Johnson's Three Card Trick

My Bulgarian, Portugese, Polish, Italian, Romanian, Russian and American readers will, I know, be waiting “with bated breath” for my reaction to the latest Brexit development. So my post is based on 5 of your questions -

- How did he manage to pull it off? 

- Will it fly tomorrow in Parliament? 

- In what sense is it different from the Deal which Theresa May negotiated last year?
- What are this morning's front pages saying? 
- what happens now? 

1.     How did the “greased piglet” manage to pull it off?

The media reaction in the UK so far seems to assume that all he conceded was that Norther Ireland will remain under EU rules, for the foreseeable future - with the Belfast Assembly (mothballed since January 2017) given the power to decide when to opt out. The reality is rather different (see section 3 below).

The EU’s main concern has been to maintain the integrity of the Good Friday agreement  that saw the end of violence in the north. The EU could not accept the idea of any border controls or customs arrangements on the border between Ireland (an EU member) and Norther Ireland (UK). So the EU was happy to get this concession – although it just seems to postpone the moment at which there could be such controls….

One of the known risks is that the North could eventually unite with the Irish republic - but Conservative party members have already given a clear indication they are fed up with Northern Ireland and would be happy to see it go. And ditto for the Scots – who have too loud a voice in the British Parliament - and have anyway clearly stated that what’s sauce for the Irish goose is sauce for the Scottish gander.  

2.    Will MPs vote for it?

Johnson’s tactics have loosened the parliamentary logjam. He basically threw his allies in the DUP (the Irish unionists) to the wolves when he made the concession. When Theresa May gambled in the 2017 General Election and lost her majority, she had to make major concessions to the DUP which cost a lot of money.

The DUP was strongly supported by the right-wing ERG group in parliament (led by Jacob Rees-Mogg) - but the approach of a No-Deal reality; and the distaste for the Irish connection seem to have been sufficient to allow a lot of the ERG members to peel off and declare their support for the Johnson Deal.

And, of course, Boffy had sorted all this out by Thursday afternoon.

Reaction from Northern Ireland itself suggests general acceptance for what would be a considerably increased special status

MPs have this year consistently voted down May’s Deal and also what few efforts Boris Johnson managed to put in front of them. The Labour party has 6 simple tests for any Deal -

1. Does it ensure a strong and collaborative future relationship with the EU?

2. Does it deliver the “exact same benefits” as we currently have as members of the Single Market and Customs Union?

3. Does it ensure the fair management of migration in the interests of the economy and communities?

4. Does it defend rights and protections and prevent a race to the bottom?

5. Does it protect national security and our capacity to tackle cross-border crime?

6. Does it deliver for all regions and nations of the UK?

As a party, they cannot therefore support this new Deal – not least because they simply don’t trust Johnson in his assurances about coherence with EU-type regulation (the “level playing field” of EU jargon)

That leaves the mavericks who have left or been booted out of the Labour and Conservative parties in parliament – about 30 of them. 
It is therefore basically their votes tomorrow which will decide this….

And this is a quite brilliant analysis of the choices individual MPs now face - with the gun at their head and given a mere 36 hours or so to make a decision whose consequences will reverbate for at least decade. As Jeremy Bentham might have put it “nonsense on stilts”!

3.  How does the Johnson Deal differ from May’s?

The border basically moves from the Irish mainland to the Irish Sea. And the Northern Irish Assembly (which has been in abeyance for a couple of years) is given the power to decide on its extension (or not) of EU customs regulations.
But Johnson has basically been deceiving most of us with his version of the "three cards trick".

Our attention was on the harsh reality of No-Deal - against which this deal is better.  If, however, we compare this Deal with the Theresa May one, this one takes the country out of the Customs Union and Single Market....
It took Ian Dunt of the Politics Today website to remind me of that basic fact - despite my having reproduced the Labour Party's 6 tests above. 
MPs, of course, are not as stupid as me and will not fall for such legerdemain (????)

The detailed provisions which Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement  had made about the “level playing field” have been removed and put, instead, into the political agreement (which, of course, has no legal force)

Readers can see for themselves in this track-change document produced by the Open Europe website - which has also produced this guide to the Johnson Deal

This confirms the view of those who read the very composition of the new Johnson Cabinet as indicating he was going down the American path of loose regulatatory capitalism...

4.     What the front pages of the British  Press are saying

Most papers make it clear that this is not a done deal. The Times says: “Final hurdle in sight as Johnson gets his deal”, the Guardian reports: “Johnson gets his Brexit deal – now it’s a numbers game”. The Mirror says: “On the brink of Brexit … once again”, the i has: “Johnson gets his EU deal … now for the tricky part” and the FT says: “DUP veto threat leaves Johnson’s Brexit deal gamble in the balance”.

Other papers are sounding warnings to MPs to vote for the deal.

·         The Telegraph quotes from the prime minister: “It’s my deal or no deal”,

·         the Daily Mail features a picture of Johnson pointing, with the headline: “He’s done his duty. Now MPs must do theirs”,

·         The Sun has rhyming advice: “Get real … take the deal”
the Express says: “Just do it!”

And the European press is clear that the concessions were all Johnson’s

5. What Happens Now?

There could be a slight hiccup tomorrow if an amendment is selected and passed for MPs to be given a few more days to given to read and assess the implications of what is before them (see next post). The government has denied MPs an official cost-benefit analysis but enough independent economic analysis is available to indicate that the costs of the "hard" Brexit this is will be very severe....

This post from Richard North reminds us that, even if the UK Parliament approves the deal, it becomes a “done deal” only after ratification by the European Parliament and the European Council - which may take more than a week. 

And that, if the deal is voted down (however narrowly), it immediately triggers the Benn Act whereby the government has, legally, to seek a 3 month extension from the EU

So there…consider yoursel' tell’t!

Further Reading

- https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2019/oct/18/how-much-johnson-great-new-deal-actually-new; perhaps the single best briefing – includes a visual guide to the 5% difference between May’s Deal of 2018 and this one. And also to parliament’s vote on 19th
- https://www.politics.co.uk/author/ian-dunt; the best British website on politics and Brexit

- https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2019/10/time-and-motion.html; The most incisive and objective of the many Brexit blogs

- http://eureferendum.com/Default.aspx; the most independent of the pro- Brexit blogs
- http://eulawanalysis.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-withdrawal-agreement-implementation.html; detailed legal commentary on the latest withdrawal agreement 
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/sites/beta-political/files/consolidated_withdrawal_agreement_17-10-2019_1.pdf - all 537 pages of the official withdrawal agreement from the EU website

On Writing Well

“The Road to Character” was an unusual book for me – bought on impulse for a euro in one of the second-hand Bucharest bookshops which give me an intellectual lifeline. And it made me realise how “dead” and technocratic a lot of the non-fiction material is in the “professional” sections of my library – particularly those concerned with Economics, Management (whether public, private or third sector), Development and Politics.

Political economists like Mark Blyth, Paul Collier, Wolfgang Streeck and Yanis Varoufakis are the exception – their prose glows and they keep you hooked – as did veteran Susan Strange’s. And recent Nobel-prize winning Jean Tirole’s Economics for the Common Good (2017 Eng) isn’t your usual economics book but takes themes of interest to us all and reasons conversationally about them.

British political scientists like Richard Rose, Rod Rhodes, Matt Flinders and Gerry Stoker also managed to break away from the mainstream focus on parties, elections and statistics and engage our interest on important issues.

The geographers and anthropologists can generally be relied upon for fresh insights – eg Danny Dorling and Chris Shore - although you have to persevere a bit with the likes of David Harvey.

I have quite an extensive history section but have to confess that my interest gives out at about page 50 of a 400 page tome on the history of a nation or of Europe. The only writers who have survived my boredom threshold for this genre are Richard Evans (Germany) and Geert Mak. But, interestingly, some recent histories of economic or sociological thought (or indeed thought generally) can make for a good read – if they have the appropriate balance between ideas and personalities.

Traditionally such books have been a bit of a slog, with the emphasis too much on the dry dissection of ideas - but the success of a few non-specialist writers in the last decade (think Bill Bryson) has demonstrated the public’s thirst for the exposition of scientific ideas.

The academic community, however, has always taken a dim view of popularisation – the eminent economist JK Galbraith who wrote “The Affluent Society” suffered very much from academic jealousy as did the historian AJP Taylor – so it is great that some writers and journalists have turned increasingly to the world of science and ideas.

Grand Pursuit; the story of economic genius (2011) is a good example.  
Written by Sylvia Nasar, a Professor of journalism (who also produced “A Beautiful Mind” about game theorist John Nash), it attracted a rather sniffy review from one of the doyens of Economics - Robert Solow. (Michael Pollan is another Professor of journalism – this time one who has chosen to convey to the general public the realities of agro-business and food).  

Not, however, that I want to discourage academics from writing well and for the general public! The previous paragraphs have given the examples of those who have managed to do it without apparently attracting opprobrium or jealousy in the fields with which I am familiar. Philosophy is not such a field but I was delighted to discover recently a “popular” book by academic philosopher James Miller Examined Lives – from Socrates to Nietzsche with a nice interview here    

Alan Ryan is another academic who writes well although his On Politics is just a bit too voluminous a history of political thought for me. These extensive notes give a useful sense of what would be in store for any brave reader

My own favourite is “Comparative European Politics – the story of a profession” which invites 28 big names in what was then a new discipline to tell the personal story of how their careers developed. Richard Rose was one of those originals and has a delightful memoir “Learning about politics in time and space” (2014). Here’s one of his reflections on a colleague which will give you a sense of his care with words. Not for nothing was Rose in his very early life a journalist! I’m glad to say he is still going strong in his mid 80s.

I know some of you will tell me that, if I am now finding texts in my own library “dead” and technocratic, I should reconsider my antipathy to novels. I considered this question a couple of years ago in a post which started thus -

I’m not a great reader of novels – the interactions and fate of fictitious characters pale against those of the real people I find in histories…..If I want good prose, I find it in essays, travelogues and short stories – although I grant you that it’s only in stories (short and long) that the inner life of people can be treated in depth…..Perhaps that’s why I’m so partial to short stories – produced by the likes of William Trevor, Carol Shields, Alice Munro, Vladimir Nabakov, Joseph Miller and……Joseph Roth

Nine years ago one post here did actually pay tribute to about 75 novels which had taken my fancy – only one third of which, interestingly, were British….And, of those, most were Irish or Scottish since I have found their style of writing much more lively than that of English novelists…..It’s not just the older generation I’m referring to (such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Edwin Muir, Robin Jenkins and Muriel Spark) but also the younger writers (such as Andrew Greig, James Meek and James Robertson on the Scottish side – and John Banville, Sebastian Barry, John McGahern and Edna O'Brien on the Irish).

But too many contemporary English writers seem to be unable to shake themselves out of their limited middle-class environment – eg Ian McEwan, although this is not something you could say about his acerbic mate Martin Amis. Sebastian Faulks and Louis de Bernieres are two exceptions who deal with big issues – the latter giving us “Birds without Wings” about the tragic exchange of population in early 20s Anatolia. And Lawrence Durrell still thrills me – despite the reputation he has unfairly been given for “over the top” writing…… 

I was not always so prejudiced. In my youth I read a lot of novels and the 2010 post reflected the novel reading which continued to entertain me. The later 2017 post demonstrated that I was still partial to novels…. So I don’t know why I suddenly apparently went off the genre…..

Lists of personal favourites are rather self-indulgent and pointless – unless including some sort of justification for the choices….which might just persuade us to give some of the texts a whirl…. 

It’s in that spirit that I now update that earlier post. 

In 2010 I hadn’t quite adjusted to my Romanian base – so had missed a baker’s dozen of superb books - Miklos Banffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy (originally written in the 1950s but only widely available from 2010); Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy (written in the 60s but receiving a new lease of life after the film); and Gregor von Rezzori’s brilliant three semi-autobiographical books drawn from his time in Romanian Czernowitz (now in southern Ukraine) – first written (in German) between the 50s and 70s but issued by NYRB only recently.  

Rebecca West’s massive and stunning Black Lamb and Grey Falcon – a journey through Yugoslavia  was first published in 1941 and is actually four books in one – about Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Macedonia – but received a huge boost from the 90s Yugoslav conflagration. It’s not, of course, a novel but, some 80 years on, it is a gripping read - and still repays study.

I would stand by my 2010 list – with the embarrassing exception of Paul Coelho! And I also don’t know how Jason Godwin crept onto the list…. Otherwise the mix of South American “magic realism”; French romanticism and nihilism; Irish, Israeli and Egyptian realism; and Scottish whimsy stands up well……

My recent tributes to the likes of John Berger and William MacIlvanney demand their addition – as do the works of JM Coetze and Svetlana Alexievitch 

Capitalism – what is it? Can it change for the better?

If character traits are getting more inward and selfish, what does this mean for our ability to create a better future?

The recent series I did on Paul Collier’s “Future of Capitalism” makes me realise that I have never offered a serious post on “Capitalism – what is it and can it change its spots?”. This is how I had left things -

By the turn of the millennium the message seemed to be that Capitalism takes various forms; is constantly changing; and will always be with us. But increasingly, people were wondering whether it was not out of control.

And a few years back, something changed. It wasn’t the global crisis in itself but rather the combination of two things – first the suggestion that the entire engine of the system (profitability) was reaching vanishing point; and, second, a sudden realisation that robotization was a serious threat to even middle-class jobs. Now the book titles talk of the new phenomenon of “post-capitalism” 

Curious that I omitted global warming the growing appreciation of whose reality makes it a third factor. I have therefore developed a table which identifies what I consider are the most accessible books about the nature of this system “without a proper name”. In my day we knew the system as “the mixed economy” but that phrase fell out of favour in the 1980s in the face of the onslaught of privatisation.

“Neoliberalism” wasn’t a very good substitute since very few people knew what this meant – indeed it clearly registered as a term of abuse…..And any use of the term “capitalism” was banned in all but the most militant circles….. 

You almost felt the sense of relief when the phrase “post-capitalism” came along – a system whose name didn’t embarrass us!!!!

The table looks at almost a dozen very different specialisms (inc journalism, religion and policy analysts/think tankers).

I have to confess that I get very impatient with the incredible specialism in the so-called “social sciences” which has developed these past few decades with the expansion of universities. Two things in particular annoy me - first the lack of communications between these so-called “experts” is nothing short of criminal. Most of them received free education and yet, starved of the slightest contact with those developing similar thoughts in separate fields (let alone with real life), offer us, with few exceptions, boring, barren thoughts

And I get impatient, secondly, with the amnesia of these micro-specialists…their worship of the new…just look at the recommended reading they inflict on their poor students……very little before 2000….And my own lists are the same……And note what the author of one of the clearest books on capitalism said in 2008

“No social scientist over the past half century has added anything that is fundamentally new to our understanding of the capitalist economic system”

Geoff Ingham in “Capitalism” (2008)

I have selected the books which appear in the table according to whether they portray a world of “perfect competition” in which, according to the theory, no one has any power or, at the other extreme, a world of large companies and groups exercising power (legal and illegal).

We are prone these days to use ideological labels too easily – so I want to avoid that by using less obvious labels.

-      “Mixed” therefore covers those who clearly argue for what used to be called “the mixed economy” and are quite clear that they wish a better, more balanced capitalism;

-      The “critical-realist” label covers those who go further in their critical approach, extending their analysis to the role exercised by dubious and illegitimate power players who try to buy democracy and whose activities threaten the planet’s very survival.

    

Needless to say, the allocation to one particular column is arbitrary and could be disputed – as can the choice of illustrative authors and books! I shall try to say something about my choice in a subsequent post...   

Key Texts about the future of capitalism – by academic discipline and “approach”

Academic Discipline	1. Critical-Realist	2. Mixed approach	3. “market” proponents
Economics	Conceptualising Capitalism – institutions, evolution, future; Geoff Hodgson (2015) Debt and Neo-Feudalism; Michael Hudson (2012) Credo – economic beliefs in a world of crisis; Brian Davey (2015). Davey is not a career or conventional economist!	People, Power and Profits – progressive capitalism for an age of discontent; Joseph Stiglitz (2019) The Future of Capitalism – facing new anxieties; Paul Collier (2018) Shifts and Shocks – what we’ve learned, and still have to, from the financial crisis; Martin Wolf (2014) – with accompanying power point presentation	Why Globalisation Works; Martin Wolf (2004) most of the discipline
Economic history	Capitalism and its Economics – a critical History; Douglas Dowd (2000) Never Let a Good Crisis go to waste; Philip Mirowski  (2013)	Crashed – how a decade of financial crises changed the world Adam Tooze (2018)	Economic historians by definition have a strong sense of political and other institutions
Political economy	“The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century” – Susan George (1999). Susan Strange - The Retreat of the State (1994) - States and Markets (1988) - Casino Capitalism ; (1986)	Austerity – the history of a dangerous idea; Mark Blyth (2013) Yanis Varoufakis - And the Weak Suffer what they must – Europe, austerity and the threat to global stability (2016) - The Global Minotaur (2012)	The discipline still rediscovering itself but, again, by definition, has a strong sense of the importance of institutions
Political Science	Crisis without End - the unravelling of western prosperity: A Gamble (2014) Democracy Incorporated – managed democracy and the spectre of inverted totalitarianism; Sheldon Wolin (2008)	Paul Hirst eg Revisiting Associative Democracy; ed Westall (2011). The Great Disruption – human nature and the reconstitution of social order; Francis Fukuyama (1999) Mammon’s Kingdom – an essay on Britain, Now; David Marquand (2015)	Only a few brave pol scientists trespass into the economic field – although it is becoming more fashionable
Policy analysis/Think Tanks		“The Locust and the Bee – predators and creators in capitalism’s future”; G Mulgan (2015)	An Intro to Capitalism (IEA 2018)
Sociology	Wolfgang Streeck. - How will Capitalism End?; (2016) - Buying Time – the delayed crisis of democratic capitalism (2013) End of capitalism? Michael Mann (2013) Capitalism; Geoff Ingham (2008)	Vampire Capitalism – fractured societies and alternative futures; Paul Kennedy (2017)	The sociological voice is still inspired by C Wright Mills, Veblen, Weber and Durkheim
Geography	David Harvey - Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (2014) - The Enigma of Capital (2010) - A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism (2005).	Danny Dorling - A Better Politics – how government can make us happier (2016 - Injustice (2014)	The geographers are a bolshie lot - with a strong sense of geo-politics
Environment	Come On! Capitalism, short-termism, population and the destruction of the planet; (Club of Rome 2018).	Why we can’t agree about Climate Change; Mike Hulme (2009) Natural Capitalism – the next industrial revolution; Paul Hawken (1999)	they pride themselves on their technocracy
Journalism	Post Capitalism – a guide to our Future; Paul Mason (2015) …. The Capitalism Papers – Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System; Jerry Mander (2012).	How Good Can we be – ending the mercenary society Will Hutton (2015) Capitalism 3.0 Peter Barnes (2006)	They don’t enjoy the tenure of the academics (altho Hutton is a college Director)
Management and man’t studies	“The Dictionary of Alternatives – utopianism and organisation”; M Parker (2007)	Rebalancing Society; Henry Mintzberg (2014) Peter Senge Charles Handy	Most mant writers are apologists – apart from the critical mant theorists
Religious studies	Laudato-Si – Pope Francis’ Encyclical (2015). Accessible in its entirety here	The Crisis of global capitalism – Pope Benedict XVI’s social encyclical and the future of political economy; ed A Pabst (2011) Questions of Business Life; Higginson (2002)	A more ecumenical bunch!

Psychology

What about me – the struggle for identity in a market based society?; Paul Verhaeghe (2014)

Is our social DNA changing?

The book profiling “character” in older generations had me musing these past few days about what, if anything, could be said about trends in contemporary behaviour and social values.

There’s always something we can fault the latest generation with – for example the “attention deficit” which modern IT gadgets seem to develop…and how this might affect future “characters”…

More critically, surveys such as the World Values and Eurobarometer indicate a large and significant trend since the early 1970s toward more individualistic, selfish and less trusting societies….

Daniel Bell had warned us as far back as 1976 in his Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism  that the spirit of 68 was difficult to reconcile with business requirements but could never have anticipated the contempt with which businesses subsequently chose to treat their employees – with wholescale layoffs and casualization of the workforce.

Richard Sennett is a philosophical sociologist who has followed these developments for almost 40 years, starting with his “The Hidden Injuries of Class” (1972), a study of class consciousness among working-class families in Boston; then “The Corrosion of Character” (1998) which explored how new forms of work were changing our communal and personal experience.

 “Respect in a world of inequality” probed the relation of work and reforms of the welfare system; and “The Culture of the New Capitalism” (2006) provides an overview of these changes

Francis Fukuyama is a prolific, elegant and much misunderstood writer whose The Great Disruption – human nature and the reconstitution of social order (1999) is an important bit of evidence of the deep concerns at that time of where we were heading.

All of these, of course, were based more or less exclusively on analyses of the United States of America and it is important to look more widely if we are to understand this important question of how the DNA of the human race might be changing….

Reckless Opportunists – elites at the end of the establishment by Aeron Davis (2018) is a small book which ruthlessly exposes the almost criminal damage which a new breed of elites have inflicted on a once proud nation,

It is the result of twenty years of intense research, over 350 interviews with the heads of corporations, senior civil servants, journalists, politicians and public relations firms. In response to Brexit, Aeron Davis wrote this slim but telling volume in less than three months. It is, in effect, a short anthropology of how the United Kingdom’s elite became clueless at governing.

Davis’s report is thus a frontline account of the way the political, industrial, financial and media elites are disabled by their own culture and methods from acting in the collective interests of the country.

“No one seems to trust anything or anyone else’. Davis observes that

‘self-interest and competition has left politicians willing to destroy their parties, civil servants their departments, chief executives their companies, and journalists their publications’.

He then sets out to explain how the new elites undermine the institutions they head.

The reporting of quarterly returns by fund managers prevents long-term investment.

Within this world, leaders have to sell themselves continuously and rely on specialists in corporate affairs to attract investors. Communications  teams spend 70 per cent of their time ‘keeping stuff out of the papers’. One result is the fading of rooted expertise and the rise of short-term consultants. This shift, echoed in politics and government, is leading to a massive loss of institutional memory essential to self-belief. It is not just bosses that come and go at speed. In 2009, Davis wanted to find out more about weapons of mass destruction decisions in Iraq, only to find there was only one person still in the department with the relevant knowledge. Of twenty-five permanent secretaries at the time, eleven had been in the post less than two years.

The parallel, insecure worlds of government and commerce, are run on ‘selfdeception’, much of it embedded in the selfserving systems of ‘communication’. ‘Greater transparency’, Davis claims, only leads ‘to more mystification’. Finance directors manipulate the rate of return to serve the public listings of the share price, and when successful,move on before the consequences are realised. Many financial journalists are in effect ‘embedded’, writing to other specialists and reinforcing a small world that believes almost religiously in the free market.

How does it maintain itself? It works through numbers. ‘Econocracy’, not democracy is the name of the game, as targets are imposed on those below while being evaded by those at the top, who are anyway hired hands: CEOs with one- or two-year contracts.

Guy Standing developed the theory of the ‘precariat’ to describe the working classes of our time. Davis shows that those at the top, while they may be doing nicely in terms of incomes, face precarious employment.

Embracing economic models that work until they fail, constantly shifting, being fired, replaced or moving on, they live in constant fear of the chop. These assertions sound like a caricature, but are set out with compelling,

Davis’s gripping account reveals a country and an economy led by rootless lemmings taking the wider public with them over the cliff edge. Lemming-like behaviour is reinforced by accountants who provide steady support without taking responsibility. The government spends £800 million on outside consultations, while civil servants retire to circulate through its fee system, as their experience and contacts are hoovered up by the private sector.

Rootlessness is magnified by the sale of so many sectors of the UK economy to overseas investors: 54 per cent of company shares traded in 2014 were foreign owned and 98 per cent of FTSE 100 companies ‘have subsidiaries or joint ventures registered in overseas tax havens’.

After twenty years of interrogating the managers and politicians of the UK, Davis finds their leadership to be ‘solitary, rich, nasty, brutish and short’. Leadership could and should, he feels, be ‘connected, modestly paid, nice, civilised and long’. But it is not. He provides a two-page list of reforms that might help.

Building Character

Nobody seems to want to talk any more about “character” – perhaps it has shades of “self-discipline” and “self-control” when the spirit of the age continues to encourage the self to flourish?
So it took some courage for David Brooks to produce in 2015 a book entitled “The Road to Character” consisting of profiles of 8 people whose life demonstrates “character” including Dwight Eisenhower, Samuel Johnson (!), George Marshall (of Marshall Fund fame), St Augustine (!), the american woman behind Roosevelt’s New Deal (Francis Perkins), the charity worker behind “The Catholic Worker” (Dorothy Day) and George Eliot, the British writer.

It’s an interesting format – there’s something a bit forbidding about the 700 page full Biography, warts and all, which assails us these days…..There is, of course, a danger that you just get the highlights – what they call a “hagiography” – which happened in 2007 when Gordon Brown published his “Courage – eight portraits” profiling Mandela, Bonhoeffer, Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Cicely Saunders, Aung Ky, Edith Cavell and Raoul Wallenburg.

But Brooks’ book manages to give us rounded profiles. It starts by contrasting two sets of values –

-      what it calls “CV values”, the achievements with which we regale potential employers on our CVs

-      the “eulogy values”, the human qualities for which we would like to be remembered at our funeral (Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Really Effective People” makes a powerful start with this point.

Five of the individuals chosen by Brooks are from my parents’ generation to which I paid due tribute many posts ago

My generation, undoubtedly, had it too easy… Recent posts have recognised just how far we have fallen from decent moral standards… I have no real memory of Eisenhower but use these amazingly prescient words of his 1960 farewell Presidential address on the very first page of my Dispatches to the Next Generation

We . . . must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Brooks’ book includes this passage – as well as an important page in the Marshall section about the importance of institutions which took me back to a post of a couple of years ago about the importance of thinking institutionally. And about the wider issue of what I call “stewardship” ie the concept that we have a duty to hand anything, of which we have been asked to take care, back in the same condition as it was when we were entrusted with it…..Now there’s another idea we don’t hear much of these days!! 

All in all, it made me realise that Robert Greene’s otherwise excellent Laws of Human Nature focus exclusively on the negative aspects – and need to be rerun through a more positive lens….Wikipedia, for example, tells me that

“the Character Strengths and Virtues (CSV) handbook of human strengths and virtues by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, represents the first attempt on the part of the psychological research community to identify and classify the positive psychological traits of human beings. The CSV identifies six classes of virtue (i.e., “core virtues”), made up of twenty-four measurable character strengths.” 

The six core virtues are -

Strengths of Wisdom and Knowledge: Cognitive strengths that entail the acquisition and skilful use of knowledge

Strengths of Courage: Emotional strengths that involve the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition, external and internal

Strengths of Humanity: interpersonal strengths that involve supporting and befriending others

Strengths of Justice:  that underlie healthy and harmonious community life

Strengths of Temperance: that protect against unhealthy excess and egotism

Strengths of Transcendence: that forge connections to the larger universe and provide meaning in life

https://demosuk.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/476_1505_characternation_web.pdf

Turning Points

I’m much exercised at the moment by the notion of “turning points” in recent history when “forces” were finely balanced and a decision or accident was enough to push the system on one direction rather than another…..

After 68, a lot of us expected the future to be a cooperative one - but the 1980s turned out to be the Age of Greed.

We all know about Nixon’s decision in 1971 to take the USA off gold – and also of the massive OPEC spike in the price of oil a couple of years later. And some of us remember the UK’s financial “Big Bang” of 1986 which brought London into the eye of the financial system.

But few people remember that there was a time in the 1960s when the question of the purpose of the company was a very live one – with “market share” being considered the most important “number”, certainly not share value. There’s a nice little video here of Charles Handy reminding us that it was Milton Friedman who articulated most clearly in 1970 the view that the purpose was to maximise share value - and his acolytes who introduced the idea in 1976 of senior managers being given “share options” as incentives.

Handy regrets the failure of people then to challenge what has now become the scandal of the gross inequalities which disfigure our societies - which Ferdinand Mount’s “The New Few” quite rightly traces back to that period. Until that point, the ratio of Directors’ salaries to average wages had been 40 to one for quite a few decades – compared to the current obscenities of 1,000 to 1.

And Paul Collier’s “The Future of Capitalism” reminds us that the question of the accountability of the corporation remains a live issue…..

But I simply didn’t understand the significance of the younger Democrat’s disowning in 1975 of the classic American populist tradition – to which the last post drew attention - until reading The Atlantic long article 3 years ago on the subject. 

It was at that point that I made the connection with Robert Greene’s “generational cycles”. Amazing the way the mind works……

The full version of Greene’s “The Laws of Human Nature” can be read here.