Layer 459 . . . Work, Education, Management Culture, Creativity, Collaboration and Character

.
BBC2  - The British At Work

Unfortunately it's not just Brits who got sucked into fuckwit work culture and management culture. It's been a worldwide phenomenon - working ever-longer hours under management that's either Hitlerian, Machiavellian or David Brentian. Possibly all three simultaneously, depending on whether management thinks your 'performance' is OK or not.

The good thing about working in a public service not-for-profit 'professional' environment used to be that you were treated as an intelligent being who didn't need to be 'motivated' - you did more and gave more than you should, simply because you were there to serve others. Very sadly this is, by and large, no longer the case. Nowadays management consultants and business schools have convinced senior management everywhere that target-setting and payment by results should be applied to the 'workforce'. Nowadays everyone has to be micro-managed and performance-managed to death.

Throw into this mix management by email, by text, and by 'bonus' culture, and you have total alienation, stress, anxiety, loss of morale, illness and breakdown.

Work-life balance? Don't be stupid.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zg047

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zvf3f#synopsis

.............................................

Here are some quotes from an essential article in Guardian Education:

Let's look at all the evidence from top educators abroad

Michael Gove is keen to see what we have to learn from education systems internationally, but the lessons may not be as straightforward as he thinks, says Valerie Hannon

"Recently Michael Gove has stressed the importance of comparing education systems internationally, as seen in the OECD's Pisa studies, and of learning from the most successful nations. But what should our response be?

"The education secretary enthuses about Andreas Schleicher, of the OECD, calling him the "most important man in English education" for the insights his work confers. Schleicher's analysis, according to Gove, shows, first, that "we [England] are falling further and further behind other nations"; and second, that the key to success is "to recruit the best possible people into teaching and provide them with high-quality training and professional development". This is true – as far as it goes. But it is a partial analysis.

"What have successful systems to tell us about the issues we face today? Schleicher's work demonstrates compellingly that demand for the competencies 20th-century school systems were good at imparting (routine cognitive and manual skills) is falling sharply among employers across the world. He shows that 21st-century systems need to prepare young people with the skills to undertake non-routine analytic and, especially, non-routine interactive tasks. Schleicher's conclusion is: "The skills that are easiest to teach and test are also easiest to digitise, automate and outsource."

"The implication of these findings is that systems need to prepare students "to deal with more rapid change than ever before … for jobs that have not yet been created … using technologies that have not yet been invented". This is about learning how to learn, and new ways of thinking that involve creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making. It is in sharp contrast to an emphasis on the capacity to reproduce facts." 

The really outrageous aspect to all this good sense is that 'progressive' educators have been saying these things since the early 20th century, and others like Dryden & Vos (The New Learning Revolution) have been banging on about it in more recent years - to no good effect in dopey old England.

"For this is the perspective being adopted by the world's leading systems. Rather than relying on past achievements, they are reconceiving how they approach the future. Take Finland – always at or near the top of the Pisa rankings. The director of the Finnish board of education has described how their system has identified the key competencies for lifelong learning, and is setting about transforming their system to ensure they're acquired. Critically, this entails enabling learners to "undertake meaningful problem-based inquiry, which might be multi-disciplinary, supported by blended teaching methods and hybrid resources". The Finns aren't giving up on acquiring knowledge. They just know it's not enough.

"Then there's South Korea, another "top performing" system. Perceived as exam-driven, cramming its students, Korea is set to change. Exploring the work of its very best schools has revealed that they focus on providing concentrated time for some subjects (rather than shallow drip-feed); on personalising learning; on evaluating creativity; and on experience-based learning. South Korea is basing its innovation agenda on the "three C's": creativity, collaboration and character.

"And finally, take one of the most improved cities in the world in terms of education performance – New York City. Gove recently hosted the former chancellor of the NYC school system, praising the rapid progress made by the city. What he omitted, however, was that NYC has acknowledged its current set of school improvement initiatives is inadequate to deal with the challenges young people face. So it has a launched an Innovation Zone, comprising a distributed network of schools, specifically to test and refine new approaches to learning and teaching that are more personalised and emphasise higher-level skills.

"So yes, let's join the global education community seeking out the best ways to make learning engaging and relevant to young people in the digital age. But let's do it with open minds, and attention to all the evidence."

Valerie Hannon is a board director of the Innovation Unit

.

Layer 361 . . . Soul Music, The Emperor, Chisels, Oil Cans and More Taoist Advice

.
Soul Music

There's a series on Radio 4 about "pieces of music with a powerful emotional impact". It's called Soul Music. The latest programme featured Beethoven's 5th piano concerto.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b008mj7p

As part of Oxzen's investigations into classical music, this programme was duly listened to. (This is a bit like Rik Mayall doing his Kevin Turvey thing. Several of his 'investigations' are on YouTube - work, depression, the supernatural, etc. Anyone remember John Sparkes and his 'Shadwell' or 'Siadwell' monologues? Also on YouTube. Inspirational Welshness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Turvey )

Soul music!!! As if!

This concerto is known as The Emperor. Someone said he loves it because it's 'heroic' and 'imperial'. Someone else prattled on about 'intense sadness', 'melancholy' and 'joy'.

This isn't soul music. This is music for manic depressives. Music to experience mania and depression to.

It's also very obvious that the only other people who like this stuff - that's to say who REALLY like this stuff, as opposed to listen to it sometimes because it's SUPPOSED to be good music - are people who have played, do play, or used to play in orchestras. And the reason they like it is because they appreciate how DIFFICULT it is to play. The Emperor is WELL hard, apparently. During the programme people kept going on about how you need to be a VIRTUOSO in order to play the piano part. So all in all it's also music for clever bastards who enjoy being in the club of people who can either play such CHALLENGING music or else they KNOW that they're not quite good enough to play it. Obviously truly great music HAS to be difficult to play. So now we know. Nothing to do with 'soul', whatsoever.

...........................................................

In a similar vein, the most important work - the really high status work in our society - is work that's intellectually demanding. It doesn't have to be satisfying or enjoyable in itself, but it does need to be intellectually difficult and impossible for most people to do. Skilled craftsmanship, on the other hand, which is also exceedingly difficult and demanding, is generally not seen to be something to aspire to.

Simon Jenkins wrote this excellent piece about work last week.

Graduates shouldn't be afraid of the chisel and oil can

George Osborne's call for a manufacturing revival is welcome. Working by hand is better than doing it solely with the head

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/07/george-osborne-manufacturing-revival-welcome

George Osborne  this week called on the nation to revert to "manufacturing" and reject the culture of the City.

Well he might. The credit crunch seems certain to lead to widespread graduate and white-collar unemployment, forcing young and old into work they would have considered beneath them a generation ago. Job-starved young people must go into cooking, gardening, decorating and personal services, even if they call them catering, landscaping, interior design and consulting. Eton now teaches cookery. Oxford has yet to pioneer a course in motorcycle maintenance.

Ever since Ruskin deplored the onset of mass production, craftsmanship has been elevated as an intrinsic virtue. Only recently have psychologists and sociologists suggested that working with hands is more than just aesthetics, but is embedded in the human gene. Hands are what drew us from the slime. Thumbs differentiated us from other mammals. Neglect the hand and you distort, torture and dissatisfy the brain. That is why pianists live so long.

When Matthew Crawford's The Case for Working with Your Hands came out last year it was treated as amusingly eccentric. "Real men" were told they should stop being slaves to their screens and Wi-Fis. They should drive nails into planks and wield spades and frying pans.

Nor is this another case of the lawyer who became a plumber because the hourly rate was higher. Crawford did indeed notice that graduate entry into the American professions was plummeting, with those supposedly educated for them drifting into listless semi-employment, "a state of uncommitted future potential". But he also noted something quite different. He himself doubled as academic and motorbike mechanic, and wondered why he always tired after a day at the former yet felt strangely exhilarated by the manual labour of a newly restored motorbike.

The sociologist Richard Sennett likewise noted a cerebral reward from playing the cello and cooking. In his book, Craftsmanship, he concluded that the handling of tools was far more than just a passing stage in human evolution. There were "skills in manual labour that link hand and brain and which are still not recognised". To Sennett it is cruel "to assume downward mobility in those who love working with their hands". It is a natural human activity. We likewise recognise the satisfaction a parent gets from caring for a baby. Childcare is skilled manual labour that delivers more than just family bonding.

Crawford assaults the binary tradition of grammar versus technical schooling that developed through the 20th century, "a partition of thinking from doing that has bequeathed us the dichotomy of white collar versus blue collar, mental versus manual". In Britain this saw its apotheosis in the 1944 education act. The 11-plus test distinguished "high aptitude" as theoretical and grammar, from low aptitude which was technical and hand-working. It then enshrined the separatism in different institutions and, de facto, different social classes.

If the career path that has been the assumption of British higher education for 50 years is outdated, the good news from the academics is that its replacement may be better adjusted to human nature. A key indicator is what many brain-workers do in leisure or retirement. The civil servant who plays chamber music, the lawyer who turns to cabinet-making or the banker who takes up cooking would once have been regarded as stepping down from their true calling and indulging in hobbies. Properly intellectual "retirees" dabbled in consultancy or wrote a novel.

The message of Crawford and Sennett, as it was for Ruskin and Morris, is that there is nothing mentally subordinate in working by hand. The gardener, the cook, the needleworker or the craftsman is not pandering to some Ruskinian aesthetic. He or she is pursuing a route back to the inner self that may indeed be more direct than working solely with the head – or the screen.

These are skills that cannot be mastered in a day. Many require disciplines learned over generations by trial and error and thus a structure of rule-based apprenticeship and training. They are thus woven into the custom of the community. But they may also be activities more attuned to the human body and brain than, say, reading or writing a book. Perhaps Milton's "precious lifeblood of a master spirit" has been sanctified too long. It is time to hear it for the chisel and the oil can.

.............................................................

Taoist Advice for Great Leaders - Part 2

Deviation from the path of reality (of Tao), and avoidance of change, can result in the harming of life by power. There is then no value in power.

The leader is secure when he is in a state of tranquility and peace. There is no situation where one cannot use illumination, and there is no place that can damage true illumination.

When illumination does not penetrate reality, injury is caused.

Self-governance, selflessness, and the refinement of the inner self is a serious matter.

Timing, knowledge, illumination, and true recognition make the difference between leadership success and failure.

Wrath, cupidity, and other disruptive conditions eat away at the natural reality of tasks and goals.

The manager should avoid excessive force. Parting is a natural process where reason prevails.

Impetuosity must give way to a path that travels between intensity and laxity.

Mundanity and obstacles are encountered constantly. The leader who follows the path of the Tao wards them off when they are met.

Learning from those who can teach and avoiding blind practice offer the leader a clear path of accomplishment without obstacles or obstruction.

Ignorance, arbitrary action, and vain imaginings of growth result in a rising into darkness, not into illumination.

Avoid complacency, self-satisfaction, and false joy.

Every leader is deeply involved in the development of others. However, the most important development is self-development.  This is the precondition for the development of others. Self-development is the true basis for an inexhaustible source of nourishment and development for all.

Every leader must get rid of his ego to move along a path of development and creativity.

Sincerity, selflessness and illumined strength are to be strived for by the leader and those around him.

Knowing the Tao is knowing when to stop.

Be aware of those many occasions when the leader must await proper timing. Manage oneself and others in such a way as to turn back from error.

The leader who achieves illumination and action in concert finds the path of the Tao effortless and clear.

The way of the Tao is to achieve richness and presence through attainment and balance. These represent fundamental leadership values, as do the importance of dealing with all matters adaptively and to depend on oneself, not on fate.

The leader in tune with the Tao deals with the world without destroying it, and transcends the world while he is in it.

To follow the path of the Tao, a leader knows when to hurry and when to relax. He knows what will bring good results,a dn he knows when to stop.

Joy is the delight found in leading along the path of the Tao. The leader who finds fulfillment encounters the true reality and essence of joy. Wealth and material gain alone are not the delight of the leader who follows the path of the Tao. Would you rather indulge yourself in self-satisfaction and outward appearances?

...........................................................

Ed Miliband on the Politics Show yesterday was a bit like an eager young puppy. He was OK, but it was all pretty lightweight and insubstantial. It's doubtful whether, at the moment, he's convincing people who don't already rate him, and doubtful if he's converting anyone to the Labour cause.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00v94rt#clips

The show ended with a clip of Anne Widdecombe dancing in a blue tent. That's entertainment!

........................................................

Football, Business and Governance

The chief executive of Liverpool FC says they've had two very good offers for their business. Which says everything, really, about the mentality of people who run football. None of them give a damn about the 'club', as such; none of them care about the non-business aspects of football; none of them has any loyalty to the fans, the community, or even the players - who are presumed to be mercenaries to the core.

Most people would love to see Liverpool, and its greedy owners, crash and burn. It would have been helpful in that respect if Gerrard and Torres had both left in the summer, thereby reducing the monetary value of the business to very little indeed. In which case there could have been some proper consideration of how the fans could become owners of the enterprise, and turn it back into a proper club - run for the benefit of the team and the fans, and not just a business, run entirely for the financial benefit of the owners and shareholders.

There's an analogy here, bursting to get out, with the way that entire countries are run - but there's a distinct lack of time and energy and inclination to pursue it at this juncture.
.

Layer 340 . . . Woods, Work, Drugs, Shock, NHS, Iraq and Folly

.
Why walking in the woods is good for you

It's one of the most enjoyable activities imaginable - and it might also be one of the most beneficial

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/27/walking-in-the-woods-health

According to the Finnish Forest Research Institute, one of the most enjoyable activities around can reduce stress and depression, ease muscle tension, counter attention deficit disorder, even calm an erratic heart. What is this wonder therapy? A walk in the woods. As Karjalainen puts it, "Many people feel relaxed and good when they are out in nature. But not many of us know there is also scientific evidence about the healing effects of nature."

........................................................

All Work and No Play

Given the levels of debt and the low wages in our society, flat-out full time working seems like the only option for most people trying to stay alive and make a decent life for themselves and their families.

The ants march on, but we'd be happier as grasshoppers

The idea that work is the meaning of existence has little basis in biology. Let us guiltlessly enjoy the sweet idleness of summer

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/01/ants-march-grasshoppers-happier

Of course, work is a good and necessary thing in its place. It stops you from starving, directs your energies and can even offer friendship and community. But nature writers like Mabey have pointed out that seeing work as the meaning of life is a human, metaphysical invention; it has little basis in biology. Play, not work, seems to be the defining essence of life on earth.

While the new austerity requires us to put a price on everything, play remains priceless precisely because it is pointless: a way of simply enjoying and celebrating life when life is all we have. Play is also free, egalitarian and equilibrium-loving: it costs nothing and asks for nothing in return and is therefore an excellent model for sustainable living with scarce resources.

.............................................................


Angus Macqueen is the guy who made the four-part series on drugs policy, which I commented on yesterday. This is an article he wrote about drugs in last Sunday's Observer:

Why do we so wilfully cover up the failure of the war on drugs?

The vulnerable are left unprotected by our attitudes to substance abuse, argues a leading documentary maker

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/01/angus-macqueen-drugs-trade-policy

Drugs policies have little to do with science, health risk or harm. They have been hijacked by the emotive rhetoric of moralists.

This fear of the Daily Mail is a dishonest excuse – the truth is that there is a collective lack of will to address one of our major social problems. We bury our heads and pretend that banning drugs equals regulation. Quite the reverse; driving drugs underground leaves them unregulated and consumers unprotected.

....................................................

The Shock Doctrine

Coalition is more radical than Thatcher government, says senior Tory minister

Francis Maude defends scope and speed of reforms with claim earlier governments have not pushed ahead vigorously enough

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jul/30/coalition-government-reforms-francis-maude

......................................................

Former MI5 chief delivers damning verdict on Iraq invasion

Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller tells Chilcot that invasion increased terrorist threat and radicalised young British Muslims

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jul/20/chilcot-mi5-boss-iraq-war

................................................

Polly Toymbee was on form with this piece on the government's intentions for the NHS:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/17/tories-are-demolishing-the-nhs

This is no careful plan: the NHS is being wired for demolition at breakneck speed

Analysts are aghast at the sheer recklessness of the proposals. Yet the Tories proceed with no answers to the basic questions

............................................

Simon Jenkins has been keeping up his relentless attacks on our follies in the Middle East:

A history of folly, from the Trojan horse to Afghanistan

By recording failure in meticulous detail, the leaked war logs bear devastating witness to our incompetence

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jul/27/folly-war-wikileaks-afghanistan

I cannot avoid the conclusion that, just as the Pashtun are said to be "hardwired to fight", so now are certain western regimes. War is about sating the military-security-industrial complex, a lobby so potent that, long after the cold war ended, it can induce democratic leaders to expend quantities of blood and money on such specious pretexts as suppressing dictators in one country and terror in another.

Like puppets dancing to manufactured fears and dreams of glory, these leaders have lost their grip on Plato's "sacred golden cord of reason". Until that grip is restored, the folly revealed by the war logs will continue.

..................................

Clegg told the truth on Iraq. It's for Cameron to end a decade of pretence

The coalition inherited a mendacious foreign policy, leading to two disastrous wars. Time now for an honourable peace

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/22/clegg-truth-iraq

Commentators are often asked to predict history's verdict on a particular era, and are well advised to decline. But it is hard not to see western policy in the first decade of the 21st century as sunk in a morass of folly. It was subcontracted to a defence lobby desperate for a role, which it found in exploiting weak leaders by playing on the ideology of fear.

It has led the US and Britain into contentious relations with the entire Muslim world, fuelling anti-western sentiment not only across Asia but, as Manningham-Buller pointed out, among Muslim populations within the west. The last decade has seen an entire foreign policy elite lose the art of friendship. Bred under the communist threat, the west's leaders craved a mighty enemy and found it by exaggerating the threat from militant Islam and elevating terrorist gangs to the status of state enemies.

As a result, British policy has relied on one outdated premise after another.

Foreign policy lurched into paranoid mode. Guantánamo filled with victims and ludicrous sums were spent on security. The world responded in kind. Airports became nests of xenophobia.

This was nowhere better demonstrated than in Blair's dreadful January appearance before the Chilcot inquiry, which now meekly claims to be unconcerned with the legality of the Iraq war (so what is it concerned with?). All evidence has testified that the war was a mistake and undermined Britain's security. Blair's contradictory display of pro-war self-delusion, arrogance and folly should be a textbook video for any school of 21st-century statesmanship.

..............................................

Seamus Milne pitched in with this:

Now Afghanistan too shows the limits of American power

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jul/21/now-afghanistan-shows-limit-american-power

The catastrophic illusions and acts of official betrayal at the heart of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are being progressively exposed, one after another. In London, the former head of MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller confirmed to the Iraq inquiry this week  that the security service had indeed warned Tony Blair's government that aggression against Iraq, "on top of our involvement in Afghanistan", would violently radicalise a generation of young Muslims and "substantially" increase the threat of terror attacks in Britain.

And so it came to pass. A few days earlier, Carne Ross, Britain's former representative at the UN responsible for Iraq before the invasion, told the inquiry that the British government's statements about its assessment of the threat from Saddam Hussein "were, in their totality, lies". In due course, those lies were brutally exposed.

It's easy to be inured to the power of such indictments after nine years of the war on terror and its litany of torture, kidnapping, atrocities and mass killing. But together with a string of earlier revelations they do combine to highlight the utter disgrace of the British political and security establishment, which deceived the public about a war it was well aware in advance would expose them to great danger.

The reason for such official dissembling and recklessness is also now clear enough. The British commitment to join the attack on Iraq was transparently never driven by the supposed menace of Saddam or the legal casuistry advanced at the time, but by an overriding commitment to put Britain at the service of US power, under whoever's leadership and wherever that might take it at any particular time. The "blood price", as Blair called it, for this – David Cameron made explicit last week – subservient relationship had to be paid.

................................................

It's good to see Susie Orbach writing again in the Guardian:

Ad men today are wrong on body size

Why Lynne Featherstone was right to celebrate curvaceous Christina Hendricks as a role model

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/31/susie-orbach-ad-men-wrong-on-body-size

http://anybody.squarespace.com/anybody_vent/2009/2/8/susie-orbach-on-bodies.html

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article5661153.ece
.

Layer 339 . . . Laurie Anderson, Inheritance Tracks, Strange Fruit, Spirituals, The Spirit Level, Spiritual Intelligence, Big Questions and Calls to Action

.

Thought for Today

I'd meant to say yesterday that Tom Jones and his new album were even mentioned on Radio 4's Thought for Today last week, as was the track 'What Good Am I?' Zeitgeisty indeed.

..................................................................

Also on Radio 4 last week was the wonderful Laurie Anderson. She's been around for 30 years now, but is still relatively unknown. So it was good to find her popping up on Saturday Live to talk about her 'inheritance tracks'.

She spoke about listening, as a young person, to the minimalist music of Phillip Glass, especially 'Music in Twelve Parts', and how the act of listening to the music gave her the mental space to ask questions like, what do I want? and what am I doing here?

In fact she used to go to live rehearsals of the music in New York, together with friends who were sculptors, musicians, dancers and actors, and she says 'This was when we learnt to be artists ourselves'. The rehearsals lasted around 10 hours. One of her friends said, "That's when I do my best work - at Phil's rehearsals".

The piece of music she chose to 'pass on' was Billie Holiday singing 'Strange Fruit'. She referred to it as a kind of haiku - simple images of racist hangings.

Can art or music influence behaviour or politics?, she asked. That song certainly did. "Southern trees / Bear a strange fruit . . . "

She said, "It's the story of fascism. How's that made possible? Songs like that motivated people to change the world, to march for civil rights. That song was key. People heard that song, confronted that chilling image, and said, 'Wait a second!' The song is a spiritual, really, and spirituals are often calls to action."

"Cruelty, tenderness, hopefulness and beauty - this song has all these things."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00t5vkr

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00t5vkr/Saturday_Live_31_07_2010/

I notice on Spotify that Tom Waits also chose this song for his 'Jukebox' album.

Other versions worth listening to on Spotify include those by UB40, Jeff Buckley, Nina Simone and Wynton Marsalis.


http://www.legacy.com/ns/fullstory.aspx?storytype=1&storyid=38

.................................................

Calls To Action

I often forget to read it myself, so I need to remind myself as much as anyone else to go to Raj Patel's website regularly  - http://rajpatel.org/

There's currently plenty of good stuff on such subjects as G20, South Africa, McDonald's and 'Cheaponomics'.

Also a reminder to buy his book 'The Value of Nothing'.

It's also worth clicking on his RSS feed.

........................................................

Patel constantly brings up inconvenient truths, and on good days so does the Guardian:

The Spirit Level: Spooking the right

Even though its great sweep invites all manner of sceptical questions, this book's inconvenient truths must be faced

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/26/the-spirit-level-society-criticism

I reckon the dividing line between left and right in politics is whether or not you want to see greater equality, even if it's for purely utilitarian and pragmatic reasons. For the left, the Spirit Level was a seminal book. A recent Guardian editorial said:

It was briefly fashionable for modernising Conservatives, up to and including David Cameron, to demonstrate their progressive credentials by giving a nod to The Spirit Level, a book by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett which traced a range of social sicknesses back to economic inequality. Suddenly, however, the rightwing thinktanks are circling. Both the Taxpayers' Alliance and Policy Exchange have attempted detailed demolition jobs, egged on from across the Atlantic by the Wall Street Journal and by another attack published under the auspices of the Washington-based Democracy Institute.

To recap: The Spirit Level charted a connection between the income gap and everything from crime to illness and under-education. Its great sweep quite properly invited all manner of sceptical questions. There were, as always in social science, disputes about whether causation and correlation were being confused . . . Thoughtful sceptics like David Runciman accepted the evidence marshalled about the damage done further down the heap as "overwhelming".

The combined forces suddenly being ranged against the book are now, however, of a very different nature. The titles of the anti-egalitarian studies – which refer variously to The Spirit Level's "delusion", "illusion" and its "false prophesy" – reveal the polemical intent, a telling contrast with the meticulous subtitle of the original book: "Why more equal societies almost always do better."

The Spirit Level did not claim to explain every social problem. Rather, it explicitly restricted itself to those societal ills which blight the lives of the lower classes more than they do the rest.

After a budget that made the poor poorer, it should be no surprise that some want to see that insight buried. Yet to emerge from stricken times without breaking Britain, The Spirit Level's inconvenient truths must be faced.

.....................................................

Also in the paper recently:

Right to Work: In search of a new slogan

In the face of cuts, trade unions are demanding the 'right to work'. Better to rethink work altogether

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/29/right-to-work-recession-women-at-work

by Nina Power

In 1972 Selma James, founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign  and, more recently, Global Women's Strike, wrote the following: "We demand the right to work less." Her reasoning was clear – when women work for a wage for 40 hours a week and still carry the weight of childcare and housework, what is the moral value in expecting them to toil away at the cost of their health and happiness? Why should anyone, male or female, work more than 20 hours a week?

Should we be clinging on to employment at any cost, or should we instead be reconsidering what it means to work at all?

When James demanded that everyone "work less", it was part of a set of proposals that included a guaranteed income for everyone, equal pay and free, community-run nurseries and childcare.

Making clear the link between housework and paid work, such that unwaged labour must be counted as work and rewarded as such, James's vision is an integrated picture of the relation between (human) reproduction and (industrial) production.

The mass entry of women into the workforce has corresponded with an overall stagnation or diminution of wages. It is as if employers have taken the very worst aspects of women's work in the past – poorly paid, precarious, without benefits – and applied it to almost everyone, except those at the very top, who remain overwhelmingly male and incomprehensibly rich.

This is equality as a race to the bottom. Feminism is not wrong to see the economic autonomy of women as central to their political and social freedom, but we do a disservice to its aims if we believe that it is enough to have a job, regardless of what it is.

The Right to Work campaign, although vital, plays into this attitude that work is the ultimate mark of a man or, in more recent decades, a woman too.

Thinking of a world with less but better work, or even no work at all (as we currently understand it), particularly in the midst of an economic crisis, is impractical, of course. Yet thinking about alternatives to the current system, however unfathomable, may help us to break with much that is wrong about our everyday existence. In Italy in the 1970s, workers under the banner of a "refusal of work" shut down noxious chemical plants and paid only what they felt was appropriate for their utilities bills. This perhaps seems quite mad today, but it is a lot more fulfilling than working even harder for less so that those at the top can keep more.

Nina Power is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Roehampton University and the author of One-Dimensional Woman.

See also an excellent piece she wrote on the study of philosophy:

A blow to philosophy, and minorities

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/29/philosophy-minorities-middleqsex-university-logic

Under the banner of the financial crisis, recent months have seen management threaten departments and jobs  in post-92 and Russell group universities alike. Although no clear national pattern of cuts has emerged, philosophy has been singled out by several institutions. Threats to philosophy at Liverpool and King's College London  were greeted with international outcry and management retreat. Recent news that philosophy recruitment at both undergraduate and postgraduate level at Middlesex University  will be terminated is a particularly terrible blow, both to the standing of philosophy in the UK and to the future of critical thought in our universities as a whole.

Interest in philosophy has in fact grown massively in recent years. This is, in part, due to the increased numbers of students taking A-level philosophy, but is also the result of the widespread desire for critical thought and analysis in the face of an increasingly disorienting world.

Closure at Middlesex would be a step back to the bad old days when philosophy meant a few young, white and almost entirely male students at privileged institutions discussing the finer points of formal logic over sherry. Middlesex University must be prevented from dismantling one of the finest philosophy departments in the country: fight to keep philosophy alive.

........................................

Schumacher Sorry . . .

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/8878400.stm

........................................


TV Highlights and Lowlife: "Human Life Has No Meaning Here"

Channel 4 ran two major hour long documentaries last night back to back - one on Britain's drugs culture and our hopeless attempts to ban drugs, and the other on the London Hospital's A & E department in Whitechapel and how it deals with the victims of knife crime.

On one level you can say the common denominator in these programmes was drugs, since most knife crime is committed by kids who are pissed or otherwise drugged up, or taking care of their drug businesses.

The excessive use of drugs, and addiction to drugs, however, is clearly just a symptom of people who are spiritually and emotionally sick and incapable of living life in any enlightened way. This type of sickness stems from a failure to develop positive spiritual and emotional intelligence, and what we can call human 'values'. People who are high in spiritual and emotional intelligence are incapable of committing knife crime, and by definition are not habitual users of debilitating drugs. Neither are they capable of inducing others to use drugs, including in some cases their own children.

So the only proper way to rid society of drug addiction and knife crime is to, on the one hand, eliminate poverty and hopelessness, and alongside of that to enable children of all ages to develop high levels of emotional, social and spiritual intelligence.

The problem, however, is that our society is light years away from doing either of these things, especially as virtually no-one understands how to work with children either from regular homes or from at-risk families living in drug-ridden communities in order to ensure they develop these key intelligences.

Virtually no-one understands how those intelligences operate, and hardly anyone has any experience of working in schools in ways that develop those intelligences to high levels, by focusing on them day in and day out. It's doable, but hardly anyone sees the need to do it, and there are far too few teachers who are equipped and trained to do it, or operate to policies in schools that prioritise it. Virtually no schools prioritise the development of emotional, social and spiritual intelligences, since they're too busy 'driving up' academic 'standards' and pass rates.
.....................................

And Finally . . .

Rev 'rather good' says Archbishop of Canterbury

Senior church figures flock to praise BBC2 comedy series, which finishes its six-week run tomorrow night

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2010/aug/01/senior-church-figures-rev-bbc

In the beginning was the script. And it was good. So good that it attracted an audience of two million every week to become the highest rating new comedy on BBC2.

A spokesman for the Church of England said it was great to see a church drama on television that did not resort to tired old stereotypes" and instead gave "an edgy insight" into the work of its clergy today.

"Clergy are incredibly gossipy; people don't realise that. It's a radical act to show vicars as human, people expect them to be paragons of patience and virtue. Just like all of us, they are vain, weak and ambitious."

The show, which has attracted more viewers than Big Brother in some weeks, reveals the jealousy, bitterness and rivalry that can exist in clerical circles. One episode is devoted to a "media vicar" who appears on quiz shows, newspaper columns and Thought for the Day.

Last Saturday's Mail magazine even featured the programme on its front page.

.

Layer 228 . . . Life Begins At . . .

.
Remember when people used to talk about life beginning at 40? Channel 4 are currently running a series of programmes called Life Begins at 60.

I guess the meaning of this expression used to be that after passing the age of 40 people usually had more confidence, more money, more opportunities for self-expression and enjoyment, etc. Child rearing used to be pretty much over by that age, and more freedom and autonomy were potentially on offer. Even if you were still responsible for kids, they were normally past the stage of needing constant attention and supervision by the time you reached 40.

Of course life could still be wonderful before the age of 40, but as a young(ish) adult you were still in many ways a work in progress, and not fully formed. Becoming a mature human being, and possibly at one with yourself and the world - self-actualised as it were - was something to look forward to, and a thing to appreciate when you got there.

With the passing of the decades and the Americanisation of our society, people tend to work harder, commute further, work longer hours and become more exhausted. These days many people no longer feel in control of their lives, as they career ever-onward with their careers and their busy, busy existences, getting and spending money, trying to keep their heads above water.

For many people these days a new life can begin at 60(ish), in the sense that post-retirement they can finally get out of the rat race and start to fully enjoy their lives. Not having to spend time doing zillions of things you'd much rather not be doing, you can finally focus on the things that really matter, whatever they may be. Even for those who love their work, their profession and their careers, there can be a huge benefit in starting to live differently, away from a lifetime of duties and responsibilities.

I mentioned in Layer 226 Jeff Koons's remark, “We should follow our interests and focus on them. There's nothing else you can do in life.” Which is all very well, but being a committed professional, or just someone who's trying earn money so that their family can live well, may well mean that many other interests have to fall by the wayside. Post-retirement, people really can follow their true interests, whether or not they're able to make money from them.

http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2009/11/layer-226-thick-of-it-game-of-politics.html

…............................................

How much money is enough?
By Robert Skidelsky

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/22/maynard-keynes-wealth-economics

In 1930, Keynes predicted that by 2030, we'd be working a 15-hour week. But he underestimated our appetite for wealth

The economic downturn has produced an explosion of popular anger against bankers' "greed" and their "obscene" bonuses. This has accompanied a wider critique of "growthmanship" – the pursuit of economic growth or the accumulation of wealth at all costs, regardless of the damage it may do to the earth's environment or to shared values.

John Maynard Keynes addressed this issue in 1930, in his little essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren". Keynes predicted that in 100 years – that is, by 2030 – growth in the developed world would, in effect, have stopped, because people would "have enough" to lead the "good life." Hours of paid work would fall to three a day – a 15-hour week. Human beings would be more like the "lilies of the field, who toil not, neither do they spin."

Keynes's prediction rested on the assumption that, with a 2% annual increase in capital, a 1% increase in productivity, and a stable population, average standards of living would rise eight times on average. This enables us to work out how much Keynes thought was "enough." GDP per head in the United Kingdom in the late 1920s (before the 1929 crash) was roughly £5,200 ($8,700) in today's value. Accordingly, he estimated that a GDP per capita of roughly £40,000 ($66,000) would be "enough" for humans to turn their attention to more agreeable things.

It is not clear why Keynes thought eight times the average British national income per head would be "enough." Most likely he took as his standard of sufficiency the bourgeois rentier income of his day, which was about 10 times that of the average worker.

Eighty years on, the developed world has approached Keynes's goal. In 2007 (ie, pre-crash), the IMF reported that average GDP per head in the United States stood at $47,000, and at $46,000 in the UK. In other words, the UK has had a five-fold increase in living standards since 1930.

It is likely that Keynes's "target" of $66,000 will be achieved for most western countries by 2030.

But it is equally unlikely that this achievement will end the insatiable hunt for more money. Let's assume, cautiously, that we are two-thirds of the way towards Keynes's target. We might therefore have expected hours of work to have fallen by about two-thirds. In fact they have fallen by only one-third – and have stopped falling since the 1980s.

This makes it highly improbable that we will reach the three-hour working day by 2030. It is also unlikely that growth will stop – unless nature itself calls a halt. People will continue to trade leisure for higher incomes.
Keynes underestimated the weight of “relative” needs, especially as societies got richer, and, of course, the power of advertising to create new wants, and thus induce people to work in order to earn the money to satisfy them. As long as consumption is conspicuous and competitive, there will continue to be fresh reasons to work.

Keynes did not entirely ignore the social character of work. "It will remain reasonable," he wrote, "to be economically purposive for others after it has ceased to be reasonable for oneself." The wealthy had a duty to help the poor.

Keynes did not really confront the problem of what most people would do when they no longer needed to work. He writes: "It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional economy." But, since most of the rich – "those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties" have "failed disastrously" to live the "good life," why should those who are currently poor do any better?

Here I think Keynes comes closest to answering the question of why his "enough" will not, in fact, be enough. The accumulation of wealth, which should be a means to the "good life," becomes an end in itself because it destroys many of the things that make life worth living. Beyond a certain point – which most of the world is still far from having reached – the accumulation of wealth offers only substitute pleasures for the real losses to human relations that it exacts.

Finding the means to nourish the fading "associations or duties or ties" that are so essential for individuals to flourish is the unsolved problem of the developed world, and it is looming for the billions who have just stepped on to the growth ladder. George Orwell put it well: "All progress is seen to be a frantic struggle towards an objective which you hope and pray will never be reached."

….......................................................

There are several interesting responses to this on the Guardian's CiF, including,

gloriana

I would love an explanation from Dr Skidelsky -- or anyone else -- of the apparently insatiable need of the rich to acquire more and more wealth. What human being, what family even, needs billions of dollars or pounds to live a good, comfortable, secure, even luxurious life? There seems to be something which impels millionaires and billionaires to go on adding to their fortunes ad infinitum -- or perhaps I should say ad nauseam -- regardless of how much actual use it can be to them.
This does not arise from envy on my part -- at nearly 80 I have enough money for my needs and don't want any more. I am just intensely curious and desirous of understanding this strange phenomenon.

princesschipchops

I know quite a few people earning what I consider large amounts of money. None of them are particularly happy but they are all considerably happier than the people I know who are living on paltry benefits and being treated like criminals by the DWP.

The happiest I know (not a scientific survey obviously) are those who have medium or even low - but not appallingly low - incomes and time to spend on family and friends.

As someone who has been forced out of the rat race by illness I know when I re join it it will be on a part time basis and hopefully doing something that I enjoy.

We only have one life. Unfortunately those struggling to earn more and more and more and voting to keep more and more of that wealth all to themselves are not only ruining their own lives - they are messing it up for the rest of us.

.