In Praise of Bibliographical Essays

Last April I posted on this theme

Readers are aware of the rather eccentric stress this blog puts on the importance of 

books having annotated bibliographies. Last year Penguin published 

Why Politics Fails – the 5 traps of the  modern world and how to escape them  

Ben Ansell (2023) which ends with a rare essay which covers, for each chapter, the key 

books the author has found essential as themes for the lens through which he examines 

democracy, equality, solidarity, security and prosperity. 

The only other book I’ve come across with such an essay is Peter Gay’s 680 page 

magnum opus Modernism – the lure of heresy  (2007) which has a stunning 32 page  

bibliographical essay which, he warned, was “highly selective”! 
Peter Gay was born in Germany in 1923 but his family came to the States via Havana 

in 1941 where he became a prolific US historian – as is evident from this Wikipedia entry.

One of his books is My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (1998), a powerful 

and insightful account of his teenage years in Berlin. 

Another which also has an extensive bib essay is Freud – a Life for our Times (1988) 

whose bib essay extends to 76 pages. The book does, after all, have 1350 pages! 

For me, such bibliographical essays are rare gems which offer an opportunity to understand 

an author’s preferences.

Yesterday I came across another book with a great bibliographical essay - 

Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven published in 1991. It’s essay is only 50 

pages long!

A Bibliography

I said yesterday that I had enjoyed Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine – on the unmaking of humanity (2025) partly by virtue of the frequency with which he mentions book titles. Just some of the books mentioned by Kingsnorth which I subsequently downloaded

• The Culture of Cities Lewis Mumford (1938)

• The Crisis of the Modern World Rene Guenon (1941-1961) short book

• The City in History Lewis Mumford (1961)

• The Sibling Society Robert Bly (1996)

• The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times Rene Guenon (2001)

• The Crisis of) Modernity  del Noce (2014)

• Why Liberalism Failed Patrick Deneen (2018)

• In the Shadow of the Machine Jeremy Naydler (2018)

• Why Liberalism Failed Patrick Deneen (2018)

• The Struggle for Humanity  Jeremy Naydler (2020)

• The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self  Carl Trueman (2020) 

• The God that Failed – liberalism and the destruction of the West John Q Publius (2020)

AGAINST THE MACHINE

 I’ve been reading Paul Kingsnorth‘s latest book Against the Machine – on the unmaking of humanity (2025). Kingsnorth is an investigative journalist and green activist, known for his Dark Mountain project and The Abbey of Misrule site. One of the reasons I’m attracted to the book is the way Kingsnorth integrates into the text quite naturally references to long forgotten figures such as Lewis Mumford and Stephen Toulmin

We have arrived at the point which the writers I have explored so far—Oswald Spengler, Christopher Lasch, Robert Bly, Patrick Deneen, Simone Weil, Ian McGilchrist and others—warned us we would come to. It is the point at which our underlying cultural and spiritual brokenness is manifesting on the surface as politics, with explosive results. This is the result of the Great Unsettling: a time and place where nothing seems to be solid, comforting or even real.

This process has been accelerated a thousandfold by the arrival of the internet, and particularly social media, which, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued, has had the same impact as the collapse of the tower of Babel: ‘people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate,condemned to mutual incomprehension.’p152 

Paul Kingsnorth goes on to argue that

The ‘decline of the West’ which is so hotly debated right now is, in my view, not a matter of the wrong people being in charge, or the wrong economic policies being pursued. It is not due to the rise of China or Russia, or racism, or ‘misinformation’, or nasty populists, or the institutionalisation of ‘woke’ ideology. As such, it will not be solved by tougher border controls, or radical rightist governments, or revolutions, or ‘decolonisation’, or controls on freedom of speech in the name of ‘protecting our democracy’. Any number of these things might or might not be real or true or desirable, but they are symptoms, not causes, of our malaise. The malaise is deeper, older, more interesting and far more consequential than any of this, and it affects the very basis of our humanity. What happens next will determine what it means to be human in the twenty-first century and beyond.

This book seeks to tell the tale of this Machine: what it is, where it came from, and where it is taking us next. Drawing from history, from religion, from current events and from the work of many other writers and thinkers, it aims to pin down the shape and genesis of this thing. My inquiry is divided into four parts. Part one explores the roots of the current Western cultural malaise. Part two explains where the Machine came from, and how it contributed to that problem. Part three examines how its values manifest around us today, and what they are destroying. Part four offers a guide to practical and spiritual survival and resistance.

But while I learned this early, it was much later that I learned something else, dimly and slowly, through my study of history, mythology and, well, people: that every culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. This does not, of course, need to be a Christian order. It could be Islamic, Hindu or Daoist. It could be based around the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin. But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.

The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representatives of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions—‘the people’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘progress’. I’m all for liberty, and it would be nice to give democracy a try one day too; but the dethroning of the sovereign—Christ—who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order has not led to universal equality and justice. It has led, via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler, to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.

Sometimes, his writing can seem a bit excessive -

You can judge a culture, I think, by its tallest buildings; what it chooses to reach towards is a reflection of its soul and purpose. The tallest buildings in a modern city are not cathedrals, temples, or even palaces: they are skyscrapers, which are homes to banks, finance houses and global corporations. (p85) And so we find ourselves in the age of AI and apps for everything, with CCTV cameras on every street corner, our opinions manufactured by interest groups, our communications tracked and monitored, wondering what is true or who we can believe, and feeling, day by day, like we have less agency, less control, less humanity than ever before. In the future that is offered to us we are not even cogs in the Machine, for the Machine can increasingly operate without human input. Mumford, as ever, is bracingly frank about where this leads:

Never before has the ‘citadel’ exercised such atrocious power over the rest of the human race. Over the greater part of history, the village and the countryside remained a constant reservoir of fresh life, constrained indeed by the ancestral patterns of behaviour that had helped make man human, but with a sense of both human limitations and human possibilities. No matter what the errors and aberrations of the rulers of the city, they were still correctible. Even if whole urban populations were destroyed, more than nine tenths of the human race still remained outside the circle of destruction. Today this factor of safety has gone: the metropolitan explosion has carried both the ideological and the chemical poisons of the metropolis to every part of the earth; and the final damage may be irretrievable.

Back to Kingsnorth -

One man who tried back in the 1960s, when an unquestioning faith in science and its offspring, technology, was roaring across the Western world, was the French thinker Jacques Ellul. Ellul’s 1964 book “The Technological Society” attempted to understand and explain what the Machine was made of. Its thesis is that the society we live in today—which he predicted with accuracy—represents a fundamental, qualitative change in what it means to be human (p113). Around the same time that Robert Bly was writing “The Sibling Society”, another American thinker, Christopher Lasch, was also predicting a future of elite colonisation. In “The Revolt of the Elites”, Lasch forecast the future accurately. ‘The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties’, he wrote, ‘are best understood as a form of class warfare, in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate, as to create parallel or “alternative” institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all.’ p135

What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the ‘progressive’ left had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same rootstock? What if the left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the new world of the Machine? (p142) It’s not hard to see that progressive leftism and the machine, far from being antagonistic, are a usefully snug fit. Both are totalising, utopian projects. Both are suspicious of the past, impatient with borders and boundaries, and hostile to religion, ‘superstition’ and the limits on the human individual imposed by nature or culture. Both are in pursuit of a global utopia where, in the dreams of both Lenin and Lennon, the world will live as one.

Kingsnorth continues -

We have arrived at the point which the writers I have explored so far—Oswald Spengler, Christopher Lasch, Robert Bly, Patrick Deneen, Simone Weil and others—warned us we would come to. It is the point at which our underlying cultural and spiritual brokenness is manifesting on the surface as politics, with explosive results. This is the result of the Great Unsettling: a time and place where nothing seems to be solid, comforting or even real.

This process has been accelerated a thousandfold by the arrival of the internet, and particularly social media, which, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued, has had the same impact as the collapse of the tower of Babel: ‘people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate,  condemned to mutual incomprehension.’(p152)

The West’ is, above all, a way of seeing—a way of looking out at the world. Once, that gaze was Christian, but it has not been that way for a long time now. The contemporary Western gaze is the gaze of the Machine; of Enlightenment Man, of cosmopolis, of reason, of money. And it is because this gaze has been unable for centuries to appreciate that the world in its fullness that we have come so unstuck. If we are going to get stuck again, as it were, we will need to learn to see the world very differently. (p236)

McGilchrist’s thesis boils down, in simple terms, to brain hemispheres. All animal brains are divided into two hemispheres, joined by a thin band of connecting tissue, and nobody quite knows why. What they do know, according to McGilchrist, is that each hemisphere has its own particular way of seeing—or, as he puts it, ways of ‘attending to the world’. This does not break down according to the popular stereotype, in which the ‘left brain’ is masculine, scientific, rational and cold and the ‘right brain’ is feminine, intuitive, artistic and warm. Rather, according to McGilchrist, ‘the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend—and thus manipulate—the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend it’. The left and right hemispheres seem to have very specific ways of relating to their world. The left’s way is the way of certainty, manipulation, detail, the local and familiar, the isolated, discrete and fragmentary. Its world is fixed, decontextualised, inanimate, general and optimistic. The right, on the other hand, sees the whole picture, notices the peripheries and is comfortable with the new, ambiguous, circumspect and complex. It attends to change, flow, context, the animate, narratives, the pragmatic, empathy and emotional expressivity, and it tends towards pessimism.

But something happened, posits McGilchrist, over the course of Western history. In this little part of the world, there was a revolution. At some point, or perhaps at many points, the left hemisphere—the emissary—overthrew the right—the master—and began to run the show itself. Instead of the parts being in service to the whole, the whole became diminished or dismissed by a perspective that could only see the world as a collection of parts. The result is the Machine mind, and the irony is ‘that the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it. Meanwhile, compounding the problem, we take the success we have in manipulating it as proof that we understand it.’

The upshot, says McGilchrist, is that ‘we no longer live in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it’.[2] There is no territory in this new world, only map. Those who can see this, and try to point it out, are dismissed as ‘romantics’, ‘nostalgics’, ‘reactionaries’ or ‘dreamers’. The left hemisphere’s world is taken to be reality, whereas it is, in fact, only an inadequate representation of it. The result, says McGilchrist, is an age that is literally unprecedented in human history. ‘We exist in the world, of course’, he writes, ‘but we no longer belong in this world—or any world worthy of the name. We have unmade the world. This is entirely new in the history of humanity and it is impossible to exaggerate its significance’.

The age of AI, the metaverse and the deepening technosphere both results from and turbocharges this way of seeing, to the point that we are now losing contact with reality altogether, all the time imagining that we are ‘progressing’ towards it. ‘Machines and tools’, notes McGilchrist matter-of- factly at one point, ‘are alone coded in the left hemisphere.’ It is the left hemisphere which built Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley which built us. He believes that ‘we have systematically misunderstood the nature of reality, and chosen to ignore, or silence, the minority of voices that have intuited as much and consistently maintained that this is the case’. Now, as a result, ‘we have reached the point where there is an urgent need to transform both how we think about the world and what we make of ourselves’.

In short, ‘the West’ as we know it today is an overwhelmingly left hemisphere culture, and this descent into a narrow way of seeing has been accelerating as modernity has progressed. At one point, McGilchrist even makes the startling claim that Western art from the modernist period onward often looks like the kind of representation of the world that is produced by people who have suffered brain damage to the right hemisphere, and he is neither being insulting nor speaking metaphorically. Are we in ‘the West’ literally a culture with brain damage? It would explain a lot. P238

I have written already about the Four Ps—people, place, prayer, the past —which could be said to underpin traditional culture, and the Four Ss—sex, science, the self and the screen—with which Machine modernity has replaced them. A reactionary radicalism could be usefully defined as an active attempt at creating, defending or restoring a moral economy built around the four Ps (p252)

This, then, is my idea of an anti-Machine politics. A reactionary radicalism, its face set against Progress Theology, which aims to defend or build a moral economy at the human scale, which rejects the atomised individualism of the liberal era and understands that materialism as a worldview has failed us. A politics which embraces family and home and place, loving the particular without excluding the outsider, and which looks on all great agglomerations of power with suspicion. The rejection of abstract ideologies in favour of real-world responses, and an understanding that material progress always comes with a hidden price tag. A politics which aims to limit rather than multiply our needs, which strategically opposes any technology which threatens the moral economy and which, finally, seeks a moral order to society which is based on love of neighbour rather than competition with everyone.

The Humanitarian Impulse is alive and well – exemplified in Mondragon

I haven’t posted enough about Mondragon and the shining example it offers about the potential of workers’ cooperatives. A young American, Ellie Griffin, from Utah state recently published The Elysian Manifesto

Once we wrote constitutions and built governments, the work was done and our future became fixed. The pamphlets stopped. The illuminated ideas ceased. We no longer amend our constitution or reinvent our governments. You wouldn’t see something like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense or Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers published today—something that would “decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice.” Instead, we cover all of the ways our systems are failing without imagining what better ones could be.

Journalism is no longer about thinking up solutions, it’s about reporting on the problems. Even our fiction is dystopian. Our science fiction writers can only imagine a future plagued by AI apocalypse, government surveillance, computer chips in our brains, and space colonies that take us away from the polluted world we created. If even our best literary minds cannot imagine a better future, how are we supposed to create it?

That’s why I’ve created the Elysian League—a utopian garden where we can study philosophy and debate politics and rethink capitalism and enjoy contemplative leisure and be part of a new Enlightenment. It’s a place where we can think through a more beautiful future through essays and literature and discourse. And I’m just optimistic enough to believe that’s enough of a start to building one. The Elysian League is the Enlightenment social club made modern, and this Manifesto is my entry into the utopian canon

Her blog is a celebration of Mondragon with such posts as

• https://www.elysian.press/p/the-cooperatist-manifesto-of-mondragon?hide_intro_popup=true

• https://www.elysian.press/p/social-companies-like-mondragon

For readers wanting to know more about cooperatives I strongly recommend

• Democracy at Work Richard Wolff (2012)

• Owning our Future – the emerging ownership revolution Marjorie Kelly (2012)

• The Case for Community Wealth-building J Guinan and M O’Neill (2020)

• Design of a Worker Cooperatives Society – an alternative beyond capitalism and 

socialism and the transition roward it Geert Reuten (2023)

The Routledge Handbook of Cooperative Economics and Management ed JN Warren et al 

(2025)

MAKING SENSE OF THE LEFT

A couple of years ago I tried to do justice to my thoughts on the subject, It’s Hilary Wainwright’s essay on David Marquand in the book in his memory Making Social Democrats – essays for David Marquand ed J Nuttall and H Schattle (2018) which persuaded me to put pen to paper this time

There are many examples which indicate the phenomenon of a socially and environmentally purposeful trade unionism. The most widely known of these examples is that of the LucasAerospace shop stewards’ alternative plan for socially useful production in the 1970s. This was the result of workers in Lucas Aerospace factories in eleven different places responding to corporate rationalisations (the outcome of accountants’ calculations) with proposals driven by social needs—needs shaped by workers’ sense of being citizens as well as workers. (Workplace trade unionism was a good deal stronger than it is now.)

More recent, though less developed, examples include the partially successful defence of jobs at Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, and also the resistance to job losses at Rolls Royce in 2022.Moreover, such organising isn’t just limited to manufacturing production jobs. Academics and education staff have also been organising in pursuit of ‘green bargaining’ to influence the university as a site of education production and economic justice for workers from the bottom up.

This move amongst a minority of workplace trade union organisations beyond the narrow limits of traditional collective bargaining (normally concerned only with wages and conditions) reinforces Marquand’s rejection of individualism. It also indicates a limitation in his implicit notion of agency, which, in his prescriptions (in contrast to his contemporary history), tends to be focussed exclusively on political parties. This publicly purposeful trade unionism could be understood as a move away from the individualist ethic of traditional trade unionism which could be described as ‘sectional’ or ‘particularistic’, concerned narrowly with the interests of the unions’ individual members, vital though these are. The workers and their organisations at Airbus, Lucas Aerospace, Rolls Royce and elsewhere all attempted, with varying degrees of success, to extend collective bargaining for public benefit.

In doing so, they were both deepening the public dialogue around the shared, public problem of climate change—taking it beyond electoral politics. More specifically, theywere challenging production priorities driven by private profit andacting as a force (and potential ally of a republican government) to socialise production.

After Marquand who represents the centre of the left, it was time to move to the 

harder end of the spectrum – people like Leo Panatch and Colin Leys who 

produced some 5 years ago Searching for Socialism – the project of the labour 

new left from Benn to Corbyn (2020)

Each of the three great economic crises of the last century – the 1930s, the 1970s and the decade after 2008 – precipitated a crisis in the Labour Party. Each time, the crisis posed fundamental questions of ideology, organisation and unity, and ended up by propelling into the leadership a radical socialist MP from the party’s left wing. In each instance this produced a sharp reaction aimed at blocking whatever potential the crisis had for taking the party in a new democratic-socialist direction. And in each case Britain’s relationship with Europe played an important role.

The first instance was in 1931, at the onset of the Great Depression, after the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald had formed a ‘National Government’ in order to impose massive cuts in social expenditure on the unemployed and the working poor. In the ensuing general election, the Labour Party, although it won 30 per cent of the vote, was reduced from 287 MPs to 52. In the wake of this, the radical socialist and pacifist George Lansbury was elected leader, and party policy took a sharp turn to the left.

Yet, despite massive street demonstrations by the unemployed, most of the remaining Labour MPs were opposed to any except purely parliamentary measures, leaving Lansbury feeling, as he wrote, ‘absolutely helpless’ in face of the imposition of ever more draconian austerity. In 1935, after the party conference endorsed military rearmament in response to developments in Europe and the Soviet Union, Lansbury resigned.

His successor, Clement Attlee, put the party in the hands of ‘a much more professional team’, but ‘also a much more “responsible” one’, as Ralph Miliband wrote in Parliamentary Socialism. This was the team that would later carry through Labour’s major post-war reforms, while leaving unchallenged the capitalist economy, the inherited structures of the state and the country’s place in the new American empire.

In the 1970s, as the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan responded to a new economic crisis by abandoning the Keynesian welfare state and restraining union militancy, a new Labour left emerged that was determined to democratise and radicalise the party; and soon after the party’s defeat by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, Michael Foot, whose political formation was rooted in the Lansbury years, was precipitated into the leadership. But in the interest of party unity Foot allied himself with the centre-right of the parliamentary party against the Labour new left and its most prominent spokesman, Tony Benn, reasserting the party’s commitment to traditional parliamentarism. This did not prevent a second heavy defeat, by Thatcher in 1983. Nor did the ruthless repression of Labour’s new left by Foot’s successor, Neil Kinnock, prevent two further electoral defeats. Instead it paved the way for ‘New Labour’, and the embrace of neoliberalism under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Throughout these years, too, the issue of Britain’s relationship with Europe was a constant complicating dimension of the party’s internal divisions. The contradictions of New Labour in government, culminating in the financial crisis of 2007–08, first propelled ‘Red Ed’ Miliband to the leadership. But when he, like Foot, gave top priority to securing the unity of the parliamentary party, leading yet again to electoral defeat in 2015, the crisis finally led to the election as leader – this time by the whole membership of the party – of Jeremy Corbyn. His election, the surge in membership that accompanied it, and the support he received from the trade unions finally brought the project of the Labour new left to the top of the party’s governmental agenda. The question now was whether the cycle of resistance and neutralisation would once again be repeated, or whether the Labour Party could after all become the agent of democratic-socialist advance in the UK.

Jeremy Corbyn and his most senior colleagues had been formed in the previous attempt to make this happen, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In “The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New Labour,” Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (1997) published in 2000, we traced the record of that attempt, and its ultimate defeat by the combined forces of its opponents inside and outside the party. Our conclusion was that ‘the route to socialism does not lie through the Labour Party’. This did not make us despondent. While accepting that ‘the first reaction to disillusionment … is fatalism, in the face of what are presented as global forces beyond anyone’s control’, we thought that this ood would ‘sooner or later change to resentment and anger, and a rediscovered will to act, to which a new socialist project must respond’. We did not foresee how soon, in reality, this would happen, in the reaction against the inequality, militarism and economic failure of the neoliberal project; nor that events would again propel a socialist into the leadership of the Labour Party and reopen the question of whether the party could yet be transformed into one capable of leading the socialist transition that the surge of activists into its ranks called for.

Although the enthusiasm behind the Corbyn leadership and the achievements of its first years were impressive, the obstacles the Labour new left project faced were if anything greater than ever. By early 2019 it was clear that its prospects of success had been severely whittled down, so that its eventual defeat in December was not a surprise. The country’s relation with Europe played an even more critical role in this than in the past, but the continuities with what had blocked the Labour new left project since the 1970s, above all the fierce obstruction from within the parliamentary party and from the media, were once again evident in every aspect of the events which culminated in defeat in the December 2019 election.

We have therefore condensed the previous book into the first five chapters of this one. The six chapters that follow cover the last twenty years. For help in researching them, we are extremely grateful to all those people inside the party, at every level, from whose knowledge and insights we have learned so much, for the generous time and help they have given us. In all of our work on the project of the Labour new left, we have tried to point to its huge importance while at the same attempting to analyse as clearly as possible the obstacles to realising its potential. But, in whatever form, the drive for democratic socialism will continue. This book is intended as a contribution and a tribute to the purpose and vision of those who, in wanting the Labour Party to become a genuinely democratic socialist agent of transformation, have done so much to recover the capacity to think ambitiously about social change.

From Illiteracy to Idiocracy?

Time was when it was books that people were deep into. Now it’s smartphones with universities now complaining that their students have difficulty reading

James Marriott’s recent post The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society went viral, 

arguing that social media represented a revolution not dissimilar to Gutenberg’s 

invention of the printing press

Where readers had once read “intensively”, spending their lives reading and re-reading 

two or three books, the reading revolution popularised a new kind of “extensive” reading. 

People read everything they could get their hands on: newspapers, journals, history, 

philosophy, science, theology and literature. Books, pamphlets and periodicals poured 

off the presses.

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the 

eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to 

superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other 

historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the 

Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the 

beginnings of the industrial revolution.  

Now, we are living through the counter-revolution. More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.

In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, “books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.” The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens.

and prompted this article from Niall Ferguson

Earlier this month Dan Williams asked whether the social media wasn’t destroying 

democracy

Because algorithms and other platform features are designed to capture people’s attention and keep them scrolling, they amplify content that is sensationalist, bias-confirming, and divisive. This viral content then infects public opinion and political debate, driving large numbers of people to adopt misinformed and hateful ideas hostile to liberal democracy. I’ve criticised this narrative. Although social media platforms undoubtedly reward low-quality discourse, narratives that place significant weight on this fact to explain recent political developments are misguided. They rest on implausibly rosy pictures of legacy media and pre-social media history. They’re not well-supported by scientific studies. They overstate the public’s manipulability and underestimate organic demand for low-quality content. And they conveniently overlook more consequential causes of anti-establishment backlash, including the objective gap between the cultural preferences of elites and those of many voters. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see no connection between social media and the rise of populism. To make sense of this connection, however, we should focus less on social media as a dysfunctional technology and more on its status as a democratising technology.

Nathan Witkin has a different view which he elaborates here

But the argument is best summed up in a video I came across recently which first beautifully summarises the plot of an older film set a couple of decades ago. The film portrays an America where the average IQ has sunk to an abysmal level not least through the influence of commercial advertising. I don’t particularly recommend its viewing but, for the masochists amongst you, the film itself is called “Idiocracy” and can be seen here

update

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/18/are-we-living-in-a-golden-age-of-stupidity-technology

https://substack.com/home/post/p-176480390 post from “The Culturalist”

Michael Walker of Novara
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e4YY9OQoNY

“This too shall pass……” - taking the long view

The table below identifies some of the central issues which have rocked public debate in the West in each of the decades since the 1930s - something I first doodled 20 years ago (with updates from time to time). We think, for example, that populism is something new - but talk of “populism” surfaces whenever things seem to be slipping from the control of “ruling elites”. Such talk has occurred every 30 years or so in the past 150 years – the 1880s in the US and Russia; the 1930s in Europe and Latin America; the late 1960s globally; the late 1990s in Europe. It’s just that we lack the sense of history to appreciate this.…

Decade	Themes of intellectual discussion	Key authors
1930s	End of capitalism Fascism	J Strachey, H Laski G. Sorel, Gramsci
1940s	The managerial revolution Keynesianism Realism in politics	James Burnham John M Keynes Reinhold Niebuhr, Edward H Carr
1950s	Totalitarianism Brainwashing Meritocracy Revisionism Private affluence/public squalour	Hannah Arendt; Zevedei Barbu. Vance Packard Michael Young Anthony Shonfield; Tony Crosland,  J K Galbraith
1960s	End of ideology Corporate planning, management Modernisation of society Participation critique of professionals	Daniel Bell Russell Ackoff, Peter Drucker Peter Berger Paolo Freire, Colin Ward Ivan Illich
1970s	Costs of economic growth, ecology Public choice theory Small is beautiful Change Corporatism Feminism	Edward J Mishan, James Lovelock, Club of Rome James Buchanan Ed Schumacher, Leonard. Kohr Alvin Toffler, Donald Schon Andrew Shonfield Betty Friedan
1980s	Deindustrialisation Privatisation decentralisation globalisation racial equality	Frank Blackaby; Ken Dyson Consultancies; World Bank OECD Joseph Stiglitz, Martin Wolf Bhikhu Parekh
1990s	End of history Flexibility and reengineering Reinvention of government; NPM Climate change The learning organisation Washington consensus	Francis Fukayama Mike Hammer David Osborne, OECD and Scientific community Peter Senge World Bank
2000s	Good governance Neo-liberalism Environmental collapse Migration and social integration Populism	World bank; OECD David Harvey Scientific community Chris Cauldwell Cas Mudde
2010s	Migration Climate warming Capitalism Austerity Inequality Populism	Everyone Everyone Joseph Stiglitz, Jerry Mander, Paul Mason, Paul Collier Mark Blyth, Danny Dorling, Richard Wilkinson, Thomas Pikety Jan-Werner Mueller,
2020s	Migration Populism Extinction AI, robots, future of work Surveillance, big data Pandemics	Everyone Everyone Rupert Read, Jem Bendell ILO, Richard Baldwin, Geoff Mulgan Shoshana Zuboff Adam Tooze, Niall Ferguson

Note to table; I do appreciate that the allocation is arbitrary and therefore contentious….and that the table gives no indication of how long each “debate” lasted….Managerialism, for example, seems to have had several phases….and various forms of human rights were being argued throughout the entire period. Nor do I try to justify detail with google analytics. My purpose is simply impressionistic – to remind us of the ebb and flow of ideas…

Our constant preoccupation with what is new and modern has a name – ”neophilia” – which makes us too easily the prey of the latest political and intellectual fashions. We drift into without exploring why we dropped our previous enthusiasm develops in us what Clive James called “cultural amnesia” – an almost fatal inability to look back at what people much wiser than us were saying in previous generations  

About the blog

This blog has been running since I began to contemplate “hanging up my boots” after a career which had started in the late 1960s in “planning” work, moved on to economics and public administration and finished as a “consultant” in ex-communist countries in something called “institutional development”. You might think that after 16 years this blog has said most of what there is to say – but I keep coming across books which throw new light on things. Most blogs have a specialist focus, be it economic, political, sociological or cultural and apply that lens to the latest fashion of the day. This blog celebrates instead the butterfly approach and depends very much on what catches my fancy – generally a book or article, sometimes an incident, painting or piece of music. And I do like to offer excerpts from the books and articles I feel positive about – as distinct from offering opinions. It’s time, however, to do one of my periodic stock-takings of the blog. When it started (in 2009) it set out three aims -    

• “This blog will try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history (let alone hope).

• I read a lot and want to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the 

• time nor inclination to read widely.

• A final motive for the blog is What have we done with our life? What is important to us?”

The first two objectives are still important. After 12 years, it’s fairly obvious from the unfinished nature of my books on administrative reform (“Change for the Better?”) and on social change (“What is to be Done?”) that there’s still work to be done – although I often feel I’m just going round in circles. And I’m still finding fascinating books and continue to have this urge to share relevant insights with posterity. But I should probably stop imposing these rather forbidding reading lists.

But the blog has been weak on the third purpose. Indeed one friend has queried the absence of the personal touch – feeling that the tone is too clinical and aseptic. And it’s certainly fair comment that the blog is a bit “scholastic”. A couple of other friends have indeed called me a “scholar” – which I used to take as a compliment. Perhaps they meant bloodless!?

As I move through my “autumn days” and feel the approach of winter, the “settling of final accounts” (in the spiritual sense) should, certainly, loom larger. Charles Handy is a real inspiration here – someone constantly challenging himself and making fresh choices every decade or so about where to put the energies and skills he’s been endowed with  

One of my favourite fellow-bloggers is Canadian Dave Pollard who is constantly offering valuable insights from his life experience – he is a few years younger than me. A lot of this touches on inter-personal relations – one of my weak areas. In that spirit let me apply the Johari Window

	strong Known to me weak
Strong Known to others Weak	Open “The Arena”	Blind The “blind corner”
	Hidden “The Façade”	Unknown

Our public self is something we try to control – but rarely succeed in. People notice things about us which we ourselves are not necessarily aware of (our blind corners). Friends should be helpful here – but we often resent critical comment and they soon learn to shut up…

From 1990 I’ve had a nomadic life – living in some ten different countries – generally leader of teams in which I would make a few new friends. Both the contexts and my particular role were very different from those in which I had spent the previous 20 years.

But I was very aware of this – even so, it took me almost a decade before I was fully up to speed and confident that my skills were producing results. Those skills were broadly the same mix of political and scholastic I had used in my previous life - but the context was so very different. And my new skill was being sensitive to that and making the appropriate adjustments to the tools I used. 

As a Team Leader, I had, of course, to be sensitive to the strengths and weaknesses of the members of the team – but it’s almost impossible to shake off one’s cultural assumptions and I carried the baggage then of a Brit still proud of what our democratic tradition had given the world (!!!). In the past decade, in Bulgaria and Romania, I've deepened my understanding of cultural contexts - and am still learning..... 

I write in English – but literally a handful of Brits read the blog. Americans are its biggest fans making up 30% of readers (for which I’m so deeply grateful) - with Russians, curiously, coming in next at 15% and no other country having more than 5%. But the scale of non-English readership is an argument for keeping the posts short. 

Because I have the time to read widely; live on Europe’s edge; and have been out of my home country for more than 30 years, I have perhaps developed a bit of the outsider’s perspective….But I remain painfully aware of my shortcomings in the inter-personal field - I learned so much when I first did the Belbin test.... 

Charles Handy's Inside Organisations - 21 ideas for managers includes the Johari window as one of the ideas. It's a delightful and easy read which I strongly recommend

What I am really trying to say is that I have to recognise that I have always been a bit “distant” in my relations with others. Indeed, as a young politician who was quickly given responsibilities, I was seen as a bit arrogant – when that was the last thing I actually felt. It was rather a defence mechanism. Ernest Schumacher (author of "Small is Beautiful") put our usual approach into superb perspective in 1973 when he wrote -

"There are four sorts of worthwhile learning

· learning about things
- learning about oneself
· learning how others see us
· learning how we see others"

I was slow to learn about myself – let alone the other dimensions. Despite undergoing some sessions of psychotherapy in the late 1980s, I was too much of a “word merchant” to allow mere words to get inside my brain and challenge my being.

It’s only recently I’ve been willing to be open about that experience all of 30 plus years ago which, at the time, it wasn’t possible to discuss. Philip Toynbee was one of the rare people who had actually written about it – I learned later that Winston Churchill used the euphemism of “black dog” to refer to his episodes. And about the only popular book about the subject was Dorothy Rowe’s Depression – a way out of your prison (1983). How times have changed – with credit being due to characters such as Stephen Fry and Alasdair Campbell who were amongst the first to go public and to encourage others to be open about a condition which touches most of us at some time in our lives.

One of my favourite books is Robin Skynner and John Clease’s Life – and how to survive it (1993) A therapist and leading British comic have a Socratic dialogue about the initial stages of everyone’s development – as babies weaning ourselves from our mothers, learning about the wider environment and coping with our feelings. The understanding the principles of healthy (family) relationships and then use these to explore the preconditions for healthy organisations and societies: and for leadership viz -
- valuing and respecting others
- ability to communicate
- willingness to wield authority firmly but always for the general welfare and with as much consultation as possible while handing power back when the crisis is over)
- capacity to face reality squarely
- flexibility and willingness to change
- belief in values above and beyond the personal or considerations of party.

It took a massive change of role and circumstances before I came across an early edition of “A Manager’s Guide to Self-Development” by Mike Pedler et al which made me aware of a range of self-evaluation tools such as the Belbin Test of team roles which you can try out on yourself here. When I did it for the first time with my team of the moment, it was quite a revelation. I had assumed that I was a “leader”. What I discovered was that I was a “resource person” ie good at networking and sharing information – which was exactly right.

Harrison and Bramson’s The Art of Thinking (1982) was also a revelation for me - indicating that people have very different ways of approaching problems and that we will operate better in teams if we (a) understand what our own style is and (b) that others think in different ways. The authors suggest we have 5 styles – “synthetist”, “pragmatist”, “idealist”, “realist” and “analyst” and, of course, combinations thereof. I regret now that I came late to an understanding of the interpersonal - the question I now have is how people can avoid my fate. Is it enough that there are so many books around for people to stumble on? Or should it now be an integral part of undergraduate work? Perhaps it is?

Dave Pollard is one of the few bloggers whose posts I generally read in full – always thoughtful, generally provocative. This post is typical - professing lack of interest in what people had to say about themselves in CVs or expressions of future hopes – but preferring rather to suggest……

six “leading questions” that might evoke some kind of useful sense of who someone is and what they care about - and possibly assess whether the person you’re talking with might be the potential brilliant colleague, life partner, inspiring mentor or new best friend you’ve been looking for. These are the questions:

1. 1. What adjectives or nouns would you use to describe yourself that differentiate you 

• from most other people? When and how did these words come to apply to you?

1. 1. Describe the most fulfilling day you can imagine, some day that might realistically

   • occur in the next year. Why would it be fulfilling? What are you doing now that might 
   • increase its likelihood of happening?

   1. What do you care about, big picture, right now? What would you mourn if it disappeared?

   • What do you ache to have in your life? What would you work really long and hard to 

   • conserve or achieve? How did you come to care about this?

   1. What is your purpose, right now? Not your role or occupation, but the thing you’re 

   • uniquely gifted and inspired to be doing, something the world needs. What would elate you if you achieved it, today, this month, in the next year? What would devastate you if you failed, or didn’t get to try? How did this become your purpose?

   1. What’s your basic belief about why you, and other humans, exist? Not what you believe 

   • is right or important (or what you, or humans ‘should’ do or be), but why 

   • you think we are the way we are now, and why you think we evolved to be where we are. 

   • It’s an existential question, not a moral one. How did you come to this belief?

   1. What’s your basic sense of what the next century holds for our planet and our 

   • civilization? How do you imagine yourself coping with it? How did you come to this belief?

• These are not easy questions, and asking them might prove intimidating or even threatening to some people, which is why in the last post I suggested volunteering your own answer to each question yourself first, in a form such as “Someone asked me the other day… and I told them…”. It’s also why there are supplementary questions to each, to get the person you’re asking started. And the last supplementary question in each group lends itself to telling a story, since that’s what we’re most comfortable with. Even then, some of these questions will stop many people cold, which might tell you something about them right there.