Nothing to Lose but the Chains on our Minds

How can we engage in collective action when we are living a more and more individualized existence? Jeremy Gilbert’s delightful little book Twenty first century socialism (2020) brought this question home to me when I looked at it over the weekend 

Today most people have very little regular experience of working effectively in groups with other people. They probably don’t know their neighbours. Their co-workers won’t be their co-workers long enough for them to get to know one another.

Even if they do, what they have in common with their co-workers is probably a ‘bullshit job’, which none of them wants to be doing and over which they feel no sense of control. In many sectors they may be working on short-term contracts, so their current co-workers will be their competitors in the labour market once the present contract runs out.

When they have to attend meetings, those meetings are boring, bureaucratic and frustrating, seeming to prove the neoliberal hypothesis that people acting together can achieve nothing.

 

They fill their hours with social media, communicating with people most of whom they will never meet and with whom they will almost never do anything more substantial than share memes. They find pleasure and satisfaction in their private lives, as consumers, on holiday, maybe pursuing solitary hobbies,31 probably just watching television.

Neoliberalism says that people are happier this way – consuming, competing, pursuing their private interests. They are not. They use platform technologies and a vast range of drugs to try to make themselves feel better, to feel some connection with other people and the wider world.

 

But this experience of daily life often makes it feel to them as if actually getting things done with other people is impossible, especially if those things have any objective other than making money.

If socialism in the twenty-first century has a single objective, that objective is to turn people’s desire for connection into real social and cooperative action for the greater good. And, if it has a single obstacle to overcome, then it is the feeling that no such thing is possible – a feeling that the whole machinery of neoliberal culture deliberately inculcates in people.

Gilbert’s little book has certainly encouraged me to look more closely at his previous book Common Ground – democracy and collectivity in an age of individualism (2014) whose title had appealed to me when I first saw it a few years back (not least because I had used the “Common Ground” as the name of a website I set up that very year). The book’s Preface had been promising – not least because it generously offered a summary of each chapter) viz   

It was arguably the ‘New Lefts’ of the 1960s, and the social movements of the 1970s, which posed the first lethal challenges to the highly conformist, homogenising model of collectivity which informed the political and democratic institutions inherited from the mid twentieth century. These had questioned the legacy of liberal individualism, not in the name of any kind of conservative ideal of community, but in the name of a radical democratic politics.

 

The book’s first chapter – “Postmodernity and the Crisis of Democracy” - argues that existing systems of representative democracy were relatively effective in the era of ‘Fordist’ industrial capitalism, but that they didn’t respond successfully to the pressure exerted by a new set of social demands emerging in the 1960s (from women, young people, black people, etc.), to the growing complexity of ‘post-Fordist’ societies, or to the mobility of capital in an era of financialisation and globalisation. Weakened by these challenges, governmental institutions have largely been captured by the ideology of neoliberalism, which the political class has normally colluded with in preference to acceding to the demands for more radical and participatory forms of democracy which characterised what the Trilateral Commission1 called the ‘democratic surge’ of the 1960s and 1970s (Crozier,  Huntington and Watanuki 1975).

But that generosity was the book's undoing since it was clear that Gilbert was in thrall to the French deconstructionists (viz Laclau, Derrida and Deleuze) whom I can’t stand. So the book was left on the shelf despite my knowing that Gilbert writes well – as this review of his most recent little book testifies

But I have now downloaded it – and will let you know how I get on with it…..

For the moment let me simply share with you some of useful reference which Gilbert’s references put me on to - 

- “A New politics from the left”; Hilary Wainwright (2018);  a short book by one of the friendliest writers (she has a great annotated reading list). Most books like this are strong on the critique and light on how to get to a better world – but the process of change is at the heart of this one. It’s in epub format which requires conversion for reading 

- “Freedom is an endless meeting – democracy in American social movements” (2002) looks at collective action on the American scene. One of 2 pdf files which can be directly accessed

- “The will of the many – how the alterglobalisation movement is changing the face of democracy” (2009)

-  “No shortcuts – organising for power in thenew gilded age” (2016) looks at trade union actions in the US in epub format which requires conversion 

- A useful article on Deepening democracy which may be from 2006 but has a typology which makes it still pertinent.

Commanding Hope

Canadian Thomas Homer-Dixon is not your typical doom-merchant – although his was one of the first books I read suggesting that the increasing complexity of the world was creating limits to man’s ingenuity viz The Ingenuity Gap – how can we solve the world’s future problems (2001). A few years later he wrote a sequel which offered a bit more hope - The Upside of Down – catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilisation (2006)

I’ve just been reading his latest contribution - Commanding Hope – the power we have to renew a world in peril” (2020) which is one of the very few books I’ve seen which takes the crisis as read - and chooses instead to use our own reluctance to change our habits as the key with which to explore the values and worldviews lying at the heart of the different sense of identity we all have. (I wasn’t aware that, some ten years ago, Clive Hamilton produced Requiem for a species – why we resist the truth about climate change (2010) although only one chapter of the book seems to deal directly with the question in the subtitle).

But I well remember reading (in 2014) “Why We Disagree about Climate Change – understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity” (2009) by geographer Mike Hulme - which used seven different lenses (namely science, economics, religion, psychology, media, development, and governance) to make us aware of the complexity behind climate change. His argument was basically that –

- We understand science and scientific knowledge in different ways

- We value things differently

- We believe different things about ourselves, the universe and our place in the universe

- We fear different things

- We receive multiple and conflicting messages about climate change – and interpret them differently

- We understand “development” differently

- We seek to govern in different ways (eg top-down “green governmentality”; marketing environmentalism; or “civic environmentalism”) 

Little wonder, with such varied and extensive divergences in beliefs, values, fears and messages that we can neither agree about global warming – nor ourselves take but pitifully token ecological steps But that doesn’t stop any of us from priding ourselves on our rationality – nor taking it amiss when told that we are all creatures of habit, intuition and downright prejudice……It was less than a decade ago that psychologists first started to challenge the myths about rationality strongly – with authors such as Jonathan Haidt leading the charge

So Homer-Dixon’s book has appeared none too soon - and tries to deal with the argument of the Extinction movement - that things have now gone too far and there is little we can do to save the planet. For the moment, I’ll just list the main points which caught my eye -

- the successful “women against the Hbomb campaign” of the 1950s (which led to a treaty ban in 1963) was started by the determination of a single woman

- Feedback mechanisms can be both negative and positive (the Hbomb campaign and South Africa’s peaceful transition are examples of the latter)

- 2 megatrends – greater connectivity; and higher uniformity. The trick is to make them work in our favour by challenging what has become in the past 4 years a heavily pessimistic social mood

- the importance of Worldviews – which I’ve covered here  

- the strength of our belief in growth, choice and security

– 2 tools to help challenge that eg Cognitive Affective Maps - Commanding Hope

– worldviews, institutions and technology (WIT) 

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.

 - Sufficiency v feasibility; solutions have to be sufficient – and enough p180

- Donella Meadows’ Leverage Points – one of the most important parts of the book

- from the “Abundance mindset” to the “Scarcity mindset” caused by widening insecurity, migration, climate change and the new pessimistic social mood

- Jonathan Haidt’s 6 “moral intuitions” – care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity (?) and liberty

- three “temperaments” – exuberant, prudent and empathic which match Amartya Sen’s approach

My feeling, on finishing the book, was that it was an important contribution but that he hadn’t succeeded in pulling the various themes and arguments together in a satisfactory way. I’m still left wondering how I can explain it clearly to others.

But that’s one of its strengths – that it makes me want to go back and reread particularly the final part so that I can provide such an explanation….  

PS The book offers neither an annotated reading list nor an index. I had wanted to check whether it mentioned Robert Quinn (a neglected writer on the theme of changing the world)  - but the absence of an index makes that impossible……  You wonder whether that’s deliberate…..

Why we need shorter non-fiction books – with chapter summaries

As I reel under the number of books pouring from publishers, I have come to place more and more importance on three requirements which I look for in any book 

- first a solid Introduction – or Preface. This is the author’s chance to show (s)he understands how overwhelmed we are by the choices; to offer us a convincing argument about why (s)he has to inflict yet another book on us. And the best way to do that is to give a brief summary of what others have written and identify the missing elements which make a book necessary. And I would like, in addition, to see a summary of each chapter…..I have always liked the old habit of prefacing a book chapter with an explanation of what that chapter will deal with. When I got hold recently of George Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism; (1928) it was to discover that his Table of Contents has no fewer than 33-pages... 

- the second thing I look for in a non-fiction book is at the end - a (short) list of recommended reading, ideally with notes explaining the choice. Most books have a long “bibliography” which, I’ve taken to calling a “virility test” - demonstrating nothing more than (a barely compressed sense of) superiority. I want instead to see a shorter (and annotated) list for several reasons - partly to smoke out the author’s prejudices; partly to see how honest (s)he is; and partly to see how well (s)he writes   

- the third check I run is for the clarity of writing – with suitable use of graphics and tables which are needed both to break up and to illustrate the text….

All of these requirements are fairly quickly established – the book either offers such features – or it doesn’t. The decline and rise of democracy – a global history from antiquity to today by David Stasavage (2020), for example, is a book I came across yesterday and checked out. It doesn’t bother with any of these features – and is therefore quickly dismissed. It doesn’t even mention John Keane’s classic “The Rise and Fall of Democracy”

But I also need to be persuaded that the book in question has three other features --

- respects the basic facts about an issue;

- has a coherent “narrative structure” (see Richard Evans’ comments in the previous post)

- tries to be fair to the various sides of the key arguments on the issue 

And this can be done only by checking the reviews.

But why, I suddenly thought, do authors insist these days on giving us such hefty tomes?

Everyone’s attention span – we are told – is declining….particularly that of the younger generation.

And so many non-fiction books are just recycling arguments we’re already familiar with…

The obvious thing is to go back to the Victorian habit of summarising the basic argument of a book – along with an annotated bibliography – and to offer it as a TASTER of maximum 100 pages

Take, for example, a superb newly-released book I have been reading today - Commanding hope – the power we have to renew a world in peril; by Thomas Homer-Dixon. It is an easy read; and addresses the issue which few such environmental books do – namely why do people resist the message about global warming? And why indeed do the rest of us do little more than token gestures? 

It’s the first book I’ve come across which is devoted exclusively to this question of intellectual resistance - with 360 pages, its basic argument could be compressed into 100 pages - as a taster - an idea I'm now testing with "Dispatches to the Next Generation - a taster" (see top-right column of blog)

update; I'm glad to see I'm not alone in searching for ways to discover whether a book will be useful  https://superorganizers.substack.com/p/surgical-reading-how-to-read-12-books

Masterclasses in reviewing non-fiction books

This is the first of a couple of posts looking at the lessons we can learn from two great practitioners of the reviewing non-fiction books – UK historian Richard Evans and German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck. 

Back in Bucharest, I took the opportunity yesterday to walk down the famous Calea Victoriei Bvd to the Kretzulescu Humanitas bookshop for the first time in many months and browse in the generous selection of English books it has. One of the titles which caught my eye was the rather fat The Empire of Democracy – from the 1970s to the end of the Cold War.

This is almost exactly the period I have been trying to cover in the current draft of Dispatches to the Next Generation which I uploaded a few days ago.

This called for the test to which I now subject interesting titles – namely check

- its “user-friendliness” (which nowadays includes size of font)

- whether it bothers to explain why yet another book should be inflicted on us (which requires the author to gives us a brief survey of the relevant literature and identify what’s distinctive about his/hers)

- its list of recommended reading

- make a note of the title and return home to google the reviews

In this case, the book claimed to be the 

“the first full account of the way the political life of Western democracies have been going for most of the past half-century” 

– a rather questionable claim given the scale of books about the crisis in western liberalism pouring from the presses in the past few years – let alone such books as Contesting Democracy – political ideas in 20^th century Europe by Jan-Werner Mueller (2013) which warrants only an endnote on page 794).

Nor is there is a recommended list of reading and, although the text certainly looked highly readable, I returned home reasonably clear that this was a 900 page book which would add little to my understanding of this important period in my life. 

Google gave me the excellent news that not only had historian Richard Evans reviewed The Empire of Democracy (in “The Nation”) but that he had given us a masterclass in the art of reviewing.

I should make it clear that Richard Evans is well known as a caustic reviewer – who gets as good as he gives, particularly in the London Review of Books which gives him full scope for both critical reviews of his own work and his own reviews of others. His 1998 book “In Defence of History” was mauled by a reviewer in LRB – occasioning eventually his own strong reply. One review of his brought forth energetic responses – as did this one 

In this case, too, Evans does not pull his punches – although he gives credit where it’s due. The review covers so many important points that I am reproducing it more or less in full……. 

Empire of Democracy – the remaking of the west since the cold war tells us how we got to where we are today - tracking the rise and fall of an economic, social, and political order that now seems to be under fundamental and potentially lethal pressure.

Despite, however, the convincing nature of his overall diagnosis of the strengths and weaknesses of neoliberalism, however, there are many problems with how Reid-Henry tells this story, starting with the narrative style in which he has chosen to cast it.

To put it bluntly, he doesn’t seem to be aware of even the most basic rules of historical narrative.

 

- Individual actors in the story, from Mitterrand to Trump, are introduced with only scant background information; important dates are missing in dense chapters; and statements and observations are ventured without any attempt to ground them in evidence. For a more or less random example, near the end of the book we are told that

 

      “Dodd-Frank had belatedly been passed in 2011, along with its famous Volcker rule.”

 

You have to read back more than 60 pages for any explanation as to what these things are. At roughly that time, Reid-Henry tells us on the very same page, 

“amplified by the extended reach of new media, the culture wars…leapt back into life as never before, as tirades blared out across the raucous and indiscriminating airwaves of shock-jock radio and Fox television.”

 He makes no attempt to unpack this sentence, simply assuming that readers will understand the references. But it’s not a safe assumption to make, and terms such as “culture wars” and “shock-jock radio” really do need to be explained for the uninitiated.

There are more substantive problems as well. For quite long stretches of the book, I found it difficult to understand the sweeping generalizations that pepper the text. For instance, what was “the distinctive sense of ennui that had haunted the Western democracies during the 1990s”? Among whom? Bored with what?

“Americans in particular,” we read a couple of pages earlier, “found themselves in a confusing place.” All Americans, and what place? “They were concerned about growing inequity,” the text continues, but we aren’t told how or why or which Americans were concerned or in what way.

 

Similar generalizations occur about other peoples, such as “the French,” who apparently “felt that they were immune from the troubles that had struck the United States, because their banking system was more prudent.”

Actually, most likely the vast majority of “the French” neither knew nor cared very much about their banking system, prudent or not. Later, we are told that a “declining sense of trust within society” in the early 21st century meant that “left and right now converged upon a resolutely anti-state ethos.”

Leaving aside the question of precisely which countries this applies to, one can think of myriad issues where this is simply untrue, from the introduction of the Sure Start program in the UK in 1998 to the British left’s growing demand for the renationalization of private utilities, including the railways (now part of the official program of the Labour Party), to the pressure exerted in the US by the right for the expansion of the state security apparatus in the “war against terror” and the persistent advocacy by Republicans of more state expenditure on the military.

 

Often, Reid-Henry’s use of the passive voice disguises an almost complete absence of detail: 

“the balance between freedom and democracy that Western liberal democracies had struggled for forty years to maintain was now rejected altogether.”

 What is the evidence for this struggle? Why should freedom and democracy be treated as opposites between which a balance needed to be maintained? And was this balance actually rejected by everyone? Or if only partially rejected—or not rejected at all—then by whom and when and where? It’s not even true of Poland and Hungary, where substantial forces remain in opposition to the right-wing nationalists currently in power.

 

In many sections, the book reads more like a commentary on events than an analytical narrative. The description of the election that put Barack Obama in the White House is a good example. There are some interesting observations on Sarah Palin, but we’re not told what public office she held before becoming a candidate for the vice presidency; the Tea Party is brought into the narrative, but we’re apparently expected to know what it was, who helped launch it, and what policies it advocated; and no statistics are provided for the election to indicate how many people voted for Obama and who they were.

 

The nature of Obama’s appeal is also largely left unexplored (his powerful catchphrase “Yes, we can!” isn’t even mentioned), and running throughout the book is also the highly dubious assumption that street politics exercise a profound effect on political systems, from the anti–Vietnam War movement, which the author tells us inaugurated the remaking of the West in the early 1970s, to the Occupy movement, which flared up briefly in 2011 and is now almost completely forgotten. Yet the more than 1 million people who marched through the streets of London on February 15, 2003, to protest the impending invasion of Iraq achieved precisely nothing, nor did the similar number of people who marched through the same streets on March 23, 2019, to demand that Britain remain in the European Union.

 

There are still many passages in this book that can be read with considerable profit: The account of the 2008–09 financial crisis is particularly perceptive, and one could mention many other examples. But there is a more fundamental and perhaps more interesting respect in which the book rests on a highly questionable assumption. Chief among these is the concept of “the West” itself and its linkage with liberalism and democracy.

Empire of Democracy falls into a long tradition of historical writing centred on predictions of the downfall of the West. In the 19th century, the idea of the West became a foil against which political theorists developed their recipes for progress and change. Russian Slavophiles rejected what they saw as Western individualism and the Western advocacy of material progress based on industrial capitalism, for example, while Russian Westernizers saw their country’s future very much in embracing these things. In the early 20th century, right-wing nationalists in Germany and Central Europe offered similar warnings, excoriating what they saw as the decadent materialism, spiritual weakness, and moral corruption of a West that was no longer able to prevent its own decline.

Foremost among them was Oswald Spengler, whose book Der Untergang des Abendlandes, usually translated as The Decline of the West, became hugely popular in Germany during the 1920s, largely because it was read as a prophecy of Germany’s resurgence under a future nationalist dictatorship and then was taken, not entirely accurately, as a prediction of Hitler’s coming to power in 1933.

Peak Oil?

A few weeks back I asked Whatever happened to Peak Oil? - and got a welcome comment from my ever-vigilant fellow blogger Boffy and from another reader. With some serendipity, an economics blog I follow posed the same question a few days later – and followed it up recently with an extensive answer which referred to an apparently famous bet that economist Julian Simon had made in the early 1980s with the famous environmentalist Paul Ehrlich that, over a decade, the prices of 5 raw resources would fall.

Ehrlich – having long argued the case that we were exhausting the earth’s resources – was emphatic that they would rise. The bet attracted a lot of attention – a lot was riding on it since each man represented schools of thought which had been locked in ideological combat. It was, surprisingly, the economist who won the bet – and fairly easily. The environmental cause has suffered massively ever since - for a typical article see this piece from “Wired”

The full story, I have discovered, was told in a book published in 2013 - “The Bet – Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon and our gamble over earth’s future” by (academic) Paul Sabin  

The history of Ehrlich and Simon’s conflict instead reveals the limitations of their incompatible viewpoints. Their bitter clash also shows how intelligent people are drawn to vilify their opponents and to reduce the issues that they care about to stark and divisive terms. The conflict that their bet represents has ensnared the national political debate and helped to make environmental problems, especially climate change, among the most polarizing and divisive political questions.

Sometimes rhetorical sparring partners hone each other’s arguments so that they are sharper and better. The opposite happened with Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon. Despite their respective strengths, both Ehrlich and Simon got carried away in their battle. The ready audience for their ideas encouraged them to make dramatic claims. Their unwillingness to concede anything in their often-vitriolic debate exacerbated critical weaknesses in each of their arguments.

I said the book gave the full story – but this isn’t strictly true since the author fails to mention that, as blogger Blair Fix puts it, 

“the switch from physical scarcity to prices is one of economists’ favorite tricks for dispelling concerns about sustainability”.

We tend to be fixated by short-term price fluctuations and forget that the issue is how this relates to more long-term income (which has, for past decade, been in decline). As Fix puts it, 

“the key is to realize that resources can get cheaper at the same time that they get less affordable”

I am painfully aware of how ignorant I am about this critical field of Energy and a blog by Gail Tverberg called “Our Finite World – exploring how oil limits affect the economy” looks exactly what I need – it’s run by an insurance actuaralist who now makes a good living from her work on the energy issue.

I’ve also started to read a new book Oilcraft – the myths of scarcity and security that haunt US Energy Policy; Robert Vitalis (2020) – with useful interviews here and here although, like many others, it looks to be more about geopolitics than scarcity but is so chaotically written that I have some difficulty in identifying the thrust of his argument. It does, however, look to be a very useful challenge to general beliefs about both imperialism and political control of oil prices – demonstrating, for example, that the prices of earth’s raw material move together,

Our Carbon Democracy is an earlier book which looks more at the geopolitics – as you will see from the author’s article in Dissent in 2015

Jeremy Leggett is a fascinating character who started in the oil industry but is now a mix of entrepreneur and activist who wrote The energy of nations in 2013 and has this website

a taster for "Dispatches to the Next Generation"

 As I was born DURING the second-world war, I strictly don’t qualify as a “baby-boomer” since those were born in the more optimistic period just after the war but, in all respects, I belong to that generation - with all the sense of disrespect if not entitlement we brought with us….

In trying, in the past few years, to write something I call “Dispatches to the Next Generation” from a selection of my blogposts over the past decade, I have found it developing into

·         a critique of the degeneration of the initially successful post-war economic and political systems; as well as

·         an attempt to understand the mistakes my generation made; and

·         an exploration of what we have to do to avoid the fate that seems in store for us all     

 I don’t pretend to be an economist – although I lectured in that capacity in the early 1970s before I saw the error of my ways

Nor is it easy to pin a political label on me – although I did spend 22 years of his life as a senior Labour councillor with responsibilities for devising and managing unique strategies for opening up the policy process and for developing social enterprise in what was then Europe’s largest local authority. The subsequent 22 years I spent as an adviser on institutional development to ministries in central Europe and Central Asia

In its present form, the book has both a short and long version and I realised today that it has a combination of formats and elements which make it fairly unique –

·         The booklet I have just uploaded is actually a taster to the longer book (300 pp) which is not yet satsifactory enough for uploading

·         The taster version now has a narrative and is long enough (150 pages) to be read as a stand-alone version  

·         It is available in the top-right corner of the blog and is called Dispatches Taster and contains hyperlinks to more than 70 short essays - each of which you can access by a simple click

·         A few of these are contained as samplers in the relevant chapter

·         The annexes contain a guide to some 200 books published in the last 60 years which have been specially annotated to give the reader a sense of their significance 

Indeed that book guide is of one the highlights – and should probably not be relegated to the final section of the book!

What you will find in each of the booklet chapters

 

Chapter Title	Thrust of chapter arguments	Supporting theories
1. Critical junctures identified	History is written by the victors. Events were often finely balanced. There’s too much fatalism around	Covid 19 as a Critical Juncture
2.Trespassing encouraged	Most leaders of organisations are in the grip of groupthink and need countervailing mechanisms of accountability to help them see new realities	Janis, t’Hart, Syad
3. Economics relegated	Basic model is badly flawed and needs urgent reinvention	Steve Keen,
4. The Blind men probe the Elephant	Talk of capitalism and post-capitalism is too loose. Are we really clear what the core and marginal aspects of the system are – and can the beast be reformed?	Brian Davey’s ”Credo”
5. A new social goal is sought for the commercial company	Shareholder value ignores other dimensions Cooperative and social enterprises employ more people than we think – but have to struggle for legitimacy	Paul Hirst Colin Mayer Ed Mayo
6. Lessons of change explored	So much protest fails and few social enterprises have a multiplier effect. How do we ensure that there is real learning?	Robert Quinn
7. Change agents and coalitions sought	Progressives are good at sounding off – and bad at seeking common ground	??
8. Bringing it all together	countervailing power social enterprise

 

Snippets – Telling stories

1. Think Tanks do not, these days, generally get a good press. They have been increasingly seen as cheerleaders for the exploitative causes of billionaires such as Charles Koch – with funders of more progressive causes such as Soros and Gates being in a tiny minority

But Enrique Endizabal is a well-intentioned technocrat who, a decade ago, set up an interesting Foundation called On Think Tanks to 

“study and support the development of such policy centres”  

It is a very active website and had just published the 2019 report on the activities of some 2800 think tanks throughout the world as well as videos from its recent 2020 virtual conference from which I’ve taken just one example – on story-telling about which I have written a few posts eg Passion as Servant of Reason and Stories we Tell

Perhaps the most powerful expose of the role of marketing in perverting our natural inclination to tell stories is Christian Salmon’s little book Storytelling – bewitchingthe modern mind (2010) nb this is an epub edition and requires conversion to pdf format

An obvious question to ask those who support Think Tanks is about their ethical practice – about how they can allow into their ranks those who receive money from the likes of the Koch brothers and who are in the business of deliberate deceit?

Sadly I could see no reference to Codes of Conduct in their section on communities of practice

2. Resilience – and the strength of our social systems

My favourite blogger is the Canadian survivalist who has a typically thoughtful post questioning whether the much vaunted concept of “resilience” can really be relied upon to get us through the intertwined challenges which lie ahead for the human race - 

What exactly are our “social systems”? They are, in essence, a vast array of tacit agreements on how we will individually and collectively behave. These agreements are built on a mutual trust that it is in the collective interest of everyone to respect them. Some examples:

·         Contribution to shared services: We agree to pay a fair amount of taxes, tithes or similar payments to finance what we agree to be “essential services” — our collective health, education, roads, communications and other infrastructure, and “defence” and “security”.

·         Abiding by laws: We agree to respect and uphold the laws of the land, even when we don’t agree with all of them.

·         Unified response to crises: We agree to subordinate our personal interests to some extent to the collective interest in times of recognized crisis (wars, depressions, “natural” disasters).

·         Allow governments to do their best: We respect governments to have the collective best interest of the whole population in mind, even when we disagree with what they see that best interest to be.

·         Universal rights and responsibilities: We agree to respect a broad set of rights and freedoms for everyone, and to amicably and peacefully resolve differences when these rights and freedoms are perceived to conflict. These rights include property rights. These rights and freedoms come with a commensurate set of responsibilities, including the responsibility to ensure one’s property doesn’t harm others, and the responsibility to dutifully discharge one’s debts so as to not undermine confidence in the system of exchange.

 

Since the 1980s — just 40 years ago — most of the population in most nations has moved from a profound respect for these agreements to a position of no longer accepting most or all of these agreements. That is neither a good nor a bad thing in itself, and it is certainly understandable given the current utter dysfunction of most of our human systems. But the prevalence of this new antipathy towards any basic social contracts has profound implications for social cohesion, locally, nationally and globally. 

3. An Alphabetical Approach to Journalism

In the world of anglo-american journalism there are only a few editorial names who commanded deep respect amongst journalists over the past half-century – Katherine Graham of The Washington Post; Harold Evans of The Sunday Times and Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian.

The first died 20 years ago and the second 2 months ago. But Rusbridger has just produced a highly accessible guide to modern journalism called “News and How to Use it” - reviewed here by the Guardian   

In an age of information chaos, a good newsroom is, to me, as essential as the police force, the hospital, the fire station or the prison.

 

Covid-19 could not have announced itself at a worse time in terms of the question about whom to   believe. Survey after survey has shown unprecedented confusion over where to place trust. Nearly two-thirds of adults polled by Edelman in 2018 said they could no longer tell a responsible source of news from the opposite.

 

This was not how it was supposed to be.

The official script for journalism was that once people woke up to the ocean of rubbish and lies all around them they’d come back to the safe harbour of professionally-produced news.

You couldn’t leave this stuff to amateurs or give it away for free. Sooner or later people would flood back to the haven of proper journalism.

 

This official narrative was not completely wrong – but nor was it right in the way the optimists hoped it would be. There was a surge of eyeballs to mainstream media sites, but it was too soon to judge if the increased traffic would remotely compensate for the drastic loss of revenues as copy sales plummeted and advertising disappeared. It normally didn’t.

At the very moment when the UK government recognized journalists as essential workers, the industry itself looked more fragile than ever. Surveys of trust showed the public (especially the older public) relying on journalists, but not trusting them.

Another Edelman special report in early March 2020 found journalists at the bottom of the trust pile, with only 43 per cent of those surveyed holding the view that you could believe them ‘to tell the truth about the virus’. That compared with 63 per cent for ‘a person like yourself’.

 

Now, four years on from being full-time in the newsroom, I want to bring an insider’s perspective to the business of journalism, but also look at it from the outside. How can we explain ‘journalism’ to people who are by and large sceptical – which is broadly what most of us would want our fellow citizens to be? This book aims to touch on some of the things about journalism that might help a reader decide whether it deserves their trust, and offer a glimpse to working journalists of how they are viewed by the world outside.

 

Now, four years on from being full-time in the newsroom, I want to bring an insider’s perspective to the business of journalism, but also look at it from the outside. How can we explain ‘journalism’ to people who are by and large sceptical –which is broadly what most of us would want our fellow citizens to be?

 

This book aims to touch on some of the things about journalism that might help a reader decide whether it deserves their trust, and offer a glimpse to working journalists of how they are viewed by the world outside.

 

I have written in these pages about techniques, about transparency (or lack of it), about the people who own the press and how their influence works. I have written about some of the most celebrated practitioners of journalism and realise that, even after days spent looking into some of their work, I still have no measure of how much they should be trusted.

 

If that’s true of me, having worked in this imperfect trade for forty years or more, how can we possibly expect an average reader to navigate this maze? Should they pick a brand rather than an individual journalist? We have seen all too clearly how institutions change. Titles that were once incorruptible, or at least honestly campaigning – the Telegraph, the Express, the News of the World come to mind – can mutate into organisations that are ethically and editorially challenged. Why, at their worst, would anyone single them out for trust?

 

And then there are things that, as I’ve come to write this book, I find myself unable to explain. I can’t see why an industry that is fighting for trust and credibility would knowingly employ columnists who, for instance, are ignorant of the truth of climate change. Why would you do that? If journalism is trying to persuade sceptical readers that it is the safe harbor of reality, why would it handsomely reward and celebrate people for writing rubbish?

The book is highly readable – its entries are a series of mini-essays in alphabetical order and can be accessed at News and How to Use it: Alan Rusbridger (2020)