The View from my Bicycle [COLUMN]

Vertical and horizontal learning

Some months ago my father had to put down one of your border collie/labradors. Max was suffered from a degenerative spinal disease, which paralysed his lower back, rendering his hind legs useless. In the final weeks of his life Max's rear end was literally wasting away. He used his front paws to drag the rest of himself around, and finally, could not really go outside to defecate. We sometimes found him lying somewhere, shivering, either from cold, or pain, or both.

It was very sad for me to find the other two dogs, Lala and Jessie, now apparently on course for a similar exit out of this world. Jessie has it worse. Her body is thinner and she appears to be nearly deaf. She has obvious trouble walking, taking short steps, each step from the front paws crossing the other. Lala is fatter, but her hind legs have already started to numb. When she turns they sometimes collapse under her. It is a cruel reality then that Max's horrible exit now appears, apparently, in store for these two beautiful animals also.

But these dogs have a limit on the span of their lives, and it is 12 years. They're already 12 years old. It may seem to us human beings a cruelly short space of time, but there is more to it than that. It is a biological adaptation, to be effective while alive at the sort of behaviour that will tend to support the success of the species. In short, the life force really has one primary motive: survival. The approach in the case of dogs may simply be to parent one or two litters, and have these integrated into the pack and perhaps a few leaving to start packs of their own.

Why then do other creatures live far longer; elephants for example live up to 60 years, and people up to 80 years, sometimes well beyond. Tortoises too are well known for their longevity.

Elephants, like dogs, are social animals, but these species differ primarily in these two respects:
1) There is a much greater emphasis on community in elephant herds, with grandmothers involved in the raising of young. One of the reasons parenting is so vital is because unlike dogs, elephants aren't predators, and as such, this high level of socialisation has stood them in good stead not only in terms of co-operatively fending off predators like lions, but something else too-
2) It is not for nothing that elephants are associated with having good memories. In periods of particular environmental stress, it is only the oldest matriarchs that can recall where the likeliest water holes are, and the routes to these water holes. This level of sentience is vital in the extreme environments that some desert elephants call home.

The Kalahari elephant is an example of a creature that is certainly smarter than people when it comes to surviving in an extremely arid area that appears not to have enough resources, but in reality these resources are sufficient, they are simply distributed, and in a constant state of flux. The elephants are smart enough and fit enough to know how, where and when to move from one fluctuating resource to another.

When it comes to the life of any organism, there are two issues that become integral to survival. Cultural transmission, and social learning. You might not think that simpler creatures such as insects need cultural transmission, but even bees and ants have sophisticated rituals that are learnt or stimulated via chemical processes [generally associated with smells]. These rituals vary from basic communication on food sources, to the delegation of roles and functions, to responses to attacks on the hive or colony.

In human beings, cultural transmission and social learning is obviously highly, highly evolved. The world's more successful economies are also a function of better integrated and more appropriately specialised and functional members of a society. What's more, these successful societies have managed to maintain some degree of continuity through - you guessed it - education. Entertainment is also a powerful sense of cultural transmission, and it is perhaps in this respect, more than any other, that America has managed to penetrate world cultures and become the dominant player. After all, music, movies and commerce is conducted according to these American standards: English, the dollar and Yanky cool.

So why would American dominance have to end? Why, with such a high level of cultural infusion, could the American dream ever become shipwrecked? These are vital questions. The distinction must be made explicit between two simple forms of learning. Vertical learning and horizontal learning.

Vertical learning

Vertical learning comes from observing what another successful organism [or organisation] is doing. Vertical learning comes from an expert from a completely different background who imparts specialised knowledge which is often highly functional, practical and useful. In short, it is filled with insights. An example in the natural world is the honey guide, a bird, that has a symbiotic relationship with the honey badger. The bird is far more mobile, and can quickly do reconnaissance of an area. But the bird has no skill at opening up a hive, and so invokes the services of the thick skinned technician. This is vertical learning in nature.
In the marketplace, the advertising agency or consultant or investment banker plays the role of the honey guide, and the corporation plays the role of the lumbering drone.

Horizontal learning

But there is also another kind of learning. It may be effective in terms of how 'transmissibility' but how effective is it in terms of utility. An example might be a number of dogs who chance upon carrion in an alleyway. The one dog learns from his brother where to find meat, but his brother is young and inexperienced, and this easy meat comes from a restaurant whose owner hates dogs. He chances upon them in the alley, and shoots at them, or throws a stone at them. An older dog would have guided his charges to a safer spot.

In human terms, horizontal learning is probably best epitomised by kids at the end of their high school careers. They are no longer boys, nor men - not quite. They share alcohol with one another, drugs perhaps, teach each other to drive, and exchange information, in the case of boys, on the 'looser' girls. This learning while to some extent useful, may be filled with dead ends, and is an incredibly dangerous period for a youngster. The risks include physical injury, pregnancy and lifelong addiction. Far better for these youngsters to learn from their fathers or mentors, or other successful youngsters.

Incidentally, horizontal learning is how crime and addiction and disease spreads. The internet has been described as a 'flattening' mechanism. In a sense, what the internet does, is it spreads all the same information to everyone else, potentially creating delusions, or dead noise. No one has any insights any more, and so what you end up with is a cultural mix that is saturated with pointless information - relating to news and entertainment, but nothing of substance, nothing that can really advance the culture.


The flip side, of course, is that an individual can elect to spend time on Wikipedia, rather than pornography, on researching an initiative, rather than trawling news sites endlessly. But it appears in this respect, we humans have trapped ourselves in our own entertainments. Because we can probably guess, we can already see where the bulk of our interests lie. In voyeuristically following celebrities and money. The insights we gain from these pursuits aren't really insights at all. They're food for the ego, and this is an insatiable an all-too human construct.

It is our ego-fixations that have drifted us into vast fields of horizontal learning, and this is the source of America's demise, and beyond America if we're not careful. We need to arrest this process by finding new and better thoughts to focus on, and that means, new and better leaders and role models.