The Pursuit of Truth

I pride myself on my “open mind” – although I do realise that I am as guilty as anyone of confirmation bias. On the Covid issue, I have followed Dr John Campbell whose daily videos I and so many others found so helpful during the pandemic. However, some of his recent posts have caused me concern for the airtime he has offered to some very dubiou. s characters – right-wing European MPs and a UK MP voicing anti-vaccine views. And, a few months back, he agreed to take part in a video series managed by the conspiracy historian Neil Oliver. At the time, I felt this was a serious lapse of judgement but, in the event, I was wrong. The discussion helped me understand his thinking - namely a slow and reluctant recognition that the UK government has, in recent years, betrayed the trust we have put in evidence-based science.

Ours is very sceptical generation – a combination of education and socal media has made us so. We now question the narratives put up by both the commercial and government worlds – our own explanations have become legitimised. I’ve written about “Fake News” only a couple of times – first at the start of the pandemic and then more recently when I wrote -

“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 y 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”??

Disinformation and Fake News – interim report was the result of the Select Committee’s interesting deliberations….….raising the sort of questions we are beginning to ask about how the commercial world is using social media and algorithms - and trying to give preliminary answers in terms citizens can understand. They are the same issues which Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism deals with. The Select Committee’s Final Report – like all such reports – iwas written in exceptionally clear language.

The results of the fake news can be seen in Brexitannia (2017) - a thoughtful film of an almost sociological depth based on about 200 in-depth interviews the length and breadth of the UK. It’s reviewed here by Zero Anthropology. On this issue, I also recommend Dave Pollard’s latest post

update; The UK has just started a "Counter Disinformation Unit" which produced this useful video from Dr Campbell

Getting Balance in our Lives

These days, we seem to love to hate. The Declassified UK website is a typical “scandal-monger” in its focus on wrong-doing. They have just sent me an interesting questionnaire to try to entice me into subscribing which got me thinking of a fascinating book which came out 15 years ago - Thinking Institutionally by Huch Heclo

For whatever reason, trust in our institutions - public and private – has sunk to an all-time low. This is the issue with which Heclo’s book starts – indeed pages 18 onwards give a 5 page spread which itemises the scandals affecting the public, private and even NGO sectors in the last 40-50 years – arguing that mass communications and our interconnectedness exacerbate the public impact of such events. 

The past half-century has been most unkind to those discrete cohering entities, both formal and informal, that "represent inheritances of valued purpose with attendant rules and moral obligations." Today, people almost universally denigrate institutions, including those of which they are members.

Attacks on institutions come from our hyper-democratic politics but stem from the Enlightenment with its unshakeable confidence in human reason; its subsequent obsessive focus on the self; and, latterly, its belief that an institution has no value beyond that which an individual can squeeze from it for personal gain.

In the last 60 years our education system  has designated institutions as, at best, annoying encumbrances and, at worst, oppressive tools of the past. Students are taught to believe what they like and express themselves as they see fit. Even people understood to be conservatives—at least in the way we conceptualize political ideology today—assail institutions. Free market economics places a premium on self-interest and assumes institutions stifle innovation and entrepreneurship.
 But institutions provide reference points in an uncertain world. They tie us to the past and present; furnish personal assistance; and institutionalize trust. They give our lives purpose and, therefore, the kind of self-satisfaction that only the wholesale rejection of them is supposed to provide.

How, then, do we protect and promote them? Heclo says that first and foremost we must learn to think institutionally. This is very different from thinking about institutions as scholars do. It is not an objective and intellectual exercise. It is a more participatory and intuitive one. To think institutionally you need a "particular sensitivity "to or an "appreciative viewpoint" of institutions.

To be more specific, the exercise moves our focus away from the self and towards a recognition of our debts and obligations to others.To think institutionally is to do something much more than provide individuals with incentives to be part of and promote institutions. It calls on them to modify their behavior. In this way, Heclo challenges rational choice's assumptions about institutional maintenance vigorously. 

I have a lot of sympathy for this line of argument – against “the quick buck”…. instant gratification….. tomorrow’s headlines…..we need cultures which respect timescales for investment and the idea of “stewardship” which Robert Greenleaf tried, unsuccessfully, to cultivate…..The quotation, indeed, which graces the first page of my Dispatches to the post-capitalist generation is from Dwight Eisenhower’s last address in 1960 

We . . . must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Heclo is now a retired American political scientist with form for an interest both in political institutions and in European aspects of political culture. I remember his name vividly from the 1970s from the book he wrote jointly with that great doyen of political analysis (and of the budgetary process) Aaron Wildavsky – The Private Government of Public Money. Heclo’s book, I concede, is in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott and tended to attract the attention of clerics and university administrators – some of whom produced this interesting symposium

Thinking institutionally is a lonely pursuit. Its practitioners are unappreciated and considered naive. They expect to be taken advantage of by those who care nothing for institutions, only for themselves. But that does not mean we should not do it.

Readers wanting a sense of Heclo’s writing style are directed to page 731 of The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions (the link gives the entire “Hand”book!) where Heclo has a short essay on the topic. And google gives some early excerpts from On Thinking Institutionally

“The Hidden Pleasures of Life”

This is the title of a book by Theodor Zeldin, hidden behind others, and pulled from the shelves here in my Ploiesti flat and one of whose attractions is its format – its pages are rounded and have margins which contain a couple of phrases to give us a sense of the text. One useful review puts it like this -

Theodore Zeldin is a curious man. And “The Hidden Pleasures of Life” a curious book. Over the course of twentyeight interconnected reflections, each beginning with the reported experiences of some figure from history, the author addresses old-fashioned philosophical questions:

• what makes a life go well?

• how should one live?

We begin with Hajj Sayyah, an Iranian student who leaves his home in 1859 at the age of twenty three and travels for eighteen years, meeting the great and the good, without any letters of recommendation or influential relatives. Sayyah is an adventurer whose quest is to discover the people of the world. Zeldin takes Sayyah, along with his other emblems, to point towards the nature of a good life. A good life involves curiosity. What is a curious life? One in which you seek to know other people. Not impersonally, as falling under this or that system of categories, nor superficially, in the ways in which we ordinarily interact. No, the point of living is to know each other properly – where that involves sharing our private thoughts and conversing on those topics which shape our lives. (Zeldin’s Oxford Muse Foundation organizes meals at which strangers are seated in pairs and given a Menu of Conversation, including such questions as “What are the limits of your compassion?” and “What moral, intellectual, aesthetic and social effects does the work you do have on others and on yourself?” Zeldin would be a wonderful lunch companion, but you might hate sitting next to him on a long plane journey.)

Conversing with others gives meaning to our lives by allowing us to learn how others see the world and, in turn, to share what it is that we see. Zeldin’s curiosity demands that we give up on the superficial frivolities that grease our everyday interactions and open instead the secret chambers of our hearts and minds, displaying, in Virginia Woolf’s phrase, the “tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out would teach one everything but [are] never offered openly, never made public”.

Theodor Zeldin will be 90 in a few months and is perhaps best known for his encouragement of the art of conversation but also a maverick historian whose books have searched for answers to three main questions

• Where can a person find more inspiring ways of spending each day?

• What ambitions remain unexplored, beyond happiness, prosperity, faith, love, technology, or therapy?

• What role could there be for individuals with independent minds, or those who feel isolated, different, or are sometimes labeled as misfits?

His work has brought people together to engage in conversations in a variety of settings – communal and business – on the basis of some basic principles

The Hidden Pleasures of Life can be downloaded in full via  

https://vdoc.pub/documents/the-hidden-pleasures-of-life-a-new-way-of-remembering-the-past-and-imagining-the-future-6hl9gfrn62g0. It's an epub so does need conversion

The Black Dog barks again

I’ve not posted for a full four weeks. Let me try to explain my silence. Some knee problems caused me to seek some help from the local physiotherapist who warned me that the blood-thinning (Xarelto) I used for my atrial fibrillation required him to treat me with a lower dosage than normal. But my third treatment produced an incident which put me in a hospital for a few hours – and has triggered a dark mood which has brought this silence.Far from being the “cruellest month” of TS Eliot’s famous poem, April was (in the late 1980s) when I emerged from what was almost like a hibernation. Ever since then, however, I have had great sympathy for those who suffer from de[ression – the most prominent Brits being Winston Churchill, Stephen Fry and Alistair Campbell. At that time Philip Toynbee was about the only prominent person admitting to the condition (I remember reading his “Part of a Journey – autobiographical notes 1977-79”) although Dorothy Rowe’s Depression – the way out of your prison Depression – the way out of your prison;(1983) became, deservedly, a best-seller.

As I have slowly slid into retirement, it is not surprising that the black dog sometimes barks. So “Reasons to stay alive” (2015) was a useful reminder for me – although I was disappointed with its self-indulgence and consider Hari’s Lost Connections (2018) is a more useful read – with

chapters on the suggested reconnections focus on: a) other people, b) ‘social prescribing’, c) meaningful work, d) meaningful values, e) sympathetic joy and overcoming an addiction to the self, f) acknowledging and overcoming childhood trauma, and g) “restoring the future” (??).

This is a good review – and this a video of the author making a presentation about the book which I simply cannot put down, it is such a gripping read as he traces his journey from a decade of popping pills, followed by several years of asking questions, reading research and tracking down what seemed to be the people and places to help him answer the questions....On the way he targets myths, medics and the pharma companies and comes up with deeply political answers about the power of collective action (the book van be accessed in the link on the title in the liast below)
The Novel Cure – an A-Z of Literary Remedies is a delightful compendium of reading recommendations for those suffering from various travails….

Resource on Depression (starting with the oldest)

Depression – the way out of your prison ; Dorothy Rowe (1983) One of the few books which was around in those dark ages, Rowe was a journalist and “agony aunt” and has a very easy tone

Life – and how to survive it ; John Cleese and Robin Skynner (1996) definitely one of the most helpful books of the decade ! A therapist and leading British comic (!) have a Socratic dialogue about the principles of healthy (family) relationships and then use these to explore the preconditions for healthy organisations and societies: and for leadership viz -

- valuing and respecting others
 - ability to communicate
- willingness to wield authority firmly but always for the general welfare and with as much consultation as possible while handing power back when the crisis is over)
- capacity to face reality squarely
- flexiblity and willingness to change
- belief in values above and beyond the personal or considerations of party.

Malignant Sadness; the anatomy of depression ; Lewis Wolpert (1999) Looks quite excellent

The noonday demon – the atlas of depression ; Andrew Solomon (2001) A much praised book, I must confess that I found its discursive style off-putting. Solomon is an essayist – although fully one third of the (large) book consists of notes. But no attempt is to break the relentless text up into headed sections to give us a hint of where the text is going

The Compassionate Mind ; Paul Gilbert (2009) This is also a bit forbidding with almost 600 pages but is well structured

Reasons to stay alive ; Matt Haig (2015) A bit too self-indulgent – but read for yourself Its short

Rip it UP – the as if principle ; Richard Wiseman (2016) One of the quotes which adorn my blog is from William James - “I will act as if what I do makes a difference”. In this entertaining and original book, Wiseman sets out a philosophy that encourages us to discipline our minds

Lost Connections ; Johann Hari (2018) I came to this book prepared (by Hari’s reputation for plagiarism) to dislike it but was completely won over by the author’s journey from a decade of popping pills, followed by several years of asking questions, reading research and tracking down what seemed to be the people and places to help him answer the questions....On the way he targets myths, medics and the pharma companies and comes up with deeply political answers about the power of collective action

How to be Depressed; George Scialabbas (2020) a terrific short read which records how the medical establishment have dealt with the author since the 1960s and offers a harrowing series of advice notes which made me realise that my present condition bears no comparison with his. Reviews are here and here

The new wave of Artificial Intelligence

Something called GPT-4 was released some 3 weeks ago and is being hailed as an innovation that rivals the atom bomb in the scale of its significance. The Center for Humane Technology puts it thus - “imagine that 50% of the engineers who built tha plane you’re stepping onto tell you that there is a 10% chance of it crashing. Would you board?”. The Centre is a much-needed body which has been running since 2018 and has some 65 podcasts to its credit – which are also available as transcripts For those who prefer a more light-hearted approach, here is a journalist’s account of a week spent with the device.

At the end of last month, top-level people in the field published an open-letter seeking a six-monthly moratorium on research in the field in order that the dangers can be properly assessed – in the absence of which recommending that government steps in. The Centre for Humane Technology brings in Robert Oppenheimer to make the point that the threat of the atomic bomb was defused by test-ban treaties. As an example of the capacity of the new device, it has managed to co-author a recent book “Impromptu – ampflifying our humanity through AI" by Reid Hoffman and...AI (2023)"

"The Guardian" newspaper has today a useful article on how it has identified a couple of articles which seem to have been written by GPT-4 and the steps it is taking behind the scenes to avoid this - but the speed with which the device is being taken up and the scale of resultant plagiarism is deeply worrying. 

There are very few of us who dare to challenge technological change. Most of us fear the ridicule involved – being the targets of taunts of being Canutes or Luddites. It, therefore, took a lot of courage for Jerry Mander in 1978 to produce Four Arguments for the elimination of television and for Neil Postman to follow this up in 1985 with “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. And, with his “In the absence of the sacred – the failure of technology” (1992) Jerry Mander took his critique our technological society even further. In this provocative work, Mander challenges the utopian promise of technological society and tracks its devastating impact on cultures worldwide. The Western world’s loss of a sense of the sacred in the natural world, he says, has led us toward global environmental disaster and social disorder - and worse lies ahead. Yet models for restoring our relationship with the Earth exist in the cultures of native peoples, whose values and skills have enabled them to survive centuries of invasion and exploitation.

Far from creating paradise on Earth, technology has instead produced an unsustainable 

contest for resources. Mander surveys the major technologies shaping the “new world 

order”, computers, telecommunications, space exploration, genetic engineering, robotics, 

and the corporation itself and warns that they are merging into a global mega-technology,

 with dire environmental and political results. Needless to say, none of such book were 

taken seriously. 

It took perhaps a BBC television series of technological dystopia Black Mirror 

– which first hit screens exactly a decade ago – for us to begin to realise that technology

 (in the shape of the social media) has its perverse side.  And here’s a useful
discussion with Yuri Harari about AI

More recent texts
Impromptu – ampflifying our humanity through AI" by AI and Reid Hoffman (2023) 
The Age of AI; and our human future H Kissinger, E Scmidt and D Huttenlocher 2021
Ten Arguments for Deleting your social media right now; Jaron Lanier (2018)
Utopia is Creepy; Nicholas Carr (2016)
The Internet is not the Answer; Andrew Keen (2015)
From Guttenberg to Zuckenberg – what you really need to know about the Internet; John Naughton (2013)
To Save everything click here – the folly of technological solutionism; Efgeni Morozov (2013)
The Shallows - what the internet is doing to our brain Nicholas Carr (2010)

Change for the Better?

"clear ideas" Renee Magritte (1958)
 

I'm just finalising my latest book which bears this title and, as subtitle, "a life in reform"

It's a mix of genres - but most decidedly, as Magritte himself might have put it, "this is not a text"! 

Although it's not quite finished, I've put it up on the list of Ebooks you will find in the top-right column when you scroll down. BUT IT HAS A NEW NAME - "The Search for Democracy"!

Warning to Reader

• People do not normally read a book about reform with any expectation of pleasure

• Such texts will normally figure as required reading in student courses, for example, in public administration reform.

• But this not a textbook on administrative reform….

• It is, rather, the story of an academically-inclined person who got involved, in the late 1960s, in community politics - and quickly rose to a position of strategic influence in Strathclyde Regional Council (Europe’s largest) for 16 years.

• On the basis of the innovative strategies I helped develop in a Regional authority covering half of Scotland, I then found myself working and living for the next 20 years in Central Europe and Central Asia - as a consultant in “institutional development”

• This is the story of how and what I have learned as a result of those endeavours in about a dozen countries

• I’m fed up with books which have unrelieved text – so have tried to liven things up a bit by the use of tables and boxes and the odd diagram

CONTENTS

Preface - in which I recall how a radio series first aroused my interest în organisations; reflect on this book’s origins; and why I think it may be of interest

1. The state of the State is chapter One in which I explain my first encounter with the deficiencies of local administration in 1968. In 1990 many of us were forced to start rethinking the role of the State - privatisation had, in the 1980s, left us wondering how far this development could redefine its role; and the unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall and of communist regimes then had us concocting pathways to capitalism and democracy.

2. Administrative Reform in the new millenium - captures one man’s attempt in 1999 to convey to a foreign audience his understanding of the organisational changes which had taken place în the 30 years from 1970 to the new millennium – particularly în the 1990s

3. Impervious Power – the eastern approaches reflects on the experience of western con-sultan..ts in central Europe and central Asia aș they wrestled with the transition to what their tiny minds assumed to be democracy and free markets.

4. Question Time A little British book about “the attack on the state” provoked me in 2018 into exploring some questions about the huge literature on public management reform (mainly academic) which has developed since the 1990s. include the following -

- How do countries compare internationally in the performance of their public services ?

- Has privatisation lived up to its hype?

- what alternatives are there to state and private provision

- why do governments still spend mega bucks on consultants?

5. The Management Virus The private and public sectors alike seem to have been taken over in recent decades by hordes of managers. How has this happened? How do we stop it? This chapter and its reading list can be viewed here

6. The echoes of Praxis As someone who has straddled the worlds of politics, academia and consultancy, I am disappointed by the sparseness of the practitioner contribution to the literature. By default we are left with academics who interview those în government and sometimes train them and consultants – allthough the former are the more voluble

7.Take Back Control? Which explores the implication of the quotation which adorns the book’s cover and asks how exactly might democracy improve the operation of our public services? Is this just a question of giving local government more power, as some would argue – ie giving a greater voice to the local public through their local representatives having a stronger legal and strategic role? Or does it require a more open and participative process – as many would argue? Or does it perhaps mean a greater say by the workforce in the everyday management of public services? Or a combination of all the above? Hilary Wainwright is amongst the very few who have taken this question seriously – although the Dutch, with the Buurtzog model, are now exploring the question

8. Theories of Change în which I question the compartmentalisation of the subject of change into studies of psychology, technology, organisation and society and offer an annotated bibliography of some 80 books

9. Inconclusion 

Just Words – a sceptic’s glossary (2023 updated version) it’s 60 pages so best read separately (my answer to Ralston Saul’s more voluminous “The Doubter’s Companion” 1994)