The language of Deceit

Ambrose Bierce was an American journalist in the latter part of the 19th Century whose pithy and tough definitions of everyday words, in his newspaper column, attracted sufficient attention to justify a book “The Devil’s Dictionary” whose fame continues unto this day. A dentist, for example, he defined as “a magician who puts metal into your mouth and pulls coins out of your pocket”.
Words and language are what distinguish us from animals – but commercial, bureaucratic, political and intellectual systems have powerful interests in keeping us passive and unquestioning and have developed a language for this purpose. One of the best attacks on this is George Orwell’s “Politics and the English language”. Written in 1947, it exposes the way certain clichés and rhetoric are calculated to kill thinking – for example how the use of the passive tense undermines the notion that it is people who take decisions and should be held accountable for them.
The importance of demystifying complex language was continued by C Wright Mills in the 1950s and 1960s who once famously summarised a 250 pages book written in tortuous syntax by the sociologist Talcott Parsons in 12 pages! And a South American priest Ivan Illich widened the attack on the mystification of professionals with his various books which eloquently argued against the damage done to learning by formal schooling methods – and to health by doctors and hospitals.
In 1979 some British citizens became so incensed with the incomprehensible language of official documents, letters and forms that they set up a campaign called “The Plain English Campaign”. It was its activities in making annual awards for good and bad practice that shamed most organisations – public and private - into reshaping their external communications. Their website contains their short but very useful manual; a list of alternative words; and lists of all the organisations which have received their awards.

It is 50 years since I started to read the literature about government and its endeavours seriously – as a student of politics and economics just as the social sciences were flexing their muscles and popular management texts appearing (we forget that Peter Drucker invented the genre only in the 1950s). And I entered the portals of (local) government in 1968 – keen to identify what that growing literature might have to say about improving the practice and impact of government endeavours.

At first I was amused at the verbal pretensions – then angry. “Governance” was one of the first terms to attract my ire. Only recently have I realised how deliberate much of it is. As governments have fallen in the past few decades even further into the hands of spin doctors and corporate interests, a powerful new verbal smokescreen has been put in place to try to conceal this.

“Evidence-based policy-making” is typical – first the arrogant implication that no policy-making until that point had been based on evidence; and the invented phrase concealing the fact that policy is increasingly being crafted without evidence in order to meet corporate interests! Sadly, a once worthy venture – the European Union – has developed such powerful interests of its own that it too is part of this significant obfuscation with its use of such phrases as “subsidiarity”.
More than 10 years ago, I prepared a glossary for a small book which contained a few ironic definitions – and I managed to slip a few more into one of the EU-funded publications I left behind recently in Bulgaria (you can see it at pages 7-11 of key paper 22 on my website ).

While you’re there – have a look at “Democracy, Bernard? It must be stopped!” (number 17) which is written from the same concerns about the emptiness behind the rhetoric about democracy and government.

At the beginning of the year I referred to the management guru Russell Ackoff’s great collection of tongue-in-cheek laws of management – Management F-Laws – how organisations really work. As the blurb put it –“They're truths about organizations that we might wish to deny or ignore - simple and more reliable guides to managers' everyday behaviour than the complex truths proposed by scientists, economists and philosophers”. An added bonus is that British author, Sally Bibb, was asked to respond in the light of current organizational thinking. Hers is a voice from another generation, another gender and another continent. On every lefthand page is printed Ackoff and Addison's f-Law with their commentary. Opposite, you'll find Sally Bibb's reply. A short version (13 Sins of management) can be read here. A typical rule is - "The more important the problem a manager asks consultants for help on, the less useful and more costly their solutions are likely to be". And I have also mentioned a couple of times the spoof on the British Constituion prepared recently by Stuart Weir.
It is people like Ackoff, Jay, Orwell, Pierce, Voltaire and Weir who are the inspiration for the new revised Devil’s Dictionary I am now working on - of about 60 words and phrases which occur frequently in the discourse of government and big business and are used to mask the worsening of social and political conditions. One I crafted today was - Bottleneck; "what prevents an organisation from achieving its best performance – always located at the top"

They always shoot the messenger!

Some people have been asking why Wikileaks Assange is being selected for attack rather than those responsible for the leaks in the first place – ie those who designed a system which distribuyed information to 2 million American civil servants let alone the single civil servant who actually downloaded the material onto a stick and sent it to Wikileaks. Why shoot the messenger they ask in an injured tone. But don’t they realize that it is ever so? This was brought home to me today when I happened to download a 2006 paper called The Cynical State by Colin Leys which examines the dishonesty at the heart of modern policy-making (the phrase “evidence-based policy-making” was clearly invented to conceal this trend!). The paper starts with the lying we saw in the run-up to the Iraq war -

Hoon (Defence Minister), Blair, and Blair’s chief press officer Alastair Campbell had all subsequently told further lies about the compilation of the dossier. Campbell told the Hutton Inquiry that he had had no input into the dossier. The evidence showed he had had extensive input. Hoon told the parliamentary committee on defence that he had had nothing to do with it either. The evidence showed he had been involved as much as anyone. Most famously, Blair told the House of Commons that it was ‘completely and totally untrue’ that there was disquiet in the intelligence community over the 45-minute claim, but a senior intelligence officer told the enquiry that he and one of his colleagues had submitted a written report about their disquiet.
Of course commentators who supported the attack on Iraq were willing to condone all this. But Lord Hutton condoned it absolutely too. The only behaviour he criticized in his final report was that of Andrew Gilligan, the BBC journalist who had broken the story, and the BBC director general and chairman who had backed him against furious attacks by the Prime Minister’s office. All of them were forced to resign, while Blair and Hoon were totally absolved. John Scarlett, the senior intelligence official who had agreed to ‘sex up’ the intelligence service’s original draft of the dossier at the behest of the Prime Minister’s office, was promoted to be head of the secret service. What is more, Hutton’s decision to put all the evidence on the internet, but then to condemn the whistleblowers and exonerate the liars, meant that members of parliament and the electorate were being asked to become complicit in official mendacity.

‘Transparent’ government, he seemed to say, just means that MPs and voters must accept being lied to and that no one should be penalized for doing so. Like ëvidence-based policy-making", another example of comforting bureaucratic (whether government or commercial) words and language being used to hide discomforting realities - as somone once said, "the more he talks about honesty, the more I count my silver teaspoons"!
I still have 6 vacant places for the 50 core books for my library. As I thought about my choice, I realised that it had been a bit pretentious to suggest that I had selected the others for „the light they threw on the European dilemmas of the last century”. This thought had actually occurred to me as I surveyed the list which had emerged! The list was actually a bit of a mix of books which had made an impact on me at my formative stage (Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies is certainly one to be added) and which I think still stand the test of time (where perhaps Popper now falls) and, on the other hand, more recent books which seem to me to capture well the dilemmas of modern life.
If a library is to be 50 books – rather than 5,000 – it would need to consist of encyclopaedias and voluminous Collected Works (eg Orwell's) to ensure its frequent use. And these are not the sorts of „real books” which you curl up in a corner with – lost in another world or with the scales falling from your eyes! So I’m not sure if this particular listing makes sense. For a start I think we need to distinguish the various types of writing – novels from tracts; poetry from essays; short stories from travelogues; etc
And we also need to distinguish the various motives for reading – understanding and insights; distraction of characters and good plots; good writing; flavour of new worlds; etc! As a good Presbyterean, I’ve generally felt some guilt when opening the pages of a novel – perhaps that explains why I tend to prefer short stories! And I’m one of these stupid people who has never shaken off the belief that, inside the cover of this latest book, lies an intellectual key to the social concerns which have had an unhealthy influence on me. And I have always taken a dubious pleasure from iconoclastic writing which exposes the deficiences of „conventional wisdom”. Ivan Illich came at a critical stage for me – and the little boy who dared to expose the Emperor’s nakedness has always been one of my heroes.
I am currently rereading Colin Leys Market Politics - neoliberal democracy and the public interest (2001) which, in many ways, brings Robert Michels 1911 Political Parties up to date - and which should therefore be considered for one of these 6 vacant places. It sets out in very clear terms (a) the dramatic changes in the British political system under the onslaught of globalisation and (b) the process of "commodifying" public services to which it has led. Sorry for the jargon - but, in this case, I think it's a justifiable term!
Certainly these remaining books have to be iconoclastic - daring to challenge and expose the conventional wisdom which is sustaining the corrosive politics and commercial (sharp) practices of the world's various elites (including the intellectuals who have so betrayed us). Another book deserving of consideration is Richard Douthwaite's Short Circuit from which I quoted recently. In a few simple pages it explains the critical events in the early 1970s which spun the world out of control - and then goes on to give numerous examples of how we might be able to bring the world back under our control. Of course this cannot be done through political parties - it can and is being done only through direct action. I don't necessarily mean by that term the street violence we are increasingly seeing. I rather mean that change will come from the decisions we take as individuals, families and neighbours in our life style and purchases, currency, and bank system. We can choose not to buy the products that are flown half way around the world (eg Chinese garlic!) when there are better local products. We can choose to put our money in cooperative banks which make loans available (at low interest rates) to local companies. We can even choose to create our own local currencies.

Oprescu destroys more of Bucharest's heritage

More destruction here of irreplaceable monuments. Sarah’s blog tells me today that I wish I had known – I would have risen from my sick bed, taken a dozen eggs and thrown them at the police. More pictures of the destroyed heritage are here
A visit to the Anthony Frost English Bookshop last week – and this time not just browsing but to buy some books since Amazon can no longer receive my orders. I have to wonder if this is not connected with the hack-atack to which the site is now subject – in view of Amazon’s craven removal (under American pressure) of Wikileaks from its computers. For the moment, I am happy to use the technical difficulty (which Amazon informed me yesterday they cannot solve) as an excuse to boycott the internet shop for their role in this affair. And, certainly, I was able to pick up at this great bookshop (just past the National Gallery, hidden by Biserica Kretzulescu) 3 books which either are not available on Amazon – or cost more (not least when postage is considered). So the past strikes back!
I am amazed there is a market here for the high quality stock they have - certainly the staff are great but it is a pity they don’t seem to have the space for events.
A great bird’s eye view of Bucharest to which my attention was drawn by the Survival Guide for Expats.
There is also a December/January issue of the Inyourpocket Guide to Bucharest

Nicusor Dan, president of the association Salvati Bucurestiul, tried to stop the demolitions of Friday night and Saturday morning on Berze/Stirbei Voda. The foreman didn't have copies of the demolition order and the police were called. Unfortunately a little later, police arrived from sector 3 saying they had the order from Oprescu to continue the demolition and if he didn't get out of the way and let the demolition team do their job, he would be fined and charged with disturbing the peace... The police stood guarding the site to stop anyone trying to prevent this outrageous and illegal destruction. By 13h30, the work to murder the house was under way again, the official papers arriving at...um...14-14h30.

Desert Island Library

Paul Mason, one of the BBC economics correspondent (all of whom do excellent blogs), is running a lovely Christmas challenge at the moment – the 50 books which your library has to have.
The challenge was apparently first made in 1930 by an American journalist who received a letter from a friend who wrote:

"As for the library, I want no more than fifty books. And none of them modern; that is, no novels that are coming off the presses these last ten years. Are there fifty intelligent books in the world? If you have time send along a list of fifty books, I promise to buy them and have them beautifully bound. I am consulting you as I would my lawyer. I have not time to develop a literary consciousness at my age. So if you were cutting your own library down to fifty books, which books would you keep?"

He has made the challenge more difficult by preventing us from consulting our shelves or the internet – so I did my best last night but have now had the time to reflect more and consult some booklists; What follows is therefore a slightly updated version of the entry I posted on his site (number 81 I think)
A library should be for consulting – the glories of novels, short stories, poetry, essays should be available there but also art and human knowledge. With only 50 books allowed, novels (of any sort) will have to be excluded - which means no “Buddenbrooks” (Thomas Mann) or “Candide” (Voltaire) let alone any of the powerful South Americans (Jorge Amado's "Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon", Allende’s “Eva Luna”, Marquez’s , “Love in the Time of Cholera” or Llosa ‘s “The War of the End of the World”) or Yehoshuova’s “The Liberated Bride” from Israel.
However, some books come in multi-volume collections eg Lewis Crassic Gibbon’s “Sunset Song”; Lawrence Durrell’s “The Alexandrian Quartet”; Olivia Manning’s “Balkan Trilogy”; and Naguib Mahfouz’s “Children of the Alley” and therefore give good bangs for bucks. Perhaps they might be allowed to stay.

And remember what Nassim Taleb calls Umberto Eco's "antilibrary" concept - that read books are less valuable than unread ones - a library should be a research tool. Collections of essays, poetry and short stories also give much more reading per book (unless it’s War and Peace) - so the collected poetry of Brecht, TS Eliot, Norman McCaig and WS Graham would be the first four books; as well as the Collected Short Stories of Nabokov, William Trevor, Carol Shields, Heinrich Boell and Alice Munro; and the essays of Montaigne.

If allowed, I would also have a few collections of painters eg the Russian Itinerants or Scottish colourists. Chuck in an Etymology and a couple of overviews of intellectual endeavours of recent times such as Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” and Peter Watson’s “A Terrible Beauty” - and I would then have space for 35 individual titles.

My basic criteria would be (a) the light thrown on the European dilemmas of the last century and (b) the quality of the language and the book as a whole.
The books I would keep (or try to find again) are
Robert Michels; Political Parties (1911)
Reinhold Niebuhr; Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
Joseph Schumpeter; Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942)
Arthur Koestler; The Invisible Writing (1955)
Leopold Kohr; The Breakdown of Nations (1977)
Gerald Brennan; South from Granada (1957)
JK Galbraith; The Affluent Society (1958)
Ivan Illich; Deschooling Society (1971)
Robert Greene; 48 laws of power (for the breadth of the stories from the medieval world including China)
Tony Judt; Postwar History of Europe since 1945
Richard Cobb; Paris and Elswhere
Vassily Grossman; Life and Fate
Roger Harrison; The Collected Papers (in the early days of organisational analysis)
Clive James; Cultural Amnesia (on neglected European literary figures particularly of the early 20th century – written with verbal fireworks)
JR Saul; Voltaire’s Bastards – the dictatorship of reason in the west
Amos Oz; Tale of Love and Darkness
Claude Magris; Danube
Julian Barnes; Nothing to be Frightened Of
Michael Foley; The Age of Absurdity – why modern life makes it impossible to be happy
Toby Jones; Utopian Dreams
Michael Pollan; The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Nassim Taleb; The Black Swan – the impact of the highly improbable
Roger Deakin; Notes from walnut tree farm
Geert Mak; In Europe – travels through the twentieth century
Donald Sassoon; A Hundred Years of Socialism – a history of the western left in the 20th century
Theodor Zeldin; The Intimate History of Humanity

Of course Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and Machiavelli’s The Prince should be there – and at least one book on the Chinese contribution to the world.

This leaves 6 empty spots - about which I shall think carefully!

This time last year, I was in the mountain house (also with minimal snow) and thinking about the useful literature on public administrative reform!

In praise of the generation past

Today – my father’s birthday – is a day for celebrating the older (European) generation – their decencies and strivings. We have not seen their like again! They went through more – were so much less selfish and egocentric – and their writings much more powerful than the simpering affectations which passes for modern writing.

I say this in the middle of my reading of English historian Richard Cobb’s Paris and Elsewhere – having bought the lovely NYRB edition after recalling how the impact his writing about Paris had made on me in the 1970s. What a life he lived – and how well his sentences capture life in the mid 20th century.
He first went to Paris in 1935 at the age of 15 and was captivated, living most of the next 20 years there and writing about various other urban settings such as Lyon, Lille and Brussels. He admired Simenon’s writings – and had the same fascination with la vie ordinaire des ordinaires. In Paris, as one obituary put it “he was poor, studied in the day and spent his nights in the bars and brothels that are lovingly described in his writings. He relied on subventions from his mother in Tunbridge Wells, also journalism and a position teaching English to Air France stewardesses. He was briefly married to an employee of the SNCF. Characteristically, Cobb used his wife's cheap rail tickets to study archives in the regions and consult with the erudits locaux who shared his historical interests. His style was at once insolent, erudite and parenthetic (sentences could be as long as paragraphs), and won him many admirers”.

It’s clear who inspired the likes of Theodor Zeldin – and perhaps even Julian Barnes who is one of the few English writers I unreservedly admire. His descriptive power of Paris and Elsewhere as he describes amazing characters in his lodgings or whom he visited on Sundays surpasses that of most novellists (or indeed the fashionable travel writers) I have read. And they are so sympathetically done – clearly borne of much close character observation. He was very much his own man, utterly individualist, with no sense of a career - admitting that he stumbled into his life as an historian of France simple because he loved living in the country and speaking the language.

I count myself lucky because I was able to follow my passions and rarely experienced the role of an employee - and feel so sorry for those who have been compelled to choose a career. For those who don’t know him, let the obituarists give you a sense.

His first book A Second Identity (about the importance of his French life) appeared in 1959 was followed by an armee revolutionnaire of books. Among the best were Promenades: a historian's appreciation of modern French literature (1980), which described favourite novelists such as Marcel Pagnol and Raymond Queneau; The Streets of Paris (1980), a dazzling essay on four arrondissements of Paris, extolling balustrades and courtyards of the 19th century, washable brothel-fronts of the 1930s and Tunisian shops of the 1960s, with photographs by Nicholas Breach; Still Life (1983), sketches from a Tunbridge Wells childhood; A Classical Education (1985), an unforgettable account of his friendship with a Dublin matricide; and Something to Hold Onto (1988), openly Proustian autobiographical sketches describing his relations, the book illustrator Frank Pape and the pleasures of the lavatory.

Cobb believed that a historian should get inside the threshold, step beyond the door, and write about private people and private places. Accents, clothes, family photographs and loneliness in cities interested him more than intellectual debates or economic graphs. He extended the frontiers of history so far that his books included descriptions of the tin trunks of French officials on the way to the colonies in a Marseilles hotel, girls in hotel rooms crouching over bidets in ''a rapid gesture of orthodoxy rather than of hygiene'' and the third army, of ''enormous, long-whiskered, dark-coated, red-eyed rats'', below the Germans and the resisters, which surfaced in Paris during the occupation. His unique ability to understand other people enabled him to make collaborators human and a childhood in Tunbridge Wells between the wars interesting.

The December 1 blog opined that “too much political discussion fails to recognise that politics (like life) is a series of individual choices, decisions and behaviour in a particular context. It is too easy to retreat behind abstractions”. I was therefore delighted to come across his justification of his modus operandi (which came to have such influence on historians such as Christopher Hill, Ralph Samuel and Edward Thompson) in these simple terms -

"I have never understood history other than in terms of human relationships; and I have attempted to judge individuals in their own terms and from what they say about themselves, in their own language. Most interesting of all, to me, is the individual unrelated to any group, the man, the girl, or the old woman alone in the city, the person who eats alone, though in company, who lives in a furnished room, who receives no mail, who has no visible occupation, and who spends much time wandering the streets. For, apart from everlasting problem of violence, the principal one that faces a historian like myself is that of loneliness, especially loneliness in the urban context."

"In history, intellectual debate can so often be a cover for over-simplification, lack of experience, insufficient culture, lack of involvement and of sympathy, and the impetus to compare and to generalize in cases where comparisons and generalizations are either irrelevant or positively misleading. Why, one wonders, when reading certain sections of Past and Present, why do historians spend so much time arguing, imposing definitions, proposing 'models', when they could be getting on with their research?"

It's not easy to get hold of his books now (Amazon have very few). This is where I need the British second hand bookshops! All credit therefore to the new York Review of Books for adding this collection to their series of classics!

Hollowing out of democracy

Finance kills creativity in more senses than one. I’ve been worrying about the euro in recent days – talking to the bank, switching currencies, contemplating (with inflation risks) going back into investments since the minimal return on money in banks means that my assets bleed. It’s all vivid proof that money does not make you happy – it makes you worry.
What makes me really angry is that, unlike a lot of people whose assets are the result largely of the property inflation, mine have been earned by the sweat of my brow. And were all at risk for a few hours 2 years ago when the Royal Bank of Scotland tottered on the brink of collapse. And still we are incapable of building back into place a banking system which both protects the savings of ordinary people and puts their money to productive use. When I spoke to my bank they sent me a prospectus for a fund which would have tied my money up for almost 5 years – subject to conditions which could have wiped out the minimal benefits I might have received (‘we reserve the right to change these conditions….”). Admittedly one of the funds offered was an environmental one (alternative power) but a closer examination revealed it was the big global players whose claims to environmental commitment are geenrally highly suspect and who often wipe out the real, smaller national players (there was no german company in the list). And another list I was sent invited me to put my money into agrobusiness and timber – the real criminals. So nothing has changed.

And the behaviour of governments to the wikileaks has again confirmed the lack of any liberal principles there – with politicians and bureaucrats alike threatening companies who might have the most miimal link with Wikileaks. I should really boycott Amazon (who have still not solved my problem anyway) and Mastercard! A Guardian article expressed it well -

What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.

As Simon Jenkins put it recently in the Guardian, "Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure." What we are hearing from the enraged officialdom of our democracies is mostly the petulant screaming of emperors whose clothes have been shredded by the net.
Which brings us back to the larger significance of this controversy. The political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet can be a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their sides too. It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about the net like maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has been deeply worrying to watch terrified internet companies – with the exception of Twitter, so far – bending to their will.
But politicians now face an agonising dilemma. The old, mole-whacking approach won't work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. Thousands of copies of those secret cables – and probably of much else besides – are out there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent. Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet. Over to them..

I've used the word "hollowing out" myself on a recent post of our democratic system - so clearly we are going to see more of this analysis.
The painting is another Bosch - this time "Death of a Miser" which fits nicely not only with the first part of the post but with Julian Barnes' latest romp - Nothing to be Frightened of - which I've just finished and highly recommend. A wry, reflective book which I would put up there with Tobias Jones' Utopian Dreams and Michael Foley's Age of Absurdity.

Gloomy Saturday

The rain and wind have been battering us for almost 24 hours – but, so far, no sign of snow. Apart from my daughers and (the beauty of) the Scottish seascape and the dry humour which goes with it, this posting gives the only reason why I would want to make a visit to UK
I’m watching Orson Welles’ 1948 black and white version of Macbeth. He is very impressive (despite the stupid Statue of Liberty hat he wears latterly!) – and, despite (because of?) the low budget, so is the film. Touch of Eisenstein about it.
It’s good weather for Sassoon’s blockbuster – One Hundred Years of Socialism – the west European left in the 20th century (enlarge the book beyond the focus on parties and west Europe and it would be double its 1,000 pages!). It has already opened my eyes – eg how minimal trade union membership was in Britain in 1910 compared with both the scale of industrialisation and other countries (7% maximum compared with minimum of 30% in other European countries less industrialised); and the government experience in the 1920s of many other socialist parties in Europe – particularly the Swedes who emerged with the most coherent and visionary philosophy of gradualist social change. Pity he doesn’t spend longer on this – since my visits to Sweden and Denmark a couple of decades ago introduced me to some of the inspirational figures in the late 19th century who laid the basis for the Scandinavian model. The folk school was a key part of that. Others, like the British labour party, had no coherence and no capacity to learn from others or even from their own mistakes
It was therefore with particular interest that I read this post which puts in historical context our greater inclination to take seriously the ideas and warnings of the ecologists.
Another useful post from boofy about the ongoing EU crisis
And also on how central european economies are being hit.