A New Year gift for my readers

This is the time of year when blogs and websites offer their “picks” of the year – what they consider to be the highlights they’ve offered.  

I thought I would go one better - and offer an edited version of the year’ s posts. It’s taken more than a week to prepare – because, for only the second time, they have been organized thematically with a short introduction trying to identify the thread of the arguments and how they might be taken forward. 

As I reread the posts indeed, I realized that there was a certain artificiality in trying to separate them into separate themes. My readers know that this blog does its best to avoid comment on contemporary events - it tries to rise above idle chatter and go to the core of our concerns. One of the editorial challenges was, therefore, to ensure that each post went into the appropriate category. The themes were -   

·       How we can identify good writing and its ingredients

·       The crisis in liberal democracy

·       Whether and how societies can (and need to) reinvent themselves

·       World values and political culture

·       Whether the West faces a “turning point”

·       Some musings about postmodernity

·       A Miscellaneous section a lot which consist of book reviews and range in subject matter from futurism to patriotism. 

The collection is called Voices in the Air – the 2021 posts for reasons explained on the 2^nd page and can be downloaded very simply from the pcloud link in the title. 

I think most readers will enjoy the first section – since it contains good advice on  communicating messages – as well as many examples of good writers and, fairly distinctively, an attempt to identify the ingredients of their trade. 

The second section may be too general for some of my readers – but the third section will be of particular interest who those of you who live in repressive regimes. The activist in me wants to identify the tools which would help find a way out of the mess most of us are in. A question the blog has pursued a lot this year – sparked off by difficulties in forming governments in Bulgaria and Romania - is how a country might go about the task of reinventing itself?  So far, politicians in this part of the world have not demonstrated any interest in such a question – but that’s no reason for civil society to ignore it. Section 3 looks at such tools as Good Governance and Anti-corruption - and wonders why reconciliation efforts don’t seem to have been attempted. 

This leads fairly naturally into a (shorter but none the less important) section (number 4) on Cultural Values and World Views which, of course, is so politically unacceptable that noone is willing to talk about it. It is, very much, the elephant in the room. I understand that, as an outsider, there is nothing I can do about this – except ask awkward questions 

Since 2009 this blog has recorded my effort to make sense of a venal system which seemed out of control – with posts containing extensive hyperlinks and book excerpts. For the past few years I have been collecting the more relevant of these to put a little book together to answer a series of questions I had posed 20 years ago in a short paper exploring the question of where I should be putting my energies. I lived through most of the Thatcher regime and my original note did register that something irrevocable was happening to the political system. But, when the global financial crash came in 2008, I too readily attributed its causes to what had been unleashed by UK and US policies in the 1980s. 

What I have begun to understand in the last few years is that the sources of our malaise are both earlier and more complex. And that I belong to the generation which unleashed a new spirit of disrespect for the past – and one of entitlement and hubris into the world. Hence the mea culpa implicit in the title “Dispatches to the Next Generation” I have given the posts which form section 5. One of the odd things to happen - as I tried in the following decade to make sense of it all – was the speed with which bad things got worse and how quickly what was I thought was an original insight became part of the conventional wisdom. At the start of the millennium, for example, the reputation of the political class sill ran high and the word “capitalism” was rarely used – 20 years later both were the subject of ridicule and contempt.

The pandemic, the onslaught of Artificial Intelligence and climate change are clearly major turning points which suggest that we are indeed at the dawn of a new era.