Reason as the servant of Passion

One of the delights of my house in the Carpathian Mountains is the library – with books cascading from shelving which started almost 20 years ago with a magnificent oak bookshelf and now bulge over doors, windows, corners and alcoves – anywhere not already invaded by paintings….

Coming back to the house immediately exposes me to a rich serendipity of texts many of which have lain there for years. Or which demand - and repay - rereading.

This past week has therefore been a bit of a reading week for me and I would like to share some of the gems I’ve come across not only in each of those two categories - but in a third one which is becoming more significant these days – the “virtual” one.   

“The Righteous Mind – why good people are divided by politics and religion” by Jonathan Haidt (2012) has lain undisturbed on my shelves since it arrived 4 years ago – but is one of the best psychological treatments of political issues I have read. And that includes Leo Abse’s dissection of leading politicians - “Private Member” (1973) which was bettered only by Alaister Mant’s strangely neglected “Leaders we Deserve”.

Psychologists were, of course, in the van of the reaction (which started a decade or so ago) against the overly rationalistic explanations of events - Thinking Fast and Slow; Daniel Kahneman (2012) is probably the best known of these - although it's too technical and dense for me. He may have won a Nobel prize but I gave up after a few pages - and had the same reaction just now when I pulled it down from another shelf
George Lakoff is a psychologist - and much more readable - who has been exploring this terrain - and that of "framing" (see recommended reading) - for more than two decades eg “Moral Politics – how Liberals and Politics Think” (1996); and The Political Mind – a cognitive scientist’s guide to your brain and its politics (2008).
 
Haidt’s treatment, however, shines for three reasons – first, it takes us beyond the narrow scope of a specialist and brings in, to illustrate his points, the wisdom of such writers as social philosopher David Hume and sociologist Emile Durkheim. Indeed Hume’s quip about “passion being the servant of reason” serves as the trigger for the text  

The core of the book, secondly, rests on what he identifies as six moral foundations of society viz the care/harm; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion; sanctity/degradation; and liberty/oppression dichotomies. He then uses this classification to suggest that the strength of the political right is their understanding of the importance of this entire range – whereas the left tend to emphasise only half of the range of values…

The final strength of the book is the way it’s structured – with the 5-6 key points of each chapter being clearly laid out and summarized. I’m an impatient reader (there are too many other interesting books waiting) and this made it much easier to skim…

It also uses the occasional diagram (something I always appreciate) one of which classifies people according to the extent to which they express EMPATHY (or “feeling for others” axis one) or SYSTEMISATION (or “classifying things or concepts” - axis two). Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant both figure in the bottom right quadrant (sociable Kant less so than the almost autistic father of utilitarianism). 

But the diagram made me realise that I too fall into that same bottom right quadrant! 
I may be a Leo but of the more retiring sort - as I learned when I took the Belbin test expecting to be confirmed as a Leader but was exposed as a "resource person". 
I was always more of a networker – if one with a strong penchant for books and typologies

Recommended Reading/viewing
The whole issue of "framing" (story-telling) is quite fascinating and is becoming a major issue as we increasingly understand the scale of both government and corporate leaders' manipulation of us all over the past century
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2014/07/stories-we-tell.html

Monoculture – how one story is changing everything by FS Michaels (2011)
Finding Frames (2011)
Warm Words – how the climate story is evolving (IPPE 2011)

Storytelling - bewitching the modern mind; Christian Salmon (2010) an epub which needs conversion to pdf
The Common Cause Handbook (2010)
Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions; Keith Grint (2008)
“Don’t Think of an Elephant – know your values and frame the debate”; George Lakoff (2004)

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2016/11/in-praise-of-documentary.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

Plus Ca Change....???

About 25 years ago I first doodled a little table which tried to identify the key subjects which had divided opinion in each of the decades since the 1930s

At the time I didn’t understand why I was doing this - but it was clearly an important idea for me because I would keep returning to it…I became fascinated by the failure of those who became disillusioned with ideas which had initially enthused them to ask the obvious question about the lessons they drew from both the seduction and disillusionment

It was, of course, Keynes who first drew our attention to the power of ideas. The quote is on my blog’s masthead –

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas"

But most of us seem to imagine that we are so hard-headed as to be resistant to anything but appeals to our self-interest.

As a result we fail to ask good questions about the rise and fall of ideas –

If only we would take time to explore the reasons for both the seductiveness and disappointments, we might learn to develop the art of scepticism…

The focus of my table (called “The Ebb and Flow of Ideas”) on fashionable ideas is, of course, rather idiosyncratic. The more normal way to handle social trends is that of social historians such as David Kynaston who emphasise the influence of technological change. But documentarist Adam Curtis shows us yet another way – choosing the theme of social control to demonstrate how the theories of a few individuals - from Freud to “game theorists” and characters such as RD Laing, JD Buchanan, Bob McNamara – were used by big business and politicians alike in the post-war period. And how an utterly negative assumption about human nature underpinned the basic model of social interaction they all used…

His series called The Trap is typical and its various parts can be viewed here, here – and here.

I knew that the author of the famous satirical series “Yes, Minister” (Anthony Jay - whose essay I reproduce in the final part of my own 5-part series) based it on the work of the “public choice” economists – (35 mins into part 1) but I had not, until viewing “The Trap” realised the role RD Laing had played in destroying the US psychology establishment and bringing in a new self-referential one…

Curtis’s work has attracted some good profiles – eg this one in 2007 and this one in 2012

His most recent documentary is Hypernormalisation which I am right now viewing and on which I may comment shortly…..

No less a journal than The Economist has just published a long interview with him – in which he makes the important point that - 

What no one saw coming was the effect of individualism on politics. It’s our fault. We all want to be individuals and we don’t want to see ourselves as parts of trade unions, political parties or religious groups. We want to be individuals who express ourselves and are in control of our own destiny. With the rise of that hyper-individualism in society, politics got screwed. That sense of being part of a movement that could challenge power and change the world began to die away and was replaced by a technocratic management system.That’s the thing that I’m really fascinated by. I think the old mass democracies sort of died in the early 90s and have been replaced by a system that manages us as individuals

My recent post on "controlling the Masses" led to another important series of posts about contemporary politics which included reading lists about the location of power….As I was rereading them, I was struck with exactly the same reaction as Curtis when he makes this comment about investigative journalism - 

“The problem I have with a lot of investigative journalism, is that they always say: “There should be more investigative journalism” and I think, “When you tell me that a lot of rich people aren't paying tax, I’m shocked but I’m not surprised because I know that. I don’t want to read another article that tells me that”. What I want is an article that tells me why, when I’m told that, nothing happens and nothing changes. And no one has ever explained that to me.

Curtis uses the opportunity of The Economist interview to emphasise the point that people are searching for a new politics which will give them a vision worth striving for....and that we all seem overcome with a dreadful fatalism....I very much agree with his opinion that our times need a new more positive and more social vision and that the central question indeed is how we learn to trust again…..
This gives me a chance to remind my readers of the great reading list I included recently for protestors

In Praise of the Documentary

I have come late to the work of documentarist Adam Curtis. I had registered a year or so ago his The Century of the Self (2002) which told the story (as Curtis puts it) of “how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy"; and shows how the man who effectively invented the PR industry which then went on to take over the machinery of state propaganda……. was Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays.

And his documentary Bitter Lake (2015) about the role of Saudi Arabia in post-war politics was a mind-blowing piece which brought forth this post earlier this year with its acknowledgment that -  

Good documentaries require a rare combination - knowledge of the subject, experience of filming, appropriate selection and editing of text, images and music, and appreciation of how to fit them together

His latest (3 hour) production - Hypernormalisation - hit our screens last month – with Curtis himself setting the scene in his blog thus -

We live in a time of great uncertainty and confusion. Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control. Donald Trump, Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, random bomb attacks. And those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed - they have no idea what to do. 

This film is the epic story of how we got to this strange place. It explains not only why these chaotic events are happening - but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand them.It shows that what has happened is that all of us in the West - not just the politicians and the journalists and the experts, but we ourselves - have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world.

But because it is all around us we accept it as normal. HyperNormalisation is a giant narrative spanning forty years, with an extraordinary cast of characters. They include the Assad dynasty, Donald Trump, Henry Kissinger, Patti Smith, the early performance artists in New York, President Putin, intelligent machines, Japanese gangsters, suicide bombers - and the extraordinary untold story of the rise, fall, rise again, and finally the assassination of Colonel Gaddafi. 

All these stories are woven together to show how today’s fake and hollow world was created. Part of it was done by those in power - politicians, financiers and technological utopians. Rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, they retreated. And instead constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang onto power.

And it wasn’t just those in power. This strange world was built by all of us. We all went along with it because the simplicity was reassuring. And that included the left and the radicals who thought they were attacking the system.

The film shows how they too retreated into this make-believe world - which is why their opposition today has no effect, and nothing ever changes. But there is another world outside. And the film shows dramatically how it is beginning to pierce through into our simplified bubble. Forces that politicians tried to forget and bury forty years ago - that were then left to fester and mutate - but which are now turning on us with a vengeful fury.

Curtis is not to everyone’s taste – with some annoyance being expressed at the randomness of his narratives - which do jump around in a rather tantalizing if not conspiratorial way….with music and odd image clips (from BBC Archives). Indeed there is a short mocking video here which does capture his style….. .

But I personally like the way he tries to capture recent intellectual history – and, in particular, builds bridges across the huge abysses that increasingly separate the social science disciplines…. We need a lot more of this….

Close readers of this blog may have noticed that it has occasionally mentioned the fascinating period of American intellectual history in the 2 decades after the second world war whose personalities and books in the late 50s and early 60s helped shape my own thinking people like JK Galbraith, James Buchanan, Ivan Illich…

 An Adam Curtis Resource

The google search I did for articles and interviews about his work unearthed quite a few gems – my favourite being this long interview with him, the second of a series (the first being a fascinating account of how he came to stumble on his particular type of documentary)

Can’t get you out of my head (2021 - 6 part series)

https://watchdocumentaries.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/

http://spectre-online.org/where-to-start-with-adam-curtis/

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/32/68236/in-conversation-with-adam-curtis-part-i/

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/33/68302/in-conversation-with-adam-curtis-part-ii/

https://soundcloud.com/e-flux-1/adam-curtis-in-conversation

https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2016/10/negotiating-the-pleasure-principlethe-recent-work-of-adam-curtis/

"all watched over by machines"….https://vimeo.com/groups/96331/videos/80799353

http://johnquincy.blogspot.bg/2010/01/active-citizens-or-passive-consumers.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/09/the_curse_of_tina.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/archives.html

http://critique-of-pure-reason.com/the-use-and-abuse-of-vegetational-concepts-adam-curtis-on-cybernetics-ecology-and-power/

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/strange_freedom_the_origins_of_the_neoliberal_leviathan

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/30/magazine/adam-curtis-documentaries.html?_r=0

Update; just come across this reference to the US documentarist Ken Burns - who recently put an Netflix a documentary about the Vietnam War which is more than 100 hours of viewing! 

From Freud to Focus Groups

Television is banned from two of the three places I currently call home but a Torrent service I have access to in Sofia has, over the past few months, allowed me to view, on my PC, films (but of of my choice), presentations - by people such as Varoufakis - and documentaries.

The experience makes me begin to question my previous reluctance to allow moving images into my home…..and Frankie Boyle is all to blame……He is perhaps one of the most outrageous comedians ever to walk a stage (more risqué by far than my old favourites of Little Britain) and has recently taken the unusual step of starting to write for the Guardian.  I almost split a rib laughing at his article in today’s paper. I do understand that humour doesn’t easily cross borders (and his accent certainly doesn’t) but this excerpt will give a sense of his style…   

The Labour party has, from the beginning, been made up of diverse factions; that’s its beauty – asking it to become cohesive is like trying to find one shampoo that will care for the hair of everybody in Angelina Jolie’s house. Until recently, Labour politicians have been scared to tell anyone their opinions as they had to have one that appealed to every single person in the country. Under Ed Miliband the current manifesto would just say: “Good Adele’s back, isn’t it?”

A certain nostalgia in the parliamentary party is inevitable: it’s hard to deny Blair helped to create a powerful movement. Unfortunately that movement was the Islamic State.

I started to read the discussion thread (2425 comments already!!) but, typically, got sidetracked early on by a reference to a documentary about the role of Saudi Arabia in post-war politics which turned out to be a mind-blowing piece - Bitter Lake - from Adam Curtis, the Director of a powerful series I saw some years back called The Century of the Self which 

advances the thesis that Freud's views of the unconscious set the stage for corporations, and later politicians, to market to our unconscious fears and desires. It shows how advertising once aimed to influence rational choice. This gave way in the early 20th century to advertising aimed to connect feelings with a product.

Amazingly enough, at the root of this change was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, an American propagandist in WWI, who applied his wartime experience and his uncle’s theories of the unconscious to peacetime commerce. He invented the field of public relations, popularized press releases and product tie-ins, and changed public opinion about matters ranging from women smoking to the use of paper cups — all to increase sales.

Viewing politics as just another product to sell, Bernays also helped Calvin Coolidge stage one of the first overt media acts for a president, and helped engineer the 1954 coup in Guatemala on behalf of his client the United Fruit Company, by painting their democratically elected leader as communist. This and more happens in just the first hour of the documentary, titled “Happiness Machines.”

The second part focuses on the ascendancy of psychoanalysis and Anna Freud’s consolidation of power. The point here is that the unconscious was seen as a dangerous menace that needed to be kept under lock and key. Rational choice, especially by crowds, was unreliable under its influence, so “guidance from above” (in Bernays’ words) was needed from political leaders and corporations for the public good.

The conformity and mass-marketing of the 1950s reflects this view of a public that cannot be trusted to think for itself. The pendulum swings the other way in the third and best installment, “There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads [and] He Must be Destroyed.”

By the 1960s the human potential movement urged the expression of impulses instead of their repression. Business was eager to help. By marketing products as a means of self-expression, business turned from channeling public impulses to pandering to them.There is a fascinating discussion in the film about political activism being co-opted in this process: making the world a better place gave way to making oneself better in ways that, not coincidentally, required buying more goods and services.

The final segment, called “Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering,” follows this impulse-pandering into politics. Instead of political leadership we now have politics led by focus groups. The public gets what it asks for not what it needs (healthcare and infrastructure improvements).

You can read the full script here and view the documentary itself here. 

Good documentaries require a rare combination - knowledge of the subject, experience of filming, appropriate selection and editing of text, images and music, and appreciation of how to fit them together
One of the best websites for challenging documentaries must be Thought Maybe – which I thoroughly recommend. You might also like this list of the best 50 documentaries of all time - from the excellent Sight and Sound journal.

Update; just come across this reference to the US documentarist Ken Burns - who recently put an Netflix a documentary about the Vietnam War which is more than 100 hours of viewing!