In praise of self-sufficiency

For the last few years, it’s been fashionable for these with a concern about declining resources to measure their "ecological foorprint”. Although that seems a good rational device for relating our own actions to wider policy issues, it patently has had little effect on the way we live our lives. It may give us a measure of the social costs of the various decisions which make up our life style - but it gives little incentive to change. Orlov’s book gives a much more powerful measure – about the sustainability of the lives we lead – and speaks directly to our self-interest.
At the moment I live in two places - my mountain house in the Carpathians and the rented (garden) flat here in Sofia. So let’s apply the Orlov perspective to these two.
I bought the mountain house directly; have therefore no debt on it (or anything else) and my overheads are minimal. I installed a couple of years ago a wood-burning stove – but need some petrol and oil to drive the power saw to ensure continued supply (brought by horse and cart). So I should now buy a substantial stock of petrol and oil – with fire risks being reduced by storeage in the stone basement.
Water comes from the municipal system – so I need to install a proper rainwater catch - and get access to the neighbour’s natural (spring) system whose network he set up decades ago.
I need electricity only for music and internet (will it still exist?) since I have no television or frig – let alone washing machine! But I should consider a standby generator – driven by solar energy ( we have lots of sun). I have access to a vegetable garden on the neighbour’s land – and the rest of food can be obtained in the village most of whose households have livestock. There is no local sewage system – we all have our septic tanks – and I therefore try to minimise the water which goes down the drains. Basically the only thing the municipality supplies is garbage collection and water (which is why I pay only 50 euros a year local taxation – and about half that again for water)
As long as currency is useful (and the banks can actually give me my money when I ask!), I can pay for food – otherwise I have few skills to barter except English. My (English) library would be worthless – although some of the foreign artefacts could be traded. Stocks of soap and detergent (spices and wines!) should be bought up!

Connections between the Carpathian house and Sofia are, at the moment, fairly easy – a 600 kilometre drive. With scarce petrol resources, the public transport option would be a bit of a nightmare. A 10 hour train journey to Bucharest – then a 5 hour train, bus and hitching schedule. But at least hitch-hiking is still a serious transport option in Romania. It has disappeared in most European countries – even in Bulgaria. Here let me indulge an aside about a favourite topic of mine - the differences between Bulgaria and Romania. The Romanians have gone for American-style strip development of flashy new houses – which you rarely see in Bulgaria. But hundreds of Bulgarian villages have been bled dry – and lie derelict. That’s why Brits, Dutch and Russians alike have been able to pick up rural houses for a song. In Romania the villages emptied only in the saxon villages of Transylvania when the remaining German stock was enticed away by Chancellor Kohl’s incentives in the early 1990s – and immediately invaded by gypsies. Elsewhere the villages have seen the city people build new holiday homes.
Anyway - revenons aux moutons (back to our muttons) as the French say! Here in Sofia, I walk, cycle and use public transport. As an ex-socialist country, the urban layout and transport system is more akin to Russia's and therefore highly resilient. I assume that the small neighbourhood subsistence shops will still be able to bring in the fruit and vegetables from surrounding villages. But I am dependent on electricity and water – and unfortunately we don’t have the Soviet District heating system – or rather it has been given over to privatised monopolisitic suppliers who are already showing all the arrogance that status brings and recklessly over-charging (30 euros last month for water when I wasn’t here). I am actually thinking of buying a flat here (for access to the pleasant urban networks and facilities Sofia offers) so do need to check out the sustainability of its water and electricity systems.

So what I might call the "Orlov check” is useful in identifying actions which I should be taking in my own interest. But it also suggests that countries like Bulgaria and Romania should be more positive in recognising the value of a lot of what they currently have – a lot of which has to do with the issue of self sufficiency. People have learned not to trust the state – indeed to make do without it. The "modernising” opinion-leaders are ashamed of this feature in their countries – "autarchy” is, after all, a bad word in the economic lexicon – which should make us appreciate its inherent value.
We could start with the municipalities – the Sofia mayor and one of Bucharest sector mayors have started with bicycle lanes and, in Bucharest, even free rental of bikes. And I quoted recently a British example of encouraging local food production and use

Resilience - a more appropriate national index?

Three questions arise from reading Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse – to which two of my recent posts have given extensive coverage
• Do European countries face the same collapse which Dmitry Orlov anticipates for the US.
• If so, what sort of differences will be evident in how the various countries such as UK, Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany and Romania , for example, cope?
• And what does that mean for our activities – whether personal or political?

Of course, countries such as England, Greece and Ireland already face severe economic and social crises – but the official rhetoric in these countries is that these are simply tough adjustments due to the excesses of (variously) bankers or specific governments. And that the bitter medicine will soon have us back on our feet agin. Orlov’s argument is completely different – that we are witnessing a breakdown of the Anglo-Saxon liberal model of economic governance (he doesn’t use this phrase) which seems to have served many of us well over the past 90 years. And that many millions face a return to basic self-sufficient living as the goods and services; and social and physical infrastucture we have become dependent on waste away and collapse.
I don’t want to offend my American readers (of whom I seem to have many) – and I’m sure they wouldn’t be reading my stuff unless they accepted that many of their systems and ways of living are excessive and inefficient. All the data tells us that US citizens are at one end of the spectrum in their resource utilisation and dependency. And advertising - and the media system it supports – beams this hedonostic and sybaritic way of life into even bedouin tents and creates enormous ambitions, envy and disatisfaction everywhere on the globe. The basic message is that it disables us all. I am an excellent product of the system - highly educated and well-read (and written) but pathetic at practical skills. My immediate reaction when something needs to be cleaned, repaired or built is to send for a house-maid, plumber or builder (at least I cook and can saw and chop wood!). In Romania I feel ashamed and inadequate – since most people (with the dangerous exception of the educated younger generation) build everything for themselves. I’ve already mentioned that this doesn’t figure in national statistics – and Romania and Bulgaria would actually rate quite high in the league tables if they were contructed around this coping or resilience factor (see tomorrow).
I’ve noticed that resilience has become a fashionable word in the past 2 years. The first paper I noticed was a 2009 Think Tank one – which basically seemed a neo-liberal take on how communities could cope with emergencies. But emergencies, by definition, are one off and short-lived events – after which things are assumed to return to normal. And this view is also evident in another interesting paper from the New Economic Foundation which looked at how a different set of national accounts might be constructed – in which resilience was, again, a factor. Bulgaria was rated very low on this index – although my experience of the modest lives they lead – with rural connections and excellent soil - suggests they would actually have a very high coping level (unlike England). And clearly Denmark and Germany would also cope very well. Sadly, despite France having heroically resisted the Anglo-saxon model culturally and protected its rural way of life, its urban spread and inequalities will not serve it well under crisis.
The UK’s Institute of Development Studies has a very useful overview of the various resilience measures in use. Access to food is a basic consideration in all these discussions – and here is a useful discussion paper on that issue. On the other hand, here is a typically crap academic treatment of the issue I realsie that I am only scratching the surface so far - and hope to return to the issue soon.

Vernissaj and wine

The Astry and Konus Galleries are both favourite ports of call for me here in Sofia. Vihra and Yassen are, respectively, highly sociable and knowledgable about Bulgarian painting - and helpful to outsiders like myself. Vihra - at Astry Gallery - organises special exhibitions every 2 months or so - with Vernissajs and bookmarks - and last evening was the first I have been able to manage. For a modest and talented young landscape artist - Sabit Mesrur - one of whose paintings heads this post.
Yassen - at the Konus Gallery - also teaches and I at last visited the small gallery which the Academy of Fine Arts has in Levski street, just round the corner from my flat. It has currently a nice little exhibition by one of the Academy's first graduates, Rumen Gasharov (1956). I was given a couple of excellent little booklets free of charge. I offered to make a contribution - but it was refused. His website should be here.
And today I opened another of the Magura range of wines I have mentioned before - from the very North-East of the country. This one of the "Rendez-Vous" label - Cuvee du Sud. Crisp and tasty. Highly recommended - if a bit pricey at 6 euros - from the great shop they have here in Sofia. It may be a bit far out - but a number 5 tram from Makedonia Bvd takes you down to Pushkin Boulevard very quickly and comfortably. They have great range of whites, reds and roses (including cheap but excellent boxes). Only pity is that they don't give wine-tasting......

Letter to the younger generation

At my stage of life, I sometimes get asked for career advice by some of the younger colleagues who have worked with me. I always find it difficult to know what to say since times and contexts (let alone individuals) are so different. And, as Oscar Wilde put it very aptly, "I always pass on good advice – it’s the only thing to do with it”! When I do try to answer – particularly in writing – I generally found that what came out was actually more helpful to me since I was forced to think about aspects of my life and its times to which I hadn’t given much attention. And I remember a couple of lovely books which were based on an older colleague writing to younger ones. The first "Lettres a une etudiante", was written by the French sociologist, Alain Touraine in 1974(and is sadly not available in English). I can’t at the moment remember the second author (it was probably C Wright Mills). But, in my Carpathian library, I have a marvellous book of reflective essays by the big names in European and American Political Science describing how they came to get involved in the discipline, who they worked with and were inspired by and how they came to write their various magni opi.

These thoughts came to me as I read one of Orlov’s papers - whose general ideas I presented yesterday. In this paper, chunks of which I reproduce below, he is trying to explore the implications of the bleak scenario he skecthes out for a young man. Let me first remind you of Orlov’s basic argument which he present on the basis of his living for significant periods of his life in Russian and the US and seeing the Soviet collapse at first hand.
• Despite the apparent ideological differences between the two countries, the SU and US the same industrial, technological civilization
• They have competed with one another in various destructive races - not only the arms race and the squandering of natural resources race – but in also the jails race and the bankruptcy race
• Both countries have been experiencing chronic depopulation of farming districts. In Russia, family farms were decimated during collectivization, along with agricultural output; in the U.S., a variety of other forces produced a similar result with regard to rural population, but without any loss of production. Both countries replaced family farms with unsustainable, ecologically disastrous industrial agribusiness, addicted to fossil fuels. The American ones work better, as long as energy is cheap, and, after that, probably not at all.
• the causes of the Soviet collapse are now clearly evident in the United States
• the Soviet Union had various features (state owned housing; concentrated urban systen; vegetable gardens; family support systemns; district heating) which gave its citizens a resilience in coping with the collapse of jobs and public services which the US completely lacks
• it is therefore all the more important people start to prepare for the worst scenario and alter their lifestyle (there was talk a year or so back of „resilience” being an important social feature)
• most contemporary American systems (justice; education; health) now operate disastrously and in the interests of the „fat cats”.

I gave a link yesterday to one of Orlov’s papers - Thriving in the age of collapse – and it is the final section of that paper which addresses the question of "What Can Young People do to Prepare for America's Collapse?" I've selected most of the text to give a sense of the tautness of his language and argument.

We have a three-tier generationally stratified middle-class society. At the top, we have a whole lot of happy, prosperous, self-assured old people, living it large, not willing for a moment to admit their complicity in impoverishing their children and grandchildren. In the middle we have a smaller number of their adult children, running themselves ragged, forced to delude themselves that everything is under control, just to keep up their spirits. And then there are even fewer young people, just coming of age, and, one would think, justifiably angry with the hand they have been dealt. Few of them are up to the Herculean task that has been set in front of them.
Consider “Steve,” who is 18 years old. He found out about Peak Oil after one of his on-line video game buddies sent him some links to Web sites, which he found deeply shocking. Now he is totally freaked out.
One of Steve's most severe and painful realizations, if he is lucky enough to have it, will be that he has been lied to all his life, more or less continuously, by his parents, his minders at school, and even, to some extent, his own peers. If he does not have this realization, then he will be doomed to see all that happens to him as the result his personal failings: his weakness, lack of talent, inability to fit in, or bad luck. Even if he does have this realization, he will find it difficult to live his life accordingly, because those who lack this realization, and deem themselves successful, will try to denigrate him as a misfit or a loser.
One part of the lie is that America is the best and getting better – land of possibility and so forth – and that he can achieve his dream, whatever it is, by being diligent, hard-working, and a team player. Of course, his dream must be an American dream – just like everyone else's, and involve a house in the suburbs, a couple of cars in the driveway, a couple of kids, maybe a cat and a dog, and lots of money in retirement accounts.
The other part of the lie is that Steve can live such a life and be free. He would be free - to make false choices. For breakfast Steve will have... stuff from a cardboard box with commercial art on it, excellent choice, Sir, well done! And in order to get around, he will have... a disposable vinyl-upholstered sheet metal box on four rubber wheels that burns gasoline, very wise, Sir, very wise! By choosing a prepackaged life, Steve himself would become a prepackaged product, a social appliance designed for planned obsolescence, whose useful life will be determined by the availability of the fossil fuels on which it operates.
That these are lies is plain for all to see: with each next generation, people are being forced to work harder and to go deeper into debt to maintain this suburban, middle-class lifestyle. About a third of them experience severe psychological problems. Also about a third of them do not believe that they will be able to afford to retire. The majority of them believe that they are not doing as well as their parents did.

Escape Plans
This society still has plenty to offer to a young person, provided that the young person is clever enough to know how to take advantage of it.
First of all, it is probably a bad idea to go straight to college. It is best to avoid getting sucked into that pipeline, which starts around the middle of senior year and ends with post-graduate indentured servitude of one sort or another. Apply to a couple of schools, strictly pro forma, to avoid suspicion. Having a high school diploma is important; the grades and test scores are somewhat important. Demonstrated excellence at one or two things is more valuable than a good average. Most important is learning the differences between your talents, you interests, and your expectations.

At this point in the game, gaining basic money-making skills is far more important, especially in the trades, such as landscaping, interior restoration, carpentry, house painting, floor sanding, mechanical repair work, and so on, because these are all jobs that can be done for cash. Avoid dangerous trades, such as roofing, abatement, and, in general, anything that involves toxic chemicals or dangerous machinery. Having some business skills is important too – knowing how to deal with bosses and customers and how to supervise people. The best approach is to work a series of short jobs – shorter than a year, learning a trade and moving on immediately, and always be on the lookout for special, unofficial projects. Think of regular employment as good cover, but not as the main source of income – and therefore best kept to part-time. Always job-hunting, switching and learning new jobs, will help keep your mind sharp. But be sure to read as well, and challenge yourself by reading difficult books – this will help you when you decide to go back to school.

Once you graduate, immediately become financially independent from your parents. Move out, and work on developing a good roommate situation. Go for the cheapest rent you can find by talking directly to landlords and offering to take care of security and maintenance. Pick your roommates carefully and try to get a cohesive group together, so that you can rely on each other. Do not accept money or other sorts of financial help from your parents. Do everything you have to so that if and when you decide to go to school, and file financial aid forms, you are not their dependent, and they are not expected to pay your college tuition or living expenses. If your parents require an explanation, it is that you care about them: you do not believe that their retirement will be enough to live on, and the money that would be swallowed up by tuition will help. If you have a system worked out for living frugally and making a bit of cash, on paper you can look penniless, which is perfect, because schools will confiscate all the money that you disclose to them. Be sure to always disclose just enough to avoid suspicion, and brush up on the laws to make sure it's all legal.

Higher What?
When thinking about attending a college or a university, it is important to understand what these institutions actually are. They are often called “institutions of higher learning,” but the learning is quite incidental to their two most important missions: research (government or industrial) and something known as “credentialing:” the granting of degrees. In many ways, it is a sort of extended hazing ritual, where the aspirant is required to jump through a series of blazing hoops before being granted access to a professional realm
Excellent teaching does happen, but more or less by accident. Professors are recruited and retained based on their publications and awards (to lend prestige to the school) and their ability to attract grant money. Much of the teaching is done not by the professors themselves, but by graduate student teaching assistants, adjuncts, and various other academic minions.

The human mind learns best through repetition and through applying knowledge, but college curricula are structured so as to avoid repetition, with each course designed as a stand-alone unit. Most of the learning takes the form of cramming for tests, and what is tested is not knowledge but short-term memory. By the time students graduate, they have forgotten most of what they have been taught, but with perfectly honed cramming skills, ready to brute-force their way through any further superficial tests of their “knowledge” or “competence,” to join the swelling ranks of America's credentialed amateurs.
For some students, the more prestigious schools offer a certain charmed quality: no matter how much they drink and how badly they do, they cannot flunk out. An echelon of tutors is summoned to guide their every mediocre step, all the way through graduation. These are the children of the elite, whose attendance at these institutions is more a matter of tradition than anything else. It makes no difference whether they learn anything or not: for their breed, the pedigree counts for a lot more than the obedience training. I have run across a few of these zombies with Ivy League diplomas, childish handwritings, speech peppered with nonsense syllables, and an attitude that never stops begging for a slap.

Fields of Mud
When choosing a field of study, it is important to keep in mind that there are disciplines that will abide and remain perennially valuable, while others are fluff. The sciences – Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Zoology, Botany, Geology – will serve you well. Mathematics, Philosophy, Astronomy, and a foreign language or two will make you a better person. Literature and History are invaluable, but rarely taught well; if you cannot find a truly inspired teacher, teach yourself – by reading and writing, which are the only two activities these two disciplines require.
Then there are the pseudo-sciences: Psychology, Sociology, Political Science, and Economics. They disguise themselves as sciences by employing experimental techniques and statistical analysis, and, in the case of Economics, a funky sort of math, but they are fluff, and are clearly marked with an expiration date.
Lastly, there are the conduits to the professions: Law, Medicine, and Engineering. They have little to do with getting an education, and everything to do with learning a trade, and, of course “credentialing.” In each case, the hazing is extreme.

The legal profession is already a bit overstocked, and, law being a luxury product, it seems unlikely that these graduates will be able to pay down their copious student loans in the new economy. Already many of them lack the option of becoming public defenders or taking on pro bono cases because of their huge financial burdens.
I have already said enough about medicine; but if Steve wants to be a doctor, there are some medical schools around the world that graduate real doctors, rather than technocrats who practice “defensive medicine” and shuffle paper half their day. After the extended sleep deprivation experiment they are put through as interns, they get to live in stately homes, fly to pharmaceutical company junkets, and play a lot of golf. That may change.

I am partial to engineering, having put myself through its rigors. It sometimes creates what I feel is a good sort of person – a bit stunted in some ways, strangely passionate about inanimate objects, but capable at many things and generally trustworthy. If Steve has exhibited the telltale tendencies – such as completely dismantling and reassembling various gadgets, and making them work perfectly again afterward – and if he looks forward to four years of scribbling out formulas under intense pressure, then engineering may be for him. Whether he will be able to earn a living by engineering is unknowable, but then engineers can usually find plenty of other things to do.

The Piece of Paper
It is often hard to tell ahead of time, but for a lot of people graduating may be quite pointless, while dropping out at an opportune moment may be quite advantageous. I know plenty of people who never graduated; they have been my bosses, my colleagues, and my employees. They often have an original perspective, along with an unusual depth of knowledge. Some of the best-educated people I have ever met have been dropouts: the self-educated poet Joseph Brodsky, for instance, who won a Nobel Prize in Literature, dropped out of grade school aged fifteen.

It is best not announce your intention to never graduate, but behave accordingly. While others are busy checking off boxes on their little curriculum planning sheets and suffering through pointless required courses with mediocre instructors, you can find out what you want to learn and who you want to learn it from, and take your time to learn it well. If a good project comes along, take it, take a leave of absence from school, then go back and study some more. Keep telling everyone that you intend to go back and get your degree. I know people in their late 40s who are still in good standing, always threatening to come back and finish their degree: people find them quite charming.

Earth, Revisited
The last, and possibly the most formative part of your education is for you to go and see the world beyond the borders of your country. Learn a language, then go and backpack through countries where you can speak it. Spanish is about the easiest language you can learn, and it unlocks a huge world, which offers a great richness of spirit, along with a level-headed perspective on all this gringo madness that you will have to learn to escape from.
You are at an age when parts of who you are – your outlook on life, your personality, your habits and your tastes – are still forming. There is no better way to gain a fresh perspective on the world – and on yourself – than to put yourself into an unfamiliar situation: new place, new culture, a different language. Who knows what you will find? It could be a new place to live, an acquired taste for leading a nomadic existence, or it could be a new peace of mind, a sense of self-sufficiency, or a unique perspective on life.
It is human nature to want to postpone making unpleasant decisions until the last moment, and we can do so with impunity, provided we leave enough options open for us to choose from. Every day that we live contentedly within the status quo, we restrict our options further and further, by making ourselves increasingly dependent on more and more systems over which we have no control, and on which we cannot rely. But there are also small, conscious steps we can take that break some of these dependencies, and create new options for ourselves. If we take enough such steps, then when the time arrives for a major, life-changing decision, we will be ready

. Tomorrow I hope to explore the question of how much of the analysis is relevant for Europe – and which countries here seem to be more reslient than others.

Facing the end of the world we have known

I’ve now had the chance to read Dmitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse; the Soviet Experience and American Prospects which I referred to a couple of weeks ago
It’s a long time since I’ve read such a provocative and uncompromising set of arguments – delivered with dry wit – about the situation which faces the US and its citizens and what they might learn from the Soviet collapse. There have been many critiques of the American system (most famously from people like Will Hutton and Chomsky) and many books about the peak-oil scenario – but Orlov’s is the first one which I’ve felt inclined to buy multiple copies of to pass on to friends and colleagues; and to go back immediately for a second read. And, unlike other books, he makes this impact with absoluetly no bibliographical references!
A couple of his earlier papers (on which his book is based) are actually available on the net – one on the parallels between the SU and the US ; the other on what individuals (although the book is aimed at Americans, it has implications for Europeans) should be doing to to prepare for the very different world in which we will be living sooner rather than later.

The Soviet Union and the United States are each either the winner or the first runner-up in the following categories: the space race, the arms race, the jails race, the hated evil empire race, the squandering of natural resources race, and the bankruptcy race. In some of these categories, the United States is, shall we say, a late bloomer, setting new records even after its rival was forced to forfeit. Both believed, with giddy zeal, in science, technology, and progress, right up until the Chernobyl disaster occurred. After that, there was only one true believer left.

They are the two post-World War II industrial empires that attempted to impose their ideologies on the rest of the world: democracy and capitalism versus socialism and central planning. Both had some successes: while the United States reveled in growth and prosperity, the Soviet Union achieved universal literacy, universal health care, far less social inequality, and a guaranteed - albeit lower - standard of living for all citizens. The state-controlled media took pains to make sure that most people didn't realize just how much lower it was: “Those happy Russians don't know how badly they live,” Simone Signoret said after a visit.

Both empires made a big mess of quite a few other countries, each one financing and directly taking part in bloody conflicts around the world in order to impose its ideology, and to thwart the other. Both made quite a big mess of their own country, setting world records for the percentage of population held in jails. In this last category, the U.S. is now a runaway success, supporting a burgeoning, partially privatized prison-industrial complex (a great source of near-slave wage labor).

The bankruptcy race is particularly interesting. Prior to its collapse, the Soviet Union was taking on foreign debt at a rate that could not be sustained. The combination of low world oil prices and a peak in Soviet oil production sealed its fate. Later, the Russian Federation, which inherited the Soviet foreign debt, was forced to default on its obligations, precipitating a financial crisis. Russia's finances later improved, primarily due to rising oil prices, along with rising oil exports. At this point, Russia is eager to wipe out the remaining Soviet debt as quickly as possible, and over the past few years the Russian rouble has done just a bit better than the U.S. dollar.
The United States is now facing a current account deficit that cannot be sustained, a falling currency, and an energy crisis, all at once. It is now the world's largest debtor nation, and most people do not see how it can avoid defaulting on its debt. According to a lot of analysts, it is technically bankrupt, and is being propped up by foreign reserve banks, which hold a lot of dollar-denominated assets, and, for the time being, want to protect the value of their reserves. This game can only go on for so long. Thus, while the Soviet Union deserves honorable mention for going bankrupt first, the gold in this category (pun intended) will undoubtedly go to the United States, for the largest default ever.

There are many other similarities as well. Women received the right to education and a career in Russia earlier than in the U.S. Russian and American families are in similarly sad shape, with high divorce rates and many out-of-wedlock births, although the chronic shortage of housing in Russia did force many families to stick it out, with mixed results. Both countries have been experiencing chronic depopulation of farming districts. In Russia, family farms were decimated during collectivization, along with agricultural output; in the U.S., a variety of other forces produced a similar result with regard to rural population, but without any loss of production. Both countries replaced family farms with unsustainable, ecologically disastrous industrial agribusiness, addicted to fossil fuels. The American ones work better, as long as energy is cheap, and, after that, probably not at all.
The similarities are too numerous to mention. I hope that what I outlined above is enough to signal a key fact: that these are, or were, the antipodes of the same industrial, technological civilization.

His second paper is called Thriving in the age of collapse which you can read while listening to him deliver a lecture on the same topic. He may not be the most powerful orator (as distinct from writer), but his dry wit is very evident. Of course, his bleak message that our political and administrative systems are incapable of preventing the collapse and that we should simply adopt the strategem of survival is, at the end of the day, literally Voltairian (After experiencing the cruelty of the world, Candide decided that the most appropriate thing for him to do was to "cultiver son jardin"). It is also a bit difficult for a political creature such as myself to accept. But the section in Orlov's book which points out that governments nowadays only intensify problems through "bondoogles" is not only amusing - but borne out by experience and the critical literature.

John Harris is a british journalist who has developed a nice "Brechtian” camera style – by which I mean one which removes the mystique of both media and politics. He has been taking us in recent weeks behind the scenes of the British party Conferences – and this is a good episode which has the British voter talking about the (ir)relevance of politicians. We need more of this style of video.

visual pleasures

I’m sorry I missed the walking tour which Valentin Mandache arranged on Sunday around Targoviste -one of Romania’s ancient capitals. I always enjoy driving through the town – and his invitation gives a sense of the town's treasures/

It’s good to be back in Sofia – with its vegetables (leeks and tomatoes); galleries; pleasant cycling and oace of life. The Sofia City Gallery continues to celebrate its greats – with a special exhibition of one of Bulgaria’s most revered painters – Nikola Petrov (1881-1916). I can understand why his influence (despite his youth) was so great – his landscapes are delicate; his portrait sketches deft; and his nudes were clearly the inspiration for Nikola Boiadjiev. A very nice little book accompanies the exhibition – at only 5 euros. I hadn’t realised that Petrov was from one of the Danube towns – in the north-east, Vidin – which I haven’t been able to get to so far but will certainly visit once the Romanian engineers eventually finish their half of the new bridge (another year off I suspect). The town does have an art gallery. For me, Nikola Tanev is the greatest and is also from a Danube village – Svishtov – the signs for whose car ferry I saw as I left the Russe District

I mentioned recently an interview with Ralf Dahrendorf on an excellent history series available on the internet. I don’t use such facilities as much as I should – here’s another challenging snippet

Visions of the Future,

My blog has been playing catch-up recently with some of the debate currently going on in European left circles. I have to confess I have mixed feelings about a lot of the stuff which comes from think-tanks written by the curious new breed of scribblers who seem to inhabit the airwaves and ante-chambers of power. God knows, I respect ideas but these rootless characters have developed a language which doesn’t seem to relate to the real world – and certainly doesn’t deal with the HOW of reform. One example is this short publication by a Norwegian (who should know better!!).
A year ago I bought and started to read an intriguing book Red Tory written by an ex-priest which seemed to be yet another attempt to give us a third way between greed capitalism and centralised socialism. And the coalition government has roped in quite a few big names from the social enterprsie sector to explore how mutualism might be applied to public services.
Not to be outdone, a figure duly appeared on the left and gave us the idea of Blue Labour – and Prospect magazine gave us a debate last year between the 2 proponents which has been updated in their present issue Their ideas also link to those of Paul Hirst which I blogged about last week, when I expressed surprise that people did not seem to be talking about the German social market model or, indeed, of Will Hutton’s notion of stakeholder capitalism - which had been the "in-idea” in the mid 1990s and to which Tony Bliar and Gordon Brown had turned deaf ears - Brown in particular being sold on the American rather than the social market model. And lo! People are indeed now referring to the German model - with some good points as always being made in the subsequent Guardian discussion thread (not least that one the key elements are regional banks).
Trying to get the best of both worlds (a rather Manichean view of the world!) can be difficult. I speak from personal experience - generally finding myself operating as a bridge between groups distinguished by class, party, profession, nation etc). There is a (central european) saying about bridges - "in peacetime, horses shit on them and in wartime they are blown up"!!

Brits play a great game of analysis – its the doing where they seem to come unstuck. That’s why I liked this blog about a local food initiative – a great example of what can be done when people get off their backsides. The same blog had a post about New Public Management written by one of its architects in the UK but announcing its demise (which has been announced for the past decade) and wondering what the next big idea would be to take its place. Obvious he hadn’t seen Paul Kingsnorth’s article I blogged about yesterday. Any way Colin Talbot replied and argued that it was not helpful to use such phrases – which concealed a variety of practices some of which were not disasters.
One of them which was certainly a disaster and which Gordon Brown forced through despite many warnings was the Private Financial Initiative (PFI) which Craig Murray writes about from his Ambassadorial experience.

Too big to be saved

I have referred several times in this blog to Paul Kingsnorth – who has a very pertinent article on the global crisis in today’s Guardian

In times like these, people look elsewhere for answers. A time of crisis is also a time of opening-up, when thinking that was consigned to the fringes moves to centre stage. When things fall apart, the appetite for new ways of seeing is palpable, and there are always plenty of people willing to feed it by coming forward with their pet big ideas.
But here's a thought: what if big ideas are part of the problem? What if, in fact, the problem is bigness itself?

The crisis currently playing out on the world stage is a crisis of growth. Not, as we are regularly told, a crisis caused by too little growth, but by too much of it. Banks grew so big that their collapse would have brought down the entire global economy. To prevent this, they were bailed out with huge tranches of public money, which in turn is precipitating social crises on the streets of western nations. The European Union has grown so big, and so unaccountable, that it threatens to collapse in on itself.

Corporations have grown so big that they are overwhelming democracies and building a global plutocracy to serve their own interests. The human economy as a whole has grown so big that it has been able to change the atmospheric composition of the planet and precipitate a mass extinction event.

One man who would not have been surprised by this crisis of bigness, had he lived to see it, was Leopold Kohr. Kohr has a good claim to be the most important political thinker that you have never heard of. Unlike Marx, he did not found a global movement or inspire revolutions. Unlike Hayek, he did not rewrite the economic rules of the modern world. Kohr was a modest, self-deprecating man, but this was not the reason his ideas have been ignored by movers and shakers in the half century since they were produced. They have been ignored because they do not flatter the egos of the power-hungry, be they revolutionaries or plutocrats. In fact, Kohr's message is a direct challenge to them. "Wherever something is wrong," he insisted, "something is too big."

Published in 1957, The Breakdown of Nations laid out what at the time was a radical case: that small states, small nations and small economies are more peaceful, more prosperous and more creative than great powers or superstates. It was a claim that was as unfashionable as it was possible to make. This was the dawn of the space age – a time of high confidence in the progressive, gigantist, technology-fuelled destiny of humankind. Feted political thinkers were talking in all seriousness of creating a world government as the next step towards uniting humanity. Kohr was seriously at odds with the prevailing mood. He later commented, dryly, that his critics "dismissed my ideas by referring to me as a poet".

Kohr's claim was that society's problems were not caused by particular forms of social or economic organisation, but by their size. Socialism, anarchism, capitalism, democracy, monarchy – all could work well on what he called "the human scale": a scale at which people could play a part in the systems that governed their lives. But once scaled up to the level of modern states, all systems became oppressors. Changing the system, or the ideology that it claimed inspiration from, would not prevent that oppression – as any number of revolutions have shown – because "the problem is not the thing that is big, but bigness itself".

Drawing from history, Kohr demonstrated that when people have too much power, under any system or none, they abuse it. The task, therefore, was to limit the amount of power that any individual, organisation or government could get its hands on. The solution to the world's problems was not more unity but more division. The world should be broken up into small states, roughly equivalent in size and power, which would be able to limit the growth and thus domination of any one unit. Small states and small economies were more flexible, more able to weather economic storms, less capable of waging serious wars, and more accountable to their people. Not only that, but they were more creative.

On a whistlestop tour of medieval and early modern Europe, The Breakdown of Nations does a brilliant job of persuading the reader that many of the glories of western culture, from cathedrals to great art to scientific innovations, were the product of small states.
To understand the sparky, prophetic power of Kohr's vision, you need to read The Breakdown of Nations. Some if it will create shivers of recognition. Bigness, predicted Kohr, could only lead to more bigness, for "whatever outgrows certain limits begins to suffer from the irrepressible problem of unmanageable proportions". Beyond those limits it was forced to accumulate more power in order to manage the power it already had. Growth would become cancerous and unstoppable, until there was only one possible endpoint: collapse.

Two years ago, I reread the book and picked out several quotations– of which this was one –

the chief blessing of a small-state system is ...its gift of a freedom which hardly ever registers if it is pronounced.....freedom from issues....ninety percent of our intellectual miseries are due to the fact that almost everything in our life has become an ism, an issue... our life’s efforts seem to be committed exclusively to the task of discovering where we stand in some battle raging about some abstract issue...

The blessing of a small state returns us from the misty sombreness of an existence in which we are nothing but ghostly shadows of meaningless issues to the reality which we can only find in our neighbours and neighbourhoods

Kingsnorth continues that

We have now reached the point that Kohr warned about over half a century ago: the point where "instead of growth serving life, life must now serve growth, perverting the very purpose of existence". Kohr's "crisis of bigness" is upon us and, true to form, we are scrabbling to tackle it with more of the same: closer fiscal unions, tighter global governance, geoengineering schemes, more economic growth. Big, it seems, is as beautiful as ever to those who have the unenviable task of keeping the growth machine going.

This shouldn't surprise us. It didn't surprise Kohr, who, unlike some of his utopian critics, never confused a desire for radical change with the likelihood of it actually happening. Instead, his downbeat but refreshingly honest conclusion was that, like a dying star, the gigantist global system would in the end fall in on itself, and the whole cycle of growth would begin all over again. But before it did so, "between the intellectual ice ages of great-power domination", the world would become "little and free once more"

The discussion thread to Kingsworth's article is also worth reading.