart right now is, you’ve identified this method of observation, but as the emotional environment becomes more violent or volatile or what have you, how do you stay on course? How do you maintain your discipline? How do you, how would I say, keep looking, but keep those emotional cross currents from overwhelming you?

Christian Madsbjerg:

Right. I don’t know. I mean, it’s hard to stop judgment. It’s so natural to judge. And the emotions you talk about are to take a worldview or an ideology and impose it on the world that you see, and the world then snaps into place and makes sense to you. And the more dramatic things are, and the higher, the stronger the emotion, the harder it gets, of course. But isn’t that what good science is when you have the ability to not do that? Isn’t it what good governance is? Real good governance or real good politics is to even in the face of deep seeded emotion, you can still … Which you should keep by the way, there’s nothing wrong with having those emotions. But you should also have a part of you that just observes to try to understand what’s going on. Otherwise, you end up lashing out, doing things that are unhelpful.

And if you went to the Midwest, to the people we met when we studied trucks and the pickup truck as a social phenomenon. And you just told them, but 2% temperature raise, they would say, “What are you talking about? We don’t care.” But if you talk about nature, they would care. It’s just figuring out ways that we experience the same notions but put together in different ways. And without that, I don’t think you’re a very good politician. I don’t think you’re a very good regulator, or you’re certainly not a very good scientist if you can’t stay in that place of observation for some of your time.

Rob Johnson:

Well, when you talked to me about this discipline in your book, I noticed that you didn’t start with J.A. Baker and The Peregrine. That was the climax, that was the conclusion. That was the thing I think when I walked out the door you wanted to plant most powerfully in my mind. And I remember years ago I was through a coincidence involved in sailing in Alaska, which led to an introduction to Werner Herzog. And then he had a formative group for his masterclass on making a film. And this was at a time when I was working with Alex Gibney and a handful of other people on documentary film, whether music or politics. And listening to Werner Herzog talking about how to create that awareness, that listening, how when one of his mentors was passing away, he walked a 100 miles to get his head straight amidst all the pain and emotion that he had.

But he kept coming back, and coming back, and coming back. And if you take his masterclass, there’s a whole segment about The Peregrine as perhaps the best example of observation that we’ve ever seen someone render. And the book is now legendary. And in 1967 it was unrecognized. Tell me how you discovered The Peregrine and tell me, you have something like nine lessons in the last part of the book?

Christian Madsbjerg:

Yes.

Rob Johnson:

Let’s help our young scholars get on track with The Peregrine.

Christian Madsbjerg:

Right. I mean, before you even think of reading my book, you should read that one. It is my favorite book in the world. It was given to me by one of my associates, one of the people I worked with in my previous company. And he just gave it to me one day and said, “This is your book.” And I didn’t know of it. I mean, it’s a legendary book, but it’s also not that well known. It’s a small, what is it, a 100 pages, something like that. And it describes an observer, a man walking around in Essex in the east side of London looking for Peregrines. And the Peregrine is of course a falcon. It’s a predatory bird. And of course, he’s not just looking for the falcon. The Falcon is a notion to describe the entirety of the place. What he’s observing is the place that he lives in and that he enjoys.

And he just also happens to be a poet of great, I mean, just amazing prose. His way to write what he sees, what he actually sees, not what he wants to see, not any sort of photoshopped image of what’s going on, but the actual raw experience of it. If you read it, it’s a furious, brutal book. It’s basically about killing. You see these birds kill every day in the most brutal, extraordinary ways and eat the flesh of the animals that they eat. And you see then how that all plays out. And the directness of the description of what he’s seeing is so inspiring. And it might be about birds, but it doesn’t matter really. It matters to him. But to me, the technique he’s using could be used in anything. That book is every time I feel sort of lost or blue, I read that book and it gives you equanimity and centeredness that someone is this good, someone is just this exquisite in his observational techniques.

And I know Werner Herzog also likes it. He likes Virgil as well. He has a set of books that he believes are the best observations, and mine is for sure The Peregrine. And it changed my life in a way. Because it gave me a benchmark, or it gave me a bar that’s way too high to clear for anyone, but me. But it showed me what the best is and the most extreme you could say of that. That is observation. And he just happens to be in Essex and he just happens to be with binoculars out in the wild. But he shows you what he sees, not what he believes, not what he judges, but what he actually sees. And then he ends up, of course, describing that there’s a relationship between the watcher and the watched. That if you think you can watch, you can observe the human world from a distance, or from an abstract position where you have no involvement and your humanity and your experience and your background and your childhood and so on has no merit in the observational act.

That is of course bananas that anybody will think that. He says the watcher and the watched are together in a place, and the emotions and perspective of the watcher is also data. It’s also fact, just as much as what he sees, and navigating that is of course important and something you could learn, but it is also a fact. And he ends up, when he talks about the bird in the end of the book, he ends up merging with it. He understands it so deeply now that he says we when it flies, instead of, I’m here and it’s there. So the depth of understanding of the place and the birds get to a sophisticated level that I haven’t tried, and I wish I one day would, but that’s certainly something we can shoot for or try to reach for.

Rob Johnson:

Well, I think your example of Werner Herzog brings me to a place. Last year at DOC New York, his new movie called The Theater of Thought was shown for the first time. And in the aftermath, I was in the audience, the leader of the DOC New York Festival was interviewing him on stage. And he said, “Well, you do these remarkable interviews.” And one of the gentlemen, man named Jamie Daves, who’s a friend of mine, was a person who was a subject in the movie, and he was also in the audience. He said, “Jamie Daves, I mean, it’s amazing that a journalist like you can get to.” And Werner stopped him and he said, “I am not a journalist, I’m a poet. I am a poet, I am not a journalist.” And he repeated it another time.

And I guess what I’m getting at, what triggered in me is there’s a book I read years ago called The Lost Art of Heart Navigation by a man named Jeff Nixa. And the question between head and heart and how you keep them both engaged, I think is very important. And that reductionist way of feeling safe anesthetizes which are now called the curiosity of the heart at times out of fear. But how do you bring the heart back on stage with the head, given how we are taught from kindergarten through the end of college? I mean the arts, whether it’s poetry or whether it’s music or whether it’s visual, painting, whether Donatello’s, sculpture, whatever, take you right to the heart. And they are respected, but they are also a very, very small part of the curriculum in the modern world. And I’m just curious, what is the role of the arts and what is the role of the heart? I guess the two questions I’m asking you?

Christian Madsbjerg:

Right. I mean, of course it’s a scandal how little we teach our children about the arts, let’s call it the arts, but not in a snobbish way, like the visual world, the world of visual representation, the world of sound, and so on. It’s a catastrophe how little we do. And it’s seeing the arts as something you do on a Sunday if you are wealthy, is just ridiculous and unhelpful. But when it comes to bringing in the heart, I think if you do observation of this kind and you involve yourself, well aware that you are involving yourself and that you have to arrest your innate need for judging things. You will feel something about it and you will engage with the whatever social phenomenon you are working on. And there’s no way you can’t empathize when you do that and get involved in it in a different way.

The other way would be distancing yourself from what you’re looking at. Imagine you sell food, but you never care about how people eat and their relationship to food. Or imagine you are an economist and you don’t really care about the people for whom inflation changes everything. The inflation level changes everything. If it’s all an abstract system, you can be called and feel scientific, yet be wrong all the time. It’s funny how the economist world can’t see that they’re always wrong, like systematically always wrong about whatever prediction they have. And that the rest of us are still in on the scam. But that’s because they are so abstracted from everything that they don’t do this engaged observation that could really help them innovate and create new ideas and transform the practice. I think the heart, if you could, what you call the heart, comes from engaging in the social phenomenon that you’re interested in.

Instead of, here’s an example. Instead of having opinions about homelessness, whether you’re on the right or left or whatever you think about it, try to walk the street at night, and in a safe way, but try to walk the street at night, figure out what’s it like to not know where if you can sleep, where you can sleep tonight, what’s that like? What does it sound like? What does it smell like? What’s the dynamics of it? How do they see the world? If you don’t engage like that, you don’t feel anything. But if you do, you can learn, you can understand, and you can start doing really good science on it, but you need to go and you need yourself to go. You can’t just source it to someone else. You have to do it yourself. And by doing that, we start understanding each other and relating to each other in a way that I think has heart and breakthrough capacity to it.

I think people should get out of their offices, and they should get out of their headquarters, and they should get out of their models and go observe and as a daily practice. And if you do it constantly, you become good at it. And if you become good at it, you can use it. And I think it’s for everyone. It doesn’t cost anything necessarily. I mean, it might cost a plane ticket, but it’s not an expensive endeavor in that sense. It’s just like exercise. You have to go to the gym. It’s like that. And it’s a beautiful thing.

Rob Johnson:

Well, you bring, again, I used Buffalo Springfield. Some of those guys joined a thing called Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. And I guess the closing song or lyric that I would cite today is a song called Teach Your Children. It’s, “Teach your children well. Their parents’ hell will slowly go by.” But then it comes back and it said, “And you of tender years can’t know the fears that your elders grew by. Help them with your youth. They seek the truth before they do die. Teach your parents well. Their children’s hell will slowly go by. And feed them on your dreams. The ones they pick, the one you’ll know by.” I see so much now, I have 11 and 14 year old daughters, one of whom I’m taking to Comedy Camp right after we record. And I see the Scholas Occurentes of Pope Francis, the [inaudible 00:58:17] Encounters group. I feel like it’s time to learn again from the young people.

Doris Sumner at Harvard is teaching the arts in relation to racial animosity, to climate change. Thomas Berry’s written beautiful books. I think there are more people to go along with J.A. Baker that you and I and others can come together. But asking young people reading about Wilke or Rumi or any of these others, there is a heart education. And I think the young people will carry it up to us and they will teach their parents well.

Christian Madsbjerg:

That’s a good hope.

Rob Johnson:

Well, we’ll have to make some more chapters and get together with our young scholars. But thank you for taking the time today, and most importantly, thank you for writing this beautiful book.

Christian Madsbjerg:

Thank you so much, Rob.

Rob Johnson:

Talk again soon. Bye-bye for now.

Christian Madsbjerg:

Bye.

Rob Johnson:

And check out more from the Institute for New Economic thinking at ineteconomics.org.