In my last post I linked to the delightful autobiography Amartya Sen produced to accompany his acceptance speach for his Nobel prize in economics. The whole thing is worth a read but I particularly liked two quotes that brought a smile to my face.
The first is from his early years at Rabindranath Tagore‘s school, where as he says, “my educational attitudes were formed.” and goes on to explain:
“This was a co-educational school, with many progressive features. The emphasis was on fostering curiosity rather than competitive excellence, and any kind of interest in examination performance and grades was severely discouraged. (“She is quite a serious thinker,” I remember one of my teachers telling me about a fellow student, “even though her grades are very good.”) Since I was, I have to confess, a reasonably good student, I had to do my best to efface that stigma.”
The second is his concluding paragraph:
“I end this essay where I began – at a university campus. It is not quite the same at 65 as it was at 5. But it is not so bad even at an older age (especially, as Maurice Chevalier has observed, “considering the alternative” ). Nor are university campuses quite as far removed from life as is often presumed. Robert Goheen has remarked, “if you feel that you have both feet planted on level ground, then the university has failed you.” Right on. But then who wants to be planted on ground? There are places to go.”
Category: Uncategorized
Against Plural Monoculturalism
Amartya Sen is one of my favourite economists, because he comes across as being a thoughtful and humane man, committed to human freedom. His latest focus of attention, express in a recent article in The Guardian is on the dangers what he calls Plural Monoculturalism:
“What grates on Sen is the idea that individuals should be ushered like sheep into pens according to their religious faith, a mode of classification that too often trumps all others and ignores the fact that people are always complex, multi-faceted individuals who choose their identities from a wide range of economic, cultural and ideological alternatives. “Being defined by one group identity over all others,” he says, “overlooking whether you’re working class or capitalist, left or right, what your language group is and your literary tastes are, all that interferes with people’s freedom to make their own choices.”
What begins by giving people room to express themselves, he argues, may force people into an identity chosen by the authorities. “That is what is happening now, here,” he says, a little indignantly. “I think there is a real tyranny there. It doesn’t look like tyranny – it looks like giving freedom and tolerance – but it ends up being a denial of individual freedom. The individual belongs to many different groups and it is up to him or her to decide which of those groups he or she would like to give priority.””
As he argued in an article in the FT (reproduced here):
“Multiculturalism can be understood in terms of making it possible for people to have cultural choice and freedom, which is the very opposite of insisting that a person’s basic identity must be simply defined by the religious community in which he or she is born, ignoring all other priorities and affiliations.”
The more taboos and inhibitions there are
What a relief
I have a very long list of things that I failed to do, so it was with an enormous sense of relief that I read Lucy Kellaway’s column in the FT that begins:
“Every day I do a lot of things. Every day I avoid doing a lot more. I avoid replying to e-mails, I avoid researching any articles that do not need writing immediately.
I avoid ringing my bank to cancel a standing order for a subscription to some internet computer game that my sons no longer play. I avoid trying to find a builder to rebuild my garden wall. I avoid opening bills.
In fact, I avoid opening my mail altogether. (I used to open letters from friends, but now that friends no longer seem to write letters the official envelopes pile up in the hall.) I avoid making phone calls, and above all I avoid doing my tax return.”
(Sadly, this one is subscription only)
All that is different
Today I stumbled across some lines from a song,“All That is Different is Part of the Dance”, by Leon Rosselson, quoted in a review of two books about Blake by Paul Foot that resonate strongly with me:
“For all things are holy, the poet once said,
And all that is different is part of the dance.
And the web of life’s colours needs each single thread
For the dance to continue unbroken.”
A Corporate Muse?
I read Robert Cringely’s on-line column every week. I don’t always agree with what he says, but invariably he gives me something to think about. In a recent column he poses the intriguing idea, “What if, instead of having to accept the board presence of Steve Jobs as a cost of getting Pixar’s animation talent and film library, Disney actually views the transaction as buying Pixar TO GET Steve Jobs and then gaining the animation bits as a bonus?”
To find why he thinks that Robert Iger, CEO of Disney wants Jobs so badly you have to go to the end of the piece where he says:
“For the entertainment industries, the next 10 years will be the most revolutionary in a century. Broadcast TV as we knew it is going away, replaced by a Chinese entertainment menu of such complexity that even knowing what’s “on” tonight will be beyond the abilities of most viewers. At some point, too, movies will be subsumed into television and recorded music will find its own new place with new rules. This will be Steve Jobs’s world and we’ll all just be visitors. It’s obvious to me and, evidently, to Iger, too.”
Before that, after admitting that he is no great fan of Steve Jobs, having called him a sociopath in print and still holding that position , Cringely goes on to argue that after reading a piece by film historian Neal Gabler on Walt Disney he believes that:
“… Disney and Jobs have a lot in common. Both were iconoclasts and loners, driven by creative visions and always a bit out of sync with their peers. Both were dreamers, but dreamers who for the most part realized their dreams. Both believed that the purpose of being in business was to create a unique product that came to define an experience for customers. Rod Canion and Michael Dell and Ted Waitt never talked about user experience, but Jobs and Disney did, right from the beginning of their careers.”
and
“… Disney is in the film, TV, sports, publishing, and hospitality industries, but none of its major competitors — none — are run by people who come to their positions with anything like an artistic drive or a real sense of what their customers want. Does Sumner Redstone understand MTV? Does GE have an artistic molecule in its “lop off the bottom 10 percent” corporate culture? Does Rupert Murdoch really understand his own success and its ultimate cost? Does ever-imploding Sony even know what to do with its music and movie empires? No, no, no, and no.
If Robert Iger creates a miracle at Disney, which I think he will, that miracle is Steve Jobs. We’re in a new century with new realities, but we haven’t yet found a new archetype for enlightened corporate power. Bill Gates? Give me a break! What we have are people in power who have no muse and wouldn’t recognize one if they could even hear her. Steve Jobs knows his muse.”
The universe is alive
Willis Harman was asked in an interview:
“Of your life experiences, the time that you have been here, what is your wisest piece of advice or the wisest thing that you know?”
He replied:
“I think the wisest thing is being humble and listening. We live in a very arrogant society. Listening has to do not only suppose with listening to myself, but listening to nature and listening to very simple people. There are things that Native Americans have said to me in just a few words, that just summarize so much. I was talking with one Native American and he got a little tired of my questions and he said, “you know you white people, you have so much trouble understanding the way we Indians look at the world, it is very simple to understand how Native Americans view things, you only have to remember two things, one is, everything in the universe is alive, the other is, we are all relatives” and that is wisdom.”
Am I worried?
Over the past few weeks the Independent has published a number of scary stories. Perhaps, the most alarming was James Lovelock’s essay,”The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years:Each nation must find the best use of its resources to sustain civilisation for as long as they can”
But they also ran stories on the end of oil, the flu pandemic and others that have now got blurred in my mind.
I have written here in a similar vein myself:
“What we often forget is that our taken for granted world is an experiment that has been running for much less time than the Norse Colonies in Greenland. No doubt for much of the time the Norse thought things were going pretty well for them and ignored the signals that things might not be as they seem.
The Tsunami was a natural disaster, but its impact on human life and well-being was as much to do with the patterns of life we have adopted as it was to do with a wall of water hitting coastlines in Asia. It was also a reminder of how fragile human life can be and, perhaps, if we are wise, a signal to be less arrogant and to pay more attention to what is going on around us.”
So the question is am I worried? Well at one level I would be a damn fool if I didn’t. But, I am older enough, that with a bit of luck, I may be dead before the full impact of these impending disasters strikes. On the other hand I have a much loved a 19 year old son, who is chronologically right in the impact zone.
If I focus on public debate and the response of our politicians and other opinion leaders, of course I’m worried. We have known for about three decades that our carbon-based civilisation was built on rocky foundations and the glaciers seem to be melting faster than the political response to what seems to happening.
But two things keep me feeling fairly cheerful. The first is a remark made by a Conservative Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, who these days would come across as a wild eyed, lefty radical. He was asked what was the most important thing in politics (I am slightly distorting the context here, it was a bit more specific than that). His response was, “Events, dear boy, events.”
This is something I find myself saying with increasing frequency these days. Lovelock might be right, but a large volcanic eruption might make him wrong. The truth is no one of us can predict the future. Events, dear boy, events makes fools of us all.
So am I saying we should do nothing at all. Far from it. I put my faith in some thing Jane Jacobs wrote more than twenty years ago:
“In its very nature, successful economic development has to be open-ended rather than goal-orientated, and has to make itself up expediently and empirically as it goes along. For one thing, unforseeable problems arise. The people who developed agriculture couldn’t foresee soil depletion. The people who developed the automobile couldn’t foresee acid rain. Earlier I defined economic development as a process of continually improvising in a context that make injecting improvisations into everyday life feasible. We might amplify this by calling development an improvisational drift into unprecedented kinds of work that carry unprecedented problems, then drifting into improvise solutions, which carry further unprecedented work carrying unprecedented problems…”
(Jane Jacobs, “Cities and the Wealth of Nations”,Penguin Books, 1986 pp221-222)
I see our most urgent task being devising and designing new contexts for productive improvisation, alongside nurturing those we can already identify. I believe if we look outside the areas of big government and industry, we may already be creating the seeds of the next civilisation, that takes account of the fact that we live in a vast network of interactions that if we play our proper part will continue to sustain us over many centuries.
Of course, my faith may be totally misplaced. The threshold beyond which there is no safe place for us may have already been passed. But then maybe is hasn’t.
So am I worried? Well, yes, but cheerfully so.
The cracks begin to show
Two telling extracts from a piece in the Guardian:
“Ofsted’s annual report on primary education says that in maths and English, teachers are so intent on covering official objectives of lessons that they fail to check if real learning is taking place. It says children are passive for too long; there is too little speaking or listening, and too often teachers ask closed questions that prevent engagement with pupils, particularly boys. Low-attaining pupils leave classes for catch-up sessions that don’t relate to the lesson in hand, and are confused upon return. Underachievement isn’t spotted in years 3 and 4, because schools concentrate on getting year-6 children through Sats – yet a quarter leave without the skills they need for secondary school. This ends their chances as effectively as the 11-plus would have done; 90% never catch up.”
and
“Little improves at secondary school. Ofsted says maths lessons tend to be mechanistic rather than enlightening. It concludes that the improvement in national test results is as much due to better test technique as a rise in standards. In English, most 14-year-olds spend much of the year practising for Sats instead of learning to work independently or creatively. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority says that at all ages children find it difficult to write independently because they are usually given preset “scaffolds” to write from. It notes, almost forlornly, that on the rare occasions when children can make choices in their writing, “there is evidence that pupils find the sense of ownership motivating”.”
No one is in control
Dave Pollard usually manages to find something interesting or provocative to say – and for someone who claims to suffer from procrastination he seems staggering productive. His site “how to save the world” is yet another one that deserves exploring rather than just dropping to see the latest thing he has to say.
In a recent entry he attacks the cult of leadership,taking on Peter Block’s view that leadership is often a form of paternalism that infantalises the led. But, the point he makes that resonates most strongly with me is this one:
“Block understands the essence of complex systems: No one is in control. What gets done (for better or worse) gets done as a result of the staggeringly complex interactions and personal decisions of everyone. Even in the most hierarchical organizations, far more energy is expended finding workarounds for incompetent management decisions and policies (without offending management, of course) than is spent implementing the odd intelligent insight that management, with all the resources at its disposal, ‘manages’ to come up with. Employees, and customers (who are often treated only slightly less paternalistically than employees), actually have almost all the good ideas that would be needed to make any organization much more successful, but it is taboo to listen to them, to even be accessible to them. That would make the leaders look weak, as if perhaps they don’t have all the answers. And that, of course, is unthinkable.”
Most of us recognise, at least on occasion, that “no one is in control”, but tend to shy away from the notion, because it seems too frightening. But, equally, it can be seen as a very liberating idea, with the caveat that if no one is control, then we all bear some responsibility for what is going on.