Words have
suddenly become sterile for me…..significantly, perhaps, after a series of
posts about the writing on public administration…..and an earlier series this
year on
the global crisis.
Strangely, contemplation
of such complexities doesn’t seem to bring either understanding or resolution -
but rather a world-weariness….Activism is more exciting – but its closed focus,
lack of cooperation and proper links to the world of rational analysis are but several
deficiencies which always seems to bring it down.
Are we
therefore forced to choose between technocratic rationality on the one hand…
and strident activism on the other?
What other
ways are there to pass the “autumn of one’s days”??? Music? Family and
Friendship? Wine?
I had
imagined that composing an open (and extended) letter to my daughters with
reflections about the understandings I feel I’ve developed since 2000 might
have wider interest…..simply because I consider myself a typical baby-boomer -
if one with wider inter-disciplinary and nomadic experiences than
normal…..Hence the draft Dispatches to the
post-capitalist generation. I had always regretted that my father (and a
couple of other father figures) had not left me with such reflections……
But the
present draft is no more than a pseudo-intellectual’s reading notes….a modern
commonplace book. It doesn’t move the soul….
The one
“issue” that has tempted me into a post this past month has been the ongoing
Brexit saga in Britain (Ireland and Gibraltar) but that very fact reminds me of
a quotation from a great book Breakdown
of Nations;by Leopold Kohr which I read some years back -
the chief blessing of a small-state system is ...its gift of a freedom which hardly ever registers if it is pronounced.....freedom from issues....ninety percent of our intellectual miseries are due to the fact that almost everything in our life has become an ism, an issue... our life’s efforts seem to be committed exclusively to the task of discovering where we stand in some battle raging about some abstract issue...The blessing of a small state returns us from the misty sombreness of an existence in which we are nothing but ghostly shadows of meaningless issues to the reality which we can only find in our neighbours and neighbourhoods
I hope still
to write soon about Brexit – since it is something currently devouring and
destroying a nation I once belonged to……
But if I
cannot, at the moment, easily write or read about “issues”, I find that I can
still devour material about individuals……and was very taken this morning with a
book about 28 people who clearly had “made a difference” ….eg to someone who
had the grace to write about the contribution she felt these people had made
not only to her own profession but to the world - Intellectual
Shamans – management academics making a difference; by Sandra Waddock
(2015). Such books – which profile key figures in intellectual disciplines –
are quite rare but always worthwhile (available also, to my knowledge, for
political scientists; development economists; and sociologists).
I know only 4 of the 28 figures included in the book - Henry Mintzberg, Robert Quinn, Ed Schein and Otto Scharmer - but all seem to have this “inner light” which allows them to inspire an alternative vision. More excerpts from the book are available here
It may not be an emotional response we need these days but it is certainly something more than ratiocination - more on the spiritual/humanistic dimension?
