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.

Musing Away

Today I celebrate the 1000th post of the blog I started 5 years ago. 

It’s been quite a journey - 1,300 pages of text and pictures covering those topics which took my fancy – the hallmark being the exclusion of the noise of current affairs…..and sparked off by the books and articles I was reading (and sometimes writing).

Initially it was called “Carpathian Musings” by virtue of the dramatic location of the old mountain house south of Brasov which I had acquired in 2000 – a decade into my nomadic wanderings in Central Europe and at the start of what was to become 8 years of nomadic work (on capacity development) in Central Asia.

In 2007 I felt it was time to get back to Central Europe and find out how places like Bulgaria and Romania were dealing with the challenge of transition. The Bulgarian work …..which I described in the 2008 paper Learning from Experience had aroused my interest in websites and E-learning and was the incentive to set up first a website for the various papers I had written – Publicadminreform - and then the blog whose title was broadened in 2010 or so….

Earlier this year, I published two small E-books based on the posts I had done on Romania and Scotland in the past year - Mapping Romania and The Independence Argument.

Now I have just brought out a 200 page tribute to Bulgarian painters - Exploring Bulgaria thro its Art – which is a major expansion of the 2010 booklet “Introducing the Bulgarian Realists – getting to know the Bulgarians through their paintings”. Sixty names have been added as have some 140 pages of the blogposts I have written on the subject in the past few years……  Many of these posts were written as I travelled around Bulgaria in 2011/12 visiting the various municipal galleries in the regions (and tasting the wines!) - so readers will get an unusual sense of the country although it does not pretend to be the sort of analysis you can find in Mapping Romania.

You’ll find a statement of intent at the start of each of the 5 volumes of Balkan and Carpathian Musings available in the E-book section of my new website Mapping the Common Ground.

I have not sought so far any publicity for this website – which is a fairly unusual library of material useful for those who are unhappy with the direction modern civilisation has been taking and who believe in the importance of people coming together and exploring how best to change things for the better……Libraries, after all, are places for quiet, calm reflection…….  

Update

Just loved the 15 “ailments” which Pope Francis has apparently identified in the Vatican bureaucracy. He could be speaking about the leading denizens of any large organisation – most of whom need being brought down to earth…….They include these six -

1 Feeling immortal, immune or indispensable. “A Curia that doesn’t criticise itself, that doesn’t update itself, that doesn’t seek to improve itself, is a sick body.”

7) Being rivals or boastful. “When one’s appearance, the colour of one’s vestments or honorific titles become the primary objective of life.”

9) Committing the “terrorism of gossip”. “It’s the sickness of cowardly people who, not having the courage to speak directly, talk behind people’s backs.”

10) Glorifying one’s bosses. “It’s the sickness of those who court their superiors, hoping for their benevolence. They are victims of careerism and opportunism, they honour people who aren’t God.”

13) Wanting more. “When the apostle tries to fill an existential emptiness in his heart by accumulating material goods, not because he needs them but because he’ll feel more secure.”

15) Seeking worldly profit and showing off. “It’s the sickness of those who insatiably try to multiply their powers and to do so are capable of calumny, defamation and discrediting others, even in newspapers and magazines, naturally to show themselves as being more capable than others.”

Expectations

As a politician from my late 20s, I quickly learned how soon public expectations turn to dust – although my first speeches “on the stump” (ie in the open air) did warn people that I could make no promises (I would generally have to stop myself from adding “except blood and toil”!).

I found that such an honest approach paid off – and from 1968 I had an undefeated record of 8 public electoral victories and a further string of 8 consecutive successes in the contests which were held immediately after the elections by the ruling Labour party (of which I was part) to decide the key positions.

It was as such a “seasoned” politician (I love the bon viveur sense this epithet gives – as in “add some seasoning”!) that I was initially elated and then deflated by Obama…..

But I was still moved by yesterday’s Presidential inauguration of Klaus Iohannis here in Bucharest – first his speech to the unrepentant parliamentarian sinners with its declaration that their stable needed cleansing….then the motorcade to the Cotroceni Palace we had passed just last week - to accept the baton from ever loquacious Basescu. 
What a contrast Transylvanian Iohannis makes – with his typically slow delivery! But it was this modesty and circumspection which won him his highly unexpected victory last month and which gives many Romanians the first hope they have had for some time…..        

In 25 years, the Romanians have had only one brief five-year respite from the insidious poison which the plutocrats (regardless of political label) have been injecting into their veins. Iliescu – who led the palace revolution this time 25 years ago - may have been personally incorruptible but all his minions quickly took the silver; and University Professor Constantinescu simply proved unequal to the task of reform. By coincidence, the country’s first post-communist Prime Minister Petr Roman was talking volubly on his mobile (in French) in the English Bookshop at midday – but I failed to identify him. Otherwise I would have approached him to remind him that some 24 years ago, he gave me an hour-long interview…….     

Romanian television has these days been playing images of the uprising 25 years ago and one of the links carried a striking 5 point contrast of life 25 years on – as typified by cars, communications, television channels, churches and….. malls. Petrol, for example, was then rationed (I remember the hassle driving in 1992 the 650 kms from the border down to Bucharest) whereas now the cars block the pavements everywhere.

Nudging the politicians out??

The World Bank used to be a name to conjure with. Its keynote annual “World Development” reports blazed an ideological trail in the 90s – particularly its infamous 1997 neo-liberal attack on the State to which Japan actually issued a specially-commissioned riposte.

The Bank’s 2014 World Development Report - entitled “Mind, Society and Behaviour” – is a showcase for the newer type of behavioural economics which the Bank would have us believe has replaced the discredited system of economics. A lot of people – such as those at Real World Economics – would disagree…..

  

The World Bank (WB) no longer seems to arouse the controversy and anger it once did – presumably because there are now so many more worthy targets such as real bankers and plutocrats. Twenty years ago my bookshelves were stocked with exposes of the ecological, social and economic damage WB lending policies were inflicting on developing countries. Special websites and books with such names as “50 years is enough” were dedicated to the abolition of both the Bank and the International Monetary Fund. 
“The Washington Consensus” was a phrase we angrily splattered our conversations with – denoting the intellectual homogeneity, it not hegemony, the Bank exercised over the economics “discipline”.

                

Successive WB Presidents toned down the neo-liberal rhetoric and skilfully co-opted a lot of the critics – particularly the NGOs. So things are quieter now – but be under no illusions. Behind the scenes, the Bank’s largesse toward the academic community ensures that economists continue to act as castrated  lapdogs of prevailing power. And over in Brussels, the Economic Commission exercises the same sort of lobotomy surgery of most academics who stray into its territory….

Indeed the recent fashion for governments to “nudge” their citizens to various forms of desired behaviour makes one wonder why we bother with politics any more. They are, after all, just so much unnecessary grit in the machinery….  .whose simplistic interventions really should be challenged with rather more effective systems of challenge than most parliaments can manage these submissive days.

But don't let me put you off from what seems quite a good read - the RSA link  (the second above) is a serious treatment of the report.......and the Real World Economics collective continues to gives us much-needed and bracing home truths eg this thoughtful piece Challenging the current economics curriculum by the Vice-Chancellor of one of Pakistan’s Institutes of Development Economics