It is called Black Boxing and this is just an example of how I understand it to work – although I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you were able to prove me completely wrong:
1. I have a bag full of things I no longer need.
2. I give it to charity.
3. The world is a better place.
The Black Box is sandwiched between steps two and three and contains all of the things that need to occur in order for step three to be achieved: things that I neither understand nor know about. I know that there is a whole cart load of cogs in there, but I just don’t want to even think about how to turn them. I (in my utter saintliness) give, and someone who needs the help benefits from it. It is all I need to know.
Except that I am suddenly beginning to become aware of how liberally my life is littered with the little consciousness vacuums that lay between my actions and the ultimate consequences of them. I have no idea what happens between putting an empty beer bottle into the recycle bin and drinking another beer a few weeks later, ensconced in the self-same silica, because I don’t need to know. It is of no consequence to me. Conscience tells me I have done a good thing by recycling my bottle and the Black Box confirms it, by hiding anything that might, like Putin’s line on ‘defence’, point in another direction. Black Boxes contain all of life’s messy stuff: you meet a girl and fifty years later, when you celebrate your Golden Wedding Anniversary, nobody cares at all about all of the stuff that happened in between times – good days, bad days, laughter, tears, shouting, coo-ing, pendulous haemorrhoids and a veruca the size of a Pacific Island (before the Chinese built an airbase on it). As we get older it is increasingly life itself that gets Black Boxed.
Obviously, it is not always a good idea to delve too deeply into what comes in between. How many meat eaters actually want to know what goes on with the sheep and the cows and the pigs between farm and plate? They have a happy, carefree life, they die a stress-free painless death and that’s that. The Black Box contains a carnivore’s conscience.
The Black Box is the very essence of Psychology and Sociology: the core of all dilemmas and the essence of all solutions. Take a known situation and a wholly predictable outcome, stick a whopping great Black Box between them and bingo! nobody even has to consider the mechanics of what happens in between. The world becomes a much simpler place. Psychopaths are, for instance, famously the responsibility of absentee fathers, but as long as we do not need to understand the mechanics of it, we can find a solution by merely providing a father for each and every budding Norman Bates. Any man who does not have a son must adopt a proto-psycho and, simply in the act of doing so, eradicate the infant’s antisocial tendencies. Nobody needs to know how. The Black Box contains the hows and whys. Drop any number of fatherless children together with an equal number of childless fathers (I know, I know, but stick with me) into the Black Box and the world instantly becomes a better place. Perhaps someone could create a Black Box capable of taking in a self-seeking, sexist, entitled, ego-maniac before spitting out a normal, well-adjusted human being. Let’s think about who we would like to put in it. I bet we’re all thinking about the same former prince.
I mention all of this because I think that I may well have just isolated a Black Box that could save the world! Let me talk you through it. The planet is suffocating in a blanket of greenhouse gases, heading towards temperatures that could lead to financial calamity for tanning parlour owners and a mass-extinction event capable of engulfing the rest of humankind – although not necessarily the ones you’d want. Carbon is the problem. We can either stop releasing carbon into the atmosphere – which we seem to be incapable of doing – or find a way of removing it retrospectively. This we can do, although it is in itself a complex process which, I think, involves giant filters, melamine, broccoli and a whole lot of other stuff which is probably contained within an even bigger Black Box. I know that diamonds are made from carbon. They are dense, they are famously ‘forever’, they are stable, virtually indestructible and very manufacturable, much like government lies, so here is my solution:
1. Capture the carbon from the atmosphere
2. Black Box
3. Use it to make diamonds on a massive scale
4. Black Box
5. Bury the diamonds where no-one will attempt to dig them up (Chernobyl, Gruinard Island or Wolverhampton) and Bob’s your Mother’s Brother. The planet is saved and all you need to do, dear human race, is simply fill in the Black Box…
P.S. Believe it or not, I am actually by qualification a sociologist and I do understand how Black Boxes really work, but wouldn’t it be lovely to live in a world saved by poetic licence?
P.P.S For a couple of weeks I had, thanks I am told to a bot, a readership in the thousands. On the third week my figures returned to normal but last week my weekly blog had a readership that could be counted without taking off the second glove. I don’t think it was a bad post, but even if it was, that would not explain the absence of readers: nobody would know it was bad until they had read it. If anyone can explain I would love to hear.
Getting On 