Excerpts from JUST WORDS

I owe my readers an apology. For some time ”Just Words – a sceptic’s glossary” has been sitting in my list of Ebooks – but, when clicked, drew a blank. I’ve now sorted this out. And by way of compensation let me offer some excerpts.

But first, let me explain the title – of which I’m rather proud. The title has two meanings – the first could be construed as half-apologetic, meaning these are mere words – some trifles. The second relates the title to the idea of justice and the 60 pages do offer a real treasure trove about how the literary world has challenged the powers-that-be – whether Jonathan Swift, Gustave Flaubert, George Orwell, Ambrose Bierce, J Ralston Saul or Anthony Jay. Apart from my own definitions of words commonly used by bureacrats and politicians (some 100) to deceive us, I’ve also found many other examples.

So here goes -

Assumptions; the things other people make – which cause problems. Parsed – “I think; you assume; (s)he fucks up”. Project management techniques do require us to list assumptions and identify and manage risks – but in the field of technical Assistance these are just boxes to tick. In any project, the best approach is to list the worst things which could happen, assume they will occur and plan how to minimise their frequency and effects.

Audit; something both overdone and underdone – overdone in volume and underdone in probity. A process more feared at the bottom than at the top as frequent recent scandals (Enron; global banking scandals have demonstrated). See also “Law”

Benchmark; a technical-sounding term which gives one’s discourse a scientific aura.

Best practice; one of the most dangerous terms of the English language – implying, aș it does, that the answer to our problems has a solution which fits all contexts.

Bottleneck; what prevents an organisation from achieving its best performance – always located at the top!

Capacity; something which other people lack

Communications; the first thing which people blame when things go wrong – parsed “I communicate; you misunderstand; he/they don’t listen”.

Consultation; the skill of bouncing other people to agree with what you have already decided.

Contract out; as in “put out a contract on” – to wipe out.

Decentralisation; creating local people who can be made scapegoats for deterioration in service.

Empower; a classic word of the new century which suggests that power can be benignly given – when in reality it has to be taken.

Evidence-based policy-making; a phrase which represents the hubristic peak of the generation of UK social scientism which captured the UK civil service in the late 1990s at the time its political masters succumbed to corporate interests and therefore were practising less rather than more evidence-based policy-making!

Evaluation; job-creation for surplus academics. An important part of the policy-making process which has been debased by it being sub-contracted to a huge industry of consultants who produce large reports which are never read by policy-makers.

Focus group; a supposedly representative group of voters who will give us a clue about what we should be doing.

Hubris; something which politicians and policy experts suffer from – ie a belief that their latest wheeze will solve problems which eluded the skills and insights of their predecessors

Human Resource management (HRM); treating staff and workers like dirt

Law; “the spider's webs which, if anything small falls into them ensnare it, but large things break through and escape”. Solon

Lobbyists; people who make the laws

Reform; to divert attention from core questions by altering organisational boundaries and responsibilities

Training; “surgery of the mind”. A marvellous phrase an old political colleague of mine used to describe the mind-bending and propaganda which goes on in a lot of workshops.

Trust; something which economists and their models don’t have and which, therefore, is assumed by them not to exist within organisations. As economic thinking has invaded public organisations, everyone has been assumed to be a “rent-seeker” – and a huge (and self-fulfilling) edifice of audits, checks and controls have been erected

Whistle-blower; a Jesus Christ figure who blows a whistle – but is subsequently crucified.

JUST WORDS

“Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.”
TS Eliot “East Coker”

Words are indeed slippery.

We hear what we want to hear

We look at the world in so many different ways

It’s a wonder that we are able to communicate at all

That seems to take me clearly into the postmodernity camp about whom I do, however, have ambivalent feelings – reflected in a series of posts I did last year viz Postmodernity Anyone?

History is assumed to consist of hard events like wars and revolts. But such events don’t just happen – they are caused by what goes on inside out minds – not just feelings of ambition; fear; greed; resentment; but the stories (theories) we use to make sense of events. And they are legitimised by the words we use. Words are very powerful - indeed have a life of their own – some more so than others. Once we stop thinking about the words we use, what exactly they mean and whether they fit our purpose, the words and metaphors (and the interests behind them) take over and reduce our powers of critical thinking.

One of the best essays on this topic is George Orwell’s “Politics and the English language” Written in 1947, it exposes the way certain clichés and rhetoric are calculated to kill thinking – for example how the use of the passive tense undermines the notion that it is people who take decisions and should be held accountable for them.

Fifty years before Orwell, Ambrose Bierce was another (American) journalist whose pithy and tough definitions of everyday words, in his newspaper column, attracted sufficient attention to justify a book “The Devil’s Dictionary” whose fame continues unto this day – with almost 2000 definitions. A dentist, for example, he defined as “a magician who puts metal into your mouth and pulls coins out of your pocket”. A robust scepticism about both business and politics infused his work.

Not so well known (at least in the anglo-saxon world) is The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas - a short satirical work collected and published in 1911–13 from notes compiled by Gustave Flaubert during the 1870s, lampooning the clichés endemic to French society under the 2^nd French Empire. It takes the form of a dictionary of platitudes - self-contradictory and insipid (at least 500 of them). It was translated and made available to an American audience by the famous Jacques Barzun only in the 1950s – with a definitive version appearing in 1967. The idea of a spoof encyclopedia had fascinated Flaubert all his life. As a child, he had amused himself by writing down the absurd utterances of a friend of his mother's, and over the course of his career he speculated as to the best format for a compilation of stupidities.

This glossary of mine - called Just Words - has a slightly more serious intent. It identifies more than 100 words and phrases used by officials, politicians, consultants and academics in the course of government reform and offers provocative definitions which will hopefully get us into a more sceptical frame of mind.

Only in the latter stages of its drafting did I come across John Saul’s A Doubter’s Companion – a dictionary of aggressive common sense¹ issued in 1994 which talks of the

“humanist tradition of using alphabetical order as a tool of social analysis and the dictionary as a quest for understanding, a weapon against idée recues and the pretensions of power”.

Its entries are not so pithy – many taking an entire page…..and more didactic….in the style of Deconstructing Development Discourse – buzzwords and fuzzwords (Oxfam 2010 and The Development Dictionary; Wolfgang Sachs (2015. Saul contrasts his approach with that

“of the rationalists to the dictionary for whom it is a repository of truths and a tool to control communications”.

The glossary is written in that same humanist tradition of struggle against power – and the words they use to sustain it. My glossary therefore forms part of a wider commentary on the effort various writers have made over the ages to challenge the pretensions of the powerful (and of the ”thought police” who have operated on their behalf). And , of course, the role of satire², caricature and cartoons³, poetry⁴ and painting⁵ should not be forgotten! Nor the role of films and TV series these days⁶.

1 Some examples can be found here – and an interview with him at http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/saul.html

2 not just the literary sort - see section 9

3 from Daumier to Feiffer and Steadman

4 Brecht

5 Goya, Kollwitz and Grosz are the most powerful example

6 From the “Yes, Minister” series in the UK in the 1970s to “The Thick of it” of the 2000s

END TIMES?

In a previous post I listed some books on social change, indicating that I hoped to get around to reviewing them. They were

• Neither Vertical nor Horizontal – theories of political organisation by Rodriguez Nunes (2021) who is interviewed here

• Augmented Humanity – being and remaining agentic in a digitised world by Peter Bryant (2021). One of these annoying academic books which disfigures every second sentence with (bracketed) name references which require you to consult the end of each chapter. How AI is used is a fundamental issue which deserves better than this. John Naughton has just recommended this short paper on the risks of Artificial Intelligence which includes Geoff Hinton as one of the authors

• World Protests – study of key protest issues in the 21^st Century I Oriz et al (2022). A slim book which focuses on description. What I missed was any attempt to offer advice or theorise

• If we Burn – the mass protest decade and the missing revolution by Vincent Bevins (2023) interviewed by Chris Hedges here and by DIG here . I have to confess that these interviews really put me off the book – with Bevins coming across a rather arrogant young man

• End Times – elites, counterelites and the path of political disintegration by Peter Turchin 2023 with Turchin interviewed by Aaron Bastani. The most fascinating book not least because it uses Big Data to challenge our understanding of history. Tuchin graduated in zoology and biology but has grown out of these disciplines to venture in the last 2 decades into the field of history

I want to concentrate on “End Times” mainly because it is the more over-arching of the books, looking not at internal aspects of political organisation but rather on how various changes have come together to threaten the future of civlisation as we know it.

What, then, is this model? To put it somewhat wonkily, when a state, such as the United States, has

• stagnating or declining real wages (wages in inflation-adjusted dollars),

• a growing gap between rich and poor,

• overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees,

• declining public trust, and

• exploding public debt,

these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. In the United States, all of these factors started to take an ominous turn in the 1970s. The data pointed to the years around 2020 when the confluence of these trends was expected to trigger a spike in political instability. And here we are.

“I will look across human history for examples, but my primary goal is to speak to how we have slid into our current age of discord, with the United States as my empirical focus”.

Because the crisis has deep historical roots, we’ll need to travel back in time to the New Deal era, when an unwritten social contract became part of American political culture. This informal and implicit contract balanced the interests of workers, businesses, and the state in a way similar to the more formal, explicit tripartite agreements in Nordic countries. For two human generations, this implicit pact delivered unprecedented growth of broadly based well-being in America. At the same time, the “Great Compression” dramatically reduced economic inequality. Many people were left out of this implicit pact—Black Americans, in particular, a fact I will address in some detail. But overall, for roughly fifty years the interests of workers and the interests of owners were kept in balance in this country, such that overall income inequality remained remarkably low.

But the social pyramid has now grown top-heavy. We now have too many “elite aspirants” competing for a fixed number of positions in the upper echelons of politics and business. In our model, such conditions have a name: elite overproduction. Together with popular immiseration, elite overproduction, and the intraelite conflicts that it has engendered, has gradually undermined our civic cohesiveness, the sense of national cooperation without which states quickly rot from within. Growing social fragility has manifested itself in collapsing levels of trust in state institutions and unraveling social norms governing public discourse—and the functioning of democratic institutions.

This is, of course, a bare-bones summary. The meat of the book will unpack these ideas, relate them to the statistical trends for key economic and social indicators, and trace some archetypal human stories of people buffeted by these social forces. Although my focus here is primarily on America and Americans, the book will make forays into other parts of the world and into previous historical eras. Again, our crisis in America is not without precedent; we are in a position to learn from our past.

Interviews with Turchin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcrbz4EoTfw&ab_channel=INETOxford

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R-AotyKPDU&ab_channel=UncertainThings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsbLZYDWLfQ&t=29s&ab_channel=TheRealignment

THE BOOK WHICH EVERYONE SHOULD READ??

The Cultural Tutor is am amazing blog with text and music which comes in every Friday. Its latest issue asked a simple question - which book should everyone read?. The obvious answer is The Bible or the Koran - ideally with Christians reading the second book and Muslims the first.

But its not just religion which separates people – it’s also AGE. My younger self had books whose importance I recognised (listed here) - a few of which I find on rereading don’t impress eg Social Science as Sorcery (1972). And my older self lacks the memory to do justice to some of the books from the new millennium, some of which are covered in the above list. I suspect many readers of the Cultural Tutor blog will as a result mention books they have recently read. But first I need to indicate how I make my judgement ie what criteria I use in measuring impact. That’s not actually all that easy to divulge – I suppose it’s some sort of combination of

- perennial wisdom

- causing us to look at the world in a different way

- good writing

- a sense of wry humour

- humility

It’s not surprising that the books I remember are from the early 1960s – for example EH Carr was a favourite, not just his “Twenty Years’ Crisis” (1946) which introduced me to Realism but What is History? EH Carr (1961) which I vividly remember for its story of how you caught fish (facts) depended on the type of reel you used and the spot you chose to fish at. Peter Berger was another writer who made an impact – first for his prescient postmodern analysis in The Socal construction of Reality P Berger and T Luckman (1966) and then Pyramids of Sacrifice – political ethics and social change (1975)

More recently, writers such as Francis Fukuyama, David Graeber, Michael Greer, Roman Krznaric, Kate Rawarth, Wolfgang Streeck and Yanis Varoufakis have also impressed . One book, however, stands out for the variety of explanations it offers for the difficulties we have in agreeing and acting on global warming – viz Why We Disagree about Climate Change by Mike Hulme (2009)

But, at the end of the day, I tend to fall back on Bertrand Russell whose Sceptical essays still delight although published in 1925

Our elders do have some wisdom

Old men ought to be explorers

Here or there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

East Coker (TS Eliot’s Four Quartets)

Readers will know that Four Quartets is a favourite of mine – although I don’t pretend to understand past the first line of this excerpt. The sections I prefer are those dealing with the difficulties we have in making sense to others and the ambiguities of the words we use.

My business card carries the word “explorer” - partly because of the dozen countries I have known in the past 35 years; and partly because of the delight I have taken in getting to know writers over my lifetime. Now that I approach the winter of my years, I’ve been trying to put down what I’ve learned from the 50 years of trying to get bureaucratic systems to operate more in the interests of the average citizen. I’ve already told the tale of listening spellbound on the family radio to the 1970 Reith Lectures on “Change and Industrial Society” by Donald Schon – subsequently issued as the book “Beyond the Stable State” (1971). In it, he coined the phrase “Dynamic conservatism” and went on to talk about government as a learning system and to ask what can we know about social change. From that moment I was hooked on the importance of organisations (particularly public) and of institutional reform……In those days there was little talk of management (!) - only a few Peter Drucker books although Kenneth Boulding had published as far back asa 1953 The Organisational Revolution a study in the ethics of economic organisation. But it was 1969 before Gerald Caiden gave us Administrative Reform - reflecting the change that was in the air in the 1960s. The early 1960s had seen, first in 1961, the election of JF Kennedy then of Lyndon Johnson who started the “War on Poverty” – then in 1964 of Harold Wilson who had initiated a series of Royal Commissions to identify the weaknesses of a range of British institutions (including the civil service and local government).

1968 saw not only the student rebellions but the start of my own political career (first in a Scottish municipality where, from 1971, I chaired an innovative Social Work system - then in the largest European Regional local authority which, from 1975, established a unique community-based social strategy). That lasted until 1990 when the pending dismantling of the Regions encouraged me to accept the invitation from the Head of Public Health in the Copenhagen branch of WHO to work for her on a temporary basis (lasting 6 months) allowing me take up a new career as a consultant in ex-communist countries. All this is described in the current draft of The Search for Democracy – a long journey which is a sort of memoir of the reform lessons from the 40-odd years between 1970 and 2012 when I eventually hung up my boots.

Others doing some stock-taking were Rod Rhodes and Chris Pollitt whose video presentation on the lessons from the British reform efforts of the past 40 years is well worth watching

Sadly, Pollitt is no longer with us – but the other writers in the band I very much respect are. And this includes names such as Bourgon, Caiden, Fukuyama, Guy Peters, Hood, Jessop, Jun, Rhodes, Raadscheldres, Rose and Rothstein. Of these, only Raadschelders has graced us with a memoir (of a sort) which is The Three Ages of Government – from the person to the group to the world (2020) who is, sadly, far too academic – every sentence has a reference which you have to consult at the end. But it does give a very good sense of the literature.

Classic Texts

Administrative Reform Gerald Caiden 1969

The Dynamics of Public Administration Gerald Caiden 1971

Comparative European Politics – the story of a profession - https://www.gbv.de/dms/sub-hamburg/222052791.pdf ed Hans Daalder 1997

The social construction of Public Admin Jong Jun 2006

Public Administration in Transition – essays in honour of Gerald Caiden 2007

Questioning reform https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2015/05/come-back-state-all-is-forgiven.html

jocelyne bourgon’s presentation of A new synthesis of PA - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3A669FX-bU&t=718s&ab_channel=LSE

PROSPECT FOR NEGOTIATIONS

Last night I watched Oslo – the film about the secret (“backchannel”) Israel-PLO negotiations which took place in the early 1990s while an official process was underway in Madrid and which are described in this background note.

For 76 years, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been hemmed in and the violent Hamas incursion last weekend has caused a brutal Israeli retaliation – bringing forward accusations of war crimes from a few people but cheered on by most Western politicians. This protest from a UK Conservative politician is a rare voice of sanity

As far back as 1988 Christopher Hitchens and Edward Said edited this book Blaming the Victims – spurious scholarship and the Palestine Question. Thirty years later we get Gaza – an inquest into its martyrdom by Norman Finkelstein (2018)

There seems little chance of anyone being willing to go back to the negotiating table but the question does need to be raised - What it would take to get people back to that table?

I’ve been going back to some posts I’ve done on the issue of RECONCILIATION in which Adam Kahane was very much my guide. Two of his books can be read here

Solving Tough Problems – an open way of talking, listening and creating new realities Adam Kahane (2006) and

Power and Love – a theory and practice of social change (2010)

For less US-oriented stuff I would recommend -

Negotiating in Times of Conflict ed G Sher and G Kurz 2015

Small State Mediation in International Conflicts – diplomacy and negotiation in Israel-Palestine; J Erikkson (2015)

The classic is, however, Getting to Yes – negotiating agreement without giving in by R Fisher and W Ury (1981)

UPDATE; I’ve been horrified by the pathetic British response to the violence of the last week – with no empathy shown to the suffering and simply siding with a state which has brutally suppressed Palestinian aspirations. I was therefore heartened by this post which closely analysed the speech of a Labour politician which wasn’t able to condemn the Israelis for their war crimes – and grateful that at least one Conservative politician was able to cross that line. And even more grateful that my positive comments on the post received a lot of positive feedback from Brits who clearly find the MSM coverage distasteful  

On Thinking for oneself

One of the faults of which I am constantly guilty is assuming that my reading will bring new insights. So I was delighted to read this morning the latest post from the marvellous Cultural Tutor

Arthur Schopenhauer is not the sort of person I usually write about in the Areopagus. 

He was a philosopher, after all, and I maintain that philosophers must be treated 

with caution! But, recently, somebody suggested that I read a few of his shorter 

essays. One of them, simply titled “On Thinking For Oneself”, caught my attention. 

Thinking and writing are in many ways synonymous: the better we think, the better 

we write, and vice versa.
So, how does one think for oneself? The thrust of Schopenhauer's advice is that 

we shouldn't rely too much on reading: “Reading is a mere makeshift for original 

thinking”.
That is not to say we shouldn't read, of course. Schopenhauer's point is that we 

mustn't confuse reading (which can be very useful) with thinking:

The difference between the effect produced on the mind by thinking for oneself 

and that produced by reading is incredibly great... reading forces on the mind ideas 

that are as foreign and heterogeneous to the tendency and mood it has at the moment, 

as is the seal to the wax whereon it impresses its stamp.

....the mind is deprived of all its elasticity by much reading as is a spring when a weight 

is continually applied to it; and the surest way not to have thoughts of our own is for 

us at once to take up a book when we have a moment to spare. This practice is the 

reason why erudition makes most men more stupid and simple than they are by 

nature and also deprives their literary careers of every success. As Pope says, they 

remain, "For ever reading, never to be read."

Scholars are those who have read in books, but thinkers... are those who have read 

directly in the book of the world. Schopenhauer uses a rather neat analogy for 

the difference between reading and thinking:

Those who have spent their lives in reading, and have drawn their wisdom from books,

 resemble men who have acquired precise information about a country from many descriptions 

of travel. They are able to give much information about things, but at bottom they 

have really no coherent, clear, and thorough knowledge of the nature of the country. 

On the other hand, those who have spent their lives in thinking are like men who 

have themselves been in that country. They alone really know what they are talking 

about; they have a consistent and coherent knowledge of things there and are truly 

at home in them.

I’m not sure if I totally agree with the thrust of his argument. Our own opinions,

 after all, are generally a reflection of the prevailing social consensus or, as 

JK Galbraith famously called it, the “conventional wisdom”  Christian Lupsa is a 

Romanian journalist who was for the past decade the editor of an interesting 

journal DoR  and now writes a weekly blog (in English) which this week challenges 

the ease with which we sink into these bubbles  

Schopenhauer goes on to argue that we must begin with our own opinions rather than 

those of other people:

Thus the man who thinks for himself only subsequently becomes acquainted with the 

authorities for his opinions when they serve merely to confirm him therein and to 

encourage him. The book-philosopher, on the other hand, starts from those authorities 

in that he constructs for himself an entire system from the opinions of others which 

he has collected in the course of his reading. Such a system is then like an automaton 

composed of foreign material, whereas that of the original thinker resembles a living 

human being.

It isn't easy to find our own opinions, of course, but Schopenhauer argues that 

effort in doing so is entirely worthwhile. These days, of course, we are besieged 

by books offering to help us to think more critically  

Even if occasionally we had been able very easily and conveniently to find in a book a 

truth or view which we very laboriously and slowly discovered through our own thinking 

and combining, it is nevertheless a hundred times more valuable if we have arrived at 

it through our own original thinking. Only then does it enter into the whole system 

of our ideas as an integral part and living member; only then is it completely and firmly 

connected therewith, is understood in all its grounds and consequents, bears the 

colour, tone, and stamp of our whole mode of thought, has come at the very time 

when the need for it was keen, is therefore firmly established and cannot again 

pass away

I shall leave it there for now. Schopenhauer, though he has been accused of many 

things, is rarely accused of not being an original thinker. In an age when the internet 

makes it all too easy to pass our time consuming the words (and, therefore, the thoughts 

and opinions) of others, he offers a timely reminder to step back and put in the work 

ourselves. As always, I recommend reading the essay in full.