The Age of the Unthinkable

On or about summer 1977, the world suddenly started to become a much more complicated place when Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel prize in Chemistry for his work on “dissipative structures” which led to the field for which he is better known – self-organising systems. His Order out of Chaos - man’s new dialogue with nature wasn’t published in the USA until 1984 although it had been released in french the same year he had won the Nobel prize.

A few years later Chaos – making a new science (1987) was the first book to popularise the remarkable changes which were beginning to undermine the way we thought we had understood the world and science since Isaac Newton’s time.

Einstein’s theory of relativity had, of course, been a bit of a challenge a hundred years ago – but somehow we had ridden that out. But the findings of what was variously called systems, complexity or chaos theory have, for the last couple of decades, been challenging everything we thought we knew about cause and effect! 

This blog has several times tried to understand what the new approach actually meant – one of my first efforts appearing exactly ten years ago but has had to admit failure – this post containing the reading list I was using last December in a continuing effort to make sense of what the basic message and its implications actually were.

A highly readable book, however, has persuaded me to give the subject yet another chance. It is The Age of the Unthinkable – why the new global order constantly surprises us and what to do about it by J Cooper Ramo which actually appeared in 2009 - 12 years ago - but, curiously for such a great read, doesn’t appear to have made much impression. But he knows how to tell a good story – and they soon had a sufficient grip on me to be willing to put my prejudice aside about his being a Director of a Henry Kissinger institute. 

One story he uses is the famous one told by Isaiah Berlin about foxes and hedgehogs – with the latter knowing a lot about one subject and the former a little about a lot of subjects. He also makes good use of Richard Nesbitt’s work on the very different ways Asians and Westerners apparently think – with the former seeing more the context and background and the latter individuals. 

Indeed, apart from the story of a Danish scientist I hadn’t heard of (Per Bak who worked on what causes an individual grain of sand suddenly to cause collapse of an entire heap) Ramo doesn’t refer all that much to the extensive literature on systems and complexity theory. Perhaps indeed, that’s why I enjoyed the book so much! He chooses instead to focus on the ability of a few creative people to think outside the box. Indeed his book has parallels with Range – Why Generalists triumph in a specialised world by David Epstein and Rebel ideas – the power of diverse thinking by Matthew Syed

Let’s see what another of the (rare) reviewers of Ramo’s book had to say about it - 

The US-led ‘war on terror’ has succeeded only in creating more terrorists..... Largely self-regulating global capital markets have proven to be incapable of balancing or regulating effectively enough to stave off economic misery to millions. Capitalism itself, and its Cold War foe, communism, have in most cases achieved the very opposite of their aims of bringing prosperity, health and happiness to all.

Ramos does not suggest that the world is anarchic, however. His view is that the world is in a state of ‘organised instability’, a concept drawn from the physical sciences, in particular chaos theory and complexity science.

In this system, we never know what event, object or person may prove to be responsible for triggering unexpected and occasionally catastrophic change. 

Our current institutions are inherently incapable of grasping the idea of ‘organised instability’ and therefore formulate policy via outmoded thought and practice. Essentially, they make bad policy because they do not understand the environment in which they operate, and are too lethargic and inflexible to adapt and respond.

Ramo is encouraging policy-makers to take a good hard look at the world around them and at themselves and then begin reconfiguring power structures and decision-making processes in order to generate good and appropriate policy that reflects the dynamism of a complex world. Through a series of diverse case studies Ramo draws conclusions about how some people and organisations are thriving in an unstable world.  

At the heart of them all is a reliance on quick-wittedness, innovation, pragmatism, and an eye for opportunity. This holds true as much for Hizballah as it does for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. The bulkof the book is taken up with describing how people are adaptingsuccessfully across the world while traditional structures are falling behind.

Ramo writes in engaging fashion, is adept at linking across times and subjects, and the reader is left in little doubt that he is definitely on to something. His suggestion that we view threats as systems, rather than objects, is wise but already part of military planning, if not political decision-making. 

In the next post, I want to go back to Ilya Prigigone’s 1984 book – not least because it has an extensive introduction written by no less a figure than Alvin Toffler

A World Changed?

There were two headlines at the top of yesterday’s Guardian front page – the first the predictable one about the observation of the 20^th anniversary of 9/11; the other about the US drone strike on Kabul which had mistakenly targeted an Afghan who turned out to be working for a US organisation and which also blew up several of his children. We are supposed to see the first as a “world-changing” event and the second as “collateral damage”. This is US exceptionalism at its most distasteful and hypocritical.   

The world did not change on September 11^th 2001 – and anyone who thinks so is out of their tiny mind. I can well believe that it shocked the American population to realise that they could be attacked on their own soil – but that just shows the scale of their imagined exceptionalism. And did the American voter realise that they were unleashing a military spend of some 8 trillion dollars??

But the question of global turning points is an important one….Virginia Woolf's famous assertion (in 1924) that “on or about December 1913 human nature changed” rather challenges my view that modernism started when Marx and Engels produced their “Communist Manifesto” in 1848. But her statement is matched by the equally questionable claim that “the modern world died at 3.32 pm  15 July 1972 in St Louis, Missouri when the notorious Pruitt Igou housing scheme was dynamited”. This is taken from an amusing article “Postmodernism – 10 key moments” written by the author of “Grand Hotel Abyss – the lives of the Frankfurt School” 

My recent posts have focused on such questions as

-       when modernity became postmodernity

-       whether postmodernity has played itself out

-       what will replace it

-       whether any of this matters 

Let me try to deal with each of these – briefly 

1.      Daniel Bell’s use of the phrase “post-industrial” in 1960 signalled the birth-pangs of post-modernism with 3 important books detailing the relevant social changes before the decade was out – viz in The Temporary Society by Warren Bennis and Philip Slater (1968); The Age of Discontinuity; by the famous Peter Drucker (1969) and Between Two Ages - America’s Role in the Technetronic Era by Zbigniev Brzezinski (1970) best capturing the transition pains… 

2.     Postmodernity is like a slow-burning fuse. The whole “fake news” saga is down to it – although I have tried to show in these posts that it has had its positive side eg our appreciation that the world can and should be seen from a variety of perspectives   

3.    So I think it’s a bit early to celebrate its death. We still haven’t managed to respond to the savaging it’s given to the belief we used to have in human reason – and how untruths can be exposed. Indeed it’s only recently that I, for one, have come across books which, 2 decades ago, made sterling efforts to deal with the challenges this posed to the various academic disciplines. Two of the best are Richard Evan’s In Defence of History (1997) and D McCloskey’s “The Rhetoric of Economics” (1998)  

4.     And yes, I do think it’s important to try to identify turning points in history. Global warming, Artificial Intelligence and Pandemics are the three factors which, together, seem now to be leading us in a new direction – as these 2 reports indicate “Artificial Intelligence and the future of Humans” (Pew Institute 2018) “Humanity is at a Precipice” (2019)

Postmodernity/postmodernism – WTF

Some readers may feel that these labels are pointless and, generally, I would agree..But, on this occasion, it seems rather important to know if we are in a new era - where the old assumptions which served us well in the past no longer work

So allow me to pursue these personal recollections – to see where they lead…… 

I don’t think too many of us – if asked - would be able to give a convincing account of “postmodernity”. And that certainly includes me.

Until recently I would have muttered something like “incoherent gibberish” as a comment and “anything goes” as an epitaph – except that it hasn’t really gone away. Arguably, with “post-truth”, it is only now reaching its zenith….

As Postmodernity is presumed to have revealed itself just as I was starting university (1960) and I didn’t notice anything all that unusual until sometime in the new millennium, this suggests a certain carelessness – if not insouciance - on my part.

Although I can always plead that I haven’t lived in Western Europe for the past 30 years!  

But did we ever understand what “modernity” was about? And when did we first become aware that it was no more?

It’s interesting that it was 1982 before clear explanation was published - with Marshall Berman’s  “All that is Solid Melts into Air”  – a quotation, of course, from Karl Marx whose “Communist Manifesto” launched the age of modernity. But I for one didn’t came across the book until the last decade or so. Oh - and modernity, for him, was the combustion engine, electricity, trains, speed, ideology etc 

In 1972 I set up a Local Government Unit at Paisley College of Technology which basically allowed me to use my position as a reforming politician in a shipbuilding town to present and explore the odd mixture of ideas about rationality, participation, positive discrimination which were wafting their way across the Atlantic…..The very phrase “maximum feasible participation” of the poor indicated how radical the efforts were…

The Unit’s papers and seminars achieved sufficient success to allow the powers-that- be to give me a sabbatical for 4 years to try to consolidate its position.

I have to confess that I repaid their faith with lethargy – the powerful position I held as one of the leaders of Strathclyde Region (which had half of the Scottish Office budget and managed half of the professional employed in Scotland) just took up too much of my time.    

Recognising in 1982 or so that I would need to go back to real academic work, I was in the first group to enrol in Britain’s first (part-time) Masters’ degree in Policy Analysis set up by Professor Lewis Gunn at the University of Strathclyde whose staff included people such as Michael Keating, Arthur Midwinter and Gavin Kennedy.

Lewis Gunn delivered traditional lectures about the fascinating exchanges which had been taking place in the postwar period in the USA about rationality and the decision-making process involving people such as Herbert Simon and Charles Lindblom…..

The session on “Frame Analysis” (originating from Erving Goffman in 1974) made such a vivid impression on me that I still have memories of my reaction as it was being delivered. The technique simply demonstrates how different “stories” are used to make sense of complex social events. But I had no occasion to use it - little did I realize that it was to become a central part of post-modernism’s encouragement of diverse realities…  It took more than a decade before political scientist Chris Hood’s The Art of the State (1998­) brought it all home to me. The book uses Mary Douglas’ grid-group theory to offer a brilliant analysis of 4 basic “world views” (individualist, hierarchical, fatalist and egalitarian) and their strengths and weaknesses in particular contexts.

Michael Thompson is an anthropologist who has used Mary Douglas’ cultural theory to make The case for clumsiness (2004) which, again, sets out the various stories which sustain the different positions people take on various key policy issues – such as the ecological disaster with which we are now confronted. There is a good interview with the author here

Three short reports give an excellent summary of all this literature; and its political significance – Keith Grint’s Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions (2008); Common Cause (2010); and Finding Frames (2010) 

But geographer Michael Hulme’s Why We Disagree About Climate Change (2009) is probably the most thorough and satisfying use of the approach - applying seven different lenses (or perspectives) to make sense of climate change: viz those of “science, economics, religion, psychology, media, development, and governance”. His argument is basically that –

·       We understand science and scientific knowledge in different ways

·       We value things differently

·       We believe different things about ourselves, the universe and our place in the universe

·       We fear different things

·       We receive multiple and conflicting messages about climate change – and interpret them differently

·       We understand “development” differently

·       We seek to govern in different ways (eg top-down “green governmentality”; market environmentalism; or “civic environmentalism”) 

It’s a pity that so few authors have tried to apply this approach to the global economic crisis. Most people who write about that are stuck in their own particular “quadrant” (to use the language of grid-group writing) and fail to do justice to the range of other ways of seeing the crisis. This diagram of mine tries to offer an example of the sort of humility we need from our writers 

The previous post and this one have involved a romp down memory lane. I’ve inflicted this on my readers simply because it seems to take us a long time to recognise what’s staring us in the face. I’m sure I remember George Orwell saying something to that effect. It’s like boiling a frog – something I’ve never done – but Charles Handy uses the story to make the point about the dangers of being left behind by social change

Postmodernity - another go

These last 2 weeks I’ve been trying to get my head around postmodernity – or rather what the relevant “literature” seemed to be saying about it. An accident of birth had actually given me the facility, from my mid-teens, of seeing the world through several lens. Initially I experienced this as a difficult tension but that gradually gave way to a realisation that being able to look at the world from a variety of angles had its beneficial side. Like Monsieur Jourdain, I’ve been speaking prose all my life 

This post is a continuation of the recent series of posts on postmodernism started here – in which I will try to bring my thoughts on the issue more clearly together. For reasons I can’t quite explain, however, I feel it important that I first describe

-       my particular learning experience

-       the difficulties I’ve had in making sense of postmodernism

and then to explore the question of what follows postmodernism. This may take several posts…

Why I was lucky 

I received my education in a state school which still then possessed the positive features of Scotland’s Democratic Tradition now, sadly, much traduced. It would have been easier for my parents to send me to the secondary school just a few blocks from our house but my father was a Presbyterian Minister and home was a manse (owned by the Church of Scotland) in the exclusive “West End” - so that school was fee-paying, if one in which I already had friends.

And my parents (although no radicals) would never have contemplated taking a step which would have created a barrier with my father’s congregation who were stalwarts of the town’s lower middle classes with modest houses and apartments in the centre and east of the town. 

Thus began my familiarization with the nuances of the class system – and with the experience of straddling boundaries which was to become such a feature of my life. Whether the boundaries are those of class, party, professional group intellectual discipline or nation, they are well protected if not fortified…..And trying to straddle such borders – let alone explore them – can be an uncomfortable experience.  

At University in the 60s I had been interested in how social systems held together - and  in particular in why people (generally) obeyed those placed in authority above them - Max Weber’s classification of political systems into – “traditional”, “charismatic” and “rational-legal” was an eye-opener and gave me the first of many typologies I was to find myself using. 

When I became a young councillor in 1968 (for the Catholic-dominated Labour party), I found myself torn between my loyalties to the local community activists on the one hand and those to my (older) political colleagues and officials on the other.

And I felt this particularly strongly when I was elevated to the ranks of magistrate and required to deal with the miscreants who confronted us as lay judges every Monday morning – up from the prison cells where they had spent the weekend for drunkenness and wife-beating……..The collusion between the police and my legal adviser was clear but my role was to adjudicate “beyond reasonable doubt” and the weak police testimonials often gave me reason to doubt….I dare say I was too lenient and I certainly got such a reputation – meaning that I was rarely disturbed to sign search warrants! 

And, on being elevated a few years later to one of the leading positions in a giant new Region, I soon had to establish relations with - and adjudicate between the budgetary and policy bids of - senior professionals heading specialized Departments with massive budgets and manpower. 

It was at that stage that I developed a diagram for my students to make sense of the “conflict of loyalties” in what I saw as 4 very different sets of accountabilities to which politicians are subject – 

- local voters (if the electoral system is based on local constituencies);

- the party (both local and national)

- the officials (and laws) of the particular government agency they had entered;

- their conscience. 

Politicians, I argued, differ according to the extent of the notice they took of each of the pressures coming from each of these sources – and the loyalties this tended to generate. And I gave names to the 4 types which could be distinguished –

-       “populist” – who articulated the stronger voices of the voters

-       “ideologue” – who operated in the bubble of the party faithful

-       “statesman” – who would try to extract the commonality from the multiple voices of professional advisers 

-       “maverick” – who tries to sort it out for him/herself

But, I argued, the effective politician is the one who resists the temptation to be drawn exclusively into any one of these roles. Each has its own important truth - but it is when someone blends the various partialities into a workable and acceptable proposition that we see real leadership.

Each generates its own way of looking at the world – as you will see from the table in this post which looks only at seven academic disciplines 

Once we become aware of the very different worlds in which people live, our world suddenly becomes a very richer place – in which we have choices about the particular lens we use to make sense of it all…

I remember the first time I really became aware of this – when I did the Belbin team test. And The Art of Thinking by Bramsall and Harrison (1984) very usefully sets out the very different ways each of us thinks. viz types of strategic thinking..How we see ourselves (and others see us) is a critical part of self-discovery - part of the Schumacher quote which figures in the “quotations” block which I’ve just moved up to the 4^th section of the long list which now stretches down the right-hand corner of the blog

Holding Power to Account

I’ve posted before about how far the United States has become a rogue state. For the last half century at least, the principles of free speech and of democracy have been honoured there in the breach more often than in reality. I was, however, shocked this morning by a Scheerpost reporting two items which reveal just how far the power structure goes to muzzle those who challenge the military-industrial complex

First, human rights attorney Steven Donziger has now been under house arrest in his New York City apartment for two years. The reason for his detainment is that Donziger made it his business to hold Chevron accountable for how the Big Oil megacorp "harmed, sickened and killed tens of thousands in Ecuador" and tried to avoid paying "billions of dollars" in restitutions. 

Donziger's battle against American oil companies and on behalf of indigenous communities and farmers in Ecuador spans nearly three decades. He was part of an international legal team that represented indigenous groups in Northern Ecuador where, as he tells Camp, from the 1960s to the '90s Texaco (now Chevron) deliberately "dumped billions of gallons of cancer-causing toxic waste" into local waterways, costing thousands of people their health, livelihood—even their lives.

Though in 2011 the lawsuit culminated in a historic $9.5 billion pollution judgment, Chevron brass subsequently focused on going after Donziger rather than paying the fee. In late July, he was hit with a six counts of criminal contempt, a conviction stemming in part from his refusal to turn over his computer and other devices, which he fought last month with a request for a new trial. His ongoing pre-trial detainment for a misdemeanor offense is unprecedented for any person without a prior criminal record in federal court. (Click here to watch Chris Hedges' interview with Donziger, and listen to Robert Scheer's "Scheer Intelligence" podcast episode with Donziger here) 

The second example is of a former intelligence analyst in the drone program for the Air Force who as a private contractor leaked some 17 classified documents about drone strikes to the press, was sentenced today to 45 months in prison. 

The documents, published by The Intercept on October 15, 2015, exposed that between January 2012 and February 2013, US special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. For one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The civilian dead, usually innocent bystanders, were routinely classified as “enemies killed in action.”

The Justice Department coerced Hale, who was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, on March 31 to plead guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act, a law passed in 1917 designed to prosecute those who passed on state secrets to a hostile power, not those who expose to the public government lies and crimes. Hale admitted as part of the plea deal to “retention and transmission of national security information” and leaking 11 classified documents to a journalist. If he had refused the plea deal, he could have spent 50 years in prison.  

But what’s really sinister about the case is, as Chris Hedges puts it, that 

Those charged under the act are treated as if they were spies.  They are barred from explaining motivations and intent to the court. They cannot provide evidence to the court of the government lawlessness and war crimes they exposed.  Prominent human rights organizations, such as the ACLU and PEN, along with mainstream publications, such as The New York Times and CNN, have largely remained silent about the prosecution of Hale. 

The sentencing of Hale is, of course, one more potentially mortal blow to the freedom of the press in the USA.  It follows in the wake of the prosecutions and imprisonment of other whistleblowers under the Espionage Act including Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou, who spent two-and-a-half years in prison for exposing the routine torture of suspects held in black sites.  Chris Hedges continues 

The group Stand with Daniel Hale has called on President Biden to pardon Hale and end the use of the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers. It is also collecting donations for Hale’s legal fund. The bipartisan onslaught against the press — Barack Obama used the Espionage Act eight times against whistleblowers, more than all other previous administrations combined — by criminalizing those within the system who seek to inform the public is ominous for our democracy.  It is effectively extinguishing all investigations into the inner workings of power. 

Not that the Americans are the only ones up to dirty tricks of this sort. Just a few nights ago, I had watched the 2019 film Official Secrets which told the case of UK whistleblower Katharine Gun, who leaked a memo exposing an illegal spying operation by American and British intelligence services to gauge sentiment of and potentially blackmail United Nations diplomats tasked to vote on a resolution regarding the 2003 invasion of Iraq

Her defence team decided on the plea that Katharine was acting out of loyalty to her country by seeking to prevent the UK from being led into an unlawful war in Iraq. UK Foreign Office deputy legal adviser, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, had famously resigned when the UK Attorney General Peter Goldsmith changed his position on the legality of the Iraq War after meeting with several lawyers from the Bush administration. Despite the odds stacked against them, Katharine refused to plead guilty in exchange for a reduced charge.

On the day of the trial, the Crown prosecutor dropped all charges against Katharine on the grounds that prosecuting her would have shown that Bliar led the UK into war on false pretences. 

OK the goodies won on this occasion - but they all too rarely do!

Little wonder that one of the books on my recent reading list was Unaccountable – how the elite brokers corrupt; Janine Wedel (2014)

Update; Scheerpost has just put up a third striking post - this time a forensic dissection of the Afghan strategy.

And, on 13 September, this brilliant contextual analysis

Evoking Zeitgeist

One of the most difficult challenges for any writer is to try to evoke the spirit of a nation - in a balanced but insightful way. Chauvinism comes all too easily - be it of the American, English, French or even Scots variety.

But summoning up the soul of a country with appropriate text is a much greater challenge – and may well be best done by an outsider who knows the country well…Think Madame de Stael and Germany; de Tocqueville and the USA  

This train of thought is sparked off by my reading – almost in one go – a delightful book called “The Story of Scottish Art” – explored in this nice video. The author is himself a painter and uses a lot of examples (carvings as well as paintings) to illustrate the text - as well as his own water-colours. The book is based on a BBC series.

One of the things which endeared the book to me was the way he skilfully wove together aspects of the painters’ lives with developments in the nation. 

Painting is a good “handle” on a country – but it’s rarely used. Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily gives a “food and Mafia” take on that country; and Simon Winder’s “Germania” and Neil McGregor’s “Germany; memories of a nation” cultural takes on Germany – but skate over painting.

In 2007, I found myself leading a project in Sofia, Bulgaria and quickly became so taken with the paintings – particularly from the interwar period - I came across in its fascinating small galleries that I started to collect them. Naturally I wanted to know something about the artists – and found myself traipsing into antiquarian bookshops in search of information. The result was initially a small book of 50 pages – and, by 2015 or so, a larger one of 250 pages Bulgarian Realists – getting to know Bulgaria through its Art

This particular book started its life quite literally as a scribbled list on the back of an envelope - of painters whom a gallery friend thought I should know about in 2008 or thereabouts…..

It eventually became a list of 250 or so Bulgarian artists of the “realist” style which I developed to help me (and visitors) learn more about the richness of the work (and lives) of artists who are now, for the most part, long dead and often forgotten. 

But it also got me wondering about who is best placed to try to evoke the spirit of a nation….Social historians? Anthropologists? Artists? 

Some of you may know the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb whose book The Black Swan became a best-seller a few years ago. In it he makes a profound point about the process by which artistic “genius” is recognised (or not – the latter being more often the case). More than four centuries ago, the English essayist Francis Bacon had a very simple intuition….about a man who, upon being shown the pictures of those worshippers who paid their vows then subsequently escaped shipwreck, wondered where were the pictures of those who happened to drown after their vows. The lack of effectiveness of their prayers did not seem to be taken into account by the supporters of the handy rewards of religious practice. “And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like”, he wrote in his Novum Organum, written in 1620.

This is a potent insight: the drowned worshippers, being dead, do not advertise their experiences. They are invisible and will be missed by the casual observer who will be led to believe in miracles.

Not just in miracles, as Taleb goes onto argue…..it is also the process which decides whether an artist is remembered. For every artist of genius, there have been many more with the same talent but whose profile, somehow, was submerged….

Art, of course, is the subject of high fashion – reputations ebb and flow…..we are vaguely aware of this…but it is money that speaks in the art “market” and it is the din of the cash register to which the ears of most art critics and dealers are attuned…… 

As I read Lachlan Goudie’s little vignettes of painters in “The Story of Scottish Art”, I realised that painters have always occupied an important position in social networks – often poor themselves, they rub shoulders with a wider range of people than most of us. In the early days, of course, they would focus on religious figures and then society people. But from the mid 19^th Century, artists such as David Wilkie were able to celebrate ordinary folk in their paintings.

Nowadays, of course, we rarely see faces any more in paintings – just blobs and abstractions. Perhaps our artists are telling us something?

But my question is, I think, a good one – who is best placed to gives us insights into a country’s soul? Poets? Writers? Painters? Anthropologists? Historians? Social historians? Travel writers? Sociologists? Or who? 

Further Reading

Watching the English by anthropologist Kate Fox is one of my favourites – for that country.

Theodor Zeldin is probably the best on the French.

Perry Anderson’s article A New Germany? offers a great intellectual and political history of contemporary Germany. But otherwise, it’s not easy to find a serious book about modern Germany (although many good -histories) Gordon Craig’s magnificent “The Germans” came out in 1982 and John Ardagh’s “Germany and the Germans” in 1987 – since then there has be no real update to their insights into the German soul - Gitty Sereny’s “The German Trauma – experiences and reflections 1938-2001 and Fritz Stern ‘s “Five Germanies I have known” (2007) notwithstanding

On Italy, people are spoiled for choice – not just Barzini’s classic “The Italians” (1964) but Foot, Gilmour, Ginsborg, Hooper, Jones and Parks all giving a sense of the modern Italians….You pays your money….

The background to social history is laid out in this article

7 social historians lay their claims here

A book on The anthropology of Ireland demonstrates its possibilities

And the others?

A Plus for Postmodernism - part III of series

My foray, these past few days, into “the literature” of postmodernism has provoked two thoughts –

the first the (flippant) question of why on earth these guys can’t agree their terminology. What are we actually talking about - is it critical theory? literary theory? structural theory? Constructivism? Deconstructionism? Postmodernism? postmodernity?

Why so many different words? I know they’re trying to tell us that words are meaningless…but hey, I’m getting confused!

Confused people, of course, tend to lash out. And there’s a lot of anger in the air – so maybe that’s why we’re angry!!

The second thought is a discovery - that the trawling through the most significant commentaries on the field (Perry Anderson, Peter Berger, Marshall Berman, Chris Butler (“A Short Intro to PM”), Terry Eagleton, David Harvey) unearthed one gem – The Saturated Self- dilemmas of identity in contemporary life (1991) by a well-read and good writer who happened to be a social psychologist, Kenneth Gergen who dramatically introduces his book thus - 

Many nonacademic readers are aware of the debates over the canons of Western literature now engulfing the academic community, and the increasing currency of such terms as de construction, poststructuralism, and postmodern. Yet these are meagre indications of the radical reconsideration of longstanding traditions of truth and knowledge which are underway.

As beliefs in objective knowledge fall into disrepute, the entire face of education, science, and "knowledge-making in general stands to be altered. The issues are far too important, and too much fun, to be contained within the walls of academia.

One aspect of this ferment is of special concern to me. For many years one of my central interests has been the concept of self, our ways of understanding who we are and what we are about. Beliefs about the self seem pivotal to all our undertakings. We believe that as normal human beings we possess reasoning powers, emotions, conscience, intentions; these beliefs are critical to the way we relate to others…… 

Remember this was written 20 years ago!! 

It is not simply that the present turn of events has altered the emphasis placed on rationality, the emotions, and the like, or that it adds new concepts to the traditional vernacular. Rather, like the concepts of truth, objectivity, and knowledge, the very idea of individual selves—in possession of mental qualities—is now threatened with eradication.

I have just started reading the book – although this excellent review has given me a good sense of the argument It starts with the observation that a combination of modern transport systems and the internet have transformed how each of us relate to others and then moves to consider how this has affected the way we understand (or fail to!) the world.

The last post made the point that one of the aspects of Postmodernism with which I don’t have a problem is its celebration of seeing the world from multiple perspectives – indeed I joked about my 57 varieties of capitalism. Even in 1991 Gergen accepted that our pursuit of progress was putting the very existence of the planet in danger - and argued that awareness of the multiplicity of perspectives could – if put into an appropriate decision structure - help give voice to marginalised groups.

In fact, a few years later, this is exactly what happened when a social anthropologist presented a fascinating case study of the process by which Arsenal Football Club found the site for its new stadium 

which started off quite elegantly - just the market actor (Arsenal) and the hierarchical actor (Islington Council) - but was soon clumsified by the entry of an egalitarian actor (the Highbury Community Association). Association). The result was a solution, totally overlooked in the early stages, that gave each of these contending actors more of what it wanted (and less of what it did not want) than it would have got if it had somehow established hegemony and "gone it alone." 

This "clumsy solution" came about more or less by accident, and it stands in marked contrast to the sort of outcomes that we usually get, especially in relation to policy issues that have a high scientific input: environment and development in the Himalayan region, for instance. All of which raises the question: "How can we get clumsy solutions by design." One important part of the answer is: "By doing pretty well the exact opposite of what policy orthodoxy says we should do." Rather than a single, agreed definition of the problem, we need to move towards noisy and argumentative institutional arrangements in which all three voices (each with its distinctive definition of the problem - a definition, moreover, that cannot be reconciled with the other two) are (a) able to make themselves heard and (b) are then responsive to one another.  

Michael Thompson uses the “grid-group” or “cultural analysis” approach which I’ve discussed before on this blog – but sets it out very clearly in The Case for clumsiness (2004)

The ideas were considered important enough to be presented by Professor Keith Grint in “Wicked problems and clumsy solutions – the role of leadership” (2008) Michael Thompson was interviewed by the RSA here. This tribute gives a good sense of his work

Update; I’ve been a bit remiss in not mentioning one book which is a model of clarity - From post-industrial society to post-modern society – new theories of the contemporary world; Krishan Kumar (2nd edition 2004) which follows an earlier 1978 book of his which looked at the post-industrial writers such as Daniel Bell and Alain Touraine who explored the move to a service economy and a ‘knowledge society’, and  the social and political changes that could be expected to follow from this. Those theories have been joined by others with a more ambitious scope about the information and communication revolution, the transformation of work and organization in the global economy; and of political ideologies and cultural beliefs

Spirit of the Times - part II of series

“Modernism” is the label we stick on the cultural and intellectual genie which was released by industrialisation from the middle of the 19^th Century - although purists insist that “modernity” is actually the world for the philosophical aspects. In many ways “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848) marks the start of what was to be a very turbulent century 

The cultural aspects are superbly described in Peter Gay’s Modernism – the lure of heresy (2007) which has a stunning 32 page bibliographical essay. The intellectual/political aspects of modernism probably require both The Crisis of Reason – European thought 1848-1914 by JM Burrows (2001) and Contesting Democracy – political ideas in the 20^th Century by Jan Werner-Mueller (2011) 

There is some dispute about when Modernism eventually gave way to Post-modernism - with Perry Anderson’s The Origins of Postmodernity (1999) doing the most thorough detective work. This timeline tracks down a reference by C Wright Mills in 1958 – but most people now accept that Daniel Bell’s use of the phrase “post-industrial” in 1960 signalled the birth-pangs of post-modernism with The Temporary Society by Warren Bennis and Philip Slater (1968); The Age of Discontinuity by Peter Drucker 1969 and Between Two Ages - America’s Role in the Technetronic Era by Zbigniev Brzezinski (1970) best capturing the transition pains…

I’ve made a couple of efforts to make sense of Post-Modernism – with my last attempt selecting what I considered to be the more accessible of what is a very turgid field of study.  This was probably the best summary I came across. 

I’m encouraged to return to the fray by a book which came out recently with the title Cynical Critical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody (2020) by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay  

This looks to help those of us who are puzzled by the way that both hard left and hard right seem engaged in a new Culture War – with the clear progress which has been made toward racial and gender equality not apparently being enough to satisfy significant numbers who are taking to the streets and toppling statues…..Is this just impatience – or is there more to it than that. Pluckrose and Lindsay think the latter. Here’s how the they start - 

A fundamental change in human thought took place in the 1960s. This change is associated with several French Theorists who, while not quite household names, float at the edges of the popular imagination, among them Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard. Taking a radically new conception of the world and our relationship to it, it revolutionized social philosophy and perhaps social everything. 

Over the decades, it has dramatically altered not only what and how we think  but also how we think about thinking. Esoteric, academic, and seemingly removed from the realities of daily existence, this revolution has nevertheless had profound implications for how we interact with the world and with one another. At its heart is a radical worldview that came to be known as “postmodernism.” 

Ultimately, the Enlightenment that postmodernists rejected is defined by a belief in objective knowledge, universal truth, science (or evidence more broadly) as a method for obtaining objective knowledge, the power of reason, the ability to communicate straightforwardly via language, a universal human nature, and individualism. They also rejected the belief that the West has experienced significant progress due to the Enlightenment and will continue to do so if it upholds these values 

When I’m being flippant, I refer to Postmodernism as the “whatever” school – since its proponents use that phrase and a shrug of their shoulders to express their contempt for the poor souls who still believe in objectivity or searching for “truth”.

Personally I have a lot of time for people who insist on looking at the world with multi-angled prisms – I posted once about 57 varieties of capitalism. But that doesn’t make me a relativist! I respect the process of trying to disprove falsities… 

And, in all the discussion, I can’t understand why no one refers to the classic book on this subject which was long before any French deconstructionists got involved in the fight – The Social Construction of Reality by T Luckman and Peter Berger (1966)

In Praise of Richard Hoggart

I have a young Bulgarian journalist friend who has a multilingual blog The Bridge of Friendship about cross-border issues. He’s based in his home town of Russe on the Danube – a selection of the earlier posts can be read here.

We chat frequently and he has taken recently to posing what he calls “challenges” – when he presents, in a few phrases, a new issue which he needs to explore. This wrenches me out of my usual channels and has me musing about things which normally pass me by.

And this was particularly true of the latest one he threw at me – about the sociology of literature or was it literary theory – or indeed critical theory?  Is there a difference? And does it matter?    

As I’m not a fan of novels, this was a tough one. But then I remembered the reason for my dislike of English novels and their boring portrayal of the various dilemmas of middle-class characters….it’s the narrowness of the social context which turns me off – in contrast with the dynamism I find in Scottish and Irish writing – let alone French and German cultural icons. 

Take the Germans first – I was still in my early 20s when I first came across artists such as Georg Grosz and Kathe Kollwitz and writers such as Bert Brecht and Heinrich Boell – all profoundly influenced by the experience of war and exploitation, the first three angrily whereas Boell’s  stories were more resigned. Michel Houllebecq’s novels react against consumer capitalism where JG Ballard’s tales show the threatening dystopia.

In picking out such artists I simply show my own preference not just for critical narrative but for stories to be set against a social context. Other people are different – they don’t like to be reminded of such realities – preferring more magical tales….Where does that get us? 

In 2014, Michael Schmidt produced a 1,200 page book called “The Novel; a biography” which discussed the plots of hundreds of writers – grouping them into strange categories such as 

THE HUMAN COMEDY: Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola 

IMPERFECTION:  George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, George Gissing, Samuel Butler

BRAVERIES: Robert Louis Stevenson, Bruce Chatwin, William Morris, Charles Kingsley, Henry Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling

SMOKE AND MIRRORS: Lewis Carroll, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Athur Conan Doyle, J. M. Barrie, Max Beerbohm, Kenneth Grahame

PESSIMISTS: Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane

LIVING THROUGH IDEAS: Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy 

A book I read with some interest a few years back was Grand Hotel Abyss – the lives of the Frankfurt school; by Stuart Jefferies (2015). For me, Erich Fromm was the most interesting of the group but he soon parted company with them. Jefferies’ Intro to his book is useful as it reminds us that - 

The School came into being in part to try to understand failure, in particular the failure of the German Revolution in 1919. As it evolved during the 1930s, it married neo-Marxist social analysis to Freudian psychoanalytical theories to try to understand why German workers, instead of freeing themselves from capitalism by means of socialist revolution, were seduced by modern consumer capitalist society and, fatefully, Nazism.

The School was forced to leave Germany in 1933 – for the USA and, while in Los Angeles exile in the 1940s, Adorno helped develop the California F-scale, a personality test designed to discover those likely to fall prey to fascist or authoritarian delusions. Breivik would have been the perfect example of the authoritarian personality Adorno wrote about, one who was ‘obsessed with the apparent decline of traditional standards, unable to cope with change, trapped in a hatred of all those not deemed part of the in-group and prepared to take action to “defend” tradition against degeneracy’. 

But Herbert Marcuse was the only one of the group to take a revolutionary path – remaining in the States and supporting the students during the 1968 unrest. 

What I find most curious is that the ultimate legacy of the Frankfurt School was not actually in the field of literature but - in popular culture. This is what fascinated the group in 1950s America – and spawned the discipline of Cultural Studies - started in the UK by Richard Hoggart in 1964 but whose biggest star was Stuart Hall. The Frankfurt school may have shown an initial interest in people like George Lukacs and Lucien Goldmann who were trying to develop a sociology of the novel but soon veered into polling work on the authoritarian personality…. 

I came to adulthood in the late 1950s – just as the New Left was getting off the ground. I remember the impact Hoggart’s “The Uses of Literacy” (1957) made with its picture of the resilience of working-class culture and the threat posed by the banality of “popular culture” – as well as the excitement as I held in 1960/61 the first few issues of “New Left Review” in my hands after its creation from “New Reasoner” and “Universities and Left Review”. 

The wider global context is nicely caught in the diagrams in this short paper 

But Cultural Studies has probably done more harm than good – it was certainly the means through which the issue of identity came to the fore and destroyed the left. Richard Hoggart is, for me, an immensely important – if rather neglected – figure in the story. Raymond Williams is the man who attracts the adulation these days from the trendies – perhaps because he is so high-falutin’ and boring!

So what do I take from this canter down Memory Lane? What lessons about culture? About the left? About the UK? Well, my prejudices are still intact – I find it curious that anyone can take writers such Goldmann, Lukacs and Williams seriously…. 

On the other hand, I realise that I have neglected Richard Hoggart for too long. He was a superbly sensitive writer whose various autobiographies (he lived to the grand old age of 95!) are beautifully written – you can get a sense from some excerpts from A Measured Life – the times and places of an orphaned intellectual; R Hoggart (1994; 2019) 

And I’m delighted to see that he’s still celebrated today – see this recent article in the Los Angeles Review of Books

Further Reading

Understanding Richard Hoggart – a pedagogy of hope M Bailey, B Clarke, J Walton (2011)

Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies ed S Owen (2008)

a review of the above book

Rereading Richard Hoggart ed Sue Owen (2008) some excerpts of a more personal tribute

“Promises to keep – thoughts in old age”; R Hoggart (2005)

Cultural Studies 1983 – a theoretical introduction; Stuart Hall et al (2016) which contained the lecture series he gave in the US in that year which was issued only two years after his death

The Novel; a biography; Michael Schmidt (2014)