How Myths take root and are difficult to shift

The beauty of a book with large print is that it’s easy to go back and read – and that’s what I’ve been doing today with Bregman’s “Humankind – a hopeful history”. I also wanted to check out some references and landed up with some good material, including an interview and a discussion between Bregman and Steve Pinker.

But the main focus has been one of my famous tables which I’ve used to build a map of the various “research myths” about human nature which Bregman identified during the course of his writing – I’ve identified more than 20

I draw two conclusions from my rereading -

- first that, once a myth takes root, it’s very difficult to shift. The media don’t like revisionism and never give equal space or time to something that challenges the conventional wisdom – particularly if it seems to contain a positive message.

- second that most people are fairly decent – but power corrupts ie the evil is in those with power and the battalions of police, soldiers, spies and bureaucrats they control

Here’s Bregman with a couple of comments on two of the experiments -

     The Stanford experiement

RB: Then many of these students said that they didn’t want to do it. They didn’t want to do it because they said: No, that’s not who I am. Then Zimbardo said: You got to do this because I need these results, then we can go to the press and say look, prisons are horrible environments. We need to reform the whole thing. That was actually a movement in the 60s where people said, you know, we got to abolish prisons totally.

And the terrible irony of this movement, which, and Zimbardo was part of that as well, is that it was  then later used by conservatives to say, oh, well, if prisons you know don’t work at all, if rehabilitation is not an option, then, you know, let’s just throw people in prison and throw away the key, right? Let’s just lock people up for life, because then that’s the only option. It’s a history full of dark ironies.

But yeah, the Stanford Prison Experiment is — I think it can only be described as a hoax and it’s very sad that this has been taught to students for 50 years.

 

The Milgram shocks

RB; It’s a problematic experiment as well. The archives have opened up, again, and we now know that many of the subjects didn’t believe the situation was real. And we also know that the people who went all the way, to give 450 volt shocks, yeah, the chance that they would do that was higher if they didn’t believe the whole thing was real. Maybe it was not 65 percent, as Milgram initially reported, maybe it was 50 percent, or 40, or 30, but it’s still way too high. It’s still a very dark and sinister experiment that shows that, indeed, friendly people can do this.

But I do think the experiment needs to be reinterpreted. So Milgram made the argument that people became sort of rigid robots, that they just blindly followed orders, just as many Germans said after the war, you know, “I was just following orders.”

But I think what really happened in that experiment was something different. It was about joining; it was about followership. It was about people wanting to help the scientist, and yes, sort of feeling part of his group — which is not a comfortable message, right? It’s not a comfortable message at all. We talked earlier about, you know, how so often we do the most horrible things in the name of loyalty and friendship. And I think that’s also how we should interpret this experiment.

 And then the table

Issue	Initial thesis	Revised analysis
Bombing of German cities	It would lower civilian morale	It boosted morale
Hurricane Katrina	Social breakdown	Social support strong
“mean world syndrome”	The world is getting worse	Stephen Pinker’s “The Better Angels of our Nature” tells us that past 70 years have been much less violent. It’s the media that stirs our pessimism and cynicism
Homo economicus	People are selfish	They are altruistic and cooperative
Veneer theory of civilisation	ditto	“Only recently have scientists concluded that the grim view of humanity needs revision” p19
“The Selfish Gene”	Richard Dawkins original book	Which he later disowned
Lord of the Flies	Even kids are aggressive	The original boys in Golding’s story actually rewarded cooperation
Friendly foxes	Darwinian selection rewards aggression	Russian geneticist demonstrating selection breeds friendly foxes
Cannibalistic apes	Aggression is inbuilt	Pinker wrong about  violence of hunter-gatherers
“Soldiers who don’t shoot”	Fighting is natural	Only about 15% of soldiers fire their rifles
“The curse of civilisation”	When ice retreated, farming became possible and progress started	Settled life was labour-intensive; possessions and leadership developed – sickness and violence started
“The Mystery of Easter Island”	Large statues were rolled into place with logs – requiring chopping down of forests – people then turned on one another (Mulloy 1974)	Duly repeated in J Diamond’s “Collapse” (2005).  Reality was that rats destroyed the forests and western ships brought slavery and plague
Stanford University	1971 experiment - Students separated into prisoners and jailors and role-played – with sadism and violence resulting	When students protested they were told that results needed to prove that prisons didn’t work. Zimbardo published that research in 1973. Martinsen then pushed that thesis – with strong media support – although his subsequent retraction got no publicity
Stanley Milgram’s shock machine	1961 experiment which had psychology students apply ever-stronger voltage to control subjects	Follow-up research indicated that many students understood it was a mock study
38 New York Bystanders	1964 incident when a young woman loudly stabbed to death – with no one going to her rescue. A few days later, the  killer was apprehended by 2 bystanders	Experiment confirmed there was a “bystander effect” when people thought that others would deal with sit. No media reported fact that it was 2 bystanders who caught the killer Meta analysis pub in 2011. In 90% of cases people help!
The “Broken Windows” theory	James Q Wilson started this with a 1982 article in The Atlantic which was taken up by Mayor Giuliana and police Commissioner Bratton	A 2015 meta-analysis disproved a theory which had cops arresting anyone for minor felons. Demographic trends were the basic cause of the decline in crime. Arguably the strategy has led to racial profiling and increased police aggression
German fighting zeal in 2nd WW	Janowitz and Shils discover that German soldiers fight for camaraderie	But outsiders don’t count 95% of soldier deaths in 2nd WW were from “distance” weapons
The Pygmalion effect	Humans can and should be classified into positive and negative categories	Expectations are self-reinforcing - it’s the basis of theory X and theory Y schools of management. If you assume people are lazy, they will prove you  right – and vv
Monetary rewards can demotivate	People need financial rewards to achieve	Edward Deci has demonstrated that bonuses are generally perverse
The tragedy of the commons	G Harin wrote an article with this title in 1968 which argued that people abused common land eg overgrazing	Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel prize in 2009 for proving him wrong – starting with a famous Workshop in 1973 to study the “commons” and her 1990 book “Governing the Commons”
Norway’s prisons	The US incarcerates about 10 times more people in prisons than the average country	Norway’s low recidivism rates demonstrate a better way
Drinking tea with terrorists	Heavy prion sentences are the normal recourse	Dutch and Danish treatment show there is a more effective way

 Further Reading

One of the most serious and systematic reviews of any book I have ever encountered - https://www.academia.edu/43631182/On_Rutger_Bregmans_Humankind_Minor_revisions_22_September_2020_

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/07/human-nature_11.html

Bregman and Pinker discussion https://thepanpsycast.com/panpsycast2/episode80-1

The Power Paradox -

http://www.ippanetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Power-Paradox-Leakey.pdf

https://leakeyfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Origin-Stories-Episode-20-The-Power-Paradox-LIVE.pdf

Humankind

Rutger Bregman is one of the 18 writers who feature in the table I drafted earlier this year to illustrate my theory that those who straddle different worlds (whether of nationality, profession or discipline) are both more creative and clearer writers than more insular types. Bregman wrote the little book Utopia for Realists (2016) which thrust him into the global league.

He graduated as an historian but has, since 2013, been a journalist at a fascinating Netherlands journal De Correspondent whose funding was crowdsourced; operates on a membership basis; and sets its face against “news” as such. This has given him the 

“privilege to pursue my own fascinations and be powered by that magical stuff known as intrinsic motivation”

That’s a quote from the Acknowledgements in his most recent (and larger) work – Humankind – an optimistic history (2020). He clearly has a great English translator but his material is written so clearly and in such highly readable short chapter chunks - each of which introduces us to some well-known but generally false research such as the “broken windows” criminological “explanation”. 

His style has some similarities with that of Malcolm Gladwell – so I finished its 400 pages in a couple of days.

It’s been generally well received – although this sniffy, caustic review writes it off for being too simplistic 

Not yet erased from the annals of history, for example, is the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on whom the author regularly calls for his view that humans are naturally nice, and it is the institutions of civilisation that have corrupted us. Bregman contrasts this with what he calls, following the biologist Frans de Waal, “veneer theory”: the view (attributed to Hobbes among others) that civilisation is a thin skin of decency barely concealing the savage ape underneath.

 

You might suspect that there is something to both these views simultaneously, but Humankind is a polemic in the high Gladwellian style and so aims to be a simple lesson overturning our allegedly preconceived ideas, with the help of carefully selected study citations and pseudo-novelistic scenes from the blitz and other teachable stories. The “veneer” theory, Bregman insists, is totally wrong.

What is his evidence? Infants and toddlers, studies suggest, have an innate bias towards fairness and cooperation. When some Tongan children were shipwrecked on a Pacific island for over a year, they cooperated generously rather than re-enacting Lord of the Flies.

 

Since Bregman is a priori sure that all nasty stories about human nature must be “myths”, he tries to puncture several. The chapter on Philip Zimbardo’s notorious Stanford prison experiment ably collects the recent discoveries that the whole thing was a hoax, with the guards being coached in their cruelty to the prisoners.

On the other hand, a bizarre chapter about Easter Island attempts to disprove, on the basis of some inconclusive fragments of evidence, the accepted story of how deforestation led to civil war, cannibalism and population collapse. This never happened, concludes Bregman blithely, even though the Easter Islanders themselves say it did: a vivid example of his gift for dismissing inconvenient evidence.

 

That approach, however, won’t wash with Stanley Milgram’s “obedience” experiments, in which subjects were instructed by experimenters to give (fake) electric shocks to people in another room, and continued to do so even when the “victims” seemed to be in terrible pain. Disarmingly,

Bregman admits that he originally wanted to bring this story crashing down, but he can’t: the findings have been robustly repeated. Instead he reframes the subjects’ “obedience” as “conformity”, which might sound to you like a distinction without much of a difference. Our social instinct to conform, along with the well-known camaraderie between soldiers, is what Bregman finally offers as an explanation for the Holocaust, in place of some story about fundamental human evil. Which even if plausible, notably fails to explain the actions of the Nazi leaders themselves.

 

Bregman also points at how nice Norwegian prisons are, and visits a hippyish school where there are no set lessons or curriculum. If we believed in human decency, he suggests, this is how things could be everywhere.

But plainly the attempt to replace a story about humans’ essential wickedness with a contrasting story about humans’ essential loveliness has already run aground – as it was bound to, since any claim that complex human beings are essentially one single thing or another is a fairytale. “I’ve argued that humans have evolved to be fundamentally sociable creatures,” Bregman writes – as though this is a brave thing to argue, though absolutely no one in the world disagrees with it

What I really appreciated about the book was how easily it wove theory into the narrative. That’s no easy thing to do and was particularly well done in the chapter on “The Power of Intrinsic Motivation” which gave pride of place to the Buurtzog model of social care which I faulted Goodhart’s “Head Hand Heart” for ignoring. Jos de Blok is its founder and has some very critical things to say about both management and academia! Pity that Bregman didn't elaborate.....

The book finishes with “Ten Rules to Live by” – the most disappointing section.

The business model used by “The Correspondent” has attracted its share of criticism – a positive Guardian article here but a more critical piece from Niemanlab which, in itself, looks an interesting media site.   

Links I liked

Luck, context and talent

The world has seen so many talented artists and writers – but for every success there are many thousands of disappointments. That’s why I’m a fan of the Neglected Books blog which resurrects excellent writing from some decades past which has long been forgotten about. And the current post has a discussion about the part luck plays in the process by which some books become classics. It was Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan which first made me aware of this when he wrote the following - 

More than four centuries ago, the English essayist Francis Bacon had a very simple intuition. ….. Bacon mentioned a man who, upon being shown the pictures of those worshipers who paid their vows then subsequently escaped shipwreck, wondered where were the pictures of those who happened to drown after their vows. The lack of effectiveness of their prayers did not seem to be taken into account by the supporters of the handy rewards of religious practice. “And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like”, he wrote in his Novum Organum, written in 1620.

 

This is a potent insight: the drowned worshippers, being dead, do not advertise their experiences. They are invisible and will be missed by the casual observer who will be led to believe in miracles.

Not just in miracles, as Taleb goes onto argue…..it is also the process which decides whether an artist is remembered. For every artist of genius, there have been many more with the same talent but whose profile, somehow, was submerged….

Art, of course, is the subject of high fashion – reputations ebb and flow…..we are vaguely aware of this…but it is money that speaks in the art “market” and it is the din of the cash register to which the ears of most art critics and dealers are attuned

 

Someone else who celebrates unknown or, rather, forgotten artists is Jonathan in Wales who runs a great blog called My Daily Art Display which fleshes out the detail of the lives of long-forgotten but superb artists…..

But it’s not, of course, just a matter of LUCK – the discussion at Neglected Books mentions the fantastic sea artist, Turner, who very much stood on the shoulders of other artists he knew –

 

There is a wing of the local museum devoted to the Norwich school of painters, who were around the time of J. M. W. Turner, who knew him, who inspired him and were inspired by him—but who weren’t Turner. So, it’s full of works that are amazing—but that aren’t the few classics people associate with Turner. Certainly, some of my favorite painters are artists I wouldn’t have known unless I’d seen their work hanging in a gallery or museum.

 2. The “Stepping Stones” report and diagram of 1977

Last month the new English libertarian journal The Critic had an interesting article reminding us of the maverick policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s, John Hoskyns, a systems analyst who owned his own company. 

But in the early 1970s, as the three-day week, double-digit inflation, a declining GDP and crippling industrial action began to accelerate, he turned his mind to politics. Why, he asked himself, was Britain in the state it was? What exactly had gone wrong? Why did it have the longest working hours, lowest rate of pay and lowest production per head of any major country in Northern Europe? Why – a former industrial superpower and winner of two world wars – were we now falling so far behind?

The questions began to obsess him: “It was,” he wrote, “such an absolute Everest of problem-solving that I wouldn’t leave it alone, I couldn’t think about anything else.” He thus set to work on a diagram to map out all the causes and effects.

The diagram took an entire year to complete. It was really a “why?” diagram, Hoskyns explained:

Why did things happen? In other words, you look at a problem – what are the causes? And of course, there are often many causes. But then you look at the causes and you realise that they themselves are the result of other problems and other causes. Almost everything turned out to be a precondition for almost everything else.

 

“What the diagram really said,” Hoskyns later explained “is that if you’re going to change anything, you’ve got to change everything … because actually, in terms of logic, the causal connections are such that you cannot say, ‘Let’s just do that’, because – you can’t! Because actually, there are five other things that are causing that.”

When the Wiring Diagram was completed – a vast flow chart of interconnected ailments, some of the arrows moving in both directions – Hoskyns showed it to Thatcher.  She laughed at its complexity and said it looked like the map of a chemical works, but she was intrigued. 

 The final 1977 Stepping Stones report Hoskyns produced can be viewed here

Head, Hand, Heart

David Goodhart is a British “thinker” whose work arouses mixed feelings in good liberal circles. He was the author of “The Road to Somewhere – the new tribes shaping British politics” (2017) which I called, in an extended post of 2 years ago, “the most insightful analysis of contemporary British society I’ve read”.

But appearing, as it did, only a few months after the Brexit referendum, its sympathetic treatment of the “left-behinds” offended privileged Remainers. He may have been a founding member of the centrist monthly “Prospect” but his card had been marked from 2004 when he published a pamphlet entitled “Too Diverse?” - which argued that the country was approaching the limits of acceptable levels of immigration    

He’s just published a worthy successor Head Hand Heart – the struggle for dignity and status in the 21^st Century whose 280 pages I managed to romp through in a couple of days and whose key points I want to share with you. But first an explanation of the title's first three words - 

Britain and America in particular suffer from a condition he describes as “Peak Head”, where cognitive achievement acts as a sorting mechanism in a supposed meritocracy. Along the way, we have devalued both technical, practical abilities (Hand), and social and empathetic skills (Heart), while alienating and demoralising the people who do the jobs that require them.

Deindustrialisation is a big part of the story. In 1976, Goodhart writes, there were 45,000 steelworkers and 4,000 students in Sheffield. In 2017, 20 years after Tony Blair made a mantra of “education, education, education”, there were 5,000 steelworkers and 60,000 students.

One of the results of this profound cultural shift has been a stagnation in pay and a demoralising loss of status for jobs not deemed to be part of the graduate “knowledge economy”. The hourly pay of bus and coach drivers has risen by just 22% since 1975, compared with a 111% rise for advertising and public relations managers. 

The book is a remarkably easy read – with extensive quotations from (and references to) other books (not unlike the style of this blog!) – although I did find my eyes glazing over at the excessive references to statistical trends and percentages.  

Key Points (for this reader)

1. The chapter on the history and significance of the Intelligence Quotient is not as thorough or as useful as it might be – which is strange given that this is the basis of his critique. 

2. The chapter on “Whatever happened to Heart?” is only 30 pages long and devoted mainly to nursing and the social care of the elderly but makes no mention of the Dutch model for neighbourhood care – started by Buurtzorg a few years back which, for the past few years, has been inspiring people everywhere. This is a worker cooperative model… which, quite rightly, figures as one of the inspiring case-studies in Frederic Laloux’s “Reinventing Organisations”. Will Davies’ very useful review of the book notes that it is very weak (if not lame) on prescriptions – tending to rely on moral exhortation, pay adjustments and the dishing out of honours. 

Why on earth does he not recognise that cooperatives offer the strongest way to dignity?

3. The following chapter “The Fall of the Knowledge Worker” is even shorter (20 pages) and records an interesting interview with Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s Chief Economist, about the possible effects of automation on “the future role of humans” (!!). For Haldane these seem to consists of 3 Cs – Creativity, Craft and Caring. 

- First the cognitive skills requiring creativity and intuition.

- The second are skills of “bespoke design” – the market niches which require craft skills – be it in art, foodstuffs or textiles.

- “tasks requiring emotional intelligence (sympathy and empathy, relationship-building and negotiation skills, resilience and character) rather than cognitive intelligence”

4. The final chapter “Cognitive Diversity and the Future of Everything” is perhaps the most interesting since it relates to some of the posts of this year about how “outsiders” with “peripheral vision” who straddle different worlds produce the most insightful perspectives – except that it uses the concept of “cognitive diversity” and of “collective intelligence”. This takes me back to my consultancy days, when I used Belbin’s team roles and Harrison and Bramson’s The Art of Thinking to help my staff understand that there was no ideal way of operating in a team – there are distinctive roles or ways of thinking and the trick is to use them effectively…. 

5. I am a great believer in the concept of the “golden medium” – ie balance between opposing forces. And this is how the book ends – with the argument that what is needed is a better balance between head, hand and heart.

Further references

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/life-after-meritocracy

http://www.erstestiftung.org/en/the-three-hs-and-the-achievement-society/

https://unherd.com/2020/07/why-universities-had-to-be-challenged/

https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-insufferable-hubris-of-the-well-credentialed?cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/10/04/work-or-toil-in-the-pandemic/

Feelings....

William Davies is a writer I have grown to respect whose third book “Nervous States – democracy and the Decline of Reason” (2018) is a highly original analysis of how feelings seem in recent years to have overwhelmed western societies.

It is perhaps best seen as a trilogy with “The Happiness Industry – how the Government and Big Business sold us Well-Being” (2015) and “The Limits of Neoliberalism – authority, sovereignty and the logic of competition” (2014) being its predecessors.

“Nervous States” was one of the first books I read from the latest Amazon arrival and certainly encourages me to read his earlier two books. There have been surprisingly few serious reviews of the book – LRB, certainly, didn’t take it seriously and the Jacobin review from which I initially quote disappears up its own arse in the second half. The Point mag (to which I am currently subscribed) has a very good interview with the author (translated from Die Merkur) which does justice to the richness of the book. 

But the first question and answer in the New Yorker’s interview gave a good sense of the book’s originality 

What was it in the seventeenth century that changed how we organize our society, and that we’re now at risk of losing or have already lost today?

A different mentality, a different political project, emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century, which was one that essentially trusted a certain group of people—and this is the same group that is routinely denigrated as being some kind of élite or liberal élite nowadays—to set aside their own personal opinions or feelings or preferences in order to observe and report on the state of the world in an objective, impartial fashion.

We’ve taken that for granted for some time, that this is possible, and this is something that is present not only in the institutions of the state, such as public administration and the judiciary, but it’s also something that scholarship, academic science depends on, that journalism to a greater or lesser extent depends on.

There needs to be some kind of trust: these people are not acting in their own private or political interests when they’re doing this but are able to park their feelings, their own perspective. One of the claims I make in the book is that this is a peacekeeping mentality.

 The Jacobin’s review starts well - 

A veteran scholar of neoliberalism, Davies has drawn on a wide set of genres — history, philosophy, political science, medicine — to explain the “decline of reason” subtitle of his book.

In the seventeenth century, a twin set of abstracted languages were born: the abstract system of signs set up by modern commerce and science and the system of “abstract” representative government. Each of these moments has its own protagonists in Davies’s book. Not just Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes and Francis Bacon but, arguably, the first technocrat William Petty’s “political arithmetic” - as inventors of the modern state, commerce and modern science.

Then there is the anti-rationalist camp, in which we find Friedrich Hayek, Sigmund Freud, Gustave Le Bon, Napoléon, and Donald Trump, who together initiate the much-lamented “decline of reason.”

 

Modernity’s twin system of representation (modern science and the representative state) has seen a dramatic loss of legitimacy in the last thirty years.

- Science has lost its glow and has retreated into a citadel of expertise.

- Party-politics and parliaments, in turn, have lost their attraction, with decreasing memberships and increasing popularity for referendums from populists.

The result is a two-pronged “crisis of representation,” both on scientific and political fronts.

 Davies is very good on how trade led to the development of the system of trust which allowed bills to be issued and exchanged; and subsequently to the wider system of trust of middlemen and experts. I was less convinced by his attempt to explain the new emotionality and polarisation which has crept into politics with reference to bodily functions…..I don’t know why he doesn’t run with the story told so well in “Fantasyland – how America went haywire – a 500 year history” which I wrote about only last week

For me, the crucial issue is that the expertise that guides decision-making is completely detached from popular control. 

The knowledge used for central bank policy, for instance, is determined in tight-knit think tanks, not open public assemblies.

One of Davies’s central players in this story is the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek - one of the earliest voices to recognize the distinct role emotions play in our economic lives. In Hayek’s view, if one wanted “to understand economic and social changes,” one was

 

“far better off consulting the people who actually make the changes happen — the consumers, entrepreneurs, managers — than experts looking at these events from some presumed position of neutral objectivity.”

This, of course, is the “tacit knowledge” celebrated by the likes of James C Scott,  Ivan Illich and anarchists such as David Graeber…….

A Public Admin Manifesto

 Strange how the public mood changes. The 90s were times of celebration – all was going well for the West. The new millennium started with a more cautious mood – turning to fear after 09/11 and the Iraq War. Since the financial crash of 2008 we have been fed a relentless diet of vilification of both government and business. I like a good critique like anyone else – but there comes a point when critical analyses of institutions become so overwhelming as to make it impossible ever to trust them again. For some time my view has been that we were overdoing the critiques…..

It was three years ago when I first realised the danger we were in – a little book with the harmless title On Thinking Institutionally (2008) opened with a 5 page spread itemising the scandals affecting the public, private and even NGO sectors in the last 40-50 years – arguing that mass communications and our interconnectedness exacerbated the public impact of such events…… 

Today, people almost universally denigrate institutions, including those of which they are members.

Attacks on institutions come from our hyper-democratic politics but stem from the Enlightenment with its unshakeable confidence in human reason; its subsequent obsessive focus on the self; and, latterly, its belief that an institution has no value beyond that which an individual can squeeze from it for personal gain.

The book – by Hugh Heclo - went on to explain that “acting institutionally” had three elements. 

The first, "profession," involves learning and respecting a body of knowledge and aspiring to a particular level of conduct. The second, "office," is a sense of duty that compels an individual to accomplish considerably more for the institution than a minimal check-list of tasks enumerated within a kind of job description. 

Finally, there is "stewardship." Here Heclo is getting at the notion of fiduciary responsibility. The individual essentially takes the decisions of past members on trust, acts in the interests of present and future members, and stands accountable for his actions.

I have a lot of sympathy for this line of argument – against “the quick buck”…. instant gratification….. tomorrow’s headlines…..we need cultures which respect partnership, timescales for investment and the idea of “stewardship” which Robert Greenleaf tried, unsuccessfully, to cultivate…..

One of my favourite quotations is from Dwight Eisenhower’s last address in 1960  

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.

I do, however, have two questions -

-     -  How did we reach this sad point?

-      - What can we do about it?

How did we Get Here?

Way back in the 60s, Penguin books had published a series of popular paperbacks with the series title “What’s Wrong with…….?” in which virtually all British institutions were subjected to a ruthless critique. And it wasn’t only in Britain that a more critical mode of thinking was developing at that time – as I tried to explain in a post on Post-Modernism at the beginning of the year. It was, however, 1990 before The Condition of Postmodernity appeared.  

Later, in the 90s, Michael Power drew our attention in the UK to what he called an Audit Explosion of bodies (many of them statutory) set up to monitor what public bodies were up to.

Little wonder that the global expert on expert, John Keane, started, in 2009, to suggest that this was a dangerous turn and to designate it Monitory Democracy When I was in Germany for a couple of months in 2013, I noticed a rash of critical titles. And France was also flooded a few years ago by the literature on its demise…..

Perhaps one of the most thorough discussions about blunders in government was this long paper in 2015 on Comparative Blunders

What can we Do About it?

Last year a group of fifteen scholars from different sub-fields, countries, and generations launched a manifesto for a more ‘positive’ strand of research for the field entitled Toward Positive Public Administration – a manifesto 

In our contemporary “monitory democracies” , as the broad social trust and public deference underpinning input legitimacy have eroded, the legitimacy of government institutions and actions depends more and more on simple and simplified accountability processes.

Government’s every move is scrutinized, assessed and often found wanting. The thickening of transparency and accountability, the advent of social media, and the expansion of specialized scholarship has led to an enormous amount of energy being directed at pinpointing and dissecting instances in which governments fail our expectations. By now, there is a vast body of investigative reports, media exposés, and scholarly studies on government ‘disasters’

 

Many of the stinging criticisms of government are channeled through traditional and social media, where opinion leaders, politicians, journalists and media personalities lambast and satirize governments, oftentimes with good reason. There are indeed many examples of policy failure or disaster with comical or tragic outcomes. Public administration scholars have identified various reasons behind those apparent failures

 

On the whole, public, academic and even public service discursive routines are not equally attuned to spotting and naming successes as they are to finding faults and blaming public officials and agencies for them. There are several mechanisms at work to sustain this.

- the human propensity for negativity bias.

- the inclination of citizens, career civil servants, and political officeholders think in stereotypical terms and perceptions about each other rather than in more informed understandings

- the political opportunity structure of bureaucrat-bashing, whose lure even parties that regularly are in government find difficult to resist.

- constant negative reports in the media may feed a ‘spiral of cynicism’

 

This is as such not a new disciplinary ambition but a reformulation of the classic ambition of the field. In Wilson’s (1887) seminal paper the objective of the study of administration is to “discover (…) what government can properly and successfully do (…) with the utmost possible efficiency”.

However, in a social and political climate of overbearing, if not venomous, criticism of government, there is a great urgency to revisit this classic disciplinary ambition and systematically focus on positive contributions of governments and governance. If the study of failure, breakdown, and crisis can tell us what to avoid and what to terminate in designing institutions and managing processes, the study of positives in public governance can teach us what to embrace, support, and emulate.

And there is a linked Successful Public Governance site which announces the publication of various journals and books including one with the absolutely glorious title - 

'Great Policy Successes: How Governments Get It Right in a Big Way at Least Some of the Time. Or, A Tale About Why It’s Amazing That Governments Get So Little Credit for Their Many Everyday and Extraordinary Achievements as Told by Sympathetic Observers Who Seek to Create Space for a Less Relentlessly Negative View of Our Pivotal Public Institutions' - by Mallory Compton and Paul 't Hart 

The Dethroning of Reason

For 60 years we have been arguing about how rational we are….It was 1959 when Charles Lindblom published an article entitled The Science of ‘Muddling Through’  disputing the view that strategic decision-making in organisations did (or even should)  consist of an exhaustive process of optimisation - and arguing instead that strategy was more akin to “a never-ending process of successive steps in which continual nibbling is a substitute for a good bite”.

Lindblom’s writings were more focused on government but “struck a chord” in the business world too. Cyert & March’s A Behavioural Theory of the Firm (1963) explored this idea from a number of angles, but one of the first clear articulations was by Henry Mintzberg in his publication Patterns in Strategy Formation (1978). Here Mintzberg framed the ‘adaptive mode’ in sharp contrast to a ‘planning mode’ which was considered a “highly ordered, neatly integrated [approach], with strategies developed on schedule by a purposeful organisation.”

By that stage, I had ten years of political experience as an elected Councillor under my belt. First in the shape of the community action I encouraged - inspired by the work of not only of Saul Alinsky but of the anarchist thinker Ivan Illich whose Deschooling Society I would frequently call into play. And then, in 1971, came the chance of some managerial responsibility when I became (for 3 years) a Chairman of the new Social Work system then being established in Scotland….

It was a tension I not only recognised but celebrated in a paper I wrote for the Local Government Research Unit I had set up in 1971 – “From Community Action to Corporate Management”

In 1980, James Quinn published Strategies for Change in which he studied how companies actually went about formulating strategies. He found that they proceeded by trial and error, constantly revising their strategy in the light of new learnings, which he called “logical incrementalism”. Critics felt this sounded suspiciously like just having no strategy, but Quinn strongly denied this, arguing that there were great benefits to formalising the process.

In 1985, Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent, Mintzberg honed his views on what he now called Emergent strategy. He playfully argued that strategies should grow initially like weeds in a garden, not cultivated like tomatoes in a hothouse. That the process can be over-managed and

 “sometimes it is more important to let patterns emerge, than to force an artificial consistency upon an organisation prematurely”.

 Mintzberg contributed more than anyone over the years to this idea, later referring to it as “The Learning School”

At this time I had enrolled in the country’s first (part-time) course in Policy Analysis – at Strathclyde University and led by Lewis Gunn – in which Lindblom figured as a major character. Indeed my thesis was on “organisational learning” – just a few years before Peter Senge’s seminal “The Fifth Discipline” (1990)

The “Policy and Society“ journal devoted a special issue in 2011 to Lindblom’s “Incrementalism at 50” and the debate continues as you can see in “Policy Failure and the Implementation Gap”. 

Indeed the growth of Behavioural Economics since the millennium was at one stage the most promising evidence that we were developing a more balanced view of the role of reason (click the phrase and, from p219, you will get a 25 page list of the most popular books on the topic!).

But then fake news came into the picture – and we quickly lost any remaining sense of what was real; and to scorn anything that smacked of rationality. Kurt Andersen is one of many who would argue that this is the inevitable consequence of post-modernist thinking

William Davies’ “Nervous States – democracy and the Decline of Reason” has just come into my hands and looks an excellent analysis of how feelings seem to have taken over our mind.