Reform – and the neglect of context

Today’s highlight was a fascinating story by a Peruvian of how local technocrats – trained at US universities – returned to Peru to peddle solutions to the country which were lapped up from 2000 but are now being rejected by the prevailing power structure - a strange blended mix of left and right.    

Since taking office in July 2021, the so-called “left-wing” government and the ostensibly “right-wing” National Congress have been working together to dismantle the weak scaffolding that held our infant liberal democracy. This regression’s happening against the backdrop of a savage rollback in the state’s capacity. The government has removed career civil servants, reneged on the expectation that key ministries should be withheld from political appointees and acted to undermine the transparency and accountability gains.

This year, the Congress passed two crucial pieces of legislation: removing oversight of higher education standards and giving parents the right to approve all school teaching materials.

This move has been promoted by conservative groups, who want to stop the government from allowing educators to teach important topics in schools, like sex education or encouraging informed assessments of the roles that the Shining Path and the Peruvian State played in the violence of the 1980s and 1990s.

 

In May 2022, the National Congress elected new members of the Constitutional Tribunal – Peru’s version of the US Supreme Court. Four of its six members are aligned with supporters of the previous laws. Many other liberal reforms made during the previous 20 years are also at stake:

·       Transport reforms (tackling informal transport providers).

·       How parties can use resources during political campaigns (the basis of several money laundering cases, involving the leaders of most parties).

·       Hard-earned minority rights.

·       Freedom of information and expression.

·       Environmental protection policies.

 

You may well think that a self-styled “left wing” government and a primarily “right wing” congress should be at loggerheads. The reality is more complex and interesting.

“Left” and “right” in Peru, as in much of the world, are now meaningless political labels. Political power provides economic and social opportunities – that’s what matters now in Peruvian politics.

Peruvian parties are mercantilist operations – public prosecutors have even accused some of being criminal organisations, with clear private interests. This shift in priorities has made it easy for them to come to a tacit, multi-party understanding to undo the progressive reforms. It’s a new elite bargain. 

I’ve never worked in South America – but, for some reason, the article struck home. I recognised the issue because, in 1990, I found myself invited by the WHO (Europe) Director of Public Health to help her develop a network of health promotion in the newly-liberated countries of Central Europe. It was a short-term contract of some 6 months but proved to be a launch-pad for my new career as consultant in “capacity (institutional) development” in both central Europe and central Asia. This was a fascinating experience which I’ve written about in Missionaries, mercenaries or witchdoctors? (2007) and “The Long Game – not the logframe” (2011) - presented to NISPAcee Conferences in which I took apart the superficiality of the assumptions EC bureaucrats  were making about the prospects of its Technical Assistance programmes  making any sort of dent in what I called (variously) the kleptocracy  or “impervious regimes” of most ex-communist countries.  

Basically my criticism was that project for institutional change failed to understand the local contexts and cultures - and assumed that “good practice blueprints” from elsewhere could be easily replicated – with a bit of training.

One of the reasons I enjoyed my eight years in Central Asia from 1999 was that I had the freedom to take account of the local conditions and to design strategies which the local European Delegations had confidence would actually work. The “conditionalities” which governed the “candidate countries” of aspiring EU members in central Europe patently didn’t apply in Central Asia – and the “counterparts” with whom I worked had the intelligence and ability to be able to insist on “workable” strategies. In Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan, this produced results. 

Last year I came across a rare book which helped me understand why – this was Helping People help themselves – from the World Bank to an alternative philosophy of technical assistance by David Ellerman (2006) which I wrote about at the time here - https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/06/helping-people-help-themselves.html 

In my next post I hope to develop the theme

US vanity

This blog does not pretend to be familiar with military strategy but, ever since Vietnam, I have doubted US claims to military supremacy. It always seemed to me to be the worst form of bully talk. The US is now playing a deeply dangerous game – arming Ukraine to the tune of 100 billion dollars while simply cheering from the sidelines. One of the blogs I follow always fires from the hip and posed this question yesterday - 

How long can an empire keep losing wars without losing power? “where are the tangible results in what throughout human history has served as the most important test of power: victories in wars?” This is a question America has been violently, rudely asking for decades, and the answer has long been ‘none’. Now it’s just becoming obvious.

Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, all draws or losses. America is capable of destroying things, but not achieving strategic objectives, or even having a strategy beyond destruction for profit. In Afghanistan, America deployed for 20 years, spent trillions of dollars, and still somehow lost to some of the poorest people on Earth. All the blood, all the treasure, it was all for nothing. It was all just human sacrifice on the altars of their war gods, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.

 

In Ukraine, NATO trained a large Ukrainian force and flooded the place with billions of dollars in weapons. And it’s all getting ground up in Putin’s cauldron. America screamed propaganda about how dangerous Russia is to the world, but then did nothing about it besides profit from the suffering of Ukrainian people. Now they just look impotent.

An empire can’t take L after L like this and not one day be deemed a loser. America’s military actually sucks, and Andrei Martyanov called it in 2018, in his book Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning. In that book, he talked about the current conflict with Russia before most of us perceived it happening (though it was happening). Alexis de Tocqueville’s widely renowned book, “Democracy in America”, addresses this aspect of the American character:

 

All free nations are vainglorious, but national pride is not displayed by all in the same manner.

The Americans in their intercourse with strangers appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of praise. The most slender eulogium is acceptable to them; the most exalted seldom contents them; they unceasingly harass you to extort praise, and if you resist their entreaties they fall to praising themselves. It would seem as if, doubting their own merit, they wished to have it constantly exhibited before their eyes.

 

Their vanity is not only greedy, but restless and jealous; it will grant nothing, whilst it demands everything, but is ready to beg and to quarrel at the same time. If I say to an American that the country he lives in is a fine one, “Ay,” he replies, “There is not its fellow in the world.” If I applaud the freedom which its inhabitants enjoy, he answers, “Freedom is a fine thing, but few nations are worthy to enjoy it.” If I remark the purity of morals which distinguishes the United States, “I can imagine,” says he, “that a stranger, who has been struck by the corruption of all other nations, is astonished at the difference.” At length I leave him to the contemplation of himself; but he returns to the charge, and does not desist till he has got me to repeat all I had just been saying. It is impossible to conceive a more troublesome or more garrulous patriotism; it wearies even those who are disposed to respect it.

 

This observation from 1837 should have been a warning to the American political and intellectual elites long ago. Sadly, it has been ignored and has cost everyone dearly. The American vaingloriousness described by Tocqueville has today become a clear and present danger to the world and it is, in the end, a direct threat to what’s left of America’s democratic institutions and processes. It threatens a shaky republic and it is embedded in the very foundation of a now increasingly obvious American decline.

This is, of course, reflects a Russian discourse – if one who moved from Baku to the US in the late 1990s. Dmitry Orlov is a well-known character who recently made the move in the opposite direction and who now posts on the Ukraine war with some relish .

So it’s not surprising that some commentators have raised doubts about  Andrei Martyanov  - but have come away convinced. He is a fairly prolific writer on military matters (with a recent book on US decline) and his blog can be viewed here. 

Why do Writers Write?

With the world in a state of what Adam Tooze has taken to calling “Polycrises”, it may seem nothing short of offensive for me to have a bee in my bonnet about the absence in contemporary books of reading lists. But bear with me while I try to convince you of the contempt in which authors now hold us poor readers.

Let me pose a simple question – when an author sits down to compose a book, what do you imagine are her/his motives??

·       to help us understand an issue?

·       to help persuade us of something she/he fervently believes?

·       to make money?

·       to make his/her reputation? 

Let me suggest the following percentages as answers to each of these questions

·       1%

·       40%

·       20%

·       39% 

I can’t, of course, prove any of this – I’m simply suggesting that the author who is genuinely attempting to help the average reader understand an issue is a rarity to be treasured. Of course, there are “Dummy Guides” and “Brief Introductions” -  but many are written in a patronising way.

The last post criticised a couple of recent books for their failure to give the reader any indication of the books which might be found useful as further reading. An earlier post had mentioned Framers – human advantage in an age of technology and turmoil (2021) which also fails to offer a reading list although it does reference Range – why generalists triumph in a specialised world by David Epstein (2018) but not two equally important books – Gillian Tett’s “The Silo Effect” (2015) or Matthew Syed’s “Rebel Ideas” (2019) - not even in the index  

I’m currently reading George Monbiot’s Out of the Wreckage (2018) which integrates references to books he’s found useful into the text itself. This works very well – although it’s not something many others attempt. Offhand, I can think only of a couple of others who do this – David Runciman and Matt Flinders ..

Thanks to Monbiot I’ve been able to download at least a couple of books I didn’t know about – Viking Economics – how the Scandinavians got it right and how we can too (2016) and Democracy for Realists – why elections do not produce responsive government (2016)

Three Books on Power - Why I judge books by their reading lists

At a time when Europe as a whole is suffering from extreme heat, it seem appropriate to turn to an eminent environmentalist, Richard Heinberg, whose Power – limits and prospects for human survival (2021) I have been trying to read. I was attracted by its opening pages which posed three crucial questions - 

·       How has Homo sapiens, just one species out of millions, become so powerful as to bring the planet to the brink of climate chaos and a mass extinction event?

·       Why have we developed so many ways of oppressing and exploiting one another?

·       Is it possible to change our relationship with power so as to avert ecological catastrophe, while also dramatically reducing social inequality and the likelihood of political-economic collapse? 

And the introduction continues - 

There is a fundamental correlation between physical power and social power. Social scientists sometimes tend to downplay this point. But throughout history, dramatic increases in physical power, derived from new technologies and from harnessing new energy sources, have often tended to lead to a few people having more wealth than everybody else, or being able to tell lots of other people what to do.

The “will to power,” about which German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, is real—but it isn’t everything. We humans have other instincts that counteract our relentless pursuit of power. Efforts to limit power are deeply rooted in nature’s cycles and balancing mechanisms, and have been expressed in countless social movements over many centuries, including movements to curb the power of rulers, to abolish slavery, and to grant women political rights equal to those enjoyed by men. 

But the claim in the opening pages that “no book has systematically examined the sundry forms of power and investigated how they are related” took me aback since this book, unusually, contains no reading list to allow me to check what particular study this environmentalist has undertaken – particularly in the psychological and political fields. Regular readers will know that I have various tests to allow me to judge whether a book is worth reading – and this is one of them. The most thorough study of power is that in Michael Mann’s opus (extending to 3 volumes and more than 1000 pages) and this does indeed get a (brief) mention – but the index makes no mention of the classic work on the subject by Steven Lukes – Power, a radical view (1986) 

I have another reason for being disappointed with my skim of the book - we are, these days, overwhelmed with books. I do my best to keep up but I have taken recently to issuing appeals to publishers and authors for some self-discipline. Heinberg’s book is some 500 pages and starts with detail (about the origins of life) which I did not find particularly interesting or relevant. At one level his use of diagrams and sidebars suggests he understands the problems most readers will have in wading through a 500 page book – but whatever happened to good old self-discipline? 

A second BOOK which disappointed was Corruptible – who gets power and how it changes us by Brian Klaas (2021) who presents us with different possibilities - 

       power makes people worse — power corrupts.

·       it’s not that power corrupts, but rather that worse people are drawn to power—power attracts the corruptible.

·       the problem doesn’t lie with the power holders or power seekers, it’s that we are attracted to bad leaders for bad reasons, and so we tend to give them power.

·       focusing on the individuals in power is a mistake because it all depends on the system. Bad systems spit out bad leaders. Create the right context and power can purify instead of corrupting.

 

These hypotheses are potential explanations for two of the most fundamental questions about human society: Who gets power and how does it change us? This book provides answers.

Klaas seems to have travelled the globe in his search of shady characters to illustrate his theme but, very curiously in the light of all his travels and effort, he doesn’t appear to have done the basic thing – which is to look at how other people have dealt with these questions. When I apply my test  it’s to discover that the book lacks even a short list of useful or recommended reading and his index ignores most of the literature on the subject – the most important of which, for me by a long chalk, is Leaders we Deserve produced almost 40 years ago by Alistair Mant which I was delighted to be able to access on the Internet Archive. 

It makes you wonder – how on earth can a writer even imagine he can do justice to an issue when he demonstrates that he hasn’t even bothered to read some at least of the relevant literature? Predictably, Machiavelli gets only one entry in the Index – and Madoff (Bernie) two! And, equally predictably, Robert Michels who, arguably, started the modern interest in what power does to people with his “Political Parties” (1911) and “the iron law of oligarchy” doesn’t figure in the index – nor do Hitler, Lenin or Stalin – although, curiously, Mussolini gets 2 pages! My advice therefore to readers is to use the tests I’ve pointed to in this post – particularly

https://elizabethjpeterson.com/2020/12/how-to-never-read-another-boring-book/

https://every.to/superorganizers/surgical-reading-how-to-read-12-books-580014

There is, however, a third book I wholeheartedly recommend Good and Bad Power - the ideals and betrayals of government by Geoff Mulgan (2006) and you can read it in full thanks to the Archive link in the title - but iy allows viewing only for one hour (renewable) 

The Stories People Tell to make sense of the world - part VI of a series

Political parties in the US and UK apparently used to be broad coalitions but have become (at least on the right) ideological sects. And that certainly seem confirmed in the nominations presented yesterday for the UK Prime Minister – a position which has become vacant due to Boris Johnson’s long-awaited resignation.

As readers know, I try to avoid comment on so-called “current affairs” but it is simply worth noting that the extremist faction of the Conservative party (very much encouraged by Johnson) has now gained such a powerful hold on the party that all eight candidates who yesterday secured nominations are devotees of the “small state” idea. 

More in Common is an interesting organisation with teams in France, Germany, UK and US which develop communication strategies that can help unite people across the lines of division and strengthen people’s sense of belonging and common identity. One of their recent reports divided the UK population into the following 7 groups (with the percentage indicating the importance of the group) 

-Progressive Activists (13%): A powerful and vocal group for whom politics is at the core of their identity, and who seek to correct the historic marginalisation of groups based on their race, gender, sexuality, wealth and other forms of privilege. They are politically-engaged, critical, opinionated, frustrated, cosmopolitan and environmentally conscious.

–Civic Pragmatists (13%): A group that cares about others, at home or abroad, and who are turned off by the divisiveness of politics. They are charitable, concerned, exhausted, community-minded, open to compromise, and socially liberal.

–Disengaged Battlers (12%): A group that feels that they are just keeping their heads above water, and who blame the system for its unfairness. They are tolerant, insecure, disillusioned, disconnected, overlooked, and socially liberal.

–Established Liberals (12%): A group that has done well and means well towards others, but also sees a lot of good in the status quo. They are comfortable, privileged, cosmopolitan, trusting, confident, and pro-market.

–Loyal Nationals (18%): A group that is anxious about the threats facing Britain and facing themselves. They are proud, patriotic, tribal, protective, threatened, aggrieved, and frustrated about the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

–Disengaged Traditionalists (17%): A group that values a well-ordered society and takes pride in hard work, and wants strong leadership that keeps people in line. They are self-reliant, ordered, patriotic, tough-minded, suspicious, and disconnected.

–Backbone Conservatives (15%): A group who are proud of their country, optimistic about Britain’s future outside of Europe, and who keenly follow the news, mostly via traditional media sources. They are nostalgic, patriotic, stalwart, proud, secure, confident, and relatively engaged with politics 

Each of these groups tells – or frames - a story of the world as it understands it. And human beings have told stories since Adam and Eve. But it’s the modern world – and the advertising of the past century – which has really made us aware of this. And it was sociologist Erving Goffman’s “Frame Analysis” of 1974 which introduced the term. It was a decade later before I heard the term for the first time – when I was taking the UK’s very first course in Policy Analysis. I can still remember the impact it made. But somehow its secret was guarded in the halls of marketing power for another couple of decades and it was 2004 before “Don’t Think of an Elephant – know your values and frame the debate” by George Lakoff made an appearance - Lakoff was an undergraduate at MIT under Noam Chomsky, and was already well established as a linguist by the mid-1970s when he was one of a handful of pioneering academics establishing the foundations of cognitive linguistics, a discipline that brought an understanding of the brain to bear on theories of language and meaning. In cognitive linguistics, the meaning of a word is not just a simple dictionary definition but a cognitive frame associated with a particular word in a particular language community. Other mechanisms, such as metaphor and prototyping, can also be involved

Framing Public Issues (US Frameworks Institute 2006) quickly followed. But it is Finding Frames – new ways to engage the UK public (2010) which I find the most satisfactory account of the meaning and development of Frame Analysis. It’s a 120-page report issued by Oxfam and the Department for International Development on how a more effective marketing strategy could be used by charities in their funding appeals to the general public. And it’s linked to another report Common Cause – the case for working with our cultural values (2010). The second chapter of “Finding Frames” looks at social values - 

Perhaps the best known and certainly the most widely applied and validated of the values frameworks, comprises 56 principal value ‘labels’ that can be boiled down into just ten value types (Schwartz and Boehnke 2004) which can best be understood in terms of the degree to which they are compatible or in conflict with one another. People find it difficult to hold certain combinations of values at the same time, whereas other combinations are relatively easy to hold simultaneously - eg people who rate wealth and status as important tend not to rate social justice and living in a world at peace as equally important. 

Storytelling – bewitching the modern mind by Frenchman Christian Salmon (2014) puts the issue in the wider political context it needs. 

The more recent Framers – human advantage in an age of technology and turmoil  K Cukier, F de Vericourt and V Schonberger (2021) initially disappointed me since it didn’t seem to offer the analytical elements I had been expecting. It seemed simply to string a series of stories together in a rather undisciplined way. And then, as I flicked to the middle of the book, I alighted on a story which made me realise that the story-telling was in fact a far more powerful method than the analytical approach. As the intro puts it - 

Framing is so fundamental to human cognition that even those who study the workings of the mind rarely focused on it until relatively recently. Its importance was overshadowed by other mental capabilities, such as sensing and memory. But as people have become more aware of the need to improve their decision-making, the role of frames as fundamental to choosing and acting well has moved from the background to center stage.

Reflections on national cultures - part V

This series of posts took an interesting turn when I read Howard Wiarda’s “Political Culture, political science and identity politics – an uneasy alliance” from 2014 which offers a fascinating account of how (over 2000 years) people have tried to convey a sense of the moral meaning of their collective lives. Almost all studies of political culture begin after the 2^nd World War and are academic in nature. The beauty of Wiarda’s book is he devotes and entire chapter to much earlier efforts to describe other worlds.

It was this which encouraged me to  start my list of texts with Madame de Stael but it could (and should) have gone back, if not to Plato (as Wiarda does) to Montesquieu whose Persian Letters (1721) gave some great insights into the mores of upper-class French society in the period before the French revolution. 

Modern academics have three problems in dealing with national cultures –

·       they assume they have to quantify everything (the great weakness of Basanez’s book);

·       they are, for the most part, specialists and

·       they lack a soul and therefore the sensitivity to grasp the essence of things

The one exception to the last generalisation are the historians – of whatever sort. Of necessity they have to cover all aspects of life. That’s why a cultural historian like Peter Gay’s book on the Viennese middle-class is in the list – and also the intellectual historian Daniel T Rodgers’ Age of Fracture about the 4 US decades after 1970.

And Kristan Kumar – whose The Idea of Englishness; English culture, national identity, social thought figures as a must-read - is a sociologist who, as a breed, still manage to keep their fingers on the pulse of nations. 

Perhaps my next project might be to identify the title which best conjures up the soul of each nation. “Natasha’s Dance – a cultural history of Russia” wold probably be my selection for Russia - although that country’s indigenous music, poetry and so many of their own writers have had such incredible talent as to make it easier to go for a general compendium such as Orlando Figes’. Perhaps only the Germans can compete with this richness – although few of us know much about the Chinese….

On Culture – part IV of a series (2008 to the present)

Three of today’s books are particularly interesting. I’ve already quoted from Wiarda’s 2014 book so I can leave it and turn first to “The Culture Map” which came out the same year. It’s not an academic text – based rather on the intensive work (not least listening) which the author has done with global clients and at INSEAD, the management training centre in France. Her job has been to help prepare managers for the inter-cultural work they are or will be doing in foreign places.

Basically she looks at 8 elements which profoundly affects the effectiveness of teams which consist of different nationalities - 

·       Communicating: the ease of which depends on the extent to which team members use direct or indirect language or what is known as “low-context vs. high-context”

·       Evaluating: direct negative feedback vs. indirect negative feedback

·       Persuading: deductive (principles-first) vs. inductive (applications-first)

·       Leading: egalitarian vs. hierarchical

·       Deciding: consensual vs. top-down

·       Trusting: task-based vs. relationship-based

·       Disagreeing: confrontational vs. avoids confrontation

·       Scheduling: order vs. flexibility 

She references Richard Nisbett and makes this interesting comment – 

Chinese people think from macro to micro, whereas Western people think from micro to macro. For example, when writing an address, the Chinese write in sequence of province, city, district, block, gate number. The Westerners do just the opposite—they start with the number of a single house and gradually work their way up to the city and state. In the same way, Chinese put the surname first, whereas the Westerners do it the other way around. And Chinese put the year before month and date. Again, it’s the opposite in the West. 

The table which heads this post is a famous one which she also uses. As someone who worked for some 20 years with multi-cultural teams, I find her analysis and insights very helpful. Indeed, in its stress on the importance of thinking about how each of us might behave more appropriately when faced with cross-cultural problems, it reminded me of “The Art of Thinking” by A Harrison and R Bramson (1982) which made me realise that we all think in different ways. The book identifies 5 styles (synthesist, idealist, pragmatist, analyst and realist) and at least 10 combinations (the full book can be accessed here). We too easily attribute differences in thought processes to stupidity; and more of us need to be aware that these differences (whether in styles of thought or indeed cultures) are real and legitimate. 

The third book of interest I’’ keep for another post 

Book Title	Author	Takeaway
Remaking Management – between global and local	ed Smith, McSweeney and Fitzgerald 2008	Management academics A rare book which disputes the de Hofstede thesis
Age of Fracture;	Daniel T Rodgers (2011)	Intellectual historian A tremendous analysis of the development of the US zeitgeist in the 4 decades from 1970
The Culture Map; Erin Meyer (2014)	INSEAD consultant	A pop management book which will annoy academics since it doesn’t seem to be based on theory. It focuses on 8 processes – leading, deciding, trusting, conflict, scheduling, persuading, evaluating and communicating
Political Culture, political science and identity politics – an uneasy alliance;	Howard Wiarda (2014)	Political scientist - a fantastic intellectual history of the field doing justice from Montesqeuieu, Comte, Marx, Weber, Almond and the moderns - and not forgetting more popular writing. A delightful read
The Idea of Englishness; English culture, national identity, social thought	Kristan Kumar 2015	A follow-up to his 2003 book which must be the best source book for this strange nation. Very accessible and surveys all the relevant literature
A World of Three Cultures – honour, achievement and joy;	M Basanez (2016.	Political scientist Not an easy read – with a large number of tables
The Patterning Instinct;	Jeremy Lent (2017)	how worldviews develop and can change history
Cultural Evolution – people’s motivations are changing, and reshaping the world ;	Ronald Inglehart (2018)	Inglehart, a political scientist, has been at the heart of discussion about cultural values for the past 50 years – both the book and this article summarise that work.
Culture, Crisis and Covid-19 – the great reset	Trompenaars and C Hampden-Turner (2021)	Management consultants A curious book which doesn’t seem to rest on any analytical base. Strong on opinion – and starts with a strange assertion that private enterprise knows best; strange because Asian governments did best in the Covid Crisis.