My Life in the Commentariat

Global Brief, elaboration, and how to make something out of nothing

Sariputra, form is not other than emptiness

and emptiness is not other than form

form is precisely emptiness

and emptiness precisely form

from the Heart Sutra

For a very short time, I had a gig writing end pieces for an international affairs magazine called Global Brief. Briefly, Global Brief even had money, which made it especially interesting to me. The money came from Blackberry (Research in Motion) co-CEO James Balsillie who also founded the Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo. The publisher and editor was Irvin Studin who had great plans and was able to pull together a multi-national team of writers, journalists, politicians, economists, pundits, academics, and me. My job was to write a one-page essay at the end of each issue, which would reflect the issue theme. The magazine came out four times a year, both in print and online. Irvin called my end pieces epigrams.

Merriam Webster gives the following definition of an epigram: “1. a concise poem dealing pointedly and often satirically with a single thought or event and often ending with an ingenious turn of thought, 2. a terse, sage, or witty and often paradoxical saying.” In my mind, this meant something like an extended aphorism or short essay with that form. This lent itself to formal elaboration in ways that I found congenial. (Some of you will have read my earlier discussion of composing by elaboration. If you haven’t, it’s here.)

Irvin would give me a topic and a deadline. The topics were gnomic and vague, often just one word. Deals. Population. Diplomacy. Winning. Nature and Spirit. Competition. The Coming World Order. History. Obviously, I wasn’t going to make myself a world expert on a given topic in a couple of months. I had to create something out of nothing. I had to set words in motion and elaborate, play with them and extend them.

This was also a job. I had to invent a work flow that would make it doable within a limited time frame and recyclable. Wash, rinse, dry. Repeat. The first step in elaboration was to corral the topic, put it inside a frame. This meant defining the terms (elaboration 1). In defining the terms I needed to be original and entertaining. Also I had to make the topic interesting to me (I have always had a difficult time writing about things that don’t interest me, so my task is always to search within myself for the hook that engages and draws out thought). If you read through my collected Global Brief epigrams, you’ll see me defining the terms over and over. But my methods vary.

In my piece on population, I invented a metaphor instead of a definition (elaboration 1.1¹) I re-invented the world as a table top, with new people climbing up one side and other people falling off the edge (as in dying).

Imagine a tabletop. It seethes with tiny homunculi, surging this way and that, gathered in frenzied knots here, elsewhere spread out. At one end of the table, newcomers climb rickety ladders and bound off to join the mass; at the other end, startled souls tumble and leap into the ether (think swan dives, jackknives, pikes and reverse tucks). This is what the word ‘population’ means.

Note how I invent the metaphor as a scene (elaboration 1.1.1), with lots of little active elements, even a list (another form of elaboration). Note also when you read the entire essay how the metaphor threads through the text (elaboration 1.1.2). These are elements of form, empty of content until you fill them, modular and reusable at any stage of composition.

I also use various kinds of reversal (antithesis, inversion, paradox) as a way to elaborate definitions (elaboration 1.2). This is a favourite move of mine since it is often unexpected by the reader and instantly opens up a fresh and lively perspective on the topic. It occurred to me that when people talk about population, they never talk about its opposite — no population. So I began to play with the idea no population (population consists of living things between birth and death, how long would it take for population to cease if we stopped having sex, when in the past had population been seriously threatened?). You can see how this particular elaboration instantly spawned loads of interesting text.

Population is the boiling, breathing mass of people between the twin absolutes of birth and death. In one sense, this is a fragile, even temporary circumstance. Science tells us that it is impossible to extend human life past 120 years; if we all stopped having sex, the tabletop could be cleared in less than a century, a couple of million years of evolution and species success wiped out in a nonce.

And later,

Only twice in history have we encountered significant setbacks: in the 14th century, the Black Death wiped out nearly a quarter of the world’s people; and about 73,000 years ago, the Toba supervolcanic eruption in Sumatra caused a population ‘bottleneck’ that knocked us back to perhaps 10,000 individuals worldwide, or about a thousand ‘breeding pairs’ (in the jargon of population studies, romance is all).

Paradox belongs here, a form of thought generating an equal and opposite counterclaim. Paradoxes are vastly interesting to me, as they are to many thinkers. It is in the nature of language to generate paradoxes (Kant is perhaps the first philosopher to notice this problem in the system; see the Paralogisms section in his Critique of Pure Reason).

We have never needed Malthus to tell us that we are living a biological paradox: success equals failure.

Paradoxically, some of the world’s wealthiest and most civil countries are among those reaching a steady-state or even contracting, while some of the poorest are reproducing rapidly.

These are topic sentences for two separate paragraphs, the paradox itself opening up formal space for examples (another form of elaboration), for extensions of my original tabletop metaphor, for jokes (another form of elaboration that also speaks to reader interest and tone), etc.

I know it gets a bit tedious to close read your own prose, so I’ll stop. You’ll find several other devices of elaboration including quotation from other writers

On the tabletop, there are just under seven billion of us now; but there will be nine billion by 2050. This is wonderful news if you still hew to the biblical line: “In the multitude of people is the king’s honour; but in the want of people is the destruction of the prince.” (Proverbs 14:28)

historical examples, and another favorite of mine, juxtaposing different language games.

…the Toba supervolcanic eruption in Sumatra caused a population ‘bottleneck’ that knocked us back to perhaps 10,000 individuals worldwide, or about a thousand ‘breeding pairs’ (in the jargon of population studies, romance is all).

Of course, ending a text is always a problem. But usually some sort of gathering (device of elaboration) helps give a poetic twist. By gathering, I mean simply mentioning a lot of the elements you have already mentioned before. This is SOP for essay writers and story writers. You get a kind of falling rhythm accompanied by a glance back over the journey traced before, but there is still fresh space here, inspired by the gathering, to make one fresh spin of the governing metaphor.

Classic demographic transition theorists predict that population growth will hit a near steady-state worldwide by the middle of this new century. This is an optimistic view if one is the gregarious type and does not mind standing room-only on the tabletop. We are a tenacious and resilient lot, each one his own special case (possibly the true meaning of the word ‘soul’), much given, as Malthus observed, to cheerful venery, with an un-lemming-like passion for self-preservation. Yet, increasingly, these days we are haunted by history and finitude, cursed with too much knowledge. The ghosts of the previous inhabitants, revealed to us daily by modern science, are sombre reminders of other populations long gone. We are only renting the room (or the tabletop), they tell us; others will certainly follow.

Throughout I use humor and rhetorical oppositions to juxtapose multiple lines of thought on the subject of population without actually taking a position myself in the fray. I don’t write polemic (except occasionally and mostly by mistake); I write irony. I think this is important. In this case, I wanted to frame the population debate without actually engaging in the debate. Where humans are concerned, a little diffidence goes a long way. We all suffer the damage done by people who think they own the truth.

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The Boiling, Breathing Masses²

Imagine a tabletop. It seethes with tiny homunculi, surging this way and that, gathered in frenzied knots here, elsewhere spread out. At one end of the table, newcomers climb rickety ladders and bound off to join the mass; at the other end, startled souls tumble and leap into the ether (think swan dives, jackknives, pikes and reverse tucks). This is what the word ‘population’ means.

Population is the boiling, breathing mass of people between the twin absolutes of birth and death. In one sense, this is a fragile, even temporary circumstance. Science tells us that it is impossible to extend human life past 120 years; if we all stopped having sex, the tabletop could be cleared in less than a century, a couple of million years of evolution and species success wiped out in a nonce. But, as Thomas Malthus, in his notorious 1798 essay, portentously observed, “passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.” The seething mass increases relentlessly, the crowd presses ever closer to the edge, the air is difficult to breath, eyes dart in panic.

We have never needed Malthus to tell us that we are living a biological paradox: success equals failure. Hunting peoples, farmers and scientists have ever been familiar with the cycles of rising and collapsing populations. Lemmings are a shining example of natural control; every seven years, the surplus cheerfully rushes over a handy cliff (think tabletop), thus freeing up the ecosystem for another few years of guilt-free procreation amid plentiful food and housing possibilities (granted, perhaps the concept of a guilty lemming is a little de trop).

Only twice in history have we encountered significant setbacks: in the 14th century, the Black Death wiped out nearly a quarter of the world’s people; and about 73,000 years ago, the Toba supervolcanic eruption in Sumatra caused a population ‘bottleneck’ that knocked us back to perhaps 10,000 individuals worldwide, or about a thousand ‘breeding pairs’ (in the jargon of population studies, romance is all). On the tabletop, there are just under seven billion of us now; but there will be nine billion by 2050. This is wonderful news if you still hew to the biblical line: “In the multitude of people is the king’s honour; but in the want of people is the destruction of the prince.” (Proverbs 14:28) But the gloomy sort, who throws around disagreeable phrases like ‘carrying capacity’ and ‘world food stocks,’ as likely as not will take a dim view of such developments.

The picture on the tabletop is further complicated by regional disparities in terms of relative want and plenty, creature comforts and population density. Birth rates fluctuate around the world; these days, some countries hover at or even below ‘replacement level,’ an austere phrase that brings to mind inventory control software, auto parts and cans of beans.

Paradoxically, some of the world’s wealthiest and most civil countries are among those reaching a steady-state or even contracting, while some of the poorest are reproducing rapidly. Wealth, technology, industrialization, ecological degradation and food shortages create dramatic anomalies, inequities and relative vacuums; people are irrepressibly mobile; the crowd on the tabletop roils and concentrates and flows like a living thing.

Once we wandered about in extended family hunting bands spread thinly over the land. In the Neolithic Age, the world convulsed, cities sucked up people, rural agriculturalists gathered in fertile rural hinterlands that served more and more cities. In the 18th century, industrialization accelerated the process, hoovering up even more people into larger and larger cities, vortices of wealth and production, and the first great modern migrations began as Ireland, then Britain and Eastern Europe shipped their surplus poor off to America. Nowadays, America does not welcome those teeming hordes, but the surging poor are battering at the gates, and everywhere along the lines that divide the wealthy from the impoverished, high-tech walls of wire and concrete try to stem the tide. The underworld traffics in people as well as drugs these days.

Classic demographic transition theorists predict that population growth will hit a near steady-state worldwide by the middle of this new century. This is an optimistic view if one is the gregarious type and does not mind standing room-only on the tabletop. We are a tenacious and resilient lot, each one his own special case (possibly the true meaning of the word ‘soul’), much given, as Malthus observed, to cheerful venery, with an un-lemming-like passion for self-preservation. Yet, increasingly, these days we are haunted by history and finitude, cursed with too much knowledge. The ghosts of the previous inhabitants, revealed to us daily by modern science, are sombre reminders of other populations long gone. We are only renting the room (or the tabletop), they tell us; others will certainly follow.

1. This little number codes are a bit pointless, but I am trying to get across the idea that you can see each of the text moves, gambits, as separate devices that can be strung together to form a piece of writing. There are a lot of them.

2. Global Brief–World Affairs in the 21st Century, June 14, 2010