Mind Matters

Although the quotation which heads the list of quotes (you can find by scrolling down the top right column of the blog) refers to the importance of self-knowledge, that doesn’t mean that I share much of that with my readers! Indeed, I’m normally fairly circumspect about revealing too much of myself in the posts – as one of my school friends complained some years back.

In October, however, I seemed to break that habit with first a post entitled Know Thyself and then one about the Johari Window. But I now realise that psychological matters seem to have been pressing in on me for some time – with posts last year about various books which are summarised in this table  

Book Title	A tentative overview
The Saturated Self – dilemmas of identity in contemporary society (1991) by Kenneth Gergen	I only became aware of this book last year and have, so far, only managed to skim it. I laud the rarity of its avowed attempt to bridge the dreadful divide between specialists and the rest of us.
What about Me? the struggle for identity in a market-based society (2014) by Paul Verhaeghe	starts by contrasting our two basic urges as individuals - the initial sense of "belonging" and the growing need for "separation" - and how this expresses itself in later struggles eg "self-respect" v "self-hatred". It then moves onto a fascinating discussion of values and morality - showing how the Greeks had an integrated view of our character which Christianity destroyed when it placed God as an external power. The Enlightenment dethroned religion to an extent – although Verhaeghe argues that Diderot’s emphasis on reason, passion and empathy was set aside by an unholy coalition of Voltaire and Rousseau who basically helped the French state set up a new religion. He also argues that true rationality started only after the second WW – which fits with the more recent arguments of people like Nicolas Guilhot who are beginning to analyse the role of the military in the post-war social sciences.  It’s the chapter on the Enron Society where he really lets rip – “The west has never had it so good – but never felt so bad!” leads to a discussion on mental illness and the pharma industry. How, he asks, has 30 years of neoliberalism affected our DNA – with its “Rank and Yank” systems of management; Universities as knowledge businesses; anonymous call-centres; CCTV; ubiquitous contracts, rules, regulations, league tables, fear, uncertainty - but no real accountability. It ranges through intellectual history, sociology and ethics before suggesting that the last few decades have seen a radical new self-identity being engineered – which he calls “The Enron Society”. Conclusion very weak.
Commanding Hope – the power we have to renew a world in peril Thomas Homer-Dixon (2020)	A book which takes as read the reality of global warming and seeks to understand our apparent indifference. He outlines his “theory of Hope” here and cites the successful “women against the Hbomb campaign” of the 1950s (which led to a treaty ban in 1963) being started by the determination of a single woman. The 2 megatrends – greater connectivity; and higher uniformity – have to made to work in our favour by challenging what has become in the past 4 years a heavily pessimistic social mood “It’s all in our minds” is one of his central arguments and he stresses  the importance of Worldviews which I’ve discussed here and here. To that he adds something he calls ideological state spaces. The combination of worldviews, institutions and technology (WIT) is powerful  By far the hardest transition will involve getting from today’s (economic growth) WIT to another arrangement that drastically reduces the global economy’s consumption of resources and its output of waste. This new arrangement must explicitly address the three “equivalencies” I highlighted— growth equals happiness, freedom, and peace— because people won’t relinquish conventional growth if they aren’t reasonably sure they’ll be at least as happy, free, and secure as they are under the existing arrangement. The intellectual and scientific foundation of this new WIT will also need to incorporate a renovated discipline of economics—one that recognizes that human economies are complex systems intimately connected with nature; that markets won’t automatically find good substitutes for some of the most precious things nature gives us, like moderate temperatures and enough water for our crops; and that economics must be grounded in moral principles attuned to our world’s demanding new material and social realities.  Donella Meadows’ Leverage Points paper is used to give the most important part of the book. We need to move from the “Abundance mindset” to the “Scarcity mindset” caused by widening insecurity, migration, climate change and the new pessimistic social mood
Unlearn – a compass for radical transformation (2021) by Hans Burmeister	A very unusual book in that it deals with the changes needed at the level of the individual, the company and society as a whole which are normally dealt with by 3 different fields – self-help, business and social change. His basic argument is that there is a “core self” which warns us when we are going against our nature and that we should listen to it. As individuals, organisation and societies we are too comfortable with the status quo and ignore the multiple signs of stress around us – be it depression, suicide, protest. His section on “things that hold us down” makes some good points. And the point of his title is that we all – at whatever level – need to prepare properly for what is involved as we make the necessary adjustments to our values and behaviour

Worldviews are also central to the work of Jeremy Lent - who writes about the archaeology of the mind and whose The Patterning Instinct – a cultural history of man’s search for meaning (2017) actually calls itself possibly the first “cognitive history”. I’ve only started to read it and can, at this point, simply note that it is a very important book

The worldview of a given civilization—the implicit beliefs and values that create a pattern of meaning in people's lives—has, in my opinion, been a significant driver of the historical path each civilization has taken. But, at the same time, I disavow any affinity with the old triumphalist view of history, which posits some characteristic of the Western mind-set that made it somehow superior to that of other cultures and, therefore, led to the West's “success” over the rest of the world. Instead, as the book unfolds, it reveals an underlying pattern to Western cognition that is responsible for its Scientific and Industrial Revolutions—as well as its devastating destruction of indigenous cultures around the world and our current global rush toward possible catastrophe.

In this respect, the book shares much with the postmodern critique of Western civilization, recognizing those capitalized universal abstractions such as Reason, Progress, and Truth to be culture-specific constructions. In fact, a significant portion of the book is devoted to tracing how these patterns of thought first arose and then infused themselves so deeply into the Western mind-set as to become virtually invisible to those who use them.

 

When drastic change occurs to a given society, its cognitive structures—and, ultimately, its entire worldview—can change equally drastically within a generation or two

(Lawrence Harrison’s The Central Liberal Truth – how politics can change a culture also argued this in 2006 but is these days regarded as beyond redemption)

The last book in the table pointed me to two other interesting references – the first being a very detailed treatment of worldviews The World we create – from god to market Tomas Bjorkman (2019) to which I hope to do justice once I have got through its 400 odd pages. The other is by development psychologist Robert Kegan whose In over our Head – the mental demands of modern life (1994) set out a useful 5 stage theory of personal development – (the video in the title link gives a very short intro to the stages) 

Stage 1 — Impulsive mind (early childhood)

Stage 2 — Imperial mind (adolescence, 6% of adult population)

Stage 3 — Socialized mind (58% of the adult population)

Stage 4 — Self-Authoring mind (35% of the adult population)

Stage 5 — Self-Transforming mind (1% of the adult population) 

What has impressed me about all this material is the link they satisfactorily make between the personal, the social and the political – levels that are normally dealt with in compartmentalised study.

Further Reading;

A Hidden Wholeness – the journey toward an undivided life Parker Palmer (2004) a book which has apparently inspired the creation of many reading circles for those seeking purpose

https://www.swarthmore.edu/kenneth-gergen/available-manuscripts

In over our heads – the mental demands of modern life; Robert Kagan (1994)

https://fs.blog/mental-models/

Deep Scepticism

I haven’t, so far in this blog, deigned “Fake news” with a single post although I have referred to the increasing polarization in societies with some concern. When I type “fake news” into the Zlibrary, it reveals a lot of titles on the subject – most of recent vintage but some going back a decade. Kurt Andersen wrote a couple of recent intellectual histories which explored the phenomenon brilliantly – with the usual suspects being rounded up namely   

- the “relativity” elaborated in the various proponents of postmodernity discussed from p142 of Voices in the Air – the 2021 posts

- the ease with which new social media have undermined the legitimacy of newspapers; and trivialised and polarised everything 

Do we really need a 200 page book to tell us that “fake news” is in the eye of the beholder? Or indeed that, when we decry those who deny climate change and the benefits of vaccination, WE are guilty of the same behaviour – namely that we choose to trust our own preferred groups of people. This is the basic message of  a new book - Bad beliefs – “Why they happen to good people” (2022) - by philosopher Brian Levy which has just been made freely available by the publisher and author but which I don’t recommend because it contains so much jargon.

Very few of us have the scientific training to “follow the science”. What those of us who accept that climate change is a reality have done is defer to those with the expertise. Those who deny simply don’t share our faith in science – let alone government – and choose to trust those found on social media.

Of course, there is the little matter of the “falsifiability” embodied in scientific method – requiring theories to be set aside when evidence emerges that challenges them.    

Something called The Institute for Arts and Ideas (IAI) expressed things rather nicely in its “aims” - 

There is little that we can be certain about, but we can be confident that a time will come when our current beliefs and assumptions are seen as mistaken, our heroes - like the imperial adventurers of the past - are regarded as villains, and our morality is viewed as bigoted prejudice.

So the IAI seeks to challenge the notion that our present accepted wisdom is the truth. It aims to uncover the flaws and limitations in our current thinking in search of alternative and better ways to hold the world.

The IAI was founded in 2008 with the aim of rescuing philosophy from technical debates about the meaning of words and returning it to big ideas and putting them at the centre of culture. Not in aid of a more refined cultural life, but as an urgent call to rethink where we are.

 

That rethinking is urgent and necessary because the world of ideas is in crisis. The traditional modernist notion that we are gradually uncovering the one true account of reality has been undermined by a growing awareness that ideas are limited by culture, history and language. Yet in a relative world the paradoxes of postmodern culture has left us lost and confused. We do not know what to believe, nor do we know how to find the answers. 

I’ve made no secret of my sympathies for those who see multiple realities – who assert that there is no single truth. How could I do otherwise when I have argued there were 57 different ways of understanding capitalism? Or when I celebrate that outsiders are generally more insightful by virtue of the sense of different worlds they bring with them?

But in all this, I insist on proofs of falsifiability. Mere assertion is no use – what disturbs me is that the new “deep sceptics” (who bring the scepticism I have always admired into gross disrepute) have no such criterion – or preferred group. They seem to oppose just for the hell of it.

It’s at times such as this that I begin to question my admiration for such contrarians as Chris Hitchens who took such joy in the process of disputation. The profession of lawyers has that same inclination and is it, therefore, any wonder that the USA, having the largest number per capita of litigious lawyers, just happens to be the country in which “fake news” has become so dominant? 

The author of the book with which I started this post – Brian Levy – has a more readable article here in which he reasserts his basic point that we all need a group we can trust 

No doubt, psychological biases play a role in what people end up believing (though the extent to which we are irrational when we rely on these biases is open to question). No doubt there are many irrational and uninformed people around. But these facts don’t explain the partisan split we see on surveys, or indeed the many bizarre claims attributed to our fellow citizens.

Many of these reports are hugely exaggerated; inflated through some combination of expressive responding, the use of partisan heuristics or the sheer unwillingness to admit ignorance and downright trolling. To the degree there is a partisan divide, it doesn’t arise from their stupidity or our rationality. It arises from the fact that we place our trust in different sources. 

A simple question, therefore – where do we find the verifiable sources quoted by the “deep sceptics”??

Patterns of the Mind

Some 18 months ago I noticed a strange omission in the blog – no discussion of climate change. Rather lamely, I tried to explain this blog silence by suggesting that  

- the issue was too complex; 

- others were dealing with it; 

- technical change would sort things out; or 

- a few personal changes in life-style could at least salve the conscience…. 

What’s strange is that I do buy, download and read books on the subject. It’s just that I don’t choose to share the content with readers of the blog. Why not? I wonder… 

Last year, I did have two posts on the issue – the first on the Extinction Movement whoseprotests in the UK have brought forward new laws there which are seen in liberal circles as threatening the very essence of English identity.

The other consisted of my initial notes on a book which had just been published Commanding Hope - the power we have to renew a world in peril (2020) by Thomas Homer-Dixon and which I recognised as deserving of a reread. As always, I got distracted and it took a reminder from the author himself a couple of days ago to direct me back to the book 

What had originally intrigued me about Dixon’s book was its focus on our mental processes – on the mix of hope and despair we brought to a subject which can and does arouse trauma. At the time I was aware only of geographer Mike Hulme’s Why We Disagree about Climate Change – understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity” (2009) - although Clive Hamilton had apparently produced Requiem for a species – why we resist the truth about climate change in 2010. 

My reread of Homer-Dixon’s latest alerted me to two other useful titles on this intriguing theme of why most of us seem unable to take the issue of global warming with the seriousness which it warrants –  Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life; Kari Marie Norgaard (2011) and  Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change ; George Marshall (2014) 

Although it’s only a year since I first read “Commanding Hope”, the reread didn’t ring any bells in my head; and that’s despite my having made notes available in the last half of the post - which questioned the lack of an index and bibliography. Many of you may see this as a bit pedantic of me – but, if I’m spending a few hours reading an author’s work I need to have a sense of their biases. I don’t need (or even want) a long reading list - indeed the shorter the better since the author is then required to think very carefully about the average reader. A reading list stretching over 40 pages is simply a virility symbol – “see how clever I am”!!

I do find it disturbing, however, that I have so little recollection of reading the book – just 12 months ago. That’s not a good sign! 

Rightly in my view the book identifies “world views” as a crucial factor in explaining the attitude we adopt to global warming. Coincidentally, I devoted a section of Voices in the Air – the 2021 posts (just uploaded to the blog) to that very subject (from p 105) in which I make the point that the term is only one of five you can find in the literature – others being “world values”, “political culture”, “cultural theory” and “cultural values”. Homer-Dixon makes my life more complicated by offering two more terms – “cognitive affective maps” and something he calls “ideological state space” which he explains in a table containing 15 fundamental “issues” which divide people such as  

Are moral principles universal and objective?

is the world a safe or a dangerous place?

Is the world best understood through reason or emotion?

Can people choose their fate?

Are there large and essential differences between groups of people?

How much should we care about other people?

Should one resist authority or defer to it?

I’m not able to reproduce the table so can’t do justice to it here. Those interested can read this 40 page article which Homer-Dixon wrote in 2015 and which reproduces an earlier version of the table and all the diagrams. He has also outlined his "theory of hope" in this useful briefing note. 

Important Blog Features

Yesterday I released a little book – which you can find as the lead item in the list of E-books in the top-right corner of the blog. It’s called “Voices in the Air” and is the edited version of last year’s blogposts. 

It’s a balmy 15 degrees in downtown Ploiesti, Romania today – with fewer cars on the street and a lot of families enjoying a stroll in the park.

But the internet doesn’t let up – and I realised from one of today's posts that I had not recently updated my “blogroll” which is – perhaps confusingly – called “Insights into other worlds – good writing and painting”.

So I have now duly deleted a few sites and added five new ones. It’s always sad to say goodbye – but 2 Romanian sites had not posted for more than a year and Eva Balogh, whose Hungarian Spectrum about the perversities of the Orban government made fascinating daily reading, died last month. Rest in Peace, Eva - your voice will be missed. 

Five websites brought great delight in the last few months and needed to be added These are –

-       Adam Tooze - prolific writer and economic historian who has written the definitive histories of the Nazi economy, the global financial meltdown and the pandemic and now produces every few days an amazing collection of thoughts

-       Global inequality - Branko Milanovic  was a lead expert for the World Bank on the subject, and has this highly individual blog

-       Question the powerful – a great blog from Henry Tam who writes powerful stuff about democracy and communitarianism 

-       Scheerpost - is the leading radical blog in the US and hosts posts from the likes of Chris Hedges and Ralph Nader   

-       Surplus energy – offers the challenging views of post-growth writer Tim Morgan

A second thing that I now realise is that I have never properly introduced to new readers all the other rich features of the blog which have grown a life of their own in the 12 years of the blog – particularly the list of E-books.

And,  if you punch a favourite phrase into the search facility, chances are it will instantly give you something interesting. Try it.  

Update; Just as the year was ending, I discovered a brilliant new blog “Accidental Gods” and the writing of Rupert Read.

A New Year gift for my readers

This is the time of year when blogs and websites offer their “picks” of the year – what they consider to be the highlights they’ve offered.  

I thought I would go one better - and offer an edited version of the year’ s posts. It’s taken more than a week to prepare – because, for only the second time, they have been organized thematically with a short introduction trying to identify the thread of the arguments and how they might be taken forward. 

As I reread the posts indeed, I realized that there was a certain artificiality in trying to separate them into separate themes. My readers know that this blog does its best to avoid comment on contemporary events - it tries to rise above idle chatter and go to the core of our concerns. One of the editorial challenges was, therefore, to ensure that each post went into the appropriate category. The themes were -   

·       How we can identify good writing and its ingredients

·       The crisis in liberal democracy

·       Whether and how societies can (and need to) reinvent themselves

·       World values and political culture

·       Whether the West faces a “turning point”

·       Some musings about postmodernity

·       A Miscellaneous section a lot which consist of book reviews and range in subject matter from futurism to patriotism. 

The collection is called Voices in the Air – the 2021 posts for reasons explained on the 2^nd page and can be downloaded very simply from the pcloud link in the title. 

I think most readers will enjoy the first section – since it contains good advice on  communicating messages – as well as many examples of good writers and, fairly distinctively, an attempt to identify the ingredients of their trade. 

The second section may be too general for some of my readers – but the third section will be of particular interest who those of you who live in repressive regimes. The activist in me wants to identify the tools which would help find a way out of the mess most of us are in. A question the blog has pursued a lot this year – sparked off by difficulties in forming governments in Bulgaria and Romania - is how a country might go about the task of reinventing itself?  So far, politicians in this part of the world have not demonstrated any interest in such a question – but that’s no reason for civil society to ignore it. Section 3 looks at such tools as Good Governance and Anti-corruption - and wonders why reconciliation efforts don’t seem to have been attempted. 

This leads fairly naturally into a (shorter but none the less important) section (number 4) on Cultural Values and World Views which, of course, is so politically unacceptable that noone is willing to talk about it. It is, very much, the elephant in the room. I understand that, as an outsider, there is nothing I can do about this – except ask awkward questions 

Since 2009 this blog has recorded my effort to make sense of a venal system which seemed out of control – with posts containing extensive hyperlinks and book excerpts. For the past few years I have been collecting the more relevant of these to put a little book together to answer a series of questions I had posed 20 years ago in a short paper exploring the question of where I should be putting my energies. I lived through most of the Thatcher regime and my original note did register that something irrevocable was happening to the political system. But, when the global financial crash came in 2008, I too readily attributed its causes to what had been unleashed by UK and US policies in the 1980s. 

What I have begun to understand in the last few years is that the sources of our malaise are both earlier and more complex. And that I belong to the generation which unleashed a new spirit of disrespect for the past – and one of entitlement and hubris into the world. Hence the mea culpa implicit in the title “Dispatches to the Next Generation” I have given the posts which form section 5. One of the odd things to happen - as I tried in the following decade to make sense of it all – was the speed with which bad things got worse and how quickly what was I thought was an original insight became part of the conventional wisdom. At the start of the millennium, for example, the reputation of the political class sill ran high and the word “capitalism” was rarely used – 20 years later both were the subject of ridicule and contempt.

The pandemic, the onslaught of Artificial Intelligence and climate change are clearly major turning points which suggest that we are indeed at the dawn of a new era.

The new face of power

 There are very few of us who dare to challenge technological change. Most of us fear the ridicule involved – being the targets of taunts of being Canutes or Luddites. It, therefore, took a lot of courage for Jerry Mander in 1978 to produce Four Arguments for the elimination of television and for Neil Postman to follow this up with “Amusing Ourselves to Death” in 1985. And, with his “In the absence of the sacred – the failure of technology” (1992) Jerry Mander went beyond television to critique our technological society as a whole. 

In this provocative work, Mander challenges the utopian promise of technological society and tracks its devastating impact on cultures worldwide. The Western world’s loss of a sense of the sacred in the natural world, he says, has led us toward global environmental disaster and social disorder - and worse lies ahead. Yet models for restoring our relationship with the Earth exist in the cultures of native peoples, whose values and skills have enabled them to survive centuries of invasion and exploitation.

Far from creating paradise on Earth, technology has instead produced an unsustainable contest for resources. Mander surveys the major technologies shaping the “new world order”, computers, telecommunications, space exploration, genetic engineering, robotics, and the corporation itself and warns that they are merging into a global mega-technology, with dire environmental and political results. 

Needless to say, none of such book were taken seriously. It took perhaps a BBC television series of technological dystopia Black Mirror – which first hit screens exactly a decade ago – for us to begin to realise that technology (in the shape of the social media) has its perverse side. 

John McNaughton is a highly-respected commentator on technology and had a powerful piece a few days ago which led me to a review of two books in The Boston Review which is beginning to rival the New York Review of Books for the power of its analysis

The books are “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot” by Jeremy Weinstein, Mehran Sahami, and Rob Reich and “Solving Public Problems: A Practical Guide to Fix Our Government and Change Our World” by Beth Noveck 

Each makes important contributions. “System Error” breaks new ground in explaining why Silicon Valley (SV) is wreaking havoc on U.S. politics and offers uniformly thoughtful reforms. “Solving Public Problems”, on the other hand, offers possibly the most detailed and serious treatment of how digital tools help enhance democratic governance around the world. Neither, however, answers the question implicitly posed by opening their books with a description of U.S. democracy’s failure: What happens now, after January 6?

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“System Error’s” greatest contribution to public debate is to identify more precisely how Silicon Salley (SV) went wrong. Books such as Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” depict SV as a vast devouring Moloch, perfecting the means to manipulate human behavior. Others, such as Roger McNamee’s “Zucked”, focus on the business side. These books help correct an imbalance in public debate, which just a few years ago treated business leaders like Mark Zuckerberg as heroes, and took Facebook seriously when it claimed it was spreading freedom and building a new cosmopolitan world where borders didn’t matter and everyone was connected. But these books don’t get at the core problem, which is a product of the powerful mathematical techniques that drive SV’s business model. 

Optimisation; “System Error” explains that SV’s ability to turn complicated situations into optimization problems accounts for both its successes and its most appalling failures. Optimization lies behind the ubiquitous use of machine learning and automated feedback, the relentless “solutionism” described by Evgeny Morozov, and SV CEOs’ obsession with metrics. It is a mathematical technique that allows engineers to formalize complex problems and make them tractable, abstracting away most of the messiness of the real world. F. A. Hayek wrote of the “religion of the engineers”—their modern heirs are animated by the faith that seemingly impossible problems can be solved through math, blazing a path to a brighter world……

Optimization underlies what used to be exuberant and refreshing about SV, and very often still is. Engineers are impatient with intellectual analyses that aim to understand problems and debates rather than solve them. When engineers unleashed their energies on big social problems, such as bringing down the cost of rocket launches or making video conferencing at scale rapidly possible during a pandemic, it turned out that many things could and did get done.

Optimization allows engineers to formalize complex problems and erase the messiness of the real world, but it cannot reconcile people’s conflicting world views. 

I’ve started to read “System Error”. It’s highly readable – although I felt it was telling me more than I needed to know about its commercial side. It come in at 400 pages and, in my humble view, could do with some tough editing. How often do I have to say to writers and publishers – you are flooding us with so much material that you need to discipline yourselves and slim your material down. We simply don’t have the time available to do justice to all the books we want to read! Having said that, let me quote from its opening section - 

“We must resist this temptation to think in extremes. Both techno-utopianism and -dystopianism are all too facile and simplistic outlooks for our complex age.

Instead of taking the easy way out or throwing our hands up in the air, we must rise to the defining challenge of our era: harnessing technological progress to serve rather than subvert the interests of individuals and societies. This task is not one for technologists alone but for all of us.

Tackling this challenge begins with recognizing that new technologies create civic and social by-products, or, in the language of economics, externalities. Big, unregulated tech companies that harvest our private data and sell them to the highest bidder are not that different from chemical plants; it’s just the type of dumping that is different”. 

And it makes some important points eg

Against democracy; SV bet that political problems would evaporate under a benevolent technocracy. Reasonable people, once they got away from the artificial disagreement imposed by older and cruder ways of thinking, would surely cooperate and agree on the right solutions. Advances in measurement and computational capacity would finally build a Tower of Babel that reached the heavens. Facebook’s corporate religion held that cooperation would blossom as its social network drew the world together. Meanwhile, Google’s founder Sergey Brin argued that the politicians who won national elections should “withdraw from [their] respective parties and govern as independents in name and in spirit.” 

“System Error” recounts how Reich was invited to a private dinner of SV leaders who wanted to figure out how to build the ideal society to maximize scientific and technological progress. When Reich asked whether this society would be democratic, he was scornfully told that democracy holds back progress. The participants struggled with how to attract people to move to or vote for such a society. Still, they assumed that as SV reshaped the world, democratic politics—with its messiness, factionalism, and hostility to innovation—would give way to cleaner, more functional systems that deliver what people really want. Of course, this did not work.

Reich and his co-authors (who all teach at Stanford and are refreshingly blunt about the University’s role in creating this mindset) explain how their undergraduates idolize entrepreneurs who move fast and break things. In contrast, as then-Stanford president John Hennessy once told Joshua Cohen, it would be ridiculous for Stanford students to want to go into government. 

Maximising profits; As “System Error” explains, optimization theory worked well in harness with its close cousin, the “Objectives and Key Results” (OKR) management philosophy, pioneered by Andy Grove at Intel, to align engineering insight with profit-making intent. For a little while, the mythology of optimization allowed entrepreneurs to convince themselves that they were doing good by virtue of doing well. When Facebook connected people, it believed it made everyone better off—including the advertisers who paid Facebook to access its users. Keeping users happy through algorithms that maximized “engagement” also kept their eyes focused on the ads that paid for the endless streams of user posts, tweets, and videos.

But politics kept creeping back in—and in increasingly unpleasant ways. It became clear that Facebook and other SV platforms were fostering profound division: enabling the persecution of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar, allowing India’s BJP party to foster ethnic hatred, and magnifying the influence of the U.S. far right. As the chorus of objections grew, Facebook drowned it out by singing the corporate hymn ever more fervently. The company’s current Chief Technology Officer argued in a 2016 internal memo that Facebook’s power “to connect people” was a global mission of transformation, which justified the questionable privacy practices and occasional lives lost from bullying into suicide or terrorist attacks organized on the platform. Connecting people via Facebook was “de facto good”; it unified a world divided by borders and languages.

In reminding readers of Jerry Mander and Neil Postman, I don't want to detract from the importance of naysayers such as Efgeni Morozov and Nicholas Carr, particularly the latter's The Shallows - what the internet is doing to our brain (2010) and his more recent collection of essays Utopia is Creepy

The political incorrectness of cultural explanations

“I am convinced that the luckiest of geographic circumstances and the best of laws cannot maintain a constitution in despite of mores, whereas the latter can turn even the most unfavourable circumstances and the worst laws to advantage. The importance of mores is a universal truth to which study and experience continually bring us back. I find it occupies the central position in my thoughts: all my ideas come back to it in the end”.

Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy in America”

 

“The central conservative truth is that it is culture not politics that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself”

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan

 

“Why is it that social scientists are so averse to explanations that advance culture as a possible explanation. Are they all secret Marxists still influenced by Marx’s shopworn and too-simple ideas about substructure and superstructure? Are they still, as a legacy of the Nazi regime and World War II, concerned that what were then called “national character studies,” will lead to ethnic stereotyping and, hence, to mass extermination of Jews, gypsies, and others? Or are they so PC that, having mistakenly conflated culture and race, they fear above all—the unpardonable sin—of being labeled “racist.” One can legitimately argue the degree of importance of culture as an explanatory factor but, in considering cultural explanations, it has become clear to me that something more than “mere” science is at work here. Something else, something deeper, is afoot. Is it ideology; is it psychological; is it political correctness; what is it?”

Howard Wiarda intro to “Political Culture, Political Science and Identity Politics – an uneasy alliance” (2014)

Moynihan’s statement turns up in title of Lawrence Harrison’s 2006 book The Central Liberal Truth – how politics can change a culture and save it from itself in which he asserts a view which is no longer acceptable in these politically-correct days. It is one, however, with which I find myself in strong agreement - 

The influence of cultural values, beliefs, and attitudes on the way that societies evolve has been shunned by scholars, politicians, and development experts, notwithstanding the views of Tocqueville, Max Weber, and more recently Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, David Landes, Robert Putnam, and Lucian Pye, among others.

It is much more comfortable for the experts to cite geographic constraints, insufficient resources, bad policies, and weak institutions.

 

That way they avoid the invidious comparisons, political sensitivities, and bruised feelings often engendered by cultural explanations of success and failure. But by avoiding culture, the experts also ignore not only an important part of the explanation of why some societies or ethno-religious groups do better than others with respect to democratic governance, social justice, and prosperity. They also ignore the possibility that progress can be accelerated by (1) analyzing cultural obstacles to it, and (2) addressing cultural change as a remedy.

There is compelling evidence, for example from Geert Hofstede’s comparative analyses of cultural differences in IBM offices around the world,18 and the World Values Survey, which assesses values and value change in some 65 countries, that meaningful patterns exist in the values, beliefs, and attitudes of nations, and even “civilizations,” that make generalizations both valid and useful. 

This field is so rich in understanding that I am amazed how social scientists avoid it like the plague. In its absence, they are left only with geopolitics as an explanatory factor…

What will it take to rekindle our lost faith in the political process?

This is the time of year I devote to reviewing the year’s posts to see what sort of sense they make. Two years ago – on noticing a few common themes I actually structured the collected posts around those issues and wrote introductions to each section which you can see at Peripheral Vision – the 2020 posts. I am inclined to do so again for this year’s collected edition as several things have combined, for example, to get me writing fairly frequently this year about the quality of government – with the pandemic exposing the very different capacities of state and government in different parts of the world 

Of course, it doesn’t take much to get me going on this issue – my dissatisfaction with the combination of politics and bureaucracy goes back fully 50 years to my initial experience as an elected member with a local municipality; subsequent successes in making a large Regional authority more open and democratic; and experience since 1990 as a consultant in “capacity development” in ex-communist countries. 

The tragic failure of the rule of law to take root these past 30 years in this part of the world has slowly become obvious even to the most obtuse. Recent elections in Bulgaria and Romania have demonstrated the extent to which people have, understandably, completely lost trust in both their governments and the state. Adages of good governance and anti-corruption have been tried – and failed.

In a post in May, I posed some questions which needed to be asked about this failure - 

- how do we find out what conciliation efforts have already been attempted - let alone lessons learned - in BG and RO? South Africa had hundreds of such efforts 

- how would effective and "trustworthy" mediators be identified? There’s an Association of Conciliators here in Romania (presumably for commercial and family disputes) but perhaps they have relevant resources?

- who are the key actors who would be involved in any such meeting?

- how do we identify the positive lessons from other efforts throughout the world to bring societies together? Latin America clearly has had many such efforts

- how do we deal with the cynics who dismiss such experience as irrelevant to their country? 

Unfortunately the state has for the past few decades been losing what capacity it had throughout Europe and the rest of the world. The global financial meltdown of 2008 and the austerity policies that produced compounded the process. The political class's dedication to the notion of the minimal state promoted by globalisation and neoliberalism has encouraged many citizens to reward the populists. 

One of the limitations of blogposts is their brevity – although I know that will make some of you laugh. But my posts do tend to take either a positive or negative perspective on an issue – balance is more difficult. A post this year on how to build state capacity makes my point exactly.

An annual collection of posts, however, makes such balance possible. There have been more than 20 posts so far in 2021 dealing with the question of how ordinary citizens might rediscover their lost faith the political process – an issue which the blog has also explored in previous years. I will therefore read them carefully – along with earlier writing on the issue – and pen an introductory summary of the posts which deals with this critical question.