Cultural Values ...again

When I started, some 40 years ago, to move in European circles, I was stunned to realise that words and concepts had such different meanings in other languages eg “accountability”, “Chancellor” let alone “local government” and “democracy”!

The more I listened to the simultaneous translation, the more amazed I was that there could be any mutual understanding – and that was before the Wall fell and the central and south-eastern Europeans were suddenly exposed to strange concepts of capitalism, democracy and multiple variants thereof. And it’s not just that our talk reverbates in different ways – the very way we think is also so very different according to people such as Richard Nesbitt. Johan Galtung wrote an important paper as long ago as 1981 in which he analysed the different intellectual styles of the Saxons, French, German and Japanese. These days he would think twice before venturing into this territory.

A post last week mentioned that I was working on a paper trying to make sense of various terms such as “political culture”, “world values” and “cultural theory” which go back almost 100 years to the 1930s as anthropology became a discipline to be reckoned with, producing academics of the stature of Frans Boas, Ruth Benedict, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead and Mary Douglas. The second world war produced a demand for anthropological understanding – although the Frankfurt School social psychologists were also involved in the interpretation of Nazism. But it was not until the 1950s that the political scientists muscled in.

1968 saw a values revolution – a famous author actually used the phrase “narcissistic” – although others called it “post-materialism”. The idea of national cultural traits was never a fashionable one in academic circles – there was always something a bit embarrassing about it. But, from the 1990s, it became very acceptable as business globalised and popular interest has never waned.

As I mentioned in the previous post, since 1990 I have lived in about a dozen countries and have tried to keep up with the literature on cultural differences. Indeed earlier this year I did a series of posts on this which I have these past couple of weeks developed into a 30 page paper which is almost finished - and I’m previewing here

The core of the paper consists of some 50 books in the field on which I’ve made brief notes and structured into 3 tables to make the reading easier.

As I waded through the reading for the paper, certain books made more sense to me than others – they just seemed better at explaining things. I’ve picked these out for a final table – there are nine of them.

And I make an amazing discovery – four of them focus on an issue which is not one of the terms with which I started this inquiry, that of VALUES. And, furthermore, “Political Culture” ties with “Values” – also with four, with “Cultural Theory” coming in with only one representative. Now this could simply reflect the fact that they are all (with the exception of the final EC document) much better written than the World Values Survey material which does tend to be heavy on statistics and verbal pomposity

Is the UK becoming a failed State?

How quickly a country can collapse – socially and economically. Lebanon and Sri Lanka are the latest examples.

Mark Blyth is a political economist highly respected across the political spectrum for the clarity and bluntness of his dissection of complex issues. On a 2021 podcast he had expressed the view, in his typically succinct way, that Brexit had been a turning point for the British economy – with the past year in particular suggesting that little was left except an enormous “Rentier Class” living off hundreds of billions of profits of privatised companies. The social media is full of the amazing profits being made by the shareholders and bosses of these companies - which add insult to injury by failing to undertake basic investment in infrastructure. There’s been quite a spate of books recently about “Rentier Capitalism” of which this looks the most interesting

As far as action is concerned, Richard Murphy has been a rare voice pushing in the past decade for tax justice and probably has the most detailed programme. His brief outline is here – and the 30 page detailed programme is here

But forgive me for wanting to focus on the part of the UK I know best – Scotland, from which Mark Blyth also happens to hail. Having been against the idea of Scotland separating in 2014 from the UK, he was “outed” recently on Twitter as having changed his mind – although he has subsequently confessed to finding it difficult “to make a positive case for independence” and has apparently just been axed from the Advisory group he joined a year ago. The Scottish Government last month decided to make a bid for a second referendum on the issue (for October 2023) – with the 2 candidates for the Conservative party leadership both strongly opposed to allowing it.

It’s not easy to find a good discussion on the internet about the issues involved in the idea of Scotland separating – but I’ve just come across a fantastic one superbly chaired by a young trade union woman. All the participants are Scottish and the tone is respectful;

Common Weal is an important Scottish Foundation which has run a podcast for quite some time and here features Richard Murphy to take us back to the UK economy.

The social media are having a great time with such fake ads as this one for the UK government 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1561657960819937282

update; and lo, 2 days later, James O'Brien was also talking of "the failed state" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPduUCpjkNE

26 August - How Chris Grey's latest post put it -

Domestically, that means a rapidly worsening cost of living crisis. Inflation is at its highest since the early 1980s and still rising, with households facing their largest ever recorded fall in living standards, and the Bank of England predicts five continuous quarters of economic recession. There are multiple strikes in the rail network, the docks, the courts, the postal service and elsewhere, and more to come. With a growing ‘Don’t Pay’ campaign in the face of what for many will be impossible energy bills, talk of civil unrest and disobedience does not seem hyperbolic.

There are now chronic labour shortages in almost every occupation, so that even as food prices rise to a 40-year high there is food rotting in fields for lack of people to pick or harvest it. The NHS, and especially the ambulance service, is at breaking point, as, not unrelatedly, is the social care system. In fact it is hard to find any part of the public or private sector which is not, in some way or other, under alarming strain. The beaches are awash with sewage, like a metaphor. And, though you’d hardly know it, we are still living with the effects of a pandemic, including an estimated 1.6 million people in England alone living with Long Covid, and presumably the possibility of a new wave to come.

Throughout all this, the leadership contest means there has been, in effect, no functioning government. The notional Prime Minister, rather than acting as a responsible caretaker, has spent the summer alternating between sulking, holidaying and squeezing the last drop out of the perks of his office. Any chance Boris Johnson had of a final period of dignity to set against the depraved conduct that led to his ejection has been squandered. Most Prime Ministers end up being judged less harshly by history than they are at the time of their departure; I strongly suspect that Johnson will be assessed even more critically in the future than he is now.

Post-Brexit political instability set to continue

When this strange summer ends, it will not herald the end of the period of political instability any more than the events and crises of the summer are peculiar to the season. This isn’t a holiday that has gone horribly wrong, it’s the latest instalment of a reality there is no taking a break from. That political instability began with the 2016 referendum. Having a new Prime Minister is not going to finish, but is a part of, this post-2016 story. I don’t mean that there were no political problems before, but that since then there has been a particular sort of instability and for particular reasons.

It’s not a coincidence that the new Prime Minister will be the fourth in the six years since the referendum, the same number as held office in the thirty-one years between 1979 and 2010. Nor is it a coincidence that within those six years there have also been two general elections, massive churn in the holding of ministerial posts, an illegal prorogation of parliament, a unique judgment that the government was in contempt of parliament, numerous highly unusual constitutional events, a government openly threatening to break international law, massive stresses in the relationship between Westminster and the devolved administrations, significant pressures on the Good Friday Belfast Agreement, and perhaps the most significant rifts between ministers and the civil service in modern history. All these things reflect the way that Brexit has all but overwhelmed the capacity and norms of the UK state and political institutions.

Confused about Political Cultures?

It’s more than 40 years since I noticed that concepts have different meanings in other languages. It’s as if each nation carries its distinctive baggage in its collective heads – for example “Chancellor”, “policy” and “accountability”. And the image conjured up by the word “councillor” very much depends on the country’s electoral system and the relative financial power of the municipal system.

When the Wall fell, central and south-east Europeans had to learn what such previously reviled concepts as capitalism and democracy meant – both in practice and in theory. Thirty years on, it’s assumed they know – although political cultures in countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania – let alone Italy – do not operate in quite the way of those in NE Europe.

It’s Bulgaria and Romania I know best – from living in them for some 15 years and have tried during that period to convey to my readers a sense of their political culture.

Since 1990 I have lived in about a dozen countries and have tried to keep up with the literature on cultural differences. Indeed earlier this year I did a series of posts on this which I have this week reviewed – resulting in a short (10,000 word) paper which you find here and which I hve tried to summarise thus -

1. The words and concepts we use have different meanings in different cultural contexts – some subtle, some profound

2. Until recently, the western interpretation was accepted as the holy grail

3. The origins of the field can be traced back to Almond and Verba’s “The Civic Culture” of 1963 which looked at various democratic societies.

4. The subsequent literature uses a variety of terms – political culture, national culture, world values, world views and cultural theory – which may or may not refer to the same phenomenon.

5. De Hofstede used his base in IBM to carry out survey work on its plants in various parts of the world and popularised in the 1980s a series of measures showing the power of distinctive national contexts

6. This work was taken up by a variety of consultants to multinational business such as Richard Lewis, Frans Trompenaars, Charles Hampden-Turner and Erin Meyer to reinforce the argument about national traits

7. Something seemed to happen at the turn of the new millennium. Anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists and political scientists somehow started to feel that discussions about cultural differences are no longer politically acceptable.

8. Indeed the World Values Surveys take great care to create clusters which blur national divisions and focus instead on such things as tradition and self-expression

9. And yet we persist as citizens in maintaining – and arguably accentuating – our cultural identities – see the section on the Scots

The UK finally goes off its head

It is normally France we associate with public protest – tractors clogging the streets and protestors tearing up cobbles. But, for once, its citizens are quiet – and little wonder since they have been guaranteed a limit of 4% to their increased energy costs. It is Britain which has seen the public outrage about the cost of living – and about time after it has been subjected for more than 40 years to the most aggressive programme of privatisation – as well as a continual deterioration in standards of public life.

But something broke this summer – even Tory MPs objected to the torrent of lies and misdemeanours in which its citizens have been deluged from Brexit to Covid.

And so, for the second time in 3 years, a Prime Minister was forced to resign and the country is subject not to an election – but a replacement procedure which is confined to 200,000 ageing members of the Tory party. And this is the country that would have us believe that it has led the world in democracy????

The country’s broken constitutional system was revealed for all to see when Boris Johnson tried to suspend Parliament in 2019 and in the government’s attempts since then to hobble the judicial system. And more and more people now realise that the English electoral system gives governments too much power (the Scots were able to opt in 1999 for a “proportional” one which is much more responsive to the spread of public opinion - their governments since then have been coalitions or minority)

The massive increase in prices unleashed as a result of the breakdown in supply chains and the Ukraine War has created in the UK a “summer of discontent” which puts the famous “winter of discontent” of the late 1970s completely in the shade. The Rail, Communications and Nursing Unions are on strike – with unusually strong support from the public. And a series of campaigns have elicited widespread social media interest – such as “Enough is Enough”, “Don’t Pay” (on energy bills) and We Own it (on renationalisation of public utilities). And the poor consumer, for once, has been given an active voice by the campaigns of Martin Lewis. One of the factors driving the outrage is the scale of the profits being made in the UK by the (privatised) energy companies – hundreds of billions of pounds – and the lack of serious government response compared with its European neighbours

As the Conservative party tears itself apart in a horrifying campaign between a shallow, unbelievable, right-wing Liz Truss and an elegant Sunak, the Prime Minister goes on holiday and the Leader of the Opposition goes missing. The only politician who seems able to express the public mood is an ex-Prime Minister who retired 12 years ago – Gordon Brown who has demanded that an immediate emergency budget be established and also set out a draft programme.

From the candidates comes nothing that makes any sort of sense. Indeed they both seem to be arguing that the past 12 years of Conservative government rule has been wasted – even although Truss worked under the past 3 Prime Ministers and Sunak has been Chancellor of the Exchequer for the past 3 years. No wonder that one commentator was reduced to summarising their arguments as 

buying into the faith that nameless regulations are shackling business and, above all, that a weak political class, deep state and obeisance to technocrats have combined to make Britain quasi-socialist – despite 12 years of Tory rule. Truss is the insurgent carrying the Thatcherite flame who will put the world to rights. 

Will Hutton's article is worth reading in full - since it's one of the few pieces I've seen which sets out the sheer craziness of what lies in store when Liz Truss (whose ambition is to appear in Vogue magazine) is announced the winner of the contest on September 5. Simon Wren-Lewis is another serious economist whose posts – unlike his colleagues’ - are always sensitive to political realities and offers a shrewd assessment here of why the 2 contenders are pursuing such a right-wing course

https://twitter.com/i/status/1559213230790156288 is a 5 minute video exchange about a small company (with a thousand employees) which is having to lay off its workers and move to the Rotterdam area. It offers a fascinating insight into how the UK is committing economic suicide - through the combination of Brexit; a government which simply has ceased any attempts at government; and excessive energy costs/profits. The company simpy cannot pass 260% additional energy costs onto customers - but in the Netherlands there is a cap on charges which will allow them to survive 

see also https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/16/britain-has-been-avoiding-its-biggest-problems-for-decades-now-were-paying-the-price

update; for a Scottish perspective on the contest see https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2022/08/14/stealing-the-constitution/

 

Why the polarisation - and what can be done about it?

 “Polarisation”, we are told, has become the predominant feature of contemporary societies. I want to explore why this issue has arisen in the past decade – and what we can do about it.

My first stab at an explanation put it down to a combination of the forces released by the ethic of greed which swept us up in the 1980s AND the technology of internet communication with which we were presented in the late 1990s. It’s so easy now to press a “like” button or tweet our feelings of identity with the particular tribe we belong to

The financial crash of 2008 gave us every reason to be angry – with Trump and Brexit being the initial beneficiaries. Now it’s Covid, global warming, supply chain collapse, war, inflation and energy shortages which are stoking our fears and divisions. We have become gibbering addicts to immediate gratification - such are the forces which Thatcher and Reagan released in 1979

But then I remembered that Galbraith’s “The Affluent Society” which emphasised the contrast between “private affluence” and “public squalour” came out in 1958 – long before Thatcher has even been heard of. Clearly things are more complicated than I had originally thought. The rot had started earlier….but when...and how?

For the moment, I’ll leave these questions hanging because I’ve come across a clutch of books offering ways to deal with the issue of polarisation. Unlike global warming, this seems something on which we can and should be working with friends and neighbours. It also touches on the issue which I’ve become increasingly fascinated by – namely the mental maps, lens, frames and stories we use when trying to make sense of the world. Here are some of the books I encountered -

• “Living in Denial – climate change, emotions and everyday life” Kari Norgaard (2011) A researcher returns to her Norwegian roots to spend a year exploring what one town felt about climate change

• “Active Hope – how to face the mess we’re in without going crazy”; Joanne Macey and Chris Johnstone (2012) A philosopher and social psychologist team up to develop an important idea about hope (about which St Augustine did not say - "Hope has 2 beautiful daughters - anger about how things are and courage to ensure they do not remain so)

• How to have impossible conversations; Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (2019) a rather formula-ristic book 

• “Still Hopeful – lessons from a lifetime of activism”; Maude Barlow (2021) an admirable activist in issues such as water and globalisation offers some lessons from her work

• “Saving Us – a climate scientist’s case for hope and healing in a divided world”; Katharine Hayhoe (2021) which starts with a nice story about her being confronted with a large poster with the 4-way test of the Rotary Club, throwing away the speech she had prepared and using the 4 principles -

Start with something you have in common. Connect it to why climate change matters to us personally—not the human race in its entirety or the Earth itself, but rather us as individuals. Climate change affects nearly everything that we already care about. It will make us and our children less healthy, our communities less prosperous, and our world less stable. Often, in fact, it already has.

Then, describe what people can and are doing to fix it. There are all kinds of solutions, from cutting our own food waste to powering buses with garbage tor using solar energy to transform the lives of some of the poorest people in the world. There are solutions that clean up our air and our water, grow local economies, encourage nature to thrive, and leave us all better off, not worse. Who doesn’t want that?

This book is packed with stories, ideas, and information that will lead to positive conversations—conversations that bridge gaps rather than dig trenches, conversations that may surprise you with the discovery of common ground. By bonding over the values we truly share, and by connecting them to climate, we can inspire one another to act together to fix this problem. But it all begins with understanding who we already are, and what we already care about —because chances are, whatever that is, it’s already being affected by climate change, whether we know it or not.

Beyond Intractability is an important resource for the polaristion issue

 

Out of Control?

With growing inequality, the Ukraine War, the heat waves, the energy shortages and raging inflation, we can be forgiven for believing that the world is out of control. Rather ironic for Brits given that Brexit was supposed to be about "taking back control"!

One of the side effects of the thought-system which is unhelpfully known as “neoliberalism” is what the academics equally confusingly call “loss of human agency”. So let’s cut the crap - call a spade a spade – and say simply that many of us have lost our sense of solidarity The Brits have never been fond of that word – it spills more easily from French mouths. But perhaps the UK railwaymen are helping the country to understand what we’ve lost in the last half-century by our hesitancy in using the word? I’ll readily admit that, despite my active membership of the Labour party, I was ambivalent about trade unions. It’s only now that I understand how pathetically middle-class that made me. Trade unions in those days (with the exception of individuals such as Jimmy Reid) may have been a bit traditional and defensive – but they deserved support which never came - with Arthur Scargill having a lot to answer for with the way he chose to revel in his role as National Rogue/scourge. Mick Lynch has set the pace in giving workers a new pride in their capabilities compared with the crass idiots of the preening media and the ruling class. 

But let's return to the issue of loss of control. Although Joseph Tainter published “The Collapse of Complex Societies” as far back as 1988, it was Jared Diamond who set the ball rolling with his “Collapse – how societies choose to fail or succeed” in 2005 – although J Michael Greer’s “The Long Descent” made the bigger impact on me in 2008 – the same year as Dmitry Orlov’s “Reinventing Collapse”. Since then the floodgates have opened – with Covid and global warming perhaps being the final nails in the coffin of our smugness.

But it was never supposed to end like this – we were assured by the doomsters that the process would be gradual! Deep Adaptation – navigating the chaos of climate change ed by J Bendell and R. Read (2021) is the book I’m currently trying to read. It’s at the extreme end of the spectrum and has attracted criticism from even sympathetic viewers here and here 

I had expected by now to be reading one of these helpful overviews of recent literature on the subject for which the NYRB is famous – but have not been able to find one. 

It's a curious omission. 

It’s exactly three years since I did an annotated bibliography of the global warming issue. Clearly it’s now time to do one on “collapsology” - with this hot-off-the-press paper on “Exploring catastrophic climate change” as exhibit number one

Update; this blogger has a series of no less than 10 (long) posts on Collapse - starting with https://theeasiestpersontofool.blogspot.com/2020/06/collapse-you-say.html