Life's Brief Span

I’m clearly getting morbid in my old age! A book in the underground shop at the University got me thinking at the weekend – it was the New York Times Obituaries of 2011-12! I failed to buy it simply because it was (of course) too heavily dominated by Americans – and I can access the archives here. Odd that no one has yet thought of getting European Commission funds to compile a set of obituaries of Europeans – drawn from such European “heavies” as Die Zeit and le Monde perhaps!

I was reminded of how readable and quirky the Daily Telegraph books of obituaries had been (as are the weekly Economist obits) and led then to The Guardian series of “other lives” which honours those less celebrated perhaps but whose lives were marked by dedication and thoughtfulness.

Elizabeth David was Britain’s most celebrated food writer – and her hundredth anniversary was nicely marked in this piece. And here's a lovely piece about the Irish poet Seamus Heaney who died recently - in a highly readable journal. 

What is to be done?

The discussion thread to the David Simon article is worth looking at. It confirms my view that few people are taking the time or trouble to explore the feasibility of the various paths which are open to those of us appalled with the behaviour of our commercial, financial, media and political rulers and systems.

Let’s try to set out what most thinking people would probably agree with (after some argument)–

• The mixed economy we had for almost 40 years after the war was a good system for us in the West
• It kept power in check
• Economic globalisation has, however, now undermined the power which working class people had in that period – probably irretrievably
• Neo-liberalism has supplied instead a thought system which justifies corporate greed
• All political parties and most media have been captured by that thought system and the elite which now rules the world
• Privatisation is a disaster
• It has undermined both the capacity of western states – and the trust people had in the public sector of those states
• It is no longer possible to see a “countervailing power” which would make these corporate elites pull back from the disasters they are inflicting on us
• Bricks are perhaps part of the answer (also “suicide missions” of the elderly!)
• The ruling elite understand this threat – which is why it has been building up an Orwellian “security state” ready to act against “dissidence”
• But the beliefs which lie at the dark heart of the neo-liberal project do need more detailed exposure
• We need to be willing to express more vehemently the arguments against privatisation – to feel less ashamed about arguing for “the commons” and for things like cooperatives and social enterprise (inasmuch as such endeavours are allowed)
• to feel less ashamed about arguing for “the commons” and for things like cooperatives and social enterprise (inasmuch as such endeavours are allowed)
• to take more strength from appropriate points in history and 
• to take the time to find and talk with those who can distill the essence of what others have been saying..........We don't need to reinvent the wheel - and should beware those with ready answers!

By comparison have a look at what some Germans were saying in June 

Breaking out from an insane world

It’s highly appropriate that, at the end of the week during which I have been thinking and about blogging the difficulties what, for lack of a better phrase I have to call “social reform”, a blistering article appears.

I won’t spoil the effect by revealing, for the moment, the identity of the writer. What is important for me is that the author gives central place to the notion of a “re-balancing” of power and systems. Have patience – the excerpt is a long one! So I’ve taken the liberty of adding some headings……

The notion that capital is the metric, that profit is the metric by which we're going to measure the health of our society is one of the fundamental mistakes of the last 30 years. I would date it in my country to about 1980 exactly, and it has triumphed.
The great irony of it is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of partisan or philosophical perfection. It's pragmatic, it includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works because we don't let it work entirely. And that's a hard idea to think – that there isn't one single silver bullet that gets us out of the mess we've dug for ourselves. But man, we've dug a mess….

 Some history
A working class that had no discretionary income at the beginning of the century, which was working on subsistence wages was turned it into a consumer class that not only had money to buy all the stuff that they needed to live but enough to buy a bunch of shit that they wanted but didn't need, and that was the engine that drove us.
It wasn't just that we could supply stuff, or that we had the factories or know-how or capital, it was that we created our own demand and started exporting that demand throughout the west. And the standard of living made it possible to manufacture stuff at an incredible rate and sell it.
And how did we do that? We did that by not giving in to either side. That was the new deal. That was the great society. That was all of that argument about collective bargaining and union wages and it was an argument that meant neither side gets to win.
The unions actually mattered. The unions were part of the equation. It didn't matter that they won all the time, it didn't matter that they lost all the time, it just mattered that they had to win some of the time and they had to put up a fight and they had to argue for the demand and the equation and for the idea that workers were not worth less, they were worth more.

 The big mistake
Ultimately we abandoned that and believed in the idea of trickle-down and the idea of the market economy and the market knows best, to the point where now libertarianism in my country is actually being taken seriously as an intelligent mode of political thought. It's astonishing to me. But it is. People are saying I don't need anything but my own ability to earn a profit. I'm not connected to society. I don't care how the road got built, I don't care where the firefighter comes from, I don't care who educates the kids other than my kids. I am me. It's the triumph of the self. I am me, hear me roar.
And so in my country (the US) you're seeing a horror show. You're seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you're seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You're seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we've put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.

 I’m no pansy!
I'm utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument's over. But the idea that it's not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn't going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that's astonishing to me.
And so capitalism is about to seize defeat from the jaws of victory all by its own hand. That's the astonishing end of this story, unless we reverse course. Unless we take into consideration, if not the remedies of Marx then the diagnosis, because he saw what would happen if capital triumphed unequivocally, if it got everything it wanted.

 But things can’t go on like this!
Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and the socialist impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine that is capitalism.
The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my country passionately and we're going down the tubes. 

OK at this stage I have to tell you that the author is the guy who created and wrote one of television’s best series - “The Wire” – one David Simon who has delivered this amazing blistering address  He goes on the say -

And that's what The Wire was about basically, it was about people who were worth less and who were no longer necessary, as maybe 10 or 15% of my country is no longer necessary to the operation of the economy. It was about them trying to solve, for lack of a better term, an existential crisis. In their irrelevance, their economic irrelevance, they were nonetheless still on the ground occupying this place called Baltimore and they were going to have to endure somehow.

 The great horror show
That's the great horror show. What are we going to do with all these people that we've managed to marginalise? It was kind of interesting when it was only race, when you could do this on the basis of people's racial fears and it was just the black and brown people in American cities who had the higher rates of unemployment and the higher rates of addiction and were marginalised and had the shitty school systems and the lack of opportunity.
And kind of interesting in this last recession to see the economy shrug and start to throw white middle-class people into the same boat, so that they became vulnerable to the drug war, say from methamphetamine, or they became unable to qualify for college loans. And all of a sudden a certain faith in the economic engine and the economic authority of Wall Street and market logic started to fall away from people. And they realised it's not just about race, it's about something even more terrifying. It's about class. Are you at the top of the wave or are you at the bottom?

 So?
So how does it get better? In 1932, it got better because they dealt the cards again and there was a communal logic that said nobody's going to get left behind. We're going to figure this out. We're going to get the banks open. From the depths of that depression a social compact was made between worker, between labour and capital that actually allowed people to have some hope.
……..Or we're going to keep going the way we're going, at which point there's going to be enough people standing on the outside of this mess that somebody's going to pick up a brick, because you know when people get to the end there's always the brick. I hope we go for the first option but I'm losing faith.

 Looks like we have to throw bricks
The other thing that was there in 1932 that isn't there now is that some element of the popular will could be expressed through the electoral process in my country.
The last job of capitalism – having won all the battles against labour, having acquired the ultimate authority, almost the ultimate moral authority over what's a good idea or what's not, or what's valued and what's not – the last journey for capital in my country has been to buy the electoral process, the one venue for reform that remained to Americans.
Right now capital has effectively purchased the government, and you witnessed it again with the healthcare debacle in terms of the $450m that was heaved into Congress, the most broken part of my government, in order that the popular will never actually emerged in any of that legislative process.
So I don't know what we do if we can't actually control the representative government that we claim will manifest the popular will. Even if we all start having the same sentiments that I'm arguing for now, I'm not sure we can affect them any more in the same way that we could at the rise of the Great Depression, so maybe it will be the brick. But I hope not.

This emphasis on the importance of balance was the focus of a very good (but neglected) paper which Henry Mintzberg published in 2000 about the Management of Government which starts with the assertion that it was not capitalism which won in 1989 but "the balanced model” ie a system in which there was some sort of balance between the power of commerce, the state and the citizen. Patently the balance has swung too far in the intervening 20 years! Mintzberg is a very sane (Canadian) voice in a mad world – ás is obvious from this article on managing quietly and his ten musings on management. 

I mentioned his paper on the blog a couple of years ago when he seemed to be writing a book about the need for re-balance but his website contains now only a promise of a pamphlet. Mintzberg is one of the few people familiar with the relevant literature who could develop an appropriate typology to help us move forward from the desparate shouting......

Salute to Varna City Gallery

It’s not often that one can upload an entire book of paintings free of charge but that is what Varna City Art Gallery now offers as part of its city bid to be European City of Culture in 2019.

It’s not a large book (136 pages) and contains very little text – other than the names and dates of the painters - which is sad. But the quality of the reproductions is excellent and the book is a good short introduction to about 50 of the key names in Bulgarian art of the first part of the 20^th Century. 

By comparison the little book I published last year gives some detail of the lives of about 150 of the key Bulgarian painters – as well as some 50 reproductions. 

One of the artists in the Varna book is Alexander Moutafov, the seascape specialist, who was schooled in the area in 1880s and 1890s and trained in Turin and Munich in the first decade of the 20th century. The aquarelle above is a new one I acquired today. This is the third of his paintings I now have. You can read more on the Dec 5 post.

I now have my beady eye on this painting from the 1940s or so - by Dimo Nikolov about whom I know nothing except that he had some art training in Prague.......The photo does not do the painting justice - the style and strong colours in particular remind me of the Baia Mare school of painting ( then in Hungary - now Romania) of the turn of the century

A Plague on all your Houses!

It's a very serious stage in one's life (particularly that of a political activist) when one feels it necessary to advise friends to have nothing to do with politicians and political parties. What is the alternative? A life of quietism and religious commitment?
I am indebted to my friend Ivan Daraktchiev for the short story ‘Tale of The Staircase’ by Hristo Smirnenski (1898-1923) which has apparently been much quoted in the Bulgarian Parliament over the past 2 decades. A man of the people who goes to represent his people to the king is stopped at a staircase by a devil At each step the devil asks him for a gift to move ahead. The devil asks first for his ears; then for his eyes; and finally for his heart and memory. So in the end when he meets the King he speaks the language of the King as he cannot hear the cry of his people, cannot see the naked bleeding bodies of his people and also has no memory about their suffering. Thus the man of the people becomes the man of the state. 

The key part of the story goes as follows -

"I have no gold. I have nothing with which to bribe you... I am poor, a youth in rags... But I am willing to give up my life..."The Devil smiled: "O no, I do not ask as much as that. Just give me your hearing.""My hearing? Gladly... May I never hear anything any more, may I...""You still shall hear," the Devil assured him, and made way for him. "Pass!" 

The young man set off at a run and had taken three steps in one stride when the hairy hand of the Devil caught him. "That's enough! Now pause and listen to your brothers groaning below."The young man paused and listened - "How strange! Why have they suddenly begun to sing happy songs and to laugh light-heartedly?..."

Again he sets off at a run.Again the Devil stopped him. "For you to go three more steps I must have your eyes."The young man made a gesture of despair. "But then I shall be unable to see my brothers or those I go to punish.""You still shall see them..." The Devil said. "I will give you different, much better eyes." 

The young man rose three more steps and looked back."See your brothers' naked bleeding bodies," the Devil prompted him."My God, how very strange! When did they manage to don such beautiful clothes? And not bleeding wounds but splendid red roses deck their bodies..." The young man proceeded, willingly giving everything he had in order to reach his goal and to punish the well-fed nobles and princes.

Now one step, just one last step remained and he would be at the top. Then indeed he would avenge his brothers."Young man, one last step still remains. Just one more step and you shall have your revenge. But for this last step I always exact a double toll: give me your heart and give me your memory."

The young man protested. "My heart? No, that is too cruel!"The Devil gave a deep and masterful laugh: "I am not so cruel as you imagine. In exchange I will give you a heart of gold and a brand-new memory. But if you refuse me, then you shall never avenge your brothers whose faces are the colour of sand and who groan more bitterly than December blizzards." The young man saw irony in the Devil's green eyes."But there will be nobody then more wretched than I. You are taking away all my human nature.""On the contrary, nobody shall be happier than you. Well, do you agree: just your heart and memory?"The young man pondered, his face clouded over, beads of sweat ran from the furrowed brow, in anger he tightened his fists and through clenched teeth said: "Very well, then. Take them!" ...

And like a swift summer storm of rage and wrath, his dark locks flying in the wind, he crossed the final step. He was now at the very top. And a broad a smile suddenly in his face, his eyes now shone with tranquil joy and his fists relaxed. He looked at the nobles revelling there and looked down to the roaring, cursing, grey ragged crowds below. He gazed, but not a muscle of his face quivered: his face was radiant, happy and content. The crowds he saw below were in holiday attire and their groans were now hymns.

Only the Greens (and particularly the Germans) have properly recognised and tried to deal with the problem of the corruption of leadership (the iron law of oligarchy)

The pessimism I feel about the performance capacity of governments relates to my experience and understanding of (a) the UK system since 1968 and (b) the so-called transition countries of Europe, Caucusus and Central Asia in which I have worked and lived for the past 20 years. I have a more open mind about the situation of the Scandinavian countries (in one of which I have briefly worked and lived); of Federal Germany and of the consensual Netherlands (although consensual Belgium and Austria have been disasters). But the UK system has become ever more centralised and adversarial in my lifetime - and these two characteristics seem to me to affect the chances of policy success in that country –

• Policies are imposed – rather than negotiated or thought through
• They are often very poorly designed (eg the poll-tax; rail privatisation; the whole Stalinist target system – with all the counter-productivities that involves)
• Ministers have a high turnover rate (Ministers of Finance excepted)
• Implementation is very poor (see agency theory)
• Morale of public servants is low (political hostility; targets; frequency and number of new initiatives; crude management)
• Changes in government lead to cancellation of programmes

Such governance arrangements as a whole do not excite much interest in Britain – but issues relating to the operation of the political system (and of what is felt to be the disenfranchisement of the citizen) do. Concerns about the British political system were so great that a completely independent inquiry was established in 2004 (funded by the Rowntree Trust) reporting in 2006 and leading to the establishment of a campaign in late 2009 to try to extract commitments from parties and candidates to electoral reform and greater citizen influence in government. Here is one important comment and discussion thread about the process – which has disappeared without a trace

A highly ironic report on the operation of the British system was published by Stuart Weir and Democratic Audit to coincide with the launch of the campaign 

The three questions

Who were the organisations and people whose stance on things I admired – and how could someone like myself help them achieve more? That is the basic question I have tried to address on various occasions over the past decade. In my various musings I’ve referred to a lot of books – but have not yet really tried to give a definitive answer to this question of whose voices and messages we should be listening to.

I’m reminded of one of Tolstoy’s fables – the Three Questions about a king who wants to know the best moment for taking a decision; the best people whose advice to listen to; and “how he might know what was the most important thing to do.”

His courtiers give him conflicting views about these 3 questions as a result of which he decides to seek the advice of a wise hermit. He disguises himself in simple clothes and dismisses his bodyguards and finds the hermit, frail and weak, digging his garden with some difficulty. He states his reason for coming but then takes pity on the old man and takes over the digging. He repeats his questions but gets no answer. He’s about to leave when a wounded man staggers to the hermit’s. The man falls unconscious and the king dresses his wounds but then, tired by his exertions, falls asleep. When he awakes, the stranger is standing over him – and asks the king to forgive him. It turns out that the stranger, apparently, wronged by the king, had been planning to kill him but had been surprised and wounded by the king’s bodyguard. Now, he is so touched by the king’s kindness that he wants instead to serve him. The story continues -

The King approached the hermit, and said, "For the last time, I pray you to answer my questions, wise man.""You have already been answered!" said the hermit still crouching on his thin legs, and looking up at the King, who stood before him.
"How answered? What do you mean?" asked the King.
"Do you not see," replied the hermit. "If you had not pitied my weakness yesterday, and had not dug these beds for me, but had gone your way, that man would have attacked you, and you would have repented of not having stayed with me. So the most important time was when you were digging the beds; and I was the most important man; and to do me good was your most important business. Afterwards, when that man ran to us, the most important time was when you were attending to him, for if you had not bound up his wounds he would have died without having made peace with you. So he was the most important man, and what you did for him was your most important business.

Remember then: there is only one time that is important -- and that is now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power.
The most necessary man is he with whom you are, for no man knows whether he will ever have dealings with anyone else.
And the most important thing to do is, to do good, because for that purpose alone was man sent into this life!"

I’m not sure if I really accept the second of the answers – about the most important person being the one in whose company we presently find ourselves – not least because we can and do exercise some choice about the company we keep. But I have been dithering long enough in my quest – and do agree with Tolstoy that “doing good” should be a key factor in our approach to life. Of course, in this cynical age, it is easy to deride this as facile – “give me a definition!” is the cry. But I think we all know how much time we spend on trivial or reprehensible activities with base motives.

I hope to spend some of the next few days looking at the questions – trying to identify the sane voices.

It’s obvious that systems no longer work. Perhaps, however, the original question needs first to be rephrased, for example, thus - 

• How can we restore faith in institutions - in people?
• How do we select the most appropriate and effective social intervention?
• How can we develop a consensus about that?

All at Sea?

This post is perhaps one of the most important I have done in the past four years.
How should one spend the time and whatever other resources one has in the last part of one’s life to best public advantage is the simple question I started to pose more than a decade ago. Rich Americans have a tradition of establishing Foundations (Ford; Rockefeller; Mellon; Soros; Gates) or University Chairs which honour their names. 
Those who are merely “comfortably-off” go on world tours or establish Annual Awards.

Frankly the results don’t seem to offer much inspiration…or original thought

My 2001 note (see last post) was structured around 5 questions which of course were rather ego- and indeed ethno-centric. They limited the search for answers to those within my ‘ken and that of the Anglo-Saxon world. But we are in a globalised world which seems to have become even closer in our (essentially negative) political assessments as a result of the global financial crisis.

The update a couple of years back of the original 2001 paper referenced a lot of books – both political and economic and, as a result, I suspect rather lost focus. There are simply too many different diagnoses and prescriptions. Too many prophets and peacocks preening themselves….allocating blame….and announcing favourite recipes….all within a power structure which never really seems to change…..

This is where, perhaps, things have now changed dramatically. 

In the first part of the 20^th century educated people had religion, movements and ideologies to put their faith in.

In the second part of the century we had things like managerialism and privatisation (in the US still religion) to give us continued faith that things could and would get better.

But the tectonic plates seem to have moved in the past decade –

• we have become aware that the “Western world” is only a small (and declining) part of the world
• we no longer trust the institutions of democracy and the market (let alone faiths) which were the core of our being.
• Corporate and bureaucratic power is evil and the very notion of political power laughable. All that seems left are disaggregated, atomistic and alienated individuals
• with most people no longer believing that the future has anything better to offer
• We cannot therefore agree any more on diagnoses - let alone on prescriptions.
• We are completely at sea…have no engines …nor bearings….

I wonder whether my readers would accept these assertions? 

I am now struggling to pose some questions which might be more helpful than the five with which I started my original paper.............

The painting is an Alexander Moutafov - born in Shumen and educated in Varna, he studied art in Turin between 1899 and 1902; then Munich 1902/03. He was also a war artist

It was the Munich experience which aroused his interest in Jugendstil. From 1921-33, he was professor of Painting in Sofia’s Art Academy. First Bulgarian seascape painter, he laid the basis for this specialism for subsequent Bulgarian painters. There is, I understand, a museum in his Sozopol house

Draft Guide for the Perplexed

Some 12-13 years ago I drafted a paper with the rather odd title “Living for Posterity” which was -

"one man’s attempt to explore how he might “make a difference”; or at least feel that what he is doing is improving the human condition rather than compounding its problems. For I was at the enviable point in my life where I didn’t need to work full-time and could choose what I did with my time and life.
The first half of the paper still has the form and content it had when it was originally written (in Tashkent) in 2001 some 10 years after I had left political life in Scotland and started the nomadic life of a consultant in countries which were assumed to be in some sort of transition from a form of communism to capitalism".

How – was my question – should I use my energies and resources (time, skills, knowledge and money) in the future to best public (rather than private) advantage?

My 2001 note was structured around 5 questions -

• why I was pessimistic about the future and so unhappy with the activities of the programmes and organisations with whom I dealt – and with what the French have called La Pensee Unique, the post 1989 “Washington consensus”

• who were the organisations and people I admired

• what they were achieving - and what not

• how these gaps could be reduced

• how with my resources I could help that process

One friend responded and I returned to the questions 10 years later and tried to update my thoughts.

On Sunday I had a stimulating chat – over a white wine - with a new acquaintance about the issues and have been encouraged to do a minor update which you can find on my website with the title - Draft Guide for the Perplexed

I’ve been very lucky in my life – having a position of considerable political influence in the West of Scotland for 22 years from the age of 28 – and then having responsibility for a variety of capacity-building projects in central European and Central Asian governments for another 20 odd years.

From these very different vantage points (and my constant reading) I have developed some views about what we might call social/political interventions…..Unfortunately I find that my attempt to communicate these gets perverted by language – not just my own imperfections but, I suspect, the verbal infrastructure itself. Hence the pleasure I got from drafting a “Devil’s Dictionary” to warn people about language – entitled Just Words

I readily confess to being one of these annoying people who “takes stock” every few years of what has been going on in a place for which I felt some affinity and offers some uninvited (and generally unpalatable) comment. I started the habit in the mid- 1970s and was allowed to indulge the habit by my various positions. I might say that it made few friends!

Although I continue to write a blog I now use it mainly to pass on what I consider to be useful perspectives of others who are better skilled than  -, whether by virtue of their more felicitous language, their experience, reading or understanding.