These essays have been about governance, public management and that very odd thing called modernisation.
Reflection, as against bits of research or theoretical exposition, lets thoughts arise as they will; allowing concern to define what is valuable. I find, when I have let it happen - on the canal side, aeroplane, art gallery, night time wakefulness - that reflection draws upon different pools of thought; bits of experience in ‘doing’ public management, or attempting to be an active citizen, or being an academic and consultant who necessarily peddles current ideas or practices in the trade, as well as what comes to mind when ‘walking the dog’. Like research, reflection grounds observation in comparison, but is free to discover likenesses and contrasts in everyday experience, media reports, journals as well as the occasional poem, picture, or wayside landscape[1]. Reflection on events and happenings at home - wherever counts as home - is sharpened and brought into focus by seeing sameness and difference in other people’s societies; known or half-known as traveller, consultant, friend, in several interesting corners of the world.
Findings? No knew theory, thankfully, but, looking back on the series - incomplete as it is - I suppose that I can be pinned down to some observations. Modernisation I still find to be an almost entirely unhelpful word into which politicians and other advocates pour both inconsistent meaning and high moral enthusiasm - which academics then elaborate; a very dangerous substitute for thought-through ideologies or consistent social, economic or environmental objectives and strategies.
The much used governance word, on the other hand, usefully expands the idea of social control for public wellbeing. From a bounded thing called ‘government’ we now must recognise the roles of other agents in the process. A good economy, a sound environment, a participative democracy is always the outcome of a balance of contradictory agents; a triumvirate of hierarchical, collective and individualistic agents, variously labelled ‘State, Market and Civil Society’ or Public Management, Private Sector, and Community, etc[2]. They represent distinctly different sets of social values and ways of thinking about priorities and loyalties in coordinating social life. The only sociological generalisation used in this set - well, the most important anyway - is that all three are always present, always conflicting, always necessary and often failing in different ways.
Both New Labour’s Third Way and the World Bank’s post 2000 policy commitments were promoted as a response to this enlarged idea about what makes for governance in society. Both sound logical and, when not wrapped in too much jargon, quite convincing but in fact allow for new forms of policy perversity. Third Way perversities include; centralisation in the name of ‘decentralisation’, ‘managers free to manage’ but tightly controlled by mechanistic target setting and monitoring, the ‘measurement’ imperative driving out immeasurable value, ‘choice’ leading to dithering[3], and an overall tendency to detach established meanings from once respected words.
To detach meanings from words is to go a stage beyond what is useful. It is useful, in fact necessary, for there to be some elasticity in the labelling of roles, institutions and structures; this because these social institutions have to be lived in, argued about and fought for[4] if they are to remain vital. As soon as they become reduced to mere abstractions they can be taken for granted, corrupted or simply ignored and no longer serve their purpose. Parliament, for instance, with associated roles; MP’s, Ministers, Speaker, etc, and familiar processes; PM’s Question Time, etc. is largely ignored by most of the electorate most of the time, until some crisis calls for action[5]. Then the life-blood of democracy stirs. Nevertheless, abstraction is unavoidable; once a principle is established, a rule enacted, a precedent created, we have a structure and a structure is an abstraction. Another generalisation: expect tension between established structures and processes, with several consequences.
Some structures have evolved, some are adopted through imitation, some are transplanted and thrust upon an unsuspecting population - the colonial experience everywhere but not unknown elsewhere - think of recent UK imports form American. Whichever: they are inevitably complex. Being complex they don’t ‘work’ without a bit of rule bending or informal recognition of contradictory principles that I label, ‘eccentricity’[6],[7]. Too much rule bending and they don’t ‘work’ at all. Complexity is enhanced due to the multiple functions that arise in any formal institution - getting things done, maintaining the system, exercising authority, motivating and rewarding staff, dealing with others, etc.. Complexity can lead to the almost complete detachment of institution from purpose, the use of power to defend the interests of power rather than purpose[8], the misapplication of power to negate purported outcomes[9]. Oh, yes; the obverse too, the hope that charisma can transform[10] and the fear that it can’t.
[1] See; ‘‘N’ ways of modernisation; not all bad’
[2] See; ‘Monocrops, etc., mindsets in governance’
[3] See; ‘The Other Side of the Fence: the perversities of choice’
[4] See; ‘Constitutionalism and rolling roads’
[5] See; ‘Sense, sound and fury, the dialectic of public choice’
[6] See; ‘Let local be different’
[7] See; ‘The sometimes missing Jester’
[8] See. ‘Walking the dog’; how and how not to control
[9] See; ‘Governing the Professors’
[10] See; Dangers and hopes in charisma’
Monday, June 22, 2009
Mono-crops, etc.; mindsets in governance
Third Way thinking should have opened up a plurality of ways of ‘doing’ governance - as varied as gardens, fields, meadows and wild margins of the rural English landscapes, viewed from Midlands canal tow-paths - but somehow didn’t.
I realise that in this piece, with meadows and wild margins in the title, I could be accused of Wordsworthian reverie[1]. But elevated thought can be quite utilitarian. A managed landscape is after all an instance of public management styles applied.
Rural English landscapes these days, as I find on my daily cycle excursions on the local canal towpaths, are often dominated by mono-crops of one kind or another; fields of look-alike cows, uniform yellow oil seed rape, short stemmed wheat or whatever. But urban back gardens set a different pattern and in deep country settings the dominant mono-crop of the farmland is broken by the multicoloured splendour of an old fashioned hay meadow or, on low lying swampy land, the reeds, rushes and wetland plants of a water meadow; these places often now subject to restoration by environmental activists. Where the canals leave the suburbs and the influence of the motor mower wanes, the banks are free to take on the dissolute appearance of the wild, inadvertently sharing with railways and motorways the role of linear wilderness in an otherwise heavily managed environment. It is this diversity of landscape that canal users admire. Is there a parallel in public management?
The Third Way
Anthony Giddens would certainly have argue so. Mono-crops, meadows, gardens and wild places have of course to be taken as symbols. Mono-crops have the uniformity, imposed order, and planned regularity that 20th Century bureaucrats imposed on housing estates, schools and health care regimes, employing the logic of the mass production processes of their contemporary industrial magnates. Meadows signify the plurality of the open market, where plants, nature’s agents, jostle competitively for position, revealing diverse qualities - deep roots and shallow, tall and short stems - but also compliment each other, some symbiotic - let us call them partnerships, some finding strength in clumped association. Gardens are more varied of course, displaying the temperaments of their owners, but are characterised by purposeful diversity. The wild, in this piece will be identified as the sphere of the undecided – the political arena, where raw forces of civil society are at play.
Inspired by the Labour Party landslide victory at the poles in 1994, Anthony Giddens came down from the intellectual heights of modernist and post-modernist sociological discourse to give us a plain person’s guide to a new kind of thinking. He sought to define the scope of public policy after the ‘death of socialism’ and, he nearly said, the taming of capitalism. The Third Way, subtitled the Renewal of Social Democracy (Giddens 1998) set out a new programme for political action for a left of centre government. The tone of the piece is quite rhetorical – as might be expected[2] - for an avowed polemic. The substance of the programme appears in simple lists such as the following that appears on page 70;
The third way programme
The radical centre
The new democratic state (the state with no enemies)
Active civil society
The democratic family
The new mixed economy
Equality as inclusion
Positive welfare
The social investment state
The cosmopolitan nation
Cosmopolitan democracy
To catch the nuanced meanings to some items on this list requires a lot of turning of pages (Marx and Engels were more succinct in their polemic). In several instances it was clearer that these phrases indicated ‘a good thing’ than a defined condition. In need of creative in-exactitude perhaps, ‘new’ was used as a substitute for ‘good’. In the text as a whole ‘modern’ was likewise applied as indicator of an unquestioned virtue. But what remained clear and innovative was that, in this new order, the state was not to be the sole responsible actor; the market was accepted as an active agent, and civil society an expected – if ill defined - player[3]. The Third Way programme described a diverse social landscape as a desirable as well as inevitable response of British society to the social and economic forces that would be at play in the 21st Century.
I will want to conclude that, despite these Third Way aspirations and modernisation assumptions, public management in the UK is still pervaded at all levels by an essentially mono-crop mentality but - whatever its limitations – the New Labour ‘project’ did attempt to address a recognised dilemma; how to harmonise state hierarchy, market actors and collectivist forces in civil society. The experiments have been many. However, whether one looks at health care, schools management, policing and security or, now, policy for the growing numbers of pensioners and elderly – for which I find I have a particular interest – stable new forms do not seem to have emerged.
Through two terms of office the New Labour administration in Britain sought to turn vision into programme and a further window of opportunity opened with its unique third term. Problems have arisen both with administer-ability; how to actually do a Third Way programme (Curtis 2005), as well as political saleability; how to generate public support. Arguably these – as well as the normal proneness of grand visions to stumble over events - have led to the Third Way programme diverting considerably from the initial vision. Certainly, prophets of the Third Way, Will Hutton conspicuously and even Giddens himself, have reverted from advocates to critical commentators. I attempt to explain why.
The key to this thing I believe lies in the concept of agency: who are the expected actors, who has the freedom to act; who exercises responsibility. The sociological tradition from which Giddens emerged had taken as its problem the question of free will in society. It reacted against Neo-Marxist determinist views in which people were portrayed as passive, alienated beings, subject to the will of others; people who might daily struggle with class, state and industrial systems but could not be expected to dent prevailing structures. In the new thinking choice had to be factored in. Modernist sociologists and contemporary economists of course came at this issue from opposite sides. Sociologists came to say [in extraordinarily convoluted ways it has to be said] that ‘there is more room for people to influence social outcomes than we used to think’. Economists – for whom choice had always been central to their favoured notion of market rationality – began to see institutions as sets of precedents and rule bound procedures that constrain information and hence choice. But both sets of gurus had sufficient focus upon real world processes to feel that they had something to contribute to the world of the practitioner – when the door was opened for them. New Labour opened that door – for a moment in any case. Prompted by the gurus, choice was promoted all over the place; parents as school governors, ‘managers free to manage’, civil servants facing competition for postings, local authorities able to choose how to provide services. But has this produced meadow-like diversity?
Meadow as a metaphor
A meadow, to the English mind, is a pasture lush in variety and abundance. Aesthetically it is the seasonal flowers that impress for their magnificence of diversity and colour. For the herbivore animal it is no doubt the healthy succulence of the foliage and the wholesomeness of the nutrients that such variety can provide.
As a metaphor that captures a view of the common good and the process through which it might be achieved, the meadow has a lot to offer;
q Variety: multiple products offering choice to varied consumers with varied tastes
q No grand design, though plentiful opportunities to influence, through seasonal variations of grazing patterns
q Dispersion, an outcome of plants jostling for a place in the sun, individual members of a species accommodating other species, seeking or giving shade, deep roots complementing shallow, thin fellows finding room between fat; as a consequence members of each species spreading out across the meadow.
Outcome: the good meadow is a consequence of the behaviour of multiple choosers.
This is an individualist’s view. The good society, to a hearty individualist, accommodates diversity and is built up from multiple choices of many people. Such a view has a long history in many cultures – that subsumes but goes way beyond the idea of market. In England the idea that the town is the place of ‘the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker’ will die hard, though it now has more sophisticated expression in the concepts of town planners and civic leaders[4]. There remains the idea – in the rationalist mind of the planner - that the creation of one job, say in manufacturing, will have the effect that multiple others will be created or sustained as that newly employed person creates a demand for a house, a car, a school and so on. In late capitalist society, planners do not attempt to map that demand in total but are content to leave it to the ‘hidden hand’ of the market. The multiplier idea is a nice one because it allows full scope for the consequences of personal choice. Limited demand for candlestick makers, as against light bulb suppliers, does not need to be specified in a master plan but is left to the good judgement of the suppliers. Equally satisfactory is the idea that bad judgement has a beneficial effect for the social weal. People making judgements that turn out to be bad are testing the boundaries of the feasible.
The idea that the interactions take place through a market is a powerful influence upon the individualist’s concept of the common good. Adam Smith gave the concept a good start. It is the dominant ideology of the present time. It is not negated by noting that choice takes place within an institutional framework. Just as meadow flowers and grasses are constrained – or liberated: depending upon how one views it – by the contingent characteristics of their neighbours in the meadow, so with personal choices in social life. The market itself requires a set of socially determined rules about who is entitled to sell or buy what. In most societies property law turns out to be fairly complicated; the direct (as in case law) or indirect (as in statute law) outcome of earlier decisions about buying, selling, holding, accommodating, sharing, managing risk, creating security and so on. Beyond the market are diverse rules and principles about how one should behave towards kith and kin, what is a good or bad way of relating to neighbours, how to treat strangers, etc. Through this ever changing microstructure of institutional arrangements we shape the necessary diversity of social life, become secure in the knowledge of our own social structure and make existence sufficiently predictable to be able to get on with life.
So far this picture of the individualist’s good life does not contain any true commons. What about air pollution, flood, etc.? Can these be managed within this framework or will we have to move to collective group or hierarchical solutions? The individualist’s solution to the commons is to negotiate shares – shares in benefits and shares in obligations. Taking shares can be a different solution to dividing into private lots. English kings, in times past, claimed ownership of certain forests; their primary interest being in furry things that they could chase. The penalties for poaching deer were horrendous. But commoners were granted specific entitlements to keep pigs or horses in the forest or to take deadwood for the fire – related to specific needs and non-competitive with the royal interest.
Some privately owned goods such as the internet are not of value unless there is entitlement for other private users to benefit. Taking shares is of course a more readily available solution if there are convergent interests or complementary interests in the good. It may be the case however, that some public goods / bads are such that the sum of individual choices, contests and bargains cannot be made to add up to a complex of rules that provides adequate governance in the common interest. Air pollution may be one such case. But it is equally the case that a common property regime that ignores the diversity of individual interests in that property is doomed to failure.
The view of the good society as accommodating a variety of specific interests has a lot to be said for it. If diversity of perceptions is a necessary characteristic of the good society, many people are likely to see opportunity for themselves to share in the conceptualisation, recognising that what they give/take to/from the society can also be varied, but with equal recognition.
The Garden as a metaphor
A garden is also a thing of variety, though there will tend to be clusters of plants and production processes, products and (in the case of a commercial garden) marketing strategies.
There should be
q responsiveness to contingent opportunities
q within an overall conscious design
q outcome: the good garden is the result of prioritisation and choice around multiple possibly competing objectives, each initiative a struggle in the face of established priorities
q means of achieving harmony: negotiation
It is perhaps not too far fetched to see in this metaphor the group culture’s response to the fact of separate interests and negotiation processes for reconciling these interests for the sake of harmony within a democratic society framework. Hutton (1999) makes a passionate plea for this conception of the good society, arguing that it is deeply embedded in European Social Democratic thought and practice. He contrasts the stakeholder society with both with unbridled individualism of the Thatcherite version of capitalism and with the heavy hand of the hierarchical state.
A different train of thought heading in a similar direction is the ‘Civil Society’ model, stemming ultimately from Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1835) conceptualisation of the plural institutional structures of 19th Century America, Ferdinand Tonnies (1957) revisit of the theme in the early 20th Century, and Robert Putnam’s more recent eulogy (2000).
The Stakeholder society model for the development of the common weal is not an alternative to the market model, rather an elaboration of it, based upon the observation of co-operation within the market place. Co-operation around a shared interest emerges in the face of competition and in response to competition. Workers and managers can find ways of co-operating in the interests of ensuring effective production, in the face of competition. Small firms producing similar products can form associations through which to develop distant markets, or guarantee quality, or negotiate with governments (the North Italy model).
Unions emerge to represent the interests of categories of workers, investors form councils, local governments across the land associate with each other in various ways, not least to organise responses to the exercise of power by the central state. In the more social spheres, artists cluster in certain locations and find some means of exchange of ideas and stimulus; perhaps in a favoured café. Neighbourhood associations emerge, usually in response to a threat of one kind or another.
Where big government pertains, civic institutions emerge as protest organisations, and can be seen as countervailing forces to the over centralised hierarchy of the state. However, the pure model of the good stakeholder society, is not about protest but about building up the common good on the basis of negotiation between well articulated and represented interest groups. It is about exploiting synergies. The Stakeholder Society may be what Tony Blair is hunting for in his insistence upon partnerships in the provision of public services – though it has to be questioned whether synergy can be achieved by compulsion. Partnership by shotgun is certainly far from Will Hutton’s concept.
Can the pluralism of stakeholder society deal with the true commons? The answer would seem to require that the common in question is put into collective ownership, governed through a council at which the different parties sit and negotiate. A widespread European practice in ‘pre-modern’ times put the management of cities into the collective responsibility of trades associations (Guilds) under Royal Charter. All the monarch had to do was to issue this charter as a legitimating instrument, allowing the collective organisation the right to raise funds, spend, own, and exercise necessary sanctions in the common interest. On a world scale, to take the example of climate change, we are now attempting to achieve negotiated agreement between the nations, through the Rio Conference and its successors. Bargaining is slow, outcomes are uncertain, but it is often the best that we have got.
The Mono-crop model
It will be clear that I have a ‘thing’ against the culture that produces the mono-crop. So let me start with some praise. Cultivation of single species of rice, or maze or, in this country, wheat in large fields under controlled conditions and with appropriate doses of fertilisers and pesticides was one of the wonders of the 20th Century. Bigger volumes of food produced at lower prices have, it can be argued, fed more people. But the strength of the Mono-cropping system is also its weakness. Where every one plant is a replica of its neighbour the vulnerability of the one is the vulnerability of the others and some individualist bug will find this weakness, replicate itself in response to this golden opportunity and thrive.
Successful Mono-cropping requires:
q a constant process of centrally managed innovation: to keep ahead of the pests and to defeat the diminishing returns that results from negative entropy
q control of all ‘inputs’ in the hands of the master, to create ideal conditions for growth
q control of the natural environment, so that control of inputs is possible
q complete knowledge of both production environment and process
q a production cycle of known periodicity and predictability
q a monitoring system that will ensure that deviations or unforeseen happenings do not distort outcomes
q and, usually, machinery
As the human environment becomes more man made this model of orderly management has gained in appeal. It is a hierarchical order. One set of decisions has to suffice, otherwise there will be conflicts of information or interest, the outcome being that most people find themselves following orders.
In what sense is this a model of the common good? Can such a controlled system create the ‘greatest good of the greatest number? Can central control and uniformity (standing in lines or queues) satisfy multiple needs? The State Socialist countries that in many ways dominated the middle years of the 20th Century were built upon this assumption. We now mock their plans and organisations, forgetting that, many such countries achieved the fastest rates of industrialisation experienced in the 20th Century. It is also one of the many ironies in public management that over the same period, capitalist society, while built upon more individualist suppositions, also relied upon massive, bureaucratically managed production systems to produce uniform goods for the mass market [with massified consumption tastes] while the bureaucratic machinery of state doled out uniform and universal welfare goods.
The same stateist philosophies that relied upon hierarchical organisation to produce goods and distribute services found it no problem to think that the pure common goods could be dealt with by centralising decisions in these areas as well. The quality of water and the control or river pollution is decided by national governments and administered by centralised agencies of the state (or superstate). The risk of flood is met, not by individuals in flood prone areas building houses on mounds or stilts and keeping a boat handy (as is the culture in flood prone Bangladesh): not by getting together in groups under local leadership to build protective embankments (also a Bangladeshi habit) but by centrally administered controls or centrally conceived earthworks.
And these stateist philosophies have not gone away. Direct bureaucratic control may have been replaced by agencies of various kinds and armies of inspectors, but the tell-take thinking can still be found underlying much official documentation. Ranking systems reveal central categorisation and judgements. They are about uniformity, and set supposedly free agents into a flurry of activity to achieve that uniformity.
The canal side landscape
The UK countryside is still dominated by the mono-crop, but things may be changing. One has to go to the farms themselves or to listen to the farming programmes on the radio to realise that many farmers are thinking their way out of dependency upon one crop, one supply chain and one agri-business based outlet to market - to realise also that the government edifice that supported this simplicity is gradually being replaced, both in terms of its structures and its thinking. The 20th Century version of the ‘modern’ is making way for something else, far more varied, more diverse in its expectations of active agency, more harmonious – at least in some of its thrusts – with the ways of nature. The other day I met a man – ex schoolteacher, now farmer who is growing saffron crocuses. “Saffron is the only product worth more than its weight in gold” he said. Now there is an idea; and there a good example of active agency.
The problem of implementation
To have a vision as to what the good modern or post modern society should be like is one thing, to develop the means of achieving it is another. The Third Way book was strong on the idea of the good society as being one that would harness the market, revive community and transform the public sector but contributed little to the debate that must have taken place within the civil service as to how to achieve it.
If we look first at the question of what the New Labour government attempted to do, a contradiction which, I argue, came to dog the process, quickly emerged. What central government gave with one hand it sought to control with the other. Managers might be shaken out of line administration and made responsible for outcomes; they might be ‘free to manage’, but their performance came increasingly to be regulated and inspected using thoroughly mono-crop methodologies. As a supposedly free agent the headmaster [liberated from local education authority ‘tyranny’ I suppose] came to have a standard national curriculum imposed and performance against it assessed by an enhanced national inspectorate. A civil servant, transformed into agency chief executive, is told precisely what his agency must achieve, to what timetable, and a tick-box national audit becomes her/his monitor.
In the [relatively] small world of international assistance – my personal encounter – aid management has also become subject to competitive tendering. Fair enough, that might be read as encouraging diversity [although it is rapidly becoming a game that only the big players can play]. But it is also subject to innumerable performance strictures monitored from central places. All these performance requirements sound good – about poverty, gender, environment, and so on [and a huge international effort has gone into the development of hopefully shared Millennium Development Goals]. Public participation is often a requirement. A range of measures have been designed to promote the interest of the poor. Some processes have been specifically introduced with the idea of restoring ‘agency’ to the poor and dispossessed. Yet, for the project manager, these are in tension with the same tick-box performance monitoring procedures that that have become the public management norm. Tick boxes belong to mono-crop monitors; the poor by contrast are supposed to be allowed, encouraged, supported, to become agents of their own meadow-like development (Curtis 2003). These things do not reduce to tick boxes.
Amongst present day public agents the hospital doctor is probably the most thoroughly confused being. It is in this sector that the plurality of contradictory principles is most apparent. Market like mechanisms have been tried to regulate the use of drugs. Performance targets have been introduced to speed up the processing of patients. Administrators have been introduced by the dozen to rationalise this processing. The hospital does of course lend itself to factory comparisons – and therefore factory designed management process. As long as patients can be persuaded to come to the right entrances with the right complaints a speedy system can be developed to inject the right fluids or cut the appropriate pieces – and even to feed and water as necessary, monitored by people with clip boards. Fortunately factory management systems have become very sophisticated and fortunately also there are standard complaints; faulty appendices, hernias, varicose veins that can be more or less dealt with through appropriately organised queues. But good health is also a thing of gardens - beds of tender care; bring back the Ward Sister, meadows, places where we choose where to get advice; if not the wild; countenance alternative medicine.
And now comes old age [to all in due course, let me assure young readers] a real public management issue at the present time. A Green Paper posits or re-posits some very Third Way ideas (Department of Health 2005, Society Guardian 18 05 05). Most dramatic is the notion that the elderly could be granted – more or less as a payback for long participation in economy and as a tax payer, I suppose – the right to make decisions about how to use public funds to generate the support that she or he comes to need. It would be a kind of voucher scheme. The professionals however are dubious. They doubt that people would be capable of making the necessary decisions; in some cases mental faculties will indeed have declined. A subsidiary question that bears upon their judgement is how public authorities would be able to assure themselves that the decisions being taken are sensible, qualified people are being employed, etc.. The writers are assuming that professionals in the public service will still have to tick the necessary boxes. Certainly there would need to be a quantum shift in ways of managing. But, who could doubt that diverse meadow-like responses would emerge in response to such a radical proposal. The great hidden army of life-long carers might find new roles. The newly-retired could be found as carers for the longer retired. Persons of sound limb could do errands for persons of sound mind, and someone lovely could read me poetry all day. In other words there is no bounding of the novel social arrangements that could emerge.
More than metaphor
How do I get back from here to my meadows and gardens? A sudden memory comes to me of an evangelistic American forester [attending a UN environmental conference] extolling the virtues of trees. Hospital patients who look out on trees and greenery, he asserted, need less medication and recover quicker than those who face concrete. We do need to get gardens, glades, greenery directly into public management as well.
Conclusion
In this reflection, the shortcomings of Third Way ideology – or more importantly the weaknesses apparent in the ‘doing’ of its diversity - have been made to take the blame for the persistence of mono-crop mentality in public management. This is perhaps not entirely fair. New Labour is too much of a present day phenomenon for anyone to be able to adequately trace influences or attribute blame. But at least a part of the present state of affairs must be put down to popular perception and populist responses in politics. We, the public, have been highly resistant to the idea that we should cultivate our own security, make adequate pension provision, re-invent mutual support, or plant the seeds of home care for our old age. We have not ‘bought into’ this philosophy. We are happy to be individualist consumers. We can hold political parties in distain – another very individualist indulgence. We can even vote opportunistically. But we still expect ‘them in authority’ to solve emergent social problems and blame them when they don’t. We get what we deserve, I suppose.
Like Wordsworth[5], I hanker after evidence of meadow-like diversity (without nostalgia; it was not there in my youth). It is a goal worth striving for but I do not think that it can be hectored into existence by a messianic centre, however inspiring the founding polemic. Nor do I think that an emerging diversity of institutions could survive being subjected to tick box monitor regimes. The problem in the medium term is going to be to hang on to the vision through inevitable disappointment.
References
Curtis D 2006 ‘Mindsets and Methods: Poverty Strategies and the Awkward Potential of the Enabling State’ International Journal of Public Sector Management
Curtis D 2005 ‘Known Ways and Labyrinths in Public Management’, Local Governance Vol 30 No. 4. pp199-208
Curtis D. 1999 ‘Institutional options for Local Governance and Community Self Management’, Local Governance, 3, 153-166.
De Tocqueville A 1835, Democracy In America New York Alfred A Knopf
Department of Health UK, 2005 ‘Independence, Wellbeing and Choice, www.dh.gov.uk reviewed, Society Guardian, 18-05-05].
Giddens A, 1998, The Third Way; the Renewal of Social Democracy Cambridge, Polity Press
Hutton W, 1999, The Stakeholding Society, Blackwell Publishing Co. Oxford UK , Malden MA USA,)
Korten D C, 1990 Getting to the 21st Century, Voluntary Action and the Global Agenda West Hartford, Connecticut, Kumarian Press
Putnam R, 2000 Bowling Alone; The Collapse and Revival of the American Community New York, Simon and Schuster
Tonnies F 1957 Community and Society East Lansing, Michigan State University Press
[1] … And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, /Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, /And the round ocean and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; /A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still /A lover of the meadows and the woods, / And mountains; …….[from, William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey]
[2] …as was ‘The Communist Manifesto’ where Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, departing from their scholarly norm, sought to catch the imagination of the readership with an account of the inevitability of the sweep of historical forces towards a new social order.
[3] This may have been new to UK public management but in development studies plural institutional strategies already had their advocates, such as David Korten (1990).
[4] It is the England of G.K. Chesterton’s ‘Reeling road and rolling road that rambles round the shire’; if I may risk getting poetic again.
[5] 'There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, / The earth and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / It is not now as it hath been of yore:- / Turn wheresoe'er I may, /By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.' William Wordsworth
I realise that in this piece, with meadows and wild margins in the title, I could be accused of Wordsworthian reverie[1]. But elevated thought can be quite utilitarian. A managed landscape is after all an instance of public management styles applied.
Rural English landscapes these days, as I find on my daily cycle excursions on the local canal towpaths, are often dominated by mono-crops of one kind or another; fields of look-alike cows, uniform yellow oil seed rape, short stemmed wheat or whatever. But urban back gardens set a different pattern and in deep country settings the dominant mono-crop of the farmland is broken by the multicoloured splendour of an old fashioned hay meadow or, on low lying swampy land, the reeds, rushes and wetland plants of a water meadow; these places often now subject to restoration by environmental activists. Where the canals leave the suburbs and the influence of the motor mower wanes, the banks are free to take on the dissolute appearance of the wild, inadvertently sharing with railways and motorways the role of linear wilderness in an otherwise heavily managed environment. It is this diversity of landscape that canal users admire. Is there a parallel in public management?
The Third Way
Anthony Giddens would certainly have argue so. Mono-crops, meadows, gardens and wild places have of course to be taken as symbols. Mono-crops have the uniformity, imposed order, and planned regularity that 20th Century bureaucrats imposed on housing estates, schools and health care regimes, employing the logic of the mass production processes of their contemporary industrial magnates. Meadows signify the plurality of the open market, where plants, nature’s agents, jostle competitively for position, revealing diverse qualities - deep roots and shallow, tall and short stems - but also compliment each other, some symbiotic - let us call them partnerships, some finding strength in clumped association. Gardens are more varied of course, displaying the temperaments of their owners, but are characterised by purposeful diversity. The wild, in this piece will be identified as the sphere of the undecided – the political arena, where raw forces of civil society are at play.
Inspired by the Labour Party landslide victory at the poles in 1994, Anthony Giddens came down from the intellectual heights of modernist and post-modernist sociological discourse to give us a plain person’s guide to a new kind of thinking. He sought to define the scope of public policy after the ‘death of socialism’ and, he nearly said, the taming of capitalism. The Third Way, subtitled the Renewal of Social Democracy (Giddens 1998) set out a new programme for political action for a left of centre government. The tone of the piece is quite rhetorical – as might be expected[2] - for an avowed polemic. The substance of the programme appears in simple lists such as the following that appears on page 70;
The third way programme
The radical centre
The new democratic state (the state with no enemies)
Active civil society
The democratic family
The new mixed economy
Equality as inclusion
Positive welfare
The social investment state
The cosmopolitan nation
Cosmopolitan democracy
To catch the nuanced meanings to some items on this list requires a lot of turning of pages (Marx and Engels were more succinct in their polemic). In several instances it was clearer that these phrases indicated ‘a good thing’ than a defined condition. In need of creative in-exactitude perhaps, ‘new’ was used as a substitute for ‘good’. In the text as a whole ‘modern’ was likewise applied as indicator of an unquestioned virtue. But what remained clear and innovative was that, in this new order, the state was not to be the sole responsible actor; the market was accepted as an active agent, and civil society an expected – if ill defined - player[3]. The Third Way programme described a diverse social landscape as a desirable as well as inevitable response of British society to the social and economic forces that would be at play in the 21st Century.
I will want to conclude that, despite these Third Way aspirations and modernisation assumptions, public management in the UK is still pervaded at all levels by an essentially mono-crop mentality but - whatever its limitations – the New Labour ‘project’ did attempt to address a recognised dilemma; how to harmonise state hierarchy, market actors and collectivist forces in civil society. The experiments have been many. However, whether one looks at health care, schools management, policing and security or, now, policy for the growing numbers of pensioners and elderly – for which I find I have a particular interest – stable new forms do not seem to have emerged.
Through two terms of office the New Labour administration in Britain sought to turn vision into programme and a further window of opportunity opened with its unique third term. Problems have arisen both with administer-ability; how to actually do a Third Way programme (Curtis 2005), as well as political saleability; how to generate public support. Arguably these – as well as the normal proneness of grand visions to stumble over events - have led to the Third Way programme diverting considerably from the initial vision. Certainly, prophets of the Third Way, Will Hutton conspicuously and even Giddens himself, have reverted from advocates to critical commentators. I attempt to explain why.
The key to this thing I believe lies in the concept of agency: who are the expected actors, who has the freedom to act; who exercises responsibility. The sociological tradition from which Giddens emerged had taken as its problem the question of free will in society. It reacted against Neo-Marxist determinist views in which people were portrayed as passive, alienated beings, subject to the will of others; people who might daily struggle with class, state and industrial systems but could not be expected to dent prevailing structures. In the new thinking choice had to be factored in. Modernist sociologists and contemporary economists of course came at this issue from opposite sides. Sociologists came to say [in extraordinarily convoluted ways it has to be said] that ‘there is more room for people to influence social outcomes than we used to think’. Economists – for whom choice had always been central to their favoured notion of market rationality – began to see institutions as sets of precedents and rule bound procedures that constrain information and hence choice. But both sets of gurus had sufficient focus upon real world processes to feel that they had something to contribute to the world of the practitioner – when the door was opened for them. New Labour opened that door – for a moment in any case. Prompted by the gurus, choice was promoted all over the place; parents as school governors, ‘managers free to manage’, civil servants facing competition for postings, local authorities able to choose how to provide services. But has this produced meadow-like diversity?
Meadow as a metaphor
A meadow, to the English mind, is a pasture lush in variety and abundance. Aesthetically it is the seasonal flowers that impress for their magnificence of diversity and colour. For the herbivore animal it is no doubt the healthy succulence of the foliage and the wholesomeness of the nutrients that such variety can provide.
As a metaphor that captures a view of the common good and the process through which it might be achieved, the meadow has a lot to offer;
q Variety: multiple products offering choice to varied consumers with varied tastes
q No grand design, though plentiful opportunities to influence, through seasonal variations of grazing patterns
q Dispersion, an outcome of plants jostling for a place in the sun, individual members of a species accommodating other species, seeking or giving shade, deep roots complementing shallow, thin fellows finding room between fat; as a consequence members of each species spreading out across the meadow.
Outcome: the good meadow is a consequence of the behaviour of multiple choosers.
This is an individualist’s view. The good society, to a hearty individualist, accommodates diversity and is built up from multiple choices of many people. Such a view has a long history in many cultures – that subsumes but goes way beyond the idea of market. In England the idea that the town is the place of ‘the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker’ will die hard, though it now has more sophisticated expression in the concepts of town planners and civic leaders[4]. There remains the idea – in the rationalist mind of the planner - that the creation of one job, say in manufacturing, will have the effect that multiple others will be created or sustained as that newly employed person creates a demand for a house, a car, a school and so on. In late capitalist society, planners do not attempt to map that demand in total but are content to leave it to the ‘hidden hand’ of the market. The multiplier idea is a nice one because it allows full scope for the consequences of personal choice. Limited demand for candlestick makers, as against light bulb suppliers, does not need to be specified in a master plan but is left to the good judgement of the suppliers. Equally satisfactory is the idea that bad judgement has a beneficial effect for the social weal. People making judgements that turn out to be bad are testing the boundaries of the feasible.
The idea that the interactions take place through a market is a powerful influence upon the individualist’s concept of the common good. Adam Smith gave the concept a good start. It is the dominant ideology of the present time. It is not negated by noting that choice takes place within an institutional framework. Just as meadow flowers and grasses are constrained – or liberated: depending upon how one views it – by the contingent characteristics of their neighbours in the meadow, so with personal choices in social life. The market itself requires a set of socially determined rules about who is entitled to sell or buy what. In most societies property law turns out to be fairly complicated; the direct (as in case law) or indirect (as in statute law) outcome of earlier decisions about buying, selling, holding, accommodating, sharing, managing risk, creating security and so on. Beyond the market are diverse rules and principles about how one should behave towards kith and kin, what is a good or bad way of relating to neighbours, how to treat strangers, etc. Through this ever changing microstructure of institutional arrangements we shape the necessary diversity of social life, become secure in the knowledge of our own social structure and make existence sufficiently predictable to be able to get on with life.
So far this picture of the individualist’s good life does not contain any true commons. What about air pollution, flood, etc.? Can these be managed within this framework or will we have to move to collective group or hierarchical solutions? The individualist’s solution to the commons is to negotiate shares – shares in benefits and shares in obligations. Taking shares can be a different solution to dividing into private lots. English kings, in times past, claimed ownership of certain forests; their primary interest being in furry things that they could chase. The penalties for poaching deer were horrendous. But commoners were granted specific entitlements to keep pigs or horses in the forest or to take deadwood for the fire – related to specific needs and non-competitive with the royal interest.
Some privately owned goods such as the internet are not of value unless there is entitlement for other private users to benefit. Taking shares is of course a more readily available solution if there are convergent interests or complementary interests in the good. It may be the case however, that some public goods / bads are such that the sum of individual choices, contests and bargains cannot be made to add up to a complex of rules that provides adequate governance in the common interest. Air pollution may be one such case. But it is equally the case that a common property regime that ignores the diversity of individual interests in that property is doomed to failure.
The view of the good society as accommodating a variety of specific interests has a lot to be said for it. If diversity of perceptions is a necessary characteristic of the good society, many people are likely to see opportunity for themselves to share in the conceptualisation, recognising that what they give/take to/from the society can also be varied, but with equal recognition.
The Garden as a metaphor
A garden is also a thing of variety, though there will tend to be clusters of plants and production processes, products and (in the case of a commercial garden) marketing strategies.
There should be
q responsiveness to contingent opportunities
q within an overall conscious design
q outcome: the good garden is the result of prioritisation and choice around multiple possibly competing objectives, each initiative a struggle in the face of established priorities
q means of achieving harmony: negotiation
It is perhaps not too far fetched to see in this metaphor the group culture’s response to the fact of separate interests and negotiation processes for reconciling these interests for the sake of harmony within a democratic society framework. Hutton (1999) makes a passionate plea for this conception of the good society, arguing that it is deeply embedded in European Social Democratic thought and practice. He contrasts the stakeholder society with both with unbridled individualism of the Thatcherite version of capitalism and with the heavy hand of the hierarchical state.
A different train of thought heading in a similar direction is the ‘Civil Society’ model, stemming ultimately from Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1835) conceptualisation of the plural institutional structures of 19th Century America, Ferdinand Tonnies (1957) revisit of the theme in the early 20th Century, and Robert Putnam’s more recent eulogy (2000).
The Stakeholder society model for the development of the common weal is not an alternative to the market model, rather an elaboration of it, based upon the observation of co-operation within the market place. Co-operation around a shared interest emerges in the face of competition and in response to competition. Workers and managers can find ways of co-operating in the interests of ensuring effective production, in the face of competition. Small firms producing similar products can form associations through which to develop distant markets, or guarantee quality, or negotiate with governments (the North Italy model).
Unions emerge to represent the interests of categories of workers, investors form councils, local governments across the land associate with each other in various ways, not least to organise responses to the exercise of power by the central state. In the more social spheres, artists cluster in certain locations and find some means of exchange of ideas and stimulus; perhaps in a favoured café. Neighbourhood associations emerge, usually in response to a threat of one kind or another.
Where big government pertains, civic institutions emerge as protest organisations, and can be seen as countervailing forces to the over centralised hierarchy of the state. However, the pure model of the good stakeholder society, is not about protest but about building up the common good on the basis of negotiation between well articulated and represented interest groups. It is about exploiting synergies. The Stakeholder Society may be what Tony Blair is hunting for in his insistence upon partnerships in the provision of public services – though it has to be questioned whether synergy can be achieved by compulsion. Partnership by shotgun is certainly far from Will Hutton’s concept.
Can the pluralism of stakeholder society deal with the true commons? The answer would seem to require that the common in question is put into collective ownership, governed through a council at which the different parties sit and negotiate. A widespread European practice in ‘pre-modern’ times put the management of cities into the collective responsibility of trades associations (Guilds) under Royal Charter. All the monarch had to do was to issue this charter as a legitimating instrument, allowing the collective organisation the right to raise funds, spend, own, and exercise necessary sanctions in the common interest. On a world scale, to take the example of climate change, we are now attempting to achieve negotiated agreement between the nations, through the Rio Conference and its successors. Bargaining is slow, outcomes are uncertain, but it is often the best that we have got.
The Mono-crop model
It will be clear that I have a ‘thing’ against the culture that produces the mono-crop. So let me start with some praise. Cultivation of single species of rice, or maze or, in this country, wheat in large fields under controlled conditions and with appropriate doses of fertilisers and pesticides was one of the wonders of the 20th Century. Bigger volumes of food produced at lower prices have, it can be argued, fed more people. But the strength of the Mono-cropping system is also its weakness. Where every one plant is a replica of its neighbour the vulnerability of the one is the vulnerability of the others and some individualist bug will find this weakness, replicate itself in response to this golden opportunity and thrive.
Successful Mono-cropping requires:
q a constant process of centrally managed innovation: to keep ahead of the pests and to defeat the diminishing returns that results from negative entropy
q control of all ‘inputs’ in the hands of the master, to create ideal conditions for growth
q control of the natural environment, so that control of inputs is possible
q complete knowledge of both production environment and process
q a production cycle of known periodicity and predictability
q a monitoring system that will ensure that deviations or unforeseen happenings do not distort outcomes
q and, usually, machinery
As the human environment becomes more man made this model of orderly management has gained in appeal. It is a hierarchical order. One set of decisions has to suffice, otherwise there will be conflicts of information or interest, the outcome being that most people find themselves following orders.
In what sense is this a model of the common good? Can such a controlled system create the ‘greatest good of the greatest number? Can central control and uniformity (standing in lines or queues) satisfy multiple needs? The State Socialist countries that in many ways dominated the middle years of the 20th Century were built upon this assumption. We now mock their plans and organisations, forgetting that, many such countries achieved the fastest rates of industrialisation experienced in the 20th Century. It is also one of the many ironies in public management that over the same period, capitalist society, while built upon more individualist suppositions, also relied upon massive, bureaucratically managed production systems to produce uniform goods for the mass market [with massified consumption tastes] while the bureaucratic machinery of state doled out uniform and universal welfare goods.
The same stateist philosophies that relied upon hierarchical organisation to produce goods and distribute services found it no problem to think that the pure common goods could be dealt with by centralising decisions in these areas as well. The quality of water and the control or river pollution is decided by national governments and administered by centralised agencies of the state (or superstate). The risk of flood is met, not by individuals in flood prone areas building houses on mounds or stilts and keeping a boat handy (as is the culture in flood prone Bangladesh): not by getting together in groups under local leadership to build protective embankments (also a Bangladeshi habit) but by centrally administered controls or centrally conceived earthworks.
And these stateist philosophies have not gone away. Direct bureaucratic control may have been replaced by agencies of various kinds and armies of inspectors, but the tell-take thinking can still be found underlying much official documentation. Ranking systems reveal central categorisation and judgements. They are about uniformity, and set supposedly free agents into a flurry of activity to achieve that uniformity.
The canal side landscape
The UK countryside is still dominated by the mono-crop, but things may be changing. One has to go to the farms themselves or to listen to the farming programmes on the radio to realise that many farmers are thinking their way out of dependency upon one crop, one supply chain and one agri-business based outlet to market - to realise also that the government edifice that supported this simplicity is gradually being replaced, both in terms of its structures and its thinking. The 20th Century version of the ‘modern’ is making way for something else, far more varied, more diverse in its expectations of active agency, more harmonious – at least in some of its thrusts – with the ways of nature. The other day I met a man – ex schoolteacher, now farmer who is growing saffron crocuses. “Saffron is the only product worth more than its weight in gold” he said. Now there is an idea; and there a good example of active agency.
The problem of implementation
To have a vision as to what the good modern or post modern society should be like is one thing, to develop the means of achieving it is another. The Third Way book was strong on the idea of the good society as being one that would harness the market, revive community and transform the public sector but contributed little to the debate that must have taken place within the civil service as to how to achieve it.
If we look first at the question of what the New Labour government attempted to do, a contradiction which, I argue, came to dog the process, quickly emerged. What central government gave with one hand it sought to control with the other. Managers might be shaken out of line administration and made responsible for outcomes; they might be ‘free to manage’, but their performance came increasingly to be regulated and inspected using thoroughly mono-crop methodologies. As a supposedly free agent the headmaster [liberated from local education authority ‘tyranny’ I suppose] came to have a standard national curriculum imposed and performance against it assessed by an enhanced national inspectorate. A civil servant, transformed into agency chief executive, is told precisely what his agency must achieve, to what timetable, and a tick-box national audit becomes her/his monitor.
In the [relatively] small world of international assistance – my personal encounter – aid management has also become subject to competitive tendering. Fair enough, that might be read as encouraging diversity [although it is rapidly becoming a game that only the big players can play]. But it is also subject to innumerable performance strictures monitored from central places. All these performance requirements sound good – about poverty, gender, environment, and so on [and a huge international effort has gone into the development of hopefully shared Millennium Development Goals]. Public participation is often a requirement. A range of measures have been designed to promote the interest of the poor. Some processes have been specifically introduced with the idea of restoring ‘agency’ to the poor and dispossessed. Yet, for the project manager, these are in tension with the same tick-box performance monitoring procedures that that have become the public management norm. Tick boxes belong to mono-crop monitors; the poor by contrast are supposed to be allowed, encouraged, supported, to become agents of their own meadow-like development (Curtis 2003). These things do not reduce to tick boxes.
Amongst present day public agents the hospital doctor is probably the most thoroughly confused being. It is in this sector that the plurality of contradictory principles is most apparent. Market like mechanisms have been tried to regulate the use of drugs. Performance targets have been introduced to speed up the processing of patients. Administrators have been introduced by the dozen to rationalise this processing. The hospital does of course lend itself to factory comparisons – and therefore factory designed management process. As long as patients can be persuaded to come to the right entrances with the right complaints a speedy system can be developed to inject the right fluids or cut the appropriate pieces – and even to feed and water as necessary, monitored by people with clip boards. Fortunately factory management systems have become very sophisticated and fortunately also there are standard complaints; faulty appendices, hernias, varicose veins that can be more or less dealt with through appropriately organised queues. But good health is also a thing of gardens - beds of tender care; bring back the Ward Sister, meadows, places where we choose where to get advice; if not the wild; countenance alternative medicine.
And now comes old age [to all in due course, let me assure young readers] a real public management issue at the present time. A Green Paper posits or re-posits some very Third Way ideas (Department of Health 2005, Society Guardian 18 05 05). Most dramatic is the notion that the elderly could be granted – more or less as a payback for long participation in economy and as a tax payer, I suppose – the right to make decisions about how to use public funds to generate the support that she or he comes to need. It would be a kind of voucher scheme. The professionals however are dubious. They doubt that people would be capable of making the necessary decisions; in some cases mental faculties will indeed have declined. A subsidiary question that bears upon their judgement is how public authorities would be able to assure themselves that the decisions being taken are sensible, qualified people are being employed, etc.. The writers are assuming that professionals in the public service will still have to tick the necessary boxes. Certainly there would need to be a quantum shift in ways of managing. But, who could doubt that diverse meadow-like responses would emerge in response to such a radical proposal. The great hidden army of life-long carers might find new roles. The newly-retired could be found as carers for the longer retired. Persons of sound limb could do errands for persons of sound mind, and someone lovely could read me poetry all day. In other words there is no bounding of the novel social arrangements that could emerge.
More than metaphor
How do I get back from here to my meadows and gardens? A sudden memory comes to me of an evangelistic American forester [attending a UN environmental conference] extolling the virtues of trees. Hospital patients who look out on trees and greenery, he asserted, need less medication and recover quicker than those who face concrete. We do need to get gardens, glades, greenery directly into public management as well.
Conclusion
In this reflection, the shortcomings of Third Way ideology – or more importantly the weaknesses apparent in the ‘doing’ of its diversity - have been made to take the blame for the persistence of mono-crop mentality in public management. This is perhaps not entirely fair. New Labour is too much of a present day phenomenon for anyone to be able to adequately trace influences or attribute blame. But at least a part of the present state of affairs must be put down to popular perception and populist responses in politics. We, the public, have been highly resistant to the idea that we should cultivate our own security, make adequate pension provision, re-invent mutual support, or plant the seeds of home care for our old age. We have not ‘bought into’ this philosophy. We are happy to be individualist consumers. We can hold political parties in distain – another very individualist indulgence. We can even vote opportunistically. But we still expect ‘them in authority’ to solve emergent social problems and blame them when they don’t. We get what we deserve, I suppose.
Like Wordsworth[5], I hanker after evidence of meadow-like diversity (without nostalgia; it was not there in my youth). It is a goal worth striving for but I do not think that it can be hectored into existence by a messianic centre, however inspiring the founding polemic. Nor do I think that an emerging diversity of institutions could survive being subjected to tick box monitor regimes. The problem in the medium term is going to be to hang on to the vision through inevitable disappointment.
References
Curtis D 2006 ‘Mindsets and Methods: Poverty Strategies and the Awkward Potential of the Enabling State’ International Journal of Public Sector Management
Curtis D 2005 ‘Known Ways and Labyrinths in Public Management’, Local Governance Vol 30 No. 4. pp199-208
Curtis D. 1999 ‘Institutional options for Local Governance and Community Self Management’, Local Governance, 3, 153-166.
De Tocqueville A 1835, Democracy In America New York Alfred A Knopf
Department of Health UK, 2005 ‘Independence, Wellbeing and Choice, www.dh.gov.uk reviewed, Society Guardian, 18-05-05].
Giddens A, 1998, The Third Way; the Renewal of Social Democracy Cambridge, Polity Press
Hutton W, 1999, The Stakeholding Society, Blackwell Publishing Co. Oxford UK , Malden MA USA,)
Korten D C, 1990 Getting to the 21st Century, Voluntary Action and the Global Agenda West Hartford, Connecticut, Kumarian Press
Putnam R, 2000 Bowling Alone; The Collapse and Revival of the American Community New York, Simon and Schuster
Tonnies F 1957 Community and Society East Lansing, Michigan State University Press
[1] … And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, /Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, /And the round ocean and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; /A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still /A lover of the meadows and the woods, / And mountains; …….[from, William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey]
[2] …as was ‘The Communist Manifesto’ where Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, departing from their scholarly norm, sought to catch the imagination of the readership with an account of the inevitability of the sweep of historical forces towards a new social order.
[3] This may have been new to UK public management but in development studies plural institutional strategies already had their advocates, such as David Korten (1990).
[4] It is the England of G.K. Chesterton’s ‘Reeling road and rolling road that rambles round the shire’; if I may risk getting poetic again.
[5] 'There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, / The earth and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / It is not now as it hath been of yore:- / Turn wheresoe'er I may, /By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.' William Wordsworth
Friday, June 19, 2009
Dangers and hopes in charisma.
Three fellows who lunch keep a wary eye on President Obama, fearing charismatic precedents, seeing the need for transformation in the public management of the world economy, the environment and international politics but hoping for nothing more than for common sense to prevail.
The seasons change. In our Northern hemisphere, as inversely in the Southern, the days lengthen and shorten. Yet, what were once the reassurances of nature these days often fail to reassure. Serious uncertainties assault us;
In the environment;
- an ‘unseasonable’ cold spell in Britain: a sign of the slowing Gulf Stream?
- a time without rain evidence of Global Warming?
- normal ‘grey’ a sign that grey will forever prevail’…..?
Serious economic disruption;
- the banking crisis; management failure
- or systems failure within the global financial institutional set-up
- or end to capitalism as we know it?
Serious noise in the world of politics;
- the ‘war on terror’, what is this?
No, on this one we know; a self-fulfilling prophesy. Hate breeds hate; the only question is why? In whose interest is it to stimulate this socially reproductive process? What power is protected by its pursuit? What weakness or fear is thereby perpetuated?
And most disturbing of all; the understandings that have sustained normal behaviour no longer explain; no longer enable. We look for change. Where will it come from?
Three fellows who lunch: a report.
Long experience in the real worlds of advertising, the law or the odd byways of academe, incline a fellow to wariness if not weariness. All is never as it seems, even when the signs are positive. So when three persons of a certain age - defined by the orange coated card that does wonders at London’s ticket barriers - meet to discuss the state of the world over lunch we were of course wary; even about President Obama.
I doubt if we were alone in enjoying a strange feeling of disbelieve - that did not yield to the usually normalising effects of a glass or two of red - that the American public had chosen an apparently sensible man to lead their nation. The normal expectation of democratic processes after all is that if there are two or more candidates for high office Jo Public will choose the dud. Yet here we are with a man of apparently moderate views working his way into the White House and issuing his first words - press releases and so on - and they too are of moderation.
Not that the dud always turns out bad. When Ronald Reagan was elected, we remembered, such was the despair of the rest of the World (we claim to be competent representatives) that we had to grasp at the slightest whiff of hope. A contemporary spoof film poster had adorned a colleague’s office wall. Reagan had Maggie Thatcher in his arms as if in a scene from Gone with the Wind; text reading “She promised to follow him to the end of the earth; He promised to organise it”. It captured the mood. This screen cowboy had stomped the electoral stage, rhetorical six guns blazing. We took refuge in the wisdom of a contemporary wit: the rest of the world would take note and ‘load blanks’. As things turned out they did. Or perhaps it was simply the coincidence of the emergence of an apparently sensible Soviet leader on the side of the ‘Indians’ - not by election of course - Mr Mikhail Gorbachev. And the rest is history. At least we have been allowed a continuation of that messy process.
Serious contemplation of an Obama era had also to overcome a second level of suspicion if not disbelieve. The man is so eloquent and hansom. Our discussion became a bit difficult at this point. We confessed without problem that it was the universal view of our wives that this man had what it takes. (Note that, as a matter of equity, we grant our three wives a higher status in representative-ness that we claim for ourselves - they the universe, we just the globe…).
But are we allowed the suspicion that superior appearance and way with words is a dangerous adjunct to those who hold the reigns of power in America? Some election analyst may yet demonstrate that what tipped the balance in America were the votes of women, abandoning prejudice and responding to deep urges to associate with alpha male power. A touch jealous perhaps, we put aside such suspicion and thought instead of the nurturing and safeguarding wisdom of women in choosing one who uses words with sincerity and moderation.
For me the big problem is how to respond to apparent charisma. I may now be deviating from the conversation of the three - the third glass, as Shakespeare might have said, increases eloquence but decreases the effectiveness of memory. But it is a worrying issue. A certain seniority - indicated in travel passes - allows us to have rather vivid memories of the last American charismatic, JFK. Not just his end - an end that had clearly been exercising the minds of America’s security officials as well as the reflective public over the election - but his reckless postures in relation to America’s foes. “Ich bin ein Berliner” was a great line for use at the Brandenburg Gate but did not add one jot to a fellow’s sense of security. Heading for the moon was fine, but has allowed successive American Presidents to dream of Star Wars. And the more we have learned about how John F carried on in his public-private affairs the less sense of retrospective well-being we live with. Will the charismatic Obama do better? [The evidently sensible Michelle may see to one aspect of it]. Or is there something inevitably dangerous in charisma?
An aside here; we in Britain have had our own, not very encouraging, ten year long brush with charisma: our Tony Blair. New Labour promised a new land. Its wordsmiths coined new slogans. Tony emerged as a dexterous manipulator of the media: nothing quite as simple as “yes we can”, but a touch of the same charm nevertheless. But it did not take very long before sound-bites, spin, ‘quick on the feet repartee’ and undoubted rhetorical powers ceased to disguise quite normal leaden feet and a sadly blinkered vision when it came to war or peace, or other real-world vexations.
We have to ask then, was it charisma that Americans were looking for in the recent elections or was the outcome simply a result of the binary nature of modern electoral politics? People perhaps thought, ‘whatever he is inclined to say or how he is inclined to say it, he cannot be worse than what went before’. Or was it indeed what he said during the seemingly endless electoral process? What in the words of the man - as selectively reported of course - could have encouraged us to hope?
* * * * *
A digression here to link this discussion of charisma back to my overall focus upon processes of governance: How do we locate charisma within the formal structures and processes of government, or within the processes of identity and collectivity, or within the competitive individualist thrust in public life? What kind of authority comes from or results in charisma?
These were questions for classical sociology. I am groping here; back to the intellectual giants, those who commanded the heights in the great contests of ‘60s’ sociological disputation. I need some reminding and find on line a very helpful essay by a Professor Charles Lindholm[1]. Max Weber and Emile Durkheim were the two early 20th Century thinkers, one German, one French, representing contrasting perspectives and methods around whose standards 60s Sociologists tended to rally - Weber to some degree sanitising Marx for those nervous of Marxian polemic. Both Weber and Durkheim were interested in kinds of thought and kinds of action as these define kinds of society.
Weber was much taken up with what he saw or perhaps hoped for as the increasing rationality of early 20th Century society in which scientific thinking and law would progressively guide behaviour and traditional thinking would wither away. The charismatic for Weber was a unique character, not altogether rational, not followed because of apparent clarity of ideas or vision but because of personal magnetism.[2] Such beings he thought have an authority that does not fit within traditional leadership, or rational or bureaucratic authority patterns but could be instrumental in achieving change from one state to another; he hoped positively. Of course he did not live to see or hear Hitler do his bit to damage the reputation of charisma.
For Durkheim, father of the ‘social construction of reality’ school of thinking, and I would guess for his follower, Mary Douglas - of whose ideas more below - charisma would be much less problematic, because the processes through which societies of different kinds generate ideas are not assumed to be entirely rational anyway; hence Professor Lindholm’s interest in analysis of crowd behaviour or the emergence of religious or other sects under the guidance of an apparent charismatic. To sway a crowd or inspire a group of people and lead them out into the wilds of the American mid-West - which seems to happen quite often - makes for an interesting social phenomenon but it not does not transform society as a whole. Indeed, the resultant sects can probably be seen as reactions against dominant social values. We have insipient crowd swayers in London. Tourists and a few native Brits go by bus or tube to Hyde Park Corner weekly to hear them. The speakers’ licence to say what they like how they like is widely regarded as some kind of safety valve, defusing forms of social tension; when not simply allowing an egotist an opportunity to be egotistical.
For Weber the role of the charismatic in social transformation fascinated but his analytic powers were largely focused upon world religions or trends in the history of far places [such as India], assuming that contemporary transformation in Europe would follow the path laid down by the Enlightenment thinkers. For Durkheim and more significantly for followers in the Durkheimian tradition such as Talcott Parsons or Edward Shills, social transformation came to be seen as a self-correcting process of differentiation and re-integration that - surprise, surprise - would lead with apparent inevitability towards a condition called modernity. In this process there is no apparent need for charisma at all.
Interestingly, much sociological analysis has moved on from considering the individual qualities of the charismatic to pondering the social or economic or political circumstances in which such qualities are called for. Crudely; the old question; was Hitler an outcome of conditions or a cause of another mindset?
So where does charismatic leadership or follower-ship fit into contemporary political processes?
We should note that there are two parts to any political equation; the part of the governor and the part the governed. Both halves display matching mindsets. Let me set that out in terms of the types of governance that have been outlined elsewhere; the hierarchical, the groupist and the individualist approaches to maintaining order and, at the same time, expand upon the framework to include an element so far neglected, namely the isolate, the alienated, the sufferer from ‘atomised subordination’; an individualist culture that is so because its adherents feel themselves miss-fits, a category into which most of us, at some time or another, may feel we fall[3].
The hierarchical mindset matches an assumption of the virtues of super-ordination with an equal assumption of the benefits that stem from willing subordination; disguised in industry as a legal-rational contract, in politics as a rather vaguer social contract between state and individual. The social contract leaves the subject (even if called citizen) free to take solace in whatever “lies, flattery and entertainment”[4] the authorities deign to dish out and to grumble when perceived entitlements under the contract are not delivered to acceptable standards. .
Groupism is sustained by locating virtue in the values of the group and vice in the values of ‘other’, all others. The groupist mindset in politics allows every individual to balance the delights of mutuality - the sense of belonging to community, political party, tribe or nation - with the acrimony, rancour and spitefulness that follows when ‘group’ fails to deliver. Card carrying political party loyalists will identify with the ‘ferrets in a sack’ picture that I paint here. To group together is a comforting way of distancing difference but has its costs.
The individualist mindset in politics is a rather easier animal to deal with - except perhaps by aspirant leaders [herding cats being the possible metaphor here]. Each individualist is only looking for individual advantage, his/her alignment with others a pragmatic deal to achieve a mutually convenient objective, her/his commitment confined to a handshake, his/her need for belief or ideology happily limited to metaphor - ‘level playing field’ or a vaguely inclusive, ‘turn to in time of need’ religion - such as is provided perhaps by the Church of England.
To be outside each or any of the above three types defines a condition of marginality that generates a fourth type of culture. Mary Douglas who started this game, herself a committed Catholic, often ignored this logically necessary category, as I have done heretofore. She was herself inclined to see hierarchy and its associated rituals as the norm from which ‘other’ cultural types deviate, abandonment of hierarchy and ritual leading towards inward looking religious sects, abandonment of both ritual and group loyalties, to the individualist culture of the opportunist network or market. But this left a range of behaviours that are evidence of a response to dominant ideas or regimes that she initially saw as fatalist, only later, as it emerged from her continuous re-workings of key texts[5] variously adding the notions of ‘atomised subordination’, or ‘insulated’ individualism, or ‘backwater isolation’[6]. As other writers took an interest in her Grid/Group matrix the words alienation - linking to Marx or to Weber and anomie - normlessness - linking back to Durkheim became associated with this box. The evident behaviours that she and others see as outcomes of this cultural type included student protest, dropping out of society, Millenarian movements, and - back to our theme - a tendency to follow charismatic leaders.
It is satisfactory in any framework of thought to be reasonably consistent and I think that Mary Douglas eventually got there[7]. But this last category is admittedly a bit of a catch-all. The least satisfactory aspect of such exercises in typology is that they identify but do not explain. Why the culture of alienation or anomie? Marx and Weber provided a rationale, something to do with forces in history, or with spread of scientific thinking. Durkheim and Douglas stick with the essentially circular model of causality in which societies produce mindsets and mindsets reinforce societies. All we can take from the Grid/Group framework as such is that charisma is associated with the least well defined and perhaps least stable social configuration. This will not do. Let us go back to the beginning of this little piece.
The thing which the environment, the economy and the international polity share at the present time is that the understandings that have sustained our use of natural resources, or the international as well as domestic and personal flows of funds, incomes and expenditures, or international relationships have suddenly - perhaps not so suddenly but nevertheless disturbingly quickly - become untennable. What were reasonable sureties for many of us [of course many were wiser] are now alien. In Grid/Group terms, huge numbers of us will have moved from comfort zones in a bureaucratic hierarchy box , or in a collective zone of GreenPeace membership, or in an ‘I look after myself and subscribe to charity’ box, to say ‘This no longer adds up’.
The sociological underpinning of this shift is rather complex and not quite captured in either of the classical interpretative approaches that we have been considering. There is a relationship between ways of thinking, the ways in which social agents have behaved and outcomes for society, but, as far as I can see, in each of these spheres the implicit behavioural models that make these linkages have to be supplemented by a good dose of Chaos Theory, before they make sense. Something ‘out there’ takes hold;
Thinking about the environment - in the Christian tradition in any case - has been dominated by the biblical assumption of man’s dominion over nature, resulting in extractive property rights, uninhibited consumption, random disposal of waste and painfully slow adjustments to the growing evidence of feedback links in global warming, declining soil fertility, oceanic pollution and acidity……
Thinking about the international economy over recent years has been dominated by a neo-libertarian philosophy granting precedence to market forces over state controls, encouraging developing country governments to increase their exposure to foreign investment that would ensure the benefits of trade; making the poor think ‘micro-credit’ without always thinking ‘micro-savings’; allowing the marketisation of ‘financial products’ that fuelled spirals of expansion but are now deemed toxic; forgetting that bubbles burst……..
Thinking about international relations? Well this is a bit different. American Neo-Con pre-eminence in international relations under George W Bush was of shot enough duration for many of us to have known a time when it could be presumed that national interest would be the motive force in international relations and that the powerful would exercise their power but that naked greed and belligerence would not be their favoured strategy; that peace agreements were worth working for and that taking weapons of mass destruction out of the equation was also for the best. So when the Neo Cons changed all that we were shocked.
The War on Terror followed providing a way of thinking that pervades international relations at all levels, to this day; encouraging the Sri Lankan government in the view that the Tamil Tigers can be eliminated; demanding of the Pakistan government that the Pakistan Taliban be eliminated…. No, we did not believe in that way of thinking but are still looking for something better to turn up[8].
Which brings us back, I think, to some musings on the likely outcome of the election of President Obama.
Actually we had learned very little of Barack Hussain Obama’s intentions on any specific policy area while he was at the hustings. On matters of international import; the things that concerned us most out here in the big wide world, there was only a word or two. What we did pick up was a few simple things that encouraged a hope of moderation. He would talk to ……, have open conversations with ….., hold out his hand towards, ….all indicative of a reasonable man. Sure: a contrast with what went before. But can he stick to it?
A few days later as Obama was getting himself established we had further evidence. He had avoided triumphal gestures; no transformation of the White House - as a French email joke had it - into its negative, a Black House. Time has freed me from any attempt to faithfully represent the discourse of my friends over some Arabic Mezze and a bottle or two of modest red so now I can voice my own hopes and fears without contradiction. Put it another way. I am free to contemplate what I see as the contradictive demands of and on leadership at the present time: which are these:
- what we call the world order is in disarray and its supportive economic and political logics and doctrines are proved false. We need some dynamic leadership to bring new vision and help shake us out of old understandings and into new. That might sound like a demand for charisma
- but a charismatic - as argued above - is a dangerous being unless open to challenge and possessed of a willingness to modify her/his views and opinions in exchange with others. A ‘lets talk’ posture might be a good start.
Can he stick to it? We don’t know. I find myself encouraged by the modesty of his beginnings in office. He, like the rest of us, can “screw up”, and acknowledges the same. On the other hand I note with mild alarm the transformation of what appeared to be an unconditional ‘talk to’ into “if they unclench their fist first”. That is an old game and does not equate with either secular or religious approaches to peace.
The secular formula for cooperation is called ‘tit for tat’[9]. Game theory players arrived at the formula through repetitive simulations of a conflict and cooperation scenario. It turns out that a successful, stable, formula is simple. Cooperate with your opponent on the first move then follow your opponent’s last move for all subsequent moves. The success of the strategy is attributed to the fact that it combines, as the blurb says, ‘nice’ (cooperating on the first move), ‘retaliatory’ (in following punishment with punishment) as well as ‘forgiving’ (immediate return to cooperation after one cooperative gesture by your opponent). So, Mr Obama, please be the first to stick out your hand.
And, Mr Obama, if you need encouragement to follow a secular directive don’t forget the religious dicta. The American religious right probably would swallow hard - perhaps preferring the thunderous front end of the Good Book - but ‘Turn the other cheek’ is in their somewhere. And if an Islamic text could be useful at some stage try the Surat-al-Anfal (8), ayah 61, which the web assures me translates as “But if they incline to peace, you also incline to peace and trust in Allah”.
This is a topic that will not go away and it is not the only ailment that besets the world. As fellows who lunch our aim, in a modest way, is to help to right some wrongs. More monitoring will be necessary in the near future requiring my colleagues to get out their bus passes again. But, Mr Obama, we are not asking for charisma. Charm yes. Extraordinary powers, no. Just a bit of common sense and decency please. The signs are good. On this one we stick with ‘hope’.
[1] ‘Charisma, Crowd Psychology and Altered States of Consciousness’ http://www.bu.edu/anthrop/faculty/lindholm/ASCCharisma.html
[2] S.N. Eisenstadt, Introduction in S.N Eisenstadt, ed. Max Weber, On Charisma and Institution Building, Selected Papers 1968
[3] Not the ‘Ring the bell conductor, I’m on the bus’ of the ME generation but ‘Stop the bus; stop the World I want to get off’, sad but it happens.
[4] As C. Wright Mills - another 60s icon Sociologist - put it somewhere
[5] Natural Symbols editions in 1970 and 1973, Essays in the Sociology of Perception 1982, How Institutions Think, 1986/7
[6] see Richard Fardon’s analytic biography Mary Douglas (London and New York, Routledge 1999) page 224.
[7] Many others think that her erudition ran away with her, but there are still many scholars in quite different fields who have made use of her basic framework
[8] I was working in Bangladesh at the time and penned the following; Subdued.
The mighty leaders of the West / with powers of rhetoric are blest / to set the World to moral right / a right supported by their might. / They quite disguise material gain / for which they’re quite prepared for pain / to fall on others. Others who / if wise enough, will then subdue / their shame and self disparagement / but naturally will soon resent / the pious claim that betterment / can come battle blasted. / That leaves the little likes of me / to face covert hostility.
[9] http://brembs.net/ipd/tft.html-3k-
The seasons change. In our Northern hemisphere, as inversely in the Southern, the days lengthen and shorten. Yet, what were once the reassurances of nature these days often fail to reassure. Serious uncertainties assault us;
In the environment;
- an ‘unseasonable’ cold spell in Britain: a sign of the slowing Gulf Stream?
- a time without rain evidence of Global Warming?
- normal ‘grey’ a sign that grey will forever prevail’…..?
Serious economic disruption;
- the banking crisis; management failure
- or systems failure within the global financial institutional set-up
- or end to capitalism as we know it?
Serious noise in the world of politics;
- the ‘war on terror’, what is this?
No, on this one we know; a self-fulfilling prophesy. Hate breeds hate; the only question is why? In whose interest is it to stimulate this socially reproductive process? What power is protected by its pursuit? What weakness or fear is thereby perpetuated?
And most disturbing of all; the understandings that have sustained normal behaviour no longer explain; no longer enable. We look for change. Where will it come from?
Three fellows who lunch: a report.
Long experience in the real worlds of advertising, the law or the odd byways of academe, incline a fellow to wariness if not weariness. All is never as it seems, even when the signs are positive. So when three persons of a certain age - defined by the orange coated card that does wonders at London’s ticket barriers - meet to discuss the state of the world over lunch we were of course wary; even about President Obama.
I doubt if we were alone in enjoying a strange feeling of disbelieve - that did not yield to the usually normalising effects of a glass or two of red - that the American public had chosen an apparently sensible man to lead their nation. The normal expectation of democratic processes after all is that if there are two or more candidates for high office Jo Public will choose the dud. Yet here we are with a man of apparently moderate views working his way into the White House and issuing his first words - press releases and so on - and they too are of moderation.
Not that the dud always turns out bad. When Ronald Reagan was elected, we remembered, such was the despair of the rest of the World (we claim to be competent representatives) that we had to grasp at the slightest whiff of hope. A contemporary spoof film poster had adorned a colleague’s office wall. Reagan had Maggie Thatcher in his arms as if in a scene from Gone with the Wind; text reading “She promised to follow him to the end of the earth; He promised to organise it”. It captured the mood. This screen cowboy had stomped the electoral stage, rhetorical six guns blazing. We took refuge in the wisdom of a contemporary wit: the rest of the world would take note and ‘load blanks’. As things turned out they did. Or perhaps it was simply the coincidence of the emergence of an apparently sensible Soviet leader on the side of the ‘Indians’ - not by election of course - Mr Mikhail Gorbachev. And the rest is history. At least we have been allowed a continuation of that messy process.
Serious contemplation of an Obama era had also to overcome a second level of suspicion if not disbelieve. The man is so eloquent and hansom. Our discussion became a bit difficult at this point. We confessed without problem that it was the universal view of our wives that this man had what it takes. (Note that, as a matter of equity, we grant our three wives a higher status in representative-ness that we claim for ourselves - they the universe, we just the globe…).
But are we allowed the suspicion that superior appearance and way with words is a dangerous adjunct to those who hold the reigns of power in America? Some election analyst may yet demonstrate that what tipped the balance in America were the votes of women, abandoning prejudice and responding to deep urges to associate with alpha male power. A touch jealous perhaps, we put aside such suspicion and thought instead of the nurturing and safeguarding wisdom of women in choosing one who uses words with sincerity and moderation.
For me the big problem is how to respond to apparent charisma. I may now be deviating from the conversation of the three - the third glass, as Shakespeare might have said, increases eloquence but decreases the effectiveness of memory. But it is a worrying issue. A certain seniority - indicated in travel passes - allows us to have rather vivid memories of the last American charismatic, JFK. Not just his end - an end that had clearly been exercising the minds of America’s security officials as well as the reflective public over the election - but his reckless postures in relation to America’s foes. “Ich bin ein Berliner” was a great line for use at the Brandenburg Gate but did not add one jot to a fellow’s sense of security. Heading for the moon was fine, but has allowed successive American Presidents to dream of Star Wars. And the more we have learned about how John F carried on in his public-private affairs the less sense of retrospective well-being we live with. Will the charismatic Obama do better? [The evidently sensible Michelle may see to one aspect of it]. Or is there something inevitably dangerous in charisma?
An aside here; we in Britain have had our own, not very encouraging, ten year long brush with charisma: our Tony Blair. New Labour promised a new land. Its wordsmiths coined new slogans. Tony emerged as a dexterous manipulator of the media: nothing quite as simple as “yes we can”, but a touch of the same charm nevertheless. But it did not take very long before sound-bites, spin, ‘quick on the feet repartee’ and undoubted rhetorical powers ceased to disguise quite normal leaden feet and a sadly blinkered vision when it came to war or peace, or other real-world vexations.
We have to ask then, was it charisma that Americans were looking for in the recent elections or was the outcome simply a result of the binary nature of modern electoral politics? People perhaps thought, ‘whatever he is inclined to say or how he is inclined to say it, he cannot be worse than what went before’. Or was it indeed what he said during the seemingly endless electoral process? What in the words of the man - as selectively reported of course - could have encouraged us to hope?
* * * * *
A digression here to link this discussion of charisma back to my overall focus upon processes of governance: How do we locate charisma within the formal structures and processes of government, or within the processes of identity and collectivity, or within the competitive individualist thrust in public life? What kind of authority comes from or results in charisma?
These were questions for classical sociology. I am groping here; back to the intellectual giants, those who commanded the heights in the great contests of ‘60s’ sociological disputation. I need some reminding and find on line a very helpful essay by a Professor Charles Lindholm[1]. Max Weber and Emile Durkheim were the two early 20th Century thinkers, one German, one French, representing contrasting perspectives and methods around whose standards 60s Sociologists tended to rally - Weber to some degree sanitising Marx for those nervous of Marxian polemic. Both Weber and Durkheim were interested in kinds of thought and kinds of action as these define kinds of society.
Weber was much taken up with what he saw or perhaps hoped for as the increasing rationality of early 20th Century society in which scientific thinking and law would progressively guide behaviour and traditional thinking would wither away. The charismatic for Weber was a unique character, not altogether rational, not followed because of apparent clarity of ideas or vision but because of personal magnetism.[2] Such beings he thought have an authority that does not fit within traditional leadership, or rational or bureaucratic authority patterns but could be instrumental in achieving change from one state to another; he hoped positively. Of course he did not live to see or hear Hitler do his bit to damage the reputation of charisma.
For Durkheim, father of the ‘social construction of reality’ school of thinking, and I would guess for his follower, Mary Douglas - of whose ideas more below - charisma would be much less problematic, because the processes through which societies of different kinds generate ideas are not assumed to be entirely rational anyway; hence Professor Lindholm’s interest in analysis of crowd behaviour or the emergence of religious or other sects under the guidance of an apparent charismatic. To sway a crowd or inspire a group of people and lead them out into the wilds of the American mid-West - which seems to happen quite often - makes for an interesting social phenomenon but it not does not transform society as a whole. Indeed, the resultant sects can probably be seen as reactions against dominant social values. We have insipient crowd swayers in London. Tourists and a few native Brits go by bus or tube to Hyde Park Corner weekly to hear them. The speakers’ licence to say what they like how they like is widely regarded as some kind of safety valve, defusing forms of social tension; when not simply allowing an egotist an opportunity to be egotistical.
For Weber the role of the charismatic in social transformation fascinated but his analytic powers were largely focused upon world religions or trends in the history of far places [such as India], assuming that contemporary transformation in Europe would follow the path laid down by the Enlightenment thinkers. For Durkheim and more significantly for followers in the Durkheimian tradition such as Talcott Parsons or Edward Shills, social transformation came to be seen as a self-correcting process of differentiation and re-integration that - surprise, surprise - would lead with apparent inevitability towards a condition called modernity. In this process there is no apparent need for charisma at all.
Interestingly, much sociological analysis has moved on from considering the individual qualities of the charismatic to pondering the social or economic or political circumstances in which such qualities are called for. Crudely; the old question; was Hitler an outcome of conditions or a cause of another mindset?
So where does charismatic leadership or follower-ship fit into contemporary political processes?
We should note that there are two parts to any political equation; the part of the governor and the part the governed. Both halves display matching mindsets. Let me set that out in terms of the types of governance that have been outlined elsewhere; the hierarchical, the groupist and the individualist approaches to maintaining order and, at the same time, expand upon the framework to include an element so far neglected, namely the isolate, the alienated, the sufferer from ‘atomised subordination’; an individualist culture that is so because its adherents feel themselves miss-fits, a category into which most of us, at some time or another, may feel we fall[3].
The hierarchical mindset matches an assumption of the virtues of super-ordination with an equal assumption of the benefits that stem from willing subordination; disguised in industry as a legal-rational contract, in politics as a rather vaguer social contract between state and individual. The social contract leaves the subject (even if called citizen) free to take solace in whatever “lies, flattery and entertainment”[4] the authorities deign to dish out and to grumble when perceived entitlements under the contract are not delivered to acceptable standards. .
Groupism is sustained by locating virtue in the values of the group and vice in the values of ‘other’, all others. The groupist mindset in politics allows every individual to balance the delights of mutuality - the sense of belonging to community, political party, tribe or nation - with the acrimony, rancour and spitefulness that follows when ‘group’ fails to deliver. Card carrying political party loyalists will identify with the ‘ferrets in a sack’ picture that I paint here. To group together is a comforting way of distancing difference but has its costs.
The individualist mindset in politics is a rather easier animal to deal with - except perhaps by aspirant leaders [herding cats being the possible metaphor here]. Each individualist is only looking for individual advantage, his/her alignment with others a pragmatic deal to achieve a mutually convenient objective, her/his commitment confined to a handshake, his/her need for belief or ideology happily limited to metaphor - ‘level playing field’ or a vaguely inclusive, ‘turn to in time of need’ religion - such as is provided perhaps by the Church of England.
To be outside each or any of the above three types defines a condition of marginality that generates a fourth type of culture. Mary Douglas who started this game, herself a committed Catholic, often ignored this logically necessary category, as I have done heretofore. She was herself inclined to see hierarchy and its associated rituals as the norm from which ‘other’ cultural types deviate, abandonment of hierarchy and ritual leading towards inward looking religious sects, abandonment of both ritual and group loyalties, to the individualist culture of the opportunist network or market. But this left a range of behaviours that are evidence of a response to dominant ideas or regimes that she initially saw as fatalist, only later, as it emerged from her continuous re-workings of key texts[5] variously adding the notions of ‘atomised subordination’, or ‘insulated’ individualism, or ‘backwater isolation’[6]. As other writers took an interest in her Grid/Group matrix the words alienation - linking to Marx or to Weber and anomie - normlessness - linking back to Durkheim became associated with this box. The evident behaviours that she and others see as outcomes of this cultural type included student protest, dropping out of society, Millenarian movements, and - back to our theme - a tendency to follow charismatic leaders.
It is satisfactory in any framework of thought to be reasonably consistent and I think that Mary Douglas eventually got there[7]. But this last category is admittedly a bit of a catch-all. The least satisfactory aspect of such exercises in typology is that they identify but do not explain. Why the culture of alienation or anomie? Marx and Weber provided a rationale, something to do with forces in history, or with spread of scientific thinking. Durkheim and Douglas stick with the essentially circular model of causality in which societies produce mindsets and mindsets reinforce societies. All we can take from the Grid/Group framework as such is that charisma is associated with the least well defined and perhaps least stable social configuration. This will not do. Let us go back to the beginning of this little piece.
The thing which the environment, the economy and the international polity share at the present time is that the understandings that have sustained our use of natural resources, or the international as well as domestic and personal flows of funds, incomes and expenditures, or international relationships have suddenly - perhaps not so suddenly but nevertheless disturbingly quickly - become untennable. What were reasonable sureties for many of us [of course many were wiser] are now alien. In Grid/Group terms, huge numbers of us will have moved from comfort zones in a bureaucratic hierarchy box , or in a collective zone of GreenPeace membership, or in an ‘I look after myself and subscribe to charity’ box, to say ‘This no longer adds up’.
The sociological underpinning of this shift is rather complex and not quite captured in either of the classical interpretative approaches that we have been considering. There is a relationship between ways of thinking, the ways in which social agents have behaved and outcomes for society, but, as far as I can see, in each of these spheres the implicit behavioural models that make these linkages have to be supplemented by a good dose of Chaos Theory, before they make sense. Something ‘out there’ takes hold;
Thinking about the environment - in the Christian tradition in any case - has been dominated by the biblical assumption of man’s dominion over nature, resulting in extractive property rights, uninhibited consumption, random disposal of waste and painfully slow adjustments to the growing evidence of feedback links in global warming, declining soil fertility, oceanic pollution and acidity……
Thinking about the international economy over recent years has been dominated by a neo-libertarian philosophy granting precedence to market forces over state controls, encouraging developing country governments to increase their exposure to foreign investment that would ensure the benefits of trade; making the poor think ‘micro-credit’ without always thinking ‘micro-savings’; allowing the marketisation of ‘financial products’ that fuelled spirals of expansion but are now deemed toxic; forgetting that bubbles burst……..
Thinking about international relations? Well this is a bit different. American Neo-Con pre-eminence in international relations under George W Bush was of shot enough duration for many of us to have known a time when it could be presumed that national interest would be the motive force in international relations and that the powerful would exercise their power but that naked greed and belligerence would not be their favoured strategy; that peace agreements were worth working for and that taking weapons of mass destruction out of the equation was also for the best. So when the Neo Cons changed all that we were shocked.
The War on Terror followed providing a way of thinking that pervades international relations at all levels, to this day; encouraging the Sri Lankan government in the view that the Tamil Tigers can be eliminated; demanding of the Pakistan government that the Pakistan Taliban be eliminated…. No, we did not believe in that way of thinking but are still looking for something better to turn up[8].
Which brings us back, I think, to some musings on the likely outcome of the election of President Obama.
Actually we had learned very little of Barack Hussain Obama’s intentions on any specific policy area while he was at the hustings. On matters of international import; the things that concerned us most out here in the big wide world, there was only a word or two. What we did pick up was a few simple things that encouraged a hope of moderation. He would talk to ……, have open conversations with ….., hold out his hand towards, ….all indicative of a reasonable man. Sure: a contrast with what went before. But can he stick to it?
A few days later as Obama was getting himself established we had further evidence. He had avoided triumphal gestures; no transformation of the White House - as a French email joke had it - into its negative, a Black House. Time has freed me from any attempt to faithfully represent the discourse of my friends over some Arabic Mezze and a bottle or two of modest red so now I can voice my own hopes and fears without contradiction. Put it another way. I am free to contemplate what I see as the contradictive demands of and on leadership at the present time: which are these:
- what we call the world order is in disarray and its supportive economic and political logics and doctrines are proved false. We need some dynamic leadership to bring new vision and help shake us out of old understandings and into new. That might sound like a demand for charisma
- but a charismatic - as argued above - is a dangerous being unless open to challenge and possessed of a willingness to modify her/his views and opinions in exchange with others. A ‘lets talk’ posture might be a good start.
Can he stick to it? We don’t know. I find myself encouraged by the modesty of his beginnings in office. He, like the rest of us, can “screw up”, and acknowledges the same. On the other hand I note with mild alarm the transformation of what appeared to be an unconditional ‘talk to’ into “if they unclench their fist first”. That is an old game and does not equate with either secular or religious approaches to peace.
The secular formula for cooperation is called ‘tit for tat’[9]. Game theory players arrived at the formula through repetitive simulations of a conflict and cooperation scenario. It turns out that a successful, stable, formula is simple. Cooperate with your opponent on the first move then follow your opponent’s last move for all subsequent moves. The success of the strategy is attributed to the fact that it combines, as the blurb says, ‘nice’ (cooperating on the first move), ‘retaliatory’ (in following punishment with punishment) as well as ‘forgiving’ (immediate return to cooperation after one cooperative gesture by your opponent). So, Mr Obama, please be the first to stick out your hand.
And, Mr Obama, if you need encouragement to follow a secular directive don’t forget the religious dicta. The American religious right probably would swallow hard - perhaps preferring the thunderous front end of the Good Book - but ‘Turn the other cheek’ is in their somewhere. And if an Islamic text could be useful at some stage try the Surat-al-Anfal (8), ayah 61, which the web assures me translates as “But if they incline to peace, you also incline to peace and trust in Allah”.
This is a topic that will not go away and it is not the only ailment that besets the world. As fellows who lunch our aim, in a modest way, is to help to right some wrongs. More monitoring will be necessary in the near future requiring my colleagues to get out their bus passes again. But, Mr Obama, we are not asking for charisma. Charm yes. Extraordinary powers, no. Just a bit of common sense and decency please. The signs are good. On this one we stick with ‘hope’.
[1] ‘Charisma, Crowd Psychology and Altered States of Consciousness’ http://www.bu.edu/anthrop/faculty/lindholm/ASCCharisma.html
[2] S.N. Eisenstadt, Introduction in S.N Eisenstadt, ed. Max Weber, On Charisma and Institution Building, Selected Papers 1968
[3] Not the ‘Ring the bell conductor, I’m on the bus’ of the ME generation but ‘Stop the bus; stop the World I want to get off’, sad but it happens.
[4] As C. Wright Mills - another 60s icon Sociologist - put it somewhere
[5] Natural Symbols editions in 1970 and 1973, Essays in the Sociology of Perception 1982, How Institutions Think, 1986/7
[6] see Richard Fardon’s analytic biography Mary Douglas (London and New York, Routledge 1999) page 224.
[7] Many others think that her erudition ran away with her, but there are still many scholars in quite different fields who have made use of her basic framework
[8] I was working in Bangladesh at the time and penned the following; Subdued.
The mighty leaders of the West / with powers of rhetoric are blest / to set the World to moral right / a right supported by their might. / They quite disguise material gain / for which they’re quite prepared for pain / to fall on others. Others who / if wise enough, will then subdue / their shame and self disparagement / but naturally will soon resent / the pious claim that betterment / can come battle blasted. / That leaves the little likes of me / to face covert hostility.
[9] http://brembs.net/ipd/tft.html-3k-
The Sometimes Missing Jester
We do not find a slot labelled ‘Jester’, ‘Joker’, ‘Fool’ or ‘Praise-singer’ on present day government organisation charts, but such characters have cropped up historically in many parts of the world. They have apparent purpose; to speak truth to power. If power is with the people then, we the people, need the truth. Jesters there are but do we listen?
Academic theorising about contemporary governance can make heavy reading. It is not just that the subject has an air of high seriousness about it; there are after all serious issues or situations that need to be governed. It is not simply the endless questioning of other people’s meanings while attempting to pin new meanings onto thoroughly slippery concepts. No, it is more likely that the mental constructs that we build and seek to share must not only explain but be able to provide a moral base for action: for making war, building peace, doing business or - my theme here - fixing the environment. Theories of governance are never purely positivist; norms are hidden in there somehow. Explanations have to serve also as justifications. My present reflection might appear to be an escapist indulgence in this respect. I want to talk about the Joker, the Fool, the Praise-singer who can also blame and various equivalents. Indulge the thought that these social roles are totally marginal to our governance theme. But note that such characters recur in literature, history and anthropology with some regularity and be prepared to think otherwise.
My mind runs back to Christmas Day or was it Boxing Day, 1971, or was it 1972, no matter. The scene was the kgotla - the village assembly in Mankgodi Village, Botswana. I was the resident Anthropologist - in those days many villages seemed to have them. My task was to understand how village society ‘worked’, its politics, its economics, its processes of social change; in particular how external agents of change might inject ideas about better farming and such like; very much part of the prevalent ‘modernisation’ theme. So I had not taken particular interest in the choirs that I had heard rehearsing in different parts of the village. ‘Missionary influence’ I had thought and since I am a bit allergic to hymns I nearly stayed away when informed that choirs would be singing in the kgotla over the festive occasion. But I didn’t. Hymns or no, the choral tradition in Southern Africa is stunning. But as I dived into the melee with my tape recorder I realised that I was on to something else. The trigger came as I was attempting to talk to the Chief and saw his face turn to thunder. The song being sung at the time was questioning whether it was he, the chief, who had stolen the post from the village post box or whether it was the elected Councillor who had done it, perhaps to discredit him[1]. On the face of it the song was an open confrontation with authority, yet the singers were evidently immune from the normal, well established principles of Tswana jurisprudence. Chief Tobega could apparently do nothing about it[2]. An aspect of social order had been inverted for the occasion. Clearly there was a political dynamic behind these harmonies that I might have missed. Maybe the upside down bit of governance is as important as the upright.
What do I take from this? It is not going to be simple. Social life can probably rival biological life in its connectivity and complexity. James Lovelock with his Gaia concept was ridiculed back in the 1960s by professional biologists[3], each into his or her own kind of worm or plant or aphid, but eventually won recognition as each worm studier found that changes in worm nourishing conditions mattered, not a bit but fundamentally to the success or failure of said worm and that these conditions are shaped by other worms or plants or aphids that in turn …. Life in other words is a big and complicated thing. So, I recognise, is our social means of getting a place in it.
Lovelock’s big idea was that the Earth is self-regulating. Kick it and it will kick back. We humans are kicking it with over-consumption and pollution and it will kick back with - he might have said - storms, pestilence and things unpredictable. That is how his Gaia image has entered common minds - such as mine. And there it echoes the cries of a deranged King who, having botched his relationships with his three daughters, stomps the moors with his friend the Fool - Shakespeare’s King Lear.
The grand theme in all this is regulation: a theme much talked about in the field of government and governance. Our modern or post-modern governments - perhaps particularly the British government - are very keen on ‘putting in place’ regulatory systems through which to control the price of gas, the frequency and timeliness of trains, the disposal of waste, the performance of schools or the extraction of fish from the North Sea. The problem with such ‘put in place’ systems, I argue, is that they do not always fit. They assume a rather mechanical model of connectivity: that all the bits behave as did the bits of James Watt’s steam engine, the speed of which was governed by a regulator - a device that sat atop the machine and responded to acceleration by centrifugal expansion to slow its rotation. James Watt’s governor worked for slow, stationary engines - though not very well apparently. In the mechanical world the governor concept has been theorised and refined over a century and a half to provide a range of useful devices. A governor can be fitted to curb the exhuberance of drivers of fast cars and some such could be used to enforce motorway speed restrictions - if there were the political will to do so. Aye, there’s the rub; at a certain point regulation becomes a social matter rather than mechanical, introducing other dynamics entirely.
Many things have no machine-like connectivity at all. In these cases, putting in place a so-called independent regulator with powers to demand information on this and that and to set limits upon behaviour of this kind or that kind can have quite perverse consequences. Between declining fish stocks in the North Sea and the rate of extraction of fish from that stock and the behaviour of fishermen or their unions and the propensity of consumers to consume fish, there are innumerable linkages and feedback processes that are not really understandable by, or reducible to, a readily applicable formula. What a regulator then does can have quite perverse consequences. When the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission and the European Union enforcers set limits on the size, type and quantity of permitted catch their rules sound logical but vast quantities of fish, deemed ineligible for landing, finish up being thrown back dead into the sea. French fishermen protest and block harbours at the thought of any restriction on their rights to fish[4]. A seemingly endless process of attempted conflict resolution follows[5]; which might just be missing the point. Catch limitation is not necessarily the most effective way of controlling a wild stock. Exclusion zones might work better. Rotating catchment zones might allow for accelerated recovery after intensive extraction[6]. Regulatory systems have to reflect sophisticated understandings of underlying technical possibilities. They also have to be compatibility with feasible social processes, the main criterion of which is that the perpetrators have some interest in successful outcomes. Ordinary minds would see the weakness of a crude ‘putting in place’ approach to regulation if an Atmospheric Pollution Regulator decided that - to control CO2 emissions - citizens should be licensed to breathe only on alternate days. System survival and human survival within our biosphere requires more sophisticated understandings to drive more sophisticated processes.
Is there not scope for self-regulation?
The idea of self-regulation is very attractive and has been adopted in various disciplines. In economics the idea that the market is self-regulating has been central to the discipline since its founding and has survived the plentiful evidence that history has thrown up to the contrary. Many people responding to price signals, supply responding to demand, ought to do the trick; other things being equal; which of course they seldom are. When markets crash there are always two plausible interpretations;
- ‘they would have been self-correcting had not governments intervened’ and
- ‘look what happens when external regulation is inadequate’.
The first survives mostly in the minds of believing economists. The latter recurs in the minds of sceptical stateists. Crashes happen when market players don’t self-regulate because they are testing the boundaries of government indulgence [moral hazard]. Slumps follow when government bail-outs fail to re-establish the risk sharing basis of trust. Might it not have been better had some Joker on the sidelines ventured;
(rubbish) + (rubbish) = asset?
In the functionalist tradition of Anthropology and Sociology the idea that social systems are self-regulating is built into the underlying methodological suppositions. Not only do courts function to restore ordered relations in society - which might be obvious enough - but witchcraft accusations or other allocations of blame[7] function to maintain the credibility of authority and it’s supporting beliefs or ideologies. While functionalism as such is out of fashion, the basic observation that people in society seem to like self-confirming accounts is itself confirmed by post-modernist fascination with discourses and narratives; particularly those of people in power.
Among the 60’s Sociologists Talcott Parsons was the most prominent functionalist. A little quote from a Wikipedia entry may help us to understand his method;
In Parsons' theory of history and evolution, the constitutive-cognititive symbolization of the cybernetic hierarchy of action-systemic levels has in principle the same function as the function of genetic information in DNA's control of biological evolution but this factor of meta-systemic control does not "determine" any outcome but it defines the orientational boundaries of the real path-breaker, which is action itself.
- on the other hand it might not. I think that what this says is that people are free to act, within social constraints, constraints being societies’ means of regulation. Note however that such regulation is a supposition of method rather than an observation of fact. All actions of all social agents - in this conceptualisation - tend towards socio-stasis. [If the Jester is there, he is ipso facto necessary, if not there, ipso facto unnecessary.]
Parsons was a particular hate-figure for the other kind of 60’s Sociologist - Rex, Darhendorf, others - who wanted to account for conflict and to give individuals the mental liberty to be outsiders, the other side of the police lines, even if such freedom often petered out in smoke. For them, society was a construct, real enough to be oppressive to the rebel, real enough also to make that rebel reach for collar and tie when unemployment struck. For conflict theorists regulation was a matter for fisticuffs. Well, we can see it in the streets. It is real. It is also something that many, perhaps most people in most societies try, pragmatically, to find some way to do without. Hence the search for opportunities to debate, mediate, resolve; perhaps leaving room on the edge for the Jester, to ease things along a bit when debate gets sticky.
The Gaia model was built upon the idea of self-regulation, again with huge functionalist suppositions. It made the rather anthropomorphic assumption that Earth can behave in a manner that responds to human behaviour; our misbehaviour prompting vengeful returns. Earth System Scientists have refined the model, making it comply with the established objectivist tenets of the scientific tradition, and finding facts to take the place of suppositions. The outcome still allows them to see human behaviour as the driving force that threatens chaos. And what is chaos? Is it an end to self-regulation or an interim phase between one self-regulating regime and another in which human populations may not feature? Not many of us want to hang around to await the outcome of this drama. We would like voice, choice, a touch of agency. But how? A well placed word in edgewise? But where?
Shakespeare builds his dramas around similar assumptions about social and natural order, tin sheets in the wings rattling thunder as King Lear or that Scottish fellow are exposed for their unnatural social ways as they walk the wilds. In Shakespeare’s case however Nature has no agency. Unnatural human behaviour is the driver; reflected in unnatural events in nature. The sun will only shine again when proper social order is restored. In the theatre, caught up in a tale of human folly, the mind is quite prepared to suspend disbelief in this pattern of implied causality. We also note that King Lear, having handed his kingdom to his avaricious daughters, has a voice in his ear, the Fool, who says, without much disguise, ‘who is the fool here, you or me?[8]
The Fool, Jester or Joker of the Medieval European court seems to have been a ubiquitous character. By most accounts these characters had some licence to speak truth to power. Southern African societies have also featured similar characters, there referred to as Praise Singers. A South African Zululand tourism website makes the point [9] that such singers could also, in round about ways, temper praise with criticism. Tswana society historically had also recognised Praise Singers. One man, in the other village in which I lived for a while [Manyana], attempted the style, standing on occasion to deliver a staccato flow of high oratory. He was much enjoyed by the assembled men, but lightly dismissed since he was regarded to be slightly ‘touched’, with a history of mental illness. How authentic his efforts were I could not say, mostly because his diction left me behind, but, as I read now, to be ‘touched’, simulated or real, may often have been self - protection, justifying the licence to speak their mind that Jesters and such-like characters in different historical settings seem to have enjoyed.
What is apparent about the license that the Jester or Praise Singer is allowed, is that it always seems to require a touch of artistry. Lear’s Fool uses a riddle-like form to make his point.
Fool. Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell? Lear. No.Fool. Nor I neither; but I can tell why a snail has a house.Lear. Why? Fool. Why, to put his head in; not to give it away to his daughters, and leave his horns with-out a case.
King Dingane’s Praise Singer wrapped his comment on the King’s short temper in a charming butterfly picture. The choir that stood before Chief Tobega to test the implications of the stolen post, harmonised their tale in verse.
A different protective technique would to approach the truth obliquely, using a typical joke - like inversion, even when humour was not called for;
Jesters could also give bad news to the King that no-one else would dare deliver. The best example of this is in 1340, when the French fleet was destroyed at the Battle of Sluys by the English. Phillippe VI's jester told him the English sailors: "Don't even have the guts to jump into the water like our brave French." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jester#Political_significance
That such a person was entitled, or might be expected to speak out of turn would also have been indicated by deviance from proper dress code; adopting for instance the three-pointed hat and motley garb that still graces the odd card within the pack; the Joker, which can take, or be given, exceptional powers when it sits alongside the King, Queen and Jack in a pack of playing cards.
Functionalist Sociologists would no doubt just say that a Jester role was a necessary adjunct to hierarchical authority, functionally necessary for the maintenance of society in that form. But that tautology does not tell us much. Conflict theorists would say - much the same thing really - that jesting statements of awkward truths provide an escape from the everyday realities of power and domination; leaving that power in place. I think I am inclined to put a slightly different caste upon it, but first another question. Has not society, our modern, post-modern or whatever we now label it, changed so much that it no longer needs the Jester?
My rhetorical question needs putting more precisely. In whose ear would a Jester now speak his riddles or rhymes? Since power has been wrested from monarchs in most parts of the world there is no point in focusing upon kings. The Duke of Edinburgh can be left to his own wisecracks. But - insofar as ‘sovereignty of the people’ is the dominant idea in the democratic variant of modern society, is it not ‘we the people’ who now need the occasional word of truth?
If by ‘we the people’ in Britain we mean us couch potatoes who hunt through the channels on a Friday evening for a bit of light humour at the expense of government, society and just occasionally ourselves, then we have been nourished by a long tradition of such stuff - going back three centuries to Hogarth, Thackery, Dean Swift, Dickens. They did pictures and books. That Was the Week That Was (TW3), which flourished briefly in the early 1960s, brought the mass audience provided by television the kind of humour that had previously been confined to the Cambridge Footlights on the one, upper-crusty, hand and the Music Hall or the stand up comedians’ turns on the other, working class hand. The two had merged briefly on stage in Beyond the Fringe. In so far as TW3 material could be called satirical, calling upon us to question our daily suppositions and values - commentators question how far this was the case[10] - it could indeed be seen as a means whereby a Jester put some wittily self-critical words into the ear of the electorate. TW3 also made fun of authority, delighting in the Edwardian mannerisms of the Prime Minister of the time Harold Macmillan. But the program was closed down before the 1964 election not, it is said, because the government was agin it but because it had run out of steam (Sandbrook p588). In any case neither Macmillan nor the public needed a critical word in the ear when ‘events’ of the time - the Profumo scandal in particular - did so much to question the credibility of government.
More recently Spitting Image [using puppetry as its distancing mechanism], as well as programmes such as Bremner, Bird and Fortune have all brought critical humour back to the small screen in the corner of the room. One thinks of satirical elements in such programmes - Bird and Fortune in a mock interview discussing the credit crunch, balancing criticism of the venality of bankers or the foolishness of the Government Treasury with the gullibility of us the ‘punters’[11] - but wonders what difference such awareness makes to us as citizens. Does it not just reinforce a feeling that doing anything about it is hopeless, contributing to citizen apathy rather than stimulating to action?
Of course the awakened citizen is also aware of the limited sense in which democracy is indeed anything like ‘government of the people, by the people’. In varying degrees we still have concentrated powers and government by representatives of an elite. In considering the role of humour, the jest and The Jester we should not perhaps be seeking to locate the necessary injection as being either in the ear of The Supreme Leader [as Private Eye mockingly labels the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown] or as pricking the consciousness of the democratic masses but as a part of the interactions that go on between the two. The same incidentally is true of Tswana society. The singers of the song of the stolen post made their mark on their fellow citizens in the kgotla as much as the chief, no doubt reminding him and them of the well known Tswana / Sotho saying that “A chief is a chief by the people”.
My last take. All systematic thought and - with greater certainty - all attempts at systematic political thought, are limited. Lots of ideas, observations, actions or events, will fail to ‘fit’ or to be explicable within any particular mind-set, action plan or ideology. The function of jest is to test boundaries and credibilities. The Jester is like the flea on the back of the hedgehog - without it there is no life-giving circulation. It is my contention that we, like hedgehogs, can’t do without them: and there should also be one in political entourage of any Supreme Leader.
[1] The mail service often carried remittances. The chief was the licensed agent at the time but the box had been broken into, to cover tracks….?
[2] Other songs had wide ranging but always critical themes. One song encouraged ‘sister’ so and so to go and chase the former school headmaster who had impregnated her before he was transferred to another village. Another urged a group to take an unspecified complaint to Tau Tona [big lion], the then President, Sir Seretse Khama in the capital city, Gaborone; a procedure that would have conformed to traditional governance norms but would be unlikely to be well received by the security details that surrounded the modern head of state.
[3] My mind refreshed on the Gaia theme by the Big Issue, April 13-19, 2009
[4] Press reports 13th April 2009
[5] www.neafc.org/page/743
[6] see Fikret Berkes, Carl Folke and Johan Colding, 1998, eds Linking Social and Ecological Systems Cambridge
[7] as in the tale of Baby P
[8] Shakespeare’s King Lear, Act 1 Scene 4
[9] The office of the praise singer, the only professional artist in traditional society, was the most important in the culture of African people. His duty was to recount both the positive and negative deeds of the sovereign. This would include, for example, details on the King's bad temper or his latest misdemeanour. Everyone of the King's battles - victory or defeat, was faithfully recounted in elaborate and ceremonial language. A praise singer had to be an intelligent, deeply spiritual person of the highest repute amongst his society. The songs he sung had to be memorable, composed in such a way that every line which was spoken in classical, poetic language, would be easy to remember. For example, in the praise song of King Dingane his is referred to as the "butterfly of Punga and Mageba" - "the butterfly with very bright colours, a butterfly which, when touched, suddenly darkened its colours." This line, sung by a Zulu praise singer attests to Dingane's very, very quick temper and his displeasure at even the slightest joke. www.warthog.co.za/dedt/tourism/zululand/usiko/singers.htm
[10] Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, A history of Britain from Suez to the Beatles London, Abacus 2005
[11] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXBcmqwTV9s&feature=related
Academic theorising about contemporary governance can make heavy reading. It is not just that the subject has an air of high seriousness about it; there are after all serious issues or situations that need to be governed. It is not simply the endless questioning of other people’s meanings while attempting to pin new meanings onto thoroughly slippery concepts. No, it is more likely that the mental constructs that we build and seek to share must not only explain but be able to provide a moral base for action: for making war, building peace, doing business or - my theme here - fixing the environment. Theories of governance are never purely positivist; norms are hidden in there somehow. Explanations have to serve also as justifications. My present reflection might appear to be an escapist indulgence in this respect. I want to talk about the Joker, the Fool, the Praise-singer who can also blame and various equivalents. Indulge the thought that these social roles are totally marginal to our governance theme. But note that such characters recur in literature, history and anthropology with some regularity and be prepared to think otherwise.
My mind runs back to Christmas Day or was it Boxing Day, 1971, or was it 1972, no matter. The scene was the kgotla - the village assembly in Mankgodi Village, Botswana. I was the resident Anthropologist - in those days many villages seemed to have them. My task was to understand how village society ‘worked’, its politics, its economics, its processes of social change; in particular how external agents of change might inject ideas about better farming and such like; very much part of the prevalent ‘modernisation’ theme. So I had not taken particular interest in the choirs that I had heard rehearsing in different parts of the village. ‘Missionary influence’ I had thought and since I am a bit allergic to hymns I nearly stayed away when informed that choirs would be singing in the kgotla over the festive occasion. But I didn’t. Hymns or no, the choral tradition in Southern Africa is stunning. But as I dived into the melee with my tape recorder I realised that I was on to something else. The trigger came as I was attempting to talk to the Chief and saw his face turn to thunder. The song being sung at the time was questioning whether it was he, the chief, who had stolen the post from the village post box or whether it was the elected Councillor who had done it, perhaps to discredit him[1]. On the face of it the song was an open confrontation with authority, yet the singers were evidently immune from the normal, well established principles of Tswana jurisprudence. Chief Tobega could apparently do nothing about it[2]. An aspect of social order had been inverted for the occasion. Clearly there was a political dynamic behind these harmonies that I might have missed. Maybe the upside down bit of governance is as important as the upright.
What do I take from this? It is not going to be simple. Social life can probably rival biological life in its connectivity and complexity. James Lovelock with his Gaia concept was ridiculed back in the 1960s by professional biologists[3], each into his or her own kind of worm or plant or aphid, but eventually won recognition as each worm studier found that changes in worm nourishing conditions mattered, not a bit but fundamentally to the success or failure of said worm and that these conditions are shaped by other worms or plants or aphids that in turn …. Life in other words is a big and complicated thing. So, I recognise, is our social means of getting a place in it.
Lovelock’s big idea was that the Earth is self-regulating. Kick it and it will kick back. We humans are kicking it with over-consumption and pollution and it will kick back with - he might have said - storms, pestilence and things unpredictable. That is how his Gaia image has entered common minds - such as mine. And there it echoes the cries of a deranged King who, having botched his relationships with his three daughters, stomps the moors with his friend the Fool - Shakespeare’s King Lear.
The grand theme in all this is regulation: a theme much talked about in the field of government and governance. Our modern or post-modern governments - perhaps particularly the British government - are very keen on ‘putting in place’ regulatory systems through which to control the price of gas, the frequency and timeliness of trains, the disposal of waste, the performance of schools or the extraction of fish from the North Sea. The problem with such ‘put in place’ systems, I argue, is that they do not always fit. They assume a rather mechanical model of connectivity: that all the bits behave as did the bits of James Watt’s steam engine, the speed of which was governed by a regulator - a device that sat atop the machine and responded to acceleration by centrifugal expansion to slow its rotation. James Watt’s governor worked for slow, stationary engines - though not very well apparently. In the mechanical world the governor concept has been theorised and refined over a century and a half to provide a range of useful devices. A governor can be fitted to curb the exhuberance of drivers of fast cars and some such could be used to enforce motorway speed restrictions - if there were the political will to do so. Aye, there’s the rub; at a certain point regulation becomes a social matter rather than mechanical, introducing other dynamics entirely.
Many things have no machine-like connectivity at all. In these cases, putting in place a so-called independent regulator with powers to demand information on this and that and to set limits upon behaviour of this kind or that kind can have quite perverse consequences. Between declining fish stocks in the North Sea and the rate of extraction of fish from that stock and the behaviour of fishermen or their unions and the propensity of consumers to consume fish, there are innumerable linkages and feedback processes that are not really understandable by, or reducible to, a readily applicable formula. What a regulator then does can have quite perverse consequences. When the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission and the European Union enforcers set limits on the size, type and quantity of permitted catch their rules sound logical but vast quantities of fish, deemed ineligible for landing, finish up being thrown back dead into the sea. French fishermen protest and block harbours at the thought of any restriction on their rights to fish[4]. A seemingly endless process of attempted conflict resolution follows[5]; which might just be missing the point. Catch limitation is not necessarily the most effective way of controlling a wild stock. Exclusion zones might work better. Rotating catchment zones might allow for accelerated recovery after intensive extraction[6]. Regulatory systems have to reflect sophisticated understandings of underlying technical possibilities. They also have to be compatibility with feasible social processes, the main criterion of which is that the perpetrators have some interest in successful outcomes. Ordinary minds would see the weakness of a crude ‘putting in place’ approach to regulation if an Atmospheric Pollution Regulator decided that - to control CO2 emissions - citizens should be licensed to breathe only on alternate days. System survival and human survival within our biosphere requires more sophisticated understandings to drive more sophisticated processes.
Is there not scope for self-regulation?
The idea of self-regulation is very attractive and has been adopted in various disciplines. In economics the idea that the market is self-regulating has been central to the discipline since its founding and has survived the plentiful evidence that history has thrown up to the contrary. Many people responding to price signals, supply responding to demand, ought to do the trick; other things being equal; which of course they seldom are. When markets crash there are always two plausible interpretations;
- ‘they would have been self-correcting had not governments intervened’ and
- ‘look what happens when external regulation is inadequate’.
The first survives mostly in the minds of believing economists. The latter recurs in the minds of sceptical stateists. Crashes happen when market players don’t self-regulate because they are testing the boundaries of government indulgence [moral hazard]. Slumps follow when government bail-outs fail to re-establish the risk sharing basis of trust. Might it not have been better had some Joker on the sidelines ventured;
(rubbish) + (rubbish) = asset?
In the functionalist tradition of Anthropology and Sociology the idea that social systems are self-regulating is built into the underlying methodological suppositions. Not only do courts function to restore ordered relations in society - which might be obvious enough - but witchcraft accusations or other allocations of blame[7] function to maintain the credibility of authority and it’s supporting beliefs or ideologies. While functionalism as such is out of fashion, the basic observation that people in society seem to like self-confirming accounts is itself confirmed by post-modernist fascination with discourses and narratives; particularly those of people in power.
Among the 60’s Sociologists Talcott Parsons was the most prominent functionalist. A little quote from a Wikipedia entry may help us to understand his method;
In Parsons' theory of history and evolution, the constitutive-cognititive symbolization of the cybernetic hierarchy of action-systemic levels has in principle the same function as the function of genetic information in DNA's control of biological evolution but this factor of meta-systemic control does not "determine" any outcome but it defines the orientational boundaries of the real path-breaker, which is action itself.
- on the other hand it might not. I think that what this says is that people are free to act, within social constraints, constraints being societies’ means of regulation. Note however that such regulation is a supposition of method rather than an observation of fact. All actions of all social agents - in this conceptualisation - tend towards socio-stasis. [If the Jester is there, he is ipso facto necessary, if not there, ipso facto unnecessary.]
Parsons was a particular hate-figure for the other kind of 60’s Sociologist - Rex, Darhendorf, others - who wanted to account for conflict and to give individuals the mental liberty to be outsiders, the other side of the police lines, even if such freedom often petered out in smoke. For them, society was a construct, real enough to be oppressive to the rebel, real enough also to make that rebel reach for collar and tie when unemployment struck. For conflict theorists regulation was a matter for fisticuffs. Well, we can see it in the streets. It is real. It is also something that many, perhaps most people in most societies try, pragmatically, to find some way to do without. Hence the search for opportunities to debate, mediate, resolve; perhaps leaving room on the edge for the Jester, to ease things along a bit when debate gets sticky.
The Gaia model was built upon the idea of self-regulation, again with huge functionalist suppositions. It made the rather anthropomorphic assumption that Earth can behave in a manner that responds to human behaviour; our misbehaviour prompting vengeful returns. Earth System Scientists have refined the model, making it comply with the established objectivist tenets of the scientific tradition, and finding facts to take the place of suppositions. The outcome still allows them to see human behaviour as the driving force that threatens chaos. And what is chaos? Is it an end to self-regulation or an interim phase between one self-regulating regime and another in which human populations may not feature? Not many of us want to hang around to await the outcome of this drama. We would like voice, choice, a touch of agency. But how? A well placed word in edgewise? But where?
Shakespeare builds his dramas around similar assumptions about social and natural order, tin sheets in the wings rattling thunder as King Lear or that Scottish fellow are exposed for their unnatural social ways as they walk the wilds. In Shakespeare’s case however Nature has no agency. Unnatural human behaviour is the driver; reflected in unnatural events in nature. The sun will only shine again when proper social order is restored. In the theatre, caught up in a tale of human folly, the mind is quite prepared to suspend disbelief in this pattern of implied causality. We also note that King Lear, having handed his kingdom to his avaricious daughters, has a voice in his ear, the Fool, who says, without much disguise, ‘who is the fool here, you or me?[8]
The Fool, Jester or Joker of the Medieval European court seems to have been a ubiquitous character. By most accounts these characters had some licence to speak truth to power. Southern African societies have also featured similar characters, there referred to as Praise Singers. A South African Zululand tourism website makes the point [9] that such singers could also, in round about ways, temper praise with criticism. Tswana society historically had also recognised Praise Singers. One man, in the other village in which I lived for a while [Manyana], attempted the style, standing on occasion to deliver a staccato flow of high oratory. He was much enjoyed by the assembled men, but lightly dismissed since he was regarded to be slightly ‘touched’, with a history of mental illness. How authentic his efforts were I could not say, mostly because his diction left me behind, but, as I read now, to be ‘touched’, simulated or real, may often have been self - protection, justifying the licence to speak their mind that Jesters and such-like characters in different historical settings seem to have enjoyed.
What is apparent about the license that the Jester or Praise Singer is allowed, is that it always seems to require a touch of artistry. Lear’s Fool uses a riddle-like form to make his point.
Fool. Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell? Lear. No.Fool. Nor I neither; but I can tell why a snail has a house.Lear. Why? Fool. Why, to put his head in; not to give it away to his daughters, and leave his horns with-out a case.
King Dingane’s Praise Singer wrapped his comment on the King’s short temper in a charming butterfly picture. The choir that stood before Chief Tobega to test the implications of the stolen post, harmonised their tale in verse.
A different protective technique would to approach the truth obliquely, using a typical joke - like inversion, even when humour was not called for;
Jesters could also give bad news to the King that no-one else would dare deliver. The best example of this is in 1340, when the French fleet was destroyed at the Battle of Sluys by the English. Phillippe VI's jester told him the English sailors: "Don't even have the guts to jump into the water like our brave French." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jester#Political_significance
That such a person was entitled, or might be expected to speak out of turn would also have been indicated by deviance from proper dress code; adopting for instance the three-pointed hat and motley garb that still graces the odd card within the pack; the Joker, which can take, or be given, exceptional powers when it sits alongside the King, Queen and Jack in a pack of playing cards.
Functionalist Sociologists would no doubt just say that a Jester role was a necessary adjunct to hierarchical authority, functionally necessary for the maintenance of society in that form. But that tautology does not tell us much. Conflict theorists would say - much the same thing really - that jesting statements of awkward truths provide an escape from the everyday realities of power and domination; leaving that power in place. I think I am inclined to put a slightly different caste upon it, but first another question. Has not society, our modern, post-modern or whatever we now label it, changed so much that it no longer needs the Jester?
My rhetorical question needs putting more precisely. In whose ear would a Jester now speak his riddles or rhymes? Since power has been wrested from monarchs in most parts of the world there is no point in focusing upon kings. The Duke of Edinburgh can be left to his own wisecracks. But - insofar as ‘sovereignty of the people’ is the dominant idea in the democratic variant of modern society, is it not ‘we the people’ who now need the occasional word of truth?
If by ‘we the people’ in Britain we mean us couch potatoes who hunt through the channels on a Friday evening for a bit of light humour at the expense of government, society and just occasionally ourselves, then we have been nourished by a long tradition of such stuff - going back three centuries to Hogarth, Thackery, Dean Swift, Dickens. They did pictures and books. That Was the Week That Was (TW3), which flourished briefly in the early 1960s, brought the mass audience provided by television the kind of humour that had previously been confined to the Cambridge Footlights on the one, upper-crusty, hand and the Music Hall or the stand up comedians’ turns on the other, working class hand. The two had merged briefly on stage in Beyond the Fringe. In so far as TW3 material could be called satirical, calling upon us to question our daily suppositions and values - commentators question how far this was the case[10] - it could indeed be seen as a means whereby a Jester put some wittily self-critical words into the ear of the electorate. TW3 also made fun of authority, delighting in the Edwardian mannerisms of the Prime Minister of the time Harold Macmillan. But the program was closed down before the 1964 election not, it is said, because the government was agin it but because it had run out of steam (Sandbrook p588). In any case neither Macmillan nor the public needed a critical word in the ear when ‘events’ of the time - the Profumo scandal in particular - did so much to question the credibility of government.
More recently Spitting Image [using puppetry as its distancing mechanism], as well as programmes such as Bremner, Bird and Fortune have all brought critical humour back to the small screen in the corner of the room. One thinks of satirical elements in such programmes - Bird and Fortune in a mock interview discussing the credit crunch, balancing criticism of the venality of bankers or the foolishness of the Government Treasury with the gullibility of us the ‘punters’[11] - but wonders what difference such awareness makes to us as citizens. Does it not just reinforce a feeling that doing anything about it is hopeless, contributing to citizen apathy rather than stimulating to action?
Of course the awakened citizen is also aware of the limited sense in which democracy is indeed anything like ‘government of the people, by the people’. In varying degrees we still have concentrated powers and government by representatives of an elite. In considering the role of humour, the jest and The Jester we should not perhaps be seeking to locate the necessary injection as being either in the ear of The Supreme Leader [as Private Eye mockingly labels the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown] or as pricking the consciousness of the democratic masses but as a part of the interactions that go on between the two. The same incidentally is true of Tswana society. The singers of the song of the stolen post made their mark on their fellow citizens in the kgotla as much as the chief, no doubt reminding him and them of the well known Tswana / Sotho saying that “A chief is a chief by the people”.
My last take. All systematic thought and - with greater certainty - all attempts at systematic political thought, are limited. Lots of ideas, observations, actions or events, will fail to ‘fit’ or to be explicable within any particular mind-set, action plan or ideology. The function of jest is to test boundaries and credibilities. The Jester is like the flea on the back of the hedgehog - without it there is no life-giving circulation. It is my contention that we, like hedgehogs, can’t do without them: and there should also be one in political entourage of any Supreme Leader.
[1] The mail service often carried remittances. The chief was the licensed agent at the time but the box had been broken into, to cover tracks….?
[2] Other songs had wide ranging but always critical themes. One song encouraged ‘sister’ so and so to go and chase the former school headmaster who had impregnated her before he was transferred to another village. Another urged a group to take an unspecified complaint to Tau Tona [big lion], the then President, Sir Seretse Khama in the capital city, Gaborone; a procedure that would have conformed to traditional governance norms but would be unlikely to be well received by the security details that surrounded the modern head of state.
[3] My mind refreshed on the Gaia theme by the Big Issue, April 13-19, 2009
[4] Press reports 13th April 2009
[5] www.neafc.org/page/743
[6] see Fikret Berkes, Carl Folke and Johan Colding, 1998, eds Linking Social and Ecological Systems Cambridge
[7] as in the tale of Baby P
[8] Shakespeare’s King Lear, Act 1 Scene 4
[9] The office of the praise singer, the only professional artist in traditional society, was the most important in the culture of African people. His duty was to recount both the positive and negative deeds of the sovereign. This would include, for example, details on the King's bad temper or his latest misdemeanour. Everyone of the King's battles - victory or defeat, was faithfully recounted in elaborate and ceremonial language. A praise singer had to be an intelligent, deeply spiritual person of the highest repute amongst his society. The songs he sung had to be memorable, composed in such a way that every line which was spoken in classical, poetic language, would be easy to remember. For example, in the praise song of King Dingane his is referred to as the "butterfly of Punga and Mageba" - "the butterfly with very bright colours, a butterfly which, when touched, suddenly darkened its colours." This line, sung by a Zulu praise singer attests to Dingane's very, very quick temper and his displeasure at even the slightest joke. www.warthog.co.za/dedt/tourism/zululand/usiko/singers.htm
[10] Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, A history of Britain from Suez to the Beatles London, Abacus 2005
[11] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXBcmqwTV9s&feature=related
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