Is the UK becoming a failed State?

How quickly a country can collapse – socially and economically. Lebanon and Sri Lanka are the latest examples.

Mark Blyth is a political economist highly respected across the political spectrum for the clarity and bluntness of his dissection of complex issues. On a 2021 podcast he had expressed the view, in his typically succinct way, that Brexit had been a turning point for the British economy – with the past year in particular suggesting that little was left except an enormous “Rentier Class” living off hundreds of billions of profits of privatised companies. The social media is full of the amazing profits being made by the shareholders and bosses of these companies - which add insult to injury by failing to undertake basic investment in infrastructure. There’s been quite a spate of books recently about “Rentier Capitalism” of which this looks the most interesting

As far as action is concerned, Richard Murphy has been a rare voice pushing in the past decade for tax justice and probably has the most detailed programme. His brief outline is here – and the 30 page detailed programme is here

But forgive me for wanting to focus on the part of the UK I know best – Scotland, from which Mark Blyth also happens to hail. Having been against the idea of Scotland separating in 2014 from the UK, he was “outed” recently on Twitter as having changed his mind – although he has subsequently confessed to finding it difficult “to make a positive case for independence” and has apparently just been axed from the Advisory group he joined a year ago. The Scottish Government last month decided to make a bid for a second referendum on the issue (for October 2023) – with the 2 candidates for the Conservative party leadership both strongly opposed to allowing it.

It’s not easy to find a good discussion on the internet about the issues involved in the idea of Scotland separating – but I’ve just come across a fantastic one superbly chaired by a young trade union woman. All the participants are Scottish and the tone is respectful;

Common Weal is an important Scottish Foundation which has run a podcast for quite some time and here features Richard Murphy to take us back to the UK economy.

The social media are having a great time with such fake ads as this one for the UK government 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1561657960819937282

update; and lo, 2 days later, James O'Brien was also talking of "the failed state" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPduUCpjkNE

26 August - How Chris Grey's latest post put it -

Domestically, that means a rapidly worsening cost of living crisis. Inflation is at its highest since the early 1980s and still rising, with households facing their largest ever recorded fall in living standards, and the Bank of England predicts five continuous quarters of economic recession. There are multiple strikes in the rail network, the docks, the courts, the postal service and elsewhere, and more to come. With a growing ‘Don’t Pay’ campaign in the face of what for many will be impossible energy bills, talk of civil unrest and disobedience does not seem hyperbolic.

There are now chronic labour shortages in almost every occupation, so that even as food prices rise to a 40-year high there is food rotting in fields for lack of people to pick or harvest it. The NHS, and especially the ambulance service, is at breaking point, as, not unrelatedly, is the social care system. In fact it is hard to find any part of the public or private sector which is not, in some way or other, under alarming strain. The beaches are awash with sewage, like a metaphor. And, though you’d hardly know it, we are still living with the effects of a pandemic, including an estimated 1.6 million people in England alone living with Long Covid, and presumably the possibility of a new wave to come.

Throughout all this, the leadership contest means there has been, in effect, no functioning government. The notional Prime Minister, rather than acting as a responsible caretaker, has spent the summer alternating between sulking, holidaying and squeezing the last drop out of the perks of his office. Any chance Boris Johnson had of a final period of dignity to set against the depraved conduct that led to his ejection has been squandered. Most Prime Ministers end up being judged less harshly by history than they are at the time of their departure; I strongly suspect that Johnson will be assessed even more critically in the future than he is now.

Post-Brexit political instability set to continue

When this strange summer ends, it will not herald the end of the period of political instability any more than the events and crises of the summer are peculiar to the season. This isn’t a holiday that has gone horribly wrong, it’s the latest instalment of a reality there is no taking a break from. That political instability began with the 2016 referendum. Having a new Prime Minister is not going to finish, but is a part of, this post-2016 story. I don’t mean that there were no political problems before, but that since then there has been a particular sort of instability and for particular reasons.

It’s not a coincidence that the new Prime Minister will be the fourth in the six years since the referendum, the same number as held office in the thirty-one years between 1979 and 2010. Nor is it a coincidence that within those six years there have also been two general elections, massive churn in the holding of ministerial posts, an illegal prorogation of parliament, a unique judgment that the government was in contempt of parliament, numerous highly unusual constitutional events, a government openly threatening to break international law, massive stresses in the relationship between Westminster and the devolved administrations, significant pressures on the Good Friday Belfast Agreement, and perhaps the most significant rifts between ministers and the civil service in modern history. All these things reflect the way that Brexit has all but overwhelmed the capacity and norms of the UK state and political institutions.

Confused about Political Cultures?

It’s more than 40 years since I noticed that concepts have different meanings in other languages. It’s as if each nation carries its distinctive baggage in its collective heads – for example “Chancellor”, “policy” and “accountability”. And the image conjured up by the word “councillor” very much depends on the country’s electoral system and the relative financial power of the municipal system.

When the Wall fell, central and south-east Europeans had to learn what such previously reviled concepts as capitalism and democracy meant – both in practice and in theory. Thirty years on, it’s assumed they know – although political cultures in countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania – let alone Italy – do not operate in quite the way of those in NE Europe.

It’s Bulgaria and Romania I know best – from living in them for some 15 years and have tried during that period to convey to my readers a sense of their political culture.

Since 1990 I have lived in about a dozen countries and have tried to keep up with the literature on cultural differences. Indeed earlier this year I did a series of posts on this which I have this week reviewed – resulting in a short (10,000 word) paper which you find here and which I hve tried to summarise thus -

1. The words and concepts we use have different meanings in different cultural contexts – some subtle, some profound

2. Until recently, the western interpretation was accepted as the holy grail

3. The origins of the field can be traced back to Almond and Verba’s “The Civic Culture” of 1963 which looked at various democratic societies.

4. The subsequent literature uses a variety of terms – political culture, national culture, world values, world views and cultural theory – which may or may not refer to the same phenomenon.

5. De Hofstede used his base in IBM to carry out survey work on its plants in various parts of the world and popularised in the 1980s a series of measures showing the power of distinctive national contexts

6. This work was taken up by a variety of consultants to multinational business such as Richard Lewis, Frans Trompenaars, Charles Hampden-Turner and Erin Meyer to reinforce the argument about national traits

7. Something seemed to happen at the turn of the new millennium. Anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists and political scientists somehow started to feel that discussions about cultural differences are no longer politically acceptable.

8. Indeed the World Values Surveys take great care to create clusters which blur national divisions and focus instead on such things as tradition and self-expression

9. And yet we persist as citizens in maintaining – and arguably accentuating – our cultural identities – see the section on the Scots

The UK finally goes off its head

It is normally France we associate with public protest – tractors clogging the streets and protestors tearing up cobbles. But, for once, its citizens are quiet – and little wonder since they have been guaranteed a limit of 4% to their increased energy costs. It is Britain which has seen the public outrage about the cost of living – and about time after it has been subjected for more than 40 years to the most aggressive programme of privatisation – as well as a continual deterioration in standards of public life.

But something broke this summer – even Tory MPs objected to the torrent of lies and misdemeanours in which its citizens have been deluged from Brexit to Covid.

And so, for the second time in 3 years, a Prime Minister was forced to resign and the country is subject not to an election – but a replacement procedure which is confined to 200,000 ageing members of the Tory party. And this is the country that would have us believe that it has led the world in democracy????

The country’s broken constitutional system was revealed for all to see when Boris Johnson tried to suspend Parliament in 2019 and in the government’s attempts since then to hobble the judicial system. And more and more people now realise that the English electoral system gives governments too much power (the Scots were able to opt in 1999 for a “proportional” one which is much more responsive to the spread of public opinion - their governments since then have been coalitions or minority)

The massive increase in prices unleashed as a result of the breakdown in supply chains and the Ukraine War has created in the UK a “summer of discontent” which puts the famous “winter of discontent” of the late 1970s completely in the shade. The Rail, Communications and Nursing Unions are on strike – with unusually strong support from the public. And a series of campaigns have elicited widespread social media interest – such as “Enough is Enough”, “Don’t Pay” (on energy bills) and We Own it (on renationalisation of public utilities). And the poor consumer, for once, has been given an active voice by the campaigns of Martin Lewis. One of the factors driving the outrage is the scale of the profits being made in the UK by the (privatised) energy companies – hundreds of billions of pounds – and the lack of serious government response compared with its European neighbours

As the Conservative party tears itself apart in a horrifying campaign between a shallow, unbelievable, right-wing Liz Truss and an elegant Sunak, the Prime Minister goes on holiday and the Leader of the Opposition goes missing. The only politician who seems able to express the public mood is an ex-Prime Minister who retired 12 years ago – Gordon Brown who has demanded that an immediate emergency budget be established and also set out a draft programme.

From the candidates comes nothing that makes any sort of sense. Indeed they both seem to be arguing that the past 12 years of Conservative government rule has been wasted – even although Truss worked under the past 3 Prime Ministers and Sunak has been Chancellor of the Exchequer for the past 3 years. No wonder that one commentator was reduced to summarising their arguments as 

buying into the faith that nameless regulations are shackling business and, above all, that a weak political class, deep state and obeisance to technocrats have combined to make Britain quasi-socialist – despite 12 years of Tory rule. Truss is the insurgent carrying the Thatcherite flame who will put the world to rights. 

Will Hutton's article is worth reading in full - since it's one of the few pieces I've seen which sets out the sheer craziness of what lies in store when Liz Truss (whose ambition is to appear in Vogue magazine) is announced the winner of the contest on September 5. Simon Wren-Lewis is another serious economist whose posts – unlike his colleagues’ - are always sensitive to political realities and offers a shrewd assessment here of why the 2 contenders are pursuing such a right-wing course

https://twitter.com/i/status/1559213230790156288 is a 5 minute video exchange about a small company (with a thousand employees) which is having to lay off its workers and move to the Rotterdam area. It offers a fascinating insight into how the UK is committing economic suicide - through the combination of Brexit; a government which simply has ceased any attempts at government; and excessive energy costs/profits. The company simpy cannot pass 260% additional energy costs onto customers - but in the Netherlands there is a cap on charges which will allow them to survive 

see also https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/16/britain-has-been-avoiding-its-biggest-problems-for-decades-now-were-paying-the-price

update; for a Scottish perspective on the contest see https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2022/08/14/stealing-the-constitution/

 

Why the polarisation - and what can be done about it?

 “Polarisation”, we are told, has become the predominant feature of contemporary societies. I want to explore why this issue has arisen in the past decade – and what we can do about it.

My first stab at an explanation put it down to a combination of the forces released by the ethic of greed which swept us up in the 1980s AND the technology of internet communication with which we were presented in the late 1990s. It’s so easy now to press a “like” button or tweet our feelings of identity with the particular tribe we belong to

The financial crash of 2008 gave us every reason to be angry – with Trump and Brexit being the initial beneficiaries. Now it’s Covid, global warming, supply chain collapse, war, inflation and energy shortages which are stoking our fears and divisions. We have become gibbering addicts to immediate gratification - such are the forces which Thatcher and Reagan released in 1979

But then I remembered that Galbraith’s “The Affluent Society” which emphasised the contrast between “private affluence” and “public squalour” came out in 1958 – long before Thatcher has even been heard of. Clearly things are more complicated than I had originally thought. The rot had started earlier….but when...and how?

For the moment, I’ll leave these questions hanging because I’ve come across a clutch of books offering ways to deal with the issue of polarisation. Unlike global warming, this seems something on which we can and should be working with friends and neighbours. It also touches on the issue which I’ve become increasingly fascinated by – namely the mental maps, lens, frames and stories we use when trying to make sense of the world. Here are some of the books I encountered -

• “Living in Denial – climate change, emotions and everyday life” Kari Norgaard (2011) A researcher returns to her Norwegian roots to spend a year exploring what one town felt about climate change

• “Active Hope – how to face the mess we’re in without going crazy”; Joanne Macey and Chris Johnstone (2012) A philosopher and social psychologist team up to develop an important idea about hope (about which St Augustine did not say - "Hope has 2 beautiful daughters - anger about how things are and courage to ensure they do not remain so)

• How to have impossible conversations; Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (2019) a rather formula-ristic book 

• “Still Hopeful – lessons from a lifetime of activism”; Maude Barlow (2021) an admirable activist in issues such as water and globalisation offers some lessons from her work

• “Saving Us – a climate scientist’s case for hope and healing in a divided world”; Katharine Hayhoe (2021) which starts with a nice story about her being confronted with a large poster with the 4-way test of the Rotary Club, throwing away the speech she had prepared and using the 4 principles -

Start with something you have in common. Connect it to why climate change matters to us personally—not the human race in its entirety or the Earth itself, but rather us as individuals. Climate change affects nearly everything that we already care about. It will make us and our children less healthy, our communities less prosperous, and our world less stable. Often, in fact, it already has.

Then, describe what people can and are doing to fix it. There are all kinds of solutions, from cutting our own food waste to powering buses with garbage tor using solar energy to transform the lives of some of the poorest people in the world. There are solutions that clean up our air and our water, grow local economies, encourage nature to thrive, and leave us all better off, not worse. Who doesn’t want that?

This book is packed with stories, ideas, and information that will lead to positive conversations—conversations that bridge gaps rather than dig trenches, conversations that may surprise you with the discovery of common ground. By bonding over the values we truly share, and by connecting them to climate, we can inspire one another to act together to fix this problem. But it all begins with understanding who we already are, and what we already care about —because chances are, whatever that is, it’s already being affected by climate change, whether we know it or not.

Beyond Intractability is an important resource for the polaristion issue

 

Out of Control?

With growing inequality, the Ukraine War, the heat waves, the energy shortages and raging inflation, we can be forgiven for believing that the world is out of control. Rather ironic for Brits given that Brexit was supposed to be about "taking back control"!

One of the side effects of the thought-system which is unhelpfully known as “neoliberalism” is what the academics equally confusingly call “loss of human agency”. So let’s cut the crap - call a spade a spade – and say simply that many of us have lost our sense of solidarity The Brits have never been fond of that word – it spills more easily from French mouths. But perhaps the UK railwaymen are helping the country to understand what we’ve lost in the last half-century by our hesitancy in using the word? I’ll readily admit that, despite my active membership of the Labour party, I was ambivalent about trade unions. It’s only now that I understand how pathetically middle-class that made me. Trade unions in those days (with the exception of individuals such as Jimmy Reid) may have been a bit traditional and defensive – but they deserved support which never came - with Arthur Scargill having a lot to answer for with the way he chose to revel in his role as National Rogue/scourge. Mick Lynch has set the pace in giving workers a new pride in their capabilities compared with the crass idiots of the preening media and the ruling class. 

But let's return to the issue of loss of control. Although Joseph Tainter published “The Collapse of Complex Societies” as far back as 1988, it was Jared Diamond who set the ball rolling with his “Collapse – how societies choose to fail or succeed” in 2005 – although J Michael Greer’s “The Long Descent” made the bigger impact on me in 2008 – the same year as Dmitry Orlov’s “Reinventing Collapse”. Since then the floodgates have opened – with Covid and global warming perhaps being the final nails in the coffin of our smugness.

But it was never supposed to end like this – we were assured by the doomsters that the process would be gradual! Deep Adaptation – navigating the chaos of climate change ed by J Bendell and R. Read (2021) is the book I’m currently trying to read. It’s at the extreme end of the spectrum and has attracted criticism from even sympathetic viewers here and here 

I had expected by now to be reading one of these helpful overviews of recent literature on the subject for which the NYRB is famous – but have not been able to find one. 

It's a curious omission. 

It’s exactly three years since I did an annotated bibliography of the global warming issue. Clearly it’s now time to do one on “collapsology” - with this hot-off-the-press paper on “Exploring catastrophic climate change” as exhibit number one

Update; this blogger has a series of no less than 10 (long) posts on Collapse - starting with https://theeasiestpersontofool.blogspot.com/2020/06/collapse-you-say.html

Reform – and the neglect of context

Today’s highlight was a fascinating story by a Peruvian of how local technocrats – trained at US universities – returned to Peru to peddle solutions to the country which were lapped up from 2000 but are now being rejected by the prevailing power structure - a strange blended mix of left and right.    

Since taking office in July 2021, the so-called “left-wing” government and the ostensibly “right-wing” National Congress have been working together to dismantle the weak scaffolding that held our infant liberal democracy. This regression’s happening against the backdrop of a savage rollback in the state’s capacity. The government has removed career civil servants, reneged on the expectation that key ministries should be withheld from political appointees and acted to undermine the transparency and accountability gains.

This year, the Congress passed two crucial pieces of legislation: removing oversight of higher education standards and giving parents the right to approve all school teaching materials.

This move has been promoted by conservative groups, who want to stop the government from allowing educators to teach important topics in schools, like sex education or encouraging informed assessments of the roles that the Shining Path and the Peruvian State played in the violence of the 1980s and 1990s.

 

In May 2022, the National Congress elected new members of the Constitutional Tribunal – Peru’s version of the US Supreme Court. Four of its six members are aligned with supporters of the previous laws. Many other liberal reforms made during the previous 20 years are also at stake:

·       Transport reforms (tackling informal transport providers).

·       How parties can use resources during political campaigns (the basis of several money laundering cases, involving the leaders of most parties).

·       Hard-earned minority rights.

·       Freedom of information and expression.

·       Environmental protection policies.

 

You may well think that a self-styled “left wing” government and a primarily “right wing” congress should be at loggerheads. The reality is more complex and interesting.

“Left” and “right” in Peru, as in much of the world, are now meaningless political labels. Political power provides economic and social opportunities – that’s what matters now in Peruvian politics.

Peruvian parties are mercantilist operations – public prosecutors have even accused some of being criminal organisations, with clear private interests. This shift in priorities has made it easy for them to come to a tacit, multi-party understanding to undo the progressive reforms. It’s a new elite bargain. 

I’ve never worked in South America – but, for some reason, the article struck home. I recognised the issue because, in 1990, I found myself invited by the WHO (Europe) Director of Public Health to help her develop a network of health promotion in the newly-liberated countries of Central Europe. It was a short-term contract of some 6 months but proved to be a launch-pad for my new career as consultant in “capacity (institutional) development” in both central Europe and central Asia. This was a fascinating experience which I’ve written about in Missionaries, mercenaries or witchdoctors? (2007) and “The Long Game – not the logframe” (2011) - presented to NISPAcee Conferences in which I took apart the superficiality of the assumptions EC bureaucrats  were making about the prospects of its Technical Assistance programmes  making any sort of dent in what I called (variously) the kleptocracy  or “impervious regimes” of most ex-communist countries.  

Basically my criticism was that project for institutional change failed to understand the local contexts and cultures - and assumed that “good practice blueprints” from elsewhere could be easily replicated – with a bit of training.

One of the reasons I enjoyed my eight years in Central Asia from 1999 was that I had the freedom to take account of the local conditions and to design strategies which the local European Delegations had confidence would actually work. The “conditionalities” which governed the “candidate countries” of aspiring EU members in central Europe patently didn’t apply in Central Asia – and the “counterparts” with whom I worked had the intelligence and ability to be able to insist on “workable” strategies. In Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan, this produced results. 

Last year I came across a rare book which helped me understand why – this was Helping People help themselves – from the World Bank to an alternative philosophy of technical assistance by David Ellerman (2006) which I wrote about at the time here - https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/06/helping-people-help-themselves.html 

In my next post I hope to develop the theme

US vanity

This blog does not pretend to be familiar with military strategy but, ever since Vietnam, I have doubted US claims to military supremacy. It always seemed to me to be the worst form of bully talk. The US is now playing a deeply dangerous game – arming Ukraine to the tune of 100 billion dollars while simply cheering from the sidelines. One of the blogs I follow always fires from the hip and posed this question yesterday - 

How long can an empire keep losing wars without losing power? “where are the tangible results in what throughout human history has served as the most important test of power: victories in wars?” This is a question America has been violently, rudely asking for decades, and the answer has long been ‘none’. Now it’s just becoming obvious.

Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, all draws or losses. America is capable of destroying things, but not achieving strategic objectives, or even having a strategy beyond destruction for profit. In Afghanistan, America deployed for 20 years, spent trillions of dollars, and still somehow lost to some of the poorest people on Earth. All the blood, all the treasure, it was all for nothing. It was all just human sacrifice on the altars of their war gods, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.

 

In Ukraine, NATO trained a large Ukrainian force and flooded the place with billions of dollars in weapons. And it’s all getting ground up in Putin’s cauldron. America screamed propaganda about how dangerous Russia is to the world, but then did nothing about it besides profit from the suffering of Ukrainian people. Now they just look impotent.

An empire can’t take L after L like this and not one day be deemed a loser. America’s military actually sucks, and Andrei Martyanov called it in 2018, in his book Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning. In that book, he talked about the current conflict with Russia before most of us perceived it happening (though it was happening). Alexis de Tocqueville’s widely renowned book, “Democracy in America”, addresses this aspect of the American character:

 

All free nations are vainglorious, but national pride is not displayed by all in the same manner.

The Americans in their intercourse with strangers appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of praise. The most slender eulogium is acceptable to them; the most exalted seldom contents them; they unceasingly harass you to extort praise, and if you resist their entreaties they fall to praising themselves. It would seem as if, doubting their own merit, they wished to have it constantly exhibited before their eyes.

 

Their vanity is not only greedy, but restless and jealous; it will grant nothing, whilst it demands everything, but is ready to beg and to quarrel at the same time. If I say to an American that the country he lives in is a fine one, “Ay,” he replies, “There is not its fellow in the world.” If I applaud the freedom which its inhabitants enjoy, he answers, “Freedom is a fine thing, but few nations are worthy to enjoy it.” If I remark the purity of morals which distinguishes the United States, “I can imagine,” says he, “that a stranger, who has been struck by the corruption of all other nations, is astonished at the difference.” At length I leave him to the contemplation of himself; but he returns to the charge, and does not desist till he has got me to repeat all I had just been saying. It is impossible to conceive a more troublesome or more garrulous patriotism; it wearies even those who are disposed to respect it.

 

This observation from 1837 should have been a warning to the American political and intellectual elites long ago. Sadly, it has been ignored and has cost everyone dearly. The American vaingloriousness described by Tocqueville has today become a clear and present danger to the world and it is, in the end, a direct threat to what’s left of America’s democratic institutions and processes. It threatens a shaky republic and it is embedded in the very foundation of a now increasingly obvious American decline.

This is, of course, reflects a Russian discourse – if one who moved from Baku to the US in the late 1990s. Dmitry Orlov is a well-known character who recently made the move in the opposite direction and who now posts on the Ukraine war with some relish .

So it’s not surprising that some commentators have raised doubts about  Andrei Martyanov  - but have come away convinced. He is a fairly prolific writer on military matters (with a recent book on US decline) and his blog can be viewed here. 

Why do Writers Write?

With the world in a state of what Adam Tooze has taken to calling “Polycrises”, it may seem nothing short of offensive for me to have a bee in my bonnet about the absence in contemporary books of reading lists. But bear with me while I try to convince you of the contempt in which authors now hold us poor readers.

Let me pose a simple question – when an author sits down to compose a book, what do you imagine are her/his motives??

·       to help us understand an issue?

·       to help persuade us of something she/he fervently believes?

·       to make money?

·       to make his/her reputation? 

Let me suggest the following percentages as answers to each of these questions

·       1%

·       40%

·       20%

·       39% 

I can’t, of course, prove any of this – I’m simply suggesting that the author who is genuinely attempting to help the average reader understand an issue is a rarity to be treasured. Of course, there are “Dummy Guides” and “Brief Introductions” -  but many are written in a patronising way.

The last post criticised a couple of recent books for their failure to give the reader any indication of the books which might be found useful as further reading. An earlier post had mentioned Framers – human advantage in an age of technology and turmoil (2021) which also fails to offer a reading list although it does reference Range – why generalists triumph in a specialised world by David Epstein (2018) but not two equally important books – Gillian Tett’s “The Silo Effect” (2015) or Matthew Syed’s “Rebel Ideas” (2019) - not even in the index  

I’m currently reading George Monbiot’s Out of the Wreckage (2018) which integrates references to books he’s found useful into the text itself. This works very well – although it’s not something many others attempt. Offhand, I can think only of a couple of others who do this – David Runciman and Matt Flinders ..

Thanks to Monbiot I’ve been able to download at least a couple of books I didn’t know about – Viking Economics – how the Scandinavians got it right and how we can too (2016) and Democracy for Realists – why elections do not produce responsive government (2016)

Three Books on Power - Why I judge books by their reading lists

At a time when Europe as a whole is suffering from extreme heat, it seem appropriate to turn to an eminent environmentalist, Richard Heinberg, whose Power – limits and prospects for human survival (2021) I have been trying to read. I was attracted by its opening pages which posed three crucial questions - 

·       How has Homo sapiens, just one species out of millions, become so powerful as to bring the planet to the brink of climate chaos and a mass extinction event?

·       Why have we developed so many ways of oppressing and exploiting one another?

·       Is it possible to change our relationship with power so as to avert ecological catastrophe, while also dramatically reducing social inequality and the likelihood of political-economic collapse? 

And the introduction continues - 

There is a fundamental correlation between physical power and social power. Social scientists sometimes tend to downplay this point. But throughout history, dramatic increases in physical power, derived from new technologies and from harnessing new energy sources, have often tended to lead to a few people having more wealth than everybody else, or being able to tell lots of other people what to do.

The “will to power,” about which German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, is real—but it isn’t everything. We humans have other instincts that counteract our relentless pursuit of power. Efforts to limit power are deeply rooted in nature’s cycles and balancing mechanisms, and have been expressed in countless social movements over many centuries, including movements to curb the power of rulers, to abolish slavery, and to grant women political rights equal to those enjoyed by men. 

But the claim in the opening pages that “no book has systematically examined the sundry forms of power and investigated how they are related” took me aback since this book, unusually, contains no reading list to allow me to check what particular study this environmentalist has undertaken – particularly in the psychological and political fields. Regular readers will know that I have various tests to allow me to judge whether a book is worth reading – and this is one of them. The most thorough study of power is that in Michael Mann’s opus (extending to 3 volumes and more than 1000 pages) and this does indeed get a (brief) mention – but the index makes no mention of the classic work on the subject by Steven Lukes – Power, a radical view (1986) 

I have another reason for being disappointed with my skim of the book - we are, these days, overwhelmed with books. I do my best to keep up but I have taken recently to issuing appeals to publishers and authors for some self-discipline. Heinberg’s book is some 500 pages and starts with detail (about the origins of life) which I did not find particularly interesting or relevant. At one level his use of diagrams and sidebars suggests he understands the problems most readers will have in wading through a 500 page book – but whatever happened to good old self-discipline? 

A second BOOK which disappointed was Corruptible – who gets power and how it changes us by Brian Klaas (2021) who presents us with different possibilities - 

       power makes people worse — power corrupts.

·       it’s not that power corrupts, but rather that worse people are drawn to power—power attracts the corruptible.

·       the problem doesn’t lie with the power holders or power seekers, it’s that we are attracted to bad leaders for bad reasons, and so we tend to give them power.

·       focusing on the individuals in power is a mistake because it all depends on the system. Bad systems spit out bad leaders. Create the right context and power can purify instead of corrupting.

 

These hypotheses are potential explanations for two of the most fundamental questions about human society: Who gets power and how does it change us? This book provides answers.

Klaas seems to have travelled the globe in his search of shady characters to illustrate his theme 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. When I apply my test  it’s to discover that 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 which I was delighted to be able to access on the Internet Archive. 

It makes you wonder – how on earth can a writer 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! My advice therefore to readers is to use the tests I’ve pointed to in this post – particularly

https://elizabethjpeterson.com/2020/12/how-to-never-read-another-boring-book/

https://every.to/superorganizers/surgical-reading-how-to-read-12-books-580014

There is, however, a third book I wholeheartedly recommend Good and Bad Power - the ideals and betrayals of government by Geoff Mulgan (2006) and you can read it in full thanks to the Archive link in the title - but iy allows viewing only for one hour (renewable)