Key points
a celebration of intellectual trespassing by a retired "social scientist" as he tries to make sense of the world.....
what you get here
Monday, December 31, 2018
The Search for the Holy Grail
Key points
Wednesday, November 4, 2020
Celebrating the Open Free Spirit
In the eleven years of blogging, I occasionally muse about the nature of blogging. When I’m in a (self-) critical mood I refer to it as an extreme form of self-advertisement; in more benign moods I talk about its role in clarifying confused thinking….
And, of course, I’ve noticed that most serious blogs specialise in a particular topic – be it novels; economic, political or legal commentary; the EU; social policy; Marxist economics; a particular academic discipline etc
What I haven’t paid enough attention to is how few serious blogs there are – like this one - which challenge these boundaries and choose to tramp or trespass in what I have called “NO Man’s Land”. The other image I have used is that of the butterfly which gracefully alights for a few moments on a flower and then moves on. I should perhaps be more careful in my use of that image/metaphor since the butterfly’s life is a short one
So in closing, for the moment, this series of “posts…so far this year”, I want to try to identify those few blogs which set their face against being enclosed by boundaries and range more freely.
1. Let me start with someone who has sadly gone silent these past couple of years – a retired Liverpool academic, Gerry of How the Light Gets In whose material makes for great reading - with celebrations of the history and landscapes of NE Engalnd – as well as cultural and literary events all covered in loving detail. Hopefully Gerry will find his voice again…
2. Then a blog from a Bulgarian woman long resident in the US – Maria Popova - whose Brain Pickings focus on the timeless and uplifting advice of creative writers such as Ursula le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell and Rebecca Solnit
3. Then there’s my current favourite blogger, Canadian Dave Pollard of How to Save the World whose blog exudes the integrity of someone searching for what is worthwhile in life and living
4. Another blog which defies classification is RioWang – which is half travelogue (but of such way-out places as Iran and the Caucusus ) and half celebration of the remnants of old Jewish history in such places. This, for example, is the latest post which includes a classic Persian song
5. Brave New Europe is a leftist site with an open and creative selection process
6. The Worthy House is a blog I hesitated to include – since its over-confident, ant-leftist tone sometimes offends me but the sheer range of its reviews warrant its inclusion. See for yourself with these reviews of the important book The Geography of Thought; Banfield’s The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (to which I often refer in the posts); and Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs of which they seem none too fond.
But why can I find only a handful of blogs with such an open spirit?
Posts This Year – Part V – the last few weeks
Post Title |
Inspired by |
The basic message |
A Polish right-wing philosopher
challenges liberal democracy |
Identity politics has indeed gone too
far |
|
A 3 year old article with that title |
is puritanism and post-modernism really
to blame? |
|
Remembering the debate in the 1970s
about “muddling through” |
Did post-modernism and behavioural
economics really start the rot? |
|
A long-overdue Manifesto |
We have become too cynical about
institutions |
|
“Nervous States” book by William Davies |
How did experts initially get their
status – and then lose it so recently? |
|
David Goodhart’s latest book |
The devaluing of manual and technical
work and the overestimation of the university |
|
The accident of genius; how a 1977
report changed the UK |
30 years after Thatcher’s resignation,
we still don’t have the measure of her |
|
Rutger Bregman’s latest book is a model
of clarity |
His argument that humans are basically
altruistic doesn’t quite convince – altho he adds the rider about “power
corrupting” |
|
A reread of Bregman’s book |
One of my famous tables - with 22 of
Bregman’s exploded myths explained |
|
I get fed up hearing the UK PM talk
about “following the science” |
Governments can’t avoid choices and
values. Experts have their limits |
|
2 of my favourite blogs |
The endgame |
|
Reading at last J Michael Greer’s “The
Long Descent” (2008) |
I realise how little I understand about
energy issues |
|
This is the time of the year when I
start to think about the annual E-book of posts |
It is an opportunity to reflect on the
blog’s distinctiveness – and what it might be doing better |
|
Perennials - II |
I like to think that a post of several
years ago can still be read with benefit |
why straddling boundaries gives insights |
A book-length report from a fascinating
new think-tank with teams in 4 countries |
Gives a detailed insight into the UK of
2020 – using the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt |
|
Le Temps Perdu III |
The third of the series |
Why we should turn off the News |
Between the Lines - IV |
I’ve started – so I’ll finish |
What I would like to be distinctive
about the blog |
Dave Pollard’s blog which, like mine,
is also one of the few generalist blogs |
The importance in these times of good
questions – and of not being put off by the lack of response |
Thursday, December 10, 2020
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?
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
Wednesday, April 17, 2019
A New Feature for the Blog?
A Musing Decade put it as simply as I could – namely that few people have the length and breadth of the experience which I can claim to in a variety of roles, countries and disciplines. Both my “voice” and reading notes have developed over a 50 year period which has seen massive social changes.
Thursday, January 17, 2019
Is Admin Reform really Sexy?
In Transit – notes on good governance (1999) were the reflections which resulted from my first decade living and working in the countries of post-communist central Europe. Eight years then followed in three Central Asian countries and strengthened a feeling about the inappropriateness of the approach we “foreign experts” were using in our “technical assistance”.
I started blogging in 2008 with a website which is still active – publicadminreform - clearly signalling that I wanted to use it to reach out to others. Sadly that has not happened…but it has not stopped me from continuing to “talk to myself” on this blog and from trying to produce a book which does justice to the thoughts and experiences I’ve had in about 10 countries over the past 50 years….
- I’ve occupied different roles (political, academic, consultancy) in different countries and have therefore been able to develop a facility for seeing different sides to the same story
- My knowledge of “the literature” tells me that few authors have bothered to try to explain the stratospheric and continued rise in interest in administrative reform
- New cohorts of politicians, public servants and even academics arrive in the workforce without a good sense of history
- Few authors in this field seem to have an interest in communicating with the public – they focus instead on students or experts in government, academia and think tanks. I know of only two books with a wider appeal
So please have a look at How did Administrative Reform get to be so Sexy?
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Confession Time
I got as far as a draft Preface – but the harder I thought about the posts and how the issues they raised might be pulled together in a coherent conclusion, the more depressed I became about the impossible task I had set myself. To pretend that one person has anything original to add to the thousands of scribblers whose writings so learnedly analyse the world’s ills……..!!
a blog is a ‘web log’, i.e. an online diary. Regular blogging builds up a handy, time-saving archive. I’ve been blogging daily since 2008. OK, that’s a little excessive, but what that means is that essentially I have a download of my brain activity over the last 7 years – almost every book and papers I’ve read, conversations and debates. Whenever anyone wants to consult me, I have a set of links I can send (which saves huge amounts of time). And raw material for the next presentation, paper or book.
The problem, of course, is when your brain switches off – as mine seems to have in the past couple of months!! Only 3-4 books have engaged my interest – eg Theodor Zeldin’s The Hidden Pleasures of Life; and, more recently, Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything – a writer, I must confess, whose celebrity status had until now discouraged me from reading her stuff… This review explains why her new book is so well worth reading. But I have not been encouraged to excerpt either of these books….. nor to comment on the surprising victory of an old leftist in Labour’s leadership contest. Somehow I have lost my capacity to believe in the possibility of “change for the better”…..
The photo is one of series I have of marvellous Uzbek terra cotta figures which I acquired in Tashkent in the 3 years I spent there from 1999
Thursday, September 9, 2021
Postmodernity - another go
These last 2 weeks I’ve been trying to get my head around postmodernity – or rather what the relevant “literature” seemed to be saying about it. An accident of birth had actually given me the facility, from my mid-teens, of seeing the world through several lens. Initially I experienced this as a difficult tension but that gradually gave way to a realisation that being able to look at the world from a variety of angles had its beneficial side. Like Monsieur Jourdain, I’ve been speaking prose all my life
This
post is a continuation of the recent series of posts on postmodernism started here
– in which I will try to bring my thoughts on the issue more clearly together. For
reasons I can’t quite explain, however, I feel it important that I first describe
-
my particular learning experience
-
the difficulties I’ve had in making sense of
postmodernism
and then to explore the question of what follows postmodernism. This may take several posts…
Why I was lucky
I received my education in a state school which
still then possessed the positive features of Scotland’s Democratic Tradition now, sadly, much traduced. It would have been
easier for my parents to send me to the secondary school just a few blocks from
our house but my father was a Presbyterian Minister and home was a manse (owned
by the Church of Scotland) in the exclusive “West End” - so that school was
fee-paying, if one in which I already had friends.
And my parents (although no radicals) would never have contemplated taking a step which would have created a barrier with my father’s congregation who were stalwarts of the town’s lower middle classes with modest houses and apartments in the centre and east of the town.
Thus began my familiarization with the nuances of the class system – and with the experience of straddling boundaries which was to become such a feature of my life. Whether the boundaries are those of class, party, professional group intellectual discipline or nation, they are well protected if not fortified…..And trying to straddle such borders – let alone explore them – can be an uncomfortable experience.
At University in the 60s I had been interested in how social systems held together - and in particular in why people (generally) obeyed those placed in authority above them - Max Weber’s classification of political systems into – “traditional”, “charismatic” and “rational-legal” was an eye-opener and gave me the first of many typologies I was to find myself using.
When I became a young councillor in 1968 (for the Catholic-dominated Labour party), I found myself torn between my loyalties to the local community activists on the one hand and those to my (older) political colleagues and officials on the other.
And I felt this particularly strongly when I was elevated to the ranks of magistrate and required to deal with the miscreants who confronted us as lay judges every Monday morning – up from the prison cells where they had spent the weekend for drunkenness and wife-beating……..The collusion between the police and my legal adviser was clear but my role was to adjudicate “beyond reasonable doubt” and the weak police testimonials often gave me reason to doubt….I dare say I was too lenient and I certainly got such a reputation – meaning that I was rarely disturbed to sign search warrants!
And, on being elevated a few years later to one of the leading positions in a giant new Region, I soon had to establish relations with - and adjudicate between the budgetary and policy bids of - senior professionals heading specialized Departments with massive budgets and manpower.
It was at
that stage that I developed a diagram for my students to make sense of the
“conflict of loyalties” in what I saw as 4 very different sets of
accountabilities
to which politicians are subject –
- local voters (if the electoral system
is based on local constituencies);
- the party (both local and national)
- the officials (and laws) of the
particular government agency they had entered;
- their conscience.
Politicians, I argued, differ according to the
extent of the notice they took of each of the pressures coming from each of
these sources – and the loyalties this tended to generate. And I gave names to
the 4 types which could be distinguished –
-
“populist” – who articulated the stronger voices
of the voters
-
“ideologue” – who operated in the bubble of the
party faithful
-
“statesman” – who would try to extract the
commonality from the multiple voices of professional advisers
-
“maverick” – who tries to sort it out for him/herself
But, I argued, the effective politician is the one who resists the temptation to be drawn exclusively into any one of these roles. Each has its own important truth - but it is when someone blends the various partialities into a workable and acceptable proposition that we see real leadership.
Each generates its own way of looking at the world – as you will see from the table in this post which looks only at seven academic disciplines
Once
we become aware of the very different worlds in which people live, our world
suddenly becomes a very richer place – in which we have choices about the
particular lens we use to make sense of it all…
I remember the first time I really became aware of this – when I did the Belbin team test. And The Art of Thinking by Bramsall and Harrison (1984) very usefully sets out the very different ways each of us thinks. viz types of strategic thinking..How we see ourselves (and others see us) is a critical part of self-discovery - part of the Schumacher quote which figures in the “quotations” block which I’ve just moved up to the 4th section of the long list which now stretches down the right-hand corner of the blog