How many of us have actually taken time to ask - How do we know what we know?

Funny how words get invested, suddenly, with new meaning. Until very recently I’ve used the term “sceptical” with pride – it meant challenging what John Kenneth Galbraith called in the 1950s “the conventional wisdom” and few were, for me, better at this than Bertrand Russell whose Sceptical Essays I remember devouring in the late 1950s. In a new Introduction written recently, John Gray says - 

Russell had great admiration for Joseph Conrad and one of the reasons was surely his suspicion that Conrad’s sceptical fatalism was a truer account of human life than his own troubled belief in reason and science.

As reformer, Russell believed reason could save the world. As a sceptical follower of Hume he knew reason could never be more than the slave of the passions. “Sceptical Essays” (1928) was written as a defence of rational doubt. Today we c,an read it as a confession of faith, the testament of a crusading rationalist who doubted the power of reason. 

But now, thanks to climate and vaccination ”sceptics”, the word has become tainted with connotations of conspiracy, irrationality and tribalism. I want to understand –

-       how this apparent retreat to irrationality has happened and

-       what we can do about it 

Let me offer some tentative thoughts

-       for some reason, we have become more polarised in our thinking

-       the general consensus seems to be that the social media are to blame

-       as a good sceptic, I’m not so sure

-       perhaps increased educational opportunities have simply made us more aware of the subjectivities in our “take on reality” (pop psychology is a huge growth industry)

-       we have certainly become more aware, in the past decade, of the importance of “story-telling” whose importance first became obvious to me only a decade ago although people like Edward Bernays and Joseph Goebbels have been preaching its significance for almost a century and Alex Evans’ The Myth Gap appeared in  2017.

Evans was also the co-author of one of the most thoughtful pieces about polarisation which appeared in 2019 - Rebuilding Common Ground produced by a group which calls itself variously “Collective Psychology” or “Larger Us”. It’s a great analysis about what’s happened – although I’m not quite convinced by his recipes.

I have a feeling that too much of this is driven by attempts to be different and that we need to return to some of the basic issues of epistemology – namely “how do we know what we think we know”? Completely by accident, I stumbled a couple of days ago on a book entitle From Belief to Knowledge published in 2011 by Douglas and Wykowski. The focus may be organisational change but most of the book is a rare intellectual exploration – by 2 consultants - of a subject I have to confess I’ve spent too little time bothering to understand, put off to an extent by its name – epistemology. It’s not the easiest of reads but, fortunately, I also discovered another (downloadable) book which explores the same issue at a much more practical level - The Knowing-Doing Gap (2000)

Avoiding Best Practice

The last few posts (on cultural values) have led me back to the draft of a little book I abandoned two years ago – Crafting Effective Public Management - a collection of personal reflections about the craft I have followed now for almost 50 years.

As it stands, the document represents the musings I penned as I tried to understand the lessons from the very distinctive work which has occupied me for most of the last half of this period – namely reforming institutions of local and central state administration in ex-communist countries in these regions....

The opening section of the book (Part 1) was written in the late 1990s as I was trying to explain to a Central European audience the nature and significance of the changes in organising the business of government which started in britain in the 1970s and soon became global in scope. Separated geographically by then for almost a decade from that world, I could perhaps aspire to a measure of distance if not objectivity….

“Managing Change” may have been at the height of fashion then back home but the projects funded in the “newly-liberated countries” by Europe (and America) were not in the business of “catalysing” change but rather “imposing” it….”This is the way it's going to be”!! I vividly remembering the ticking off I got from the German company which employed me when, as Director of an Energy Centre in Prague, I offered some ideas for how the centre’s work might better fit the Czecho-Slovak context (it was 1992). Their response was classic - “We do not pay you to think – we pay you to obey”……I kid you not!! German friends tell me that there are traces in that formulation of the old Prussian influence!

It became obvious to me that these centres (funded by the European Commission) which purported to be helping countries of the ex-soviet bloc adjust to new ways of energy conservation were in fact little more than fronts for the selling of western technology…

“Best practice” was the phrase which the British private sector consultants were bringing with them to projects and was one to which I was starting to object. It was in Tashkent in 2000 that I first drafted material to make a point about the relative novelty of the government procedures in Europe which passed for “best practice” (whether in matters of hiring or procurement) and the number of exceptions one could find not just in southern European countries but even in the heart of Europe…..

As writers such as Ha-Joon Chang have documented in the development field, a lot of kidology was clearly going on!

Old draft material is like a good cheese or wine – it needs time to mature. And, rereading my material on ”crafting effective PM” made me realise that, despite my own determination since the beginning of my work here always to start from the local context and to find ”local champions”, I felt it needed more detail on how exactly to avoid the trap of "the best practice" formulae which are embedded in most EC guidelines...  

I have never been a fan of the World Bank but its Governance Reforms under real world conditions (2006) is one of the best reads - one paper in particular (by Matthew Andrews which starts part 2 of that book) weaves a very good approach around 3 words – “acceptance”, “authority” and “ability”. 
I enthused about the paper in a 2010 post and notice that he (and a couple of colleagues) have another book out - Building State Capability  - on the same theme of the need for a practical, ”learning approach” The book can be downloaded in its entirety from the publisher here.....

It’s got too much jargon for my taste; rather overdoes the analyses of individual (African and Asian) countries; and disfigures every line of every page with this annoying academic habit which groups names in brackets to prove that the author has read everything - but its basic argument is very important and can be read in this earlier paper by Andrews and Moorcock about something called ”Capability Traps”. 

“capability traps can be avoided and overcome by fostering different types of interventions…..which - 

(i) aim to solve particular problems in local contexts,

(ii) through the creation of an ‘authorizing environment’ for decisionmaking that allows ‘positive deviation’ and experimentation,

(iii) involving active, ongoing and experiential learning and the iterative feedback of lessons into new solutions, doing so by

(iv) engaging broad sets of agents to ensure that reforms are viable, legitimate and relevant—i.e., politically supportable and practically implementable.

We propose this kind of intervention as an alternative approach to enhancing state capability, one we call Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA). We emphasize that PDIA is not so much ‘new’ thinking as an attempt at a pragmatic and operational synthesis of related

The authors are part of an increasing number of people who want, like me, to “do development differently” – a few years back it was called…. political analysis……. From Political Economy to Political Analysis (2014) is an excellent overview of the thinking process

The basic ideas can be expressed a bit more simply -

- Fixing on an issue widely seen as problematic

- Getting people to admit that it can’t be solved by the usual top-down approach

- Getting wide ”buy-in” to this

- Bringing people together from all sectors which are touched by the issue

- Starting from an analysis of where we find ourselves  (reminds me of a philosophical colleague known for his phrase “We are where we are”!)

- Avoiding polarisation

- Working patiently to seek a feasible and acceptable solution

Fairly simple steps - which, however, conflict with prevailing political cultures – and not just in Central Europe!!

Feelings....

William Davies is a writer I have grown to respect whose third book “Nervous States – democracy and the Decline of Reason” (2018) is a highly original analysis of how feelings seem in recent years to have overwhelmed western societies.

It is perhaps best seen as a trilogy with “The Happiness Industry – how the Government and Big Business sold us Well-Being” (2015) and “The Limits of Neoliberalism – authority, sovereignty and the logic of competition” (2014) being its predecessors.

“Nervous States” was one of the first books I read from the latest Amazon arrival and certainly encourages me to read his earlier two books. There have been surprisingly few serious reviews of the book – LRB, certainly, didn’t take it seriously and the Jacobin review from which I initially quote disappears up its own arse in the second half. The Point mag (to which I am currently subscribed) has a very good interview with the author (translated from Die Merkur) which does justice to the richness of the book. 

But the first question and answer in the New Yorker’s interview gave a good sense of the book’s originality 

What was it in the seventeenth century that changed how we organize our society, and that we’re now at risk of losing or have already lost today?

A different mentality, a different political project, emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century, which was one that essentially trusted a certain group of people—and this is the same group that is routinely denigrated as being some kind of élite or liberal élite nowadays—to set aside their own personal opinions or feelings or preferences in order to observe and report on the state of the world in an objective, impartial fashion.

We’ve taken that for granted for some time, that this is possible, and this is something that is present not only in the institutions of the state, such as public administration and the judiciary, but it’s also something that scholarship, academic science depends on, that journalism to a greater or lesser extent depends on.

There needs to be some kind of trust: these people are not acting in their own private or political interests when they’re doing this but are able to park their feelings, their own perspective. One of the claims I make in the book is that this is a peacekeeping mentality.

 The Jacobin’s review starts well - 

A veteran scholar of neoliberalism, Davies has drawn on a wide set of genres — history, philosophy, political science, medicine — to explain the “decline of reason” subtitle of his book.

In the seventeenth century, a twin set of abstracted languages were born: the abstract system of signs set up by modern commerce and science and the system of “abstract” representative government. Each of these moments has its own protagonists in Davies’s book. Not just Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes and Francis Bacon but, arguably, the first technocrat William Petty’s “political arithmetic” - as inventors of the modern state, commerce and modern science.

Then there is the anti-rationalist camp, in which we find Friedrich Hayek, Sigmund Freud, Gustave Le Bon, Napoléon, and Donald Trump, who together initiate the much-lamented “decline of reason.”

 

Modernity’s twin system of representation (modern science and the representative state) has seen a dramatic loss of legitimacy in the last thirty years.

- Science has lost its glow and has retreated into a citadel of expertise.

- Party-politics and parliaments, in turn, have lost their attraction, with decreasing memberships and increasing popularity for referendums from populists.

The result is a two-pronged “crisis of representation,” both on scientific and political fronts.

 Davies is very good on how trade led to the development of the system of trust which allowed bills to be issued and exchanged; and subsequently to the wider system of trust of middlemen and experts. I was less convinced by his attempt to explain the new emotionality and polarisation which has crept into politics with reference to bodily functions…..I don’t know why he doesn’t run with the story told so well in “Fantasyland – how America went haywire – a 500 year history” which I wrote about only last week

For me, the crucial issue is that the expertise that guides decision-making is completely detached from popular control. 

The knowledge used for central bank policy, for instance, is determined in tight-knit think tanks, not open public assemblies.

One of Davies’s central players in this story is the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek - one of the earliest voices to recognize the distinct role emotions play in our economic lives. In Hayek’s view, if one wanted “to understand economic and social changes,” one was

 

“far better off consulting the people who actually make the changes happen — the consumers, entrepreneurs, managers — than experts looking at these events from some presumed position of neutral objectivity.”

This, of course, is the “tacit knowledge” celebrated by the likes of James C Scott,  Ivan Illich and anarchists such as David Graeber…….

WHAT SORT OF FUTURE ARE WE LEAVING BEHIND?

Climatologists may overwhelmingly (the exact figure is some 97%) be convinced that global warming is a real and immediate threat - but the public is not so easily persuaded. Our reasons are many and diverse

• The world's climate tends to go in cycles – remember the Ice ages

• experts are increasingly suspect – their forecasts often turn out to be falsified

• technological innovations will save us

Beneath such rationalisations lies an almost religious belief in the idea of “Progress” which has recently become the subject of increasing criticism

As individuals, we deal with the threat of global warming in a whole variety of different ways -

• we deny it

• we mobilise and protest

• we accept fatalistically that future generations are doomed and feel guilty

• we invent a new vocabulary – of “resilience”

• and resort to notions of local self-sufficiency” and “degrowth”

This post is about two climate activists whose writing has engaged my interest in the last few days – Rupert Read and Jem Bendell. Read is one of the founders of Extinction Revolution but has just left his posiyion as a philosophy academic to concentrate on his activism. Bendell is a geographer who has edited a book jointly with Read

Let me start with Read's latest book - Why Climate Breakdown Matters (2022) which starts with reminding us of the anxieties we had in earlier decades

Not so well known is that in 1983, we came even closer to nuclear war. This was instigated by a flock of geese flying across the edge of the Soviet Union. The USSR’s radar systems misidentified this avian excursion as a series of incoming nuclear missiles. It was only due to the prompt action, or (if you will) inaction, of an intelligent and calm Russian officer (not even a very senior officer), that nuclear missiles weren’t released in response to those geese. Against protocol, he delayed authorizing a retaliatory strike, until the looming threat was unmasked as simply birds. This episode is documented in a film called “The Man Who Saved the World” and the title is apposite: he did.....

Thankfully, Read's book is a short one. We are so overwhelmed with books on the subject (and many others) that I have several times appealed to writers and publishers to discipline themselves and give us shorter books (ideally half his length!). But because its a recent book, it's able to trawl over the writing of the past four decades on the issue and identify their shortcomings -

While discussion of the science is abundant, discussion of the social, political and economic ramifications of taking the science fully seriously is typically far more marginalized. For instance, most of ‘Political Science’ and of Sociology still simply ignore the way that the ecological crisis will entirely transform our world in the lifetime of students now studying these subjects at university. Browsing through the latest issues of top philosophy journals reveals a similar lacuna in the discipline, with some notable exceptions. This is insupportable and unethical. But it is part of a wider trend.

And why has there been so little focus on adaptation in climate activism, climate politics, and climate science? Adaptation is creeping steadily up the international agenda, but is still not being taken anywhere near as seriously as mitigation/prevention.

Most books on the subject are equivocal about future prospects but Read is emphatic that we are far beyond the tipping point - hence the emphasis on adaptation. He stresses the need to think about our children and the importance of future generations

Conventional wisdom in mainstream climate activism has until recently – until the game-changing advent of the likes of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion – said that if we direct people’s attention to the scale and severity of present and impending ecological collapse, then they will abandon all hope in the face of it and will fail to act against it. The consensus has largely been that messages of hope and progress motivate, while those of impending catastrophe and failure demotivate and alienate otherwise receptive audiences. In short, put on a happy face (p16)

Social responses we can expect to emerge as the intensity and frequency of disasters is amplified – as it will be. I draw on the work of disaster studies scholars that shows that the popular narrative of these events as a catalyst for the worst elements of our nature is (thankfully) hugely inaccurate. Instead, thoughtful and attentive empirical research suggests that disasters are often the scene of intense community building. This shatters an important cultural myth about human nature. More importantly, it is also a source of real hope for fast changes in our attitudes to climate breakdown. It may be that from the aftermath of disasters we can seize renewed vigour for creating a better and more resilient world. (p21)

An important theme which occurs in the book is that of challenging our obsession with economics growth - and leads me to the subject of degrowth which has been the subject of some challenging books eg Post-Growth – life after capitalism; by Tim Jackson

During the year 2020, the world witnessed the most extraordinary experiment in non-capitalism that we could possibly imagine. We now know that such a thing is not only possible. It’s essential under certain circumstances. The goal of this book is to articulate the opportunities that await us in this vaguely glimpsed hinterland. (p12) Post Growth is an invitation to learn from history

Beyond the ‘fairytales of economic growth’ lies a world of complexity that demands our attention. Those fairytales are coded into the guidance manual of the modern economy. They’ve been there for decades. They continue to distort our understanding of social progress and prevent us from thinking more deeply about the human condition.

The broad thesis of this book is that good lives do not have to cost the earth. Material progress has changed our lives –in many ways for the better. But the burden of having can obscure the joy of belonging. The obsession with producing can distort the fulfilment of making. The pressure of consuming can undermine the simple lightness of being. Recovering prosperity is not so much about denial as about opportunity.

Robert Kennedy's Kansas speech attacking growth

That single number ‘measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country’, concluded Kennedy. ‘It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.’.....

JS Mill was saying that a postgrowth world may be a richer, not a poorer, place for all of us. And it’s that vision of a richer, more equitable, more fulfilling world – glimpsed by Mill and demanded by Kennedy and developed by Daly – which provides the inspiration for the arguments in this book.

There's a great conversation with Jackson here and a critique of the book here

Let me end with a superb post from my favourite blogger about the chaos which seems to be descending on us all

In ‘chaotic’ economic and political systems that means oligopolies, bribes, extortion and other ‘officially illegal’ activities may prevail without limit. In some cases, organized crime actually substitutes its own laws, rules and constraints, to deal with the chaos.

What I think we are starting to see this century is gradually increasing levels of chaos in much of the world. In fact, the increasing number of the world’s economies that are dominated by oligopolies and organized crime might actually be a little less chaotic than countries that are still trying to play by the rules. In countries ruled by oligarchs and organized crime, you at least know who you have to pay off, and how much, and the consequences if you don’t. That may be despotic, but it isn’t chaos.

If the system collapses to the point that even oligopolies and organized crime cannot maintain order, then you have at least short-term chaos and possibly anarchy. Immediately, in order to get essential things done (like food and energy diThe Future is Degrowth A Vetter and J Vansint 2022stribution), ad hoc systems will emerge.

Resource

 a review of degrowth literature (2022) 

 Deep Adaptation – navigating the realities of climate chaos ed J Bendell and R Read (2021)

Rethinking Readiness – a brief guide to 21^st century megadisasters 2020

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii128/articles/kenta-tsuda-naive-questions-0n-degrowth 2021

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii115/articles/mark-burton-peter-somerville-degrowth-a-defence.pdf 2019

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii112/articles/robert-pollin-de-growth-vs-a-green-new-deal 2018

Previous posts on the issue

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/08/climate-change.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2014/07/why-we-disagree-on-wicked-problems.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/08/climate-change.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/11/is-patriotism-answer.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2022/08/why-polarisation-and-what-can-be-done.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/07/oberheated.html

And a newsflash https://bylinetimes.com/2023/09/06/courts-to-face-wave-of-protests-as-climate-campaigners-say-right-to-jury-trial-under-attack/

Those Clever Romans – the tactical Playbook of the Corporate Elites

That’s half a dozen posts I’ve done in a row on the apparent increased divisiveness in our societies – without any real attempt at either explanation or prescription. Indeed the blog’s focus on political frustration can be traced back to the first mention of the pending election in Bulgaria at the beginning of April. The posts since then have argued that -

- few (if any) societies can any longer claim to be democratic

- we need, very loudly, to be exposing such claims to be the falsehoods they are

- a better vision of democracy needs to be articulated

- pressure groups should coalesce around the demand for citizen juries – initially at a municipal level to demonstrate their benefits

- political parties no longer serve any useful purpose

- we should be insisting that governments start focusing on the big issues - which governments currently seem incapable of even attempting to deal with

- using citizen juries

- governments, in other words, should govern

So let me try to pull the posts together by questioning the way the media has placed the issue of political polarisation on the agenda. It’s clear that social media have increased the rancour of the tone of conversations - - certainly since Twitter started in 2006.

But can we really blame the social media for the strong and sustained political divisions? The fact that 70% of US Republican party members still cannot accept the validity of Jo Biden’s victory in the 2020 Presidential elections certainly indicates not just a very significant shift in the US political mood but a major question about the resilience and legitimacy of that country’s basic political system. This may or may not be part of “American exceptionalism” but is certainly very serious.

But the wider populist backlash against elite rule is part of something much deeper – and was there for anyone with any sensitivity to see some 20 years ago. I don’t profess to have any particular skills of foresight but in 2001 I drafted a short note which forms the first seven pages of this longer paper (written a decade later). I summarised the basic message at the time thus

·       The “mixed economy” which existed from 1950-1980 was an effective system for the West.

·       It worked because power was diffused. Each type of power – economic (companies/banks etc), political (citizens and workers) and legal/admin/military (the state) – balanced the other. None was dominant.

·       deindustrialisation has, however, now undermined the power which working class people were able to exercise in that period through votes and unions

·       a thought system has developed which justifies corporate greed and the privileging (through tax breaks and favourable legislation) of the large international company

·       All political parties and most media have been captured by that thought system which now rules the world

·       People have, as a result, become cynical and apathetic

·       Privatisation is a disaster – inflicting costs on the public and transferring wealth to the few

·       Two elements of the “balanced system” (Political and legal power) are now supine before the third (corporate and media power). The balance is broken and the dominant power ruthless in its exploitation of its new freedom

·       It is very difficult to see a “countervailing power” which would make these corporate elites pull back from the disasters they are inflicting on us

·       Social protest is marginalized - not least by the combination of the media and an Orwellian “security state” ready to act against “dissidence”

·       But the beliefs which lie at the dark heart of the neo-liberal project need more detailed exposure

·       as well as its continued efforts to undermine what little is left of state power

·       We need to be willing to express more vehemently the arguments against privatisation - existing and proposed

·       to feel less ashamed about arguing for “the commons” and for things like cooperatives and social enterprise (inasmuch as such endeavours are allowed) 

But the elite - and the media which services their interests - noticed something was wrong only when Brexit and Trump triumphed – 5 years ago. But that was simply the point at which the dam broke – the pressure had been building up for much longer.

If we really want to understand what is going on we have to go much further back – not just 20 years but probably at least 50 years – as Anthony Barnett, for one, most recently argued in his extended essay “Out of the Belly of Hell” (2020)

The demos have been giving the Elites a clear warning – “your social model sucks”. Some may not like some aspects of what the crowd is saying – for example the border restrictions….but we ignore its message at our peril. So far I don’t see a very credible Elite response. Indeed, the response so far reminds me of nothing less than that of the clever Romans who gave the world Bread and Circuses. Governments throughout the world have a common way of dealing with a problem – which runs like this –

-       Deny the problem

-       Rubbish the critics

-       Blame the victim

-       Marginalise the issue – concede a little by suggesting that the problem was caused by “just a few bad pennies”

-       set up an Inquiry

-       But ensure (by its composition and direction) that it goes nowhere

-       Compartmentalise the responsibility – to confuse

-       Sacrifice a few lambs

-       Bring on the games and spectacle

-       clowns and jesters

-       Feed the dogs with scraps

-       Starve any programme conceded of serious funds

-       Take the credit for any eventual concession that there was indeed a problem

Suggested Background Reading

We are so  swamped with books these days that someone like me can offer only what catches his eye. But the OECD, Lakoff and Tarrow are significant sources which should be taken seriously!

Catching the Deliberative Wave (OECD 2020) Executive summary of recent important book Innovate Citizen Participation and new democratic institutions - catching the Deliberative Wave which tries to help the global elite make sense of the latest challenge to their rule

Macron’s Grand Debat; useful article about the French approach

citizen jury experience (2016) german; rather academic

Creating Freedom – the lottery of birth, the illusion of consent, the fight for freedom Raoul Martinez (2016) Fascinating book which starts from the proposition that the current failure of our social systems must lead us to question our foundational beliefs

Can Democracy be Saved?  - participation, deliberation and social movements; Donatella Della Porta (2013)  Too much of the discussion on democracy is conducted by anglo-saxon political scientists. Here an Italian sociologist makes the connection to the social movement literature

The New Machiavelli – how to wield power in the modern world ; Jonathan Powell (2011) Tony Bliar’s Chief of Staff does some musing about the government class thinking

Moral politics – how conservatives and liberals think; George Lakoff (1996) an important psychologist sets out our tribal thinking

Power in movement – social movement and contentious politics; Sydney Tarrow (2011 edition – first in 1994) one of the key writers in this field

Metaphors we live By  George Lakoff (1980) our very words betray us