Changing One's Mind

 I have been totally blown over by Dougald Hine’s At Work in the Ruins (2023) which I read as the most profound exploration of our world views - and of how the combination of his experience of

• climate activism

• changing his domicile to Sweden a few years before Covid struck

caused him to question those world views. And to pose more profound challenges than simply those of global warming. The book digs deep into the ways we try to make sense of the world - a subject which I dealt with not so long ago. Here's how Hine describes it -

“Two paths lead from here: one big, one small. The big path is a brightly-lit highway on which many lanes converge. It unites elements of left and right, from Silicon Valley visionaries and Wall Street investors, through a broad swathe of liberal opinion, to the wilder fringes of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, and in some form it will constitute the political orthodoxy of the 2020s. It sets out to limit the damage of climate change through large-scale efforts of management, control, surveillance and innovation, oriented to sustaining a version of existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development.

The small path is a trail that branches off into many paths. It is made by those who seek to build resilience closer to the ground, nurturing capacities and relationships, oriented to a future in which existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development will not be sustained, but where the possibility of a ‘world worth living for’ nonetheless remains. Humble as it looks, as your eyes adjust, you may recognise just how many feet have walked this way and how many continue to do so, even now.

Which of these paths I would have us take is clear enough. The big path is a fast track to nowhere. We will not arrive at the world of fossil-free jumbo jets promised by the airport adverts. The entitlements of late modernity are not compatible with the realities of life on a finite planet and they do not even make us happy. But we may well follow that path for a while longer, as it leads us deeper into dystopia and leaves us more dependent on fragile technological systems that few of us understand or can imagine living without.

And what I think I can see now is that the very language of climate change will be owned, from here on out, by the engineers and marketeers of the big path. Any conversation about the trouble we are in, so long as it starts within the newly politicised frame of science, will lead inexorably to their solutions.

However far it may be from our political roots, we find that we have more in common with assorted conservatives, dissidents and sceptics – including some whose scepticism extends to climate science – than with the mainstream progressive currents that have so far had a claim to be on the right side of history when it comes to climate change. Under the authority of ‘the science’, talk of climate change will belong to the advocates of the big path, and those of us who do not wish to contribute to that future will need to find another place to start from when we want to talk about the depth of the trouble the world is undoubtedly in.” (pp34/35)

Along the way the author meets other travellers who also challenge the conventional wisdom – people like my compatriot Alastair McIntosh and others such as VM de Oliveira (“Hospicing Modernity”), James Bridle (“New Dark Age”) and Justin Smith. The book continues thus -

The path we are on now looks like a dead end and we are left to look for other paths worth taking. The way we answer such a question can be informed by science, but science alone cannot answer it for us because we’re not dealing with the kind of question that can be answered definitively through processes of observation, measurement and calculation. Rather, what we have is a question that calls for the exercise of judgement. And it cannot not be answered, since any response to climate change will contain an implicit answer. If the question is not made explicit – if the existence of upstream questions, these questions that take us beyond the boundaries of what science can tell us about climate change, is not recognised – then the default answer will be to treat it as bad luck and pursue some combination of techno-fixes and lifestyle adjustments.

The trouble is, compared to the promise of science, the exercise of human judgement looks terribly fragile and fallible. Indeed, from early in the development of modern science, before it even got that name, there have been those who hoped that scientific ways of seeing and knowing the world could free us from dependence on the exercise of judgement and the disputes to which it often leads. You can trace this hope within the history of environmentalism and the climate movements arising from it. Yet to expect scientific knowledge to take the place of the exercise of judgement is to ask too much of science, and those who have done so tend to end up disappointed, as we shall see.

In 1987, the Brundtland Report had established ‘sustainable development’ as the frame within which the international community would talk about the planetary situation: a framing which yoked the pursuit of ecological sustainability to the trajectory of economic and technological development, without any proof that this pairing could pull in the same direction. In hindsight, the five years between its publication and the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 appear as a high tide of international concern and intergovernmental action around the environment that remains unsurpassed to this day. This was also the moment at which the environmental movement drew back from the terrain of culture and established a new relationship with science. No longer was the scientific evidence a starting point for a larger questioning of society or making political arguments; now the evidence itself was to make the case for change, to carry the weight and do the work of politics.

This turn is not hard to understand: in countries where Green politicians had entered parliament, the demands of working within existing institutions drove a certain kind of ‘realism’. Meanwhile, the journey of David Icke from BBC sports presenter to Green Party principal speaker to promoter of lizard-related conspiracy theories offered a cautionary example of how the attempt to call your whole culture into question could unravel. pp59-60

Some Politicians can – and do - make a Difference

 ”Emancipations” is a ”journal of critical social analysis” edited by Albena Azmanova and James Chamberlain to both of whom I am grateful for their acceptance of Dilemmas of Social Change for publication in a future issue. The article’s title may be a play on the title of a famous book from 1967 Dilemmas of Social Reform but it really does spend a few pages spelling out the dilemmas some of us faced aș we wrestled with developing, in the early-1980s, the UK’s very first social strategy.

The article is an update on one I drafted last year ,choosing to ask at both its start and end, the simple question of why it is now so difficult to get politicians to give any sort of priority to the ”marginalised”. Instead they are stigmatised and hounded. This is how the article starts -

There was a sense of shock when poverty appeared on the agenda in the 1960s – the 

US launched an official War against it - the UK, typically, was more restrained in its 

reaction to such television portrayals as “Cathy Come Home” in 1966 and 

the establishment of the Shelter campaign. After all, the 1945-51 

Labour government was supposed to have eradicated it. And it was to take 

a couple of decades before it became an issue for the Europeans.

In looking at the circumstances which created the UK’s first “Social Strategy”, 

this article asks the larger question of why politicians are so 

reluctant to take action against the scourge of poverty. Is it simply public 

indifference – or do the roots lie deeper in various myths and rationalisations 

as argued by Daniel Dorling viz that exclusion is necessary; prejudice 

is natural; greed is good and despair is inevitable. 

I had the good fortune to be in at the start of a great adventure in 1974 – the inauguration of a new system of Scottish local government and, more specifically, the creation of Strathclyde Region covering half of Scotland’s population. In May of that year I was one of 74 newly-elected Councillors who assembled one Sunday to find myself in a leadership position and able to help forge its priority strategy relating to the scandal which had emerged the previous year (in the “Born to Fail?” report) about the conditions in which many people in the urban areas lived viz of what we then knew as ”multiple deprivation” or a triple whammy of insults – poor housing, poor health and unemployment.

My luck extended even further – the Region had attracted the most talented of officials and politicians who discovered new ways of getting the best out of each other in something, for example, called ”Member-officer” groups and were also blessed by a serie of other innovations from the Labour government of 1964-70, not least a new planning regime and corporate management.

But, equally, the Region’s very legitimacy was in question from the start by virtue both of its size and the prospects of a Scottish Assembly which were then being actively discussed - before being settled by the 1979 devolution referendum. Arguably, however, this was one of the factors which pushed us into commiting to the more open and community-based style of policy-making which was our legacy. It was just a few politicians and officers who pushed those initiatives but we rarely felt any pushback – whether from councillors, officials or the wider public. 

The behaviour of politicians does not receive the attention it deserves in 

political science. Political psychology - despite Trump’s arrival – still seems 

a marginalised subject. Here’s how the Oxford Handbook (see below) defines the subject - 

Political psychology, at the most general level, is an application of what is
known about human psychology to the study of politics. It draws upon 
theory and research on biopsychology, neuroscience, personality,
psychopathology, evolutionary psychology, social psychology,
developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and intergroup
relations. It addresses political elites—their personality,
motives, beliefs, and leadership styles, and their judgments,
decisions, and actions in domestic policy, foreign policy,
international confl ict, and confl ict resolution. It also deals with
the dynamics of mass political behavior: voting, collective action,
the influence of political communications, political socialization
and civic education, group-based political behavior, social justice,
and the political incorporation of immigrants.
I remember the impact Leo Abse’s “Private Member” made on me when it 

was published in 1973. It did a Freudian dissection of the personalities of 

people such as Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson in a way I had never seen 

before – and, later, of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown
 
These are the only books I feel able to recommend on the subject 
The Psychology of Politics B Richards (2019) focuses too much on populism
How Statesmen Think – the psychology of international relations Robert Jervis (2017) 

limits itself to foreign affairs
The oxford handbook of political psychology ed L Huddy et al (2013) runs to 1000 pages!
The Psychology of Politicians; Ashley Weinberg (2012) For me, the most interesting and 

readable of the titles

SNIPPETS

1. Down with Centrists

I have just unsubscribed from ”The Rest is Politics” podcast which has consistently been voted the number one podcast în the UK. My reasons are well caught în this recent post from Rikki - but I did at least convey to Cambell and Stewart my reasons for stopping the subscription viz that Alaister Campbell, despite my initial admiration for openness about his mental health, is a criminal warmonger who deserves prosecution; and Stewart, despite my initial respect, is a self-confessed egocentric

2. Brexit.

I’ve been a bit remiss în not keeping my readers updated on this subject on which, each week, there is no better chronicler than Chris Grey. For almost 8 years now he has regaled us once a week with his analyses of this discourse. His most recent post is, for me, one of his best – în suggesting that Brixiteers are like communists with their argument that it has never been properly attempted or has been betrayed

A recent example is the discussion on GB News between Jacob Rees-Mogg and 

Nick Tyrone, which Tyrone described on his Week in Brexitland Substack. Tyrone 

did as good job as anyone could of responding to Rees-Mogg’s salvoes, the more so 

given the huge advantages his interlocutor had by virtue of being the host. But it is 

impossible to ‘win’ such encounters because they are intended to confuse rather than 

to clarify, and setting innumerable false hares running is one of the easiest ways of 

doing so. This doesn’t just apply to broadcast interviews. In any number of published 

comment pieces, Brexiters layer falsehoods upon half-truths upon questionable 

assumptions, in ways which can only be unpicked through line-by-line ‘fisking’, which 

is incredibly time-consuming, and not especially effective.

Nevertheless, it’s worth disaggregating and examining some of the commonest arguments 

currently used to defend Brexit, an especially those about sovereignty and democracy, 

which are the Brexiters’ last redoubts. Even so, despite being the longest ever post 

on this blog, it’s impossible to provide an exhaustive analysis.

Stonewalling and denial[ These are the now boilerplate defences of Brexit, so 

commonly made as to not need specific links. They include the claim that ‘it hasn’t 

been done properly’, which comes in variants ranging from ascribing this to governmental 

incompetence, to blaming it on EU punishment, right through to positing betrayal by 

various actors up to and including ‘the deep State’.

All of these were virtually baked into Brexit, partly because it made utopian promises 

that could never come true, and partly because it thrives on narratives of betrayal, 

treachery and victimhood. So, like apologists for communism, Brexiters say it has 

• ‘never really been tried’ 

• fallen victim to counter-revolutionaries and to renegades from the true path 

of purity

3. EP Thompson’s 100th Anniversary

This famous British historian and activist was born on 3rd February 1924 with one of the few tributes being in The Tribune. His “Writing by Candlelight” (1980) gives a flavour of the quality of his writing. And Bryan Palmer has given us a superb Homage to the man – in two parts, the first here and the second here.

Travails of Socialism

Britain, it seems, is so cautious, conservative and class-ridden a country that it has taken a hundred years for it to come to terms with the first Labour government of 1924. That is, if we are to believe 2 books which have just appeared on the subject – Peter Clark’s ”The Men of 1924” and David Torrance’s ”The Wild Men. A possible explanation for this sad state of affairs was explored in Guardians of Power – the myth of the liberal media (2006) namely that the british masses are simply too stupid to understand where their true interests lie. The Brits have every reason to be grateful if not complacent – the country was the first to industrialise and used this to build an Empire - little wonder, then, that they felt, what a friend of mine used to call, ”illusions of adequacy”. Such feelings were understandable in the immediate post-war period – when I grew up – but surely the younger generation knows better?

In Scotland it does and has said very clealy ”A plague on both your houses” in preferring the SNP in recent polls.

But why does the Labour party remain so unattractive? After all, a majority of British citizens support the renationalisation of public utilities.

Last autumn I discussed several books here which analysed the debates which have torn the party apart in recent decades – but none of them dealt properly with the critical question of why people apparently feel such resistance in voting for the party.

It’s understandable that progressives feel antipathy to Keir Starmer – the media has done an effective job în painting him aș an unreliable, indeed duplicitous, individual. For a better treatment of the question, I recommend

Warring Fictions - left populism and its defining myths (Christopher Clarke 2019)

whose basic argument is that conventional ways of understanding Labour’s 

civil war focus on the wrong issue. The conflict doesn’t really run along a political 

spectrum – between ‘left-wingers’ and ‘centrists’, between ‘radicals’ and ‘moderates’

, or through degrees of egalitarianism. Instead, it is a clash between two world 

views: characterised by the author as ‘left populism’ and ‘left pluralism’. 

As the book’s title suggests, it’s at the level of narrative and analysis where 

the crux of this distinction lies. This review puts it well -


“Warring Fictions” focuses on three myths, which sustain left populism but are not 

found on the pluralist left: the Dark Knight, the Puppet Master and the Golden Era.

• The Dark Knight claims that the political spectrum is a moral one; that 

• the left is where virtue lies and that the further to the right you go the 

• more wicked or self-serving. It frames policy questions in terms of good 
• and evil, and treats those with different values as enemies and traitors.

• The Puppet Master myth describes the belief that far-sighted elites 

• coordinate and control society for personal gain. It holds that there is a 

• singular ‘will of the people’ which is frustrated by ‘the establishment’ – and 
• that governments wield immense power, oppressing wilfully rather than 
• mediating badly.

• The Golden Era is the declinist view that a left-wing Arcadia – a spirit 

• of ‘original socialism’ – once existed but has been polluted by modernity. 

• This is fed by the notion of a drift to the right on all fronts. It undermines internationalism, and stops the left engaging with an interconnected world.

John Pilger RIP

I have to confess, to my shame, that I had mixed feelings about John Pilger, the great investigative journalist who died at the age of 84 due undoubtedly to the influence of the media aș demonstrated so brilliantly by the likes not only of Noam Chomsky (in ”Manufacturing Consent” 1988) but in Edwards and Cromwell’s Guardians of Power – the myth of the liberal media which actually contains a foreward by John Pilger. Let Pilger’s words (written in 2006) speak for themselve -

The latest ‘bad things’, such as America’s and Britain’s bombing of civilian targets with cluster bombs, and use of napalm and depleted uranium, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are not reported as acts of rapacious conquest but as imperfect liberation, justified by the myths of the ‘good war’ and the Cold War. The principal conveyer of these myths is that amorphous extension of the established order known as ‘the media’. While occasionally begging to differ on tactics and political personalities, journalists know, almost instinctively or by training, or both, the true nature of their tasks, especially when the established order appears to be threatened or goes to war. Societies are to be reported in terms of their threat or usefulness to ‘us’. Offi cial enemies are to be identifi ed and pursued. Parallels are to be drawn with the ‘good war’ and the Cold War, while official friends are to be treated as one views one’s own government: benign, regardless of compelling evidence to the contrary.

What has changed is the public’s perception and knowledge. No longer trusting what they read and see and hear, people are questioning as never before. A critical public intelligence is often denied by journalists, who prefer notions of an ‘apathetic public’ that justify their mantra of ‘giving the people what they want’. These days, however, the public is well ahead of the media, refusing to accept the limits of what academics called ‘the public discourse’. For example, according to the polls, a majority of the British people regard their prime minister as a liar: not one who has ‘misled parliament’ or ‘spun the facts’, but a liar. That is unprecedented. (remember this was 2006)

The last article Pilger wrote was a few months ago and warned of how we are being prepared for war -

In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, George Orwell are 

obsolete. Post-modernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder.

A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting 

secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Whistleblowers are 

outlaws, to be tried in secret. An especially sinister law bans ‘foreign interference’ 

by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean?
Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation 

merged with the state and the demands of ‘identity’. American admirals are paid 

thousands of dollars a day by the Australian tax payer for ‘advice’. Right across the 

West, our political imagination has been pacified by PR and distracted by the intrigues 

of corrupt, ultra low-rent politicians: a Johnson or a Trump or a Sleepy Joe or a Zelensky.

No writers’ congress in 2023 worries about ‘crumbling capitalism’ and the lethal 

provocations of ‘our’ leaders. The most infamous of these, Blair, a prima facie criminal 

under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who dared journalists 

to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second decade of incarceration…..

The article then discusses the hypocrisy evident in the media’s portrayal of 

the Ukraine war 

In Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligensia is the silence of intimidation. 

State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be avoided if you want to 

keep a campus job or a teaching tenure. What happened to Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 

is repeated on campuses where opponents of apartheid Israel are casually smeared 

as anti-Semitic. Professor David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority 

on modern propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly 

that Israel’s ‘assets’ in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate 

influence worldwide — a fact for which the evidence is voluminous. The university 

hired a leading QC to investigate the case independently. His report exonerated 

Miller on the ‘important issue of academic freedom of expression’ and found 

‘Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech’. 

Yet Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it perpetrates, 

Israel has immunity and its critics are to be punished.

A PILGER RESOURCE 
https://johnpilger.com/ His website
Hidden Agendas John Pilger (1998) A superb collection of the causes he took on

The New Rulers of the World John Pilger (2002) His expose of the conditions in which modern corporations expect their global workers to sweat.

Tell me No Lies – investigative journalism and its triumphs John Pilger 2004
The New Rulers of the World John Pilger – the video verion of the book 

https://highprofiles.info/interview/john-pilger/

Post-Modernity, Anyone??

The 1960s was a critical period for Europe. My generation left the austerity of the postwar years behind and tasted freedom - not just in the UK but in the world as a whole as vividly shown in this brilliant production by the German Historical Institute 1968 – memories and legacies of a global revolt (2009). These past few days, I stumbled on a short draft about Post-Modernity which I felt needed updating – not least because it traces my intellectual development, a subject on which I tend to be a bit reticent. I’m attaching the new draft because I suspect it reflects the experience of my older readers and might help my younger readers make more sense of the world.

I consider myself lucky because my upbringing made me particularly aware of the very different ways people look at the world. This for various reasons

• My parents lived in a mansion in the West End of a Scottish town – but were poor, my father being a presbyterean Minister.

• I went to a State school although some of my friends came from more privileged backgrounds.

• I became a Labout councillor at a young age (25) in a town very sensitive to class differences and, as a result, became a bit of a “mugwump”.

• At University, I was exposed to the teachings of Karl Popper and therefore resisted the easy ideology of the New Left – despite my avid readings of the early editions of the New Left Review from 1960, with various hiccups, right through to the present. Whether you agree with it or not, it is the most thoughful of publications.

This is a short paper but an important one for me given that we have so many lens through which we look when we’re trying to make sense of the world - be it 2, 3, 4, 5, 12 or 57. The exact number is not a matter of great importance – what does matter is that we recognise that there are these differences in how we view the world. But that is something we seem very reluctant to do. The paper tries to -

• explain how my upbringing and university experience predisposed me to a postmodernist way of thinking

• demonstrate the influence of such writers as EH Carr (1961) and Peter Berger (1966)

• show how the mix of academic and political work developed in me an appreciation of the different ways people understand the worldview

• suggest how this was confirmed in my later reading and work

The paper can be accessed here – or in the list at the top-right column of the blog

Rabbie Burns

 January 25th sees Scots all over the world coming together to celebrate the Scottish values we’ve long seen as embodied in the life of our national poet, Rabbie Burns. A ploughman and then customs official, Burns wrote in revolutionary times; understood its hypocrisies; and sympathized with its struggles against injustice. The Best Laid Schemes – selected poetry and prose of Robert Burns ed by Robert Crawford and Chris MacLachlan (2021) sets the scene well in this Introduction -

Tender, humorous, sly, sometimes stinging, Robert Burns is one of the world’s greatest love poets. His vernacular tone of address can have a beguiling intimacy about it at the same time as sounding cheekily egalitarian. In tone and tenor Burns, not Shakespeare, is the representative poet of modern democratic cultures. In his work a warmth and a radical political alignment, a bonding of poetry to the causes and traditions of ‘the people’, are immediately apparent and engaging. Though his politics are complex, even at times contradictory, recent writing has reshaped understanding of Scotland’s national poet as a politically radical writer of republican sympathies, one schooled by knowledge of the American as well as the French Revolution.

One of the world’s most mercurially alluring writers, Burns is the first modern poet to be acclaimed a national bard. His erotic verse, like his own life, ranges from the lyrically delicate to the scandalous and bawdy. He lived much of what he wrote about, and Burns lived with dramatic intensity. In 1796 he burned out, dying at the age of 37. His depressive temperament (hinted at early on in the poem ‘To Ruin’), his struggles with poverty, and his engagement with his own celebrity status make his life and work remarkably forceful. Repeatedly there is an insistent performative impulse. His poetry is bound up with his own life, but his songmaking is also splendidly universal so that verses like those of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ are relished and used in cultures very different from his own. The innate drama of his life and the reach of his poetry transcend the locally Scottish, and appeal to the global community. The modernity of his radicalism did not compromise his artistic gift, and presses the case that contemporary egalitarian societies round the world should recognise him as both ancestral and familiar, should regard him still as ‘The Bard’.

This is a wonderful BBC documentary presented by a Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagen and this is a typical Burns’ Supper