Notes on a Western Crisis

I have known for a long time about the importance of taking a critical approach to one’s own writing - of reading it back as if I was a reader. This helps me not only to find easier ways to say what I mean but also to identify imprecisions and ambiguities…

And whenever I notice that the argument in a text of mine has moved on, whether to another aspect of the same theme or to a new theme, I will tend to mark that change by starting a new paragraph (at the very least) or by inserting a heading – no matter how small. This makes the text easier to read….

But it is the tables I started to use in the blog a year or so ago which are now proving to a powerful tool in the editing the book which I have been trying to finish for the past 20 years…To the extent that I now realise that the focus of the book is not quite what I thought it was.

Initially the book carried the title “Ways of Seeing…the global Crisis” but, some years ago, that changed to “Dispatches to the Future Generation” to convey first the fact that it was structured from blogposts (like “letters”); and, second, the sense that it was the giving of one generation’s account of its “stewardship” of the world (or lack of it) to the next generation (my daughters’)

But, as far as I was concerned, the core of the book was its commentary on the various books written about the global economic crisis…

In the past week, however, I have been adding various posts from the archives which, intuitively, seemed appropriate eg the recent series on the UK power structure, old ones about political roles (which had identified four very distinctive group loyalties or “constituencies” between whom politicians generally have to choose); thinking institutionally; and a conservative philosopher’s musings on the New Left. These, patently, had nothing to do with economics and yet my unconscious clearly saw them as significant. They joined some other commentaries already in the draft which had more to do with social values; and also a significant one about intellectual timelines….And means that the draft has broken through the 200 page barrier..

I was already aware that my draft said very little about the ecological crisis (surely, I argued, it’s all been said?) but that, equally, it focused very much on the reactions of the privileged world. So I am now experimenting with the title “Notes on a Western Crisis”