They say that understanding is 90% of problem-solving or – as Einstein once put it -
“if I was given an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes trying to understand it and just 5 minutes to solving it”.
The UK may have been the first country to industrialise and certainly had in the 19th century a very good record for scientific understanding but – since then – it has had a deplorable attitude to critical thinking. My question today is why the country finds itself with its reputation in total tatters?
Brexit, of course, is the immediate reason but, in the spirit of the five why s, I want to go much deeper and to explore what it is about british/english institutions that might explain the disaster which has overtaken the country in the 15 or so years. We were, after all, always “semi-detached” from the EU project. “Decline” has been a favourite conversation piece since the 1960s reaching a pinnacle in the debate surrounding Martin Wiener’s 1981 English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980 which argued that the Victorian middle class had been seduced by the values of the aristocracy and lost its edge to the competence of the Germans.
Certainly the monarchical, imperial and class trappings of the British system are not a pretty sight – and have got up my nose since I became a Scottish politician in 1968. What accompanies imperial success is, of course, a lazy complacency which reveals itself in upper-class English arrogance and, in its political class, in sheer HUBRIS (in my book the worst sin). The old Etonians really still imagine that they are a superior race = and Johnson;s fall from grace has still not persuaded them otherwise. Until the country faces this reality, it is doomed – however much well-intentioned think-tanks put out documents (such as this most recent) trying to persuade us differently
Public intellectuals and the question of british decline is a very good review of th e dbate until 2001 by English and Kenny
I don't think its a peculiarly "British disease". I think you could say the same about the US, and to a lesser degree, most EU countries. As far as emulating the old aristocratic class is concerned, rich Americans are at least as guilty, and whilst we think of the Europeans having subjected their aristocracies to the criticism of Madame Guillotine, there seems to remain an awful lot of French and German barons and other nobility that litter its landscape, not to mention its boardrooms.
ReplyDeleteWhere Europe may be more advanced than both Britain and the US is in relation to education, and reflects perhaps the role of state capitalism and the concept of the elite, technocracy and meritocracy in its development. When I was a County Councillor, and we were being cajoled into the idea that elderly people really should not aspire to being catered for by the state in care homes (which I saw as an attempt to avoid responsibility for them to save costs) I argued that the reason so many have such a bad opinion of them is that, like all such state provision, in Britain, as compared to the rest of Europe, it is seen as a cheap safety net, whereas there is no reason not to look at it in terms of a long stay in a luxury hotel or resort, which is the standard we should be aiming at!
And, of course, the rich do more or less precisely that, and even the comfortably off middle-class aim for it too, notably in the US, where they retire to the sunny condos in Florida and so on.
Education is, though, a clear division, as Alan Greenspan noted in one of his testimonies to Congress years ago. The US has a small number of elite students with very high levels of education, but the great mass with very low levels of education, manifest in the dichotomy of the most scientifically advanced country in the world, being also where about 75% of the population think the world is only 7,000 years old, and was created in 7 days!
Nor is it just in basic education. My son went to study in the US for four months back in 2001, and commented on just how easily he obtained A grades compared to back in Britain.
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ReplyDeleteThe real problem I think comes down to the fact that, particularly over the last 30 years it has been the concept that wealth is created by inflating asset prices and not by labour and the accumulation of capital. That is fostered by the fact the ruling class nowadays owns all its wealth in the form of fictitious capital (shares and bonds) rather than as real capital (factories, machines etc) as it did in the 19th century. Its why they have used their control of boardrooms to have executives use profits to buy back shares, rather than invest in additional capital, and why they welcome recessions, because they reduce wages and interest rates, and so inflate asset prices.
In addition to that, we have seen in the US, the executives that act in the interests of these shareholders, rather than the company, also use their positions to feather their own nests, as with Enron, TYCO and so on. In other words, its rent seeking activity, and such rent seekers also move seamlessly from the corporate world to the state and back again, as with the military industrial complex, medical industrial complex and so on, breeding corruption, inertia and risk aversion. I saw it having worked in local government too.
Germany may partly avoid it, given the role that industry continued to play, and because of the existence of co-determination. But, codetermination is essentially superficial and a means of co-opting workers, and as the scandals of Diesel emissions showed, the workers on German boards went along with the cover-up too.
It emphasises to me once again, the necessity for raising the property question, and the need, thereby to make this the century for the struggle for industrial democracy in the same way that the 19th cand 20th century were about the struggle for political democracy. Company boards made up of and elected by workers would make radically different decisions, using profits to invest in new labour saving technologies to improve their own lives, rather than stuffing the pockets of shareholders. They would pay out in interest/dividends only what a market rate of interest required. They would put a premium on a high level of education for all workers to advance that development, and for the development of infrastructure, housing and health to facilitate it.
What is more, having been drawn into that active industrial democracy the idea that they would settle for a political democracy which required nothing more, and allowed them nothing more, than placing a cross on a ballot every four years would pass into history.