With Remembrance Day occurring next week, it seems only fitting to re-release a podcast we recorded in 2018. In this podcast, we discuss Remembrance Day, what it means, why we commemorate, and how its purpose has changed over the decades.

Remembrance Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing Remembrance Day. Nick, lead us in.

Okay. Yeah, there's some questions I want to ask straight away, but let's just go to Chris. Chris, any initial thoughts on what Nick just said?

Well, it's already, I mean, I think when it was originally, certainly for the first few decades, you know, the whole country would come to a standstill, cars would stop in the street and stuff. And I think that it's not observed on that level anymore. So I think, you know, it seems reasonable to expect just a petering out of observance, the ceremony will still carry on, but fewer and fewer people will probably pay attention to it.

Okay. I'm not sure if that's correct. So let's see.

Neither am I. But I mean, that would be what it looked like. It's not like some politician is going to say, we'll cancel the ceremony, even if it's Jeremy Corbyn, you know, I think they'll still carry it on. But the question is, will people pay less and less

attention to it? Because I think there is something different about, I mean, this was all kicked off with the First World War. And I think there is something different about the First World War that means that it could ironically live beyond other wars in terms of commemoration, which was first, I guess that it was global. Secondly, that it wasn't the first example of mechanised warfare, but it was where, yeah, where...

Where we lost hundreds of thousands of people, you know, in this country.

Exactly. And so on that is the sort of, there's an element of more futility about this war than others. I think...

And also it was so accidentally entered into. Nobody wanted the First World War, but it happened anyway.

Yeah, I think that was partly driven by the fact that we had soldiers overseas. So it's not just a recognition of those in the First World War. It's also veterans from other countries.

Absolutely. And so I remember around that time, and still now to a certain extent, sort of feeling a little bit uncomfortable personally with what was happening with Remembrance Day. It was ceasing to be Remembrance Day and started to be more a kind of banging the drum for Iraq and Afghanistan, and more associated. And I think definitely, what's it called? The British Legion. Because the First World War was obviously sort of receding, and you have got these new conflicts, I felt there was a greater emphasis. There was a conscious move to sort of tie in.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I think that's right. I think talking about the armed forces and heroes and all that kind of thing is definitely something which I don't remember people really paying any attention to at all in the 80s and 90s so much. I mean, if anything, the kind of standard opinion was, well, the military are kind of, in some way, morally suspect. And that has turned around. And now it's, I think we've moved much more towards the sort of American approach, which is to be possibly a bit overly respectful towards the military. But yeah, I mean, I think you're right. I mean, I think I know what you mean. You know, there is a sense of kind of renewed interest in the First World War and widening the scope of remembrance to include everyone who's died in a war. And I think that brings me on to what I would suggest. So first of all, we can think of the role of these sort of commemorative silences and those commemoration ceremonies as being about honouring the people involved and perhaps, you know, providing some sort of comfort, whatever, to the families. But I think it serves this other purpose, which is to act as a kind of cultural booster injection for our societal antibodies to needless conflict. Because I think that's, and I worry that, you know, the further away major conflict is, the more likely politicians are to enter into it. Because that's what bloody happens. You know, that's what happened for the last 400 years is, you know, I think we touched on this in a previous podcast, but there is this, it does, looks like a sort of two generation cycle between major wars. You know, you've got your Second World War, First World War, then Napoleonic War, and then, you know, the Seven Years War. And it just seems like, and the 30 Years War before that. And it seems like, well, it seems to, everyone agrees, no, this is really, really bad, and we shouldn't do it. And then gradually, people start thinking, well, let's actually, no, it's a good idea. Let's have a big war again. And I think, you know, enforcing at least some recognition that war's bad, and we should make sure that we all agree that we'll all spend time all together, all just as a nation agreeing that war is bad, just sort of slightly reinforces that memory. Not that it works. I mean, it didn't stop the Second

World War from happening, necessarily, but... No, but I think, you see, I think the interesting purpose of Remembrance Day, and the reason why it's important for it not to be subverted, from a perspective of historical lessons, is if you look at most sort of recognition of British military campaigns prior to that, there was an element of triumphalism about them, you know, big monuments that, you know, obviously there's a lot of war memorials associated with the First World War, but they are much more humble, and they're much more about the loss, as opposed to the victory that came from them. And I think that we, you know, Britain had had, you know, a martial history which kind of scaled up to the First World War, and that lesson about going from small wars that are successful and aren't too much of a problem, so okay, we might as well have a big one now, I think that's particularly critical, and you can see that in things like Tony Blair's Prime Ministership, Premiership, for example, where he started off with, you know, Sierra Leone and Kosovo, and they were deemed to be sort of successors, and then, you know, up comes his sort of commitment to the Iraq War, which was obviously much more contentious, and on a larger scale, and much less successful, and I think that guarding against sort of, you know, having a few successful wars, and then moving into a great catastrophe is the key lesson for me, I think, a humility about military conflict.

Okay. Okay, I might be right, actually, there is something interesting about the use of silence, where, you know, you can imagine people saying, no, what we'll do is every year we'll sing a patriotic song together or something. The good thing about silence is it doesn't reveal what people are thinking. It's a point I found on the internet, but I thought was quite striking, actually. The point is a pacifist and a, you know, real sort of diehard patriot can do Remembrance Day together, and there's no conflict, you know, they can do it together and be in perfect harmony while they're observing it, which I think, and I think that's actually very clever.

And it's also very arresting, you know, as somebody who both played and watched, you know, football on, you know, often there would be moments of silence to remember, you know, a dead famous player or something along those lines. And, you know, it's obviously a powerful collective experience. And, you know, as Nick said, there's, there's nothing to indicate the, you know, the way you are responding to that. Yeah, it's disruptive. Apparently, it is disruptive.

Apparently, Man United, when they were going to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Munich air crash, discovered that that day they were scheduled to play Man City, and they were worried that all it would take was one shouty hooligan to destroy the whole thing. So they went for, I think, a minute's applause. Yeah, which is sort of not surprising, but quite sad. But this issue, actually, this is something I was quite interested in. This issue of minute silences, you know, is there, is there, and I think a lot of people feel that there's a bit of an inflation in minute silences. And so I tried to, I looked at a few things for which, you know, silence is used to commemorate, to commemorate, and tried to find out if there was some consistency, like does the scale, the number of observers, the length of the silence and stuff, scale in some way to the magnitude of the calamity? And the answer is very much not, right? It's hugely inconsistent. So, and I tried to put some numbers on it. And I found, you know, if you take World War One and Two, for which you had something like 87, well, 87 billion deaths is the figure I used. And I reckon the observers of minute silences per year are in the billions. It's, you know, if you add up all the countries who have a minute silence for the First World War, it's a couple of billion. What that means is that the number of person days per death of silence, so in other words, if you add up the number of people observing it, and the amount of silence, and what I've done is I've added up all the, all the silences for the last hundred years. I think, you know, so you have your two minute silence, it comes to a few days per death of silence. So if you added up all the silence that people were producing, it would give you a few days, like, you know, one or two, three, four, five days of silence per death. It's quite a lot. I don't know, feels like it's quite a lot if you think about it. Then, but then we have the, if you take the Asian tsunami, 230,000 deaths, three minute silence, I think, again, observed very widely throughout the world, which works out at something like 30-ish, 30-ish person days of silence per person. Well, I've only just got started, Fraser, hold on to your hat. Doesn't repeat though, does it? No, no, so that's, no, but I've included the repetition, you see, in my numbers. Okay, so that was a one-off, but it, but it still, at the moment, vastly exceeds the amount of silence dedicated per death to the World Wars. Football matches, when someone dies, I reckon 50,000 people producing one minute of silence for this, for each dead person, which comes to about the same, actually, as the tsunami, it's about 30 days. Then we, then we start to get stratospheric. The one minute silence for the Titanic, which was observed in, across sort of Europe and the US, comes to- I definitely didn't recognise that silence. That's about 100, upwards of 100 person days. Then we, then we get 9-1-1, where there was a lot of silence. I think in the US they had five, five minutes at one point, and, you know, again, very widely observed, similar order of magnitude. Now we go up into the, we start to get stratospheric. Madrid, the Madrid bombings, 191 deaths, but I reckon, when you factor in all the people observing the silence, it comes to about 1,000 person minutes. So we're already up to a matter of days. Are we going to get onto a Paris car crash? Then we, then we have the, and the similar, similar for 7-7, similar for the terrorist attacks in Morocco. Well, no, the very, yes. So, whereas when we, a national silence for the death of a leading figure, e.g. sort of Churchill or Princess Diana or whatever. Yeah, for, certainly in the UK, I mean, I haven't worked it out for China, but it's going to be big. But in the UK, it works out as a total of 114 person years of silence for that one individual. So over a lifetime of silence is observed for that one person. Interesting stuff, I thought. Okay. So what I'm saying is totally inconsistent. What we should do is have a sort of millisecond of silence for a monarch and scale it up according to the total number of people observing it and the total number

of people who died. Okay. Although that's interesting, and I get the point that you're making. Really, that's not, okay, it is about commemoration, but it's more about. What I'm,

no, I'm saying there is an argument for scaling it, which is that it doesn't devalue it, you see? Yeah. This is why it worries me when we have these, suddenly a two minute silence for, you know, for, you know, relatively, relatively not particularly serious kind of event, devalues the two minute silence for the 90 million people who've died in World Wars 1 and 2.

I agree. But I also think, like, for example, having a minute silence when the Queen dies, having a minute silence for that, I don't, I think. I hadn't realised she was dead. Anyway,

carry on. Can we stop saying a minute silence and say it like it is, having 114 years of silence?

114 years of silence. 114 years of silence. The point is that all of those people who are engaging in their own one minute silence, kind of feel like they know the Queen, right? So, you know, they are observing their one minute silence for the Queen. In the event of some mass catastrophe, you're sort of, you might have, let's say, let's take a world war. You might have a relative or two relatives that you are recognising your silence on behalf of. I mean, I know it's a mass event, but we don't, we don't feel a connection, particularly with that person over there who died. We might have, you know, particular people ourselves that we are connected with. So, we're celebrating, we're commemorating our one minute silence for a small number of

people, if you see what I mean. Yeah, I'm being a bit superstitious. I'm not suggesting that we try and bring all these things into line with one another. What I am, I'm just trying to demonstrate. Creating an exchange rate mechanism. Yeah, exactly. I'm just demonstrating that there's a lot of inconsistency in it. And I think we just, we do need to be cognisant of the problem of potentially, you know, grief inflation here. We just need to make sure that we are reserving, you know, the right amount of silence for things that are relatively much more significant and where it's more important to commemorate. Yeah. Something we haven't got onto and we don't have

time for actually is the kind of the hysteria that every year there's always some news article somewhere about some poor celebrity went on a game show or something who didn't have a poppy. And the backlash against this person for not wearing a poppy. But we don't have time to get into that. What I want to do is actually slightly jump on the bandwagon with that and just pose the question of, just out of interest, what personal connections do you two and myself have to this whole thing with remembrance? Any connections with family? It's always interesting here about this sort of thing, about your antecedents. And I've got a selfish reason for asking this. But

anyway. Yeah, well, I mean, I think our generation is a little bit in limbo with the First World War generally, because our grandparents were probably too young to have served in the First World War. But I do have some, my great uncle was gassed. He didn't die, but he was affected. And I'm also quarter Austrian. So I have a number of relatives who fought on the Alpine front as well. Okay. Nick?

The naval engagement of the First World War.

Absolutely, yeah. And he used to, when I was younger, he used to tell all sorts of stories about sort of people getting killed at sea and all that sort of business. And then in the Second World War, he was in the RAF in North Africa, not really fighting, but he was in Cairo, I believe. Anyway, so...

Shagging, probably.

Probably. Well, my mum records that. Anyway. That's another podcast. Yeah. Okay. So, all right, we'll stop there. Thanks, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. And until next time, goodbye.