The lacy city

 In China Mieville's fascinating The city and the city, two cities occupy the same space: tightly enmeshed physically, but powerfully separated culturally with different cultures, economies, building styles, fashions and language. Citizens avoid seeing things occuring in the other city even though they might be on the same street. It's called 'unseeing'. People pass through a border control point to see a place the other city, even though the route they travel might take them back along the same roads to a building right next door to their starting point.

It sounds like wildest invention, but it's not so different to life in an ordinary European city. I live in Southampton, but I haven't walked or even driven down every street. Not even every street in my area. I follow a fairly small set of routes to and from work, my son's school, particular shops, friends' houses, the stations. My Southampton is a lacy little subset of the city as a whole, reflecting my lifestyle and tendencies like a kind of fingerprint. It will be just as unique - as would anyone's, especially those with less regular lives.

As well as my sub-Southampton physically, I live culturally in a sub-Southampton. I work with and live near people who generally share my outlook, I connect digitally with people who share my interests. My father, who worked in social housing for many years and felt passionately about homelessness, has made our homeless population very visible to me - but many people 'unsee' those in doorways with cardboard notices. Other people unsee other groups. I myself try to unsee unnervingly raucous groups of teenagers in the street, trusting that they will elect to unsee me in return as I scuttle middle-agedly by.

It seems harmless, but in the city riots five years ago, the rioters were almost certainly throwing their stones across an invisible division into another city, one that shared a name and a location, but wasn't theirs.

The heat of the moment

I've gone off 'living in the moment'. It is true that the past cannot be changed and the future cannot be controlled. Yes, we must beware of letting hopes, fears, regrets and wistfulness dominate the foreground of our experience. However, and it's a big however, there isn't time in the brevity of the moment, to consider. In the moment there is only immediate reaction, instinct, the heat.

It is time which tells. Time tells because deep thought is slow, no matter how fast events are. We need to digest experience and ideas, mull things over. We need time to catch ourselves out in the errors of perception and judgement which are part of normal fallible human consciousness. We need to mull over and re-examine things. And because of this, we simply can't think properly about everything ourselves, there isn't time.

This is what we need experts for. We need to outsource the time to become well-informed about some difficult issues, so that we can focus on others. I don't think we are 'tired of experts': reviews, curated selections and price comparison sites abound. The trouble is that our global connectivity means we are called upon to develop to too many opinions too quickly.

As we struggle with the overload, we are drawn to hyper-real clarity: soundbites, slogans, shortcuts. We don't want the ifs and buts, the complexities - indeed we suspect them to be the mark of the weasel, instead of honest respect for a difficult issue.

Processing deep thoughts takes time, but life is fast and getting faster. The amount of the world to which each of us is exposed is huge and getting huger. If we want to stop people managing the overload by radically and dangerously oversimplifying issues, we really need experts. And time.