Quote me on that
The RSA recently published an excellent pamphlet by Paul Ormerod entitled N Squared.
He was on Radio 4 yesterday if anyone heard it?
As I said, I think it is an excellent pamphlet which strongly makes the point that an understanding of the way networks behave is vital for the future of policy making.
However, I was left annoyed by the pamphlet for dredging up that old Karl Marx quote that “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”. 
Ormerod concludes that “Politicians have sought to change the world. The point is that they need to interpret it correctly”
A nice rhetorical flourish but one which completely misunderstands the point Marx was making.
No one could really believe that Marx thought interpreting the world was pointless; after all he spent his whole life doing exactly that!
I am not claiming to fully understand the point Marx was making, which is written in a complex Hegelian style.
However, I think what he is getting at is that we should not think that we can separate interpretation and action. Instead we should aim for a type of interpretation which is bound up with action.
An example of this approach might be the way that the Connected Communities project is looking at how reflexivity works in social network analysis. Our theory is that the very process of mapping social networks itself has benefits, since it encourages those who take part to think of themselves in network terms, and thereby reflect on their responsibility to use, sustain and develop their networks.
I will be running some workshops in New Cross Gate next week. In these workshops we will look at how reflexivity works in some detail. Hopefully, in some small way, we will both interpret and change the world.
The organisers are coming
How many organisers does it take to change our communities? Quite a few, apparently. The ballot papers for the Labour leadership election went out yesterday, with David Miliband having recruited 1,000 community organisers as part of his bid. In doing so he’s stolen a march on the Government, which has promised to recruit and train 5,000 of them to get the Big Society going.
So soon we’re going to have 6,000 new organisers, and the idea has new-found favour on both sides of the political divide. This, and the pre-election timing of both pledges, surely begs the question: are community organisers simply the latest must-have policy accessory, or can they really make a difference to our communities?
The cynical amongst us might incline to the former. Indeed, it is easy to see why they might do so. It’s pretty clear that the driving influence behind both initiatives has been the experience of Barack Obama – the Conservatives acknowledged this explicitly back in March, and David Miliband has used the familiar-sounding ‘Movement for Change’ as his banner for recruitment. There’s no mystery as to why politicians might want to nail their colours to that particular mast.
But how relevant is this US experience to communities in this country, in this moment? Obama, drawing on the teachings of the urban radical Saul Alinsky, worked in Chicago for a non-profit organisation that wanted to help improve people’s lives by bringing them together and winning concessions or funding for projects that would benefit them. And even he, with all his persistence and personality, and with unjust situations to arouse the passions, found it difficult to engage, motivate and empower local people. One of my enduring memories of Dreams from my Father is the sheer persistence, belief and personal drive it took to achieve what he did.
The situation in the UK is a bit different. The Conservatives have had to gloss over the conflict and struggle at the root of their policy, and have taken the organisers ‘in-house’. In doing so it seems to me that they will have surrendered at least some of the policy’s driving force. How much harder will the Big Society organisers find it to engage and motivate communities if, unlike Obama, they are seen as part of the establishment and therefore somehow associated with the very problems they are trying to solve?
Equally, how will they fare in the face of widespread suspicion that, in the current economic climate, there are few concessions or funding packages to be won? And with the best will in the world, how many will have the Obama-esque persistence and personality that they’re likely to need? Alinsky-ite organisers have been able to draw strength from people’s dissatisfaction and feelings of disenfranchisement. The Big Society organisers won’t have that luxury.
In that sense, the Miliband organisers are in a better position – they can align themselves against the establishment and draw on people’s anger to motivate and engage them. But the purpose of these organisers is overtly political, as well as social, in that they are Labour party members and intended to promote grass-roots engagement with politics. This worked well for Obama (him again) during his run for the presidency. But it’s a separate task, and I wonder whether it will diminish, or even conflict with, organisers’ focus on community issues.
There’s also a question as to how much duplication there will be between these organisers and the community development workers, local councillors, party members and others who are already active in their communities, only under a different name.
And yet we shouldn’t be cynical. Communities are going to have to organise themselves, and where there are barriers to that, they’re going to need some help. Better organised groups have stronger voices and greater opportunities, and in community terms that means less isolation, better services and a better quality of life.
A piece of research I conducted at the end of last year indicated that the level of organisation in a community is largely self-perpetuating: organised communities organise themselves; those that lack that structure need a significant leg-up before they can reach that self-sustaining position. I do believe that organisers, be they Big Society or Labour, have the potential to provide that external leg-up, but their effectiveness will depend on who they are, how they’re presented to communities, what their agendas are, and how well they’re trained, funded and supported. If they’re being made available, they’re an opportunity for communities that should not be allowed to go begging. But we don’t yet know enough about them to judge.
And a final thought, for anyone who’s still reading this. One of the first four Big Society ‘vanguard’ areas is the Labour heartland of Liverpool, which raises the intriguing prospect of red and blue-shirted organisers all trying to organise the same community. There’s already one rivalry between those colours on Merseyside – do we need another?
Is Osborne a closet Rawlsian?
To stop myself from writing mini-essays pretending to be blogs, I’ve set myself a 30 minute limit to knock this out. Let’s see how it goes.
I ask this question with more than a little tongue-in-cheek and not entirely seriously. He would probably want to vomit at the very thought of it. How many people, let alone political conservatives, really believe, like John Rawls, in the ‘difference principle’ (i.e. the principle that the only social and economic inequalities that are morally justifiable in society are those that work to the benefit of the least advantaged in society) and the radical egalitarian project this belongs to?
But perhaps the question is not so silly. Read Osborne’s first budget speech and listen to Clegg’s recent response to the IFS analysis of that budget and you’ll come across core Rawlsian concepts of justice. Osborne tells us that fairness is the first principle of the coalition’s economic policy. For Rawls, justice and fairness amount to the same thing. Indeed, he later described his theory of justice as ‘justice as fairness’. The government’s social and economic policy agenda is progressive and fair, or so we are told, because it will improve the lot of the least well-off in society in the long-term, while ensuring that they’re protected more than most from the forthcoming fiscal cuts. Why? Because this is only fair.
This would seem to be classic Rawls. The IFS analysis and the battle between the Treasury and DWP over welfare reform would seem to suggest something very different. The reality is that the coalition government lacks any obvious substantive philosophy of fairness. It desperately needs this if it’s going to be the transformative government it says it wants to be. We are told that Steve Hilton meets every policy proposal in Downing Street with a question I rather like: ‘but is it transformative?’ Great – but for what purpose? This question cannot be adequately answered without a coherent philosophy or conception of fairness. I doubt any government can have strategic direction or be socially and economically transformative without this.
The concept of fairness is being emptied of content – this is certainly not specific to the coalition government. Fairness has become a kind of mantra for politicians who want to sound at once socially progressive and in tune with the basically centrist instincts of the British electorate. But fairness is not an unambiguous concept government or political parties can appeal to when wanting to legitimise their policies. Fairness, or so it seems to me, is really a less morally charged way of talking about justice. What we consider to be fair inevitably reflects some of our basic views of what the just order of society and social relations should be.
Like a tautological circle, this leads us back to Rawls. I’ve just finished re-reading chunks of A Theory of Justice for a pamphlet I am writing on how we might develop a more progressive view and set of policies around citizen rights and responsibilities. It is nearly forty years since the book was first published. Like other versions of contractarian liberalism (and Kantian liberalism), his political philosophy has always seemed to me enormously powerful but also too state-centric, and his view of the world and social relations too legalistic and bureaucratic for my liking. Rawls also prematurely brackets questions of the good, which seems to me an impossible ask of both individuals and any government. But reading him again, I find myself in awe of the sheer intellectual force and conceptual rigour of his thinking. And who could fail to be moved by the moral conviction of what remains a radical political and moral philosophy we can all learn from and argue with? Only those without a heart or mind.
Finished. 37 minutes. Fail.
Happiness is an original iPhone app
The news that doctors are increasingly using their iPhones to measure their patients’ heartbeats is a great reminder of how a device can be engineered for one purpose and used in a completely different way (a disruptive innovation, to trot out the well-worn phrase). Bet Apple didn’t see iStethoscope coming.
Another great idea and well-engineered implementation is Mappiness, which asks iPhone users (about once a day) how happy they are, along with “a few basic things to control for: who you’re with, where you are, what you’re doing”. The responses and the approximate location are analysed, creating a hedonimeter that shows the average happiness for a location (London is looking a little below average at the moment).
Mappiness follows the good advice “Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not” from Galileo Galilei, as does one of the strands of the RSA’s Citizen Power programme. The purpose of the Civic Health Audit, led by my colleague Ben, is to develop a tool that could be used by communities and local authorities to better measure local residents’ capability to participate in shaping the places in which they live. You can have a closer look here.
Does it matter what we think about Blair?
The Guardian today bracketed their “exclusive” interview with Tony Blair in a slightly strange way; pondering the question, whether or not Blair had ever been away, before concluding, enigmatically “Blair may or may not have ever gone away. But he is certainly back.”
Perhaps more than any other Prime Minister, Blair has stimulated a cottage industry concerned with analysing how we perceived him.
One of the most prominent voices in this debate has been Ipsos-MORI. Ben Page, their Chief Executive, argues that being seen as capable in a crisis is more important than being seen as honest when it comes to being elected.
Does this tell us anything about the difference between what we actually want from politicians (and the public sector) and what we want from charities and community groups?
I ask this because the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) recently received an astonishingly high score in the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators’ assessment of organisations reputations.
This survey found that the global average score for all organisations assessed (mostly corporations) was 64.2 per cent whereas the average for charities was 86.7 per cent and the RNLI scored 95.1 per cent.
I am tempted to suggested that the factors which determine the public’s view of the reputation of an organisation or a politician have only a small crossover with whether or not that organisation or politician is doing a good job.
Not that I am suggesting that the RNLI does a poor job, but does it really do that much better a job than other similar sized charities?
A comparison could be drawn with empowerment. A report from 2009 by our very own Sam McLean argued that we should think of empowerment as having two aspects; de facto empowerment (how much we are able to influence decisions) and subjective empowerment (how much we believe we are able to influence decisions).
When you look at this split in some detail you find out that the most effective means of increasing subjective empowerment have almost nothing to do with increasing de facto empowerment. Rather, improved communication comes out tops.
With the end of the Place Survey we will have to see how much weight the public sector puts on improving people’s perceptions…
Keep on running
I recently took part in the London Triathlon with a friend of mine. This fired off a couple of thoughts about communities and community life.
Coincidentally the triathlon was based in the Excel conference centre in East London, just opposite Silvertown. I say coincidentally, because I had, in a previous job, undertaken a review of a housing development in Silvertown.
This was the kind of review which doesn’t get done enough. I looked at how much the housing development had met its original objectives, now that it had been built for over a decade.
Part of the idea behind the development was that placing social housing next to private housing would encourage the social housing tenants to make connections with their wealthier neighbours and, thereby, improve their lot.
What I found was that the residents of the private housing were, overwhelmingly, DINKYS (Double-Income families with No Kids Yet) who liked the convenience which the DLR line offered them and the new build houses. They did not use the local shops, the local schools or the local community centre. Their social networks took them much further afield. They had friends all over London, they worked some distance away and they did not intend to live in the area for very long.
This meant that very few relationships were formed between the social housing tenants and those who lived in private housing. It reminded me of a book about the Reformation which showed how Catholics and Protestants had a completely different way of thinking about the cities they lived in.
Perhaps the original plans were based on a nostalgic idea of community where people would automatically know their neighbours and be in and out of each other’s houses the whole time.
As I was huffing and puffing my way along the triathlon I started thinking about a new initiative called the Good Gym.
As I understand it, people who sign up to the Good Gym are linked with an isolated person who lives in their area (it’s based in Tower Hamlets at the minute, quite near Silvertown actually).
Then, when they go for a jog, they stop off at this person’s house, for a quick drink and chat. This has the dual advantage of encouraging exercise (I know I trained a lot more for the triathlon because I trained with a friend – the peer pressure alone kept me exercising) and widening the social networks of people who are isolated.
Perhaps this is the kind of low cost initiative which was needed for the Silvertown housing development to achieve its objectives.
Finally, as a treat for getting to the end of this blog post here is a video of me finishing the triathlon, holding hands with the friend I trained with!
Strange Fruit
Is it just me, or does politics on the other side of the pond invariably seem more interesting?
It is fairly clear that the next Labour leader will be a Miliband, if not an Ed, and I find myself underwhelmed by either prospect, and the contest as a whole. The aftermath of the general election was hugely exciting, but now that the coalition seems to be holding itself together, I find I am less trigger happy with my mouse on British news pages. The ‘Big Society’ interests me at a conceptual level, but it’s a slow burner, and Tony Blair’s biography will doubtless create a media frenzy, but the focus will be on Iraq, and I will be surprised if we learn anything that transforms existing opinion.
Politics in the USA invariably feels more vivid, dramatic and personal, perhaps because of the way it is reported. I got into the habit of watching The Daily Show while I was a masters student in the US, and I now watch it on Channel Four. Rory Bremner is funny, but frankly he is not a patch on John Stewart, who hosts the show with a rare mixture of insight, humour, respect and side-splitting incredulity.
Last week’s main story was the Fox news anchor Glenn Beck’s speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in which he used the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech to ‘reclaim civil rights’ and ‘restore honour’ to America. Neither idea makes much sense to me, but the Guardian’s American editor, Mike Tomasky, frames the issue in a typically astute way:
“Part of citizenship, a crucial part of citizenship, is standing in their(the less privileged/prosperous-JR) shoes for a few moments – as they must stand in yours, and understand your point of view too. The Beck movement is the we-stay-in-our-shoes movement. It’s Grover Norquist’s “leave us alone” coalition.”
Perhaps it is such binaries that make American politics more engaging. Indeed I strongly encourage anybody interested in exploring the mutual incomprehension that lies at the heart of political debate to read Jonathan Haidt’s excellent essay called: “What makes people vote Republican?” Haidt(author the critically acclaimed ‘The Happiness Hypothesis’) contends that the American right has a wider range of moral reference points:
“The second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats “just don’t get it,” this is the “it” to which they refer.”
Our social brain project is partly founded on building a deeper appreciation for this ‘it’, because the importance of group membership and institutions falls out from our understanding of human nature outlined in ‘Changing the Subject‘. However, ’sanctified and noble’ remains a hard sell in a relatively secular society, and is perhaps closer to Glenn Beck’s motivation, who referenced ‘God’ several times in his speech.
But what of the strange fruit in the title? I also read the New York Times on most days, and I was prompted to blog by one particularly elegant Op Ed by Charles M Blow called ‘I had a Nightmare’, in which he lambasts Beck’s decision to associate himself with Dr. King and refers pointedly to ‘strange fruit‘. This expression rang a bell, but had no emotional impact, until I looked at the wikipedia page above.
If you are not already aware of the poem or the song, made famous by Billie Holiday, I will leave you to discover it for yourself, but be warned that the image may haunt you for a while.
Perhaps American politics seems more interesting because such atrocities are still visceral, and form part of the collective political unconscious there. Our political discourse seems to be relatively bereft of such intense cultural reference points, or perhaps I am missing something?
Keeping up with the Joneses
So, The Spirit Level is back in the news again, although not for reasons that its authors would have wanted. The pre-election consensus over the book’s conclusion that financial inequality is bad for all of us has quickly broken down, and its evidence and analysis has been attacked from a number of quarters.
We shouldn’t be surprised by this – an idea with such real and far-reaching implications for social policy was unlikely to transcend ideological divisions for long. But it would be unfortunate if future discussion of the concept of inequality were to be dominated by wrangling over national-level statistics, because that seems to me to overlook an important aspect of the question.
What about inequality at the local level? Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue that comparing one’s possessions and status with those who have more in life leads to stress and a greater propensity to violence, and that many of the damaging effects of inequality flow from there. If that is the case, shouldn’t people be worse off in areas where affluence and disadvantage sit side by side, where evidence of inequality can be seen every day? Or is there some potential benefit to be derived from this situation – could close proximity to people with more be of help to people with less, or even vice versa? Or, perhaps, do the haves and have-nots just ignore each other, having little impact for good or ill?
These questions matter, because local inequality can be found all over the country, not least in London. The area covered by the Connected Communities project is a case in point. It focusses on New Cross Gate, which looks up (topographically and figuratively) to the more affluent conservation area of Telegraph Hill. There is currently little interaction between the two neighbourhoods; despite the fact that they live almost on each other’s doorsteps, and may well use some of the same facilities, the residents look in different directions and live separate lives.
There is plenty of evidence to show that people feel happier living ‘among their own’ than they do in more mixed (and less equal) communities; but there is also evidence that this type of homogeneity is less useful when it comes to finding a job or getting access to people in power. So would greater contact between New Cross Gate and Telegraph Hill improve the lives of people at the foot of the hill, or would it simply highlight the inequalities between them? And if it would be helpful to increase contact, how could people at the top of the hill be encouraged to come down and what effect would it have on them?
If the issue of inequality gets mired in arguments about national-level taxation and redistribution, we should not forget the local angle and its potential effects for better or worse. One of the tasks for the Connected Communities project will be to understand those effects and develop ways to harness them for good.
Tags: community, inequality
Ornamenting the Nation with Natural Nudges
Up until the eighteenth century, one of the effects of the industrial revolution was to leave the UK short of wood. In 1755, through premiums and medals, the RSA encouraged tree planting “for the supply of the Navy, the employment and advantage of the poor, as well as the ornamenting of the nation”. Over 50m trees were planted until the end of the project in 1835.
In the 21st century we’re still grappling with the need to use resources sustainably, but a lack of UK forests is no longer a pressing danger. Climate change and the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is a much more urgent challenge. Another change between then and now is that the approaches we can take to solving problems have developed. For example, because many of today’s RSA projects examine how individuals and communities can make a difference, knowledge from fields such as behavioural economics is important to informing strategies and explaining unexpected side-effects.
The UK’s roads are a fascinating and (environmentally-speaking) important (car travel contributes more carbon dioxide than any other form of transport in the UK) arena in which to develop behavioural interventions. Across many motorways, for example, lines painted at decreasing intervals on the approach to a roundabout, trick drivers into thinking they are driving too fast and encourage them to reduce speed.
But in a neat (and hopefully not too tenuous) link between the RSA’s past and its present, I wanted to post about Norfolk council, who are piloting a scheme that uses trees planted at the road-side to nudge drivers into driving more safely:
The planting of trees and hedges is designed to reduce speed ‘by playing with the driver’s peripheral vision’. One technique involved placing trees – at decreasing distances apart – on the approach to a village, tricking drivers into thinking they were speeding. (thanks to @danlockton for the link to the Independent’s coverage)
The main benefit of course is safer driving but is also likely (depending on the type of road) to reduce the carbon emissions of passing traffic. It seems to me a rather ingenious example of making use of a feature that could have been planted regardless – “a good result for what is a very cheap method” as Stuart Hallett, the casualty reduction manager observed. There’s also something nicely cyclical about using a natural carbon sink to reduce emissions…
The Greatest Speech since Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
Filed under: Citizenship, Community, Education, Social Brain
“Some are born posthumously”, said Nietzsche, and the acuity of this remark hit me on learning of the death of Jimmy Reid.
Frankly, I had never heard of him. I am a relatively Anglicised Scot and it is not the first time that an important part of my heritage had passed me by. With such a name, it was no surprise to hear he hailed from Govan, but he might have been Rab C Nesbitt’s neighbour for all I knew.
Then I read that his funeral was attended by Alex Ferguson, Billy Connolly, Gordon Brown, and my step-father, Ray, and I figured he was somebody I ought to know more about. You don’t need to be a social networks expert to understand that anybody attracting such a diverse range of stars (yes, you too Ray) probably made a big impact on the world. The funeral proceedings are available on I Player, with Billy Connolly’s amusing and heartfelt address around 1:08 (available until Thursday 3pm).
So who was Jimmy Reid? I still don’t really know, but I have read the early 21st century shortcut and the quick answer is Trade Union Activist, Labour Movement Leader, Journalist, Writer, Thinker, Rector of Glasgow University and resolute Lefty. He educated himself at Govan library, and became one of the most articulate and compelling intellectuals of his era. The most striking fact in his biography, to my mind, is that his inaugural address as Rector of Glasgow University, ‘Alienation‘, was printed in full in the New York Times, who described it as “the greatest speech since Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address.”
The most quoted aspect of the speech is his comment on ‘the rat race’:
“To the Students I address this appeal. Reject these attitudes. Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts and before you know where you are, you’re a fully paid-up member of the rat-pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit. Or as Christ put it, “What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?”
Socialism may be out of fashion, or even ideologically discredited, but you don’t have to be a Socialist to be moved by the clarity of Jimmy Reid’s convictions. If you do nothing else today but read this speech, it will be a day well spent.
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