What is Change?

We use the concept of “change” all the time but there seems to be surprisingly little written about it as an all-embracing concept. The literature on change is, of course, immense but is divided very much into several completely separate fields which guard their boundaries very strongly - dealing with the individual, the organisational and the societal respectively (forgive the last term but “social” does have a rather different meaning from activities relating to a particular society). The first field tends to be interested in things like stress; the second in the management of change (but in 3 separate sectors); and the last in collective challenges to power which often go under the label of “social change”

Capacity development is one of the few approaches which recognises the importance of all three – although, in reality, its focus is on training and it never ventures into the dangerous field of social change.   It’s only in the past year or so that people have dared challenge this (see last 2 titles in "networked" level of table)  

As my few faithful readers know, I have taken on this strange, Sisyphean task of trying to make sense of the modern world. Each time I think I am close to success, the stone breaks free and rolls back down the mountain – or rather I realise either that the words don’t do justice to the reality or, more often, that what I regarded as original thought is now the conventional wisdom. I leave the text for a few months and then – masochist that I am – return to the task. The latest version of “What is to be Done?” has some marginal changes but I’m now keen to improve the chapter which deals with Change.                   

Our understanding of that phenomenon generally comes from history books the most popular of which deal with individuals - who are easier to identify with. Talk of technological and economic forces tends to be too abstract for most people – although recent books from the likes of Jared Diamond and Yuval Hari are enjoying a new vogue by virtue presumably of our increased awareness of the power of technology. 

The trouble is that knowledge has, in the past half century, become so specialised that it is now very difficult to explore Change in a truly inter-disciplinary way. That’s why I’ve devoted the second chapter to the glories of trespassing across boundaries – whether of class, nation, profession or intellectual discipline.

This table tries to reduce a very complex field of writing to a few milestones. 

The Level	The Focus	Example
The individual	Self-help, psychology	In Over our Heads – the mental demands of modern life Robert Kegan  1995
The organisational	Commercial – managing change, OD	In Search of Excellence Peters and Waterman 1982
	Public – new public management, public value	Reinventing Government Graeber and Osborne (1992) Appraising public value; past, present and futures (2011) useful (academic) summary article Public Value Management – governance and reform in Britain ; John Connolly et al (2021)
	Non-governmental	Creating Public Value in Practice – advancing the common good in a ….noone in charge world J Bryson and Crosby (2015)
The societal	Social change	Can Democracy be Saved?  - participation, deliberation and social movements; Donatella Della Porta (2013)   Power in movement – social movement and contentious politics; Sydney Tarrow (2011 edition) Change the World Robert Quinn (2000)
networked	The dynamic between the 3 levels	Life and How to Survive it R Skynner and J Cleese 1990 The World We Create Tomas Bjorkman  2019 Unlearn – a compass for radical transformation Hans Burmeister (2021)

 

Penis Envy and the social sciences

This blog is written by someone who calls himself a “social scientist”, hinting at a well-known condition of “penis envy” vis-à-vis the traditional sciences – witness the penetration of economics and political science in particular by mathematical modelling in the last 70 years. 

A few months back, I had a strange post which used Stephen Pinker’s latest book Rationality – what it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters as an excuse first for some reminiscences on how the post-war priority given by American social scientists to the issue of “decision-making” had influenced the direction my life subsequently took; and then for some extensive notes on reading I had just come across on the role the American military had played in the development of post-war social science in that country whose culture (let alone military) had such power and authority  

I felt I needed to return to the post – partly because I had left Pinker hanging but mainly because the notes were precisely that; inconclusive extracts from reading which didn’t lead anywhere. But the musings of the past few days are taking me into very complicated fields about human knowledge and “scientific proof” and I’m getting utterly lost…When I get blocked in this way, I’ve found a good technique is to pull back and attempt a simple description of each element. As I do so, I suddenly see the way to make connections…. 

So, on the basis that I don’t know where this train of thought is leading me, let me try to extract some messages from the reading that post flagged up.      

I took an Honours degree in “Economics and Politics” in 1964 at the University of Glasgow In those days there was no pretence of scientific status – after all, Adam Smith had been a Professor at the University in the 18^th Century; but in Moral Philosophy! And there was certainly nothing scientific about my course – the economics stream gave us no sense of basic methodologies – just statements that simplifying assumptions about human nature were being made which would be relaxed at a later stage. They never were. Nor did we deal with the subject of how understanding and knowledge developed – let alone the controversies around such issues. My one glimpse of that field was in the politics  stream when we got a couple of lectures about Karl Mannheim’s Sociology of Knowledge. But that didn’t stop me from using my status as an economics lecturer to intimidate others – changing my focus to public administration proved to be no hindrance as public management became flavour of the month in the 90s when I moved into international consultancy.  

I had been aware of the controversy surrounding the delivery in 1959 by CP Snow of the famous lecture which critiqued the UK for its Two Cultures which Snow updated in a booklet he produced a few years later. CP Snow was an interesting character – a chemist from a modest background who was also a novelist, he had been a Civil Service Commissioner from 1945-1960 and in charge of the recruitment of scientists. So not exactly a “hard” scientist – but he had that reputation. His lecture opened a can of worms – with its analysis of how the world of gentlemen amateurs had held scientists down in a second-class position – and helped spawn the field of declinism which I remember vividly from the 1960s and which still haunts the country today.

By far and away the best treatment of the significance of the Two Cultures debate is the one contained in the booklet issued in 1998 which contains the update Snow wrote in 1961 as well as an extensive introduction by Stefan Collini which superbly analyses the implications and consequences of the debate for our contemporary understanding of claims to scientific standing…Collini is probably Britain’s best intellectual historian who gave us recently a great collection of essays Common Writing 

In practice, it is clear that we still find it convenient to go on using terms like 'the humanities' and 'the sciences', and for most purposes we roughly know what we mean by them. But this conventional usage is not now underpinned by any agreed definitional criteria - it has become a matter of lively debate whether we should even be trying to identify any one method of enquiry or one range of subject matter or one professional or cultural ethos as distinguishing 'science' from 'non-science'. There is, of course, a rich and illuminating history of attempts to establish the basis for such a distinction, attempts which flourished with particular abundance once the nineteenth century had endowed the category of science with the prestige and burden of being the only provider of reliable, objective knowledge. Philosophers such as Wilhelm Dilthey in the late-nineteenth century or Karl Popper in the mid-twentieth endeavoured to draft the relevant conceptual legislation, stipulating the general properties needing to be possessed by a form of knowledge or mode of enquiry never commanded general assent, least of all among other philosophers of science. The activities conventionally referred to as 'the sciences' do not, it is argued, all proceed by experimental methods, do not all cast their findings in quantifiable form, do not all pursue falsification, do not all work on 'nature' rather than human beings; nor are they alone in seeking to produce general laws, replicable results, and cumulative knowledge.

 

…..The very nature of the revolutionary work in theoretical physics, astronomy, and cosmology has helped to challenge the model of scientific thinking which represented it as proceeding by a combination of rigorous deduction and controlled inferences from

empirical observation. The role of imagination, of metaphor and analogy, of category-transforming speculation and off-beat intuitions has come to the fore much more (some would argue that these had always had their place in the actual processes of scientific

discovery, whatever the prevailing account of 'scientific method'), As a result, more now tends to be heard about the similarity rather than the difference of mental operations across the science/humanities divide, even though some of the similarities, it must be said, seem to be of a rather strained or at best analogical kind. 

In other words, things are in a state of flux. Old certainties have vanished – under the influences of new discoveries and the multiple perspectives of postmodernity. Positivism indeed has become a term of abuse. I had wanted to refer my readers to a short, clearly written piece on the issue but the author I had in mind Alan Ryan seems to have written only The Philosophy of the social sciences which is more than 50 years old. In its stead, I offer another book but as clearly written as the subject permits - Philosophy and Public Administration (2020) which helps explain the importance in our search for understanding of such things as epistemology and ontology 

I do realise that the post so far has failed to return either to Stephen Pinker’s “Rationality” or to the influence of the military on the post-war development of US social sciences. Clearly that will require another post – but I leave you with one question about Pinker’s new book. It’s very much a book for our times – which have become conspiratorial. The book offers tools for clear thinking. But modern psychology is tone-deaf to questions of history and philosophy. His book therefore fails to consider how rational thinking has changed over the ages. Stephen Toulmin was a philosopher who wrote extensively about this and had a strong view that rationality was overdone and that we needed was “reasonableness”. He produced a couple of beautifully-written books to prove his point of which the latest was Return to Reason (2001). I find it significant that Pinker makes no mention of his name  

Mind Matters

Although the quotation which heads the list of quotes (you can find by scrolling down the top right column of the blog) refers to the importance of self-knowledge, that doesn’t mean that I share much of that with my readers! Indeed, I’m normally fairly circumspect about revealing too much of myself in the posts – as one of my school friends complained some years back.

In October, however, I seemed to break that habit with first a post entitled Know Thyself and then one about the Johari Window. But I now realise that psychological matters seem to have been pressing in on me for some time – with posts last year about various books which are summarised in this table  

Book Title	A tentative overview
The Saturated Self – dilemmas of identity in contemporary society (1991) by Kenneth Gergen	I only became aware of this book last year and have, so far, only managed to skim it. I laud the rarity of its avowed attempt to bridge the dreadful divide between specialists and the rest of us.
What about Me? the struggle for identity in a market-based society (2014) by Paul Verhaeghe	starts by contrasting our two basic urges as individuals - the initial sense of "belonging" and the growing need for "separation" - and how this expresses itself in later struggles eg "self-respect" v "self-hatred". It then moves onto a fascinating discussion of values and morality - showing how the Greeks had an integrated view of our character which Christianity destroyed when it placed God as an external power. The Enlightenment dethroned religion to an extent – although Verhaeghe argues that Diderot’s emphasis on reason, passion and empathy was set aside by an unholy coalition of Voltaire and Rousseau who basically helped the French state set up a new religion. He also argues that true rationality started only after the second WW – which fits with the more recent arguments of people like Nicolas Guilhot who are beginning to analyse the role of the military in the post-war social sciences.  It’s the chapter on the Enron Society where he really lets rip – “The west has never had it so good – but never felt so bad!” leads to a discussion on mental illness and the pharma industry. How, he asks, has 30 years of neoliberalism affected our DNA – with its “Rank and Yank” systems of management; Universities as knowledge businesses; anonymous call-centres; CCTV; ubiquitous contracts, rules, regulations, league tables, fear, uncertainty - but no real accountability. It ranges through intellectual history, sociology and ethics before suggesting that the last few decades have seen a radical new self-identity being engineered – which he calls “The Enron Society”. Conclusion very weak.
Commanding Hope – the power we have to renew a world in peril Thomas Homer-Dixon (2020)	A book which takes as read the reality of global warming and seeks to understand our apparent indifference. He outlines his “theory of Hope” here and cites the successful “women against the Hbomb campaign” of the 1950s (which led to a treaty ban in 1963) being started by the determination of a single woman. The 2 megatrends – greater connectivity; and higher uniformity – have to made to work in our favour by challenging what has become in the past 4 years a heavily pessimistic social mood “It’s all in our minds” is one of his central arguments and he stresses  the importance of Worldviews which I’ve discussed here and here. To that he adds something he calls ideological state spaces. The combination of worldviews, institutions and technology (WIT) is powerful  By far the hardest transition will involve getting from today’s (economic growth) WIT to another arrangement that drastically reduces the global economy’s consumption of resources and its output of waste. This new arrangement must explicitly address the three “equivalencies” I highlighted— growth equals happiness, freedom, and peace— because people won’t relinquish conventional growth if they aren’t reasonably sure they’ll be at least as happy, free, and secure as they are under the existing arrangement. The intellectual and scientific foundation of this new WIT will also need to incorporate a renovated discipline of economics—one that recognizes that human economies are complex systems intimately connected with nature; that markets won’t automatically find good substitutes for some of the most precious things nature gives us, like moderate temperatures and enough water for our crops; and that economics must be grounded in moral principles attuned to our world’s demanding new material and social realities.  Donella Meadows’ Leverage Points paper is used to give the most important part of the book. We need to move from the “Abundance mindset” to the “Scarcity mindset” caused by widening insecurity, migration, climate change and the new pessimistic social mood
Unlearn – a compass for radical transformation (2021) by Hans Burmeister	A very unusual book in that it deals with the changes needed at the level of the individual, the company and society as a whole which are normally dealt with by 3 different fields – self-help, business and social change. His basic argument is that there is a “core self” which warns us when we are going against our nature and that we should listen to it. As individuals, organisation and societies we are too comfortable with the status quo and ignore the multiple signs of stress around us – be it depression, suicide, protest. His section on “things that hold us down” makes some good points. And the point of his title is that we all – at whatever level – need to prepare properly for what is involved as we make the necessary adjustments to our values and behaviour

Worldviews are also central to the work of Jeremy Lent - who writes about the archaeology of the mind and whose The Patterning Instinct – a cultural history of man’s search for meaning (2017) actually calls itself possibly the first “cognitive history”. I’ve only started to read it and can, at this point, simply note that it is a very important book

The worldview of a given civilization—the implicit beliefs and values that create a pattern of meaning in people's lives—has, in my opinion, been a significant driver of the historical path each civilization has taken. But, at the same time, I disavow any affinity with the old triumphalist view of history, which posits some characteristic of the Western mind-set that made it somehow superior to that of other cultures and, therefore, led to the West's “success” over the rest of the world. Instead, as the book unfolds, it reveals an underlying pattern to Western cognition that is responsible for its Scientific and Industrial Revolutions—as well as its devastating destruction of indigenous cultures around the world and our current global rush toward possible catastrophe.

In this respect, the book shares much with the postmodern critique of Western civilization, recognizing those capitalized universal abstractions such as Reason, Progress, and Truth to be culture-specific constructions. In fact, a significant portion of the book is devoted to tracing how these patterns of thought first arose and then infused themselves so deeply into the Western mind-set as to become virtually invisible to those who use them.

 

When drastic change occurs to a given society, its cognitive structures—and, ultimately, its entire worldview—can change equally drastically within a generation or two

(Lawrence Harrison’s The Central Liberal Truth – how politics can change a culture also argued this in 2006 but is these days regarded as beyond redemption)

The last book in the table pointed me to two other interesting references – the first being a very detailed treatment of worldviews The World we create – from god to market Tomas Bjorkman (2019) to which I hope to do justice once I have got through its 400 odd pages. The other is by development psychologist Robert Kegan whose In over our Head – the mental demands of modern life (1994) set out a useful 5 stage theory of personal development – (the video in the title link gives a very short intro to the stages) 

Stage 1 — Impulsive mind (early childhood)

Stage 2 — Imperial mind (adolescence, 6% of adult population)

Stage 3 — Socialized mind (58% of the adult population)

Stage 4 — Self-Authoring mind (35% of the adult population)

Stage 5 — Self-Transforming mind (1% of the adult population) 

What has impressed me about all this material is the link they satisfactorily make between the personal, the social and the political – levels that are normally dealt with in compartmentalised study.

Further Reading;

A Hidden Wholeness – the journey toward an undivided life Parker Palmer (2004) a book which has apparently inspired the creation of many reading circles for those seeking purpose

https://www.swarthmore.edu/kenneth-gergen/available-manuscripts

In over our heads – the mental demands of modern life; Robert Kagan (1994)

https://fs.blog/mental-models/

Deep Scepticism

I haven’t, so far in this blog, deigned “Fake news” with a single post although I have referred to the increasing polarization in societies with some concern. When I type “fake news” into the Zlibrary, it reveals a lot of titles on the subject – most of recent vintage but some going back a decade. Kurt Andersen wrote a couple of recent intellectual histories which explored the phenomenon brilliantly – with the usual suspects being rounded up namely   

- the “relativity” elaborated in the various proponents of postmodernity discussed from p142 of Voices in the Air – the 2021 posts

- the ease with which new social media have undermined the legitimacy of newspapers; and trivialised and polarised everything 

Do we really need a 200 page book to tell us that “fake news” is in the eye of the beholder? Or indeed that, when we decry those who deny climate change and the benefits of vaccination, WE are guilty of the same behaviour – namely that we choose to trust our own preferred groups of people. This is the basic message of  a new book - Bad beliefs – “Why they happen to good people” (2022) - by philosopher Brian Levy which has just been made freely available by the publisher and author but which I don’t recommend because it contains so much jargon.

Very few of us have the scientific training to “follow the science”. What those of us who accept that climate change is a reality have done is defer to those with the expertise. Those who deny simply don’t share our faith in science – let alone government – and choose to trust those found on social media.

Of course, there is the little matter of the “falsifiability” embodied in scientific method – requiring theories to be set aside when evidence emerges that challenges them.    

Something called The Institute for Arts and Ideas (IAI) expressed things rather nicely in its “aims” - 

There is little that we can be certain about, but we can be confident that a time will come when our current beliefs and assumptions are seen as mistaken, our heroes - like the imperial adventurers of the past - are regarded as villains, and our morality is viewed as bigoted prejudice.

So the IAI seeks to challenge the notion that our present accepted wisdom is the truth. It aims to uncover the flaws and limitations in our current thinking in search of alternative and better ways to hold the world.

The IAI was founded in 2008 with the aim of rescuing philosophy from technical debates about the meaning of words and returning it to big ideas and putting them at the centre of culture. Not in aid of a more refined cultural life, but as an urgent call to rethink where we are.

 

That rethinking is urgent and necessary because the world of ideas is in crisis. The traditional modernist notion that we are gradually uncovering the one true account of reality has been undermined by a growing awareness that ideas are limited by culture, history and language. Yet in a relative world the paradoxes of postmodern culture has left us lost and confused. We do not know what to believe, nor do we know how to find the answers. 

I’ve made no secret of my sympathies for those who see multiple realities – who assert that there is no single truth. How could I do otherwise when I have argued there were 57 different ways of understanding capitalism? Or when I celebrate that outsiders are generally more insightful by virtue of the sense of different worlds they bring with them?

But in all this, I insist on proofs of falsifiability. Mere assertion is no use – what disturbs me is that the new “deep sceptics” (who bring the scepticism I have always admired into gross disrepute) have no such criterion – or preferred group. They seem to oppose just for the hell of it.

It’s at times such as this that I begin to question my admiration for such contrarians as Chris Hitchens who took such joy in the process of disputation. The profession of lawyers has that same inclination and is it, therefore, any wonder that the USA, having the largest number per capita of litigious lawyers, just happens to be the country in which “fake news” has become so dominant? 

The author of the book with which I started this post – Brian Levy – has a more readable article here in which he reasserts his basic point that we all need a group we can trust 

No doubt, psychological biases play a role in what people end up believing (though the extent to which we are irrational when we rely on these biases is open to question). No doubt there are many irrational and uninformed people around. But these facts don’t explain the partisan split we see on surveys, or indeed the many bizarre claims attributed to our fellow citizens.

Many of these reports are hugely exaggerated; inflated through some combination of expressive responding, the use of partisan heuristics or the sheer unwillingness to admit ignorance and downright trolling. To the degree there is a partisan divide, it doesn’t arise from their stupidity or our rationality. It arises from the fact that we place our trust in different sources. 

A simple question, therefore – where do we find the verifiable sources quoted by the “deep sceptics”??

Patterns of the Mind

Some 18 months ago I noticed a strange omission in the blog – no discussion of climate change. Rather lamely, I tried to explain this blog silence by suggesting that  

- the issue was too complex; 

- others were dealing with it; 

- technical change would sort things out; or 

- a few personal changes in life-style could at least salve the conscience…. 

What’s strange is that I do buy, download and read books on the subject. It’s just that I don’t choose to share the content with readers of the blog. Why not? I wonder… 

Last year, I did have two posts on the issue – the first on the Extinction Movement whoseprotests in the UK have brought forward new laws there which are seen in liberal circles as threatening the very essence of English identity.

The other consisted of my initial notes on a book which had just been published Commanding Hope - the power we have to renew a world in peril (2020) by Thomas Homer-Dixon and which I recognised as deserving of a reread. As always, I got distracted and it took a reminder from the author himself a couple of days ago to direct me back to the book 

What had originally intrigued me about Dixon’s book was its focus on our mental processes – on the mix of hope and despair we brought to a subject which can and does arouse trauma. At the time I was aware only of geographer Mike Hulme’s Why We Disagree about Climate Change – understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity” (2009) - although Clive Hamilton had apparently produced Requiem for a species – why we resist the truth about climate change in 2010. 

My reread of Homer-Dixon’s latest alerted me to two other useful titles on this intriguing theme of why most of us seem unable to take the issue of global warming with the seriousness which it warrants –  Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life; Kari Marie Norgaard (2011) and  Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change ; George Marshall (2014) 

Although it’s only a year since I first read “Commanding Hope”, the reread didn’t ring any bells in my head; and that’s despite my having made notes available in the last half of the post - which questioned the lack of an index and bibliography. Many of you may see this as a bit pedantic of me – but, if I’m spending a few hours reading an author’s work I need to have a sense of their biases. I don’t need (or even want) a long reading list - indeed the shorter the better since the author is then required to think very carefully about the average reader. A reading list stretching over 40 pages is simply a virility symbol – “see how clever I am”!!

I do find it disturbing, however, that I have so little recollection of reading the book – just 12 months ago. That’s not a good sign! 

Rightly in my view the book identifies “world views” as a crucial factor in explaining the attitude we adopt to global warming. Coincidentally, I devoted a section of Voices in the Air – the 2021 posts (just uploaded to the blog) to that very subject (from p 105) in which I make the point that the term is only one of five you can find in the literature – others being “world values”, “political culture”, “cultural theory” and “cultural values”. Homer-Dixon makes my life more complicated by offering two more terms – “cognitive affective maps” and something he calls “ideological state space” which he explains in a table containing 15 fundamental “issues” which divide people such as  

Are moral principles universal and objective?

is the world a safe or a dangerous place?

Is the world best understood through reason or emotion?

Can people choose their fate?

Are there large and essential differences between groups of people?

How much should we care about other people?

Should one resist authority or defer to it?

I’m not able to reproduce the table so can’t do justice to it here. Those interested can read this 40 page article which Homer-Dixon wrote in 2015 and which reproduces an earlier version of the table and all the diagrams. He has also outlined his "theory of hope" in this useful briefing note. 

Important Blog Features

Yesterday I released a little book – which you can find as the lead item in the list of E-books in the top-right corner of the blog. It’s called “Voices in the Air” and is the edited version of last year’s blogposts. 

It’s a balmy 15 degrees in downtown Ploiesti, Romania today – with fewer cars on the street and a lot of families enjoying a stroll in the park.

But the internet doesn’t let up – and I realised from one of today's posts that I had not recently updated my “blogroll” which is – perhaps confusingly – called “Insights into other worlds – good writing and painting”.

So I have now duly deleted a few sites and added five new ones. It’s always sad to say goodbye – but 2 Romanian sites had not posted for more than a year and Eva Balogh, whose Hungarian Spectrum about the perversities of the Orban government made fascinating daily reading, died last month. Rest in Peace, Eva - your voice will be missed. 

Five websites brought great delight in the last few months and needed to be added These are –

-       Adam Tooze - prolific writer and economic historian who has written the definitive histories of the Nazi economy, the global financial meltdown and the pandemic and now produces every few days an amazing collection of thoughts

-       Global inequality - Branko Milanovic  was a lead expert for the World Bank on the subject, and has this highly individual blog

-       Question the powerful – a great blog from Henry Tam who writes powerful stuff about democracy and communitarianism 

-       Scheerpost - is the leading radical blog in the US and hosts posts from the likes of Chris Hedges and Ralph Nader   

-       Surplus energy – offers the challenging views of post-growth writer Tim Morgan

A second thing that I now realise is that I have never properly introduced to new readers all the other rich features of the blog which have grown a life of their own in the 12 years of the blog – particularly the list of E-books.

And,  if you punch a favourite phrase into the search facility, chances are it will instantly give you something interesting. Try it.  

Update; Just as the year was ending, I discovered a brilliant new blog “Accidental Gods” and the writing of Rupert Read.