Turning Points

The last post may have confused some readers since it moved too quickly from a focus on 

central and eastern europe to an expose of the western system - the basic argument being 

that it was “out of balance”.  It started by noting that few people had ever imagined that 

communism would collapse; that most writers had been exploring the opposite process - of 

capitalism giving way to socialism. 
The fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of communist regimes gave rise to the literature 

of transitology but it was 30 years before we got a full reckoning of its effect on both Eastern 

and Western societies in The Light that Failed – a reckoning by Ivan Krastev and Stephen 

Holmes (2019) – a book which suggested that many of the new entrants to the European Union 

in 2004-07 were inflicted with an inferiority complex and the old members with hubris.

Jared Diamond's Upheaval – turning points for nations in crisis which came out the same year perhaps offers a better explanation in suggesting that countries have a variety of ways to respond to crisis - viz

1. National consensus that one’s nation is in crisis

2. Acceptance of national responsibility to do something

3. Building a fence, to delineate the national problems needing to be

solved

4. Getting material and financial help from other nations

5. Using other nations as models of how to solve the problems

6. Building national identity

7. Honest national self-appraisal

8. Historical experience of previous national crises

9. Dealing with national failure

10. Situation-specific national flexibility

11. National core values

12. Freedom from geopolitical constraints

Inasmuch as there's now a deep sense of crisis everywhere, it's helpful to use this framework t

to think about how societies should be responding to the present polycrises.
People shy away these days from prediction – it’s got a bad name for having so many 

failures to its name. The favoured option is scenarios (to which probabilities are attached) 

with four scenarios normally being on offer. So here goes for my scenarios for the future

• “Transhumanism” – being the name given to how AI will be extended to our human 

bodies. Here’s a helpful video about it

• Dystopia?

• Utopia – which is probably be a form of Socialism

• ??

NB

Diamond's book has received mixed reviews – this website collects them all

https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all/upheaval-turning-points-for-nations-in-crisis/

Books which ask what individual crises might tell us about national futures are rare. The only other one I know is Life – and how to survive it by Robin Skynner (psychiatrist) and John Cleese (1993)

In Praise of the Butterfly

How can I tell what I think, unless I see what I write?

EM Foster (1927)

Most serious blogs I glance at have a theme – be it British literature; Marxist Economics; paintings; Brexit; French politics; policy analysis; left politics or…Scottish mountains - which the authors stick to fairly religiously with the only relief being the occasional bit of music…(eg Boffy’s Blog; or All That’s Solid)

One of the distinctive things about this blog, however, is its “butterfly approach” to subjects…..That’s usually a derogatory term – used to indicate a shallow person who wanders from subject to subject. It’s true that I have a fixation about strange things such as democracy, government policy-making and institutions, turgid academic writing…. but – like a butterfly – I alight wherever my senses are attracted by a book cover; striking painting; a wine etiquette; a piece of music; or the ambiance of a town or encounter…..        

After all, the blog started as I knew I was phasing myself out of the job market……but conscious of the unusual variety of roles and places I’ve been lucky enough to work in.

I was first elected to political office when I was pretty young; and focused my energies respectively on community action; municipal corporate management and multiple deprivation in the 70 and 80s; and “institutional development” in ex-communist countries in the period after 1990. 

I remember, for example, going to the 2 Universities in Glasgow in the mid 70s and challenging them to produce any research which could help us - in the newly established Strathclyde Region – establish some coherent policies on deprivation…..Result? Zilch

Each of these issues now has a huge literature - but, when I came to them, it was difficult to find reading material. For example Marris and Rein's Dilemmas of Social Reform (1967) and Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals (1970) were the bibles in the early days of community action and deprivation strategies; Donald Schon's Beyond the Stable State (1971) for organisational studies; 
Linz and Stepan's Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (1996) and Elster and Offe's Rebuilding the Ship at Sea - Institutional Design in post-communist Countries (1997) were subsequently the bibles for transitilogy.....  

I had started at an early age this rather odd habit of writing (and publishing) papers and article trying to make sense of the experience – which I have continued for coming up for half a century. 

The blog has been my channel for my thoughts about these issues – talking with other people can often box you into a corner (particularly in Gallic cultures!) but writing forces you to pose questions about what you thought you knew. That’s why I use so often the saying about the “best way to understand an issue is to write a book about it”….and why I love the EM Foster quote which starts this post      

The most interesting question is not whether this blog will continue…..It will (Inshallah!!)!

The most interesting question is whether its focus should change – and if so, in what way?

Its three aims still seem to stand – but perhaps could do with some slight “tweaks” – eg

·         I am perhaps using posts even more deliberately these days as a means of getting inspiration to help me express better my thoughts on reform and social change issues….When I click open text I have been working on for some time, my creativity tends to freeze – but when I move my mind to the blog (or a blank piece of paper) the words come together to form a new perspective……

·         The world seems confronted with new problems which apparently require new thinking…….and make obsolete writings before (say) 1990?…Because I’ve kept a good record of my wide reading since 1960, I would dispute this and have therefore become more conscious of the importance of my role in giving annotated reading lists (and, even more passionately about the need for clarity of expression!!)

·         As I move through my “autumn days” and feel the approach of winter, the “settling of final accounts” (in the spiritual sense) becomes perhaps a more dominant theme 

Last year I wrote about my mother’s little “commonplace book” which we found amongst her possessions. It’s odd that, with the onset of the new technology, the idea of a commonplace book has not become more popular….one person’s record of favourite sayings of sages over the ages…….

Perhaps they were more laconic in those days - not feeling the need we apparently do these days to embellish the core of the wisdom with a lot of explanations? My posts of 2016 were collected and put in the logical order in The Slaves’ Chorus and came to 120 pages (the following year there were double the number of pages). Of course these are “musings”….they don’t try to compress and distill the components into a basic “essence”……which, in a sense, the tables I started to use last year have started to do……Now there’s a thought!

update; an academic offers some lessons from his blogging 

http://danieldrezner.com/research/APSAblogchapter.pdf