I quite enjoy Adam Hart-Davis’ television programmes sometimes. He sets to with enormous enthusiasm to build some ancient machine just the way it was built long ago – by the Romans or whoever. This often casts some light on the history of the period. I was also quite amused when HMRC cancelled his “tax doesn’t have to be taxing” ads last year, apparently after he criticised the tax system as too complex – at any rate, this is what he put on his own website about it:
His partner is apparently Susan Blackmore, also a part-time freelance writer, but better known for her work on memes. She is a “visiting professor” at Plymouth University, so she apparently does not have a serious academic job. That may be choice, to allow her to do more research. The greatest ever astrophysicist, Fred Hoyle, gave up his job at Cambridge University in order to have more time to research, and supported himself by his popular writings, to the intense annoyance of his less talented peers. Or it may not.
In any case, she describes herself as a researcher and is apparently proud of her work on memes.
The term meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976. The idea was that it almost rhymed with gene (and lacked the unhelpful connotations of mean), whilst its meaning was closely analogous. It was a little unit of culture or ideas, like a melody, catch-phrase or how-to-do-long-division. Memes were supposed to spread in a similar way to genes. A kind of natural selection was at work.
The difficulty with the idea was that it was apparently dinner-table gossip rather than science. An amusing idea, but unsupported by evidence. In fact it seemed so silly – as proposed scientific theory – that no one has bothered to do a real hatchet job of debunking it.
I was reminded of all this by an article she wrote in Today’s Guardian. I had to read the whole thing slowly and carefully, because I could not believe how stupid it was. I did not realize at first that it was the same Susan Blackmore – which was silly of me, the pink hair highlights should have tipped me off.
The article is a plea for more apologies. If more people apologised then there would be less litigation. Kind, unselfish people who don’t want money, just the comfort of an apology, would be happy.
Shouldn’t we be able to divorce the natural human act of apologising from the formal act of taking legal responsibility?
Duh??!!
Yes, I am sure that a proportion of people genuinely want nothing more than a sincere, heartfelt apology when their child is abused by the priest or their health wrecked by a careless doctor. No doubt they only turn to litigation out of frustration, after months of the offending institution refusing to talk to them, or denying any kind of wrong-doing, or giving out sham apologies.
But it is equally obvious that a proportion of people are interested in pursuing unjustified claims for money. Insurance fraud is so rife that insurance companies rarely prosecute – they would not have time to do anything else – they just get enough evidence to get the claim dropped. The most common type of abusive claim is the exaggerated harm. Yes, there was harm, but nothing like what is claimed when a million quid looks to be available. Sadly, it is part of human nature to want to get something for nothing.
I will never forget when my secretary in Los Angeles came in really delighted one day. She had tripped over a hosepipe at her son’s school. Why did that make her so happy? Because she had a pre-existing back injury. Her lawyer reckoned the school was sure to settle for $25k when she claimed that the injury was caused by the trip. It did not seem to occur to her that I was not too delighted at this turn of events, and wondered whether she was going to trip over the door on her way into the office. Actually, I was not too worried, because she was one of those people who thought it was wrong to make false claims against individuals, but acceptable to make them against large, anonymous institutions like School Boards.
So how exactly does Ms Blackmore reckon this little difficulty can be fixed? There is no clue about that in the article. She just thinks it would be good if it could be. In fact, she only indirectly acknowledges the difficulty. She puts it more positively. If we could just make apologies easier, then all that nasty litigation would go away.
Well, maybe you could make an apology inadmissible in subsequent litigation? But I do not quite see how that would work. How would you distinguish an apology from any other kind of admission? How would you avoid the apology giving useful pointers to the lawyer on how to make the case, even if the apology itself was inadmissible?
Maybe you could have some special form of words or some special way of making the apology, which would make it inadmissible? But would that be compatible with the victim’s desire for a genuine apology. Anything too hedged around is going to sound like a sham apology.
More seriously, how would you justify an apology followed by litigation which failed? It would be obvious to everyone that the claim was justified because of the apology, so how could it be right for the victim not to be compensated?
No doubt litigation is imperfect and victims sometimes get over-compensated, but the objective of the litigation is to compensate the victim. So how could the apology be real if the apologiser was not willing to compensate the victim? If he contested the litigation then he would evidently not be willing.
Then, how do you avoid the problem that the person giving the apology is typically not the person who would have to foot the compensation bill?
In other words, the article is a sham. It masquerades as something written (in the Comment section) after a certain amount of thought. But actually it seems to have had no real thought. It is just stream-of-consciousness waffle.
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