Post-Modernity, Anyone??

The 1960s was a critical period for Europe. My generation left the austerity of the postwar years behind and tasted freedom - not just in the UK but in the world as a whole as vividly shown in this brilliant production by the German Historical Institute 1968 – memories and legacies of a global revolt (2009). These past few days, I stumbled on a short draft about Post-Modernity which I felt needed updating – not least because it traces my intellectual development, a subject on which I tend to be a bit reticent. I’m attaching the new draft because I suspect it reflects the experience of my older readers and might help my younger readers make more sense of the world.

I consider myself lucky because my upbringing made me particularly aware of the very different ways people look at the world. This for various reasons

• My parents lived in a mansion in the West End of a Scottish town – but were poor, my father being a presbyterean Minister.

• I went to a State school although some of my friends came from more privileged backgrounds.

• I became a Labout councillor at a young age (25) in a town very sensitive to class differences and, as a result, became a bit of a “mugwump”.

• At University, I was exposed to the teachings of Karl Popper and therefore resisted the easy ideology of the New Left – despite my avid readings of the early editions of the New Left Review from 1960, with various hiccups, right through to the present. Whether you agree with it or not, it is the most thoughful of publications.

This is a short paper but an important one for me given that we have so many lens through which we look when we’re trying to make sense of the world - be it 2, 3, 4, 5, 12 or 57. The exact number is not a matter of great importance – what does matter is that we recognise that there are these differences in how we view the world. But that is something we seem very reluctant to do. The paper tries to -

• explain how my upbringing and university experience predisposed me to a postmodernist way of thinking

• demonstrate the influence of such writers as EH Carr (1961) and Peter Berger (1966)

• show how the mix of academic and political work developed in me an appreciation of the different ways people understand the worldview

• suggest how this was confirmed in my later reading and work

The paper can be accessed here – or in the list at the top-right column of the blog

Rabbie Burns

 January 25th sees Scots all over the world coming together to celebrate the Scottish values we’ve long seen as embodied in the life of our national poet, Rabbie Burns. A ploughman and then customs official, Burns wrote in revolutionary times; understood its hypocrisies; and sympathized with its struggles against injustice. The Best Laid Schemes – selected poetry and prose of Robert Burns ed by Robert Crawford and Chris MacLachlan (2021) sets the scene well in this Introduction -

Tender, humorous, sly, sometimes stinging, Robert Burns is one of the world’s greatest love poets. His vernacular tone of address can have a beguiling intimacy about it at the same time as sounding cheekily egalitarian. In tone and tenor Burns, not Shakespeare, is the representative poet of modern democratic cultures. In his work a warmth and a radical political alignment, a bonding of poetry to the causes and traditions of ‘the people’, are immediately apparent and engaging. Though his politics are complex, even at times contradictory, recent writing has reshaped understanding of Scotland’s national poet as a politically radical writer of republican sympathies, one schooled by knowledge of the American as well as the French Revolution.

One of the world’s most mercurially alluring writers, Burns is the first modern poet to be acclaimed a national bard. His erotic verse, like his own life, ranges from the lyrically delicate to the scandalous and bawdy. He lived much of what he wrote about, and Burns lived with dramatic intensity. In 1796 he burned out, dying at the age of 37. His depressive temperament (hinted at early on in the poem ‘To Ruin’), his struggles with poverty, and his engagement with his own celebrity status make his life and work remarkably forceful. Repeatedly there is an insistent performative impulse. His poetry is bound up with his own life, but his songmaking is also splendidly universal so that verses like those of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ are relished and used in cultures very different from his own. The innate drama of his life and the reach of his poetry transcend the locally Scottish, and appeal to the global community. The modernity of his radicalism did not compromise his artistic gift, and presses the case that contemporary egalitarian societies round the world should recognise him as both ancestral and familiar, should regard him still as ‘The Bard’.

This is a wonderful BBC documentary presented by a Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagen and this is a typical Burns’ Supper

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

 The last post suggested that too many books simply regurgitated what most of us already know about the economic system and that what is needed is a text which builds on this knowledge and identifies the detailed steps required for us to achieve a better world. Since my retiral in 2011, I’ve actually been working on such a book and am pleased to present the latest version - What is to be Done? Dispatches to the next generation. This runs in at 150 pages but is linked to a larger version which is double the size.

One of the Annexes gives hyperlinks to several hundred books which purport to thrown some light on the operation of the economic system – în some cases with some notes

Each of its chapters contains a table with links to the posts which inspired the text – with a ”takeaway” message. Let me summarise the chapters

Chapter 1. Critical junctures identified

History is written by the victors – and the sycophants who surround them. Events were generally much more finely balanced than first versions admit. Many people consider that the West has lost its way recently - and are struggling both to identify the reasons and to explore how a different future could be built. For some, it is simple – just a question of turning the clock back to the golden days....But most people recognise this as no more than an emotional tic and really want to understand how we – in the UK, the European mainland or the US – managed to make such a mess of things; and then what steps might be taken to build better societies...

This chapter looks back at the events of the past 80 years to try to identify the crucial points which have turned the hopes of the postwar period to the despair which currently grips many societies

Supporting Arguments can be found in Covid 19 as a Critical Juncture 

( Duncan Green 2020) and Out of the Belly of Hell Anthony Barnett 2020

Chapter 2.Trespassing encouraged

Intellectual specialisation has made it difficult for us to understand the world Most leaders of organisations are in the grip of groupthink and need countervailing mechanisms of accountability to help them see new realities

Boundaries – whether between countries, fields of study, professions, classes, religions or political parties – are usually heavily protected. But those able and willing to cultivate cross-border connections are often hugely rewarded – not just with monetary profit but with new insights. Just look at the Hanseatic League and the intellectual and cultural – let alone commercial - richness of towns and cities which lay on trading routes.

Supprting Arguments can be found in Irving Janis’ “Victims of Groupthink” (1972), Gillian Tett’s “The Silo Effect” (2015) and Matt Syed’s “Rebel Ideas” (2019)

chapter 3. Economics – rather than statues – should be toppled from its grip on our minds

2008 should have been the death knell of economics since it had succumbed some decades earlier to a highly-simplified and unrealistic model of the economy which was then starkly revealed in all its nakedness. But the subject had, perhaps deliberately, been made so boring that people felt they had to ”leave it to the experts”.

John Kenneth Galbraith’s ”Almost Everyone’s Guide to Economics” (1978) was probably the first book to try to rectify this – but it is only in the new millennium that things have shown sign of improvement. Annex 3 lists texts which are enjoyable as well as useful. But we have to be realistic about the chances of a real reform in the education of economists. Academic economists have invested a lifetime’s reputation and energy in offering the courses they do - and neither can nor will easily offer programmes to satisfy future student demands for relevance and pluralism….. chances are, they think, that the next cohort will be more pliable... 

Supporting arguments can be found in Steve Keen and Brian Davey’s ”Credo” (2014)

chapter 4. Probing the Elephant

Talk of capitalism and post-capitalism is too loose and reified. There are various equally legitimate ways of perceiving the “beast”. Why do we have so much difficulty finding a word to describe the nature of the system which is wreaking so much havoc on the world? Is it globalisation? Neo-liberalism? Capitalism? And does it matter?

It’s more than ten years since the global financial meltdown – although a lot of writers now concede that the rot started a lot earlier…The Marxists may be a bit extreme in suggesting about 200 years earlier…..although there is a christian school of thought that would go back to the Garden of Eden….

“Exploitation” is not a word you hear a lot about these days and yet it so vividly captures what we have done – with ever increasing intensity - to people, to the land, to resources. Initially the suggested remedies were technical in nature – if massive in their financial implications - with private debt being nationalised and traumatic increases in state debt. Slowly we have realised that political and moral responses offer the only real hope. But the neoliberal model has gone from strength to strength – with no real attempt made to rein in the financial sector.

This chapter will look at various attempts which have been made to understand the nature of the Beast whose voracious appetite keep us all in thrall and to which Varoufakis gave the name The global minotaur.

Supporting arguments can be found in 57 Varieties of Capitalism

chapter 5. A new social goal is needed for the commercial company

Shareholder value ignores other crucial dimensions – such as the wider community and workers, Cooperative and social enterprises employ more people than we think – but have to struggle for legitimacy

In certain circles, to be accused of trying to reform – rather than “destroy” or “transform” – capitalism has long been one of the gravest criticisms if not crimes. Not only this accusation but the very distinction has, however, always seemed a bit ridiculous. What would “transformation” actually mean?

And who on earth could be attracted to the notion of wholescale nationalisation and associated bureaucratic power – to say nothing of even worse scenarios?? I, for one, would rather support workers’ cooperatives…

Although Margaret Thatcher kept asserting that capitalism was the only way – or, in her own words, “there is No Alternative”, a mantra which soon attracted the acronym TINA – we have, since the end of the Cold War, become familiar with the “Varieties of capitalism” literature. Eased into it by Michel Albert, with later work by the likes of Crouch, Hall and Soskice being much more academic and, often, impenetrable. But by the turn of the millennium the message seemed to be that

- Capitalism takes various forms

- although it’s actually called “globalization” and

- will always be with us.

But all that changed in 2008 – earlier pages have plotted the increasing dystoptic aspect of book titles on the subject and the increasing use of the previously unmentionable word beginning with C

chapter 6. Lessons of change explored

So much protest fails and few social enterprises have a multiplier effect. How do we create winnable coalitions? We use the concept of “change” all the time but there seems to be surprisingly little written about it as an all-embracing concept. The literature on change is, of course, immense but is divided very much into several completely separate fields which guard their boundaries very strongly - dealing with the individual, the organisational and the societal respectively (forgive the last term but “social” does have a rather different meaning from activities relating to a particular society). The first field tends to be interested in things like stress; the second in the management of change (but in 3 separate sectors); and the last in collective challenges to power which often go under the label of “social change”

Capacity development is one of the few approaches which recognises the importance of all three – although, in reality, its focus is on training and it never ventures into the dangerous field of social change. It’s only in the past year or so that people have dared challenge this.

Our understanding of that phenomenon generally comes from history books the most popular of which deal with individuals - who are easier to identify with. Talk of technological and economic forces tends to be too abstract for most people – although recent books from the likes of Jared Diamond and Yuval Hari are enjoying a new vogue by virtue presumably of our increased awareness of the power of technology

For more – see A short note and annotated bib on Change

7. Change agents and coalitions sought

Progressives are good at sounding off – and bad at seeking common ground

This book started with questions which I was posing 20 years ago to help identify where I should be putting what energies I had left in me. I have to confess that, so far, the book (and the blogposts on which it draws) is the only tangible result of those questions!

An issue I keep returning to in the book is our inability to make ”common cause” as the world seems to be collapsing around us. It’s not that we don’t care – or are apathetic. A lot of us participate actively in discussions and demonstrations. It’s rather that our energies are dissipated in too many, diverse fields of concern... And in increasingly polarising debates – sometimes about issues which have echoes of the medieval debates about ”angels dancing on the head of pins”. Why is this?

Our developing egocentricity seems also to undermine the possibilities of effective collective action. For example, too many of the big names who write the tracts about the global crises present their analyses and prescriptions with insufficient reference to the efforts of others. They have to market their books – and themselves – and, by that very act, seem to alienate others who could be their comrades in arms. For more see Common Ground – democracy and collectivity in an age of individualism Jeremy Gilbert

WHY DO SO MANY NEW TITLES WASTE OUR TIME?

“Silent Coup”, “The Big Myth”, “Rentier Capitalism”…are titles of some of the books which have hit us in recent years. People keep churning out books which just repeat what most of us already know!

When is someone going to build on these critiques from the past 50 years and do a proper exploration of “what is to be done” to give us a civilized society? One of the best is “The Capitalism Papers - fatal flaws in an obsolete system” published in 2012 by the famous US activist and journalist Jerry Mander. It has everything –

·               the ecological concerns;

·               questioning of the legal basis of the corporation and the inequities and iniquities they cause;

·               recognition that military spending and advertising supports the whole rotten system

·               that democracy is being privatised

·               as is our very consciousness 

Mander draws it all together in a masterful conclusion in some 35 pages starting at page 258 (of the hyperlink given in the title above) which has 4 sub-headings -  

·                Nature Comes First

·                The Primacy of Scale: Not Globalization, Localization

·                Experiments in Corporate Values and Structure.

·                Hybrid Economics . . . 

The only thing it’s light on is an annotated bibliography. It has a 7 page bibliography but would have been useful to have had Mander’s reasons for selecting those particular works (from p296) 

None of the titles with which this post starts have a recommended reading list but all have extensive notes

·       The Big Myth – how American businesses taught us to loathe government and love the market N Oreskes and E Conway 2023

·     Silent Coup – how Corporations overthrew Democracy C Provost and M Kennard 2023

·       Rentier Capitalism – who owns the economy and who pays for it? Brett Christophers 2020

 

The Real Lessons from British Justice

Yet another major miscarriage of justice has surfaced in the UK – to add to those which have plagued the poor suffering Brits, be it Hillsborough, Grenfell or the Birmingham Six, The current issue of the New Statesman expresses it most clearly - 

As a miscarriage of justice, it is perhaps unrivalled in British history. Between 1999 and 2015, at least 3,500 sub-postmasters were wrongly accused of theft, fraud and false accounting by the Post Office. The fault lay with the defective Horizon IT system, which incorrectly suggested that there were financial shortfalls where none existed.

Trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare, workers protested their innocence, but this did not stop them being trampled upon. More than 700 sub-postmasters received criminal convictions and 236 were imprisoned. Others were forced to pay back tens of thousands of pounds and suffered financial ruin. Family homes were lost and marriages destroyed. At least four victims are thought to have taken their lives as a consequence.

For years, this story has played out in the background of British public life. In 2019, a group of campaigners led by Alan Bates – the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance – won a major legal victory when the High Court found that the Fujitsu-developed Horizon system contained “bugs, errors and defects”, and that there was a “material risk” that financial shortfalls in branches were caused by it. Dozens of Post Office workers subsequently had their convictions quashed by the Court of Appeal in 2021.

A police investigation and an independent public inquiry into the scandal were also launched during this period.

But it has taken a TV show – “Mr Bates vs The Post Office” – to give the affair the political prominence it deserves. The four-part series, which was broadcast on ITV at the start of this year, is testimony to the power of drama. 

But it was one of my favourite blogs – Stumbling and Mumbling – which put it all in the necessary perspective – 

A well-ordered society has mechanisms which prevent such people getting power or doing much damage if they do get it. The Post office scandal shows that we lack such mechanisms, in at least four respects: 

 - There's good evidence that companies actually select for psychopaths. People who are unusually concerned with status and power are precisely those who aim for the top of hierarchies (whereas many others of us just want to get on with our jobs), and psychopaths' superficial charm and fluency appeals to hirers. As David Allen Green says, "the likes of Paula Vennells are always with us and will always somehow obtain senior positions." This is consistent with a finding by Luigi Zingales and colleagues, that a lot more corporate fraud occurs than is actually detected. What's more, companies also select for over-confidence as they mistake "competence cues" - the right body language or the illusion of knowledge - for actual ability. (All this might also apply to politics).

 - Ministers failed to control or to replace Post Office management, believing - in a remarkable example of not understanding the function of ownership - that it "has the commercial freedom to run its business operations without interference from the shareholder." Ed Davey distinguishes himself from the other ministers merely by being so uncouth as to have blurted this out in public.

 - Police for years did not investigate the likely fraud and perversion of the course of justice by Post Office bosses. The fact that they have begun to do so since the screening of the ITV drama reminds us that the Met is more concerned with PR than with justice. 

 - The courts failed to acquit innocent sub-postmasters, for systemic reasons discussed by David Allen Green. This was not an isolated miscarriage of justice; it occurred over 700 times. 

We should think of our main social institutions - markets, the democratic process, the legal system and so on - as selection devices. What we have here is evidence that these do not operate as you might think they should, not in one or two instances but systematically and persistently.

·      The Post Office board and government ministers did not select honest or competent bosses.

·      The police did not choose to investigate serious crimes.

·      And the courts failed to correctly distinguish between the guilty and the innocent. 

These, however, are by no means the only selection mechanisms which don't work as one might imagine they should. 

·       Politicians are selected for fanaticism rather than competence.

·       Financial markets often do not select the best investment opportunities, which is why we have asset price bubbles and under-performing fund managers.

·       Product and labour markets do not eliminate the "long tail of extremely badly managed firms" described (pdf) by Bloom and Van Reenen. Peer review often does not select the best academic research.

·       And the media does not select for informed expertise. 

Society's main social institutions, then, very often do not select the best or filter out the worst. Often, they do the opposite. What should we make of this fact? One reasonable inference is that it is just really difficult to make good decisions with limited information and so there will always be a great deal of ruin in the nation.

If this were all, though, we'd expect to see political activity and debate focusing upon how we might improve such mechanisms. But it isn't. Instead in recent years politics has been consumed with Brexit and other culture war issues. Which is of course yet another example of a selection mechanism: politics selects to focus on irrelevancies rather than more important matters.

This is part of a pattern. It's normal for people to neglect structural and societal forces and to pay more attention instead to individual humans. Which is why public anger is focussed upon Paula Vennells rather than the mechanisms that recruited and enabled her. People like a witch-hunt and are attacking Vennells in the same way that criminals attack nonces - to remind themselves that they are morally superior to at least somebody.

Even good people can inadvertently reinforce this tendency. In exposing the detail of the Post Office scandal there's a danger of missing the big picture. Both journalism (even when done well) and drama look more at human interest stories than at social structures.

And this suits the ruling class. It has long flattered itself that the system works because "good chaps" will be in charge. The fact that "good chaps" so rarely are - and that the Post Office merely joins a list of systemic injustices such as Hillsborough, Windrush and Grenfell - doesn't seem to undermine this complacency.

Which brings me to a concern. You might have noticed that I've avoided using the word "failure" to describe all these different selection effects. This is because they might not be failures at all. The fact that the powerful can enrich themselves at the expense of the powerless; that markets permit the incompetent wealthy to stay rich; and that politics is a clownish sideshow that avoids substantive issues all suit the elite perfectly well. Prem Sikka is right to say that the Post Office affair "has once again shown the UK to be a hotbed of corruption and cronyism where in pursuit of profits and private gains innocent people are bludgeoned to silence and submission."

It has thus shown what Marxists have long known - that law and justice are veils behind which lay exploitation and cruelty. The question for the establishment is how they might bring these veils back down.

Ways of Seeing

Each of us has a particular lens through which we look when we’re trying to make sense of the world. The International Relations people have it down to a fine art – with their classification of the subject into no fewer than 8 schools – realism, liberalism, marxism, structuralism, feminism, postcolonialism etc. (Chapter 7 of the link gives the lowdown on the various schools)   

In my youth, I was aware of a tripartite division – conservatives, socialists 

and liberals. I didn’t like the Manichean approach of left/right - there was 

always a third way, be it green or ecological. 
It was only in the new millennium, however, that I became aware of the 

four dimensions of grid-group theory which anthropologist Mary Douglas 

introduced - consisting of four very different “world views” (what she calls

 hierarchist, egalitarian, individualist and fatalist) which came to be known 

as “Cultural Theory”. I first came across Mary Douglas’ theory in 1998, thanks 

to public admin theorist Chris Hood’s “The Art of the State” which uses her 

typology brilliantly to help us understand the strengths, weaknesses and risks 

of these various world views. 

But it appears we have yet another way of understanding the world – viz 

“conjunctural analysis”. I agree it’s a bit of a mouthful but it basically denies 

the bias in the various schools and argues that we need to recognise the complexity 

of the world and to accept there are different levels of explanation for the 

way things are. John Clarke sets out the argument in The Battle for Britain – crises, 

conflicts and the conjunctures which, I have to confess, I found very hard going.

Further Reading about “World Views”

- The Battle for Britain – crises, conflicts and the conjunctures John Clarke 2023

- Theories of International Relations ed R Devetak and J True (6^th ed 2022)

- Foundations of International Relations l ed S McGlinchey et al 2022

- Britain’s Choice – common ground and divisions in 2020s Britain (More in Common 

2020) a detailed picture of the british people and their values these days

- Twelve Ways of Seeing the World M Betti (2019 Eng – original German 2001) 

based on Rudolf Steiner's thinking, this offers a curious typology

- Cultural Evolution – people’s motivations are changing, and reshaping the world; 

Ronald Inglehart (2018) a political scientist,who has been at the heart of discussion 

about cultural values for the past 50 years – and the book and this article summarises 

that work.
- Grid, group and grade – challenges in operationalising cultural theory for cross-national 

research (2014) is a very academic article although its comparative diagrams are instructive
- “A Cultural Theory of Politics” (2011) a short article which shows how the grid-group 

approach has been used in a range of disciplines
-  Consumer Shift - how changing values are reshaping the consumer landscape Any 

Hines (2011) actually much more about values and world views than it is about consumers….

- Common Cause – the case for working with our cultural values (2010) a useful little 

manual for charities
- Finding Frames – new ways to engage the UK public (2010) ditto
- “Way of life theory – the underlying structure of world views, social relations and

 lifestyles” (2009) – a rather disjointed dissertation by Michael Edward Pepperday 

and introduction to which is here.

- Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions; Keith Grint (2008) a short very useful 

article by an academic

- The Geography of Thought – how westerners and asians think differently and why; 

Richard Nesbitt (2003) An American social psychologist gives a thought-provoking book

- “The Art of the State” Christopher Hood (1998) A brilliant essay on the usefulness 

of grid-group analysis

- Riding the Waves of Culture – understanding cultural diversity in business; Frans 

Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner (1997) the Dutchman who took on de Hofstede’s 

mantle
-When Cultures Collide – leading across cultures; Richard Lewis (1996) The book which 

introduced us to the field – and gave us marvellous vignettes of the strange habits of 

almost all countries of the world
- Management development through cultural diversity Ronnie Lessem (1995) 

Lessem is a south african who uses the four lens of the compass to show how the 

environment governs our ways of thinking.