Draft Sceptic's Glossary

Incredibly warm for this time of the year here – 11C and a cloudless sky. 15 years or so ago the snow smothered the cars here. Strange that it is now the UK which is freezing! Is this the warming of the Gulf Stream?

Remember the little contest for the 50 books to form your library? The guy who set it has now given us his list.
I’m happy to report that you can now access the results of my last week’s musings on words at the latest paper Just Words? on my website . It is still very much at draft stage - but now able and needing to get feedback. So please read and tell me what you think.
I knew that there was an element of mere play in what I was doing with my definitions – for example suggesting that the word “capacity” so beloved of consultants could be interpreted simply as “something other people lack”! But – as many people have argued – play can liberate some powerful thoughts! And something very powerful has been driving this latest venture forward – at one stage I lost control of the process and began (very correctly) to question what I was trying to do. Was this just an exercise in superficial cynicism? Or was it a more profound exercise in scepticism?
Yesterday I suddenly remembered that I had a copy on my shelves here (as distinct from my real library at Sirnea) of A Doubter’s Companion – a dictionary of aggressive common sense produced in 1994 by the genius who wrote Voltaire’s Bastards – the dictatorshop of reason in the west, one of the really profound critiques of soi-disant expertise.

It’s a French edition I had picked up at a second-hand sale in Brussels and is not quite in the style I am trying to create for my glossary but it did remind me of the

 “humanist tradition of using alphabetical order as a tool of social analysis and the dictionary as a quest for understanding, a weapon against idée recues (Flaubert actually issued a Dictionnaire des Idees recues in 1880) and the pretensions of power”. 

Saul contrasts this approach with that

“of the rationalists to the dictionary for whom it is a repository of truths and a tool to control communications”. 

This crystallised my thinking! Which is why I gave the draft its subtletly and ambiguous title – Just words? “Just” means both “merely” and “fair”!! And the subtitle “reclaiming the language” has, for me shades of the Greenock poet WS Graham.

Three powerful forces have created verbal gymnastics which need to be exposed –
- first the need of governments to avoid admission of failure – better to imply a new condition had arisen by inventing a new phrase!
- the professional interests which surround each new definition.
- The last decade or so has seen a third force - governments have fallen even further into the hands of spin doctors and corporate interests and a powerful new verbal smokescreen has arisen to try to conceal this.

Time of year

I don’t normally like this time of year. It is, bluntly, when I am at risk (if in Christendom) of dipping (like a lot of others) into the depression zone – so much emphasis on families (difficult when you have made a mess of that), bright lights and selling. Twenty years ago I could put some of this down to the darkness (in north Europe they invented a useful term - sensory affective disorder (S.A.D. to explain how dreich some of us felt) And, certainly for most of the past 20 years, the exotic locations in which I have often passed this time of year have kept my spirits high – particularly when there were no celebrations taking place (Central Asia). But a small flat in Bucharest can get a bit claustrophobic – and some downs have been experienced during this artificial season. But not now that I am in semi-retirement; financially secure (absent bank meltdowns); and pursuing my own intellectual agenda, I can better enjoy the excuse the period offers to be in relaxed mode. This afternoon a visit to the Carteresti bookshop netted a wonderful new book on the Wooden Churches of Northern Olteniei; and JM Coetze’s Inner Workings – literary essay 200-2006. The latter has quite a few reviews of central European writers of the first part of the 20th century – and confirmed my fascination for this general part of the world – what was the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In the past couple of days my glossary (including introduction) is now 10 pages – and boasts the title Just Words? Reclaiming the language of social purpose. At the moment I am wrestling with post-modernism. I suppose if post-modernists have done anything, they have made us more aware of language. After all, they spend their time deconstructing texts! And they have been active in the field of public administration – Postmodern Public Administration (2007), is one taken at random. The trouble is that they play so many word games amongst themselves that what they produce is generally incomprehensible to the outsider. Despite their critiques and claims, therefore, I do not consider them helpful companions.
Before the post-modernists came along, M Edelman’s book The Symbolic Use of Politics was published in 1964 but then ignored – not least by myself. I have never found Chomsky an easy companion – but clearly books like his Language and politics (1988) are highly relevant to this theme. One of the most insightful texts for me, however, is Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organisation - a fascinating treatment of the writing about organisations which demonstrates that many of our ideas about them are metaphorical : he suggests the literature uses eight "images" viz organisations as "political systems", as "instruments of domination", as "cultures", as "machines", as "organisms", as "brains", as "psychic prisons", as "flux and transformation" and as "instruments of domination".

Bucharest antique fair

An antique fair sets up on Parcu Kisselev most weekends – and I have always found it rather pathetic – full of shady characters. Sad – as I have spent so many happy hours browsing the stalls of the puces in places such as Berlin, Brussels, Glasgow and Zurich. As it was such a lovely day today – and I knew the Xmas stalls would also be up – we went out and hit gold. First a large snow mountain painting with a superb old frame - bought apparently in a Puces in Aachen (signed R Sagner. We got it for 100 euros (frame alone worth that); then a heavy cast-iron bell for the Sirnea door with a colourful Wallony type cock (25 euros); and, finally, a very large cast-iron frog (30 euros) - which will keep the stone duck company we picked up in a fantastic open-air stone carver's gallery on the border between Drama (Greece) and Bulgaria! Between times, we hit the normal Bucharest selling technique – when I was criticised for not spotting the 2 supposedly original sketches contained in a Steriadi Catalogue. “It takes some brain to learn to identify such things”, the gypsy guy apparently said ironically - as if we were not worthy to look at such precious things that only connaisseurs would appreciate. He wanted an incredible sum for the catalogue - about 400 euros! The aggressive, arrogant attitude we encountered several times in similar dives in Bucharest. Clearly apologies are due for disturbing such “cultural elites”!

Definitions

Snow has eventually come to Bucharest - and I crunched my way to the old market nearby, availing myself of the opportunity of a tasty warm vin fiert (Gluhwein)
Working on my Devil’s Dictionary is a very useful exercise in cutting through the verbal guff about subjects on which so much hot air has been expended. The management literature of the 1980s and 1990s gave people the sense that dramatic positive changes were going on in commerce – a movement from Theory X management to Theory Y at the very least. It all concealed the reality of a dog-eat-dog world. That’s why Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power was so welcome to me – a recognition (if somewhat overdone) that, generally, “plus ca change plus cést la meme chose”. A lot of my draft entries therefore suggest that the title should rather be “The Cynic’s Dictionary” – except that I do not see myself as a cynic. Here are a more draft entries -

Audit; a placebo to give the impression that all is well. Something both overdone and underdone – overdone in volume and underdone in results. A process more feared at the bottom than at the top as frequent recent scandals (auditors signed off on the accounts of Enron and those banks which subsequently almost collapsed). See also “Law”

Law; “the spider's webs which, if anything small falls into them ensnare it, but large things break through and escape”. Solon

Communications; the first thing which people blame when things go wrong; parsed - “I communicate; you listen; he/they misunderstand”.

But drafting it has also challenged my own prejudices. I was preparing to draft a cynical entry for “open government”. "A contradiction in terms”, I confidently started. Then I realised it has been some time since I had checked what was happening under this rubric; ran a google search and came across an interesting European site on use of public sector information and what looks to be definitive overviews of the position of freedom of information in the US and in the UK.

The contrast between the two countries seems quite striking – with the many contributors to the American book being the grassroots practitioners actually using the incredible amount of data available about government activities in the US (which seems to have a proactive system) and suggesting that bureaucratic silos are being broken up more effectively by a demand-led process whereas the academics of the British book plot patiently the resistance of the state to the inquiries which come in the reactive, supply-led 2005 british system. But at least there is a blog which plots the progress And a recent independent report does show just how far Britain has to go,

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.