Celebrating the Open Free Spirit

In the eleven years of blogging, I occasionally muse about the nature of blogging. When I’m in a (self-) critical mood I refer to it as an extreme form of self-advertisement; in more benign moods I talk about its role in clarifying confused thinking….

And, of course, I’ve noticed that most serious blogs specialise in a particular topic – be it novels; economic, political or legal commentary; the EU; social policy; Marxist economics; a particular academic discipline etc 

What I haven’t paid enough attention to is how few serious blogs there are – like this one - which challenge these boundaries and choose to tramp or trespass in what I have called “NO Man’s Land”. The other image I have used is that of the butterfly which gracefully alights for a few moments on a flower and then moves on. I should perhaps be more careful in my use of that image/metaphor since the butterfly’s life is a short one   

So in closing, for the moment, this series of “posts…so far this year”, I want to try to identify those few blogs which set their face against being enclosed by boundaries and range more freely.  

1. Let me start with someone who has sadly gone silent these past couple of years – a retired Liverpool academic, Gerry of How the Light Gets In whose material  makes for great reading - with celebrations of the history and landscapes of NE Engalnd – as well as cultural and literary events all covered in loving detail. Hopefully Gerry will find his voice again…

2. Then a blog from a Bulgarian woman long resident in the US – Maria Popova - whose Brain Pickings focus on the timeless and uplifting advice of creative writers such as Ursula le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell and Rebecca Solnit

3. Then there’s my current favourite blogger, Canadian Dave Pollard of How to Save the World whose blog exudes the integrity of someone searching for what is worthwhile in life and living  

4. Another blog which defies classification is RioWang – which is half travelogue (but of such way-out places as Iran and the Caucusus ) and half celebration of the remnants of old Jewish history in such places. This, for example, is the latest post which includes a classic Persian song

5. Brave New Europe is a leftist site with an open and creative selection process

6. The Worthy House is a blog I hesitated to include – since its over-confident, ant-leftist tone sometimes offends me but the sheer range of its reviews warrant its inclusion. See for yourself with these reviews of the important book The Geography of Thought; Banfield’s The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (to which I often refer in the posts); and Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs of which they seem none too fond.

But why can I find only a handful of blogs with such an open spirit?

Posts This Year – Part V – the last few weeks

Post Title	Inspired by	The basic message
Demons and Demos	A Polish right-wing philosopher challenges liberal democracy	Identity politics has indeed gone too far
How America Lost its Mind	A 3 year old article with that title	is puritanism and post-modernism really to blame?
The Dethroning of Reason	Remembering the debate in the 1970s about “muddling through”	Did post-modernism and behavioural economics really start the rot?
Positive Public Administration	A long-overdue Manifesto	We have become too cynical about institutions
Feelings	“Nervous States” book by William Davies	How did experts initially get their status – and then lose it so recently?
Head Hand Heart	David Goodhart’s latest book	The devaluing of manual and technical work and the overestimation of the university
Links I Liked	The accident of genius; how a 1977 report changed the UK	30 years after Thatcher’s resignation, we still don’t have the measure of her
Humankind	Rutger Bregman’s latest book is a model of clarity	His argument that humans are basically altruistic doesn’t quite convince – altho he adds the rider about “power corrupting”
How Myths take root and are difficult to shift	A reread of Bregman’s book	One of my famous tables - with 22 of Bregman’s exploded myths explained
Covid19, governments, Science and Lies	I get fed up hearing the UK PM talk about “following the science”	Governments can’t avoid choices and values. Experts have their limits
The Continuing Saga of Brexit	2 of my favourite blogs	The endgame
Whatever happened to peak oil?	Reading at last J Michael Greer’s “The Long Descent” (2008)	I realise how little I understand about energy issues
The 2020 posts …..so far	This is the time of the year when I start to think about the annual E-book of posts	It is an opportunity to reflect on the blog’s distinctiveness – and what it might be doing better
Perennials - II	I like to think that a post of several years ago can still be read with benefit	why straddling boundaries gives insights
Mapping the Common Ground	A book-length report from a fascinating new think-tank with teams in 4 countries	Gives a detailed insight into the UK of 2020 – using the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt
Le Temps Perdu III	The third of the series	Why we should turn off the News
Between the Lines - IV	I’ve started – so I’ll finish	What I would like to be distinctive about the blog
The blog that keeps on giving	Dave Pollard’s blog which, like mine, is also one of the few generalist blogs	The importance in these times of good questions – and of not being put off by the lack of response

 

Lifting the lid on Hot Money - and those who make it possible

The UK’s imperial tradition gave its writers a strong streak of putting down the rest of the world – but its tradition of eccentricity encouraged in a smaller number a more respectful attitude, particularly to small nations and ethnic groups. Think Eric Newby, Rebecca West, Patrick Leigh-Fermour and, following them, Jan Morris and Neal Ascherson. Oliver Bullough is one of the most interesting of the younger generation of British writers who continue this latter tradition – another is Chris de Bellaigue whose books have focused on Iran and Turkey and Islamic civilisation.

Bullough’s first two books were on the Caucasus and Russia but his latest – which I have just finished – has the fairly self-explanatory title of Moneyland – why thieves and crooks now rule the world and how to take it back (2019). Its focus is the world of “Offshore” money which started as the post-war Bretton Woods system collapsed in 1971 – and its early pages contain the clearest explanation of how that actually got underway that I have ever read.

The book recounts visits to the multiplicity of tax havens which have sprung up – not least in British-related territories - making you wonder how the author managed to escape unscathed from these encounters with the banal evil that masquerades as the legal, taxation  and accountancy professions. 

One feature of Bullough’s books I would strongly recommend to other writers – instead of the penis-envy style of long bibliographies, he gives us at the end of each book a section on “Sources” which explains, for each chapter, which particular books he has found useful – and why….On the other hand, despite the promise in the latter part of the book’s sub-title, it doesn’t deliver on that aspect – on that Shaxson (below) is better 

Widening the discussion

It’s been 25 years since David Korten forcibly brought to our attention the legal status of the Corporation in his book “When Corporations Rule the World” (1995) Will Hutton is a rare (British) economic journalist who has, for the past three decades been trying to make more of us aware of the centrality of this question – as this useful overview of his work makes clear

British people like to think that their system is an open and honest one. But, a few years ago, British academic David Whyte edited one of the few books to explore the question of How Corrupt is Britain? (2015) - having co-authored the same year an academically very rigorous study entitled The Corporate Criminal – why corporations must be abolished; S Tombs and D Whyte (with a 30 page bibliography)

He has just published Ecocide – kill the Corporation before it kills us; David Whyte (2020) which would make an appropriate input to the ongoing study about “the future of the corporation” set up in 2017 by the British Academy and chaired by Professor Colin Mayer. In 2018 it produced 13 papers; in 2019 only 4 - and this year none. It really seems due for a kick up the proverbial arse….A previous American one had reported in 2013 

I’ve written quite a lot recently about the danger of the public leaving Economics to the experts; and have gone to the trouble of finding a selection of user-friendly texts to recommend to those readers who want to do something….. Perhaps I need to narrow the issue to that of hot money and financialisation......   

A resource on the dodgy world of hot money

Nicholas Shaxen’s Treasure Islands – tax havens and the men who stole the world (2011) was the first book I read which identified the scale of the hot money seeking refuge in these dubious places which – despite (because of) numerous international conferences – nothing has been done to stop.

Little wonder that we have now so many worthy journalistic endeavours focusing on this aspect of “financialisation” –

Richard Murphy’s Taxresearch is one of the best British sites - which has been vocal about this for years……

the Bureau of Investigative Journalism

the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2020/07/money-talks-why-we-need-new-vocabulary.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-challenge-to-conventional-finance.html

Links I Liked – hats off to black and white tradition of photography; to Words; to Localism; and to another weekly roundup worth reading

1. As a fan of Realist painting, I’ve always been drawn to black and white photography – and I was sorry I didn’t know more about Chris Killip who died a few weeks ago and was moved by this tribute to him  

Andre Kertesz’s little book On Reading is one of my favourites – and New York’s MOMA had this great catalogue about the man. 

And this week’s NYRB celebrates another photographer I hadn’t been aware of – Dorothea Lange who had also been honoured by MOMA. She had been part of Roosevelt’s famous programme which had employed artists to record the Great Depression and “An American Exodus” is one of her best-known collections of photography from that period

2. Economics from the Top Down is a blog I’ve only recently come across. Blair Fix tells us that he - 

“spends his time thinking about the future of humanity, and how we can create economic theory that’s relevant to real-world problem”

 Readers know how important I find our use of particular words – and indeed of language as a whole. So I couldn’t resist a (long) article with the title “Deconstructing Econo speak”. You can ignore the more technical aspects – it’s the use he makes of google analytics which counts….

3. a useful-looking report called Think Big, Act Small from the New Local Foundation which strikes a chord for me – given my commitment to localism

4. A Professor Heather Marquette does a weekly roundup of her reading on Governance and Conflict to which I’ve become addicted. This week’s is on corruption material…..

The Blog which keeps on giving…

Most of the mail I receive is from impersonal feeds – mainly from journals.

A letter from friend or family makes the day worthy of celebration. 

But every now and then there is a welcome post from one of my favourite bloggers eg Michael Robert’s Blog; or Mainly Macro – both of which specialise in economic commentary which I tend to skim very quickly – and another 4 I picked out for special mention in a recent update of my blogroll also focus on specialised subjects – as do, indeed, 99% of the blogs I know about…… I’ve occasionally wondered about this – once in 2014 and again last year in the post A Musing Decade when I asked 

What exactly do I mean when I say the blog is one of the longest-running “of its “kind”? Simply that the majority of blogs specialize in a particular topic - whether political commentary (yawn), book reviews (a popular subject), economics (ditto), Brexit, EC Law etc

Mine, however, darts like a butterfly to a variety of flowers. 

One blogpost which arrived this morning is always worth a close read – namely Canadian Dave Pollard’s powerfully-named “How to Save the World” and indeed is one of the very few other blogs which defies classification and which could be grouped in the “perennial” category I tried this week to claim for my own blog.

Having said that his blog defies specialisation, I then found myself immediately putting Pollard into categories by calling him both a “survivalist” and “radical non-dualist” (admittedly the phrase he uses to describe himself) And his blog certainly encourages such a labelling by grouping the people he follows into “others who write about collapse” and “radical non-dualists” 

His latest post was a typically thoughtful one sparked off by a recent interview with Frederic Laloux whose book “Reinventing Organisations” (2014) I summarised some years ago.

I would normally be pretty cynical about books with such titles – after the fiasco of the “reengineering movement” in the 1990s - but Laloux’s book looked to be a sober taking of stock of the literature on organisational excellence. And, unlike most business books, it clearly rated the notion of self-management very highly…..Laloux has been fairly quiet in the 6 years since his book was first published but, as this site and videos show, he has actually been very active   

Pollard’s post poses ten important questions which Laloux is now raising for the 2020s 

Frédéric is now asking himself and others to consider ten “revolutionary” questions to deal with the terrible crises now facing us, and the growing likelihood of large-scale collapse. All of these questions apply at both a personal and societal level:

·         Accepting unhappy truths: How can we recognize the wilful blindness we each have to “inconvenient” truths, and how can we re-train ourselves to appreciate and accept what is true even if it is not what we want to believe? It takes some intellectual courage, honesty, openness and patience to move to such a mindset.

·         Sitting with not knowing: How can we learn to admit we don’t know, and that there are no simplistic answers, so that we can then create a safe space to just sit with not knowing, with incomplete understanding, with uncertainty and ambiguity, and let possibilities emerge as we learn more, think more, and interact more, instead of rushing to resolution?

·         Admitting our powerlessness: How can we allow ourselves, especially if we’re in positions of authority, to admit that we are simply unable to solve the complex predicaments we are facing — that they are larger than all of us. That also entails breaking the co-dependency between “powerful” decision-makers (parents, bosses, preachers, and presidents) who thrive on that power and the fame and self-satisfaction it provides, and the “powerless” rest of us (who are often content to let the “powerful” shield them from any sense of obligation to make any decisions or take any actions to address what is happening).

·         Moving to blamelessness: How can we train ourselves not to blame complex predicaments on others’ actions or inaction, and to acknowledge that we’re all doing our best and that no one (and no group) is “responsible” for the crises we face? This requires letting others, and ourselves, off the hook before we start to work to address these crises. And it requires the terrifying acknowledgement that firing the boss, or the president, will not fix the predicament that has seemingly arisen under their watch.

·         Overcoming the fear of failure: How can we enable ourselves to push forward and not be paralyzed by the fear of what could go wrong and the potentially awful consequences? This need not require either exceptional courage or indemnification, but rather a collective shift in what we define as failure and how we assess others’, and our own, value, intentions and actions.

·         Giving ourselves permission: How can we move past waiting for the permission of “authorities” to take whatever action we (individually and collectively) feel must be taken to address big scary issues we care about?  [And do that while still recognizing that others are scared, conflict- and confrontation- and risk-averse, and that’s OK.]

·         Appreciating that waking people up isn’t enough: Now that many people are aware of the existential crises facing us, what more will it take to get all of us actually working on addressing these crises? It’s been a decade since Al Gore showed us beyond all doubt that merely waking people up to the reality of an “inconvenient truth” is not sufficient to lead to any meaningful action.

·         Understanding what we long for: Personally and collectively, how can we come to a better appreciation of what really matters to us, what on our deathbeds we will be most proud, or rueful, about, and why it matters, so that we can’t not act on achieving it?

·         Consciously and continually reassessing our role and purpose: How can we keep considering, every day, what else we could, individually and collectively, be doing right now that would be more useful, more joyful, more “on purpose” than what we’re currently doing? And, of course, then, why aren’t we doing that?

·         Reimagining our future as the journey of a lifetime: How can we overcome our resistance to thinking and acting on plans for a better future, when it seems so scary and hopeless, and see our future instead as a great adventure? If we’re inevitably into the sixth great extinction of life anyway, why not approach it with gusto and give it everything we’ve got? What have we really got to lose? What’s really holding us back? 

Asking these questions, first at a personal level, and then collectively, in our communities, in our workplaces, and as citizens of a world in collective peril: It’s a lot to ask!

We might well add an eleventh, meta-question: How can we learn to craft great questions? Great questions can help us, personally and collectively, engage in the conversations (the word conversation literally means “turning with”) needed to help the system (at whatever scale/scales possible) to self-correct. In other words, sometimes it’s enough just to ask the right question. 

You can listen to the interview itself here.

Between the Lines - IV

Drafting the brief intros to the series of this year’s posts I’ve been rerunning this week has been a useful exercise – at least for me. It’s encouraged me to express more clearly the philosophy behind the blog viz –

-      Reflective – taking distance from “current affairs”

-      Sceptical

-      Open – to deeper analyses

-      questioning the nature and effects of (social) media 

It’s interesting that the blog has taken recently to using the title “Whatever happened to??” to explore the sudden (and strangely unremarked) disappearance of a topic which used to be on everyone’s lips… 

We need to think more deeply about who’s pulling the strings of such intellectual fashions 

Today’s batch of posts somehow resonate with me– they may seem a bit fixated on the irrelevance of most books written by social scientists (except generic ones) but this serves only as a contrast with those written by David Graeber whose death has been such a tragedy for anyone with common sense.

 

Post Title - just click the title to get the post	Inspired by	The basic message
whatever happened to governance?	Realisation that no one was talking anymore about what was once a hot topic	did we actually learn anything from this abstract debate of the past 2 decades??
"Governance" as New Kid on the Block	Some material on networks	A reluctant concession that governments actually have to share power
why are political scientists so irrelevant?	Trying to find useful books	Penis envy has made academics in the field of political studies avoid interesting topics which are of public concern
Le Trahison des Clercs	Asking the same question today which Benda did in the 30s	How few good non-fiction books there are
Expectations	Untypically short, almost poetic post	Keep them low
Fiddling while Rome is Burning	Continuing disappointment with non-fiction books	Ban the specialists who have never tasted other worlds
The Americans take no prisoners	US libertarian article goes over the top	and accuses all progressives of being Marxists
Some Advice for social activists	Street protests in Sofia	A great reading list
Links I liked	Includes review of  the “Hope Gap” film; and powerful excerpts from Martin Hagglund’s “This Life - secular faith and spiritual freedom”	This “scooping up” of odd hyperlinks is proving less easy than I thought? Why? Too scrappy?
Why do Economists talk Gibberish?	More people need to take this question seriously	Recommendations for those who want economics explained in clear language
David Graeber RIP	We lose one of our clearest prophets 25 years too early	Most of Graeber’s work can be read online free
Strategies for Governing	My most inspiring book of the decade	We need more skills of statecraft
So Isst die Welt – und musst nicht so sein	I try (again) to explain my fixation on public admin	Most of the literature is useless – a mere handful of books are worth reading
Links I liked	The German model; meritocracy; democracy by lot?	Some great reading recommendations
Another Landmark	The blog hits 400,000 clicks	9 justifications for why blogging is good for you
Crowds and Power II	Another blog invites me to do a guest post about protests in Sofia – and I offer 4,000 words	The title is from a famous book by a Bulgarian émigré written in 1960 and the post looks at the varying success of street protests in the region
Crowds and Power !!!	how the past has 30 years have treated Bulgaria and Romania	Go back to Some Advice for social activists
Whatever Happened to Planning?	A dream; John Friedmann’s “Insurgencies – essays in planning theory”	It’s been absorbed in strategic thinking