Postmodernity - another go

These last 2 weeks I’ve been trying to get my head around postmodernity – or rather what the relevant “literature” seemed to be saying about it. An accident of birth had actually given me the facility, from my mid-teens, of seeing the world through several lens. Initially I experienced this as a difficult tension but that gradually gave way to a realisation that being able to look at the world from a variety of angles had its beneficial side. Like Monsieur Jourdain, I’ve been speaking prose all my life 

This post is a continuation of the recent series of posts on postmodernism started here – in which I will try to bring my thoughts on the issue more clearly together. For reasons I can’t quite explain, however, I feel it important that I first describe

-       my particular learning experience

-       the difficulties I’ve had in making sense of postmodernism

and then to explore the question of what follows postmodernism. This may take several posts…

Why I was lucky 

I received my education in a state school which still then possessed the positive features of Scotland’s Democratic Tradition now, sadly, much traduced. It would have been easier for my parents to send me to the secondary school just a few blocks from our house but my father was a Presbyterian Minister and home was a manse (owned by the Church of Scotland) in the exclusive “West End” - so that school was fee-paying, if one in which I already had friends.

And my parents (although no radicals) would never have contemplated taking a step which would have created a barrier with my father’s congregation who were stalwarts of the town’s lower middle classes with modest houses and apartments in the centre and east of the town. 

Thus began my familiarization with the nuances of the class system – and with the experience of straddling boundaries which was to become such a feature of my life. Whether the boundaries are those of class, party, professional group intellectual discipline or nation, they are well protected if not fortified…..And trying to straddle such borders – let alone explore them – can be an uncomfortable experience.  

At University in the 60s I had been interested in how social systems held together - and  in particular in why people (generally) obeyed those placed in authority above them - Max Weber’s classification of political systems into – “traditional”, “charismatic” and “rational-legal” was an eye-opener and gave me the first of many typologies I was to find myself using. 

When I became a young councillor in 1968 (for the Catholic-dominated Labour party), I found myself torn between my loyalties to the local community activists on the one hand and those to my (older) political colleagues and officials on the other.

And I felt this particularly strongly when I was elevated to the ranks of magistrate and required to deal with the miscreants who confronted us as lay judges every Monday morning – up from the prison cells where they had spent the weekend for drunkenness and wife-beating……..The collusion between the police and my legal adviser was clear but my role was to adjudicate “beyond reasonable doubt” and the weak police testimonials often gave me reason to doubt….I dare say I was too lenient and I certainly got such a reputation – meaning that I was rarely disturbed to sign search warrants! 

And, on being elevated a few years later to one of the leading positions in a giant new Region, I soon had to establish relations with - and adjudicate between the budgetary and policy bids of - senior professionals heading specialized Departments with massive budgets and manpower. 

It was at that stage that I developed a diagram for my students to make sense of the “conflict of loyalties” in what I saw as 4 very different sets of accountabilities to which politicians are subject – 

- local voters (if the electoral system is based on local constituencies);

- the party (both local and national)

- the officials (and laws) of the particular government agency they had entered;

- their conscience. 

Politicians, I argued, differ according to the extent of the notice they took of each of the pressures coming from each of these sources – and the loyalties this tended to generate. And I gave names to the 4 types which could be distinguished –

-       “populist” – who articulated the stronger voices of the voters

-       “ideologue” – who operated in the bubble of the party faithful

-       “statesman” – who would try to extract the commonality from the multiple voices of professional advisers 

-       “maverick” – who tries to sort it out for him/herself

But, I argued, the effective politician is the one who resists the temptation to be drawn exclusively into any one of these roles. Each has its own important truth - but it is when someone blends the various partialities into a workable and acceptable proposition that we see real leadership.

Each generates its own way of looking at the world – as you will see from the table in this post which looks only at seven academic disciplines 

Once we become aware of the very different worlds in which people live, our world suddenly becomes a very richer place – in which we have choices about the particular lens we use to make sense of it all…

I remember the first time I really became aware of this – when I did the Belbin team test. And The Art of Thinking by Bramsall and Harrison (1984) very usefully sets out the very different ways each of us thinks. viz types of strategic thinking..How we see ourselves (and others see us) is a critical part of self-discovery - part of the Schumacher quote which figures in the “quotations” block which I’ve just moved up to the 4^th section of the long list which now stretches down the right-hand corner of the blog