How many of us have actually taken time to ask - How do we know what we know?

Funny how words get invested, suddenly, with new meaning. Until very recently I’ve used the term “sceptical” with pride – it meant challenging what John Kenneth Galbraith called in the 1950s “the conventional wisdom” and few were, for me, better at this than Bertrand Russell whose Sceptical Essays I remember devouring in the late 1950s. In a new Introduction written recently, John Gray says - 

Russell had great admiration for Joseph Conrad and one of the reasons was surely his suspicion that Conrad’s sceptical fatalism was a truer account of human life than his own troubled belief in reason and science.

As reformer, Russell believed reason could save the world. As a sceptical follower of Hume he knew reason could never be more than the slave of the passions. “Sceptical Essays” (1928) was written as a defence of rational doubt. Today we c,an read it as a confession of faith, the testament of a crusading rationalist who doubted the power of reason. 

But now, thanks to climate and vaccination ”sceptics”, the word has become tainted with connotations of conspiracy, irrationality and tribalism. I want to understand –

-       how this apparent retreat to irrationality has happened and

-       what we can do about it 

Let me offer some tentative thoughts

-       for some reason, we have become more polarised in our thinking

-       the general consensus seems to be that the social media are to blame

-       as a good sceptic, I’m not so sure

-       perhaps increased educational opportunities have simply made us more aware of the subjectivities in our “take on reality” (pop psychology is a huge growth industry)

-       we have certainly become more aware, in the past decade, of the importance of “story-telling” whose importance first became obvious to me only a decade ago although people like Edward Bernays and Joseph Goebbels have been preaching its significance for almost a century and Alex Evans’ The Myth Gap appeared in  2017.

Evans was also the co-author of one of the most thoughtful pieces about polarisation which appeared in 2019 - Rebuilding Common Ground produced by a group which calls itself variously “Collective Psychology” or “Larger Us”. It’s a great analysis about what’s happened – although I’m not quite convinced by his recipes.

I have a feeling that too much of this is driven by attempts to be different and that we need to return to some of the basic issues of epistemology – namely “how do we know what we think we know”? Completely by accident, I stumbled a couple of days ago on a book entitle From Belief to Knowledge published in 2011 by Douglas and Wykowski. The focus may be organisational change but most of the book is a rare intellectual exploration – by 2 consultants - of a subject I have to confess I’ve spent too little time bothering to understand, put off to an extent by its name – epistemology. It’s not the easiest of reads but, fortunately, I also discovered another (downloadable) book which explores the same issue at a much more practical level - The Knowing-Doing Gap (2000)

Leaders we Deserve

One of the books I’ve been glancing at is the very recent Corruptible – who gets power and how it changes us; Brian Klaas (2021) which deals with four very fundamental questions - 

·       First, do worse people get power?

·       Second, does power make people worse?

·       Why, third, do we let people control us who clearly have no business being in control?

·       How, finally, can we ensure that incorruptible people get into power and wield it justly? 

The author then goes on to say - 

For the past decade, I’ve been studying these questions across the globe, from Belarus to Britain, Côte d’Ivoire to California, Thailand to Tunisia, and Australia to Zambia. As part of my research as a political scientist, I interview people—mostly bad people who abuse their power to do bad things. I’ve met with cult leaders, war criminals, despots, coup plotters, torturers, mercenaries, generals, propagandists, rebels, corrupt CEOs, and convicted criminals. I try to figure out what makes them tick. Understanding them—and studying the systems they operate in—is crucial to stopping them. Many were crazy and cruel, others kind and compassionate. But all were united by one trait: they wielded enormous power 

But, very curiously in the light of all his travels and effort, he doesn’t appear to have done the basic thing – which is to look at how other people have dealt with these questions. The book lacks even a short list of useful or recommended reading – and his index ignores most of the literature on the subject – the most important of which, for me by a long chalk, is Leaders we Deserve produced almost 40 years ago by Alistair Mant and which I was delighted to be able to access on the Internet Archive. This actually tries to understand what it is in leaders which makes them generally so ineffective 

Mant is a fascinating character – originally from Australia but working in Britain from the late 1970s and producing a delightful little book The Rise and Fall of the British Manager in 1977 whose introductory comments already give us a sense of the author’s originality - "The book represents the confluence of four distinct streams of personal experience:

-       Hoving read history and never quite recovering from the force of the experience.

-       A long association with some of the great figures out of the post-war Tovistock Institute and thus, on association with those tenuous links between the human sub-conscious and the strange things people do at work.

-       A 'career' in industry and the inevitable fund of anecdotes arising out of this, from the surreal to the grisly.

-       A life-time's fascination with words and the uses and misuses to which they are put.

 

I count myself an amateur in history, social science, management and linguistics but the combination of all four provided, for me, a slant on the topic of 'management' which I have missed elsewhere".

At least this useful collection of articles from practitioners and academics recognised the usefulness of Mant’s work – in the introduction to Leadership and Management in the 21^st century  ed G Cooper (2005). But it makes you wonder – how on earth can KLAAS even imagine he can do justice to an issue when he demonstrates that he hasn’t even bothered to read some at least of the relevant literature? Predictably, Machiavelli gets only one entry in the Index – and Madoff (Bernie) two! And, equally predictably, Robert Michels who, arguably, started the modern interest in what power does to people with his “Political Parties” (1911) and “the iron law of oligarchy” doesn’t figure in the index – nor do Hitler, Lenin or Stalin – although, curiously, Mussolini gets 2 pages!

UPDATE - in autumn 2024, I came across this fascinating book which, rightly, challenges the way the literature tends to focus on good leaders when the reality most of us deal with is BAD leaders - Debating Bad Leadership – reasons and remedies ed Anders Oertenblad (2021)

The Language of Anti-corruption

One of the most effective ways for powerful people to stop us thinking about an important issue is to ensure that the issue is made confusing and/or boring. That’s happened on climate change and, arguably, on Corruption. I’ve been looking a lot these past few days at the “discourse” of anti-corruption (sorry about the terminology but, this time, it’s an appropriate term to use). And I find it has only 2 tones – that of emotional outrage, on the one hand, and that of boring and confusing academia on the other. It’s why I found Alina Mungiu-Pippidi’s report so refreshing in my last post. It may be more than 100 pages long and written a decade ago but it was clearly and vividly presented and made me eager to keep reading. 

I was also very taken with a short paper - Doing Anti-Corruption Democratically (2022) - by Heather Maquette which gave an overview of some of the material on the subject written in the past decade and introduced me, for example, to the work of Michael Johnston who has been critical of a lot of the work of what he calls the Anti-corruption industry. Johnston indeed is one the few prepared to call a spade a spade and identify power and its inequitable distribution as the “elephant in the room” in most of the industry’s discourse. He put it very clearly in a 2005 book  

“Affluent market democracies have corruption problems of their own that – along with the conceptions of reform they have fostered – do much to shape the difficulties facing what are better called “peripheral” rather than developing societies”.

“Syndromes of Corruption – wealth, power and democracy” Michael Johnson 2005 

Which brings us to the UK – and a rare resignation by a politician for his failure to curb the fraud and corruption which took place on his watch. Simon Jenkins has the story and youtube has the politician’s short resignation speech. And remember the UK Supreme Court had just found the government guilty of favouritism.  The British judicial system indeed took a battering after a series of revelations of judicial cockups and its policing has always been suspect. But it was 2015 before a book with the title ”How Corrupt is Britain?” ed by D Whyte appeared followed a few years later by “Democracy for Sale - dark money and dirty politics”; by Peter Geoghegan (2020).  

But let me return to the question of the “discourse of anti-corruption”. I started by suggesting it knew only two tones – the first of which we hear in mass media coverage which, in a sense, tells us what we already knew, namely that people will always take advantage of opportunities/loopholes/weaknesses to rip off the system. People shrug their shoulders and settle in to fatalism.

The second tone is more academic – and boring. And I want to explore why – and whether change is possible. A few years back I referred to one of the first books to deal fairly and squarely with the question – Mark Billig’s “Learn to write badly: how to succeed in the social sciences” 2013 of which this is the Intro – and this the first chapter. So – short reads!

But this morning I came across a great video which I would strongly recommend to my more scholastic readers – a lecture on Writing Effectively . That may sound a bit paradoxical - how can you lecture on writing? But the guy is chatting to students in a very interactive way, inviting their comments and using the blackboard to record the ideas which come out of the discussion. He’s challenging the students to think more deeply about what readers want to get from stuff they read – and to realise that the writing process is horizontal (thinking out aloud) whereas reading is vertical – from the text to the world the reader is trying to understand. The guy is very provocative = and amusing. Great viewing – enjoy! And the website actually gives notes and blackboard shots as aide-memoires. 

While we’re on the subject, I’ve just recently stumbled on a blogger whose writing really makes an impact and I’d like to offer as an example – despite the occasional swearword.   It’s https://indi.ca/ and scrolling down will give you the range of topics he covers. He’s actually a Sri Lankan – but born and brought up in the US and now back in Sri Lanka and making a living from his writing. This is his latest https://indi.ca/how-white-empire-is-a-thing/  

Did Transition have to be so corrupt?

 “When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.' Alice in Wonderland

Discussions about “rule of law” and of “corruption” are never easy – since (like “populism” or “neo-liberalism”) it’s not at all clear what the terms mean. There’s a fragility about the words which tend to convey simply our feelings about the relevant issues - positive about the first term and negative about the others. 

When I arrived, all of 30 years ago, in the post-communist world, an early bit of homework I had to do was in the new field of “transitology” which was occupied by the academics of the Soviet and Eastern European Studies University departments whose previous focus had been watching the Kremlin power-plays. They did at least have the contextual understanding of the different countries of the Soviet bloc - although the only experience people could draw on about the transition from authoritarianism to liberal democracy was actually to be found in Portugal, Spain and Latin America – with Philippe Schmitter’s “Transitions from Authoritarian Rule – prospects for Democracy” published in 1986 being much studied after the Wall fell and “Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe” by Linz, Juan J. and Alfred Stepan becoming the new map in 1996.

And it was 1998 before the first exclusive studies of the transition progress being made in central and eastern Europe namely Jon Elster and Claus Offe’s famous “Institutional Design in Post-Communist Societies: Rebuilding the Ship at Sea” and David Stark’s Postsocialist Pathways – transforming politics and property 

But this was the precise point that the EC took the decision that the central European states who had applied for EU membership could – despite (or because of?) their 45 years’ experience of communism - be treated seriously as potential members. Of course, conditionality was strongly applied – in other words, the countries were required to demonstrate their compliance with the requirements of membership – meaning in particular rule of law and competition. I was in Romania at the time writing  In Transit – notes on good governance (1999)  which captures well my perceptions at the time – about the scale of the challenge facing these countries; about transitology; and about the lessons I felt Britain had learned about its reform efforts. It's a fairly unique book since very few other westerners had actually moved to the Region or were trying to capture key messages to convey to the reformists in ex-communist countries

And in due course, some 6-7 years later, 8 of the countries were admitted – with Bulgaria and Romania following in 2007. Once they had become members of the club, of course, the new states could - and did - relax. My blog started in 2009 when I was alternating between Bulgaria and Romania and able to get a sense of “progress” – such as it was. There’s more English-language material available about Romania which has therefore been the subject of more posts – perhaps the most interesting and insightful (if pessimistic) being one entitled When will it ever change? which 

- reminded readers of Ralf Dahrendorf’s Reflections on the Revolution in our time in which he had made the optimistic prediction that it might take 15-20 years for those countries to create the rule of law but two generations to have a fully functioning civil society.  

- and of Head of European Delegation in Romania, Karen Fogg’s giving all consultants a note about Robert Putnam’s book on Italian democracy which had made the point that Italy’s south was trapped in a two-century old culture

- quoted excerpts from a rare pamphlet written  by Sorin Ionitsa on Poor Policy Making in Weak States (2006) which indicated the strength of old ties in his home country of Romania

- made the obvious point that Dahrendorf had been overly optimistic in 1990/91 when he talked of one or two generations being necessary for a democratic culture to take hold in central europe 

I had actually planned to use this post to discuss some excellent new material on anti-corruption which has just been published but, for some reason, my thoughts kept pulling me back to the transitology debate – of which, incidentally, one hears very little these days. The result is a rather confused post which doesn’t do justice to either the transition issue or to anti-corruption - and will therefore require a follow-up. 

Let me finish the post with what I consider the best analysis of all the huge literature on anti-by corruption – and it’s by a Romanian, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, who was commissioned by Norway in 2010 to survey the field and give recommendations. The result – Contextual Choices in Fighting Corruption (2011) - has some very helpful diagrams and tables although it can, on occasion, be a bit abstruse - 

 What is presented in most anti-corruption literature as a principal-agent problem is in fact a collective action problem, since societies reach a sub-optimal equilibrium of poor governance with an insufficient domestic agency pushing for change.

The report argues that the question “what causes corruption” is therefore absurd. Particularism exists by default, since people tend to share in a particular way, most notably with their closest kin and not with everyone else. Modern states are based on universal citizenship, which entails fair treatment of every citizen by the government. But there are very few states that have thus far succeeded in moving from the natural state to this ideal of modernity. The question should change from “what causes corruption” to “what makes particularism evolve into universalism”. What determines a change in the equilibrium?

Her report suggested that societies could be distinguished by their commitment to three very different sets of values

-       Universalism; where the state treats its citizens impartially

-       Neopatrimonialism; which have single rulers who treat the state as their ‘own’ patrimony.

-       Competitive particularism; which hold elections and have freedoms and competing political parties but have similar non-universal allocation systems, including patronage, nepotism, and favours

and then went on to draw 10 lessons from the global experience of which these are perhaps the most important

Lesson number one is that, the battlefield upon which this war is lost or won remains national. Case studies of historical and contemporary achievers show that although external constraints played a large role in inducing disequilibrium in particularistic countries and triggering change, a transformation has to be reflected in a new equilibrium of power at the society level for it to be both profound and sustainable.

 

Lesson number two is therefore that the transition from corrupt regimes to a regime where ethical universalism is the norm is a political and not a technical-legal process. There is no global success case of anti-corruption as promoted by the international anti-corruption community. Successful countries followed paths of their own. Fighting corruption in societies where particularism is the norm is similar to inducing a regime change: this requires a broad basis of participation to succeed and it is highly unrealistic to expect this to happen in such a short interval of time and with non-political instruments.

The main actors should be broad national coalitions, and the main role of the international community is to support them in becoming both broad and powerful. All good governance programs should be designed to promote this political approach: audits, controls and reviews should be entrusted to ‘losers’ and draw on natural competition to fight favouritism and privilege granting. No country can change without domestic collective action, which is both representative and sustainable over time.

 

The media, political oppositions and civil society should not be seen as non-permanent guests taking part in consultations on legal drafts but as main permanent actors in the process of anti-corruption and holding decisive seats in all institutions promoting ethical universalism. Which windows of opportunities to use, which actors are more interested in changing the rules of the game and how to sequence the change depends on the diagnosis of each society and cannot be solved by a one-size-fits-all solution. 

Other relevant posts

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/04/why-transition-will-last-hundred-years.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/07/when-will-it-ever-change.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/01/roman-romania.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/11/plus-ca-changeplus-cest-la-meme-chose.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/06/whatever-happened-to-good-governance.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2020/09/crowds-and-power-in-sofia-and-bucharest_18.html 

What is Change?

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

Capacity development is one of the few approaches which recognises the importance of all three – although, in reality, its focus is on training and it never ventures into the dangerous field of social change.   It’s only in the past year or so that people have dared challenge this (see last 2 titles in "networked" level of table)  

As my few faithful readers know, I have taken on this strange, Sisyphean task of trying to make sense of the modern world. Each time I think I am close to success, the stone breaks free and rolls back down the mountain – or rather I realise either that the words don’t do justice to the reality or, more often, that what I regarded as original thought is now the conventional wisdom. I leave the text for a few months and then – masochist that I am – return to the task. The latest version of “What is to be Done?” has some marginal changes but I’m now keen to improve the chapter which deals with Change.                   

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

The trouble is that knowledge has, in the past half century, become so specialised that it is now very difficult to explore Change in a truly inter-disciplinary way. That’s why I’ve devoted the second chapter to the glories of trespassing across boundaries – whether of class, nation, profession or intellectual discipline.

This table tries to reduce a very complex field of writing to a few milestones. 

The Level	The Focus	Example
The individual	Self-help, psychology	In Over our Heads – the mental demands of modern life Robert Kegan  1995
The organisational	Commercial – managing change, OD	In Search of Excellence Peters and Waterman 1982
	Public – new public management, public value	Reinventing Government Graeber and Osborne (1992) Appraising public value; past, present and futures (2011) useful (academic) summary article Public Value Management – governance and reform in Britain ; John Connolly et al (2021)
	Non-governmental	Creating Public Value in Practice – advancing the common good in a ….noone in charge world J Bryson and Crosby (2015)
The societal	Social change	Can Democracy be Saved?  - participation, deliberation and social movements; Donatella Della Porta (2013)   Power in movement – social movement and contentious politics; Sydney Tarrow (2011 edition) Change the World Robert Quinn (2000)
networked	The dynamic between the 3 levels	Life and How to Survive it R Skynner and J Cleese 1990 The World We Create Tomas Bjorkman  2019 Unlearn – a compass for radical transformation Hans Burmeister (2021)

 

Penis Envy and the social sciences

This blog is written by someone who calls himself a “social scientist”, hinting at a well-known condition of “penis envy” vis-à-vis the traditional sciences – witness the penetration of economics and political science in particular by mathematical modelling in the last 70 years. 

A few months back, I had a strange post which used Stephen Pinker’s latest book Rationality – what it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters as an excuse first for some reminiscences on how the post-war priority given by American social scientists to the issue of “decision-making” had influenced the direction my life subsequently took; and then for some extensive notes on reading I had just come across on the role the American military had played in the development of post-war social science in that country whose culture (let alone military) had such power and authority  

I felt I needed to return to the post – partly because I had left Pinker hanging but mainly because the notes were precisely that; inconclusive extracts from reading which didn’t lead anywhere. But the musings of the past few days are taking me into very complicated fields about human knowledge and “scientific proof” and I’m getting utterly lost…When I get blocked in this way, I’ve found a good technique is to pull back and attempt a simple description of each element. As I do so, I suddenly see the way to make connections…. 

So, on the basis that I don’t know where this train of thought is leading me, let me try to extract some messages from the reading that post flagged up.      

I took an Honours degree in “Economics and Politics” in 1964 at the University of Glasgow In those days there was no pretence of scientific status – after all, Adam Smith had been a Professor at the University in the 18^th Century; but in Moral Philosophy! And there was certainly nothing scientific about my course – the economics stream gave us no sense of basic methodologies – just statements that simplifying assumptions about human nature were being made which would be relaxed at a later stage. They never were. Nor did we deal with the subject of how understanding and knowledge developed – let alone the controversies around such issues. My one glimpse of that field was in the politics  stream when we got a couple of lectures about Karl Mannheim’s Sociology of Knowledge. But that didn’t stop me from using my status as an economics lecturer to intimidate others – changing my focus to public administration proved to be no hindrance as public management became flavour of the month in the 90s when I moved into international consultancy.  

I had been aware of the controversy surrounding the delivery in 1959 by CP Snow of the famous lecture which critiqued the UK for its Two Cultures which Snow updated in a booklet he produced a few years later. CP Snow was an interesting character – a chemist from a modest background who was also a novelist, he had been a Civil Service Commissioner from 1945-1960 and in charge of the recruitment of scientists. So not exactly a “hard” scientist – but he had that reputation. His lecture opened a can of worms – with its analysis of how the world of gentlemen amateurs had held scientists down in a second-class position – and helped spawn the field of declinism which I remember vividly from the 1960s and which still haunts the country today.

By far and away the best treatment of the significance of the Two Cultures debate is the one contained in the booklet issued in 1998 which contains the update Snow wrote in 1961 as well as an extensive introduction by Stefan Collini which superbly analyses the implications and consequences of the debate for our contemporary understanding of claims to scientific standing…Collini is probably Britain’s best intellectual historian who gave us recently a great collection of essays Common Writing 

In practice, it is clear that we still find it convenient to go on using terms like 'the humanities' and 'the sciences', and for most purposes we roughly know what we mean by them. But this conventional usage is not now underpinned by any agreed definitional criteria - it has become a matter of lively debate whether we should even be trying to identify any one method of enquiry or one range of subject matter or one professional or cultural ethos as distinguishing 'science' from 'non-science'. There is, of course, a rich and illuminating history of attempts to establish the basis for such a distinction, attempts which flourished with particular abundance once the nineteenth century had endowed the category of science with the prestige and burden of being the only provider of reliable, objective knowledge. Philosophers such as Wilhelm Dilthey in the late-nineteenth century or Karl Popper in the mid-twentieth endeavoured to draft the relevant conceptual legislation, stipulating the general properties needing to be possessed by a form of knowledge or mode of enquiry never commanded general assent, least of all among other philosophers of science. The activities conventionally referred to as 'the sciences' do not, it is argued, all proceed by experimental methods, do not all cast their findings in quantifiable form, do not all pursue falsification, do not all work on 'nature' rather than human beings; nor are they alone in seeking to produce general laws, replicable results, and cumulative knowledge.

 

…..The very nature of the revolutionary work in theoretical physics, astronomy, and cosmology has helped to challenge the model of scientific thinking which represented it as proceeding by a combination of rigorous deduction and controlled inferences from

empirical observation. The role of imagination, of metaphor and analogy, of category-transforming speculation and off-beat intuitions has come to the fore much more (some would argue that these had always had their place in the actual processes of scientific

discovery, whatever the prevailing account of 'scientific method'), As a result, more now tends to be heard about the similarity rather than the difference of mental operations across the science/humanities divide, even though some of the similarities, it must be said, seem to be of a rather strained or at best analogical kind. 

In other words, things are in a state of flux. Old certainties have vanished – under the influences of new discoveries and the multiple perspectives of postmodernity. Positivism indeed has become a term of abuse. I had wanted to refer my readers to a short, clearly written piece on the issue but the author I had in mind Alan Ryan seems to have written only The Philosophy of the social sciences which is more than 50 years old. In its stead, I offer another book but as clearly written as the subject permits - Philosophy and Public Administration (2020) which helps explain the importance in our search for understanding of such things as epistemology and ontology 

I do realise that the post so far has failed to return either to Stephen Pinker’s “Rationality” or to the influence of the military on the post-war development of US social sciences. Clearly that will require another post – but I leave you with one question about Pinker’s new book. It’s very much a book for our times – which have become conspiratorial. The book offers tools for clear thinking. But modern psychology is tone-deaf to questions of history and philosophy. His book therefore fails to consider how rational thinking has changed over the ages. Stephen Toulmin was a philosopher who wrote extensively about this and had a strong view that rationality was overdone and that we needed was “reasonableness”. He produced a couple of beautifully-written books to prove his point of which the latest was Return to Reason (2001). I find it significant that Pinker makes no mention of his name