Peripheral Vision: Our elders do have some wisdom

what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.

So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Sunday, October 22, 2023

Our elders do have some wisdom

Old men ought to be explorers

Here or there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

East Coker (TS Eliot’s Four Quartets)

Readers will know that Four Quartets is a favourite of mine – although I don’t pretend to understand past the first line of this excerpt. The sections I prefer are those dealing with the difficulties we have in making sense to others and the ambiguities of the words we use.

My business card carries the word “explorer” - partly because of the dozen countries I have known in the past 35 years; and partly because of the delight I have taken in getting to know writers over my lifetime. Now that I approach the winter of my years, I’ve been trying to put down what I’ve learned from the 50 years of trying to get bureaucratic systems to operate more in the interests of the average citizen. I’ve already told the tale of listening spellbound on the family radio to the 1970 Reith Lectures on “Change and Industrial Society” by Donald Schon – subsequently issued as the book “Beyond the Stable State” (1971). In it, he coined the phrase “Dynamic conservatism” and went on to talk about government as a learning system and to ask what can we know about social change. From that moment I was hooked on the importance of organisations (particularly public) and of institutional reform……In those days there was little talk of management (!) - only a few Peter Drucker books although Kenneth Boulding had published as far back asa 1953 The Organisational Revolution a study in the ethics of economic organisation. But it was 1969 before Gerald Caiden gave us Administrative Reform - reflecting the change that was in the air in the 1960s. The early 1960s had seen, first in 1961, the election of JF Kennedy then of Lyndon Johnson who started the “War on Poverty” – then in 1964 of Harold Wilson who had initiated a series of Royal Commissions to identify the weaknesses of a range of British institutions (including the civil service and local government).

1968 saw not only the student rebellions but the start of my own political career (first in a Scottish municipality where, from 1971, I chaired an innovative Social Work system - then in the largest European Regional local authority which, from 1975, established a unique community-based social strategy). That lasted until 1990 when the pending dismantling of the Regions encouraged me to accept the invitation from the Head of Public Health in the Copenhagen branch of WHO to work for her on a temporary basis (lasting 6 months) allowing me take up a new career as a consultant in ex-communist countries. All this is described in the current draft of The Search for Democracy – a long journey which is a sort of memoir of the reform lessons from the 40-odd years between 1970 and 2012 when I eventually hung up my boots.

Others doing some stock-taking were Rod Rhodes and Chris Pollitt whose video presentation on the lessons from the British reform efforts of the past 40 years is well worth watching

Sadly, Pollitt is no longer with us – but the other writers in the band I very much respect are. And this includes names such as Bourgon, Caiden, Fukuyama, Guy Peters, Hood, Jessop, Jun, Rhodes, Raadscheldres, Rose and Rothstein. Of these, only Raadschelders has graced us with a memoir (of a sort) which is The Three Ages of Government – from the person to the group to the world (2020) who is, sadly, far too academic – every sentence has a reference which you have to consult at the end. But it does give a very good sense of the literature.