Saving Faces

          I once met a woman at a dinner party – a friend of our hosts – and, although we talked, on and off, for over three hours, when we met again, some months later, I did not recognise her face. Nor did I recognise her when we met on a subsequent occasion. It was embarrassing for me and, I am sure, insulting to her. It wasn’t that I found her uninteresting – if I had, it might explain my blindness. So, what happened there? Well, I have just discovered that I have a condition called prosopagnosia, a cognitive disorder which impairs the ability to recognise faces. It is not uncommon, though it can range from mild to extreme (as in not recognising even your own face). There are people who have the opposite condition – an enhanced ability to recall faces but theirs, apparently, is not a medical condition, since they are simply referred to as super-recognisers by the security services who employ them to identify ‘persons of interest’.

          But knowing there is a pathological term for one’s foible can be useful: it means that your condition is officially recognised and can be excused. You can even have a calling-card printed up, so that when offended parties look at you accusingly and say “You don’t remember me, do you?” you could present it to them, in the hope that its apologetic explanation will take the resentment out of the encounter and gain you a pardon for the supposed slight. And, even if that’s not wholly successful, it is comforting to know that the unique name means that someone, somewhere is likely to be doing research, studying its causes and, perhaps, working towards a cure. Of course, the process of attributing names does leave us with a lot of unfamiliar, scientifically-derived words to get our heads around and, sometimes, when an unfamiliar term crops up, one is inclined to question whether it is even “a thing”. Take, for example, ‘eustress’. Fortunately, with access to reference sources only a few keystrokes away, eustress is soon identified as ‘beneficial stress’ – something that is and always was very much a thing, even though it took a scientist to name it.

          But bestowing a scientific name on a subject is no guarantee that there will ever be closure on it. I came across one recently – ‘cliodynamics’ – which, though it took more than a few mouse clicks to research adequately, merits investigation because of its potential to explain so much. Its contention is that mathematical analysis can be applied to historical patterns of social development to produce two outcomes: a more accurate, less biased account of history and, using the results as a basis for modelling, prediction of likely future societal scenarios and ways in which we might influence them. Proponents contend that there is so much data and so much computing power available that it is now possible to make equations – rather like meteorologists do – that attempt to predict the outcomes of cyclical patterns observed in societies and social development. Others demur on the basis that there is too much unpredictability in human affairs.

          Meanwhile, I understand that the Chinese Communist Party is working on its very own solution to societal development by way of prosopagnosia-related research. Its solution, however, is unlikely to benefit anyone other than the Party itself, since it involves the development of facial recognition via AI to a level that will make super-recognisers redundant. Supposing (as I do) that its aim is to monitor and control every single one of its citizens more tightly, then the CCP will have cracked cliodynamics by the simple application of tyranny – though I expect the CCP will come up with a more face-saving euphemism than that.