Iago and “Let’s be clear”

There is an excellent column from Ed Smith in this week’s New Statesman.

His central thesis is that people (very often politicians) talking or writing simply often have messages that are, deliberately, saying something that is anything but simple.

As Smith notes of political spin:

It aspires to replace awkward complexities with catchy simplicity. Successful spin does not leave the effect of skillful persuasiveness; it creates the impression of unavoidable common sense.

Indeed it does. Many is the time a radio interview or newspaper article frustrates the heck out of me for the way they try to reduce a complex policy or political issue to a line or two.

Smith rightly calls on Shakespeare to re-emphasize the point, reminding us that Iago

is often seen as an honest and blunt man… [He] is believed because he seems to talk in simple truths.

But as Iago himself mentions, and as it’s always worth keeping in mind when a complex issue is presented by someone as a case of “common sense”:

I am not what I am.

The case for coproduction – made in March 1788

Karl Wilding – a brilliant and ridiculously nice man – recently tweeted:

It seems a bit of an indictment of where we've got to with designing services when 'human centred' is claimed as a new/novel characteristic—
Karl Wilding (@karlwilding) January 27, 2013

Karl’s is such a straightforward observation that belies how odd thinking about public services and the quest for innovation or newness is.

This reflection was further proven by this brief part of the Federalist Paper 73, where Publius (actually Alexander Hamilton) wrote the following in his discussion of the Executive branch’s powers over the Legislature:

The oftener the measure is brought under examination, the greater the diversity in the situations of those who are to examine it, the less must be the danger of those errors which flow from want of due deliberation, or of those missteps which proceed from the contagion of some common passion or interest.

It is far less probable, that culpable views of any kind should infect all the parts of the government at the same moment and in relation to the same object[.]

I’ve read many justifications and reasons for coproduction in public services. Hamilton’s two sentences above serve as one of the best there is, and was written in March 1788.

The Bell Curve, Federalist Paper 37, and public debate

In my work, it is more often than not the case that extreme examples are used – by both sides of an argument – to make the case for a certain policy or perspective.

It’s worse than policy-by-anecdote, and much worse than policy-based evidence.

It’s policy by the extreme ends of the bell curve (or “policy beyond two standard deviations”, if you’re mathematically inclined).

Not only is this frustrating, but it degrades the quality of public debate and the genuinely difficult issues that politics, policy, politicians and our society face. (It also helps sell newspapers, but that’s effect rather than cause.)

I was struck, therefore, by this passage from the Federalist Papers, specifically number 37:

It is a misfortune, inseparable from human affairs, that public measures are rarely investigated with that spirit of moderation which is essential to a just estimate of their real tendency to advance or obstruct the public good; and that this spirit is more apt to be diminished than promoted, by those occasions which require an unusual exercise of it…

[I]t has been too evident from their own publications, that they have scanned the proposed [work], not only with a predisposition to censure, but with a predetermination to condemn; as the language held by others betrays an opposite predetermination or bias[.]

It is right to be passionate about the causes we stand for and the work we do, and to bring values and views to inform these debates. But it is equally useful, I feel, to keep in mind the “spirit of moderation” highlighted above, and the conclusion the author of the Federalist Paper 37 (James Madison) came to:

[I] solicit the attention of those only, who add to a sincere zeal for the happiness of their country, a temper favorable to a just estimate of the means of promoting it.

150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation

I should have remembered to post this on Tuesday this week, it being 1 January, and so being the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.

You can read the rest here: the Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863.

Here’s a bit more info and context, and below is a picture of some guy showing a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation he has hanging on the wall of his office:

“… be reclaimed according to somebody’s theory but nobody’s practice”

Much mighty speech-making there has been, both in and out of Parliament, concerning Tom, and much wrathful disputation how Tom shall be got right. Whether he shall be put into the main road by constables, or by beadles, or by bell-ringing, or by force of figures, or by correct principles of taste, or by high church, or by low church, or by no church; whether he shall be set to splitting trusses of polemical straws with the crooked knife of his mind or whether he shall be put to stone-breaking instead. In the midst of which dust and noise there is but one thing perfectly clear, to wit, that Tom only may and can, or shall and will, be reclaimed according to somebody’s theory but nobody’s practice. And in the hopeful meantime, Tom goes to perdition head foremost in his old determined spirit.

This is from Bleak House, and I couldn’t agree with it more. We need less thinking and more doing.

Man walks into a column, no.6: Machiavelli

Jonathan Powell’s The New Machiavelli (sub-titled How To Wield Power In The Modern World) offers fascinating insights into the mind of a once-powerful man, but that man is Powell himself, not Machiavelli.

Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff, says in the preface that the book ‘is an attempt to test whether Machiavelli’s maxims still hold in the world of modern politics’. But it turns out that this is just a handy excuse (or ‘washing line’, to use Peter Mandelson’s term for the over-arching theme of a speech) for the second and third objectives: drawing lessons on leadership based on Powell’s experience in Number 10, and recounting anecdotes to illustrate what life at the top was really like.

JP is being a bit disingenuous when he says this is ‘not another memoir of the Blair years’, because that’s exactly what it is. I’m no Machiavelli scholar, but the breadth of the Italian apparatchik’s theorising allows Powell to find enough quotes to bolster his argument, most of the time anyway – towards the end it feels like Powell just gives up, and the chapters on ‘War and Peace’ and ‘Europe’ in particular are almost all anecdote, no Prince.

Still, I guess most people will read The New Machiavelli for the behind-the-scenes stuff – I know I did – and there’s certainly fun to be had. We hear how during the 2005 election campaign Powell assumed that Tony’s faltering delivery of a speech on immigration was due to a bust teleprompter, when it was actually the PM not looking at the camera on purpose, thus ensuring that the media didn’t report on the most politically sensitive bits of the speech. Or, when Blair was in hospital for a heart operation, we learn that Prince Charles sent a get-well card and box of Duchy of Cornwall fudge, signed from ‘Dr Wales’, which the security service thought was a suspicious package and proceeded to blow up, fudge and all.

What lets this book down, however, is the bloody-mindedness of Powell’s determination to defend the record of the Blair governments. I’ll leave aside the rightness or wrongness of the arguments he puts forward for specific decisions; the fact of the matter is that after only a short time the one-sidedness of the account really grates.

A big part of this defence is a hagiographical approach to Blair himself. Powell is convinced that Tony was a Truly Great Leader, and that the only things holding him back were Gordon Brown, an inexperienced and inept bunch of ministers, and the lying media. Whatever you may think of Blair, the complete and utter lack of balance is really distracting.

The stuff about Gordon is frequently hilarious (unintentionally and not) for the depth of hatred – there’s no other word – that it reveals. So on page 37 we have this entirely typical example:

Gordon’s influence on those around him was at times extraordinary. After a few years working with him his aides became changed people. Ed Balls, who had been a pleasant young man as a Financial Times leader writer, was transformed by his connection with Gordon. He reminds me of Quintus Fabius in [Machiavelli’s] The Discourses, who came under the influence of the tyrant Appius: ‘though an excellent fellow, [he] was after a while blinded by a little ambition and, under the evil influence of Appius, changed his good habits for bad and became like him’.

Blair, on the other hand, can do no wrong: consistently strategic, conciliatory, reforming, self-deprecating, visionary. His only failing, it seems, was being too much of a nice guy and not sacking people soon enough. I was talking to a colleague about this, who said that a friend of theirs also worked in Number 10 for a time under Blair, and that they (the friend) felt exactly the same way and would not hear even a modestly critical word against the ex-PM. The power of charisma, I guess: Machiavelli would’ve been proud.

Man walks into a column, no.5: Libraries

This is a post by Phil

It’s tempting for a fledgling blogger to write something controversial for the sake of courting attention. That’s not what this is about, honestly. The fact is that I found the text of Philip Pullman’s recent speech in defence of public libraries to be at once impassioned, forceful, moving and… well… a little simplistic.

There’s tons of stuff to agree with, and particularly cogent arguments against the blasé assumption that volunteers are the answer to all the world’s problems. Do we really think that the job of the librarian is so simple that anyone could step in and do it, Pullman asks? How on earth will local people find the time to volunteer when they find it difficult enough to squeeze in work, family responsibilities and everything else? Won’t a strategy that revolves around communities bidding for the right to run libraries favour folk in more affluent areas who are better placed to put together winning bids?

Exceptionally sound points all. But what motivates Pullman at base is his fundamental, deeply-held love for libraries. He recounts his delight upon being enrolled at the first library he ever visited: ‘All those books, and I was allowed to borrow whichever I wanted!’. He goes on to say that:

Somewhere in Blackbird Leys, somewhere in Berinsfield, somewhere in Botley, somewhere in Benson or in Bampton, to name only the communities beginning with B whose libraries are going to be abolished, somewhere in each of them there is a child right now, there are children, just like me at that age in Battersea, children who only need to make that discovery to learn that they too are citizens of the republic of reading. Only the public library can give them that gift.

And that last point is where I found myself disagreeing. Because however brilliant many libraries are, as buildings and as spaces for people to come together, isn’t free access to books the basic human right, rather than free access to libraries? And are libraries really the only way of achieving that goal?

I think we’re in danger of confusing ends with means. As anyone who works behind the scenes at a council department responsible for library funding will know, it costs an astonishing amount for every book loaned. Much of this comes from the costs of maintaining a large number of ageing, often dilapidated buildings, but also from the inefficiencies caused by the system of distributing books amongst so many points of access.

In a time of severe financial constraints I think the ‘this is the way we’ve always done things’ complaint just isn’t good enough. We need to focus on the outcomes that are important, and find imaginative, genuinely workable ways of achieving them with fewer resources.

If to solve the libraries funding crisis we have to turn to a LoveFilm-esque subscription service, with books posted out from a central depository, and/or a smaller number of ‘hub’ libraries with good transport links and much larger, more efficiently managed collections, is that such a terrible thing as long as people get free or low-cost access to a wide range of books?

I know that libraries have other benefits too, but again we should ask: are the libraries as currently provided the best and most efficient way to achieve the goals of e.g. access to the internet or a place for isolated older people to come together? Maybe they are, but let’s start with the things we want to achieve and work back from there, rather than assuming that the current model of service provision is necessarily the right one for the future.

Man walks into a column, no.4: Type

This is a post by Phil

What kind of week have I had? I’m allowed to ask this rhetorical question because, as Dave Briggs points out in this excellent post, it would be ludicrous for me to pretend that I am not a real person talking to other real people. And ‘what kind of week have you had?’ is a perfectly normal way to begin a real conversation.

Social media and networking is above all about human beings and human relationships. [...] So don’t be afraid to post what might seem at first to be trivial, or of limited interest. Much of the power of social media lies in serendipity – which probably drives people who like measuring stuff mad – and so by describing your dog walking route in one tweet might forge a link with a fellow dog walker who ends up being a vital business connection.

So: what kind of week have you had, Phil? How very kind of you to ask (although I should say that I’m willing to talk to you whether or not you are likely to become a vital business connection). 

This week I’ve been luxuriating in the prose of John Banville. This is one of those instances, I’m sure, of discovering a secret that’s not really a secret at all because virtually everyone else is in the loop already. Banville won the Booker in 2005, but I smugly chose not to begin with the novel that won (The Sea), instead opting for one of his first books, Doctor Copernicus. It’s chock full of astonishingly direct, undadorned yet luminously evocative passages, and reminded me a little of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall in its striking depiction of an aloof, otherworldy genius immersed in the muck and the mire of a filthier time. I’ll do a proper review at some point.

January has been a month of mixed blessings, reading matter aside. Like many, I began 2011 by deciding a spell off the booze would be a good idea, but then quickly discovered that things were grim enough without losing out on the chance to have a glass of wine or a cold beer at the end of a long, dark day. Problem is that, as our Antipodean cousins are known to expound, every beer’s a sandwich (mate), and so it’s little surprise that my parallel quest to shed festive poundage is going nowhere. I have no choice, it seems, but to endure a dry spell; wish me luck.

On the plus side, this has been the month when I discovered that, contrary to past experience, I actually can work productively from home. Oddly, the key seems to be Twitter. With my work laptop to one side and my Mac to the other, I find I have sufficient distraction to keep me on the straight and narrow. Because, certainly from university on, I’ve always found it impossible to concentrate when I have only one thing to concentrate on, if you know what I mean. I don’t suppose I am alone in this?

It was whilst working from home on Friday, proofing a document, that I discovered the answer to a question that has long puzzled me: why do so many intelligent, otherwise fastidious people insist on placing two spaces after full stops, irrespective of the manifest evidence – from books, newspapers etc. – that this is madness? A brief exchange on Twitter, initiated out of idle frustration, came up trumps: it’s all the fault of the typewriter.

The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type—that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks ‘loose’ and uneven; there’s a lot of white space between characters and words, so it’s more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here’s the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. [...] Because we’ve all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it.

Next week: I may or may not be writing about the delights on offer in a new publication from the Royal Society, in which leading scientists give their thoughts on the key questions for policy and society arising from latest developments in neuroscience. Until then, find me on Twitter @philblogs.

Man walks into a column, no.2: Who?

This is a post by Phil

I am being followed by a Nobel Prize winning author.

I’m conscious that it might seem a bit indulgent to post twice about the same book within the space of a week, on two different blogs, but these are special circumstances. 

The first was a short note of my entirely subjective, personal response to a novel called The Black Book, by the laureate-follower in question: Orhan Pamuk. As you can see for yourself if you read the post – there’s no particular reason you should – I thought The Black Book was a beautifully written exploration of big ideas, if not exactly what you’d call a rip-roaring read.

The biggest of the big ideas is that, by knowing the work of a writer inside out – the stories told, the ideas held, the principles promulgated – your identity can dissolve into theirs. I won’t go into detail about the extent of the dissolution in The Black Book for fear of spoiling the read for those who may choose to take it on, but suffice to say that if nothing else the novel succeeds in calling into question the fundamental idea of authorship. 

It was thus with some delight that I discovered my newest Twitter follower was, apparently, Orhan Pamuk himself. Either this really was he, in which case: bollocks, I wish I’d taken more time over the review, or it was someone pretending to be Orhan Pamuk, which opens up the possibility that whoever is actually tweeting has been so heavily influenced by The Black Book that she or he is attempting to become Turkey’s best-selling novelist. Either that or they’re just having a bit of fun; if so, it’s a great joke. (As an aside: this is a brilliant example of fans – West Wing fans in this case – being willing to adopt alternative Twitter identities for fun.)

If you’re on Twitter yourself chances are you’ll be familiar with the minimal room for establishing ‘true identity’ that the medium affords. Is there even any point in a personal profile of 140 characters? Isn’t it a strange experience when you meet someone in the flesh who you’ve previously known, sometimes for what seems like a long time, only as a 1cm squared avatar and truncated textual meanderings? So how on earth am I going to establish whether ‘my’ Orhan Pamuk is the real deal when almost all of his tweets are in Turkish? And even then? (Judge for yourself: @BenOrhanPamuk)

Which brings me, in closing, to the topic of mindfulness, which as you may’ve seen was covered in last weekend’s papers after the National Institute for Clinical Excellence’s decision to recommend mindfulness meditation as a legit treatment for chronic depression. I posted about mindfulness quite some time ago, and freely admit to having become quite a convert.

A particularly mind-boggling (ho ho) foundation of mindfulness is the notion, supported by a burgeoning scientific evidence base, that the brain is plastic, with parts of it changing shape and size in response to our patterns of thought. How weird is that, seriously? (If you’re interested in reading more about the concept of neuroplasticity then there’s an in-depth interview with a psychologist who’s a leading expert on the subject available here.) Suddenly the idea of actually becoming a different person – switching identities – doesn’t seem that far-fetched.

As Mr Pamuk might say: until next week, dear readers. You’ll find me, or someone pretending to be me, on Twitter @philblogs. 

Man walks into a column, no.2: Who?

I am being followed by a Nobel Prize winning author.

I’m conscious that it might seem a bit indulgent to post twice about the same book within the space of a week, on two different blogs, but these are special circumstances. 

The first was a short note of my entirely subjective, personal response to a novel called The Black Book, by the laureate-follower in question: Orhan Pamuk. As you can see for yourself if you read the post – there’s no particular reason you should – I thought The Black Book was a beautifully written exploration of big ideas, if not exactly what you’d call a rip-roaring read.

The biggest of the big ideas is that, by knowing the work of a writer inside out – the stories told, the ideas held, the principles promulgated – your identity can dissolve into theirs. I won’t go into detail about the extent of the dissolution in The Black Book for fear of spoiling the read for those who may choose to take it on, but suffice to say that if nothing else the novel succeeds in calling into question the fundamental idea of authorship. 

It was thus with some delight that I discovered my newest Twitter follower was, apparently, Orhan Pamuk himself. Either this really was he, in which case: bollocks, I wish I’d taken more time over the review, or it was someone pretending to be Orhan Pamuk, which opens up the possibility that whoever is actually tweeting has been so heavily influenced by The Black Book that she or he is attempting to become Turkey’s best-selling novelist. Either that or they’re just having a bit of fun; if so, it’s a great joke. (As an aside: this is a brilliant example of fans – West Wing fans in this case – being willing to adopt alternative Twitter identities for fun.)

If you’re on Twitter yourself chances are you’ll be familiar with the minimal room for establishing ‘true identity’ that the medium affords. Is there even any point in a personal profile of 140 characters? Isn’t it a strange experience when you meet someone in the flesh who you’ve previously known, sometimes for what seems like a long time, only as a 1cm squared avatar and truncated textual meanderings? So how on earth am I going to establish whether ‘my’ Orhan Pamuk is the real deal when almost all of his tweets are in Turkish? And even then? (Judge for yourself: @BenOrhanPamuk)

Which brings me, in closing, to the topic of mindfulness, which as you may’ve seen was covered in last weekend’s papers after the National Institute for Clinical Excellence’s decision to recommend mindfulness meditation as a legit treatment for chronic depression. I posted about mindfulness quite some time ago, and freely admit to having become quite a convert.  

A particularly mind-boggling (ho ho) foundation of mindfulness is the notion, supported by a burgeoning scientific evidence base, that the brain is plastic, with parts of it changing shape and size in response to our patterns of thought. How weird is that, seriously? (If you’re interested in reading more about the concept of neuroplasticity then there’s an in-depth interview with a psychologist who’s a leading expert on the subject available here.) Suddenly the idea of actually becoming a different person – switching identities – doesn’t seem that far-fetched. 

As Mr Pamuk might say: until next week, dear readers. You’ll find me, or someone pretending to be me, on Twitter @philblogs.