May 2008
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23 May 2008
Before the Bank Holiday
First of all I would like to say a big thank you to the staff here at RSA for burning the midnight oil for the past week in the final push to launch the new website. It went live yesterday evening, but apparently takes 24-48 hours to propagate around the world to all the different servers. So keep checking the site, it will soon have a fresh face and greater functionality.
Thinking about brains, as I have been this week, I was interested in the Thought for the Day on the Today programme this morning. Abdal Hakim Murad explored the Muslim take on the Academy of Medical Sciences report about the use of brain enhancing drugs.
The issue of psychoactive substances is not a new debate in the Muslim tradition. For example, coffee is allowed because it enhances brain function, but alcohol is not because it impairs the mind. In his three minute slot Abdal Hakim Murad moved from this issue to a broader perspective arguing that humanity is distinguished by the God given miracle of consciousness.
Many scientists and philosophers would replace ‘God-given miracle’ with ‘evolution-given illusion’. One of the challenges in debates about the brain is the way empirical and policy questions about advances in neurological research jostle up against what philosopher Owen Flanagan has described as ‘the really hard problem’ of meaning and consciousness.
This week I’ve been interviewing some excellent candidates for a new Fellow outreach coordinator for Scotland. It is clear that the Scottish Fellows are going full steam ahead, delivering not only the RSA mission, but thinking hard about how to build a distinctively Scottish brand identity and agenda.
So it was perhaps not surprising that at our excellent new Fellows evening last night, a Welsh Fellow was astonished to hear from me that the Welsh fellowship is subsumed into our West and Wales region. Of course, this reflects the pre-devolution development of the RSA and I don’t sense any unhappiness in the region with its current configuration. But I guess it’s only a matter of time before our Fellows in Wales are seeking to develop their own relationship with the devolved administration.
I’m on holiday next week for the school half term – but between my holiday postings and contributions of colleagues the daily blog will continue.
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22 May 2008
Cognitively enhanced
Over recent blogs I’ve been rehearsing some thoughts about what I call neurological reflexivity. The idea being that instead of a world in which what matters is what we think increasingly we are engaging with the question of how we think.
So it was timely to wake up this morning to hear on the Today programme about the report of the Academy of Medical Sciences’ report on Brain science, addition, and drugs. Following on from the Government Foresight project, Drugs Futures 20205, this commission was set up to investigate the societal, health safety and environmental issues raised by the Foresight report. It analyzes the scientific and ethical issues of drug development, use and abuse.
While there are some interesting findings about drug misuse and treatment, which are gratifyingly in line with the RSA Drugs Commission, what interests me here are the implications, both scientific and ethical, of using cognitive enhancement drugs on otherwise healthy individuals.
What the report argues is that because cognitive enhancement drugs are developed for use on unhealthy individuals (victims of stroke, Alzheimer’s or other degenerative neurological conditions) not enough is known about the long term side on healthy brains.
They argue that further research into this is necessary, particularly as the current drugs are increasingly available on the grey-market, and could be misused, for example, by students seeking to enhance exam results. Playing with brain chemistry must be an exact science given the scope for unpredictable and long term side effects.
There are major ethical implications of cognitive enhancement. John Harris, who spoke here last year,and others have powerfully attacked the superstition that we shouldn’t ‘unnaturally’ enhance our physical capacity. What he argues is the categorical difference between eye glasses and brain supplements? The more pressing dilemmas concerns equality of access and ‘devaluing unaided achievement’.
People who can afford to pay for their daily dose of cognitive enhancers will have an extra unfair advantage over those who cannot. These will probably tend to be the same people who already benefited from the environmental factors that seem to most enhance IQ.
The point about unaided achievement is that we have a strong – albeit complex and tacit – belief that achievement should result form the combination of talent and effort (we are also, according to opinion polls, happy to recognise the role that luck can play). But if performance in education, athletics, perhaps one day relationships, is dependent less on ability and effort than on access to drugs or on the interaction of these drugs with our personal physiology then, notwithstanding equity issues, this seems to challenge our most basic assumptions about human endeavour and status.
These are deep waters. They require a discourse that brings together scientists, social scientists, philosophers and policy makers. The public needs to understand and engage with dilemmas that have quickly moved from science fiction to pharmaceutical reality. And these are some of the key purposes of the RSA cognition project that we will be launching in a few weeks.
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21 May 2008
All systems are go!
Thursday, 21 May 2008, 16.30 is when we will be initiating the go-live procedure for the new website enshrined in the diaries of all the staff here at JAS and beyond and I’m immensely proud of the web team for their Herculean efforts in making this new website possible.
There are many new features which will enable Fellows and the wider public to gain a better understanding of our work. The blogs, of which mine will be but one, are windows our different areas of work. This blog will become much more of a test bed for my thoughts and ideas regarding new enlightenment thinking, pro-social behaviour, neurological reflexivity and new collectivism: in short how we become the people and society that we need to be in order to respond to the challenges of progress.
One of the great things about the RSA is our fantastic lecture series. Just this week we've had, Matt Frei, Jon Ronson, Misha Glenny, Philippe Sands QC and Darius Rejali. Because of the high quality our lectures are almost always full, though it's always been possible to do audio podcasts on our site, we are now launching Vision. These will be videos of our best speakers, enabling more people to see our amazing public lecture series and join in the debate about issues raised there.
Another video feature that Meet a Fellow, where we showcase the diversity of our Fellowship, allowing a wider audience to see the work that they do and the issues close to their hearts.
There might be some ‘downtime’ tomorrow afternoon, during the transition from the old to the new site. So if you can’t see it please try again after a little while. Any please send any comments or feed back to webmaster@rsa.org.uk.
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20 May 2008
Rationally irrational
Yesterday in writing about my ideas regarding neurological reflexivity I highlighted the work of behavioural economists in demonstrating the weakness of the homo economicus model, or the myth of rational man. This is the idea that citizens with perfect knowledge will behave in a perfectly rational way.
Of course in the real world people do not have perfect information, but are often bemused by the flood of this imperfect information. Secondly, behavioural economists have pointed out the seemingly irrational nature of the decisions we make based on this partial (in both senses) information.
There has been a massive explosion in books on this field of study, the latest is by Dan Ariely discussed in today’s Guardian.
The relevance of this to my fundamental argument is that these economists are not focusing on what we think, but as I said yesterday, how we think. What are the psychological and neurological processes that affect our decisions? And that is why this field of study forms such an important component of my thinking on how we become better at dealing with the challenges of progress. By understanding our decision making processes, by recognising that they are not entirely rational as we would sometimes like to believe, we can begin to make better choices.
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19 May 2008
Thinking about thinking
This time last week I said I would start using the blog to discuss the ideas I am developing for my second annual Chief Executive’s lecture, due to take place here at JAS on June 30th.
A key theme is what I call neurological reflexivity. But I’d be the first to admit that this concept needs a great deal more work. The notion is that advances in related fields of inquiry and activity together amount to what could become a paradigm shift. One way of putting this is that instead of being concerned primarily with what we think about the world and how we act on this we may increasingly be concerned with how we think about the world.
By ‘what we think’ I mean conscious thought expressed through the always and ever present ‘voice’ in our heads, and though intentional verbal and written communication. By ‘how we think’ I mean the ways in which the unconscious processes of our brains condition our thoughts and behaviours.
There have been advances in a number of fields which are concerned with the how of thinking:
Evolutionary psychology and anthropology have provided important insights into physiological (and cultural) determinants (and variants) in the working of the brain.
Neuroscience is starting to help us understand the workings of the most complex organism in the known universe (the brain). Have a look at Christopher de Charms on TED for a recent example of the advances being made.
Behavioural economics, social psychology and empirical sociology are providing new insights into the patterns and idiosyncrasies of human behaviours. This includes:
• the way our minds trick us (for example, making us think our thoughts precede action when on closer examination it is clear that the action precedes the thought)
• systematic irrationality (for example, we are much more resistant to putting aside £50 for a good purpose now than we are to committing to putting it aside next week)
• the way unconscious preferences lead to social outcomes (for example, ethnic zoning is less a consequence of racist attitude or policy and more the aggregate consequence of each individual’s instinctive desire to avoid living in a minority community)
There appears to be a growing popularity of various interventions that seek to impact not primarily through conscious thought (as in traditional learning or psycho-analysis) but through shaping unconscious patterns or capacities; for example the rise and rise of various forms of cognitive and behavioural therapy and of various ‘brain gym’ products.
The questions - keeping me awake at night as the date of my speech nears – are whether these different spheres of investigation can be usefully related to each other, whether together they amount to a single describable and significant change in human understanding, and if so what might be the implications?
Appropriately enough, given the topic. this is slightly doing my head in at present so any reflections or advice for further reading will be gratefully received.
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19 May 2008
Can't wait to do it again
Last week several RSA colleagues volunteered at Surrey Docks Farm. I asked Anna Leikkari who organised the day to tell us more -
"Last Friday the RSA organised its first ever Volunteering Day on Surrey Docks Farm in South East London.
The idea of the day was not only to make a positive and hands-on difference in the city of London in a small but scalable way, but to build team spirit and shared purposes across the organisation and unite Fellows with other Fellows and like-minded people, making new connections and potentially come up with ideas for new networking initiatives and projects (see current ones on the RSA Networks platform). We picked Surrey Docks Farm as our project site as it has been recognised as one of the most innovative and successful city farm education projects in England, and was in great need of voluntary help as it relies on voluntary sector grants and donations, and does not employ many full-time staff.
The day was brilliant. 10 RSA staff and 13 Fellows arrived at the farm at 10.00 am and after a thorough briefing we divided ourselves into three groups and set to work.
The projects we were given were varied: carrying and organising heavy concrete slabs, wooden beams and bricks, clearing a large shed for bee keeping materials and the grounds free of rubbish and broken equipment and materilas, filling a large skip, turning hard ground around for planting vegetables and flowers, weeding a massively overgrown children's storytelling area... and many other jobs that, at the end of the day, had visibly transformed the site. The farm manager said we were the best volunteering group she has ever had and was extremely pleased with the results!
Everyone who participated on the day said they would love to do it again and would love to see it become a regular occurrence. It was a great way to get Fellows and Staff together and some of the conversations we had during the day and afterwards in the Wibbley Wobbly riverboat pub were truly inspiring.
Personally, I felt elated at the end of the day as I think we had really made a difference on site, thus affecting many lives – especially those of children and young adults with learning disabilities who regularly come to the farm to learn about sustainability, the environment and farm animals. My most vivid memories will be of Jonathan (Deputy Director, Programme) lifting gigantic concrete slabs off the ground with a wrecking bar, of Rosie (Ideas Assistant) dancing her way through the site with a bee-keeper dummy and of all the happy faces of the volunteers when they were giggling at the little piglets and kid goats.
The fact that everyone was already talking about the "next RSA volunteering day" halfway through the day told me that it was a success and that we should do it again soon.
A massive vote of thanks to William Wong who, as a Fellow and colleague helped organise the day!"
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16 May 2008
Do as I say, not as I do...
Yesterday we had David Runciman discussing his book Political Hypocrisy. Then today, Mangus Linklater comments on a similar phenomena in The Times.
Runciman begins his thesis by arguing that the easiest way to defeat a political opponent is by showing them to be a hypocrite. He then takes us through a history of policital hypocrisy and ends by defining two types of hypocrisy in the political sphere.
The first is personal hypocrisy, when, as in the case with Eliot Spitzer in New York, ones personal behaviour doesn’t match up to the political ideals that you have been advocating. The second is political hypocrisy, when a politician draws a veil over the political realities of a policy in order to deceive the public.
We, the public, are obsessed with personal hypocrisy which blinds us to the political hypocrisy taking place all around us. We hold politicians to impossible standards, comforting ourselves with the thought that they chose to live their life in the public eye, and therefore they must be the best of us.
And yet I wonder, given that we are all hypocrites in one way or another, aren’t these politicians that we castigate just demonstrating that which we say we want – humanity. There is nothing more human than the desire to hide your worst self, and surely that is even clearer in the mind of a politician.
We need to realise that if a politician has made mistakes in their life, or changed their view on a political position, that may well make them better people, and better able to make good policies in the future. It is not a character flaw to change your mind.
What is different and objectionable is when people judge others. That’s ultimately why the Conservative’s ‘Back to Basics’ policy failed. It sounded as though they were judging the public, and so when their personal peccadilloes came to light it was so profoundly damaging.
The public is easily swayed by the rhetoric of hypocrisy precisely because the public has lost trust in politics and to a certain extent in themselves. Although the argument still rages, again see the Daniel Finkelstein piece from this week, we can at least say that rising affluence is not resulting in rising levels of contentment and fulfilment. People are apparently less happy today, less content despite being more materially affluent than any time in history. The perception gap that I have referred to so many times is part of the public hypocrisy – enough is never enough.
Arguably, democratic politics contains at its very heart a meta-hypocrisy. On the one hand politicians pretend that it’s about doing what people want, when in fact representative democracy is little more than the process by which we can get rid of bad governments.
On the other hand politicians claim the public complains too loudly about their every decision; as if, somehow, our politicians would attain a state, where their behaviour would delight us.
We the people are constitutionally dissatisfied. These two myths, that of democratic accountability and of political venality are the two expressions of the position we find ourselves in – we are a people unwilling to be governed and yet not ready to govern ourselves.
This is a much more profound ‘hypocrisy’ than politicians who call for virtue but are sometimes guilty of vice.
I completely agree with Runciman’s recognition that hypocrisy is a particularly English, or at least English-speaking phenomena. I was reminded of the fact that not all countries have this puerile obsession with politicians bedrooms by the famous Mitteraund response to the Parkinson and Hawke affair when he said “Imagine having to resign because of adultery. If we did that in France, there would only be the poofs left in the cabinet!”
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15 May 2008
Savings Gateway
Maybe it was the end of a long day but I was pretty churlish about the Government’s pre Queens Speech on Radio 4 last night. In fact there is much in the announcements I like.
For example, while I understand the concerns of small businesses, the overwhelming employer view of the right to flexible working has been positive and I don’t see why this shouldn’t be the case with its extension.
I also hope consensual progress can be made on Lords reform and party funding.
But I particularly welcome the announcement on the savings gateway. This was a policy that was first advocated by the think tank IPPR when I was its Director. It is the sister policy to the Chid Trust Fund, both being aimed at tackling the growing inequality in asset ownership and the high proportion of people who have no saving at all.
By incentivising low income savers the policy encourages thrift and responsibility and so it can be seen as explicitly ‘pro-social’. When we were debating the idea several years ago some economists said it was wrong to encourage poor people to save as the ‘utility maximising’ thing for them to do was to spend all they had. But poorer people themselves tend to disagree.
Even if they only save a few pounds a month it gives people something to fall back on bad times and a nest egg for special occasions and life changes – the kind of thing many of us take for granted.
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15 May 2008
Caution
On Tuesday we had Sir Michael Lyons in the house discussing his review of public service broadcasting. He made a powerful case, and stood up well to some searching questions from the audience (you can hear it shortly, and from next week will be able to see it in edited form on this website)
A key debate is whether the so-called ‘excess’ licence fee (the money was added in the last settlement to the BBC’s budget to cover the costs of digital switchover) should in time be given to Channel Four and other broadcasters to support them in their public service role, and thus ensure a diversity of content provision.
Lyon’s response is firstly that the BBC itself faces constant demands for better services (for example, more regional content) so it could spend the ‘excess’ many times over.
Second, while he recognises the problems faced by Channel Four as markets fragment and advertising revenues fall, Lyons does not think top slicing the license fee is the right response, particularly because to do so would change the character of C4 and thus be self-defeating.
But the core of the Lyons thesis is that what matters to the public is diversity of content and of platforms not diversity of supply. If this is the goal it is one, he argues, the BBC is quite capable of discharging on its own.
Michael Lyons has built a robust argument that is an effective counter to laziness of the excess licence fee argument. However, Channel Four too is making a strong case and the common sense view that we need diversity of supply in PSB as in other public services will be hard to resist.
As it makes it case the BBC will have, as always, to try to avoid the charge of arrogance. It was with this in mind that a particular article in The Times caught my eye. A woman is being threatened with a lawsuit by the BBC for posting free knitting patterns of Dr Who baddies on the internet (under a creative commons licence). This woman was forced to remove the patterns because of copyright infringement. The case continues, but I think that the BBC is missing a trick.
As we are entering an era of what Lawrence Lessig at the University of Stamford called a ‘read/ write’ culture, it is important that publishers begin to take notice of the benefits presented to them by fans.
In Japan the manga publishers have long had, and benefited from, a tacit agreement with their fans that they will look the other way when fans create new books about existing characters, sometimes taking them in entirely new directions.
Surely the BBC could, and should, view this model of shared intellectual property in the light of its public service role of encouraging creativity and innovation.
On an unrelated topic, the always engaging Daniel Finkelstein wrote a fascinating column yesterday about the happiness debate. It’s definitely worth a read.
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13 May 2008
Learning some tough lessons
Today is all about Education for the RSA. We are hosting our annual, standing room only Opening Minds Conference – poignantly there is also a report from the authoritative DCSF Select Committee MPs criticising SATS test (again).
There are two lessons to be learned. The first concerns the dynamics of policy development. Over time all policies end up generating unintended consequences. Today, when the Ofsted and league tables are part of every day life, and have a massive impact on school intake and by extension property prices it’s difficult to remember how relatively recent these measures are.
Before these were introduced there was a lack of information for parents to make informed decisions. Hundreds of schools were under performing year on year with few levers to tackle failure. SATS, league tables and published Ofsted inspections were not only necessary but inevitable in an age when the public demands, and can easily get hold of, more information. The democratising impact is that middle class parents always knew through the grapevine which schools were good and which not, the SATS system opened up that information to every parent.
The second is a lesson in humility. Systemic reform is difficult, not least when you need to admit that you may have been wrong. While the idea that schools should be held accountable for their pupils’ performance was absolutely correct, but the result is that pupils, teachers and parents now feel constrained rather than liberated.
The report from the DCSF Select Committee calls for a number of reforms to the current system; one of the most relevant to our mission here at the RSA is the renewed commitment to personal learning for pupils.
We have broadly welcomed the introduction of the new National Curriculum which is far more competency based (and in that way more similar to the Opening Minds Curriculum) and we are looking forward to broadening our curriculum for all the key stages with the Academy in Tipton.
The main criticism from MPs appears to be that the barrage of tests is being used, not only to assess pupils against national targets, but also to determine school funding, performance targets and teacher assessment. This creates a system where heads and teachers are understandably obsessed with testing ability, which leads to the aforementioned constraints on creativity in the classroom.
What is needed is a bit of thinking around how you motivate teachers to be creative in the classroom, and provide them with the tools for that creativity. Schools that teach solely to the test create linear thinkers who are good at memorizing facts and regurgitating them on demand – but schools whose teachers, parents, and pupils are actively engaged in a more imaginative learning process create lateral thinkers, able to work out solutions for themselves. And surely that’s what society needs.
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12 May 2008
Thinking about brains
Over the next few days and weeks I am planning to use my blog to outline the argument I intend to make in my second annual chief executive’s lecture to the RSA.
Last year my subject was ‘pro-social behaviour’. The argument, in a nutshell, was that we will not be able successfully to respond to future challenges and opportunities unless we recognise that we as citizens need to change our attitudes and behaviours. I argued for a political discourse that was less ‘Government-centric’ - what should those in power be doing for us - and more ‘citizen-centric’ - what do we have to do to achieve the things that we want.
Since last year there have been a number of further contributions to thinking about citizen behaviour. The most recent is a short pamphlet from DEMOS featuring essays about public behaviour from leading politicians. The pamphlet is edited by Duncan O’Leary, who also pens an interesting concluding chapter. O’Leary argues that the utilitarian argument for intervening to change behaviours (in areas from parenting to public health) should be supplemented (and in same cases tempered) by an account of how we enhance the capacity of all citizens to feel in control of their lives as individuals and members of communities.
O’Leary is right. For my lecture I chose the unwieldy phrase ‘pro-social behaviour’ to signal that thinking about future citizenship should start from a positive question about human capacity. This is the idea I want to build on in this year’s lecture.
I am interested in two dimensions of human development. The first element concerns individual human capacity and, in particular, what we beginning to understand about the content, adaptability and idiosyncrasies of our cognitive processes.
I will argue that we are entering ‘an era of neurological reflexivity’, by which I mean a time when we can begin to adapt behaviours and policies to a richer understanding of how our brains (and not just our conscious minds) work.
Observer readers will have seen a major article yesterday about IQ and whether and how it can be enhanced. This is just part of a bigger debate about how we can shape our brains to better adapt us to today and tomorrow’s world.
I want to link this idea to a theme I have explored in blogs and articles earlier this year; new collectivism. The claim here is that people are willing – are indeed enthusiastic – about working with others to create a better future but that they want to do this ways which fit with modern lifestyles and expectations.
I am not as clear as I need to be about how to link these two ideas but that’s one of the things I hope to work through in coming blogs.
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09 May 2008
Free as ...
This week I’ve been recalling the iconic line from Withnail and I, “Free to those that can afford it, but very expensive to those that can’t”.
This sprang to mind while reading in the Guardian about Freeconomics – Chris Anderson’s idea that companies are giving away many of their goods for free, and opening up new revenue streams elsewhere. For example, a colleague recently upgraded her phone with a particular network, and in return received not only a free new phone, but also an i-pod nano.
The business model here is based on the assumption that since i-pod will only play i-tunes formatted songs, Apple is broadening its consumer base. Given how cheap manufacturing has become, thanks to globalisation, it is actually a cost effective way of distributing goods and then making people pay for the services later.
In large part major corporates are responding to the rise of what Matt Mason (who spoke here yesterday) calls The Pirates Dilemma – which is about how corporations can compete / collaborate with the people who distribute their intellectual property without paying royalties or receiving consent.The new economics of the internet is part of a more general reappraisal both of the ‘big’ economics of markets, risk and regulation but also the day to day economics of our own consumption patterns. Things can change quickly.
Twenty years ago the value of a family house in the London suburbs was equivalent to the cost of about 400 good quality video players. Now, even with the housing market slowdown, you could buy 16,000 multi functional DVD players for the price of the same house. In the 1980s we would have expected to pay a lot more for an item of clothing than a basic foodstuff but now you can get a perfectly serviceable t- shirt for less than a good loaf of bread. It’s easy to get disorientated about the real costs and value of stuff.
With food and raw material shortages, and climate change, a key issue in the politics of consumption is waste. Whether its white goods with built in obsolescence or the tons of good food we chuck into dustbins every day I wonder whether we are approaching the end of the disposable society.
We have no idea how much producing a kilo of meat costs in environmental or economic terms, we have no idea what the real costs of making our i-pod are in labour or any other sense. We suspect corporations of overcharging for cheap goods – and they may well be in some cases. But what we must do is regain some perspective on consumption, for the good of our planet, or even just for our own peace of mind.
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08 May 2008
The changing climate of climate change
There would appear to be a change in the air – and I’m not just talking about the weather. At the Commentariat event last night (fun, if slightly self indulgent) I heard someone from Spiked magazine confidently criticising the commentators’ consensus around climate change. This wouldn’t normally have been so worrying, but it was the third time in a day that I’d heard this kind of dissent.
This time last year it appeared that all the UK, and even some American, politicians were on message with what could broadly be called the Stern Hypothesis: the climate is changing, humans have contributed hugely to this change, we should and must act now to mitigate our impact and adapt to those changes we can’t mitigate. But today people seem to be emboldened to question this scientific orthodoxy.
Richard Littlejohn, one of the most widely read columnists in Britain, recently wrote about how politicians are using ‘dodgy climate change hysteria to keep increasing taxes’. His overall point is that climate change isn’t happening, that the earth’s temperature is cooling (though I’m not sure what his source is), and that the Government’s agenda to implement green taxes is hurting the man on the Clapham omnibus (or rather in the 2001 Renault Espace).
Indeed, even looking to the American elections, climate change doesn’t seem to be an issue in the interminable Clinton v. Obama contest, and their increasing tone of protectionism doesn’t bode well for their commitment to global issues.
In some ways both Littlejohn and the American politicians are right. As people’s finances are increasingly stretched, and a downturn in the housing market means that people feel less well off, they may feel that all this talk of paying more taxes to facilitate climate change mitigation, or changing their lifestyles to reduce emissions and waste, is too much to ask when they are concerned about more pressing problems like paying their mortgage.
It was always going to be difficult to empower the individual to feel responsible for their own contributions to climate change, particularly when changes in global politics means that many less developed countries are justifiably piqued when asked to reduce their emissions (and economic growth) by developed nations who got us into this trouble in the first place.
Sceptics like Littlejohn are helped by the misnomer of ‘global warming’ – in fact climatologists would say that there is no inconsistency with the argument that humans are responsible for changes in our global temperatures and a drop in temperatures – the point is that our actions are impacting on the world, and this may take the form of some cooling and some warming, the point is that the climate is changing.
I don’t believe that ethical living, as some put it, is incompatible with a retrenchment in the family finances, quite the opposite. There are ways to live a full life that don’t involve driving a petrol guzzling car, or buying clothes made by children in distant countries, and there are ways to make such a lifestyle affordable as well. Paying more taxes to enable the government to deal with those elements that are outside our control, like what happens to the waste we inevitably create, is just a further cost that must be factored in.
There is a third, more hopeless view, falling somewhere between Stern and Littlejohn, which argues that it is pointless to tinker with car emissions and plastic bag bans because people will only make drastic changes in their lifestyle when they are forced to, the tragedy is, that assuming the science is right, by this time it will be far too late.
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07 May 2008
Commentary on the Commentariat
Tonight I am chairing an event hosted by the media analysis firm Editorial Intelligence (their events can be as good as ours but, as a business, they charge!). The subject is The Power of the Commentariat and more specifically a pamphlet with that name researched and written by Julia Hobsbawm and John Lloyd.
Based as it is on interviews with columnists and political insiders the research is largely anecdotal and the conclusions broad. Commentators generally claim neither to want nor to expect to have much impact beyond entertaining readers. However, politicians and their advisors say that columnists – particularly the most high profile and respected – can influence public opinion and decision makers.
Although newspaper readership is falling, many columnists are now bloggers and arguably the opinionated, iconoclastic tone of the political blogosphere represents the next stage of the ever expanding realm of opinion which has seen the number of national newsprint columnists rise from a handful thirty years ago to several hundred now.
Although I am a blogger I am no great fan of the opinion piece. In general, their one sidedness, polemical tone and overwhelming tendency to present politicians as self interested second-raters (something which of course distinguishes them from the selfless generous, socially transformative profession of commentators themselves), the tide of columns in daily newspapers contributes to the unhealthy atmosphere in which politicians find it ever harder to confront people with the difficult choices we face as a society.
My disillusionment with the commentariat (which has nothing at all to do with the fact that no one has ever offered me a regular column) was sealed when I developed an intellectual game based on reading the most opinionated columns.
The game is simply to read the column then consider your view. Then spend a few minutes constructing the best, equally opinionated, counter piece. Not only is it easy to do, but at the end of the process you will tend to find yourself now holding a diametrically different opinion.
Subject to even a cursory deconstruction columns reveal (and of course there are exceptions) not reality but the lens through which the columnist is viewing reality. And because we, their fickle readers, prefer to feel self righteous than challenged, that lens is generally one in which the poor reader is the blameless victim either of the venality or our rulers, or of some other class of citizens who are comfortingly described as being completely unlike us in their motives or interests.
What has arguably made the rise and rise of the commentator more pernicious is that over the last generation the profession has moved from being similar to a theatre critic - experienced, informed, authoritative, somewhat aloof - to being a rowdy audience, seeking to disrupt the performance on stage with catcalls and rotten tomatoes.
What matters less now is the weight and coherence of the opinion expressed more the capacity of the writers to whip up the rest of the audience – me or you – into a state of self righteous rage, booing the actors and demanding our money back.
I am chairing a panel of commentators tonight so may be it will be my turn to be thrown off stage.
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07 May 2008
second thoughts
This week in Fellowship...
Wow, it's been a busy one, my feet have barely touched the floor.
Last week's event at the Baltic in Newcastle went well; I met lots of interesting enthusiastic people, several of whom promised they would check out the Networks platform after I had demonstrated it, and were excited by the opportunity to contact more Fellows and be more involved, unhindered by geographical distance.
I also got winked at by the Gateshead Millennium Bridge. Then I got lost trying to find the station and had to jump in a taxi. But I managed to impress the driver with my knowledge of Sunderland's success under manager Roy Keane.
Back at home, I have started a social sciences course with the Open University. They are the biggest university in the UK, and the course 'Understanding Social Change' is their most popular and my tutor said that applications for the course had doubled since last year. Maybe this marks a growing appetite for social innovation and progress? Let's hope so.
It's the end of the day here, and now I'm going to do my homework. Hmm, voluntarily increasing my work load...what was I thinking?
Until next time
Information on how to join the RSA Fellowship, and how to nominate others here.
(Photographs by me - this one of my insightful note taking skills)
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06 May 2008
Beginnings...
Freshly back from the bank holiday weekend – and it feels that spring has definitely sprung, and the cobwebs are clearing.
The past few weeks have shown enormous promise and progress in terms of the Newtworks project, and much us this is down to the enthusiasm of Fellows.
With this in mind I hope you won’t find it too self serving if I start this weeks blog with this fantastic contribution from FRSA Tessy Britton.
Six months after the launch of the Networks project I feel more enthusiastic about it than ever. This is not because the practicalities seem easier, but the importance of what is being attempted is genuinely quite thrilling.
The RSA Fellowship is made up of extraordinary people, drawn to the RSA undoubtedly because of the organisation’s uniqueness and breadth of vision.
Where the RSA networks project adds to our Fellowship enormously is the invitation to participate. The shift in paradigm from being an interested but largely passive member to valued contributor is a really significant one.
It changes the questions from ‘what is the society doing for me?’, to ‘how can I contribute?’, it challenges our passions, time, imaginations and our commitments. It even challenges our abilities. It shakes us up, sometimes uncomfortably, to examine how, on a very personal level, we can not only talk about social change, but do social change.
The RSA is now saying to us that it is holding open a new sort of space for our ideas to be heard, to be animated by conversation with others and to be supported in many different ways. This is an incredibly inspiring thing to do, mostly because the long-term success of the developing network is dependent almost entirely on the interest and enthusiasm of Fellows to enter this space.
By these actions and attitudes the RSA is exposing the possibilities that are energised by individual generosity. It is rejecting the reductionist, remedial view of society and humanity and is firmly putting its trust and confidence into our innate capacity for collective good. What could be brighter or more optimistic?
Take this paradigm out of the RSA into local government for a moment. Imagine a local council where they put real value into their members – all of them. What would happen if those members were stimulated, inspired, encouraged and supported to form connections and groups in those communities for positive social change?
It can be hard not to envy the nimbleness that other innovation groups can offer, especially in these early stages. However, the RSA comprises a disciplinary diversity and geographic penetration that is wholly unique – and it is through its determination to create these connective opportunities, these equalities and freedoms across disciplinary, social and regional boundaries that I feel some of the most exciting projects will emerge over time.
While others may surely look for evidence of innovation in the output of social projects already, I am simply delighting in watching and helping the process, which for me is the real innovation. And it is amazing.
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02 May 2008
Local Elections
News pages will continue to be consumed over the bank holiday weekend by the fall out from the local elections. I’ll no doubt be asked to do some punditry, and I will make sure that this is in my former capacity, rather than my current one, and that my observations are as impartial as possible.
But I’d like to offer up a few observations now.
It’s not clear whether these elections are more analogous to the 2004 elections, from which Labour recovered, or to 1995 which marked the beginning of the end for the Conservatives.
I don’t perceive a fundamental shift in public priorities as was witness in 1995, but on the other hand the Conservatives are showing the kind of optimism and self confidence we haven’t witnessed since the early years of the Blair project.
But perhaps the most interesting result from yesterday was the turnout in the London mayoral election. By all accounts it is much higher than the previous election and this highlights three things.
1. Voters are more motivated by voting for people than parties
2. Having charismatic candidates helps fire up the public imagination
3. Voters are more likely to vote when they think the result is close so their vote matters.In the wake of the disappointing turn out in 2001 much ink was spilt on the inexorable decline of public participation in the democratic process. In all the reports, conferences etc on how to engage people in politics post-2001 what wasn’t recognised is that modern people are both more sophisticated and less deferential than their predecessors, so they’re more likely to make rational choices about how and when to use their voting rights.
As I’ve said before, it’s not that people aren’t interested in collective action and collective decision making, just that the ways in which we seek to engage people needs to be more responsive and tailored to their new ways of thinking and living.
So of course there will be moaning about the lack of turn out in elections around the country, but how many races had the sex appeal and glamour of the London mayoral election – or for that matter could honestly say the results would as directly affect people’s lives? This backs up a recent IPPR report which says that if we want to have a more vibrant political debate there is a strong case for having mayors in all major UK cities in order to enable people to have a stake in local democracy.
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02 May 2008
Injustices and waiting lists
This week’s events began with a screening of the BAFTA nominated “Taking Liberties”. The film follows the stories of normal people whose lives have been turned upside down by injustice, while using humour to emphasise its serious message. Set against a striking contemporary soundtrack, the film provoked a fascinating discussion with director and producer Chris Atkins and Jess Search, Chief Executive, BRITDOC.
RSA Thursday examined the question: The Secular State – the best option for British Muslims?
Featuring Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, columnist for The Independent and co-founder of a new organisation, British Muslims for Secular Democracy, Inayat Bunglawala, writer on Islam and current affairs, Dr. Usama Hasan, Director of the City Circle and Ed Husain, author of The Islamist and deputy director of the counter-extremism think-tank, The Quilliam Foundation, this spirited debate was clearly too short for the audience! Though time defeated us in the Great Room, after the formalities audience members packed the Vaults to carry on the discussion over drinks. The RSA will continue to provide an independent platform to address these important issues in the coming months, both on and offline, via the Fellows Networks platform and future public events - so the debate is far from over...!The increasing popularity of our events programme makes it all the more useful to have audio downloads and soon we will also have “Vision” to look forward to. More and more events are fully booked within days of their release and with long waiting lists, it’s great to have an alternative available for those who have missed out.
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01 May 2008
Put that in your pipe...
Is the Government really intent on reclassifying cannabis despite the advice of drug experts, police officers and the evidence that cannabis use is becoming less popular among young people?
This policy is apparently based on the idea of ‘sending a message’ about society’s disapproval and the harm caused by drugs. But is legislation the best way of sending a message, particularly to young people?
As the father of teenage sons I sometimes hear them talk about their peers smoking ‘weed’. For them it seems to be an aspect of identity, with smokers seen as a subset of what used to be called grungers; teens who wear baggie jeans, have long hair and spend a lot of time in their bedrooms listening to bands like Nirvana and their various imitators. My sons have different lifestyles and reference points so they tend to be disparaging about this particular subset of teen culture.
The point is that in all these discussions I have not once heard the idea that young people’s choices about cannabis are based on the law.
Indeed it is almost the reverse, as cannabis (the majority of which is now grown in the UK) has become easier and easier to get hold of it has lost some of its connotations of rebellion leaving young people to take a dispassionate view of its effects and its effects on those people who take a lot of it.
For me, and this is a view which echoes the excellent work of the RSA Drugs Commission, the more we can encourage young people to talk openly and pragmatically about drugs the more likely it is that most young people will make an informed choice.
While experimentation, rule breaking and pushing the boundaries of experience are all a natural part of growing up, spending most of your adolescence in a haze and becoming less mentally and physically fit than your peers is simply not a very smart thing to do.
The more you criminalise an activity the harder it is to have such a debate; ‘it’s against the law, what is there to discuss?’
Whatever happens in today’s elections the Government has some work to do to reconnect to voters. For a Government that claims to be both progressive and evidence-based, being seen to ignore evidence and good governance principles in favour of headlines in some newspapers (as it did yesterday in the decision not to increase the prisoners’ maximum weekly wage to the princely sum of £5.50) means that the battle of the headlines may be won but the war of credibility will be lost.
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