Just Words

One of the books of which I’m most proud is “Just Words – a sceptic’s glossary” and that’s not just because of the pun in the title - the first word can be read to mean either “mere/only” or “fair/impartial”. Two very different senses.

Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) came to Western notice only after 1995 when his German publisher started to release the Diaries which he had kept since an early age at the start of the 20^th Century; and it was several years later before UK and US audiences were able to read the English versions of I Will Bear Witness 1933-41 and I Will Bear Witness 1942-45 – let alone The Lesser Evil The Diaries of V Klemperer 1945-59. That’s some 40 years after his death!!

He was a philologist who used his experience of listening to passengers on the Dresden trams and buses to publish, in 1947, The Language of the Third Reich. It was 2000 – more than 50 years after his death – before it appeared in English and has now pride of place in the “Roll-call of Honour” which is chapter 4 of “Just Words”.

The book has now 73 pages and can boast

• 25 pages of definitions

• all the key authors – from La Rochefoucauld and Flaubert through Pierce and Klemperer to Susan George and J Ralston Saul

It’s a quite unique compendium - and I thoroughly recommend it.

Fathers

Today was the day my Dad was born – in 1907. Some 14 years ago I paid my extended tribute to his memory which started thus - 

We are all shaped by our upbringing – family; neighbourhood; and education. My father was a Presbyterian Minister (in a Scottish shipbuilding town) whom I would like to have known better. Last year I found myself discussing the possible establishment of a series of lectures (better perhaps “conversations”) which would celebrate my father’s passions and values. These can be tentatively but not adequately expressed in such words as understanding.. tolerance.. sharing.... service....exploration.... reconciliation.... and also, in pastimes, such as "boats, books, bees and bens".

The discussion involved me drafting the following thoughts - partly in an effort to clarify why I felt my father's memory deserved resurrection;

partly because I was aware that he represented a world we have lost and should celebrate. And partly, I realise, because I was trying to find out what being Scottish now means to me. Memorials are normally for famous people – but the point about my father is that he had no affectations or ambitions (at least that I knew about!) and was simply “well ken’t” and loved in several distinct communities. It was enough for him to serve one community (Mount Pleasant Church in Greenock for 50 years) and to use his time on earth to try to open up - to a range of very different types of individuals - the richness of other fields of knowledge. So he tutored in ancient languages and history – he was a prison chaplain – he was chairman of Greenock’s McLellan Gallery and Philosophical Society – latterly he was a lecturer on a British circuit about his travels (which included an expedition to Greenland in his sixties!). In all of this, of course, he was quietly supported by my mother. His well-known passions for books and travel were expressions of his passion for the world. His service as an independent (“moderate”) councillor (and Baillie) on Greenock Town Council equally showed his lack of dogma and his openness. When, in my late teens, I became both an atheist and socialist (offending some of our West-end neighbours) I felt only his quiet pride that I was, in my own way, searching for myself and, in different ways, living up to his values

Die Qual der Wahl

“Candide” was Voltaire’s takedown of the Enlightenment - Andersen’s “The Emperor has no clothes” is a lesser tale which demonstrates the power of ”groupthink”

Rory Stewart seems everywhere these days – his craggy face on television interviews about his life, his gravelly voice on podcasts revealing what is clearly a "beautiful mind". He has recently been promoting his latest book “Politics on the Edge – a memoir from within” which paints a devastating picture of the state of British politics. Few doubt the scale of his commitment to public service. It was bred in him at Eton - after a brief period in military service, he became a diplomat, ran a NGO in Afghanistan, became an MP in 2010, a Minister shortly thereafter, actually ran a campaign to be Prime Minister and was one of an illustrious group of 21 to be booted out of the Conservative party in 2019

But what exactly is his motivation for the excessive marketing of his brand? He clearly enjoyed his time wielding what power he had as a Minister but, as a 50-year old he clearly suffers from what the Germans call “Die Qual der Wahl” – the torture of choice. He’s had too gilded a career - he doesn’t know which of the many options open to him he should choose for the rest of his illustrious career.

• His latest book seems quite brilliant in its analysis of how the exercise of power eats into the soul (I have only these interviews to go on). So he could become an interesting member of the political punditry – although he might need to extend his range to cover more than British politics

• He already manages an international NGO encouraging cash transfers so could eventually land up with a plum job with a key international agency

• he remains a (traditional) conservative but is unlikely to be tempted back to ministerial roles. His caustic comments about colleagues make him “unreliable” – a great sin in politics.

• He has an American wife – perhaps he should acquire US citizenship and lobby to become President of the World Bank

Other interviews

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4IbnTBgYxGbJLi39lE3KZT with mary beard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbA5hfHCnjw&ab_channel=Tortoise

James o’brien interviews Rory Stewart 

Jonathan Aitken interviews Rory Stewart

Ivan Illich - why the attraction?

I am still trying to puzzle over the power Illich’s writing had for me in the 1970s.

1968 had been, of course, the year of rebellion against the forces of power and tradition. My first thought was to go back to ask who else had been competing for attention in those days? C Wright Mills had been a dominant figure with his “The Power Elite” of 1956 an attack on established power.

Illich’s work was some 15 years later and went deeper – with no obvious target to blame. But I do remember some New Statesman cartoons of “Pillars of the Establishment” (as in Grosz’s painting) tearing off their masks to reveal evil and savage faces. Illich’s books were short and an essay in The Challenges of Ivan Illich – a collective reflection; by L Hainacki (2002) suggested he used epigrammatic assertions rather than persuasive arguments – which would probably have impressed me in the 1970s.

What do I now make of his legacy? It was his critical message which made the impact on me but this seems, however, to have been taken up and morphed into a widespread cynicism about anyone exercising any sort of power. This has been a deeply dangerous development which simply serves the interests of those with the real power

update; https://www.bollier.org/blog/why-ivan-illich-still-matters-today

https://www.bollier.org/blog/why-ivan-illich-still-matters-today

Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich had a strange but profound influence on me in my early 30s and I’ve just downloaded a couple of books to help me understand his appeal – viz Ivan Illich in Conversation (1992) and Ivan Illich – an intellectual journey (2021) both by David Cayley

By then I was a politician – if a reforming one – with increasingly responsible positions as, first, a Chairman of a (newly-established) municipal social work committee and then as Secretary of the ruling group of Scotland’s (and Europe’s) largest Region and its strategist for its central policy relating to multiple deprivation – or social justice as it would be called these days. What, you might well ask, was I doing with a dangerous anarchist who challenged the claims of health and educational professionals?

Illich was an Austrian priest working in South America who set the cat amongst the pigeons of professionalism with his anarchistic critiques of the grip which educational and medical castes had on our minds – namely Deschooling Society (1971) and Medical Nemesi (1974) I used to tour the various professional associations in Scotland in those years – using both the Illich critique and the insights I had gained as a Chair of one of the new Social Work Committees to challenge the conventional wisdoms of these professions.

I had, admittedly, been open to community action since first encountering 

the likes of Saul Alinsky and Paulo Freire as I fought the local housing bureaucracy 

with local residents in the late 1960s – as you can see in the long 1977 article 

Community Development – its political and administrative challenge. 

Alinsky was more of a tactical street-fighter; Freire the deep and inspirational 

thinker about self-help. But it was Illich who supplied the hard weaponry. 

The seeds were probably sown a decade earlier – at university – when I was 

exposed to Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) and its 

demolition of those who claimed universal truths. The article given by the link 

is a critical reassessment of the 2 volume work after 50 years but can’t detract 

from the powerful impact it had on this reader in the early 1960s. Even at school,

 I had learned to be a “freethinker” and to be suspicious of what JK Galbraith 

called “the conventional wisdom”.
Illich’s critique in the 1970s of the monstrous arrogance of health and educational 

professionals in claiming to know best was, therefore, pushing at an open door 

for the likes of us….In all the talk of the dominant narrative of Neoliberalism, 

this element in my generation’s formation tends to be forgotten. 

Social Democracy was undermined to a large extent because my generation 

stopped believing in the big battalions – not least because of the power of 

such writers as Illich. In so doing, we committed the first but unnoticed 

unilateral disarmament! It was the Trade Unions and the working class who had 

given democracy its teeth. But – as individualists and members of identity tribes 

- we came to scorn organisational power and allowed Big Money to subvert 

democracy with its lobbying, Think Tanks and Corporate Media.

I am not, of course, doing Illich justice when I paint his contribution as one largely of criticism. There was also a deep caring and compassion for the ordinary person – and their capabilities. But, somehow, we western readers tended to take that for granted – such was the power of his dismantling of the claims of the powerful. Herbert Gintis was one of the few radicals of the left who recognised the importance of Illich in subjecting “Deschooling Society” to a 27-page critique – most others ignored the man and the hostility he brought to the very idea of modernity and our readiness to accept change. In its stead be preached the importance of relationships and what he called “conviviality:. Indeed amongst the welter of books he produced in the 1970s was "Tools for Conviviality"

And it was probably for this reason that, under the influence of John Stewart 

of the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV), I became an early 

convert to the idea of corporate planning and management which was then 

fashionable - although its time soon passed, with complaints about “silo management”

 being, if anything stronger in recent years (see Gillian Tett’s The Silo Effect 

(2015). 
I’ve had a curious relationship with management over the past half century – 

the first half of my adult life, from age 25, was spent as a reforming politician 

(my paid job in academia was a bit of a sideline). That changed in the second half 

of my life from 1990 when I entered the project management world of consultancy 

where I was generally Team Leader of small groups of professionals trying to 

develop the capacity of state organisations in ex-communist countries. 

That was, quite frankly, very much a question of the blind leading the blind 

since we “westerners” were only subject specialists (usually of only one country’

s system) and had little experience of change management – let alone 

understanding of the context in which we were working. So I made a point of 

doing my homework on what the literature of “change management” (which had 

started in the mid 1980s and was a decade later the most popular field) had 

to say. And have continued to try to keep up-to-date with the literature with 

this latest Short Note and bibliography on Change.

Some Reading on Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich

https://www.noemamag.com/a-forgotten-prophet-whose-time-has-come/ a short article
The Prophet of Cuernavaca – Ivan Illich and the Crisis of the West by Todd Hartch (2015) 

is a testimony to the man.
The Challenges of Ivan Illich – a collective reflection; by L Hoinacki (2002)
We Make the Road by Walking – conversations on education and social change; Myles Horton 

and Paulo Freire (1990) Myles Horton was a great American practitioner of working class 

education who teamed up with Freire for this book
Tools for Conviviality; is a short book by Ivan Illich (1975) which gives a sense of his style.

https://manhattan.institute/article/the-genius-of-ivan-illich 2022

https://www.davidcayley.com/blog/2019/1/16/echoes-affinities-resonances-ivan-illich-in-contemporary-thought

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19227_ivan-illich-an-intellectual-biography-by-david-cayley-reviewed-by-tim-christiaens/

https://www.scielo.br/j/cebape/a/NJw7rykyqZWT6cj8vYdJJtH/?format=pdf&lang=en Illich's impact on organisational studies

https://laviedesidees.fr/The-Two-Lives-of-Ivan-Illich

English Voices

Last night I watched a documentary about Brexit which my favourite newspaper – Byline Times – had commissioned. It was fairly grim viewing with working class fishermen and middle class farming women expressing their disillusionment with the politicians; and Anthony Barnett, Gina Miller and Caroline Lucas trying to explain how the country had got into such a mess. Foot soldiers from both brexit camps were brought in for some colour.

But what really hit home for me was the difficulty I had in understanding the regional accents. Admittedly I’ve been out of the country for 33 years and am more used to the Scottish burr. But it brought home to me the scale of the class structure which continues to bedevil England – indeed it’s getting worse as Fiona Hill reveals in the book “There is Nothing for You Here” (2022) which records her experience as a miner’s daughter who managed to break out. Thanks to her Russian linguistic and policy skills, she made it to the US State Department where she testified at the Trump impeachment. 

One of the strongest points she makes is that such opportunities are becoming much rarer nowadays – with the new meritocracy rewarding the children of the well-off Professional and Managerial Class

Can we penetrate anyone’s Soul?

In the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine I penned, in a sort of protest, a celebration of life consisting of a list of autobiographies. Today I was reminded of Among You Taking Notes – the wartime diary of Naomi Mitchinson 1939-1945 ed by Dorothy Sheridan (1985) which I duly retrieved from my library – Mitchinson being a Scottish writer and Sheridan has written a useful article about editing the Mitchinson book. It persuaded me to add a (n admittedly small) section to the post to which I have also added the fascinating essay which Paul Theroux gave us in “The Trouble with Autobiography”, the most comprehensive notes on the autobiographies of literary classics. I have entitled the new collection “Memoirs, Diaries and Intellectual biographies”

That duly led me to this article on The Diary in 20^th Century Britain and to the book “The Diary – the epic of everyday life”

Elizabeth Podnieks reiterates this observation in her more detailed description of the diary as

a book of days presented in chronological sequence, though not necessarily recorded as such. It inscribes the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of its author and may depict the social, historical, and intellectual period in which she or he lives and writes. Aspects of the author’s character may be denied or repressed, or acknowledged and celebrated. . . .

The diary is an open-ended book, but it may include internal closures and summations. By virtue of its status as a book of days, it is disconnected, yet it may offer structural and thematic patterns and connectives.

Though likely written spontaneously, it is a consciously crafted text, such that the diarist often takes content and aesthetics into account. Finally, though composed in private, the diary is not necessarily a secret document.

It may be intended for an audience: an individual, a small group of people, or a general public, and either contemporary with or future to the diarist’s lifetime

For those wanting to know more about Mitchinson, I recommend 

• Naomi Mitchinson – a writer in Time ed J Purdon 2023

• Witness to a Century – the autobiographical writings of Naomi Mitchinson thesis by H Lloyd 2005

Why are we so indifferent to Inequality?

It was Michael Robert’s post on Branko Milanovic’s latest book – “Visions of Inequality – from the French Revolution to the end of the Cold War” which spurred me to make some observations about inequality – a subject, I realised, I hadn’t really posted explicitly about, although it had absorbed a couple of decades of my life in Scotland between 1968 and 1990

Roberts, as befits a Marxist, is fixated on Marx whereas Milanovic focuses on 6 classical writers on the subject – Quesnay, Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Pareto and Kuznets – with more recent researchers on the subject such as Tony Atkinson and Thomas Pikety relegated to.a chapter, given the book’s curious ending in 1989

My own commitment to equality was sparked by RH Tawney and Tony Crosland – Tawney for the almost religious tone of his support for the idea and Crosland for the libertarian force of his arguments against the Conservative Enemy

This tantalising introduction to Ben Jackson’s book on “Equality and the British Left – a study in progressive political thought 1900-64” sets the scene for the power of the idea in the first part of the century in the UK. But it was The Spirit Level – why greater equality makes societies stronger by Wilkinson and Pickett in 2010 which really impacted on people. More recently Danny Dorling’s “Injustice – why social inequality persists” (2011 edition) was and remains for me a powerful and unique exploration of the reasons for our indifference to the inequalities which disfigure so many societies.

These days, everyone talks about inequality – it has become the go-to descriptor of “western civilisation” but that civilisation remains a gilded one, with few politicians daring to take serious action against the plutocrats. I’m not sure if anyone has given a satisfactory answer to the indifference – sure, since Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s, we have become inured to the rhetoric about inequalities. And some progress has been made on righting racial and gender inequalities. But there is a long way to go

Further Reading

Two Nations – the state of poverty in the UK CSJ 2023

What we owe each other – a new social contract for a better society Minouche Safik 2021

Capital and Ideology Thomas Pikety 2020

Inequality – a short history M Alacevich and A Soci 2018

Inequality – what can be done? Tony Atkinson 2015

Inequality Matters UN 2013

The Spirit Level – why greater equality makes societies stronger Wilkinson and Pickett 2010

Equality RH Tawney 1931