Have we become too fixated on Catastrophes?

My last post has been up for some 24 hours – and has attracted only a couple of dozen clicks. The title was “A Better World is Possible” since Neal Lawson was discussing prolific writer Geoff Mulgan’s latest book of that name with the author on one of the great Compass podcasts.

The low number of clicks seemsto confirm Mulgan’s belief that a book was necessary – pessimism if not downright fatalism is on the rise

You may have seen the fascinating recent research surveying the patterns of sentiment in all books published in English, German and Spanish over the last 150 years (as gathered on Google) which showed symptoms of a collective depression, on a scale greater than during the world wars, in recent decades. The authors wrote of an upsurge of ‘cognitive distortions’ since around 2000, leading them to comment that ‘large populations are increasingly stressed by pervasive cultural, economic, and social changes’ linked to ‘the rising prevalence of depression and anxiety in recent decades ’ and they show that what they call ‘catastrophising’ ways of thinking have risen sharply as utopias have been displaced by distopias in our collective mind.

This shrinking of the future matters politically too – because it fuels what the German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz has called the switch from positive politics, which emphasises the openness and possibility of the future, to a negative politics which is defensive, sceptical and nostalgic, convinced that the best years lie in the past.

Now it’s possible that we are all, indeed, objectively, doomed. But it seems to me implausible that we could know this with any certainty and one lesson of history is that it’s rarely possible to judge prospects accurately.

So it’s surely better to try to think our way out of our many crises - and if we don’t even try then we certainly will be doomed and will deserve to be.

So how might we collectively do better, how we might use the incredible knowledge of social science now to help us see and shape better than we are doing now, and to fill up the fuzzy pictures in our minds with sharper pictures of what’s possible and better?

That’s very much what Mulgan’s latest book offers – and why it’s such an important read.

I realise that it’s a bit expensive but the great thing about academics is that they like writing so much that, if you look hard enough, you can find material which they later worked up into books. As I like archiving such material and sharing it on the blog, everyone wins! For more detail see 

The role of Social Sciences in mapping and shaping the Future; a 2022 Mulgan lecture

“The Imaginary Crisis” (2020) a 40 page paper which maps out the argument

Social Innovation (2019) googlebook excerpts

Thinking Systems 2019 30pp paper

Government as a brain How Can Governments Better Understand, Think, Create, and Remember, and Avoid the Traps of Collective Stupidity Both in Emergencies and Normal Times 2022 paper

https://ecfr.eu/podcasts/episode/another-world-is-possible-the-transformative-power-of-political-imagination/ mark leonard podcast

Another World is Possible!

Neal Lawson would, under normal circumstances, be a UK Labour MP but is one of these rare characters who, somehow, understood that such a career path would constrain him and is living proof of the adage that “another world is possible”. Some 2 decades ago, he founded the centre-left Compass which seeks alliances with others seeking a better society and, since then, has inspired the most creative conversations mainly via pamphlets which force us to look at the world in a different way eg 45 Degree Change (2019)

Earlier this year he had a fascinating podcast discussion with Geoff Mulgan who is of more academic bent but had also founded a famous centre-left Think Tank (Demos) a full decade previously which he had left in 1997 to be Head of Tony Blair’s Policy Unit. Since then he has pursued a more academic career – with books on “good and bad” government; strategy; capitalism; social innovation; AI and, most recently, on imagining better societies.

Mulgan’s books actually don’t impress me. He’s clearly very well-read but his writing is a bit too nuanced and soporific for me – on the one had, this. On the other had, that... I need a little bit more guidance in my reading.

But put Lawson and Mulgan together and the results are much better. This is one of some 70 podcasts Lawson has done

Mulgan’s latest book is actually called “Another World is Possible” – the title as it happens of quite a few other books inc this one reflecting the World Social Forum discussions. A piece Mulgan wrote a couple of years earlier gives a very good sense of the argument -

Some fields are good at thinking far into the future – business invests heavily in visions of future smart homes, smart cities or health. Fiction is adept at exploring the future boundaries of humans and technology. Mainstream culture finds it easy to imagine apocalypses – what would happen if temperatures rose 4 or 5 degrees or AI enslaved humans or even worse pandemics became the norm?

But we struggle to imagine positive alternatives: what our care or education systems, welfare, workplaces, democracy or neighbourhoods might be like in 30-40 years. And we appear to be worse at doing this than in the past. This lack of desirable but plausible futures may be contributing to the malaise that can be found across much of the world. It’s certainly linked to a sense of lost agency and a deepening fear of the future.

The institutions which in the past supported practical social imagination have largely dropped out of this role.

• In universities social science frowns on futurism. You’re much more likely to succeed in your career if you focus on the past and present than the future. Mulgan indeed used a lecture to his own London college to develop this critique

• Political parties have generally been hollowed out and lack the central teams which at one point tried to articulate imaginative futures to shape their programmes.

• Think-tanks have been pulled back to the present, feeding into comment and news cycles.

This very much echoes what I was feeling a decade ago when I posted

Political parties are a bust flush - All mainstream political parties in Europe have been affected by the neo-liberal virus and can no longer represent the concerns of ordinary people. And those “alternative parties” which survive the various hurdles placed in their way by the electoral process rarely survive.

• The German Greens were an inspiration until they too eventually fell prey to the weaknesses of political parties identified a hundred years ago by Robert Michels.

• More recently, “Pirate” parties in Scandinavia and Bepe Grillo’s Italian Five Star Movement have managed, briefly, to capture public attention, occupy parliamentary benches but then sink to oblivion or fringe if not freak interest.

• What the media call “populist” parties of various sorts attract bursts of electoral support in most countries but are led by labile individuals preying on public fears and prejudices and incapable of the sort of cooperative effort which serious change requires (I was wrong about this!!).

NGOs are no match for corporate power - The annual World Social Forum has had more staying power than the various “Occupy movements” but its very diversity means that nothing coherent emerges to challenge the power elite whose “scriptures” are delivered from the pulpits of The World Bank and the OECD There doesn’t even seem a common word to describe our condition and a vision for a better future – “social change”? What’s that when it’s at home?

Academics are careerists - the groves of academia are still sanctuary for a few brave voices such as Noam Chomsky and David Harvey to speak out against the careless transfer by governments of hundreds of billions of dollars to corporate interests

• Henry Mintzberg, one of the great management gurus, has in the last decade broken ranks and now writes about the need for a profound “rebalancing” of the power structure - Rebalancing Society – radical renewal beyond left, right and centre

• Economists who challenge the conventional wisdom of that discipline are now able to use the Real-World Economics blog.

• Daniel Dorling is a geographer who focuses on inequalities eg his powerful Injustice – why social inequality persists.

Think Tanks play safe – and….think
Most Think-Tanks play it safe (for funding reasons) – although there are honourable exceptions eg -

• Susan George, a European activist and writer, who operates from the Trans National Institute and, amongst her many books, has produced two marvellous satires – Lugano I and Lugano II

• David Korton’s books and Yes Magazine keep up a steady critique.

• Joseph Stiglitz, once part of the World Bank elite, writes scathingly about economic conventional wisdom.

• Pope Frances has the resources of the Vatican behind him; and is proving a great example in the struggle for dignity and against privilege.

Geoff Mulgan has a more balanced take and argues that

Although there are fascinating pockets of creative social imagination – for example around the idea of the commons, zero carbon living, radical new forms of democracy, new monies, food systems or ways of organising time -they tend to be weakly organised, lacking the critical mass or connections to grow and influence the mainstream. The World Social Forum used the powerful slogan: ‘another world is possible’. But the fate of the WSF – now only a pale shadow of what it was 15 years ago -is symptomatic of what’s gone wrong.

As a result, the space these ideas might fill is instead filled either with reaction and the search for a better past, with narrowly technological visions of the future or with fearful defence of the present.

So what can be done to address this gap? This is a huge task, involving many people and methods. In this paper (“The Imaginary Crisis”) I set out a few thoughts on the what, the how and the who.

And indeed the last link gives important excerpts from that paper.

In the podcast, Mulgan gives examples of leaders he’s worked with globally and raises the key question - Why is UK political leadership so unimaginative?

I have a feeling that they’re scared of the responsibility they’ve had thrust on them and just can’t see that the way to deal with this is ensure that a lot of people in the nation’s cities and organisations are actually helping you - through a real programme of decentralisation.

He also makes an important point that we need to reward the “doers” rather than the “thinkers”

From Extinction Revolution to “Moderate Flank”

Rupert Read and Jim Bendell are 2 Brits supplying the intellectual hardware for the Extinction Rebellion (ER) which has made a real impact on public consciousness in the last few years. Read’s Extinction Rebellion – insights from the inside (2020) maps the progress of just a few years; and has just started a new campaign Moderate Flank to bring home to a broader group in society the importance of their active involvement in the struggle against climate change.

Jim Bendell is another academic who wrote an important Deep Adaptation essay in 2018 and the Brave New Europe site recently gave Bendell this opportunity to update us. Authorities are so concerned about the protests of ER that, in the UK< they have enacted tough new legislation which breach basic human rights (not least of reporting) and the US Atlantic journal accuses the protestors of being anti-people

I had started to read Rupert Read’s Do You Want to know the Truth? but quickly got sidetracked into what, at first sight, seems to be one of the most thoughtful of sites – Accidental Gods – run by two women, Manda Scott and Faith Tilleray. Its mission statement is not, for me, very clear but its contents - which include a superb end-of-year roundup from Manda and and a treasure trove of podcasts – really resonated. A recent podcast was an interview with Read about his latest book

Readers know that I feel guilty about the infrequency with which I post about climate change – although I do remember the impact Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature made on me when it first came out in 1989. I have, since then, read many many books on the subject – but the 2 which I most enjoyed were probably Alastair McIntosh’s “Soil and Soul” (2004) and Hell and High Water – climate change, hope and the human condition (2007). 

 McIntosh is a real original with a strong spiritual side – which may not be everyone’s cup of tea. But he is in terrific form in this recent video where he reveals a laugh, like Jung’s, which reverbated across the Swiss mountains at his villa lakeside.

A glimpse of my selection process – a typical week’s Links

As I approach the 100^th post of the year, I thought it might be interesting for my readers to get a sense of how I identify topics for the blog.

The mail I open each morning comes almost exclusively from sites I subscribe to - which you’ll find by scrolling down to the blogroll called “Insights from Other Worlds” and lists 50 plus blogs. Twitter, since I joined earlier this year, has also become a useful source of links I archive in a dedicated file.

I have simply extracted from that file the last week’s links I thought worthy of being retained.

today

• a UK economist’s analysis of the latest stage of the debate about a second referendum for Scottish independence in view of the Brexit vote; and one of the first to argue that a lot depends on the attitude taken by a future Labour government.

• The latest newsletter from the Extinction rebels

I subscribe to the New Statesman and was intrigued with this article and audio about some academics moving to substack

• https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/10/bruno-latour-rise-substackademic

• https://www.newstatesman.com/podcasts/audio-long-reads/2022/11/are-substackademics-the-new-public-intellectuals-audio-long-reads

• https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/populism-without-the-people/

29 November

Owen Jones is a thorn in the Labour Party flesh and here, quite correctly, challenges the ruthless way it is pursuing a right-wing agenda

28 November

Chris Grey publishes every week the Brexit Blog which ruthlessly analyses the nonsense of the Brexiteers. This week he argues that four factors are coming together.

• First, the Liz Truss mini-budget had tested almost to destruction the theocratic Brexiter idea that belief could trump reality and the nationalist Brexiter idea that the UK was strong enough to buck what they call ‘the global Establishment’. At the same time, it made economic growth central to defining what Brexit was supposed to deliver.

• Second, the disastrous collapse of the mini-budget and, with it, the Truss premiership, brought Rishi Sunak to power on the sole basis of his supposed economic competence and realism.

• Third, this happened against a background where opinion polls show ‘the economy’ to be by far the biggest issue of concern to the public.

• Fourth, it happened against the background of opinion polls which for many months have shown a growing majority for the view that Brexit was a mistake (56-32), and a majority view that Brexit has been economically damaging.

This site exposes how the UK Navy is dumping radioactive waste in the River Clyde – my hometown As I contemplate returning home after 3 decades, I muse on how to square a solitary life with some solidarity

26 November

“Change the World without taking power” was an interesting book produced in 2002 by British philosopher and activist - with a fuller version in 2005. He’s interviewed here – with a more recent podcast “Hope in Hopeless Times” here

The book is from Pluto Press who have a sizeable list of Open Access books one of which was “Anthropology’s World – life in a 21^st century discipline”. I’ve been long fascinated by the application of anthropological method to the modern world (see Gillian Tett on the world of finance or Chris Shore on the EU). Somehow its practitioners are able to be much more critical..

The OECD of all people seems interested in deliberative democracy

• https://twitter.com/ClaudiaChwalisz/status/1596105285634260992

• https://www.oecd.org/governance/innovative-citizen-participation/

25 November

A good take on the issues surrounding Scottish independence from a disputatious Scot

I had 2 recent posts about psychological books – and these were some of the references I had skimmed

• https://theconversation.com/the-rise-of-pop-psychology-can-it-make-your-life-better-or-is-it-all-snake-oil-158709

• https://drb.ie/articles/hugging-stalin/?fbclid=IwAR2hfYHt7nD3L4dKgx-TqsLKnmnv8D_SOMmUa6B387gSTyNkif2jwiXwOlQ Michael Foley

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Phillips_(psychologist)

• https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/08/on-wanting-to-change-review-an-inspiring-vision-of-psychoanalysis

• https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/01/adam-phillips-life-in-writing

24 November

One of the posts referred to “The Act of Living” with google offering excerpts here. The author offers a very personal tour of modern psychology and is particularly fascinated by the loneliness expressed by the American artist Edward Hopper

This link offers an expose of how US money has cultivated the British Left

23 November

The Worm at the Core - on the Role of Death in Life S Solomon et al (2015)

“Chasing Steel” a tribute to Ian Jack – a great UK journalist RIP

The British Malaise – a 40 year case-study of neoliberalism

The last post made the rather tongue-in-cheek suggestion that my failure to include psychology in a list of intellectual disciplines was a Freudian slip – revealing an inbuilt Presbyterian suspicion of the subject. But that can’t be quite true because, at University, an influential Politics tutor had been the Romanian Zevedei Barbu who had in 1956 just produced his “Democracy and Dictatorship – their psychology and patterns of life” and, subsequently, I became a fan of the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers and his On Becoming a Person (1961). So let’s just say that, from 1968, politics was for me the predominant force – and it was the late 1980s before some bouts of depression gave me cause to think about psychological factors. In those days, you didn’t own up to such a condition and the only book I could find on the subject was Dorothy Rowe’s Depression – the way out of your prison (1983)

This, of course, was the point at which Britain was being subjected the early stages of what is now a 40 year period of neoliberalism and James Davies’ Sedated – how modern capitalism created our mental health crisis (2021) is one of the first books to deal with that experiment from the psychological point of view. He starts with an important point about DEBT

Up until the 1970s, having personal debt beyond a mortgage held a certain stigma. If you took on any debt at all, it had to be for investment purposes. Other forms of debt (to consume, to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ or to ‘make ends meet’) were largely considered off-limits. A combination of tight cultural mores and credit regulations therefore kept household debt low throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. But owing to deregulatory and structural changes to the economy, public attitudes soon liberalised, making the adoption of debt almost essential to modern living. From the 1980s onwards, as borrowing became more ubiquitous, young adults in their twenties and thirties were 50 per cent more likely to take on debt than their equivalents living in the three previous decades. Being indebted was quickly being normalised. And with this, the very psychological outlook of those indebted began changing too. Owning increasing amounts of debt was altering the complexion of how people envisaged themselves and their future, creating mass shifts in attitude and behaviour not seen before.

I very much belong to that older generation for whom debt was unacceptable. Davies then moves on to explore how the world of work has been affected – with horrific statistics on the mental stress produced by the new performance culture of largely meaningless jobs

A History of Modern Psychology Duane and Sydney Schulz (2011) is a fascinating and well-written account of the development of the discipline – with a strong focus on the US – but written by an historian and psychologist. It’s very strong on the role of intellectual currents and social context in introducing and then challenging fashionable ideas. Interestingly, it’s p 300 before Freud makes his entrance!

Ignoring Psychology

I've just finished "The Act of Living – what the great psychologists can teach us about surviving discomfort in an Age of Anxiety" by Frank Tallis (2021) which is a lovely overview of key figures in that discipline. It also gives me an opportunity to correct an interesting mistake I made a few years back when one of my famous tables - purporting to show how each of the social sciences tried to make sense of the world - completely forgot to include psychology. Some, indeed, might call the mistake “Freudian”!!

The core assumptions of academic subjects (amended table)

Discipline	Core assumption	Most Famous exponents (not necessarily typical!)
Anthropology	shared meaning	B Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Claude Levi-Strauss, Margaret Mead, Mary Douglas, Chris Shore, David Graeber
Economics	Rational choice	Adam Smith, J Schumpeter, JM Keynes, P Samuelson, M Friedmann, J Stiglitz, Thomas Pikety, Ho-Joon Chang
Geography	the interaction of physical and cultural influences	Alexander von Humboldt, H Mackinder, David Harvey, Danny Dorling
Political economy	explores the role of political factors in economic outcomes.	JK Galbraith, Susan Strange, Mark Blyth, Wolfgang Streeck, Geoffrey Hodgson, Yanis Varoufakis,
Political science	Rational choice (at least since the 1970s)	Robert Dahl, Gabriel Almond, David Easton, S Wolin, Peter Hall, James Q Wilson, Bo Rothstein, Francis Fukuyama
Psychology	Maslow’s basic ones of survival	Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Erich Fromm. Bruno Bettelheim, Maslow, Howard Gardner,
Public management	mixed for traditional bodies - rational choice for New PM	Woodrow Wilson, Gerald Caiden, Chris Hood, Chris Pollitt, B Guy Peters, G Bouckaert,
Sociology	Struggle for power	Durkheim, Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, C Wright Mills, Robert Merton,  Herbert Simon, A Etzioni, Ralf Dahrendorf

And, indeed, there is something in my Presbyterian soul which probably disapproves of the idea of someone doing a quasi-Confessional on another human being. The intercession of a priest (or psychologist) is somehow not right!

And, yet, I have read psychology books with some pleasure and, indeed, edification – I thoroughly enjoyed the wry humour of Michael Foley’s The Age of Absurdity – why modern life makes it hard to be happy (2010) and learned much from "Life and how to survive it" by Robin Skynner and John Cleese (1993) - one of the clearest expositions I know of how the different stages of human development - at individual, organisational and societal levels and still in print after some 30 years. 

Such titles may focus on us as individuals rather than political creatures but I am a great believer in in the injunction to "Know Thyself”- if a bit slow in the actual practice. But psychological matters seem to have been pressing in on me recently – with posts last year such as Know Thyself, then one about the Johari Window and one actually entitled Mind Matters which brought together several books with a psychological perrspective