Neglected Bulgaria

Bulgaria – by virtue of its size and Cyrillic script - gets a raw deal on the internet. To help enlarge its profile I therefore offer this E-book of 100 pages - Bulgarian Explorations which I have drafted in the past few weeks in anticipation of one of my daughter’s first visits to the country

I shall run excerpts from it during February….starting with this - 

The Balkans have for the past few centuries been a source of great fascination for west Europeans. For intrepid travellers from the 18^th century at least, this was the furthest extremity of the world that they could reasonably attempt…..The Debated Lands by Philip Hammond (2002) looks at about 500 books written by these travellers - first at the motifs of discord, savagery, backwardness and obfuscation which characterise the 19th century British travel books about the area. “Danubian Principalities; the frontier lands of the Christian and of the Turk” (1854), for example, is written by a British engineer who found himself in the land just south of the Danube in what is now North-East Bulgaria and offers a view just 20 years before Bulgaria was liberated from the “Turkish Yoke”

There then followed a strand of writing in the late 1920s which, as Hammond puts it,  “took the romanticisation into deeper territory – with a revolt against western modernity and mass society –
 From the end of the First World War until the outbreak of the Second, travellers were finding in this previously depraved corner of Europe…. " a peace, harmony, vivacity and pastoral beauty in utmost contrast to the perceived barrenness of the West, and which produced benefits for those weary of modernity that ranged from personal rejuvenation to outright revelation”.
 According to this alternative balkanism, violence had disappeared from the region, savagery became tamed, obfuscation turned to honesty and clarity, and the extreme backwardness that had formerly been the gauge of Balkan shortcoming was now the very measure by which it was extolled. For many travelers, any mystery that did remain around the geographical object became less the marker of a befuddled and dishonest culture than a vital indication of spiritual depth…….” 

Meet Bulgaria; RH Markham (1932) (who was Balkans correspondent of The Christian Scientist) may be seen as an example. The link gives you the entire book which paints a charming picture of a rural society – and has a complete chapter on painting.

 Undoubtedly the most famous travel writer for this part of the world was Patrick Leigh Fermour (generally known as Paddy) whose trilogy about his walk from the English Channel to Istanbul in 1933 was finished only last year. A Time of Gifts (1977) covered mainly his experience of Nazi Germany; Between the Woods and the Water (1986) of Hungarian aristocratic houses in Transylvania. But, in 2013, after a 25-year gap, we got The Broken Road (2013) dealt mainly with the Bulgarian and Greek sections of his trip. Paddy’s writing is quite exquisite. He led a very full life – a website is devoted to his memory; and a great biography came out quite recently.

 Rates of Exchange by Malcolm Bradbury (1982) follows a British linguistics lecturer, Dr. Angus Petworth, on his first ever visit behind the Iron Curtain, to Slaka.

 His arrival, the paranoia of his hosts, the changing moods of his ever-present interpreter and guide, the secret trysts with attractive female novelists, his increasingly desperate attempts to phone home and the fall-off-the-chair-laughing diversion into second-division British diplomatic circles are brilliantly written vignettes that can only be based on real events.
These may or may not of course have happened in Bulgaria – Slaka ultimately borrows a little from every country once behind the Iron Curtain – but anyone who visited before (or even immediately after) 1990′s overthrowal of the communists will immediately recognise much of communist-era Bulgaria in Bradbury’s book.
Especially good are the descriptions of the hotels: dark wood everywhere, omnipresent men in long coats reading newspapers, peroxide-blondes smoking at lobby bars, terrible service and Byzantine bureaucracy. 

Imagining the Balkans by Bulgarian anthroplogist Maria Todorova writes that In the approach to the First World War specific countries were embraced by economic and military alliances and some countries acquired what has been called a "pet state" status.
Todorova sums up as the pet state approach to south-east Europe as consisting of “the choosing from amongst the Balkan states a people whose predicaments to abhor, whose history and indigenous leaders to commend, whose political grievances to air, and whose national aspirations to advocate”. In this way Montenegrins, Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians and Albanians were all, at different times, picked out for laudatory comment. 

Mindworks

Strange the way the mind works….the original intention behind yesterday’s post was to give a simple description of the trouble I’m having deciding what sound system best fits my needs……

Instead I found myself resurrecting memories……and sketching a way of life that will strike the present generation as …..well…...weird!

The idea of debt still had religious echoes in those days – the injunction ”neither a borrower nor lender be” still resonates in my mind. That’s why the word “sin” suddenly crops up in the post….

This led my thoughts back to a book which made such an on impression on me a few years back that I bought an additional couple of copies to ensure that I had it on hand more easily – Michael Foley’s The Age of Absurdity – why modern life makes it impossible to be happy

Drawing on philosophy, religion, history, psychology and neuroscience, he explores the things that modern culture is either rejecting or driving us away from:         

Responsibility – we are entitled to succeed and be happy, so someone/thing else must be to blame when we are not

Difficulty – we believe we deserve an easy life, and worship the effortless and anything that avoids struggle (as Foley points out, this extends even to eating oranges: sales are falling as peeling them is now seen as too demanding and just so, you know, yesterday…)

Understanding – a related point, as understanding requires effort, but where we once expected decision-making to involve rationality, we have moved through emotion to intuition (usually reliable) and – more worryingly – impulse (usually unreliable), a tendency that Foley sees as explaining the appeal of fundamentalism (“which sheds the burden of freedom and eliminates the struggle to establish truth and meaning and all the anxiety of doubt. There is no solution as satisfactory and reassuring as God.”) 

Detachment – we benefit from concentration, autonomy and privacy, but life demands immersion, distraction, collaboration and company; by confusing self-esteem (essentially external and concerned with our image to others) with self-respect (essentially internal and concerned with our self-image), we further fuel our sense of entitlement – and our depression, frustration and rage when we don’t get what we ‘deserve’

At that point I shook myself and tried to get back to the issue in hand – should I buy a Denon or a Bose? Should it be Bluetooth?

But now I felt I needed to explain why I was needing something apparently portable when, for the first time in 25 years, I am no longer nomadic….(.or at least only between 3 locations…….!)

In 1990 I had left the West of Scottish and found myself “on assignments” – my “user name” indeed on most websites is "nomadron" – and what does my wicked mind then divert me into? Nothing less than memories of Dick Barton, special agent to whose radio programme I was, with many millions of others, an avid listener in the early 1950s!!!

I duly inserted the Wikipedia link but was then tempted to have a look at an old black and white movie from the period. Did actors really speak and behave like that in those days???

So let’s start again……clearly music is important to me….but, until a year or so ago, I had been content with simple radio/CD players. The collection has grown - in all 3 locations I now call home…

But the demise of one the simple music systems called for a replacement and a simple bit of research and the accident of one of the quality Denon music system outlets being located on one of my regular beats in Sofia had me installing it in my mountain house – to my great satisfaction….

Now my ear had a standard of comparison…….I am on the primrose path to hell……..

My education about technical options grows by leaps and bounds! The Bose branch at the Bulgaria Mall in Sofia wasn’t exactly heaving with goodies – and could offer only a 2 week delivery date for most systems…..And I could listen only to the smallest  – a 19x6 cm Bluetooth Soundlink Mini at 450 levs (that's 230 euros). That didn’t offer the depth which the larger Denon portable speaker does at 400 levs…..

But there is another quality Bluetooth option – SoundTouch portable at 850 levs which also offer at the same price a non-portable version (ie with electricity connection). The full Bose range is here

A Technopolis branch in the same (empty and soulless) Mall offered a Logitech 2600BT with 2 subtle cones (connected obviously but with a fine small white wire looking like Lasagne) and costing (with a tiny adaptor) only 289 levs…….only problem – the guy couldn’t get it to work……….And, as the review video says, they’re not really portable……and lack quality sound…….But interesting….

On balance I’m left with 3 options –

- Stick with my simple 5 year-old 50 euros Philips radio whose tones are reverbating powerfully around my flat’s large sitting room as I write

- The 400 levs Denon – with as good a quality as the complex headphones with digital to analogue converter at 550 levs (let alone the 2000 levs amplifier and speaker systems with cables…..

- The as yet untested Bose SoundTouch options – cheapest of which (both portable and non-P) are 850 levs…….

Much as I am tempted to stay with my old Philips radio, it doesn’t allow streaming – or audio for films from Zamunda (the Bulgarian PirateBay)!!

Choice! Choice" Or as the Germans put it - Die Qual der Wahl!!
And they say this is the "instant gratification" generation! More like "paralysis by analysis"!!

Travelling Light

Although some of my earliest political acts (after demonstrations against UK repressions in Central Africa in 1959 and the nuclear submarine base on the Clyde in the early 1960s) were about boosting consumer choice (under the influence of Janey Buchan) I’ve never actually bought into the “consumer ideology” with which my generation was, I think, the first to be gripped…..

My parents, married in the immediate pre-war period, enjoyed existential (but not material) luxury. Money was scarce – my father existed on a Scottish Presbyterian Minister’s “stipend” (of less than 1000 pounds a year) although we did live rent-free in a “Manse” owned by the Church of Scotland….

Any spare cash soon disappeared into the hands of various folk who would come begging to the house……my father was a well-known “soft-touch”….

He never owned a car – being a familiar (or “well-ken’t”) figure striding (and pausing to chat on or pick up paper from) the streets of the shipbuilding town in which he spent 60 years of his life.

He would earn some spare cash from tutoring – although it was never clear whether this was from necessity or love of learning…….

I grew up in the 1950s – aware of television which was, however, a real luxury. I have a memory of watching (on a neighbour’s set) the 1952 Coronation for a few boring minutes before being let loose on an empty street and, a few years later (on Saturday afternoons) my friend Les Mitchell’s set in neighbouring Newton St first the football results and, in 1963 the first episodes of Doctor Who!

Bliss it was……..

It was 1966 or so when I acquired my first flat – with 2,000 pounds from my mum’s hard-pressed savings – and Habitat furniture…..In 1968 I outmatched my father’s income almost at first go when I became a Lecturer at a Paisley College. The very same year I was elected to Greenock’s town council and soon became a Chairman of a major committee.

In celebration I bought a second-hand Volvo saloon from a lover’s father’s garage…….. shades of John Updike. And, thereafter, a series of such cars. I acquired my first new car at the age of 47….And my first fitted kitchen a few years earlier…… 

When, after leaving Scotland, I transferred the flat (and remaining mortgage payments of some 20k) to my wife, I had neither savings nor debt……………………verily I was a happy man!

I have, since then, accumulated some possessions – one house (for 6000 euros) and helped my partner acquire a flat in central Bucharest…..But for 25 years I have rented most of the places I have stayed in – about 20 addresses during the period…..which is more than 100k in rent – but probably balanced by the absence of any legal requirement to pay tax…….The nomadic life has meant minimal possessions…..verily I am a happy man…….

although the groaning suitcases from Central Asia brought carpets, ceramics and small stuff…….and, since then, the books and paintings have been accumulating…….in four separate locations………..and in 1997 I acquired another new car (albeit a modest Daewoo Cielo) which purred happily all over North, South and Central Europe for 16 years…….. verily I began to sin…………………..

In summer 2013, I blew it……I not only bought a Kia Estate – it was a long-considered choice…..during which time I pondered other brands such as Skoda……. Verily I  sinned!

  

This is all by way of prelude to the tale of my first real consumer search a few weeks ago – for a sound system for my laptop with which to listen to classical music……

A tale which I will tell tomorrow.........(Insallah.......)

Greek tragedy

At last a Minister of Finance with some integrity…..Yanis Varoufakis – to whose important “Global Minotaur” book I devoted a blogpost almost three years ago - has emerged from the chaos that is Greece as the Finance Minister of the new Syriza government. He is either a very foolish or a very courageous man!

His has been one of the clear and strong voices of economic sanity for the past few years, using his blog to great effect – giving us not only analysis but challenging recommendations. In a post earlier this month, he explains why he decided to run in these elections. He’s fully aware of the ease with which honest people get corrupted (in different ways) by office and assures us that will keep a letter of resignation in his inside pocket for use whenever he “loses the commitment to speak truth to power”. The problem, of course, is that he has just become that power!! So his dialogue will have to be with his conscience!

Paul Mason – from whom sadly we do not hear much now that he has moved from radio to television – had a recent interview with him in which Varifakous promised to “destroy the Greek oligarchy system". In 2010, Varifakous wrote (with fellow political economics Professors Stuart Holland and James Galbraith – son of the famous JG) a 12 page modest proposal for resolving the European crisis…..

Klaus Kastner is a retired Austrian banker who has a very sharply-written blog called Observing Greece and gives us not only an interesting and measured response to the Syriza victory but access to the programme on which Syriza ran

We are all very rude about the Greeks – and their role in European events in the last 100 years gives us every reason to be. Their invasion of Turkey in 1919 caused massacres and massive migration treks and regional instability. Of course, Britain’s elite has always had strong Hellenic prejudices and has consistently been on the sidelines cheering the bloodletters and oligarchs on……..A long article in November last year gives the detail on Winston Churchill’s role in the horrific Greek  Civil War post 1944. My gym teacher at school was a Greek communist who was one of many forced to leave the country because of the violence. His nickname was “Wee Pat” and I still remember his stentorian voice as he would bellow to those wanting to be excused the stronger exercises “keep your vest on boy!”!!!

Those wanting to keep in touch with Greek events might usefully use the Macropolis website which started in 2013 specifically to help outsiders try to make sense of the Greek tragedy…..

Strolling

This is the fourth flat I’ve had in almost 8 years in Sofia – and it’s interesting what different perspectives (and indeed feelings) about the city one gets from the different micro-neighbourhoods. John Berger’s phrase “ways of seeing” comes to mind. Two were in spitting distance of one another – near the football stadium (Nikolai Pavlovitch and Khan Krum streets) – each going back to the 1920s…. Patriarch Eftemi Boulevard and Graf Ignatiev street were the backbone of the area. The very names resonate with history…..Krum referring to the first Bulgarian Empire; Ignatiev to the Russian military assistance in removing the Ottoman yoke from the Bulgarians; Pavlovitch the most influential of Bulgaria’s early painters.

The third flat was more modern, Lajos Kossuth St, just off Hristov Botev Boulevard – next to a lovely old Bulgarian revival building which actually houses the Catholic Prelate!  The street names celebrate the power of ideas about independence in the 19^th century….

Now I’m in a charming period flat in the old area between Vasil Levski, Dondukov and Princess Maria Luise Boulevards – on the edge of the Jewish neighbourhood which was focused on the fascinating women’s market, subject of an excellent brief here. Prince Dondukov played (as Russian Governor) a key role in the drafting of the Bulgarian constitution which was famed in its time as one of the world’s most liberal. “Stefan Stambolov and the emergence of the Bulgarian nation” (1993) is a rare book in the English language about those times…..

The neighbourhood has rapidly become my favourite…it’s a mere 10 minute stroll up Danube St (where my flat criss-crosses with Tsar Simeon St) to the magnificent Alexander Nevski Cathedral behind whose dome Mount Vitosha dominates the skyline. And then down past the colourful Russian church and the back of what was the Palace and is now the National Gallery – with its small park area and statues. The through the little park with the jazz buskers, the National Theatre and Sofia City Gallery via Vitosha walking street, Levski Boulevard to the Rodina Hotel where I swim and keep fit.

It was four years ago (!) that I wrote of the joys of strolling around Sofia which you can experience vicariously in “A Walk in the Street of Sofia Guidebook “ (Kras Plus 2002) - a marvellous bilingual history of the 6 parts of central Sofia for those who want to appreciate the city’s singularity by foot. Sadly I’ve not so far been able to find another copy in the bookshops….here instead are a few photos I took of the area just 500 metres or so around my flat last weekend and installed in a newly opened flickr account

Sofia Enigma and Stigma (Enthusiast 2011) by “dandy” Ljubomir Milchev is a lovely little ode to the city which contains evocative black and white photos of old, crumbling buildings in my neighbourhood. Imagine my delight in discovering, in a nearby magic bookshop on Rakovski St, “Time and Beauty; art nouveau in the Bulgarian cities” ed Vittore Collina (2014) – a booklet produced with great care and thought – a real labour of love.

And it was just a couple of minutes from the Cathedral that I found on Saturday the most amazing gallery which has been lying waiting for me for 7 years – the Atelier of Bulgaria’s Grand Old Man of Art, Svetlin Roussev… but that needs an entry on its own 

Lives worth Living

I’ve been feeling a bit guilty this morning – if that is the right word to describe my feelings on reading of the death from cancer of two figures I knew nothing about but who seemed to epitomise everything we mean by the phrase “a life worth living”.

From curiosity I had punched into an ad for a book released today called “Late Fragments” which turned out to be the touching memoir of a young activist, Kate Gross, who died on Christmas Day in her early 30s and who wrote the book as a celebration of life for her family

I’d no sooner read that than I hit, completely by accident, a tribute to another (rather older) cancer victim – one Mike Marqusee – a journalist and leftist campaigner a typical example of whose writing can be read in this article on Red Pepper.

This is a good review of one of his (short) books about pharmaceutical companies – which raises the question of what accounts for the huge increase in the number of deaths from cancer which “developed” countries have experienced in recent years.

Apart from the obvious explanation of tobacco, other factors relate to the rise in awareness and reporting - eg
- the increased emphasis on physical exercise and preventive health care
- the greater publicity which cancer has received
- the increased frequency of medical tests for the condition

But I am surely not alone in thinking that artificial food additives also have a lot to do with it.

At this stage, of course, I should declare an interest. It was at this time two years ago that I sought a biopsy - which revealed a medium-serious level of prostate cancer and had resort, in the summer, to a 2 month course of radiation treatment (in Germany).

That seemed to do the trick – although I do need to take a daily hormone pill. And, having read up on the subject, do also try to have daily exercise and (following the advice of a Professor Plant) good vitamin input  

Our lives are all too short – Gross and Maqusee both lived rich lives which have been cut tragically short. Each, in their different way, shows what we can - and should - do with our life. 

RIP

postscript
By one of these coincidences, I was this afternoon interviewed by a roving TV mike on Sofia's streets and asked how important physical exercise was to me (this after I had explained I did not speak Bulgarian). To the interviewer (and cameraman) 's obvious delight, I then extolled the virtues of the Rodina Hotel; of Bulgarian vegetables; and of daily walking and fitness routines.......... En passant I mentioned my own brush with cancer........

Beshkov's country salutes Voltaire's and Daumier's in sadness for the slain journalists of Charlie H

Today’s somber post is my tribute to the French journalists slaughtered so savagely in Paris this week.

As they would surely have wished, it is written in celebration of the courage of all those who have sought over the ages and in all countries to use their artistic skills to mock the pretensions of the dogmatists and the powerful.  But it is also written in support of the humanistic principles exemplified by writers such as Voltaire…..

Only last month I wrote a post Desperately Seeking….Satire about how much we need satire in these times and, more than two years ago, had celebrated it in a detailed post as “the greatest art form”. You will find the posts useful since they try to record the artists and writers who have risked their livelihoods and lives for centuries in the pursuit of principle.   

Simon Jenkins spoke for many people with his piece in Wednesday’s Guardian which is reproduced (with cartoons) in this excellent blog I came across recently

In one of these serendipitous moments of which my life increasingly seems to consist, I came across, earlier this week in Sofia’s open-air book market, a copy of a lovely small book about the friendship in the 1930s between Bulgaria’s most famous satirist and cartoonist, Ilyia Beshkov and an émigré journalist from Hitler’s Germany.

It is a powerful evocation (largely from the memory of Beshkov’s widow) of that period of his life when the vendetta against his cartoons had reduced him to poverty – but how the support of friends sustained him. You can actually read the full text of the book here – although sadly not the cartoons.

I was in the middle of drafting this post when friends here in Sofia contacted me about the tribute which will take place at 18.00 this evening at the French Embassy in Sofia.

I am delighted to be in a position not only to attend but also to have the opportunity of displaying the poster-size reproductions I just happened to bring down from Bucharest of 5 Daumier cartoons – which I propose to inscribe (in French of course) with suitable text, mentioning Charlie Hebdo, Daumier and Beshkov…..

Will this too pass?

I’ve been busy these past few weeks editing 3 E-books all of which will hit the world in the next few weeks. I start with Ways of Seeing …..the Global Crisis which – as has become the template for my E-books – has emerged from an editing and restructuring of those blogposts of the past couple of years which have touched on this (very general!) issue. What follows is taken from the book’s “Inconclusion”

The table with which the small book starts identifies the various “debates” which gripped English-speaking countries at least, decade by decade, from the 1930s…through to the present.It’s impressionistic – so doesn’t try to bring google analytics to aid – and people may quibble with some of the references. But many who look at it will perhaps feel a shiver down their spine as they recognise how transitory many of our discussions have been. The issues don’t necessarily go away – some are simply repackaged

It may cover an 80 year period but all the themes still echo in my mind since it was 1960 when I embarked on my political economy education at Glasgow University - and the key books of the 40s were still influential. Indeed the writings which had the biggest impact on me were Europeans from the start of the century – such as Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Robert Michels and Karl Popper. Outside the university, it was the writings of RHTawney and Tony Crosland which shaped me – and had me joining the Labour Party in 1959; becoming first an activist; then a councillor; and someone who quickly developed a rather contradictory mix of corporate management and community power principles. 

I didn’t know it at the time but I was at the start of an ideological upheaval of tectonic proportions as the Keynesian certainties began to crumble in the face of the Hayekian onslaught. For some reason, however, I chose to focus on regional development although the ideas of the strangely named “public choice” theorists did get to me in the early 1970s - through the pamphlets of the Institute of Economic Affairs

But it was the social engineering approach of the managerialists which eventually won the battle for my soul. I vividly remember sitting in front of the radio enthralled as Donald Schon delivered the Reith lectures in autumn 1970 under the title “Beyond the Stable State”.  During it he coined the phrase “dynamic conservatism” - a phenomenon which I was to study for several decades in different countries. The following year it appeared in book form - and can now be accessed on the archive website here

I read the literature on organiisational change avidly – and tried to apply it wherever I went…John Stewart of the University of Birmingham’s Institute of Local Government Studies was a particular inspiration…. Policy Analysis – then in its early days - was an obvious attraction and I enrolled on the UK’s first (postgraduate) course on the subject at the University of Strathclyde, run by Lewis Gunn which disappointed for its over-rationalistic approach – although it was there that I first came across the notion of “framing theory”. I confess, however, that when I actually had in 2002 to draft a primer on policy analysis for some civil servants in Slovakia, it was the rationalistic approach I adopted rather than that contained in the Policy Paradox book by Deborah Stone which I only encountered later. 

What, however, the “This too will pass” table doesn’t record is the amazing change that occurred in the late 1980s in HOW we talked about these various “issues”…in short the “discursive” or “narrative turn” which post-modernist thought has given us (see Annex 2 for a short explanation of this).

Although I’ve grown to appreciate the rich plurality of interpretations the postmodernists can present on any issue, I’m not quite ready to join their carefree, fatalistic band…”Whatever……” does not strike me as the most helpful response to give to those anguished by the cutthroat actions of those in privileged positions…. The point I have reached is

It seems impossible to get a social or moral consensus in our societies for the sort of rebalancing which Henry Mintzberg has brilliantly argued for

·         the voices are too diverse these days – as explained by Mike Hulme

·         people have grown tired and cynical
·         those in work have little time or energy to help them identify and act on an appropriate programme of change
·         those out of work are too depressed
·         although the retired generally have the time, resources and experience to be doing more than they are
·         but they have lost trust in the capability or good intentions of governments
·         let alone the promises of politicians
·         and are confronted with too many disparate voices in the reform movement
 ·         Most of the “apocalyptists” (such as William Greer and Dmitry Orlov) who have confronted the collapse of industrial civilisation counsel a Candide-like “garden cultivation”
 ·         And yet I still persevere in my naïve belief that governments are capable of doing more……

 Am I wrong? 

It’s perhaps appropriate that, at this point I reach for TS Eliot - …….

And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate - but there is no competition -

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again; and now under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
 (The Four Quartets)

Need for some solidarity

I had a dream during the night – that I was at a Conference which was discussing some sort of national reform but that the only opportunity offered for contributions “from the floor” were badly structured “group discussions” none of which gathered any momentum. And, in any event, I didn’t seem to have prepared any sort of input with which I might have been able to wow the audience in a 3 minute diatribe…

It was 05.00 – so I made myself a coffee and thought about “national conversations”…..Scotland, of course, has just had one – lasting 2 years….thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) meetings to explore its future….it’s a bit early to draw any lessons from the experience of the independence referendum (known as “indyref) – although one at least has tried

What of the future? First, Scotland has to be understood as more than a series of competing tribes: Yes and No, pro-independence and anti-independence, nationalist and unionist, SNP and Labour. The undercurrent of this is an attempt by partisans on each of these sides and camps to reduce every opinion down to two perspectives and a politics of two tribes. Everything revolves around the question: whose side are you on? And who do you most trust to look after Scotland? Other questions about democracy, the environment, sustainable economic growth, and how we run public services are lost in this divide, as is any real space for radical progressive politics.

Secondly, one of the most positive aspects of the “indyref” was the self-education of hundreds of thousands of Scots who showed initiative, curiosity and a willingness to learn and act for themselves, rather than being spoon-fed the predictable narrow diet of official Scotland. It is this rich practice – of opening up debate and choices and refusing to accept the stale offerings of politics, media and power which have historically characterised so much of our public life – which has to be encouraged and given sustenance.

The UK as a whole faces a General Election in 4 months….in the last run-up to an election, an electoral reform movement (The Power Inquiry) failed to make any dent on the power structure. This time there is not a whisper about challenging the power structure (unless you count Russell Brand's rantings) only talk of “austerity” and “immigration”.

Romania missed an opportunity to have a national conversation….the November Presidential elections were controlled by a powerful set of media oligarchs…although a Protestant did rather upset their applecart by winning!
The Bulgarian protests of 2013 did conjure up hopes of reform but became fond memories after the elections of early 2014……

Of course I have “form” with such dialogue and discussion! In the early 70s, in my capacity as Chairman of a new Social Work authority in Scotland, I organised annual gatherings of neighbourhood groups with the local state and business class about confronting the problems of a shipbuilding town…In the 80s I did the same for the West of Scotland around the issue of urban poverty….  And, between 2006/07, I prepared a Road Map for municipalities in Kyrgyzstan

Most attempts at such dialogue can be dismissed as mere “talking shops” since they seldom cover the basic economic aspects of life – although I was part of a small group which came together to start a community banking system in the West of Scotland in the late 1980s. We started with a visit to the Triodos Bank and, some time after I had left Scotland, a venture did eventually emerge which I think is now part of the Community Development Finance Association set-up. Developing Strathclyde Ltd was also established in 1993 with similar aims…..Community enterprise is now an important element in Scotland’s economic life – as can be seen in the activities of the Social entrepreneurs network Scotland

In these crisis times, it’s sad that so few attempts seem to be made to bring people together for such cooperative ventures – if only for solace if not solidarity…But people seem to have little energy or confidence left – save for quick “fix-its”. I referred in September to the impossible deadline a Bulgarian project was given to deliver a national strategy when something more like a “Future Search” Conference was actually needed.

All credit therefore to Open Democracy for continuing to bring important material to our notice – such as this article on “social innovation” which led me to a website Emergence by Design, containing an interesting manifesto which, on study, disappoints for its failure to situate itself properly in historical context (and for its high-falutin language). 

The elephant in the nationalist room

There were two dominant themes in this year’s blogposts which I have just reviewed - the need to dismantle the political class; and the “independence question”, whether Scotland should break away from England……

One of my strongest reservations about that discussion came from its failure to engage with the question of how exactly Scotland could break what seem these days to be two “iron laws” – namely (a) of capital flight from countries which show any signs of challenging corporate power; and (b) of the self-serving nature of the political and professional class which moves into any vacant positions of power. An August post referred to the first as the “missing question at the heart of the Scottish debate”; and one just 2 weeks before the vote referred to an article which contained the following assertion -

 Nowhere in the mainstream campaign has anyone from Yes or No acknowledged that our financial and fiscal systems are fatally flawed. No plans have been proposed to tackle the creation and destruction of money as interest paying debt, a system that cannot be sustained for much longer before it buries us all under a mountain of credit that’s impossible to service. None of the good things that enthusiasts for independence want to happen are likely to happen or be sustained until we make structural reforms to our dysfunctional systems of democracy and finance. The same goes for the “strength in unity” arguments of those who seek to preserve the union by voting No.

I am not therefore surprised by today’s news that Craig Murray – whose blogposts always enlighten my day – has been rejected as a candidate for the lists of those approved to fight the general election as Scottish Nationalists. Nor that the grounds on which he was rejected relate to his reliability as a “loyal” party supporter. He apparently gave a negative response to a question he was asked during his interview about his willingness, in the case of a coalition, to support a new tax which was highly unpopular in Scotland (and whose rejection is actually still official Nationalist policy). Note also the designation of the man signing the letter of rejection - "corporate governance and compliance manager"!!!!!!!

Murray is a man of conviction – and a thorn in the side of the powerful. The statement he was required to give in support of his candidacy was typically blunt and uncompromising..

You see him here in an extended (skype) interview earlier today,

The interviewing panel (of 3 parliamentarians) seems to have been very stupid and he has, typically, gone to town in exposing the new breed of career politician which has embedded itself in the party. Anything less than a quick disavowal of the panel decision will badly affect the standing of the Nationalist party. But that will not be easy for a party which took a very clear decision a few years ago to present itself only in a positive light and to stifle dissent……and the public and aggrieved way in which he has reacted will confirm many in the nationalist party in their belief that he lacked the suitability to be a political figure - with all the compromising that involves........ 

The Labour party has been hemorrhaging electoral support and will relish this turn of events – but would be very ill-advised to try to use it to their own advantage since it is exactly how their own higher echelons behaved in 1998 during the interviewing of candidates for the elections to Scotland’s first Parliament when they selected only loyal Blairites…..  

update
A recent post from Craig gives a link to a strong, balanced counter-response - which has the ring of truth to it.... 

Variations on a theme

This is the time of the year when some of us like to “take stock” – so I have been looking at the 180-odd blogposts of 2014, trying to identify patterns, high-points and…. deficiencies.

There were many more thematic postings than in previous years – this time last year, for example, I began a series of ten posts on Romanian culture which occupied the early weeks of 2014 and became the basis for my first E-book. The blog  then moved on to a series of reflections about political and professional power, drawing particularly on the writings of such diverse individuals as Anthony Jay, Peter Mair, Christopher Lasch and Dennis Healey which, coincidentally but symbolically, presaged the death in March of one of Britain’s most iconic politicians, Tony Benn. The forty subsequent posts on the Scottish referendum debate (collected in an E-book – The Independence Argument) were, in a sense, “variations on a theme”.   

After some musings about the absence of “European writing, I had moved back by June to knaw on my “change the world” bone – which made me think that it is perhaps time now to make a new E-book from the draft Guide for the Perplexed paper with which I have been playing around for more than a decade. This might help properly launch the new Mapping the common ground website which has been lying dormant after I explored its possible name and purpose in several posts in the summer.

Clearly I seem to have reached an impasse with that paper - first drafted in 2001 – and I’m beginning to suspect that one reason is the tension between the “rationality” model - with which I was imbued by my education - and the richness of other prisms which have been attracting me in my effort to make sense of the world. It is not an accident that the sub-title of that new website refers to multiple perspectives!

Chris Pollitt’s small book, “State of the State” (2000), had first brought me up against Mary Douglas’ “Grid-group” theory (reminding me of Amatsai Etzioni’s scintillating dissection of our approach to Social Problems into three basic schools). But it was Mike Hulme’s book – Why We Disagree about Climate Change – understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity - which really opened my eyes in July to the full potential of the sort of post-modernist “discourse analysis” which I had held until then  in such disdain……..

Most radicals take a “mechanical” view of the world (Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organisation is still the best read on the metaphors we use) – they assume, that is, that societies and systems can and should be diagnosed and “fixed”. Political parties have operated on this pre(o)mise for most of the past century. For more than a couple of decades, however, a lot of serious thinkers have been questioning the simplistic nature of social interventions driven by this principle – pointing to the lessons from chaos science and systems theory….. Picking up on this theme, one of July’s posts featured an energetic old activist called Grace Lee Boggs who argued that protests these days need a new model -

I think it’s really important that we get rid of the idea that protest will create change. The idea of protest organizing, as summarized by [community organizer] Saul Alinsky, is that if we put enough pressure on the government, it will do things to help people.

We don’t realize that that kind of organizing worked only when the government was very strong, when the West ruled the world, relatively speaking.

But with globalization and the weakening of the nation-state, that kind of organizing doesn’t work.

We need to do what I call visionary organizing. Recognize that in every crisis, people do not respond like a school of fish. Some people become immobilized. Some people become very angry, some commit suicide, and other people begin to find solutions.

And visionary organizers look at those people, recognize them and encourage them, and they become leaders of the future.

This took me back to one of the seminal books for me - Robert Quinn’s Change the World, produced in 1996 and an excellent antidote for those who are still fixated on the expert model of change imagining it can be achieved by “telling”, “forcing” or by participation. Quinn (a neglected thinker) exposes the last for what it normally is - a form of manipulation – and effectively encourages us, through examples, to have more faith in people.

Normal blog service was resumed after the Scottish referendum result in late September with a long post - Some Notes on a crisis – on a reading list which, with a couple of exceptions, shows the extent to which the mechanistic model still dominates the debate about the crisis.

An apocalyptic note entered the blog in October with a couple of posts – Are we going to Hell? and Have the Kleptomaniacs and Liars really won? the last of which itemised 13 vicious social trends.

The year ended, however, on a fairy-tale note – with the incredible victory of modest Klaus Iohannis in the Romanian Presidential elections.

But one important conclusion from this initial overview of the year’s posts seems to be that I can and should continue with the thematic approach to posts – using this year’s posts on “changing the world” as a basis rather than the essay on guiding the perplexed. But with a strong dash of the post-modern material on “frame analysis” etc a list of which can be found in the post on Stories We Tell.

I haven't been offering as many paintings on my posts - for which my apologies. I will try harder.....
This is one of my favourite Bulgarian aquarellists - Grigor Naidenov - and I have just discovered it in a small cache of stuff bundled with some old calendars of Bulgarian art which I brought down from the crowded Bucharest flat.......

Attentiveness

Good resolutions seem to have gone out of fashion – and end-of-year reflections seem to have been surrendered, vicariously, to journalists who remind us, instead, of the world’s key events and do a round up, for example, of “best books of the year”.

Whatever happened to the “mindfulness” about which we were being exhorted not so long ago – let alone simple “attentiveness”?

Tim Parks - to whom I referred in the last post – asked recently what might be the most practical way he could lead his students to a greater attentiveness…......to help protect themselves from all those underlying messages that can shift one’s attitude without one’s being aware of it? I began to think about the way I read myself, about the activity of reading, what you put into it rather than what was simply on the page.

 Try this experiment, I eventually told them: from now on always read with a pen in your hands, not beside you on the table, but actually in your hand, ready, armed. And always make three or four comments on every page, at least one critical, even aggressive. Put a question mark by everything you find suspect. Underline anything you really appreciate. Feel free to write “splendid,” but also, “I don’t believe a word of it.” And even “bullshit.”

……it was remarkable how many students improved their performance with this simple stratagem. There is something predatory, cruel even, about a pen suspended over a text. Like a hawk over a field, it is on the lookout for something vulnerable. Then it is a pleasure to swoop and skewer the victim with the nib’s sharp point.

The mere fact of holding the hand poised for action changes our attitude to the text. We are no longer passive consumers of a monologue but active participants in a dialogue. Students would report that their reading slowed down when they had a pen in their hand, but at the same time the text became more dense, more interesting, if only because a certain pleasure could now be taken in their own response to the writing when they didn’t feel it was up to scratch, or worthy only of being scratched.

 Shades of the "slow books" concept I have been trying to arouse interest in.....

Revelations

My blog occasionally refers to the welcome relief my nomadic life of the past 24 years has given from the “noise” of television and newspapers but has not so far attempted to do justice to the wonderful effect which living a solitary life in a foreign country has. You experience and see things in a different and powerfully new way….   

Tim Park, for example, has from his mid 20s made his living in Italy as a translator and teacher of translation and has written a series of short pieces in the New York Review of Books about how this experience has affected his own writing

If you write a lot yourself obviously you become more curious about how certain effects can be achieved or avoided and with application over the years your sensibility is enhanced. In my case translation has been important. I came to Italy when I was twenty-five.

Living in a second language, I became more aware of how language drives and shapes thought. Translating and teaching translation forced me constantly to take texts to pieces in order to put them back together in my own tongue. I became very conscious of elements of style, if only because I felt the tension between the author’s habits and my own. Translating texts together with students, I have also had the benefit of discovering all the things they saw that I didn’t.

My combination of political and academic roles in the 70s and 80s had made me aware of the need to communicate more clearly – whether in words or text. When I moved in 1990 to work in ex-communist countries, the translation process made me even more more aware, for example, of the jargon we use….of how context shapes and alters the meaning we give to things…of the arbitrariness or “slipperiness” of words as TS Eliot put it -

“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.”

Paul Cairney is a Scottish academic (in my field of policy analysis) whose blog is always worth reading. One of his most recent posts is a useful analysis of his thoughts on presenting a paper in Japan through interpreters which he concludes thus -

In short, if we take the idea of translation seriously, it is not just about a technical process in which words are turned into a direct equivalent in another language and you expect the audience to be informed or do the work to become informed. It is about thinking again about what we think we know, and how much of that knowledge we can share with other people.