In Praise of Interviews

Interviews can be a very useful window into the soul – depending on the skill of the interviewer and how experienced/defensive is the interviewee. Michael Parkinson was Britain's most famous television interviewer – he died last week. He was a rather “soft” interviewer, very much letting his guests perform - in complete contrast to the likes of Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, famous for her tough, no-holds-barred questioning of prominent figures such as Henry Kissinger and Komenei which you can read in her Interviews with History (1976)

Polly Toynbee is a progressive journalist and a stalwart of The Guardian newspaper which is seen as liberal but which revealed its true colours when it mounted a vicious campaign from 2016-2020 against Jeremy Corbyn. Faute de mieux, it is my regular daily reading but it thoroughly deserved the critical appraisal it got a couple of years ago with Capitalism’s Conscience – 200 years of the Guardian ed D Freedman (2021). Toynbee, typically, comes from an illustrious family – her grandfather was the famous historian Arnold Toynbee and she has just produced a revealing memoir “An Uneasy Inheritance – my family and other radicals”. 

She was the guest on James O'Brien's “Full Disclosure” podcast recently – one of my favourites by virtue of the excellence of his conversational style. Like Fallaci, he does his homework, choosing his subjects simply because he finds them interesting. And the interview is conducted in a relaxed way but with O'Brien picking up throwaway comments and using them skilfully. I didn't know, for example, about Toynbee's spells in low-paid work – very much like Barbara Ehrenreich who, very sadly, died just a year ago and is particularly famous for her “Nickel and Dimed” book. Toynbee – ever the Labour stalwart – produced, with David Walker in 2017, the book Dismembered – how the attack on the state threatens us all which inspired my Search for Democracy – a long journey (2023). And then The Lost Decade 2010-2020 - and what lies ahead for Britain which is as good an account of the state of Britain in 2020 as you are likely to find (although without a single bibliographical reference!)

And it's interesting to compare audio and visual impressions of character. Videos offer the advantage of seeing the body language - which was particularly noticeable in the interview O'Brien conducted with one of the contenders for Tory leadership Rory Stewart some years ago. Stewart now runs (with Alastair Campbell (Tony Blair's spin doctor) the UK's best-known podcast and is a bit of a maverick by virtue of his commitment to traditional Conservative values which are now very much dead in the water. Stewart was clearly at one of these points in his life where he was having to consider his future – evident in the thought he gave to the questions.

All of these people, of course, are “celebrities” – well used to being interviewed – which perhaps limits what we might reasonably expect them to give away. Less so, perhaps, Toynbee who, as a journalist, is more used to writing than speaking although her fluency told us a lot about her sense of privilege about which Stewart was ready to confess.

Chris Hitchens had a great essay on Oriana Fallaci and the art of the Interview

Biographies of Journals

• Capitalism’s Conscience – 200 years of the Guardian ed D Freedman (2021)

• Liberalism at Large – the world according to The Economist by Alexander Zevin (2019 reviewed in the New Yorke by the inimitable Pankaj Mishra

• Pessimism of the Intellect – history of the New Left Review; Duncan Thompson (2007)

AGAINST DESPAIR

The Western world has, in the new millennium, become despondent. In the 90s it was euphoric – but its world came crashing down with the Twin Towers in 2001, dealing a warning about the hubris it had shown. The falling standards of the working class then brought populism; the Global Financial Crisis austerity and rage against the indefensibly rich 1% and the governments in their pay. Global warming has been the last straw.

But what's new? My parents' generation had sleepless nights about economic depression and Fascism - my generation about the threat of nuclear war – although the 1960s brought new hope, starting with the initial issues of New Left Review (still going strong) and crystallised in the rebellious 1968

These thoughts were prompted by a post in Scottish Review which reflected on the author being accused of being too pessimistic in his writing – with links to posts in the same vein

The need for positive thinking has cropped up a couple of times in the blog – for example in a post about commanding hope and one about polarisation. And John Harris of the Guardian is one of the few journalists prepared to show examples of good community work - in his video series "Anwhere but Westminster"

But the real classics in the field (in descending order) are -

Hope in the dark Rebecca Solnit (2004) The classic contemporary statement of the need for a positive spirit – written at the time of the Iraq war. In 2016 Solnit reflected on the little book in this article

The End of Utopia – politics and culture in an age of apathy Russell Jacoby (1999) whose introduction contains this relevant injunction for our days - “At the dawn of another new century, Samuel Coleridge wrote to his friend William Wordsworth. Two hundred years ago, in 1799, he suggested that Wordsworth contest the widespread malaise and resignation. "I wish you would write a poem, in blank verse, addressed to those, who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind, and are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness, disguising the same under the soft titles of domestic attachment and contempt for visionary philosophes."' I have not written a poem,but I would like to think that in its defence of visionary impulse this book partially fulfills Coleridge's bidding”.

Living in Truth – 22 essays Vaclev Havel 1989 As Havel made clear in earlier works, such as 1992’s Summer Meditations, he saw his new political role as fully consistent with his dissident opposition to totalitarianism. In his post-1989 books and speeches, Havel continued to defend a moral vision of politics that he called “nonpolitical politics” or “politics as morality in practice.” He identified this vision with the demanding but liberating task of “living in truth.” Havel refused to identify politics with a dehumanizing “technology of power,” the notion that power was an end in itself. Instead he defended a moral order that stands above law, politics, and economics—a moral order that “has a metaphysical anchoring in the infinite and eternal.” His speeches as president, many collected in English in The Art of the Impossible (1998), were artful exercises in moral and political philosophizing, enthralling Western audiences.

The Power of the powerless Havel (1978) His classic statement

The Principle of Hope; Ernst Bloch 1923 One of the earliest invitations to get off our butts!  

Why are there so few contemporary books about the impact of technology?

The last post demanded some thoughts about the wider aspects of technological change on our societies which, according to L Winer in his “The Whale and the Reactor –a search for limits in the age of high technology ” (1986) had not been much examined. It was a curious judgement for the author to make since the decades before had been full of texts from the likes of Jacques Ellul and Daniel Boorstin (see below) about precisely that topic. The computer and the idea of the information society had hit America in the 1960s – so it was hardly surprising that it became a hot topic. Even geo-strategist Brzezinski got into the act with the highly readable Between Two Ages – America's role in the technetronic era (1980)

And in 1985 NASA and the renowned James Burke and Isaac Asimov produced a useful little booklet The Impact of Science.

The long list of books given in the last post don't deal with the impact of technology per se – their interest is rather in specific issues viz the internet, social media, Artificial Intelligence or the effect on jobs. What is so interesting about the writings of Asimov, Boorstin, Brzezinski and Ellul is that interest was much wider – on the social impact of technology. 

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 in 2011 for us to begin to realise that technology has its perverse side.

Resource on Technology

The technological society jacques ellul 1964

The technological system jacques ellul 1980

The technological bluff jacques ellul 1989

The impact of science james burke, isaac asimov (nasa 1985)

The republic of technology daniel boorstin 1978

Between two ages – america's role in the technetronic era zbigniew brzezinski 1980

The whale and the reactor –a search for limits in the age of high technology langdon winner 1986

Technopoly - the surrender of culture to technology' Neil Postman 1992

In the absence of the sacred – the failure of technology” Jerry Mander 1992

The second machine Age – work, progress and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies; Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014

Perhaps we need to be more cautious in assessing AI’s Impact

I’ve written a couple of posts this year about Artificial Intelligence – in April trying to put 

the sudden panic about it in the wider context of the discussion about the social impact of 

technology which has been ongoing since at least the 1980s; and in June about the 

possible impact on jobs. The latter post reminded us that such concerns had been around 

since Charles Handy’s 1984 book “The Future of Work” – although Living Together – the 

future of politics in a world transformed by technology by James Susskind in 2018 did 

paint a fairly grim picture. 

But both posts were perhaps too alarmist. Certainly a 2016 OECD report on The Risk of 

Automation for Jobs suggested that, if you looked at TASKS rather than OCCUPATIONS. 

the likely impact was minimal 

"Our paper serves two purposes. Firstly, we estimate the job automatibility of jobs for 21 

OECD countries based on a task-based approach. In contrast to other studies, we take into 

account the heterogeneity of workers’ tasks within occupations. Overall, we find that, on 

average across the 21 OECD countries, 9 % of jobs are automatable. The threat from 

technological advances thus seems much less pronounced compared to the occupation

-based approach. We further find heterogeneities across OECD countries. For instance, 

while the share of automatable jobs is 6 % in Korea, the corresponding share is 12 % in 

Austria. Differences between countries may reflect general differences in workplace 

organisation, differences in previous investments into automation technologies as well as 

differences in the education of workers across countries"   

and another report the following year supported this. For more discussion about the social impact of technological developments I recommend this podcast

That having been said, I must confess to one anxiety - relating to nuclear safety. Most of us have heard of the incident of a Russian radar official who identified an incoming ballistic missile on the screen but had the intelligence to assume that it was a glitch. So-called Artificial Intelligence does not have that same intelligence and would have obeyed what it was being told. We might assume that humans will always be there and act as a check – but most people in this field tell us that the day will shortly dawn when no such human checks will be there.    

For a marvellous discussion between Mustafa Suleyman and Yuval Harari, view

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JkPWHr7sTY&ab_channel=YuvalNoahHarari

Further Reading
The Gutenberg Parenthesis – the age of print and its lessons for the age of the 
internet Jeff Jarvis (2023)
Impromptu – ampflifying our humanity through AI" by AI and Reid Hoffman (2023) Interesting to have 
a book partly written by Artificial Intelligence!!  
http://mccaine.org/2022/04/26/book-review-aaron-benanav-automation-and-the-future-of-work/
this is a recent discussion with the authors of “The  Second Machine Age” (2014)
The Age of AI; and our human future Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and D Huttenlocher (2021)
Yes – that Kissinger and Schmidt! google excerpts only
Automation and the future of work; Aaron Benanov (2020) 2 articles from New Left Review
How to Run a City like Amazon and other Fables; ed M Graham…. J Shaw (2019)
Automation and the future of work HMSO (2019) a helpful overview
Rebooting AI - AI we can trust 2019Living Together – the future of politics in a world transformed by technology; James Susskind (2018) reviewed here
The People v Tech – how the internet is killing democracy (and how we save it) Jamie Bartlett (2018) looks a good read
Ten Arguments for Deleting your social media right now; Jaron Lanier (2018) A recognised expert
A World without Work? (Values and Capitalism network 2018)
Utopia is Creepy; Nicholas Carr (2016) another famous IT writer
The Internet is not the Answer; Andrew Keen (2015)
The Future of Work (ILO 2015) from the international Labour thinktank
A World without Work (The Atlantic 2015) an early article
The Second Machine Age; Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (2014) One of the classics
From Guttenberg to Zuckenberg – what you really need to know about the Internet; John Naughton (2013)
 If the link tempts you, the full book is here 
To Save everything click here – the folly of technological solutionism; Efgeni Morozov (2013) 
another classic 

The Shallows - what the internet is doing to our brain Nicholas Carr (2010) an early IT warning

WORDS

“Capitalism”…I started, but the barman hopped out of a pipkin

“Capitalism”, he countered…”That’s a flat and frothless word

I’m a good Labour man, but if I mentioned capitalism

My clientele would chew off their own ears

And spit them down the barmaid’s publicised cleavage”

“All right” I obliged “Don’t call it capitalism

Let’s call it Mattiboko the Mighty

……..

The poem finishes…

This was my fearless statement

“The Horror World can only be changed by the destruction of

Mattiboko the Mighty,

The Massimataxis Incoporated Supplement

And Gumbo Jumbo the Homely Obblestrog Spectacular”

Audience Reaction was quite encouraging

Adrian Mitchell “Come on Everybody Poems” 1953-2008

That's as friendly a way as I can imagine for introducing the difficult subject of the  compatibility of capitalism and democracy which has become, in recent years, a focus of extensive discussion as the "balance" between capital and labour which characterised the postwar period gave way in the 1980s to a new brand of financial capitalism.  

Although Margaret Thatcher kept assering that capitalism was the only way – or, in her own words, “there is No Alternative”, a mantra which soon attracted the acronym TINA – we have, since the end of the Cold War, become familiar with the “Varieties of capitalism” literature. Eased into it by Michel Albert, with later work by the likes of Crouch, Hall and Soskice being much more academic and, often, impenetrable. 

By the turn of the millennium the message seemed to be that Capitalism takes various forms; is constantly changing; and will always be with us. But increasingly, people were wondering whether it was not out of control. Pages 57-66 of my Dispatches to the Next Generation plot the increasing dystoptic aspect of book titles. But a few years back, something changed. It wasn’t the global crisis in itself but rather the combination of two things –

• first the doubling of company profits (as spelled out in this post) and

• a sudden realisation that robotization was a serious threat to even middle-class jobs.

Now the titles talk of the new phenomenon of “post-capitalism” 

"Democracy is Bullshit" is both a stinging critique of the representative system and an argument for the importance of extending democracy into the workplace as recommended powerfully in Richard Wolf's Democracy at Work – a cure for capitalism published in 2012. Somehow, though, we never seem to get the message 

How do we know what we know?

Positivism is the view that all knowledge is derived by reason and logic from sensory experience. Other ways of knowing, such as theology or intuition are rejected. Of course, post-modernity has been with us for some time but the social sciences – and economics in particular – had been pretty resistant to its influence

But positivism seems to have slipped out of favour in recently-published books. I noticed it first in my own field with the publication in 2017 of Philosophy and Public Administration; an introduction by Edoardo Ongaro which deals with the question never raised in social science textbooks “how do we know what we think we know”?

If I had been paying more attention to what was happening in the management field, I would have noticed “Strategic Management and organisational dynamics” by Ralph Stacey and Chris Mowles first published as far back as 1993; Chris Mowles’ “Rethinking management” (2011) and “Management and Uncertainty” (2015); and “Rethinking Management – confronting the roots and consequences of current theory and practice” by N Douglas and T Wykovski (2017), Stacey and Mowles put it very well –

There are a number of different, contradictory ways of explaining how human beings come to know anything. Furthermore, there is no widespread agreement as to which of these explanations is ‘true’ or even most useful.

The realist position probably commands most support amongst natural scientists and those social scientists, probably the majority, who seek the same status for their field as is accorded to the natural sciences.

Social constructionists point to a significant difference between natural and social phenomena. Humans interpret natural phenomena, those phenomena do not interpret themselves. However, when it comes to human phenomena, we are dealing with ourselves, phenomena that are already interpreting themselves. Many constructionists hold, therefore, that while the traditional scientific approach might be applicable in the natural sciences it is not in the human sciences.

Pragmatists are keen to identify those aspects of scientific method, contestation for example, which are common to both natural and social sciences.

Both our understanding of reality, and the categories which we develop to understand it, evolve over time informed by our experience of living in the world and in debate and contestation over what we take that experience to mean.

Social constructionists and pragmatists hold that it is impossible to take the position of objective observer and that those who claim to do so are simply ignoring the impact of their own participation or lack of it.

We have to recognise that the approach we adopt is the product of who we are and how we think. This, in turn, is the distillation of our personal histories of relating to other people over many years in the particular communities we have lived and do live in which also have histories.

We can never claim to stand outside our own experience, outside the web of relationships that we are a part of, and take the role of objective observer. Instead, we have to take the role of inquiring participant (Reason, 1988). Furthermore, reflexivity is not simply an individual activity dependent on that individual person’s history alone. This is because we are always members of a community that has a history and traditions of thought. Reflexivity, therefore, involves being aware of the impact on how one thinks of both one’s personal history and the histor ons of thought of one’s community. It is for this reason that Chapters 3 and 12 (of Stacey and Mowles’ book) give brief accounts of the central traditions in Western thought. Just how human beings know anything, and whether the individual or the group is primary, are hotly contested issues with no clear truth

Approaches and methodologies in social science – a pluralist perspective D Della Porta and 

M Keating 2008

The last post was about texts I would recommend for those

• baffled by Economics

• who appreciate, however, that illiteracy about economic and financial matters in unacceptable

• who are prepared to invest some time in understanding the subject’s strengths AND weaknesses

I’ve been heartened by the growth of a more pluralist approach to the discipline in the new millennium – books such as

Economic Literacy – basic economics with an attitude Fred Weaver (2^nd ed 2007)

Rethinking Economics – and intro to pluralist economics ed L Fischer et al (2018)

Applied Economics – thinking beyond stage one Thomas Sewell (2019)

Economy Studies – a guide to rethinking economics eduation de Mujnck and Tielemann (2021)

A more traditional approach

Ten principles of Economics Gregor Mankiw 5^th ed a multi-millionnaire from his sale of the textbook; and an adviser to Republican Presidents.