The sleep of reason

The expression ‘post-truth politics’ is one which I have only just become aware of, and I am not sure who coined it. The earliest usage I have found is an article about the 2012 US presidential election (Parmar, 2012) but it seems to already have been a term in use at that time.

It has come to the fore in the UK now as people begin to reflect upon the EU Referendum. Since the vote is being held today I don’t know what the outcome will be but the polls suggest the result will be close. Much of the campaign has employed familiar techniques of political rhetoric which inevitably include partial facts, selective interpretations, spinning and sloganizing of all sorts. But it has also seen repeated lies told, especially those which I have written about before concerning the size of the UK budget contribution to the EU and the assertion that Turkey is joining the EU.

It is not that telling lies in politics is new, and it isn’t that which in itself constitutes post-truth politics. It is the sense that the truth does not even matter, or that there is not even a truth to be told and, therefore, that it is meaningless to speak of lies being told. The political roots of that in the UK are associated in my mind, at least, with the way that the case was made for the Iraq War in 2003 and, more generally, with the newly relentless emphasis on ‘news management’ by the New Labour governments.

There was nothing new about spin either, of course, but this was something different. In particular, one of Tony Blair’s distinctive skills when in difficulty was to ‘break through the fourth wall’. This expression, derived from the theatre, refers to an actor speaking directly to the audience and in the process revealing the artifice of the stage. It’s just a play, after all – which we already know, but suspend our knowledge of until that knowledge is shattered. In politics this has the effect of simultaneously acknowledging but re-enforcing the idea that it is all just a game.

For skilled politicians like Blair this is a strangely disarming way of having the cake of playing the game whilst eating the cake of ironized authenticity. The blustering humour of politicians like Donald Trump or, in the Referendum context, Boris Johnson when ‘caught out’ in some particularly preposterous claim is somewhat similar. It draws the audience into a knowing acknowledgment of artifice, whilst inviting applause for the actor’s ‘honesty’ in exposing it. It’s this, rather than the telling of lies as such, which defines post-truth (and therefore post-lie) politics.

The intellectual roots of post-truth may lie with a (bowdlerized) version of post-modernism or of social constructionism: there is no truth, only interpretations. Something like this is apparent in the way that the campaign has been covered by the BBC, in particular, where a commitment to ‘balance’ has meant that every claim by one side has always been accompanied by a report of a counter-claim from the other. Again there is no truth, just opposing representations of truth; thus for every five minutes airtime saying that Turkey is not joining the EU there must be five minutes of airtime saying the opposite. Never mind that Turkey is not, as a matter of fact, joining the EU. I had a conversation at the weekend with someone about the EU debate and she suggested that whatever the facts about – in this particular conversation – immigration these didn’t matter for those concerned about it since what they claimed to be the facts were ‘true for them’ and that was what mattered.

If that is so then we have to give up on any sense of rationality in political discourse, and indeed the campaign can be read as a kind of battle between rational and post-truth politics. Thus the remain campaign deployed endless statements from various experts in economics, trade, security and so on. In response, leading leave campaigner Michael Gove opined that “the people of this country have had enough of experts”. Incredibly, he subsequently compared pro-Brexit experts to the Nazis using scientific experts to denounce Einstein’s theories as wrong, in support of anti-semitic ideology. This from a former Education Minister!

Although usually less colourfully expressed, this trope of experts being in some way corrupt or untrustworthy has run through the leave campaign. It fits very neatly – like the rest of the leave campaign – with a populism in which ‘ordinary folk’ or consistently done down by ‘the elite’ – often, the ‘liberal elite’. The logic is completely circular – the evidence that they are the elite is that they disagree; the reason they disagree is that they are the elite. In this hermetically-sealed world anyone from global corporations to trade union leaders to ‘faceless bureaucrats’ to ‘the politically correct brigade’ to ‘so-called intellectuals’ are all part of an orchestrated conspiracy. Unless, of course, someone from one of these groups comes out in favour of the populist cause, at which point they become the fount of all wisdom, ‘courageously’ speaking out.

There is an interesting and important overlap between post-truth politics and the cosmopolitan and local split which I have talked about elsewhere. For the polling evidence suggests that views on EU membership are very clearly socially stratified: the more educated people are, the more likely they are to favour EU membership; the higher their social class (which is linked to educational level) the more likely they are to favour EU membership. As with Trump’s appeal, the cleavage is between those who gain from, or at least can cope with, globalization and those who suffer from its effects. In this way, post-truth politics are inextricably linked with the consequences of neo-liberalization. And in a way there is a connection between postmodern relativism and neo-liberalism: in the marketplace of ideas you pick the one that best expresses your economic interests.

These things probably connect with the media and social media culture in which ‘passion’ is the dominant value. Thus every game show contestant is judged on how passionately they want to win, just as post-truth politicians assure us of how passionate they are about their cause. What matters most is how strongly you feel. In that calculus, it is irrelevant whether what you feel is justified by evidence or argument; the strength of the feeling is its own validation. And why not? If, as my friend told me in the conversation I mentioned earlier, what matters is what people think is true then between all the different things that people think are true the only way to adjudicate between competing beliefs is the strength with which they are held.

But there are huge dangers here. The Spanish artist Francisco Goya captioned the most famous of his Los Caprichos etchings thus: “the sleep of reason brings forth monsters” (El sueño de la razón produce monstruos). This inspired the title of The Sleep of Reason (1968) a novel by C. P. Snow about whom I have written elsewhere on this blog. It is a reminder of the dangers of the abandonment of rationality, which are just as great as those of an over-attachment to rationality – dangers which include technocracy and totalitarianism. Tomorrow we will learn whether post-truth politics have won the EU Referendum but, even if it has not, its appeal and its consequences will not disappear.

 

References

Parmar, I. (2012). ‘US Presidential Election 2012: Post-truth Politics’, Political Insight 3 (2): 4-7
Snow, C.P. (1968). The Sleep of Reason. London: Macmillan.

Corridors of power

For what will probably be my final post of the year I return, as no doubt I will many times next year, when it is likely to be held, to the UK Referendum on EU membership. For those interested in the global economic context of organizations, but also in the way that decision making happens in both politics and organizations, the current ‘renegotiation’ is fascinating.

The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, is seeking to renegotiate the terms of UK membership so as to be able to recommend to the British people that they vote to remain in the EU. The terms he is seeking, even if achieved, will not in any way change the minds of those in his own party and beyond who are implacably opposed to EU membership. And although I disagree with their opposition, they are absolutely right to see the renegotiation as a charade. Even if it succeeds, it will not in any substantive way change the terms of membership. So what is it about?

The answer is that it will enable Cameron to say to his party and voters that a deal has been struck that they can support. The more there seem to be huge difficulties and conflicts over getting the deal, the better it will be in terms of making that case. This is widely understood within the political class, the media and informed observers. So the only way that it can be successful is by its appeal to those undecided and/or only mildly anti-EU voters not following events closely and who only tune in during the run-up to the referendum (currently widely expected to be held in June 2016). They will hear that there has been a fundamental change and – if things go to plan – will vote to stay in.

Since I am strongly in favour of Britain’s membership of the EU I hope this works. But it is a risky and in many ways unsatisfactory strategy. It’s risky for two reasons. First, if Cameron doesn’t get even the limited deal he is seeking it won’t have much credibility. Second, it’s by no means guaranteed that those voters it is designed to appeal to will hear this message, rather than that of the campaign to exit. But it’s unsatisfactory because it repeats the errors of the past in failing to make a positive case for EU membership, and just trying to bamboozle a semi-detached electorate into making a half-hearted choice.

Outside of the government, the embryonic campaigns are both, to varying degrees, in trouble. Neither is as yet a single organization (although that will change when the Electoral Commission identify and fund the campaign groups). The ‘in’ campaign is dominated by Lord Rose’s (former head of Marks and Spencer) rather dull, accounting approach, stressing the benefits of membership for businesses, although something more sparky and populist is offered by Alan Johnson’s leadership of the Labour Party’s campaign. And the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, remains at best lukewarm on British membership, a major danger for the ‘in’ campaign. Meanwhile the ‘out’ campaign is openly wracked by conflict between rival groups, a key issue being the extent to which Nigel Farage, the populist but divisive anti-immigration leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) will figure. Just today, UKIP’s only MP suggested that Farage should stand down as his party’s leader.

As readers of this blog will know, I was recently in Paris and whilst there had several conversations with people who expressed bemusement at the fact that this debate was even happening in Britain, and certainty that the outcome would be a vote to stay in. I am not sure that this is true, or at least that the vote will be decisive enough to prevent the question to continue to be raised. Opinion polls suggest that the result will be very close, although there is an interesting divide between internet polls (suggesting a close result) and telephone polls (suggesting an easy win for the stay in campaign). This may reflect the fact that the anti-EU movement (at least as regards UKIP) has a very well-organized online presence, and that views within the general population are rather different. It also seems likely that, unsurprisingly, the answer depends on how the question is asked.

Leaving aside the EU issue, I’m struck by how much of this has parallels with how decisions get made in organizations. Often there is a small group of highly involved and committed people on different sides of the argument, and a larger group of more or less uninterested or ambivalent people. Similar techniques are used of taking decisions and discussions to various forums and then bringing them to other bodies to make a final decision, with all the detail having been decided elsewhere. It is a perennially fascinating process about which much has been written in the organization studies literature. But, to bang on about another of my hobby horses, nowhere more insightfully than in the novels of C.P. Snow such as his 1964 masterpiece Corridors of Power.

As I said earlier, I will for sure be returning to these issues in 2016. In the meantime, a very Happy Christmas and New Year to all those reading this blog.

The joy of escapism

In the hope of lightening the mood compared with my previous post, and indeed with the increasing darkness of the current news agenda, today I offer something completely different. At the risk of slight personal embarrassment I want to share with readers of this blog some things I have written for a very different blog, namely the World of Blyton. This is one of a number of sites devoted to the life and work of the British children’s author Enid Blyton.

Although sometimes derided for her writing skills and criticised for her sexist, racist and classist descriptions, Blyton was the best-selling children’s author of the twentieth century and is still the all-time eighth best-selling writer of fiction. Anyway, I’m not particularly concerned to try to defend or attack her reputation. For me, it’s mainly just that I read her books as a child and so they retain a cosy and comforting feel. In this way they are indeed an antidote to and escape from current events. For that matter, I find a certain magic in re-reading many other authors I read as a child. And, more generally, I think that re-reading is underrated. I routinely re-read novels (less so non-fiction) and gain much from it. Occasionally, with really special books, I re-read them immediately I finish them, a recent example being Allan Massie’s stunning moral meditation A Question of Loyalties. Some novels, such as those of C.P. Snow, I have read perhaps a couple of hundred times without tiring of them.

Anyway, back to Blyton. On my World Of Blyton contributor page you will find some eleven posts written between 2014 and 2015. Most are book reviews, one explains why I love re-reading her work, one is about how reading her books in translation has helped me learn French and one – my favourite – is a silly joke that I can’t begin to summarise here.

Is there any connection to organization studies? Well, yes there is. Some years ago I wrote a book chapter (Grey, 1998) about the ways that organization is represented in traditional children’s literature. I focussed on three series of books: Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series, Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings series and Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series. It has sunk almost without trace, but the argument was that such books are an aspect in socializing children into how the organizational world works. In the case of the Famous Five series, I suggested that it offered a template of the patriarchal group.

I think that there is some mileage in that argument, but the truth, of course, is that I wrote the chapter as a way of writing about some books that I loved, just as I did for Snow's novels (Grey, 1996), academic journals being more forgiving in those days. I also love, and occasionally re-read, the works of P.G. Wodehouse, of which in 1961 Evelyn Waugh said: “Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in”.

That sentiment captures my own feeling about Wodehouse, and Blyton and all the others. Escapist it may be, but from time to time as the guns fire and the bombs explode a little escapism is nothing to be ashamed of.

References

Grey, C. (1996) 'C.P. Snow's Fictional Sociology of Management and Organizations', Organization 3 (1): 61-83.

Grey, C. (1998) ‘Child’s Play: Representations of Organization in Children’s Literature’ in Hassard, J. & Holliday, R. (eds) Organization/Representation: Work and Organizations in Popular Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 131-148

C.P. Snow and the drama of administration

Some years, in fact almost two decades, ago I wrote an academic paper about what the novels of C.P Snow could tell us about management and organizations (Grey, 1996). Little-cited and presumably little-read, it has sunk without trace but I was thinking about it again because I have just come across an old (and largely excellent) TV adaptation of his novels and have been watching the DVD.

Snow is nowadays an almost forgotten novelist, but in the 1950s and 1960s was both popular and widely admired, even being tipped for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is most remembered now for his 1959 lecture on The Two Cultures of arts and science, and the gap between them; a lecture savagely attacked by the now perhaps even more obscure but then gargantuan figure F.R. Leavis. Actually I find this rather uninteresting, whereas his almost entirely forgotten 1961 Harvard lectures on Science and Government are fascinating. Anyway his main novelistic achievement was the eleven volume Strangers and Brothers series, and it is the adaptation of this that I have been watching. Over three million words long, Snow's is one of the most remarkable roman-fleuve ever produced in the English language, standing alongside his hero's Trollope's Barchester novels and his contemporary Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time sequence.

Snow (1905-1980) started life as a physicist but subsequently became a senior civil servant, involved amongst other things in the British atomic bomb project, and later a government minister for technology in the 1960s. All of this and more gets fictionalised in the novel sequence. I have read, and re-read, his novels since I was in my teens and I suspect that part of the reason for my interest in organizations stems from this. I was thrilled when researching a book on Bletchley Park to discover that Snow had been involved in recruiting some of its staff.

The novels are at least in part about the drama of administration, with an emphasis on decisions made within closed groups – sometimes a Cambridge College, as in perhaps his best novel The Masters, other times government – and the meetings, negotiations and small-p political manoeuvring that surrounds them. He coined the phrase, and used it as the title of one his novels, ‘corridors of power’ which has now entered the language and which sums up this theme of his work.

It may seem odd to call this a drama. After all, administration conjures up anything other than a dramatic image. Yet Snow shows how within the mundane transactions of organizational life, drama may be found. And this is not just about personal interactions. Always in Snow there is a mixture of the personal and the big-P Political: for example the Cold War in Corridors of Power (about an attempt to pursue a policy of British nuclear disarmament) and The New Men (about the development of the British atomic bomb in and after the Second World War).

There are many aspects of the novels which are of interest in terms of organizations, especially the treatment of small, powerful groups, which I explored in that 1996 article. Perhaps especially interesting is his repeated view that policy and strategy arise not from the grand designs of leaders but from what he called – using a physics metaphor – the Brownian motion of a myriad of minor decisions. That is a useful corrective to the current lionization of leadership and a validation of close attention to the detailed processes of organizational life.

The context of Snow’s novels is rather dated and specific – they depict a slice of English (not even British) life in the mid-20^th century which is now rather obscure. Even so, my own experiences both in Cambridge, when I worked there, and in Whitehall, where I have sometimes had peripheral involvement, suggest that perhaps not so much has changed, at least in England. And beyond that many of his insights, particularly into small-group interactions, transcend time and place.

I don’t suppose that Snow was a great novelist, and he will probably never reclaim his former status as a popular novelist and public intellectual. Nevertheless, anyone wanting to understand either English society in the mid-20^th century or, more pertinently to this blog, the more-or-less timeless nature of organizational power-play could do no better than to read Snow’s novels.

 

References

Grey, C. (1996) ‘C.P. Snow’s Fictional Sociology of Management and Organizations’, Organization 3, 1: 61-83.

For an introduction to Snow’s novels, see:

Tredell, N. (2012) C.P. Snow. The Dynamics of Hope. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

For what is still the best analytical account of Snow and his novels see:

Ramanathan, S. (1978) The Novels of C.P. Snow. London: Macmillan.

Surprisingly, there has been no proper biography of Snow, but his brother’s memoir is worth reading:

Snow, P. (1982) Stranger and Brother. A Portrait of C.P Snow. London: Macmillan.