WHISTLING IN THE WIND

Rather belatedly I’m uploading this past year’s collection of posts to which I’ve given the title Whistling in the wind. According to the dictionary, “Whistling in the Wind” means trying to change something which cannot be changed. 2023 was certainly a grim year – Russia’s brutal invasion continuing to murder hundreds of thousands and Israel inflicting ethnic cleansing on the Palestinians. 

And the world seems consumed with hatred and bitterness. 
But I certainly don’t want to give succour to those who believe it can never be 

changed. The title of this year’s collection is rather meant to convey the sense 

of being in a select group in fighting against the irrationality and fatalism 

gripping our societies. 
It’s interesting to look at some previous titles of these collections -

This too will Pass – the 2022 posts - a title which perhaps fell into the trap of fatalism

Voices in the Air – the 2021 posts - a title from the famous quote from Keynes when he talked of the unnoticed influence of books on our minds

Peripheral Vision – the 2020 posts. This celebrates the blog’s notion of creativity

To Whom it may Concern – the 2019 posts. Normally written in support of someone’s application

The Search for the Holy Grail – the 2018 posts Something I’ve been guilty of

Common Endeavour – the 2017 posts An important concept for me

The Slaves’ Chorus – the 2016 posts I remember listening to an emotional rendering of this chorus in a Brno theatre in 1990. I hadn’t realised that the full title of this song is actually the Hebrew Slaves’ Chorus

In Praise of Doubt – a blogger’s year (2015) An allusion to the Brecht poem of that title

Let me draw your attention to some important features of the blog -

List of E-books

It took me some time to realise that the blog contained an amazing resource for English-speakers….the top-right corner has the list of E-books which have resulted from a careful selection and editing of the posts. They are, effectively, annotated guides to such subjects as -

• change – in all its aspects

• culture in the broadest sense

• patterns of decline

• The critical writing of the past half century about our economic system

• The literature on administrative reform

• The debate about Scottish independence over the past decade

• Cultural aspects of countries such as Romania, Bulgaria and Germany

I can safely say that no such guides exist elsewhere in the English language. But I’m not able to crack the question of their wider dissemination. They’re little use if noone knows of their existence!! This is an issue I have to address. Ironically, however, the “resource” offered by the reading lists which have become such a feature of the blog is not something I seem to avail myself of too frequently! I tend all too often to “skim and save” – and generally fail to return to the link and read it properly. At this time when New Year Resolutions are so popular, there’s a bad habit I need to discipline!!

“Insights into other worlds – good writing and painting”

– aka Blogroll This offers hyperlinks to some 70 sites which I follow. At the end of each year I note the new links I subscribe to and remove those which no longer function. The new entrants are -

https://accidentalgods.life/ wonderful site which mixes environmental concerns with existential and spiritual

https://aurelien2022.substack.com/ one of the most interesting new links which “tries to understand the world” with someone with senior experience in both government and academia

https://areopagus.culturaltutor.com/profile breathtaking insight (and sounds of) to cultural treasures

https://memex.naughtons.org/ an IT journalist’s diary

Those which no longer function and have been removed include

Scottish Review, a great little internet weekly whose superb writing can still be seen here

Public admin Reform – my own site which was suddenly removed

Renegade Inc

4. Search Facility

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

LINKS – and what they tell you about someone

My blogroll lists 70 blogs I try to follow – one being an old site of mine which was suddenly removed, without notice. So, be warned, all those precious papers and books could suddenly vanish!!. And buying a web address is not a solution – as this, just as easily, can also vanish via a takeover. Indeed that’s just happened to one of my bank accounts – NatWest International who seem to have taken over the Royal Bank of Scotland - which has intimated that they are closing the account in which I have 5k dollars in late January. They offer no option to allow me to transfer the money to another account. Such are the ways of corporate capitalism.

But revenons aux moutons – to the matter of what links can tell you about a person. The last post led with a link to a file containing a 100 page list of the hyperlinks I had selected this year for their interest. Both the blogroll and this list of hyperlinks tell you a lot about what grabs my interest – for example.

The Journal of Intellectual History is onec of my favourite journals and occasionally has free articles. Two recent were

Neoliberalism – an intellectual history N Mulder review of 3 recent books

one on Anti-fascism which places the literature in the wider context of anti-colonialism

We are not ready - policymaking in the era of era of environmental breakdown

(IPPR 2020) which assesses the UK against 3 criteria

Putting the Gaza ethnic cleansing in context

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/12/18/chris-hedges-the-death-of-israel/

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/12/12/patrick-lawrence-gaza-confronting-power/

https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-currents/israeli-apartheid-and-its-apologists/

Human Rights Watch 2021 Report on Israeli use of apartheid

polarisation article

https://economy2030.resolutionfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Ending-stagnation-final-report.pdf

In the Ruins of the Present Vijay Prashad 2018

How to understand a world of unemployment and annihilation, of poverty, climate catastrophe and war? What concepts do we have to grasp these complex realities? The modes of thought that come from North American positivism – game theory, regression analysis, multi-level models, inferential statistics – are at a loss to offer a general theory of our condition. Steeped in common sense understandings of power and naive about the role of elites in our world, these approaches might explain this or that aspect of our world.

https://www.councilestatemedia.uk/p/politicians-who-respected-kissinger?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

https://www.noemamag.com/what-ai-teaches-us-about-good-writing/

Some recent Development material

Newsletter from “thinking and working politically”

Promoting institutional and organisational development 2003

Fragility, Risk and Resilience UN 2016

understanding institutional analysis

civil servants, social norms and corruption

And the number of downloadable BOOKS is increasing eg

• Tomorrow’s Communities Henry Tam 2022

• The Gutenberg Parenthesis Jeff Jarvis 2023

• The Ecology of Freedom M Bookchin 1982

• Institutions Taking Root - Building State Capacity in Challenging Contexts World Bank 2014

• The Government Analyics Handbook – leveraging data to strengthen public administration D Rogger and C Schuster World Bank Sept 2023

• Passion, Craft and Method in Comparative Politics Gerardo Munck and Richard Snyder 2007

• Globalisation and contestation - the new great counter-movement Ronaldo Munck 2007

• Digital Transformation and public services A Larsson and R Teigland 2020

• Struggle makes us human Vijay Prashad 2022

• Prisoners of Time - prussians, germans and other humans chris clark 2021

• Walter Kempowski’s Familienchronic thesis 1990

• The Language of Politics Adrian Beard 2000

• Faith seeking Conviviality Sam Ewell 2020

SOME RECENT LINKS

My hyperlinks have been piling up – indeed those for the full year already fill more than a hundred pages. I find them very useful as reminders of my daily finds. So time to identify what I have found useful in the last few weeks. It’s not all focused on texts – there have been some useful discussions on both video and podcast. I have huge respect for John Mearsheimer who engages here in discussion with Stephen Pinker about Reason and the Enlightenment

Cornel West is another who commands admiration and has a rather mutual-congratulary discussion here with Gabor Mate

“The Great Unravelling” is a term used increasingly to denote the “polycrises” which seem to be bedevilling the world and is explained in a useful report from the Post-Carbon Institute which is important background for this podcast exploration by David Runciman on whether the “anthropocene” is a useful term or whether “Leviacene” night not be a better term

Duncan Green is an Oxfam blogger I follow who frequently confronts the issue of power which is also the topic American academic Jeff Pfeffer writes about- this being a recent typical piece of his on the subject

Moses Naim wrote The End of Power (2013) about how powerful people in powerful roles are experiencing greater limits on their power. Naim notes how many people with fancy titles had confided in him about the perceived (or claimed) gaps between the power others attributed to them and both what they could get done and their own self-expressed perceptions of their power. When Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame launched a book club, he named this book his first selection. I trust you appreciate the irony. As I write this, Zuckerberg is recentralizing his control over Facebook, and of course Facebook, like many of its Silicon Valley peers, has a supermajority voting structure that assures that Zuckerberg cannot be fired regardless of what he does. Some people may face the end of power or limits on their power, but certainly not Zuckerberg; a lot fewer people have tenuous power than claim to.

In this same book, which I often hear about as an example of how theories and realities of power have fundamentally changed, Naim asks what globalization was doing to economic concentration. The presumption was that the globalization of business—and therefore, competition—would disperse economic power. He asked that question in 2013. By now the answer is clear, and it is not what many expected. Not only in the US but around the world, antitrust authorities are girding for battle because globalization has increased the concentration of power and wealth, particularly in technology multinationals but in other industries as well, such as telecommunications and even retail (perhaps you have heard of Amazon?). Following the 2008–2009 financial crisis, banks that were criticized as being too big to fail got—bigger. The story of nonexistent antitrust enforcement and increasing concentration of economic power is one often empirically told.

Then there are Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms, authors of New Power (2018) Their thesis is that power wasn’t ending, but that power and its bases and use were being fundamentally transformed by things like the internet, social media, and new communication modalities. The result of this social and technological change was to be greater democratization, a word they use often, as the ideas of new power would make power less concentrated and available to more people. Their basic argument, expressed by numerous others, was that the ability of many individuals to readily acquire a communications platform (think blogs and accounts on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram) and to easily access the world’s information (think Google) would lead to a proliferation of innovation and social movements. Much like the oft-discussed but ultimately unsuccessful Arab Spring, there would be, to take a phrase from the 1960s, more power to the people, including those lacking formal positions of power.

Unfortunately, reality intruded, and the most successful users of the new communication methods and social media platforms turned out to be those who already held political and economic power.

More to follow

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