It is obvious that dislike of one phenomenon does not necessarily result from dislike of other associated activities. We may reject military spending and industrial development but long for the security and wealth that they make possible. Reluctance to work or pay the bill does not imply a principled rejection of shopping.

The study of the past rarely if ever teaches positive lessons; but if it prevents us, just occasionally, from taking false comfort in an obvious historical analogy then all is well and its worth is proved.

Should poor criticism be held against a work of art? The answer is 'yes', if the critic was invited company.

Then again, aphorisms often achieve impact by being strikingly false.

Settled by my open door
  Shaded by an upper floor
Strollers do not look at me
  As if I were or am.

My gaze is fixed on what I see,
  A hornet crawling up a tree,
Hung upon a sharpened claw,
  Its wings vibrating as a fan.

So this is how we sort things out:
  They there, I here, and he,
Oblivious of us both, absorbs
  The questing ray of transferred doubt.

Brisk nothing passes in this way
  Handing on reflections from day to
Night: Minding a machine:
  Docketing a social hoard.

Distracted by another’s minute trust
  It’s years before we know there’s been
A steady fall of age like dust.

Without exception, all communication encounters a surprising degree of resistance, with the result that new information and inventive thought only penetrates very slowly into any public discourse. This is not wholly regrettable, since it puts a prudent brake on over rapid enthusiasm for intellectual material that is more novel than valuable; but the causes are of this friction are interesting, and reflection on them can go some way to blunting the feelings of frustration that will overwhelm even the most patient swimmers in media treacle.

We talk, carelessly enough, about 'newspapers', and the television or radio 'News'; we inquire for 'What's New?', and are excited if 'This' turns out to be 'The New That'; we subscribe to 'Newsletters' and 'Newsfeeds', and we neurotically reload our web newszines every five minutes to observe the latest changes.

But, in practice, while information cannot be too fresh, it must not be too surprising. Doubtless there has been Natural Selection for minds that reject or suspend judgment on propositions and data that call into question too large a body of currently accepted knowledge. Furthermore, because time is precious, and it is all that organisms really have, communications cannot ever require much commitment of effort from the recipient, particularly if they come from a source that is impersonal or unknown, such as broadcast and print publication.

Consequently, a story in the press, an item on the news, must be both brief and compatible with what is already accepted in the mental environment of the audience. These dual constraints result in material that is first and foremost a stripped down stimulus from which the recipient can recollect a story already existing in their repertoire or mental library. This is part of the explanation for the strangely abbreviated form of journalistic presentations, which appear strangely underdetermined and lacking in information. On examination, we find that very little is actually encoded in the semantics of the piece, which can be regarded more as a cue or a handful of cues to the recipient to retrieve a collection of preformed elements.

Thus it is that in conversation with a journalist you will be told that the material to which you are drawing their attention is one or another "kind of story". Naturally, you will have hoped it might be more interesting than that, but after years of working with the media you come to accept their premises, however wearily. The fact is that in any communicative medium there are a relatively small number of generic stories at any one time, and this constrains the originality of discourse. It is also true that the range and character of what is possible changes over time, but this evolution is slow, and attempts to force the pace tend to fail.

Indeed, so great is the risk of excessive innovation in a story that journalists will sometimes surprise those bringing material for publication by specifically avoiding exactly those parts which for those involved appear to be most surprising and worthy of publication.

The majority of any 'news' story is, in reality, very old, and cannot be anything different, otherwise we would reject it. However, a skilful communicator, whether a journalist or an academic, will and must attach fragments of genuinely unfamiliar information to the conventional hints that will provoke their story, and if they did not the recipient would be disappointed. Variation in the tolerance of the end-reader to the unfamiliar is one of the gradients on which we array our discourse types, from tabloid prejudice to scholarly article. However, viewed from a distance, the differences between them are not only mere shades of a continuum, they are also slight.

For the avoidance of doubt, I do not think we can hope to change this situation. Indeed, it is not clear that we should allow ourselves to entertain such a desire. Rock climbers make only slow progress, never moving a limb to find a new point of purchase until they are confident that they have a secure hold with the other three. No other method can contain the risk of falling to an acceptable level, and the snail's pace is the price of safety.

My text is from William Allingham, The Diaries, and the entry for 1 February 1867:

Tennyson is unhappy from his uncertainty regarding the condition and destiny of man. Is it dispiriting to find a great Poet with no better grounds of comfort than a common person? At first it is. But how could the case be otherwise? The poet has only the same materials of sensation and thought as ordinary mortals; he uses them better; but to step outside the human limitations is not granted even to him. The secret is kept from one and all of us. We must turn eyes and thoughts to the finer and nobler aspects of things, and never let the scalpel of Science overbear pen, pencil and plectrum. A Poet's doubts and anxieties are more comforting than a scientist's certainties and equanimities.

"At first it is." This must be one of the lightest of understatements. To a reader such as Allingham, who in common with many Victorians seems inclined to treat poets as sources of wisdom equal to the true prophets of the established religions, the discovery of clay feet on so perfect and true a poet as Tennyson can only have been quite shocking, and it speaks well of their friendship that no care was taken to conceal these embarrassingly earthbound extremities. But Allingham recovers well: "But how could the case be otherwise?" Correct: the poet has no access to any kind of understanding, through reflection on the materials brought to him by sensation, that is not available to any other individuals. Then, staggering in over-correction, he falls over: "he uses them better". This seems unlikely to be true, unless it is to mean that he writes them down in poetry, but that seems unlikely to qualify, since the best use would be that resulting in the best understanding, and we know from Allingham's initial premise that poets, however impressive their writings may seem to be, have no better grounds of comfort than anyone else.

He dusts himself down: "to step outside the human limitations is not granted even to him". Quite so, that much is obvious. He excuses his fall: "The secret is kept from one and all of us." Apparently, if indeed there is a single secret, a final truth only discovered at the great unveiling. With this he straightens his hat and attempts to regain what dignity can be rescued with a few vacuous pieties: "We must turn eyes and thoughts to the finer and nobler aspects of things, and never let the scalpel of Science overbear pen, pencil and plectrum." A decent reader will look the other way; it is unbecoming to embarrass let alone mock a man whose clothes have become disarranged through no fault of his own.

And then in parting he rescues it all: "A Poet's doubts and anxieties are more comforting than a scientist's certainties and equanimities." That sentence is, like Bradley's remarkable observations on the character of poetic effects ("About the best poetry, and not only the best, there floats an atmosphere of infinite suggestion"), a simple and candid observation of one of the principal paradoxes in the readerly experience of poetry; the scientific certainties and equanimities, that mental repose that comes from conclusions grounded in the most rigorous derivation of propositions from careful thought about our sensory input, offer weaker comfort to a troubled mind than the less carefully found, but over-made, utterance of a poet. How can this possibly be? It should so clearly be the other way around. My own views have been set out in detail elsewhere (see for example "The Free and the Compromised" 2004), and I will not recapitulate them here; those that care must read them for themselves. Allingham, no more than Bradley, has the answers, but his honesty in reporting the materials of his sensation is to be treated with the greatest respect. If only all critics were as sincere.

The ocean is startling and suspect in its forms and changes and timbre
In its distinction
Its comeliness
Its revisions
Its public
Its uses and its mysteries

In all that strikes the sense

And is immediately apprehended by the understanding

But also with all these
And resting lower than all
It holds a virtuous claim
Which is nearly conferred
And partially reclaimed
By the memory of mankind

The intellect finds in it a capital of high
Intangible
Correlation

Equivalences are audible
Which couple most impressively with our transient vivacity
(Beginning and closure of all)

And thus it becomes a cardinal tie to that vast fob of aspiration and commiseration with which the Creator has obliged all body and reason

Coincidentally with his own unbounded actuality

In one permitting all

The sea has often been put beside this our life

Study, though
Launches forth on its roomy heart
And gathers up the idols and semblances of our reality and end of
What we are
And what is assigned to us

Do we see its ample waves
Hasty reckless
Headfirst driven
By the lashing wind

They remind us of the gale of a furious sense
Or the rebellion of an exasperated commune

Are the rollers mute or is a stillness grasped through the surge

Is it the semblance of a complacent heart
Of a calm and tranquil daemon
Or a quiet collected past

Hesitance worry fears
Move over our understanding

Billows over the ocean

Trifling with them
As the clouds cast the waters
With their buried and unsafe values

Does a grinning hope or a flaxen rapture break in impulsively
In the midst of care or misfortune

What is it but a pause in the darkness
Such as we sometimes see sent down from the divided sky
Radiant and single at the dark horizon
A sun-burst on a stagnant sea

Then how often are the trials of life weighed against the changes of the ocean

Who that has been afar off on the sea

"Who that has heard or read anything of its mannerisms

Does not know that lucky winds and skies can bless and
Often follow those that are unknown and harmless

That the morning may rise with candid promises
Bringing the fawning zephyr
Blithe over the good water
And before the sun goes under
Or even before towering midday is there
All may be derelict with shade

The dense gust may be driven off with primitive force
The lucky sunbeams may chirrup with the lightnings
And the spring above be refreshed on the drought below
As if at once they were resolved
To dip and desertify the world"

And these things take place in human life for

Puberty flatters hopes with brilliant diagnoses
All changed at legal age
Into a dreary fiasco of black faith

Often and how suddenly the sun of thriving may be confined from sight
And its dull rays gleam in the chill and dusk of shyness of blatant hardship

In the middle of joy in the middle of peace
The breakers may instantly rise
And sway in over temperament

Your incoming tide and surf cries

The grieving psalm
Has laid us in the lowest pit
In the darkness
In the deeps

Wrath lies sharp on me
You have afflicted me with all your airs

Dank weltering

Utter desolation

The depth closed me round about
The weeds were wrapped about my head

Though no flight
On sea or over life
Is individually free from change
And lopsided cancellations

Our freight is all abroad in the wide face of presence
And some feel severer gales
And often bilking winds

For some
The typhoons of easy street appear to blow
Tropically
So fair and steady is the exodus through which they slide

While others gather
Almost at the outset
An evil that opposes
Wearies
And badgers them to the end

To that beginning they all arrive
Sooner or later

The ocean has many harbours
Life…

The squalls leave off
And all the winds of heaven fold up their wings
And rest

There the sea-dog is still
And slights his risk and dread

The breakers are beyond
The foam and toss pointlessly

The sails are furled
And the anchors dropped

We trip out
A calm one finds
And one in each another a tempest

The voyage done
Loss is the quiet backwater

So descants the seaway on the great argument of extinction
The charismatic ocean
Sounding forth perpetually
In its ghostly surges
A true and lordly metaphysics
Putting out on every shore an open book

But it does something more

It is so boundless
So unwavering
So awash
So all-inclusive
It lures our thought to a nobler issue than persistence
It takes us forever to the juncture of wrong

When contemplation on this thesis is implied
Social life retreats into a runnel
Roaming through a mixed ground
Now through fresh circlets
And now through beaches
Now plainly and now befouled
Now speechlessly and gently
And then redundant and sore
Till it is gone
Last but not least

So the sea
Which takes in and tastes nothing

There in the physical world

Earning fervor
For it can hardly be termed a division

The feeling of endless time
So powerfully as does the wide
Wide sea

Look upon its waves
Heirs to each other unceasing
One climbing up as another dissolves
Think of the lines of men
Lifting up their heads a while and then flying by night away

So, the pressures of the ages come and go
Emerge and cease

Ocean and perpetuity stay
Battered yet only touched
Lasting in the regular
Accolades of their strict element

Standing upon the unattended beach
Hear the spill over thresh to fulfill such exalted
Unusual music as fits the congregation of cliffs and skies
Minds maneuver back through time to when
When we and our begetters were not

Those swells were yet climbing
Steadily breaking
The same feral number
Heard by the eaveing cliffs
The syrupy skies
Which as quietly as possible gave heed to them

In the warmth of this old and concerted alliance
You know on what a slender point you stand
How soon you will be knocked away
And the downpour dance upon a grave

This is may be called the tenderness of forever

Perhaps the feeling is yet more intensely consummated
When lying on a bed watching
Hearing the deep-throated meter of the waves docking solemnly and soothingly throughout the composure of the night

The say-so of an essence
The vote of eternity and its animation

The blue seems now to be a living thing
Ever vital and heart-rending
A jittery government
A performance of unremitting duration
Speaking the moist apocalypses of pristine fact

Where are the untold men who have crushed its interior

They are aged away
And not a suggestion is left of all their rejoinders

Where the wintry sovereigntys who washed their jewels with the incoming tide

They have been traded and swapped again
Till museums only tell where they stood

But the sea is where it was

No monuments upon it
No ambition and pride

Not even a ruin to lecture of triumphs or existence

It remains as green
As tugging and
As free as when it first listened
And answered with all its motions our resolve

Our thoughts bend over the turn of eternity

Earth is ever quite free from the yoke

It receives and covers toppled refuse

Truly

But cannot stomach the exactitude of a long frightened prize-winner

All around the world we see the slag of generations
Caves
Wells
Pyramids
Roads
Towers
Graves

None of these are on the sea
The surface is blank but by its own mutiny

And when it buries
The sepulture is sudden and entire
A plunge
A blob of froth
And the waters are as before

Unworn is ocean

What shall we stack up against it

Allied in its greatness more with disposition than with trouble

It holds itself above cancellation

It seems to have will
Unconstraint
And a strength

These high associations
They lead us to a guileless bearing on all that is sublime and pure

All grandeur directs us to it

We cannot stop in the creature after

And yet something draws closer
When we are looking at the sea
Or listening to its roar
And bottling the emotions which it excites

Where he arrives
It reigns

The pregnancy of a trespass
Takes the throne of reputation

And then we think how butlerish is might and majesty compared with this

The infinity of ocean becomes a brief type of psychological etching
And all that grandeur just a passing clue that nothing is lessened in the pious mind

It keeps its connections
And is patronized by odious contingency

It puts on the look
And speaks with the auxiliary solemnity of a priest
Telling us that all power and magnificence are funnelled from the Maker
And that all is full of bliss
And life
And duty
Are just brain twisting

Because the sea has been called the religious sea

It is devout
It propositions with religious thoughts and emotions
And as the feelings excited by a wellborn suitor in a thoughtful mind are always reflected back
The sea appears in its own self-sacred mirror
Lying in the hollow of the hand
Chanting loud anthems of criticism in the noise of its precipitate floods
Issuing devotion from the heaving repose of its calms

So
We know nothing of the sea as we ought
We feel nothing of its best most swollen inspirations unless we receive
And communicate
The calculations and rectitude of sacrilege
Unless we grow saintly as we…

And return from watching with the knowledge that we have broken into a nearer junction with something

With moral affinities that rise naturally from knowledge of the sea
And are all in a great degree definite

The deep is
As it were
Charged with them
And bears them richly to our heart

And when we look out upon the ocean
Without these associations as the direct dependent of thought
It is the union of several or of all of them
That almost benumbs us

But also beside these views
Which can be traced and numbered
There are suggested emotions
Which we cannot define so well
If at all

I believe that no one
Loving nature
Has released himself upon the sea
And come back with that which he could simplify

All that he can acquaint us of is of a lifting and purging

Further than this he cannot declare them
For they baffled all story and chase

And it looked to him at times
As he waited with sleeplessness on the boundary
That a great intestine wave
Which he heard and received
And did not withstand

Came like whispers of sharing
And intelligence
And a concord to fill the world

They teach us something of our retired connections
Something of the unsuspected and fantastic future

And

If we are prone to love what we can touch
They gently rebuke us for our coldness

I have spoken now as I was partly able
And not perhaps as clearly as I could

Let the rest be learnt by each alone

And if his curiosity is brisk
Let him go to the shops and get wisdom

But if his holy affections are moved
Let him go to the water and wash

In the eminently monstrous and belligerent
Ending of the sea.

Clouds of white gold drift beyond a ridge of tiles edged with

seagulls.

You cannot see the ground, only the court walls, the tower and

the sky.

A throaty, sawing noise of engines competes with that of students

making notes.

Innovations in minor technologies are a convenient place to inspect the fundamental characteristics of this phenomenon. For example, the handles on fishing reels.

A 'multiplier' is a reel that sits on top of the rod, not underneath it, with the axis of the spool crossing the rod.

When the angler casts, the mass of the bait, which is either a metal or wooden lure, or literally a natural bait, such as a dead or live fish, spins the spool which pays out line, the angler's thumb controlling the spin and bringing it to a stop when the bait hits the water. When the angler wishes to retrieve the lure the free hand winds the handle, re-engaging the gears and winding the line back on to the spool.

The reel's name arises from the fact that such reels were amongst the first to have geared systems, with one turn of the handle being multipleied by the gears to produce many revolutions of the spool. Nearly all reels of all designs are geared now, but the name has adhered to the device where it first appeared.

In the United Kingdom a right handed angler will hold the rod in their right hand, controlling the spool with the thumb of that hand, and use their left hand to wind the reel, the handle being on the left side of the reel.

However, in the United States, such an angler will make the cast with his right hand, but when the bait has touched the water will transfer the rod to the left hand, and wind the handle with the right hand, the handle being on the right side of the reel.

Multiplying reels sold in the UK are, as a standard, equipped with handles on the left, while in the US, such reels are sold with handles on the right.

Since these reels are a relatively recent development such a cultural divergence is very striking, but the explanation is straightforward.

The multiplier was developed from a simpler, usually ungeared, reel that was slung beneath the rod. Anglers made their cast by throwing the bait with the rod, usually held in the right hand, and either controlling the rotating reel with their left hand or paying out line that had previously been stripped off the reel and coiled at the angler's feet. Since the strong right hand was holding the rod, the handles of the reel were on the left side, and it was the left hand that reeled the bait back.

When the multiplier was first developed in the United States in the later part of the nineteenth century, it arose from the discovery that it was possible to cast more accurately by first rotating the rod so that the reel was on top, and controlling the spinning spool with the thumb of the left hand. Of course, in rotating the rod the handles of the reel were thus moved from the left of the rod to the right. Perhaps in the interests of speed, and to prevent the bait sinking into weed and other snags, these American anglers did not tend to return the reel to its position under the rod, but passed it straight to their left hands and turned the reel handles with their right hands.

This had some disadvantages, since the rod was now in the weaker left hand, making it harder to work the bait, and to hook and play fish. However, these difficulties are by no means overwhelming, and apparently too few American anglers felt or have felt that it was so inconvenient as to motivate them to ask that manufacturers should put the reel handles on the left side of the machine. They had just made one significant innovation, and were not in the mood for another.

However, when the multiplying reel arrived in the United Kingdom, the need to switch hands, from the stronger to the weaker, was perceived as a fault, and the handles switched to the left side of the reel, where they remain today.

While it is risky to claim to have put aside national pride in such matters, it is fairly obviously better to hold the rod with your right hand and wind with the left hand (if you are right handed), so the persistence of US anglers in winding with their right hands is an instance of real curiosity. Of course, the truth is that it is not cripplingly difficult to hold the rod with your left arm, and though your ability to hook and play the fish is impaired at first, with extended practise the angler develops some degree of ambidexterity, as I know from experience, having had to fish with American tackle when on flying visits. The disadvantage is small, for the persistent angler, however annoying and exhausting it may prove for the beginner.

Four points of interest relating to the theory of innovation arise from this micro-history:

1. Significant innovations appear to exhaust or satisfy the innovators, who may be unable or simply unwilling to push on very further and related innovations even if obvious and readily implemented.

2. When innovations deliver great advantages accompanied by minor disadvantages, additional, completing, innovations addressing those disadvantages may not be called forth since the population will become accustomed to the new condition and adjust to it.

3. By contrast, a population to whom the innovation is introduced in its finished form may immediately leap to add further improvements, and will not accept the innovation without these improvements, since they perceive the disadvantages as a barrier. In such cases personal or national pride seems a productive engine of willingness for further adventure.

4. When the advantage of the subsequent or completing innovations is relatively small, at least in the longer run, the uncompleted form may become dominant so that further innovation or completion becomes very unlikely (no one expects the left hand wind multiplier to sweep the American market). This particularly true where those using the incomplete form are not confronted with those employing the completed innovation. For example, there is no competition between American and British anglers that might motivate the adoption of the left hand wind multiplier.

With regard to angling, two further thoughts present themselves:

Firstly, no Englishman who has fished in the US can fail to be impressed by the physical skill of American anglers, who are on average and by any standards excellent fisherman, and in the matter of casting simply outstanding. It is at least possible that the ambidexterous behaviour required by the right hand wind multiplier has resulted in anglers that are simply more exercised and consequently agile than those in Europe, where because the machinery itself is very slightly better designed less is required of the fisherman. Indeed, it is conceivable that the advantages conferred by the improvement in design are outweighed by the compensating muscular and nervous, and perhaps intellectual development that results from the inferiority of the American multiplying right hand wind reel.

Secondly, the multiplier is generally used when fishing with artificial lures that require the angler to give life to the lure in order to provoke a strike from a predatory fish. It is possible, though a wild hypothesis, that the weaker, hesitant, and less regular movement imparted through the rod by the left arm and hand may be more attractive to fish, since it suggests an easy prey, or at least a more natural one. I have no further evidence for this suggestion beyond the commonplace observations that beginners at lure fishing are often surprisingly successful, and that very experienced lure anglers often observe that their lures are struck at moments of inattention, for example when the angler's concentration is broken by a sudden noise or a passing kingfisher or some such thing.

Miles' Tribes of Britain (2006) sets out to persuade the reader that pre-Roman British society is as impressive as that which followed them, and in this he is successful, but not, I think, in quite the way that he expects, for while the society he describes is organised to a degree that is genuinely surprising, it is also far from sophisticated; indeed it is barely complex. The distinctions that arise in relation to these three terms are not without power, and we might say, provocatively, that our own time is highly sophisticated, extremely complex, but verging on the disorganised. Whether we accept that diagnosis, we should labour to avoid the trap of mistaking the virtues of any one of these conditions for the strengths of the others. To be organised is good, but to be so without complexity and sophistication is brutal. Our own condition, assuming that it is as I have described, is perhaps just weak, or at any rate a transitory stage en route to a more stable equilibrium of these characteristics.