The 2022 Posts

Readers have a variety of riches awaiting them on this blog. Too many of you, I fear, look only for the latest post and don’t appreciate that the site contains other treasures ie

• Ebooks

• blogroll

• hyperlinks – one the blog’s distinctive features

• search facility

Let me say a world about each -

List of E-books; It took me some time to realise that the blog contained an amazing resource for English-speakers….the top-right corner has the list of E-books which have resulted from a careful selection and editing of the posts. They are, effectively, annotated guides to such subjects as -

• change – in all its aspects

• culture in the broadest sense

• patterns of decline

• The critical writing of the past half century about our economic system

• The literature on administrative reform

• The debate about Scottish independence over the past decade

• Cultural aspects of countries such as Romania, Bulgaria and Germany

I can safely say that no such guides exist elsewhere in the English language. But I’m not able to crack the question of their wider dissemination. They’re not much use if noone knows of their existence!! This is an issue I have to address. Ironically, however, the “resource” offered by the reading lists which have become such a feature of the blog is not something I seem to avail myself of too frequently! I tend all too often to “skim and save” – and generally fail to return to the link and read it properly.

“Insights into other worlds – good writing and painting” – aka Blogroll; This is a list of my favourite blogs which I do my best to keep updated. Inevitably, some blogs will stop posting and these I will remove. And some new delights appear – a few weeks ago, for example, Accidental Gods. And two which I look forward to are first a superb German blog on constitutional matters (!!) written predominantly in English and The weekly Alternative journal

The blog’s Search Facility; This is an amazing facility which I find very helpful in finding material I know is in there somewhere. If you punch a key phrase into the blog’s search facility, chances are it will instantly give you something interesting. Try it.

Hyperlinks; This is one of the blog’s most distinctive features – surpassed only by Chris Grey’s weekly post-Brexit blog I cannot guarantee that all the hyperlinks will work – mainly because of one library link I was using turned out to be a pirate site which has now been taken down by US authorities!

So here is is This too will pass – the 2022 posts

A short note on Howard Gardner

Last month I confessed that, for some reason, I had consistently forgotten to include psychology in the various tables about the social sciences I had developed in recent years.

Howard Gardner is perhaps the most “distinguished” of US psychologists – by which I mean not that he is the “best known” (that is probably Stephen Pinker) but that he is recognised as the one who has made the biggest contribution to the field in the past 40 years (he is my age).

Starting with his 1983 “Frames of Mind”, which developed his idea of multiple intelligences, he has not rest content with clinical trials but has rolled up his sleeves and got involved in the practical field of education. The Unschooled Mind (1995) dealt with how how children saw the world in their early years and The Disciplined Mind (1999) is a brave attempt to rise above contentious and faddish discussions and establish a more fundamental philosophy of learning. 

I was intrigued with his recent memoir A Synthesising Mind – a memoir (2020)

A Gardner Resource

blogs; his site offers the reader 3 separate blogs – all up-to-date!

https://www.multipleintelligencesoasis.org/blog

https://www.howardgardner.com/synthesizing/richard-hofstadter-a-model-for-synthesizing

https://www.howardgardner.com/synthesizing/wilson-all

https://vision4learning.wordpress.com/current-reading/howard-gardner-five-minds-for-the-future/

https://www.tes.com/magazine/teaching-learning/general/howard-gardner-interview-multiple-intelligences

Critiques – just a sample

https://dana.org/article/a-debate-on-multiple-intelligences/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-everybody-else/201311/the-illusory-theory-multiple-intelligences

https://www.giftedguru.com/stop-using-multiple-intelligence-theory/

Good Work – theory and practice Howard Garner et al (2001) book which is fully accessible by clicking the link in the title. Here is an interview with HG about the book

233813920_Good_Work_An_Interview_with_Howard_Gardner/link/0c960537d1b05b09a4000000/download

https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/documents/a-to-z/g/Gardner_08.pdf 2008

https://howardgardner01.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/477-daedalus.pdf

Other Material

https://www.sloww.co/synthesis-integration/

https://www.sloww.co/synthesizers/

https://www.sloww.co/combinatorial-creativity/

Synthesising Minds

Regular readers will have noticed that I have this strange inclination for long lists of books - often structured in tables. In Howard Gardner’s terms I have a synthesising mind which he contrasts, in his Five Minds for the Future, with the “disciplined”; “creative”; “respectful”; and “ethical”. This video has him explaining the term

This morning I came across a kindred spirit – Belgian Paul Otlet who died in 1944 and whose remarkable story was told in a 2014 book Cataloguing the World

The dream of capturing and organizing knowledge is as old as history. From the archives of ancient Sumeria and the Library of Alexandria to the Library of Congress and Wikipedia, humanity has wrestled with the problem of harnessing its intellectual output. The timeless quest for wisdom has been as much about information storage and retrieval as creative genius.

In Cataloging the World, Alex Wright introduces us to a figure who stands out in the long line of thinkers and idealists who devoted themselves to the task. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Paul Otlet, a librarian by training, worked at expanding the potential of the catalog card, the world’s first information chip. From there followed universal libraries and museums, connecting his native Belgium to the world by means of a vast intellectual enterprise that attempted to organize and code everything ever published. Forty years before the first personal computer and fifty years before the first browser, Otlet envisioned a network of “electric telescopes” that would allow people everywhere to search through books, newspapers, photographs, and recordings, all linked together in what he termed, in 1934, a réseau mondial–essentially, a worldwide web.

Otlet’s life achievement was the construction of the Mundaneum–a mechanical collective brain that would house and disseminate everything ever committed to paper. Filled with analog machines such as telegraphs and sorters, the Mundaneum–what some have called a “Steampunk version of hypertext”–was the embodiment of Otlet’s ambitions. It was also short-lived. By the time the Nazis, who were pilfering libraries across Europe to collect information they thought useful, carted away Otlet’s collection in 1940, the dream had ended. Broken, Otlet died in 1944.

Wright’s engaging intellectual history gives Otlet his due, restoring him to his proper place in the long continuum of visionaries and pioneers who have struggled to classify knowledge, from H.G. Wells and Melvil Dewey to Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, and Steve Jobs. Wright shows that in the years since Otlet’s death the world has witnessed the emergence of a global network that has proved him right about the possibilities–and the perils–of networked information, and his legacy persists in our digital world today, captured for all time.

There have been two reviews of the book I know about -

• https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/06/09/paul-otlet-alex-wright/

• https://commonreader.substack.com/p/let-there-be-more-biographies-of

with the second darwing out some important lessons for us all -

So what are the lessons we can learn? It doesn’t always help to be right. Ideas aren’t easy to implement without the right combination of technology, attitudes, and luck. The work is what’s important, not the result. Maybe the cranks who fill their houses with cart loads of ephemera aren’t so crazy. Don’t make political trouble. Get a PR department. Have a partner who can do these things if you can’t. Be in the right place at the right time. Don’t get cynical, or as Churchill said, don’t let the bastards grind you down. Keep working. Philosophical and ethical beliefs matter a lot to what work you do and how you do it. Don’t be so pragmatic you end up being a conformist. Conventional schooling isn’t always the best approach for your children. Worry less about imaginative young people becoming lawyers. Being bored might give them the opportunity they need to have their big idea.

Closed Minds?

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist whose The Righteous Mind I both thoroughly enjoyed - and learned from a few years ago. This is a rarer combination than you might imagine! All too often I am left wondering what additional value a particular reading actually gave me. This morning’s post brought me a fascinating video from Haidt about the role social media is playing in the polarisation of societies – particularly Anglo-Saxon.

And demonstrated the additional value which such visual presentations offer – with good visual summaries of the differences between the Open and Closed Mindset – or what Haidt calls “Discover versus Defend”. And I’m indebted to The Atlantic journal for Haidt’s article earlier this year on “After Babel” which is as balanced a piece as you can expect these days about the different phases social media have been through in the past few decades – initially optimistic but now deeply pessimistic.

Facebook hoped “to rewire the way people spread and consume information.” By giving them “the power to share,” it would help them to “once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.”

In the 10 years since then, Zuckerberg did exactly what he said he would do. He did rewire the way we spread and consume information; he did transform our institutions, and he pushed us past the tipping point. It has not worked out as he expected.

I do understand that a huge industry has arisen around the social, psychological and political effects of social media – but Haidt’s short video and article are a very helpful summary

Coincidentally the current edition of the New Statesman has just published this great essay by Jeremy Cliffe which suggests that the traditional coffee house could contain a model for a transformed social media (probable paywall)

Jürgen Habermas in his 1962 book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which defined the öffentlichkeit (the public sphere) as “society engaged in critical public debate”. He argued that the history of the public sphere in the West is deeply rooted in one particular tradition: that of the European coffeehouse. The coffeehouse of old was also a space for news, discussion and encounter. It was in many ways the original social network. And its history points a way forward for a global social media industry now at a crossroads.

Debates rage over the role of social media networks, just as they once did over that of the coffeehouse. They stand accused of stoking precisely the same social ills. Consider “The Character of Coffee and Coffeehouses”, written by an Anabaptist bookseller, John Starkey, in London in 1661. His pamphlet can be read today as both an account of its time and as an uncannily apt commentary on Twitter and the like today.

Starkey complained of “diverse monstrous opinions and absurdities” and “strange and wild conceits” in a setting where there were “neither moderators, nor rules” and where “infinite are the contests, irreconcilable the differences”. Even high-brow participants were cheapened by association with this new institution, he wrote: “The divinest truths, become as common… as stones.” And yet, many coffeehouse regulars of the time responded forcefully to these complaints – just as social media users today are willing to credit their chosen platforms with the democratisation of wits, exchange, information and debate.

Have we become too fixated on Catastrophes?

My last post has been up for some 24 hours – and has attracted only a couple of dozen clicks. The title was “A Better World is Possible” since Neal Lawson was discussing prolific writer Geoff Mulgan’s latest book of that name with the author on one of the great Compass podcasts.

The low number of clicks seemsto confirm Mulgan’s belief that a book was necessary – pessimism if not downright fatalism is on the rise

You may have seen the fascinating recent research surveying the patterns of sentiment in all books published in English, German and Spanish over the last 150 years (as gathered on Google) which showed symptoms of a collective depression, on a scale greater than during the world wars, in recent decades. The authors wrote of an upsurge of ‘cognitive distortions’ since around 2000, leading them to comment that ‘large populations are increasingly stressed by pervasive cultural, economic, and social changes’ linked to ‘the rising prevalence of depression and anxiety in recent decades ’ and they show that what they call ‘catastrophising’ ways of thinking have risen sharply as utopias have been displaced by distopias in our collective mind.

This shrinking of the future matters politically too – because it fuels what the German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz has called the switch from positive politics, which emphasises the openness and possibility of the future, to a negative politics which is defensive, sceptical and nostalgic, convinced that the best years lie in the past.

Now it’s possible that we are all, indeed, objectively, doomed. But it seems to me implausible that we could know this with any certainty and one lesson of history is that it’s rarely possible to judge prospects accurately.

So it’s surely better to try to think our way out of our many crises - and if we don’t even try then we certainly will be doomed and will deserve to be.

So how might we collectively do better, how we might use the incredible knowledge of social science now to help us see and shape better than we are doing now, and to fill up the fuzzy pictures in our minds with sharper pictures of what’s possible and better?

That’s very much what Mulgan’s latest book offers – and why it’s such an important read.

I realise that it’s a bit expensive but the great thing about academics is that they like writing so much that, if you look hard enough, you can find material which they later worked up into books. As I like archiving such material and sharing it on the blog, everyone wins! For more detail see 

The role of Social Sciences in mapping and shaping the Future; a 2022 Mulgan lecture

“The Imaginary Crisis” (2020) a 40 page paper which maps out the argument

Social Innovation (2019) googlebook excerpts

Thinking Systems 2019 30pp paper

Government as a brain How Can Governments Better Understand, Think, Create, and Remember, and Avoid the Traps of Collective Stupidity Both in Emergencies and Normal Times 2022 paper

https://ecfr.eu/podcasts/episode/another-world-is-possible-the-transformative-power-of-political-imagination/ mark leonard podcast

Another World is Possible!

Neal Lawson would, under normal circumstances, be a UK Labour MP but is one of these rare characters who, somehow, understood that such a career path would constrain him and is living proof of the adage that “another world is possible”. Some 2 decades ago, he founded the centre-left Compass which seeks alliances with others seeking a better society and, since then, has inspired the most creative conversations mainly via pamphlets which force us to look at the world in a different way eg 45 Degree Change (2019)

Earlier this year he had a fascinating podcast discussion with Geoff Mulgan who is of more academic bent but had also founded a famous centre-left Think Tank (Demos) a full decade previously which he had left in 1997 to be Head of Tony Blair’s Policy Unit. Since then he has pursued a more academic career – with books on “good and bad” government; strategy; capitalism; social innovation; AI and, most recently, on imagining better societies.

Mulgan’s books actually don’t impress me. He’s clearly very well-read but his writing is a bit too nuanced and soporific for me – on the one had, this. On the other had, that... I need a little bit more guidance in my reading.

But put Lawson and Mulgan together and the results are much better. This is one of some 70 podcasts Lawson has done

Mulgan’s latest book is actually called “Another World is Possible” – the title as it happens of quite a few other books inc this one reflecting the World Social Forum discussions. A piece Mulgan wrote a couple of years earlier gives a very good sense of the argument -

Some fields are good at thinking far into the future – business invests heavily in visions of future smart homes, smart cities or health. Fiction is adept at exploring the future boundaries of humans and technology. Mainstream culture finds it easy to imagine apocalypses – what would happen if temperatures rose 4 or 5 degrees or AI enslaved humans or even worse pandemics became the norm?

But we struggle to imagine positive alternatives: what our care or education systems, welfare, workplaces, democracy or neighbourhoods might be like in 30-40 years. And we appear to be worse at doing this than in the past. This lack of desirable but plausible futures may be contributing to the malaise that can be found across much of the world. It’s certainly linked to a sense of lost agency and a deepening fear of the future.

The institutions which in the past supported practical social imagination have largely dropped out of this role.

• In universities social science frowns on futurism. You’re much more likely to succeed in your career if you focus on the past and present than the future. Mulgan indeed used a lecture to his own London college to develop this critique

• Political parties have generally been hollowed out and lack the central teams which at one point tried to articulate imaginative futures to shape their programmes.

• Think-tanks have been pulled back to the present, feeding into comment and news cycles.

This very much echoes what I was feeling a decade ago when I posted

Political parties are a bust flush - All mainstream political parties in Europe have been affected by the neo-liberal virus and can no longer represent the concerns of ordinary people. And those “alternative parties” which survive the various hurdles placed in their way by the electoral process rarely survive.

• The German Greens were an inspiration until they too eventually fell prey to the weaknesses of political parties identified a hundred years ago by Robert Michels.

• More recently, “Pirate” parties in Scandinavia and Bepe Grillo’s Italian Five Star Movement have managed, briefly, to capture public attention, occupy parliamentary benches but then sink to oblivion or fringe if not freak interest.

• What the media call “populist” parties of various sorts attract bursts of electoral support in most countries but are led by labile individuals preying on public fears and prejudices and incapable of the sort of cooperative effort which serious change requires (I was wrong about this!!).

NGOs are no match for corporate power - The annual World Social Forum has had more staying power than the various “Occupy movements” but its very diversity means that nothing coherent emerges to challenge the power elite whose “scriptures” are delivered from the pulpits of The World Bank and the OECD There doesn’t even seem a common word to describe our condition and a vision for a better future – “social change”? What’s that when it’s at home?

Academics are careerists - the groves of academia are still sanctuary for a few brave voices such as Noam Chomsky and David Harvey to speak out against the careless transfer by governments of hundreds of billions of dollars to corporate interests

• Henry Mintzberg, one of the great management gurus, has in the last decade broken ranks and now writes about the need for a profound “rebalancing” of the power structure - Rebalancing Society – radical renewal beyond left, right and centre

• Economists who challenge the conventional wisdom of that discipline are now able to use the Real-World Economics blog.

• Daniel Dorling is a geographer who focuses on inequalities eg his powerful Injustice – why social inequality persists.

Think Tanks play safe – and….think
Most Think-Tanks play it safe (for funding reasons) – although there are honourable exceptions eg -

• Susan George, a European activist and writer, who operates from the Trans National Institute and, amongst her many books, has produced two marvellous satires – Lugano I and Lugano II

• David Korton’s books and Yes Magazine keep up a steady critique.

• Joseph Stiglitz, once part of the World Bank elite, writes scathingly about economic conventional wisdom.

• Pope Frances has the resources of the Vatican behind him; and is proving a great example in the struggle for dignity and against privilege.

Geoff Mulgan has a more balanced take and argues that

Although there are fascinating pockets of creative social imagination – for example around the idea of the commons, zero carbon living, radical new forms of democracy, new monies, food systems or ways of organising time -they tend to be weakly organised, lacking the critical mass or connections to grow and influence the mainstream. The World Social Forum used the powerful slogan: ‘another world is possible’. But the fate of the WSF – now only a pale shadow of what it was 15 years ago -is symptomatic of what’s gone wrong.

As a result, the space these ideas might fill is instead filled either with reaction and the search for a better past, with narrowly technological visions of the future or with fearful defence of the present.

So what can be done to address this gap? This is a huge task, involving many people and methods. In this paper (“The Imaginary Crisis”) I set out a few thoughts on the what, the how and the who.

And indeed the last link gives important excerpts from that paper.

In the podcast, Mulgan gives examples of leaders he’s worked with globally and raises the key question - Why is UK political leadership so unimaginative?

I have a feeling that they’re scared of the responsibility they’ve had thrust on them and just can’t see that the way to deal with this is ensure that a lot of people in the nation’s cities and organisations are actually helping you - through a real programme of decentralisation.

He also makes an important point that we need to reward the “doers” rather than the “thinkers”

From Extinction Revolution to “Moderate Flank”

Rupert Read and Jim Bendell are 2 Brits supplying the intellectual hardware for the Extinction Rebellion (ER) which has made a real impact on public consciousness in the last few years. Read’s Extinction Rebellion – insights from the inside (2020) maps the progress of just a few years; and has just started a new campaign Moderate Flank to bring home to a broader group in society the importance of their active involvement in the struggle against climate change.

Jim Bendell is another academic who wrote an important Deep Adaptation essay in 2018 and the Brave New Europe site recently gave Bendell this opportunity to update us. Authorities are so concerned about the protests of ER that, in the UK< they have enacted tough new legislation which breach basic human rights (not least of reporting) and the US Atlantic journal accuses the protestors of being anti-people

I had started to read Rupert Read’s Do You Want to know the Truth? but quickly got sidetracked into what, at first sight, seems to be one of the most thoughtful of sites – Accidental Gods – run by two women, Manda Scott and Faith Tilleray. Its mission statement is not, for me, very clear but its contents - which include a superb end-of-year roundup from Manda and and a treasure trove of podcasts – really resonated. A recent podcast was an interview with Read about his latest book

Readers know that I feel guilty about the infrequency with which I post about climate change – although I do remember the impact Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature made on me when it first came out in 1989. I have, since then, read many many books on the subject – but the 2 which I most enjoyed were probably Alastair McIntosh’s “Soil and Soul” (2004) and Hell and High Water – climate change, hope and the human condition (2007). 

 McIntosh is a real original with a strong spiritual side – which may not be everyone’s cup of tea. But he is in terrific form in this recent video where he reveals a laugh, like Jung’s, which reverbated across the Swiss mountains at his villa lakeside.