Factors that affect a Relationship

 

On Ambition: Necessary but Corrosive?

Lucy Kellaway in The FT

Not long ago I had lunch with a friend who told me that his father, who had been a moderately well-known politician, had just died. 

How sad, I said. 

What was sad, he replied, was less his death than his life. From a young man he had set his heart on being in the cabinet but never made it beyond junior minister — and never got over it. For the past three decades of his life, he had been bitter, envious, bad company to others and a liability to himself. What had killed him in the end, his son told me, was not the organ failure reported on his death certificate, but thwarted ambition. 

A few days later I was doing a podcast with Dame Jenni Murray, the veteran broadcaster. We were discussing our careers post separation from our life-long employers, the BBC for her and the Financial Times for me. 

She said she was loving her new freelance existence and felt more carefree than she ever had. The reason: she had not one shred of ambition left. Freed from the monkey on her shoulder driving her on to succeed, she could enjoy the work she did for its own sake. 

I said that on the contrary I was entering my seventh decade more ambitious than I had ever been. I was starting a new school in September, would be teaching A-level economics for the first time, and was hell bent on doing well. 

These two conversations have got me thinking about both the corrosiveness and the necessity of ambition and wondering how much of it we need, how to turn it off when it’s no longer useful — and how to stop it from doing us in. 

Striving for power, position or money 

I was brought up to despise ambition. My parents had that snobby suspicion of overt success common in Britain in the middle of last century and disapproved of striving for power, position or money. I would hear them say “He’s very ambitious” — implying that the person in question was only a hop, skip and a jump away from turning into Macbeth. 

 When it came to my own early career as a journalist I would have sworn black and blue that I had no ambition whatsoever — any advancement was simply due to luck. 

I changed my mind about 15 years ago when I went around asking all the most successful journalists at the FT if they considered themselves ambitious. The older, posher Brits mostly said no, but everyone else, all the Americans and all younger journalists said yes. 

Suddenly I saw how pathetic the old-fashioned British aversion to visible striving was. All successful people are ambitious. If you want to achieve anything, especially in anything competitive, you won’t get anywhere at all without ambition. 

Now as a teacher, I find myself not only pro-ambition, but being forced to teach it to children. “High expectations” are one of the government’s eight teacher standards each trainee teacher must provide evidence of to qualify — the idea is that teachers expect great things from every student so that they can expect great things of themselves. 

Just before the end of term I asked my year 11 students to write down what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives. Some said they wanted to make a lot of money in the City and then start their own businesses. Others wanted to be neurosurgeons, professional footballers, astronauts, forensic scientists. One said he wanted to return to the country his parents were from and become a politician and help to resolve the civil war there. 

As they started to discuss their ambitions I wanted to cheer. What a great job the school and their parents had done to make them all aim so high. What a great job I was doing as their economics teacher! 

Aim high, but within reason 

But as this roll call of ambition continued, I started to feel a bit uncomfortable. I wanted to say: come off it Tommy, you have struggled for three years to see the difference between fixed and variable costs so I’m not sure that the ambition of being Elon Musk is realistic for you. 

What comes out of this are three thoughts. 

Ambition is a good thing but it must be proportionate. This is true not only of Tommy but of all of us — we should aim as high as we can, but within reason. If my friend’s father had had the more reasonable (but still high) ambition of becoming an MP, he might have died a very happy man. 

The second is that if you do not get the success you want, you need to let go quickly, before the wanting destroys you. My brother had the ambition of being a professional oboist. From the age of about 15, this was all he wanted in life and for a decade he did everything to make it happen. But when, in his mid 20s, he realised he was probably not going to get snapped up by the London Symphony Orchestra — or any orchestra at all — he sadly put his oboe away, cancelled his ambition and joined a stockbroker instead. 

Lastly, I now see I’m wrong about myself again. Contrary to what I told Murray, I’m not ambitious any more. I’ve looked it up and it means a “strong desire for success, achievement, power or wealth”. I don’t even have a weak desire for three of those and while I do want to achieve as an A-level teacher, that is because I’ll be no use to my students if I don’t know what I’m doing, and I won’t have any fun myself. 

Now mine is gone, I see more clearly the trouble with ambition. It is not that it turns you into a ruthless, driven version of Macbeth, but that the striving, by definition, makes you dissatisfied with your life at present. Worse still, all the really ambitious people I have known have never been satisfied by achieving the thing of their dreams, they merely concocted an even bigger dream. I daresay that if my friend’s father had made it to the cabinet, he would still have died embittered by dint of not having made it as prime minister. 

In the end he was unusual and unlucky to die still holding on to ambition. One of the greatest joys of getting older is the corrosive side of the striving, the wanting, the envy tends to recede. Whether it is because the charms of success, power and money fade as you get older or whether it is because of the diminishing probability of achieving those things — it doesn’t matter. Murray was right: life without the monkey is a good deal nicer.

Poor little rich kids – the perils of inheriting vast wealth

Emine Saner in The Guardian

It is reported that when the 6th Duke of Westminster, who died this week, realised at the age of 15 that he was heir to his family’s immense fortune, he dreaded it – the responsibility, the knowledge that he hadn’t earned it, the isolation it would bring him. He would have prepared his son for the eventuality of becoming duke, although neither would have wanted to think it would happen as early as it did. On Tuesday, Gerald Grosvenor died suddenly at the age of 64; his son Hugh, now the 7th Duke of Westminster, is just 25 and inherits the family’s £9.3bn fortune.

Aside from the trauma of losing a parent – having money does not ease the pain of bereavement – the 25-year-old finds himself in both an enviable, and unenviable, position. On the one hand, he becomes one of the richest men in the world; on the other, money didn’t bring happiness to his father, who appeared to find his title and wealth a burden. “Given the choice I would rather not have been born wealthy, but I never think of giving it up,” he said once. “I can’t sell it. It doesn’t belong to me.”

The Duke of Westminster



It is, however, very difficult to feel sorry for the rich, which is, in itself, a problem for many of them. “They know that others have no sympathy for them, and no understanding of the situation they’re in,” says Thayer Willis, author of Navigating the Dark Side of Wealth: A Life Guide for Inheritors, who runs a counselling business helping the rich deal with the psychological challenges of wealth. “They know not to go around whining and expecting people to feel sorry for them.”

But there are serious challenges that come from inheriting vast fortunes, she says, particularly at a young age. Willis knows many of them herself – she was born into the family that started the Georgia-Pacific Corporation, a timber company worth billions. “I stumbled through my 20s and made a lot of mistakes,” she says.

“For all of us, our 20s and 30s are the ‘building years’, when we’re meant to get out in the world, figure out who we are, what we like to do, who we like, who we like to date,” she says. “Having a tremendous amount of financial wealth come into your life at that point really messes with motivation. All of a sudden the question becomes: ‘What do I need to do to manage this wealth?’ instead of: ‘How do I identify and clarify who I really am?’ People’s motivation to be around you becomes questionable. Are they attracted to me or to this wealth?” These are “definitely first-world problems, but it certainly messes with the psychological development of that young adult”. In her 30s, Willis settled down, trained as a psychotherapist and became a wealth counsellor.

If it’s so awful – an obvious question – why not give the money away? “Some people think of that, usually to the horror of the family. Older family members understand what this money can do in terms of providing a resource for any kind of emergency, or starting a business, or philanthropy.”

For inheritors of wealth going back generations, there is a sense, as Grosvenor said, that they are mere custodians and the money isn’t theirs to give away or lose. “I’ve seen some quite young heirs who really understand the dynastic vision of a family from a pretty early age,” says Julian Washington, head of intermediary relationship management at RBC Wealth Management. “They don’t want to be the weak link in the chain when the family story is told. In my experience, when you deal with old-money families, if you want to call them that, they tend to be pretty good at educating their next generation, because typically they’ve been doing it for centuries.” And when someone – a male member of the family, thanks to outrageous primogeniture – comes to inherit, “more often than not they’re in a pretty good place because they come to it with all that tradition and they understand the nature of the shoes they’re stepping into”.

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg have decided to give away 99% of their fortune – but their daughter, Max, could still inherit $450m. Photograph: AP

Plenty of members of the super-rich have already decided not to burden their children with vast, unearned fortunes in the first place – it is enough that they have had expensive educations and all the opportunities of a privileged start in life. Warren Buffett’s famous take on inheritance is to leave his children “enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing”. It has been reported, though not confirmed, that Bill Gates plans to leave his children a meagre $10m (£7.7m) each from his $76bn fortune. Mark and Priscilla Zuckerberg have pledged to give away 99% of their $45bn pile(although it’s all relative – this still leaves them, and their daughter, with $450m). Not quite on the same financial scale, Nigella Lawson has said she isn’t planning to leave her children anything: “It ruins people not having to earn money.”

Sam Roddick, the daughter of the Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, didn’t know that her mother, who died in 2007, had planned to give away her entire £51m fortune. “We found out when it was published in a Daily Mail article,” she laughs. It wasn’t entirely a surprise – her parents were socialists, rather than socialites, and their business was famous for its fair-trade principles. And it wasn’t personal. Cutting one’s child out of your will can, to some, seem like “a deep act of abandonment. I never had that abandonment because I had a healthy relationship with her. I know other people who haven’t been given money and it has been a huge act of aggression.”

Duke's £9bn inheritance prompts call for tax overhaul



Roddick was also unusual among the children of the rich in that she hadn’t grown up surrounded by wealth. She was largely brought up by her working-class grandmother, “and working-class values – you work hard, you earn your keep and you contribute to society. Entitled people from inherited wealth are all about other people being in service to them.”

She has observed the very wealthy people she has met over the years. “They are isolated from normal society,” she says. With the extremely wealthy, “relationships become transactional, and that is something that is extraordinarily emotionally damaging. A lot of very wealthy people are not accountable to their community, they’re not accountable to the people they love, they show their power and control through transaction and they are unhappy, from what I can tell. The people I know who are very wealthy and are happy are all contributing something to society.” Until we sort out the rules that allow vast fortunes held in trusts, as the Grosvenor estate is, to avoid hefty death duties and be passed down the generations, it’s something for the new Duke of Westminster and his future male heirs to bear in mind.

When economists ignore the human factor, we all pay the price

Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian

Economics is not a hard science, and mathematical models won’t explain why people behave as they do. A much broader perspective is needed.

 

Adair Turner argued that ‘the dominant strain of academic economics and of policy-making orthodoxy’ failed to see the crisis coming. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images



The Guardian recently asked nine economists whether we’re heading for another global financial crash and they gave many different answers. Yet still we turn to economists as if they were physicists, armed with scientific predictions about the behaviour of the body economic. We consumers of economics, and economists themselves, need to be more realistic about what economics can do. More modesty on both the supply and the demand side of economics will produce better results.

Following the great crash that began nearly a decade ago, there has been some soul-searching about what economics got wrong. Probably the self-criticism should have been more far-reaching, both in academia and banking, but it’s there if you look for it. In particular, the economic thinkers loosely clustered around George Soros’s Institute for New Economic Thinking (Inet) have produced a telling account of what went wrong.

Adair Turner, who saw top-level decision-making as head of Britain’s Financial Services Authority and now chairs Inet, gives a measured, cogent version of the critique in his book Between Debt and the Devil. Yes, leading academic economists did challenge the mathematical models of market perfection and, yes, financial markets may have followed oversimplistic versions of those models. Nonetheless, Turner argues, “the dominant strain of academic economics and of policy-making orthodoxy” failed to see the crisis coming, and actually contributed to it.
The key flaws were the efficient market hypothesis and the rational expectations hypothesis: economists too often assumed that market actors not only behave rationally but do so according to the same mental models deployed by economists. (Soros himself has spent a half century trying to expose this fallacy.) Modern big-picture economics (macroeconomics) also “largely ignored the operations of the financial system and in particular the role of banks”.

Market fundamentalism understood itself as the diametric opposite of the communist command economy, but in fact made the same cardinal mistake: to believe that a rational model could encompass, predict and optimise the dynamic complexity of collective human behaviour. As Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg write: “Like a socialist planner, the economist thus believes that he can accomplish great feats, because he supposes that he has finally uncovered the fully determined mechanism which drives market outcomes.”

Large parts of academic economics fell prey to what has been called physics envy, by analogy with the Freudian notion of penis envy. Like some other areas of social science, it aspired to the status, certainty and predictability of physics. I have long thought that this hubris was fed by the fact that economics, alone among the social sciences, has a Nobel prize. Strictly speaking, it is only the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, endowed by the Swedish central bank and first awarded in 1969, not one of the original Nobel prizes. But everyone calls it the Nobel prize. Moreover, politicians and decision-makers listen to economists in ways that they don’t, for example, listen to political scientists of the rational choice school that dominates many American university departments. This may partly be because a politician who practised rational choice politics would soon be kicked out of office, whereas the public has had to pick up the bill for those who practised rational choice economics. 

This does not mean we should not pay attention to economists, nor that economics is unworthy of a Nobel prize. It just means it’s not a hard science like physics. Done properly, it takes account of culture, history, geography, institutions, individual and group psychology. John Stuart Mill said: “A man is not likely to be a good economist if he is nothing else,” and John Maynard Keynesobserved that an economist should be “mathematician, historian, statesman and philosopher in some degree”.

In another remarkable formulation, Keynes wrote: “Economics is essentially a moral science.” Indeed, one could argue that the Nobel prize for economics belongs somewhere midway between those for physics, literature and peace.Economics is, at best, a multidimensional, evidence-based craft, alert to all the influences on human behaviour, at once ambitious in scope and modest in its claims for what we can ever predict in human affairs.

What should follow from this revised, new-old understanding of the character and place of economics? I don’t know enough about university economics courses to say whether they need to adapt, but I was struck by a manifesto published a couple of years ago by economics students at Manchester University. This advocated an approach “that begins with economic phenomena and then gives students a toolkit to evaluate how well different perspectives can explain it”, rather than mathematical models based on unrealistic assumptions. (A colleague of mine claims to have heard a fierce argument between two economists in the common room of Nuffield College, Oxford, which culminated in one exclaiming to the other: “All right, assume immortality!”)

If economics is like other disciplines, it probably changes more slowly than it should, because of the strong inertial effect of older faculty personally invested in a certain way of doing the subject. Then there’s the conduct of major players, be they ministers, central bankers or business leaders. I recently read a splendidly robust lecture by the veteran investor Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner in Berkshire Hathaway, delivered in 2003, well before the crash. “Berkshire’s whole record has been achieved without paying one ounce of attention to the efficient market theory in its hard form,” he said, adding that the results of that efficient market doctrine in corporate finance “became even sillier than they were in the economics”.

Munger’s sage advice was to restore economics’ proper multidisciplinary character, not overweighting what can be counted against the unquantifiable, nor yielding to the craving for false precision, nor privileging theoretical macroeconomics over the real-life microeconomics that helped guide Berkshire’s long-term investment decisions.

We ordinary punters should learn the same lesson. We should ask of our economists, as of our doctors, only what they can deliver. There is a scientific component to medicine, larger than that in economics, but medical studies themselves indicate how much our health depends on other factors, especially psychological ones, and how much is still unknown. Economists are like doctors, only less so.

What if I fail?

Tom Hodkinson in The Guardian

 

Yes, even Johnny Depp (pictured with his wife, Amber Heard) feels like a failure sometimes. Photograph: Warren Toda/EPA



We are all failures. Every one of us.

That’s not always how it looks, of course. Other people seem so successful. Their own PR machines paint a positive picture. They are perpetually “excited” on Twitter about their new project. Their photos on Facebook show them looking happy and smiley.

Seen from the outside, our friends always seem to be earning more money than us. They have bigger houses and go on sunnier holidays. And we are surrounded by images of wealth. All I see when I walk the streets of London are fleets of black jeep-like cars everywhere, which has the effect of making me feel like a failure because I am skint.

  Aristotle felt we needed to make space for quiet study. Photograph: Hulton Getty

Add to that the sense that my contemporaries all seem to be writing best-selling novels or acting in Hollywood films or making tons of money somehow or other, and the sense of failure can easily creep up on you.

But if only we knew what failures other people felt, then we would not feel like failures. As Dr Johnson wrote in the mid-18th century: “All envy would be extinguished, if it were universally known that there are none to be envied, and surely none can much be envied who are not pleased with themselves.” Yes, and that even includes Johnny Depp. Can you imagine being an actor? Blimey, the insecurity of it.

Johnson’s advice was simple: drink, forget and take a nap. Sip the nectar of oblivion and conjure up happy fantasies while in a state of semi-slumber.

And what about the home lives of the rich and successful? Any amount of fame and money cannot compensate for bad relationships. Every life is full of joy and woe, probably in equal measure, so envy makes no sense whatsoever. In fact, to be envious at all shows a stunning lack of empathy, an inability to put yourself in another person’s shoes. Everyone suffers.

Sir Paul McCartney said no matter how far you get, you feel everyone is doing better than you. Photograph: Steve Parsons/PA

Even the most successful man in the world doesn’t feel successful. Who has done better than Paul McCartney? But he said in a 2013 interview: “No matter how accomplished you get – and I know a lot of people who are very accomplished – you feel that everyone is doing better than you, that it’s easier for them. You’ve got to the top of your profession – you’re now prime minister – but you still get shit off everyone.”

Successful people are failures because they have dozens of failed projects behind them. We tend only to see the successes. I’ve been reading a lot of business books recently, and if there is one thing that all entrepreneurs have in common, it’s a stunning track record of colossal disasters. Failure and success, then, are the same thing. Two sides of the same coin.

It is said that all political careers end in failure. And the merchants, the city traders – they can lose fortunes as well as make them.

So how can we answer the question: what if I fail?

‘Dr Johnson’s advice was simple: drink, forget and take a nap.’ Photograph: Alamy

The only real answer is that we need to cultivate wisdom and to do that, we need to make space for quiet study. That, anyway, was the view of Aristotle. Like most of the ancient Greek philosophers, he believed that the answer to life was to “know thyself”; in other words, not to push yourself in the wrong direction, or to chase money or fame. He said that the life of a merchant was full of worry, and that the glories of a political life were brief and fleeting. The happy life, he wrote, was the contemplative life. If you can read books and enjoy doing nothing, you can always be happy.

Another great Greek philosopher was Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoic school. The Stoics were so called because they taught in the Stoa, the marketplace. They did not believe in getting away from it all like the Epicureans. They reckoned that you should put up with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and develop a detached attitude. Their trick was to imagine that you were flying into space and looking down on the world. From that distance, our little problems and issues seem like nothing more than vanity.

Failure is polite. To be imperfect is an act of courtesy to your fellow humans. In the same way, to appear to be hugely successful is an act of extreme rudeness, simply because it excites envy and jealousy in others. A friend of mine took to calling the glossy mag World of Interiors World of Inferiors because it made people feel bad. And this truth is admirably expressed in the title of Marge Simpson’s favourite magazine: Better Homes Than Yours.

Failures are lovable. Who is more popular: Homer Simpson or Donald Trump?

The writers of comedy can make us feel a whole lot better. They are almost the heirs to the Stoics. Comedy is all about disaster and failure and anxiety, and has a great healing power, by making us realise that we are not alone.

‘Failures are lovable. Who is more popular: Homer Simpson or Donald Trump?’ Photograph: Matt Groening/AP

We’d also do well to remember that the admen out there try to make us feel like failures because it’s good for business. The world of trade, exciting though it is, thrives on negative emotion. It identifies problems in your life and then offers to fix them. Lonely? Go on Facebook. Afraid of missing the moment? Photograph it and put it on Instagram. Sexless? Try Ashley Madison. Anxious? Drink beer. Onion breath? Chew gum. The business owners have a vested interest in making you feel like a failure. Poor? Join my get-rich-quick scheme.

This is not necessarily an evil process. In fact, it is completely natural. After all, if it is dark, you can light a candle. Human life is all about the light and shade. I just think it helps to understand that advertisers deliberately appeal to our sense of failure in order to sell stuff.

‘What did Samuel Beckett say? Fail again.’ Photograph: Jane Bown/Observer

What if I fail? It doesn’t matter. Who cares? Keep failing. It’s good for society, it’s good for you and it makes your friends feel better. What did Samuel Beckett say? “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Fail again. Fail better.”

The middle-class malaise that dare not speak its name

Zoe Williams in The Guardian


 

Illustration by Jasper Rietman


What is a “middle-class” expense? According to the Daily Telegraph, after considerable dialogue with its own readers, the key items in the portfolio of the bourgeoisie are as follows: school fees, dental care, health insurance, holidays, wine (fine), new cars, holidays and “cultural activities”. The price rises in all these areas have been astronomical – health insurance has gone up by 51% over the past six years, school fees by 40% – while over the same period earnings in the double-average-wage bracket have gone down by 0.8%.

Private school fees are paid by 7% of the population; private health insurance is taken out by 11%. This isn’t really the middle: the determination to retain the term middle class for those who are actually wealthy is akin to the care with which the right wing never describes its views as rightwing, preferring “commonsense”. It is a constant project to reframe what is normal in the image of what is normal for one person in 10.

But actually, on this matter, the middle classes are pretty normal. Income has stagnated across every section of society apart from the top 1% (whom the Telegraph would probably call upper middle or well-to-do). GDP per capita is lower than it was seven years ago. “That,” said the economist Joseph Stiglitz in an interview on Sunday “is not a success.”

It’s hard for the wealthy to mobilise around their declining living standards. Their options are limited. When so much of your wealth is spent avoiding the social structures on which solidarity is based – education, the health service, our crap dentistry of international renown – who do you complain to? Who are you going to stand shoulder to shoulder with? Your outrage at the world is limited in its expression to your power as a consumer. That’s why the incredibly angry, bright pink man yelling at a BT helpline is such a staple of modern British sitcoms; as a guardian angel against feelings of impotence and injustice, BT can’t really help – even if it does answer the phone.

So there’s the stain of self-interest barring entry to the language and power and solace of unity. There’s also a huge amount of shame involved in being in debt or struggling, especially against the backdrop of assumption that privilege is somehow the result of a lifetime’s sound financial decisions.

There’s a public pressure not to mention declining living standards, because that would be to insult people whose living standards have declined to the point of being unable to eat. There’s also a private pressure, since the status of the affluent is, of course, rooted in the affluence – and if one breaks ranks to say there’s actually quite a lot of anxiety involved, it makes everyone look bad.

Oh, and one other huge impediment: nobody wants you for an ally when your complaint is that health insurance has gone up three times as fast as wages. Had housing been added to the Telegraph’s basket of middle-class goods, they would have seen that, for the older homeowner with a mortgage, the rise in other prices is offset somewhat by the very low interest rates. But they would also have seen that the “middle-class” renter, or even the renter who actually is middle class, is suffering rent rises with no respect to wages, insecurity of tenancy, crummy conditions and life-changingly large proportions of income going on housing costs – very similar conditions, in other words, to everyone else.

The extent to which we are all in this wage-stagnating, price-increasing swamp together is a question of age rather than class. A middle-class person coming out of university is part of the private personal debt boom; a middle-class person under 30 is a victim of the rentier economy. When you strip out the peculiar lottery-win of being over 40 in the housing market, you can see the picture more clearly: everyone who earns, now earns less, while, by incredible coincidence, the ratio between profit and wages has tipped in the shareholders’ favour.

It is deeply ingrained in our political culture that classes must be held in opposition to one another; and a confluence of interests between the middle and the bottom is only possible when the bottom tries to emulate or join the middle (sorry, did I say tries? Of course I meant aspires).

It cuts across the spectrum – on the left, you would never want to preach allegiance between the person hit by the bedroom tax and the person who can’t afford the second holiday. On the right, you would never admit that there was any systemic connection between falling wages for the bottom decile, and falling wages for the eighth.

But considering them together would make it easier to see the patterns: wage depression never conveniently stopped at the bottom 20%, there is little brake on corporate power, and credit is allowing prices in every sphere to peel away from earnings. These trends are obscured by the rather dated political determination that “the needy” must be interested in one kind of politics, and “the aspirational” a completely different kind. Better to acknowledge the similarities in the situations we all face.

Materialism: a system that eats us from the inside out

Buying more stuff is associated with depression, anxiety and broken relationships. It is socially destructive and self-destructive 

• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 9 December 2013 20.30 GMT

Owning more doesn't bring happiness: 'the material pursuit of self-esteem reduces self-esteem.' Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

That they are crass, brash and trashy goes without saying. But there is something in the pictures posted on Rich Kids of Instagram (and highlighted by the Guardian last week) that inspires more than the usual revulsion towards crude displays of opulence. There is a shadow in these photos – photos of a young man wearing all four of his Rolex watches, a youth posing in front of his helicopter, endless pictures of cars, yachts, shoes, mansions, swimming pools and spoilt white boys throwing gangster poses in private jets – of something worse: something that, after you have seen a few dozen, becomes disorienting, even distressing.

The pictures are, of course, intended to incite envy. They reek instead of desperation. The young men and women seem lost in their designer clothes, dwarfed and dehumanised by their possessions, as if ownership has gone into reverse. A girl's head barely emerges from the haul of Chanel, Dior and Hermes shopping bags she has piled on her vast bed. It's captioned "shoppy shoppy" and "#goldrush", but a photograph whose purpose is to illustrate plenty seems instead to depict a void. She's alone with her bags and her image in the mirror, in a scene that seems saturated with despair.

Perhaps I'm projecting my prejudices. But an impressive body of psychological research seems to support these feelings. It suggests that materialism, a trait that can afflict both rich and poor, and which the researchers define as "a value system that is preoccupied with possessions and the social image they project", is both socially destructive and self-destructive. It smashes the happiness and peace of mind of those who succumb to it. It's associated with anxiety, depression and broken relationships.

There has long been a correlation observed between materialism, a lack of empathy and engagement with others, and unhappiness. But research conducted over the past few years seems to show causation. For example, a series of studies published in the journal Motivation and Emotion in July showed that as people become more materialistic, their wellbeing (good relationships, autonomy, sense of purpose and the rest) diminishes. As they become less materialistic, it rises.

In one study, the researchers tested a group of 18-year-olds, then re-tested them 12 years later. They were asked to rank the importance of different goals – jobs, money and status on one side, and self-acceptance, fellow feeling and belonging on the other. They were then given a standard diagnostic test to identify mental health problems. At the ages of both 18 and 30, materialistic people were more susceptible to disorders. But if in that period they became less materialistic, they became happier.

In another study, the psychologists followed Icelanders weathering their country's economic collapse. Some people became more focused on materialism, in the hope of regaining lost ground. Others responded by becoming less interested in money and turning their attention to family and community life. The first group reported lower levels of wellbeing, the second group higher levels.

These studies, while suggestive, demonstrate only correlation. But the researchers then put a group of adolescents through a church programme designed to steer children away from spending and towards sharing and saving. The self-esteem of materialistic children on the programme rose significantly, while that of materialistic children in the control group fell. Those who had little interest in materialism before the programme experienced no change in self-esteem.

Another paper, published in Psychological Science, found that people in a controlled experiment who were repeatedly exposed to images of luxury goods, to messages that cast them as consumers rather than citizens and to words associated with materialism (such as buy, status, asset and expensive), experienced immediate but temporary increases in material aspirations, anxiety and depression. They also became more competitive and more selfish, had a reduced sense of social responsibility and were less inclined to join in demanding social activities. The researchers point out that, as we are repeatedly bombarded with such images through advertisements, and constantly described by the media as consumers, these temporary effects could be triggered more or less continuously.

A third paper, published (paradoxically) in the Journal of Consumer Research, studied 2,500 people for six years. It found a two-way relationship between materialism and loneliness: materialism fosters social isolation; isolation fosters materialism. People who are cut off from others attach themselves to possessions. This attachment in turn crowds out social relationships.

The two varieties of materialism that have this effect – using possessions as a yardstick of success and seeking happiness through acquisition – are the varieties that seem to be on display on Rich Kids of Instagram. It was only after reading this paper that I understood why those photos distressed me: they look like a kind of social self-mutilation.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons an economic model based on perpetual growth continues on its own terms to succeed, though it may leave a trail of unpayable debts, mental illness and smashed relationships. Social atomisation may be the best sales strategy ever devised, and continuous marketing looks like an unbeatable programme for atomisation.

Materialism forces us into comparison with the possessions of others, a race both cruelly illustrated and crudely propelled by that toxic website. There is no end to it. If you have four Rolexes while another has five, you are a Rolex short of contentment. The material pursuit of self-esteem reduces your self-esteem.

I should emphasise that this is not about differences between rich and poor: the poor can be as susceptible to materialism as the rich. It is a general social affliction, visited upon us by government policy, corporate strategy, the collapse of communities and civic life, and our acquiescence in a system that is eating us from the inside out.

This is the dreadful mistake we are making: allowing ourselves to believe that having more money and more stuff enhances our wellbeing, a belief possessed not only by those poor deluded people in the pictures, but by almost every member of almost every government. Worldly ambition, material aspiration, perpetual growth: these are a formula for mass unhappiness.

Mike Brearley's Bradman Oration 2013 - What is the point of Sport?

	Mike Brearley: "For many people otherwise inclined to be inhibited or self-conscious, sport offers a unique opportunity for self-expression and spontaneity" © Getty Images  Enlarge

Thank you very much for these remarks; and above all for the great honour you do me in inviting me to give the Bradman Oration as No. 11 in the distinguished line-up of speakers. There are those who'd say that this is the most appropriate position for me in the batting order, though I reckon I might get in ahead of Tim Rice.

It is an honour: but an intimidating honour. Following Rahul Dravid, for one thing. And he himself said it made him more anxious than going in to bat at No. 3 for India at the MCG. For another thing, it's not a talk you invite me for, or a mere lecture, or even a speech, but an Oration, no less. An imposing word and an imposing task. And not only an Oration, but what about the other word in the title: Bradman! The greatest batsman the game has known, a tireless administrator, and a man whose words are shrewd and moving.

It is just possible that the names Bradman and Brearley are not indissolubly linked together in the minds of cricket lovers, except perhaps for those who study the alphabetical order of England-Australia Test players, in which list we are separated solely by Len Braund, who played in 23 Tests for England in the first decade of the 20th century. A heckler in Sydney did once link Bradman and me during the fourth Test of 1978-79: "Breely," he shouted, "you make Denness look like Bradman."

However, I have one Test batting statistic that makes me superior to Don Bradman. I daresay many of you don't know this fact, one that is hard to believe, but of his 80 Test innings no fewer than ten ended in ducks: once in eight times he went to the crease in Test cricket, Bradman was out for nought. A remarkable fact. Whereas in my Test career, of 66 innings only six were ducks, one in 11.

I met Sir Donald a few times on my tours of Australia. Doug Insole, Ken Barrington, Bob Willis and I had lunch with him in Adelaide in 1978. I liked him - he was spry, quick, trenchant and modest. He had a twinkle in his eye. I remember best the discussion about fast bowlers. He reckoned that, for about 18 months, Frank Tyson was the fastest he'd seen; and that Harold Larwood was quicker than the bowlers of that day (who included Michael Holding, Andy Roberts, Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson - no slouches you'll agree). He acknowledged that Rodney Hogg was, as he put it, "a bit slippery". I thought he was too.

I come to Australia at a good time for English cricket, and at a key moment, I suspect, for Australian cricket. We are between two Ashes series, unusually close together. As you may have noticed, England have won four of the last five series, though I hesitate, as you'd appreciate, to rub it in. Australians, I gather, are baffled and confused by this scenario, one matched by parallel declines in other sports. It must be a time of soul-searching. I look forward very much to the upcoming series.

So - what to talk to you about, what to orate on? There are so many possible current topics - Test cricket and the threat of T20 domestic leagues, Umpire Review Systems, including the hot spot of Hot Spot, how to fight corruption in sport and in particular in cricket; and so on. But I imagine you might be a little tired of these issues (some of which will no doubt come up in the Panel), and I'm not sure I have anything original to say on them. So I've decided to talk to you now about something that borders on the work I've been doing as a psychoanalyst for the last 30-plus years since stopping playing cricket. I should like to consider the question: what is the point of sport, and in particular of cricket? And how does this link with the Ashes?

So: what is the point of it? Here are two quotes:

"Nothing in cricket has the slightest importance when set against a single death from violence in Northern Ireland."

And, second: ''Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that."

The first quote was from John Arlott, the second, Bill Shankly, the charismatic manager of Liverpool Football Club. What are we to make of this apparent conflict?

	"If human beings were not combative no one would have invented sport. But if human beings were not also cooperative neither team nor individual games would have come into existence"

The roots of sport

For those to whom sport doesn't appeal, it seems futile, pointless. They remember hours of misery at compulsory school games on cold (or indeed hot) sporting fields. They were perhaps physically awkward, and picked last; one can understand what a torment all this must have been for many.

Yet every small child, before self-doubt, and comparison with other children, gets a grip, takes pleasure in his or her bodily capacities and adroitness. Gradually the child achieves a measure of physical coordination and mastery. Walking, jumping, dancing, catching, kicking, climbing, splashing, using an implement as a bat or racquet - all these offer a sense of achievement and satisfaction. Sport grows out of the pleasure in such activities.

Moreover, this development in coordination is part of the development of a more unified self. Instead of being subject, as babies, to more or less random, stimulus-response movements of our limbs, we learn to act in the world according to central intentions or trajectories. We begin to know what we are doing and what we are about. The small child gradually finds a degree of rhythm and control through and in its movements. And there is the pleasure of improving.

So far, dance and sport are barely distinguishable. Sport proper starts to emerge when competition with others plays a more central role alongside the simpler delight in physicality. "I can run faster than you, climb higher, wrestle you to the floor." Aggression enters in more obviously, to combine with the flamboyance that is already in place.

Spontaneity and discipline

Sport is an area where aggression and the public demonstration of skills and of character are permitted, even encouraged. For many people otherwise inclined to be inhibited or self-conscious, sport offers a unique opportunity for self-expression and spontaneity. Within a framework of rules and acceptable behaviour, sportspeople can be whole-hearted. Such people - including me - owe sport a lot; here we begin to find ourselves, to become the selves that we have the potential to be.

In this process, the child and the adult have to learn to cope with the emotional ups and downs of victory and defeat, success and failure. They - we - gradually manage to keep going against the odds, to struggle back to form, to recognise the risks of complacency. We have to learn to deal with inner voices telling us we are no good, and with voices telling us we're wonderful. In sport the tendencies to triumph when we do well, and to become angry or depressed at doing badly, are often strong; we have to find our own ways of coping with them. Arrogance and humiliation have to be struggled against, whilst determination and proper pride and good sportsmanship are struggled towards.

Spectators identify not only with the skills of sportsmen but also with their characters, their characteristic ways of facing those twin impostors success and failure. These scenarios are central dramas of sport.

Sport calls too for a subtle balancing of planning and spontaneity, of calculation and letting go, of discipline and freedom. Greg Chappell wrote in an email to me: "premeditation is the graveyard of batting". And though this is importantly true, it needs qualification or expansion; for two reasons. One is that we need to set ourselves in certain ways. A batsman playing in a T20 match has a totally different orientation to the task from a player in a Test match. In one context he or she is looking to score off every ball; he is aware of the pressure of time, and of the urgent need to evaluate quickly where his side should be in two overs, say, or five. And second the advice may be in some cases a counsel of perfection, aimed at a highly skilled player, and geared to a scenario in which there is infinite time. All batsmen have to do some premeditation, if only in ruling out certain options. Even that mercurial genius Denis Compton looked to be on the back foot when facing quick bowlers. Most players pre-decide whether to go for the hook or alternatively to defend or evade the short-pitched ball; they adopt a policy; they premeditate. In shorter games, all batsmen pre-determine, or at least have a range of possibilities in their minds.

Also one has to train oneself in the sporting skills, form a reliable technique, and work at it. But - and this I think is Greg's point - having disciplined ourselves, having set ourselves according to the situation of the game, we then have to let ourselves go, trusting to our craftsmanship, skill and intuitive responsiveness, without further interference from the conscious mind. Occasionally this leads to that sublime balance between elements that constitutes being in the zone, or being on form. At the peak of performance one is simultaneously alert to possible lines of attack by individual and collective opponents, and able to respond with more or less uncluttered minds to the next play or assault. Like parents with children, we have a complicated job to do in enabling our own selves to find the right balance between self-discipline and free rein. The moments when body and mind are at one, when we are completely concentrated and completely relaxed, aware of every relevant detail of the surroundings but not obsessed or hyper-sensitive to any set of them, confident without being over-confident, aware of dangers without being over-cautious - such rare states of mind are akin to being in love. They involve a marriage between the conscious control mentioned above with the allowing of a more unconscious creativity through the body's knowledge. In such states the role of the conscious mind is, as Greg says, to stand back and quietly watch.

Teams

Sport divides into team and individual sports. One of the aims of team sport is for a group of individuals to be transfigured from a collection into a team, from a group functioning either like a homogenous flock or as a bunch of disparate individualists into a team with a range of different roles, with room for individual expression that is to be kept subservient to the cohesion of the whole team. Team sport calls for the balancing of self-interest and group interest. The members of the team have at times to constrain themselves in the interests of the team; they also have the benefit of the team's support especially when things are hard for them individually.

Cricket is unusual. Like baseball, but unlike golf or football, it is a matter of individual contests and dramas within a team context. When Chris Rogers opens the batting against Jimmy Anderson at Brisbane in a month's time, he will be well aware that what happens next is up to him (and Anderson). But their battle will also at some more subliminal level be influenced by the morale of the two sides.

	Greg Chappell once said "premeditation is the graveyard of batting" Adrian Murrell / © Getty Images  Enlarge

As Bradman said about the Invincibles (the 1948 side touring England): "Nothing can alter the figures which will appear in black and white in the record books, but they cannot record the spirit which permeated the side, the courage and fighting qualities of the players, for these things cannot be measured. They were on a very high plane."

Unlike baseball, cricket's contests between bat and ball can last for very long time periods - days, even - and go through many ups and downs. A weather-vane in the shape of Father Time surveys Lord's, the "home of cricket" - symbolising both the fact that time brings everything to an end and, perhaps, the timelessness of the experience of watching and playing cricket. Cricket is unique in its potential for drawn-out struggles between two people, each with his or her powerful narcissistic wishes for admiration and fears of humiliation, all within this team context. And for the cricket batsman failure means a symbolic death; he or she has to leave the arena, a king deposed.

Team games give people a sense of belonging and a proper pride. And this can happen not on the small scale of a single team, but on a national scale. Sport may be the one place where a country can come together with good feelings about itself. This has happened through cricket in Afghanistan, whose national team have worked their way up from Division 5 in the World Cricket League in 2008, to winning through as qualifiers for the next World Cup in 2015. Imagine what this means to a country devastated by wars, corruption and poverty.

Co-operation and competition

If human beings were not combative no one would have invented sport. But if human beings were not also cooperative neither team nor individual games would have come into existence. For reasons I will come to, rivalry can - and indeed should - be taken close to the limit. But alongside this, cricket also involves the recognition of the unspoken realities of the spirit, respect and generosity of the game. This is not merely a matter of obedience to the laws; it also involves ordinary civilities that oil the wheels of relationships and collegial activities, recognition of limits, consideration and respect, and give and take through a kind of dialogic interplay on the field.

The Latin etymology of both "rival" and "compete" reflect this fact: rivalis meant "sharing the same stream or river bank", competens meant "striving together with", "agreeing together", as in "competent."

Rivalry does not entail lack of respect for one's opponent, whatever the outcome. Test cricket is, like many other forms of sport, rightly a tough business. But there is another side of these tough contests which can too easily be forgotten, and that is the fair-mindedness and sportsmanship between hard, high-powered competitors. One occurred in the last innings of the Centenary Test in 1977, when Derek Randall made his fantastic 174 and Dennis Lillee took 11 wickets in the match (the result of which was precisely the same as the result of the original match, 100 years before, a 45-runs win for Australia). Randall was well past a century at this point, England were something like 250 for 2, Lillee was tired, and there was a serious chance of us winning against all odds. Greg, the captain, was bowling, and a ball squeezed between Randall's bat and pad. Rod Marsh dived forward to take the ball, and the batsman was given out. Picking himself up, Rod indicated to Greg that the ball hadn't carried, and Randall was called back. (Rod says it was also a fact that Randall hadn't even hit it, but that was another matter!)

When at Edgbaston in 2005 England won by two runs, England's hero Andrew Flintoff left the team huddle at the moment of victory and put his arm round his defeated opponent, Brett Lee. He was not only commiserating with the pain of defeat, a boot that could so easily have been on the other foot. He also I think was acknowledging the kinship between rivals. For at the same time as wanting to defeat our opponents, we depend on them and their skill, courage and hostility, in order to prove and improve our own skills, to earn and merit our pride. There is a unity of shared striving, as well as a duality of opposition. The 11 players on each team form bonds through their shared skills and teamwork that are sometimes hard to replicate in the less intense working relationships of everyday life. After wars, the closeness felt with fellow soldiers may make domestic ties for discharged survivors pallid by comparison. Somewhat similarly, the 22 players in a Test match go through it together, in a way that no spectator does.

Envy and jealousy play a part in, and are not always easily accommodated within, ordinary rivalry. In one county match Dickie Dodds, the Essex opening batsman, was out without scoring on a pitch that was perfect for batting. Essex went on to dominate the morning session, and by lunch had reached 150 without further loss. Having had to watch his team's success from the pavilion, Dodds camep to Doug Insole, one of the "not out" batsmen, and said, "Skipper, I hope you haven't been troubled by any bad vibes this morning?" Insole replied, "Can't say I have, Dickie, been too busy enjoying myself - why do you ask?" "Because I've been so full of bitterness I've not been wishing you well." Here is an understandable and very human envy; Dodds' frankness and regret meant there was no chance of it spoiling the relationship.

	"Competitiveness can turn into bullying, uncouthness or superiority. But it can also be perverted in the opposite direction. Some people refrain from competing wholeheartedly because they are afraid of winning, and even avoid doing so"

In 1976-77, I played five Tests in India. One of India's formidable quartet of spin bowlers was Erapalli Prasanna. He was a short, somewhat rotund offspinner, with large, expressive eyes, and a wonderful control of flight. For some reason, he and I would engage in a kind of eye-play. His look would say, "Okay, you played that one all right, but where will the next one land?" And mine would reply, "Yes, you fooled me a little, but notice I adjusted well enough." He had that peculiarly Indian, minimal, sideways waggle of the head, which suggests that the vertebrae of the subcontinental neck are more loosely linked than in our stiffer Western ones. The waggle joined with the eyes in saying: "I acknowledge your qualities, and I know you acknowledge mine."

I found it easier to enter into such an engagement with a slow bowler, who might bamboozle me and get me out, but wasn't trying to kill me. But I had something similar with some fast bowlers, especially when we were more or less equally likely to come out on top. With them I could actually enjoy their best ball, pitching on a perfect length in line with off stump and moving away. I also enjoyed the fact that it was too good to graze the edge of my bat. There was the same friendly rivalry. The spirit of cricket - or more broadly, of sport itself.

Being tested

But how much do we really desire to be tested, in life or in sport? If the opposition's best fast bowler treads on the ball before the start of a Test match (as Glenn McGrath did just before the Edgbaston match referred to above) and cannot play, is one relieved or disappointed? There is no escaping the relief. We all want an easier ride. And it would be easy to be hypocritical, falsely high-minded, and say insincerely that we regret that the opposition team is hampered. But at the same time there is also a wish - in the participants as well as among spectators - for the contest to be fought with each side at its best, not depleted, so that no one can cavil at victory or make excuses for defeat. Similarly, one might take more pleasure in scoring fifty against Lillee and Thomson than in making a big hundred against lesser bowling. Bradman made a parallel point: "There is not much personal satisfaction in making a hundred and being missed several times. Any artist must surely aim at perfection." "Perfection" includes competing with the best, and this offers the opportunity to feel most fully alive, and to find the greatest satisfaction.

Opponents challenge us. If we are up to it, they stretch us, call forth our courage, skill and resourcefulness; they force us to develop our techniques, or else to lag behind. They are co-creators of excellence and integrity. As the old Yorkshire and England batsman Maurice Leyland once said: "Fast bowling keeps you honest." And mountaineer Heinrich Harrrer, in The White Spider, "The glorious thing about mountains is that they will endure no lies." And this is why corruption - fixing of any kind - goes against the essence of sport and is the greatest threat to its integrity.

Visceral truthfulness is part of the process whereby we come to accept the urgency of our own subjectivity, whilst giving room to the subjectivity of the other. It takes courage to risk all in such competitiveness, and courage and generosity to accept the outcome without retreat or revenge. You will agree that this is pat of the appeal of the Ashes to us all.

Avoiding the contest

Competitiveness can get out of hand, turning into cheating and a nasty vindictiveness. Over-valuation of competitiveness can crush and inhibit the growing child. It can spoil relationships, and reduce love to trophy-seeking. It can result in an attitude of "devil take the hindmost".

There is I think no need for "sledging", and I encountered hardly any of it in my career as a professional cricketer, In my experience the great West Indian fast bowlers said nothing to the batsman on the field. One might say: they had no need to - first because of their superlative ability, but second because they were quite able to convey menace by eye contact and strut. It happened that, when I played my first Test match, against the West Indies, in 1976, both teams were staying at the same hotel in Nottingham and I ran into Andy Roberts at breakfast. He gave me a quizzical little look, not crudely unpleasant, but conveying, I felt, something along the lines of "Shall I be eating you for breakfast or for tea?" He gave these looks on the field too. Like the face of Helen of Troy, which launched a thousand ships, Andy's conveyed a thousand words.

	Erapalli Prasanna, says Brearley, would engage the batsmen in eye-play © PA Photos  Enlarge

There are differences that would be hard to define between appropriate shrewdness in undermining an opponent and sledging - a boorish expression of contempt. Cricket is after all not only a physical game; it includes bluff, menace, ploy and counter-ploy. Setting a field is not simply a matter of putting someone where the ball is most likely to go, (though that's not a bad idea; have modern captains forgotten about third man?) but also of making the batsman wonder what is coming next, or making clear to him that we reckon he lacks certain strokes. The aim is that he will be undone by such a "statement" either into loss of nerve or into reckless attempts to prove us wrong. Words may enter into this; a captain might say within a batsman's hearing "you don't need anyone back there for him" - and I would be inclined to see this as a fair enough nibble at the batsman's state of mind. Viv Richards' swagger at the crease and Shane Warne's slow, mesmerising nine-step walk which took up most of his so-called "run-up" were key elements in their unequivocal assertion that this was their stage, a stage their opponents had little right to share with them. Such attitudes, by captains as well as bowlers or batsmen, seem to me to be acceptable, even admirable, but they can tip over into arrogance and superiority - even into a sort of gang warfare. The line is thin.

Superiority and arrogance may be endemic in a person or a culture. The British Empire was not exactly free of it (as you may have noticed). We British had many terms of abuse or disparagement for members of other cultures - racist stereotyping. Such automatic attitudes involved stereotyping. What was remarkable about the rise of West Indian cricket - a rise that culminated in their extraordinary period of world dominance during the 1970s and '80s - is that people who had been enslaved and then released into a world of prejudice, arrogance and power, with many of these arrangements extending into cricket, should have been so open to values that they found in this colonial game.

Self-disparagement is one consequence of racial and other kinds of trauma, yet cricketers like the Constantines (father Lebrun and son Learie), George Headley and Frank Worrell were able through their exploits and attitudes to build up the self-respect of their fellows, so that later generations could be stronger, more determined, more in touch with their proper pride. It seems to me that West Indians of earlier generations were able to be modest (in the sense of knowing they had a lot to learn) without being abject, and proud without being arrogant. They were prepared to celebrate the glass as half-full rather than rage against its being half-empty. They were willing also to wait. It was thanks to their pride and forbearance that the next generation, Roberts and Richards included, could triumph so memorably in what was able to be, by then, healthy competition between true equals.

So: competitiveness can turn into bullying, uncouthness or superiority. But it can also be perverted in the opposite direction. Some people refrain from competing wholeheartedly because they are afraid of winning, and even avoid doing so. One young boy desperately wanted to win the first board game with his father, but then equally desperately needed to lose the second, so that neither party would lose face, or have to bear too much disappointment, or have to deal with any tendency to gloat. One might think, loftily, that the mature attitude to winning in sport is not to mind. The opposite is true. Not minding often means avoiding really trying.

I am aware, of course, that recreational sport played for fun may have other aims and values. Of one social-side captain it was said that "his captaincy had twin aims: to give every player a good game and to beat the opposition as narrowly as possible". I can see the point in this. But something is also lost in such an attitude. In sport we have the opportunity, and the license, to assert ourselves as separate and authentic individuals against others who have the same license; this potential allows us to find our own unique identity, whilst respecting that of others. And this is part of a wider growth of the personality, of which one aspect would be the Quaker capacity to "tell Truth to Power". One element in telling the truth is being able to stand firm against powerful and sometimes bullying forces, without becoming a bully oneself. The more strenuous and spirited aspects of competitiveness enhance self-development, courage and sheer exhilaration. They can also be the occasion and source of the discovery and growth of new methods and techniques. Whereas being less than wholehearted is liable to be, though it may not be, a kind of evasion or cowardice.

I once was a guest player for an English professional side on a short tour involving a number of matches. During the first half of the tour, we had tried our best but lost more than we won. We had been facing talented players, in their conditions. The matches were played hard, even though they were not part of any ongoing competitive leagues or series. In the next game, against a very strong side, we were led by the newly arrived captain. This captain preferred to emphasise the entertainment element in the game, this being a supposedly "friendly" fixture; not wanting to be too serious, he took off his front-line bowlers, allowing the opposition batsmen to display their most powerful strokes. They scored an even bigger total than they would have without his (to my mind misguided) generosity, bowled flat-out against us, and we limped to a crushing defeat. This gesture of "giving" runs patronised the other team and robbed each party of the satisfaction of doing their best in striving properly to win. We did not properly lose (though we did lose face and respect). The gilt on our opponents' win was tarnished.

Such dilution of proper rivalry can also occur out of a wish to look good. One Test captain, whom I won't name, decided during the afternoon of the last day that his batsmen should play for a draw rather than take further risks in going for a win - a perfectly respectable decision. He was, however, reluctant to be criticised for being a defensive captain. This match was the first Test for a young batsman in the middle order; he had been given out (incorrectly) for a duck in the first innings, and given a hard time by the crowd, who'd wanted their local hero selected instead of him. When he went in to bat that last afternoon the captain gave him the following orders: "Play for a draw, but don't make it look as if we're playing for a draw." This was hypocritical and cowardly captaincy; the debutant was in a difficult enough place without having to act a false role. This captain was more interested in how he himself looked than in competing properly or in supporting a young player.

	"It seems to me that West Indians of earlier generations were able to be modest (in the sense of knowing they had a lot to learn) without being abject, and proud without being arrogant"

I even have some doubts about what was from one viewpoint a notable example of nobility and generosity. The great Surrey and England batsman Jack Hobbs said once that as Surrey had a lot of good batsman, and the Oval pitch was usually easy, when he and Andy Sandham had put on 150 or so for the first wicket, he'd sometimes give his wicket to "the most deserving professional bowler". (When the pitch was difficult, or Larwood and Voce were bowling, that was when he really earned his money, he went on). But in making a gift of his wicket, did Hobbs belittle the recipient of the gift, who had not by his own skill and persistence forced an error? Did he treat the bowler not man to man, but man to boy? Was there an element of the feudal in Hobbs' largesse?

When England were about to tour India in 1976, some of us took the opportunity to ask Len Hutton, a Yorkshireman noted for his dry, enigmatic comments, for advice. Len appeared characteristically guarded. He then uttered a single short sentence: "Don't take pity on them Indian bowlers."

In the great battles of sport, no quarter is given and none expected. Some of you will remember the contest between South African fast bowler Alan Donald and Michael Atherton at Trent Bridge in 1998. A great fast bowler hurled all his aggression, power and skill at a defiant, gritty batsman, a battle given an extra tinge of menace by the umpiring mistake as a result of which Atherton had just been given not out, having gloved Donald to the keeper.

These are occasions when observers tremble with awe. Highlights of Test matches in Australia were for the first time broadcast in the UK in 1974-75, after the ten o'clock news. England - this you will certainly remember - were blasted by Lillee and Thommo on bowler-friendly pitches. My Middlesex colleague, opening batsman Mike Smith, reported pouring himself a large gin and tonic and hiding behind the sofa to watch.

In that series, Tony Greig used to provoke Lillee; he believed that Dennis bowled less well the more fired up he got; and Tony himself reacted at his best when the opponent was incensed. Some of the most memorable contests are those where the aggression is raw, but contained, perhaps only just, within the bounds of respect for the opposition and for the rules and traditions of the game. One of the great things about Ashes matches is the absolute commitment of both sides.

Shankly and Arlott

So to return, briefly, to John Arlott and Bill Shankley. Arlott is clearly right about particular moments. Death or serious injury are real tragedies or disasters, compared with which a low score, even a Bradman duck, is nothing. On the other hand, the institution of sport, with its challenges and opportunities, its companionship with team-mates and opponents alike, offers a setting for activities that enrich life, that build character, and that help develop the complex balance between being an individual and being part of a group or team. Both are right.