living each day....

The snow melted very rapidly – and today is a typical blustery but bright autumn day. The wolves are already here – devouring this week a small foal. As I waited at the station for my significant other, I read Thomas a Kempis’ The Inner Life – thanks to Penguin’s Great Idea series. Very powerful! I was amazed to find this passage – “You should order your every deed and thought as though today were the day of your death.......each morning remember that you may not live until evening – and in the evening not assume to promise yourself another day"!
I remember being so impressed by Stephen Covey’s exercise in imagining that we were observing our funeral – and hearing what people were saying and thinking of us!

We do indeed need to celebrate the past much more – while remembering (as writers such as Marcus Aurelius and Tolstoy have emphasised) that we do and should live only in the present. I suppose this is one reason for this blog – wanting to put my thoughts in order – aware of my frustration at how little, for example, of my father’s thinking had been left in writing. I have a few of his notebooks – but they are either of journeys he took with his own father or lists of quotations that he could use in his sermons. It was the same with Geoff Shaw when he died – he had been so busy succouring the poor and, latterly, trying to put a new quality into politics that he had no time to write anything.

I am reading a very thoughtful book which I donwloaded recently – “Questions of business life” which is result of one churchman’s humble attempt to answer the question of what Christianity can offer to those in the middle of business affairs. It is both a helpful summary of relevant literature and theological principles and their application to dilemmas such as accountability (the stakeholder debate), corruption and alienation. The book came out of the discussions held at Ridley Hall - which is an Anglican theological college in Cambridge. Its primary task is training people for the ordained ministry, and part of the author’s job is teaching them courses in Ethics and Leadership. But Ridley has also spawned a number of projects which reflect a concern to relate Christian faith to key aspects of contemporary culture. Business was one of these projects - with many seminars on concrete issues facing businesspeople successfully held. 

I admire such retreats - I have been invited both to St George's Hall at Windsor and to the Ditchley Foundation for weekend sessions on Urban Regeneration.
One of the principles behind that last workshop (Jan 1989) was to bring people together from sectors which did not normally speak to one another. Religion; trade unions; military, for example, were represented. As a result of that weekend, I had an amazing day (and lunch) in New Jersey a year later - courtesy of Monsignor William Linder whom I had befriended at Ditchley. He ran a series of community initiatives there - one of which was a restaurant in a converted church! The Priory Restaurant. As we ate with some of his selected colleagues for a discussion, I learned the meaning of "companion" - con-pane - those you eat bread with. Just as Marlyn Fergusson taught me the meaning of "conspirator" - con-spire - "those you breath with"!

a bible for our times

The outage lasted all day and allowed me therefore to read the entire Kohr book ("The Breakdown of Nations") - without the distractions of the internet! And what a book!! It pulsates with clarity, originality ...and wit.
Part of his argument is that – just as companies grow large and inefficient and have to be broken up by Monopoly Commissions – so have States grown to a size that makes them dangerous.

Remember he was an economist – and drafted the book in the early 1950s! He quotes the evidence there was even then that innovation came from small companies – and that decreasing returns of scale sets in early (evidence continues to accumulate that few company mergers are successful – and yet they continue).

In similar vein, he shows that cultural excellence was produced in small states – who may not have always been peaceful but whose wars with one another were short and limited in their damage. His early chapters are powerful statements that, when an organisation reaches the point of domination, it will always succumb to the temptation of aggression.

And he anticipates the contemporary arguments of writers such as Fridjof Capra and Margaret Wheatley about what students of organisations can learn from physics and the new insights into “chaos” – by a simple observation about “atoms”.

His main challenge, however, is to the principle of specialisation and you will find in chapter 6 – “The Efficiency of the Small”. There he is merciless in his critique of the “wealth” of the “modern” world – daring to suggest that most of is useless and counter-productive and that people were happier in medieval times! “The more powerful a society becomes, the more of its increasing product – instead of increasing individual consumption – is devoured by the task of coping with the problems caused by the rise of its very size and power”

I always have pencilled underlines, ringed sections and exclamation marks in the good books I read – and my copy of this book is almost disfigured! Two insights I found particularly relevant – one which he produces as one of the reasons for the intense cultural productivity of the small state –

 “in a large state, we are forced to live in tightly specialised compartments since populous societies not only make large-scale specialisation possible – but necessary. As a result, our life’s experience is confined to a narrow segment whose borders we almost never cross, but within which we become great single-purpose experts”... “A small state offers the opportunity for everybody to experience everything simply by looking out of the window" – 

whereas a large state has to employ a legion of soi-disant experts to define its problems and produce “solutions”. The other striking comment he makes is –

“the chief blessing of a small-state system is ...its gift of a freedom which hardly ever registers if it is pronounced.....freedom from issues....ninety percent of our intellectual miseries are due to the fact that almost everything in our life has become an ism, an issue... our life’s efforts seem to be committed exclusively to the task of discovering where we stand in some battle raging about some abstract issue... The blessing of a small state returns us from the misty sombreness of an existence in which we are nothing but ghostly shadows of meaningless issues to the reality which we can only find in our neighbours and neighbourhoods”

Most people would probably see this as utopian – and yet its argument is ruthless and very much in what I would call the “realist” mode (one of the reasons why I was taken with several of the books in my earlier list). As he puts it at one stage in the argument –

“many will object to the power or size theory on the ground that it is based on an unduly pessimistic interpretation of man. They will claim that, far from being seduced by power, we are generally and predominantly animated by the ideals of decency, justice, magnanimity etc This is true, but only because most of the time we do not possess the critical power enabling us to get away with indecency”.

This is the bible for both new management and the “slow-food” movement! The writing sparkles – and includes a good joke about a planner who, having died, is allowed to try to organise the time people spend in Heaven into more rational chunks of activity, fails and sent to help organise Hell. “I’m here to organise Hell”, he announces to Satan – who laughs and explains that “organisation IS hell”.

I once said that all courses relating to government should have Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation - the conquest of the middle east on their reading list. This is a book which portrays both the victims of the slaughter and their families and also those in the Western bureaucracies – both private and public – who make the slaughter possible and ignored the lessons of history. Their words are closely analysed – and their actions held to account in a relentless way which restores one faith in journalism. I would now add Kohr’s book to that reading list – not least because it offers an answer to the question we ask from time to time “When will they ever learn?”

Bill McKibben's Deep Economy - economics as if the world mattered (2007) is another book which would be in that list (as well as Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma). I have a short comment on McKibben's book on my public admin reform site. Although he recognises Schumacher, Leopold Kohr gets no mention. Sad!

books which made an impact

The painting is so appropriate at the moment - when I am trying to identify the books which have made an impact on me. The storm which was rumbling all night around the mountains has eventually knocked the electricity out - and I am (even at 08.30) having to write this with the aid of a candle. This is what my first list looks like -

Saul Alinsky’s Reveille for Radicals (1969)
Stanislaw Andreski’s Social Science as Sorcery (1972)
Peter Berger’s Pyramids of sacrifice – political ethics and social change (1975)
Albert Camus’ Letters to a Friend (1944)
EH Carr’s What is History? (1961)
Bernard Crick’s In Defence of Politics (1962)
Tony Crosland’s The Conservative Enemy (1962)
Ralf Dahrendorf’s Class and Class Conflict in industrial society (1959)
Marlynn Fergusson’s Age of Aquarius (1980)
Ivan Illich Deschooling Society (1971)
Leoplod Kohr; The Breakdown of Nations (1957)
Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its enemies (1945)
JR Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards (1992)
Donald Schon; Beyond the Stable Society (1971)

Doubtless there will be some additions....To save my battery, I shall now have to switch off the PC battery - and work by pencil and notebook two further questions (a) why did they make an impact? and (b) what books would I now recommend to anyone with an open mind who wanted to understand the world better and play a role in improving it?

is small beautiful?

Painting is Rusi Ganchev's(1895-1965) "A Park "

Interesting that I bought recently a reissued version of Leopold Kohr’s classic The Breakdown of Nations which argues that all major problems would be minimised if the world’s major countries were to dissolve back into the small states from which they came.

It was written by him in 1951 although he did not manage to find a printer for it until 1957 – and it made an impact only with the appearance in 1986 of a paperback version which is when I first read it.

He was an economist and had an influence on his great friend EF Schumacher who wrote the much better-known Small is Beautiful in 1973.

You can get a sense of Kohr’s argument from these excerpts
It is a convincing read – and should make a Scottish nationalist of me. But one of my hesitations has to do with the perverse social processes which seem to contaminate and undermine efforts to change our value systems and structures for the better. Feminism was and remains a worthwhile project – but so far the promise of it bringing a softer more humane set of values into government and the work-place has not been realised. Instead the women have had to show they are “plus royaliste que le roi” – ie tougher and more masculine.
I see the same happening to the nationalist project – as the Scottish nationalist government prepares for the promised referendum in 2010 on independence. Instead of offering a new vision of government and society, their First Minister seems to offer more of the same – not just in terms of policies but in terms of thinking about the form and role of the state - even down to the prospect of useless Embassies! Scottish opinion-makers likes to think of the country belonging to the Scandinavian fringe – and should therefore follow through the logic – ie decentralise powers to local municipalities. However, this is currently a vote loser – since Scottish municipalities are now so large (average 150,000 population) and (apart from the 4 cities) no longer relate to perceptions of community. Perhaps that is why Kohr-type arguments are not heard in the nationalist argument – since they would point to something smaller than a population of 5 million.
But there is one issue in Britain capable of making people think about this problematic of scale in a different way – and that is the “political expenses scandal” which I wrote about in July on my other blog (and again yesterday) and which shows no sign of going away. People are beginning to ask critical questions such as
- Does the UK need 625 MPs (when we have Scottish and Welsh devolution)?
- do MPs play any useful role any more? For decades the complain has been that they are simple ciphers of the Executive – and this situation has got worse. Their classic claim to hold the Executive to account is risible these days – and now they need to be held to account!
- Perhaps the whole notion of “representatives” is basically flawed – and the people need to take more direct Swiss-like control? Open Democracy has opened a campaign 2010 on this whole question and one interesting contribution is here 

See also this essay  

measuring one's eco footprint

An Italian woman offering “eco-holidays” in Sicily – in a neglected village on the edge of a town (Cefalu) which has been able to exploit mass tourism. It sounds a dream – with the amazing properties she owns having her personal touch not just in their design but in the way she has tried to attach the (declining) village skills and economy to the project. Visitors are taken to see (and taste!) the making of the goat-cheese, wine and bread; to use scooters and horses rather than cars. She personally has led the drive to waste recycling etc But there is a eco-downside which the article doesn’t mention – the fact that all the (highly satisfied) visitors are zoomed in and out by plane! Add the plus and minus eco columns – and out comes a negative.
I suppose she could argue that her visitors would have flown anyway and that her contribution is therefore positive. She has not only created a more sustainable environment in the village – she is also trying to demonstrate to its younger people that they don’t necessarily have to leave the village to get jobs since the old skills do, with suitable marketing, offer a sustainable life. Perhaps also she can “sell” a different vision of life to some of her visitors. But, at least for the visitors, the eco-footprint is negative – and they are being dishonest in buying their holiday as an eco-venture! Interesting issues....check it out at http://www.sicilianexperience.com/

In a small way, the issue relates to another website I came across yesterday “Front Porch Republic” which is a celebration not only of the pleasant North American architectural feature I first came across in Pittsburgh but of the social and political benefits of small towns and “smallness” generally.
http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/?p=707. I want to explore this theme of smallness – but in my next post.

tower of babel

Pieter Bruegel the elder (1563)

I ended my last post with an attack on universities. This is not the first time I have found myself attacking university over-specialisation in the social sciences. When I was struggling in the early 1970s with the appalling social and economic conditions in which almost 20% of the people in the West of Scotland lived, I could find no discipline in academia which could help suggest what we might be able to do at a local level to improve these conditions.

A few of us had to struggle to put a strategy together – the only help we received was from the Tavistock Institute in London and Rowntree Trust in York! Once we had shown the way, the universities spawned their courses and research projects – and began to present themselves as community resources.

Attacks on universities can easily be (mis)represented as leading to “burning of the books”. They also seem rather lonely if not selfish ventures. All those currently in positions of power have passed through university portals and part of their identity rests on the parchment they carry - which marks them as “physicist”, “engineer”, “accountant”, “economist” etc.
Why should they bite the hand which has given them this status? Or deny such positions to those waiting at the gates? The genie cannot, it seems, be put back in the bottle....

But, as I return to the theme 20 years later, I feel that the perspectives, terminology and career structures of the ever-spawning academic specialisms have actually contributed to social alienation and the decline of confidence in government. Why did no-one take Stanislaw Andreski seriously when, in 1971, he wrote his book “Social Science as Sorcery”? Why did it so quickly become out of print?
In the global competitive environment in which universities now operate, universities are now capitalists like anyone else – but the (unchallenged) medieval rhetoric their leaders use about their social role gives them a cloak which conceals even from themselves the evil they are doing.

What is that evil? It is in
· doing nothing to disparage the ethic of utilitarianism, individualism and private profit and
· being the major source of the development of Orwellian new-speak, technical jargon and a modern Tower of Babel.
So what might they be doing?

Basically going back to the Scottish tradition of moral philosophy and political economy – and finding the common language to allow the social sciences to communicate with one another. There are many (older) texts which could form the core of reading for such a course – eg Ivan Illich; Leopold Kohr; Michael Oakeshott; Karl Popper; Neil Postman; JQ Wilson. I will try shortly to give a more definitive list.

In the older blog on my website, I posed the question of which book you would give to a beneficiary – for example in a central Asian or Caucasian country. My choice in Uzbekistan in 2002 for the Deputy Prime Minister I was working with was Guy Peters’ The Future of Governing - four emerging models. In Azerbaijan I gave my Minister Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power!

recovering what has been lost

I want to pursue some thoughts I found myself expressing today when trying today to explain the purpose of the blog. There seem four separate but clearly related lines of argument and I’ve highlighted the phrases which I think are particularly important to develop –
· “The restless search for novelty dishonours the work (practical and written) of the past”. And I inserted an observation in a footnote about how quickly some extraordinary books seem to go out of print.
· “the recent rhetoric about monitoring and evaluation seems to have displaced the more interesting discourse of organisational learning - but, sadly, leaves those who work in organisations cold and cynical. Few people have the chance to come together and shape things in a sustained way - to build on what has gone before”.
· “making sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in - to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on” to those who want to make public organisations good for both the public and those who work in them.
· To “restore a bit of institutional memory and social history”

When I sat down to make more sense of all this, I was reminded of a cartoon I had not thought of for decades and google tells me it is Jules Feiffer - who is apparently alive and well. I'm sorry I can't reproduce the cartoon - but th bubble coming out of the little boy's head says -
“I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived...then underprivileged. Then they told me underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary”.
The vocabulary changes and implies that the problem has also – so government is not held accountable for its actions on the previous problem. And a new set of experts are needed.
Whenever we get a new perspective on an issue, we invent a new specialism – with a new elite which then marginalises the message from the bloodstream of the organisation.

Government positions require degrees and post-graduate Degrees – international bodies require PhDs so they are inhabited by those who have successfully played the academic game of specialisation and who are far removed from the hoi poloi

Tolstoy and Hans Christian Andersen – and cartoonists like Jules Feiffer say it all so much better. Even TS Eliot -

……. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again; and now under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

We need a body of people who tell the universities - "enough is enough!! These specialisms must go. Some simple truths are being masked by both the jargon and terminology you encourage people to use; and the craven cowardice you encourage".

nomad in central europe and central asia

It’s not easy to give up a powerful position in such a large organisation which was doing such interesting work – let alone to leave one’s country of birth. But that is what I effectively did one bright autumn day in 1990 – when I set sail from Kingston on Hull en route for Copenhagen and what was supposed to be a short spell with the Director of Public Health for the European division of the World Health Organisation. On the basis of my presentations of our urban strategy to their Healthy City network, she had invited me to help her identify the opportunities for preventive/public health work in the newly-liberated countries of East and Central Europe; and so began a series of visits to the Health Ministries and voluntary initiatives in each of these countries. The 6 weeks turned into 6 months – and basically set me on a new career as consultant. The EU was putting together its programme of technical assistance and I was one of the first consultants to the CzechoSlovak Republic – working with their new local government system.

When that work finished in late 1991, I returned to the Region – but only as an interim measure because, by then, I was clear that my time in Scotland was over.
Margaret Thatcher was killing local government[1]. I had left my academic base in 1985 under pressure from students understandably hostile to my absences and had therefore been a full-time regional politician for 5 years. At my age (mid 40s), I could not start a new career in Scotland – particularly holding such a high profile public position. Anxiety about my future had, in fact, led me to periods of depression and the breakdown of my marriage. I had, however, used these 5 years to network in Europe[2] – and it was now beginning to pay off. In particular a German colleague recommended me as Director – of all things – of the EC Energy Centre in Prague where I passed a very happy year in 1992. The hypocrisy and exploitation I saw in that position was, however, to lead me to write a very critical paper; send it to the European Parliament and resign from the position. But, on the basis of my CV, other assignments in Romania, Hungary and Slovakia quickly followed. But I was increasingly uneasy with the nature of the EC Technical Assistance work.

The blind leading the blind?
Nobody had ever lived through a triple transformation (Markets, nations, democracy) ever before. People had been writing profusely about the transition from capitalism to communism – but not the other way around. The collapse of communism was a great shock. Few – except the Poles and Hungarians[3] - were at all prepared for it. And understanding such systems change requires a vast array of different intellectual disciplines – and sub-disciplines – and who is trained to make sense of them all[4]? The apparently irreversible trend toward greater and greater specialisation of the social sciences places more power in the hands of technocrats[5] and disables politicians from serious involvement in the discourse of the international bodies whose staff therefore engage in the reconstruction of other country’s state systems with no effective challenge – from any source. Strange that these are the very people who preach about accountability and corruption!!!
Those of us who have got involved in these programmes of advising governments in these countries have a real moral challenge. After all, we are daring to advise these countries construct effective organisations – we are employed by organisations supposed to have the expertise in how to put systems together to ensure that appropriate intervention strategies emerge to deal with the organisational and social problems of these countries. We are supposed to have the knowledge and skills to help develop appropriate knowledge and skills in others!

But how many of us can give positive answers to the following 5 questions? -
- Do the organisations which pay us practice what they and we preach on the ground about good organisational principles?
- Does the knowledge and experience we have as individual consultants actually help us identify and implement interventions which fit the context in which we are working?
- Do we have the skills to make that happen?
- What are the bodies which employ consultants doing to explore such questions – and to deal with the deficiencies which I dare to suggest would be revealed?
- Do any of us have a clue about how to turn kleptocratic regimes into systems that recognise the meaning of public service?[6]

These were the questions I posed in a paper I drafted and presented to the 2007 NISPAcee Conference. You can find the paper in "key papers" on my website.

[1] By three strategies – legal limits on spending; transfer of functions to other sectors; and abolition of municipal bodies. She killed the Greater London Council in 1986; the English counties a bit later – and her successor John Major abolished the Scottish Regions in 1996.
[2] I was one of the British group on the Council of Europe – the Standing Conference for local and regional authorities; member of a IULA research group which produced a book on public participation in 1988; and member of the Ricardo Petrella ROME group on urban change
[3] who, with other countries admitted in 2004, had experienced these systems earlier in the 20th century!
[4] Elster and Offe were early in the field – but do not seem to have followed through
[5] JR Saul is one of the few who have tried to expose this – in his tour de force “Voltaire’s Bastards” (1992). And Harold Perkin’s "The Third revolution – professional elites in the modern world" (1996) is a more moderate argument about the self-seeking nature of professional classes. Why is it rarely get the chance to read books which are more than 5 years old?
[6] Anti-corruption strategies have, of course, become very fashionable in the international community – but seem to me a good example of a mechanism which serves the interests of donors (jobs) and beneficiary countries who have such strategies wished upon them. For the latter it gives the pretence of action and also fits with the traditional culture of rhetorical exhortation.