THE UK’S INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY is a holy trinity of efficiency, jobs, prosperity. A sugar, salt and fats hit to the national bloodstream. But industry is not a magical answer to communities. And putting to death the manufacturing mirage is Rasputin-like. New manufacturing requires eye-watering complexity, beyond the UK’s capability. Our favourite nemesis, due to its manufacturing endurance, Germany, is now running into a bureaucratic quagmire, its conservativism resisting transition to new economies.

But hope springs in a return to adjusting other national strategies, not least developing management executives with an improved blend of the symbolic and literal. Our pragmatism, in the shape of urgent-dogmas, like efficiency, over and above strategic vision, has produced recipe-mindsets. Belief in ‘evidence-based technique’, like the Russian mystic himself, will not die easily.

The global dominance of US firms is one thing, but what marks out the ‘US organisation’ is its longevity. Its ability to manage performance over long cycles. This is not due to the absolutism of any dogma, but rather long-term investment in strategic management and leadership. This well-recorded skills gap in UK boardrooms has left us nursing a 120-year decline.

The need to speak into the difficult, the complex and the contradictory remains. The UK’s technocratic boardroom requires re-balancing. Cyril Connolly, critic, might have put it that this mixed approach is a ‘pollen fertilising a new generation’. Anti-long-termism is deep-seated in the English psyche. But a new élan vital will be necessary to transcend performance-politics and its failure to craft a UK grand economic strategy.

For a diverting example of the tension between the symbolic and literal, the stage ruckus at last year’s Oscars echoed two forgotten incidents. Live on British TV, in 1963, Desmond Leslie struck broadcaster Bernard Levin. Levin’s tabloid review of Leslie’s wife’s stage show, Savagery and Delight, was unflattering. 

The other ugly moment was John Grigg emerging from London’s Television House on an August evening in 1957, and Philip Burbidge slapping him across the face. Grigg had written that Queen Elizabeth II was: “priggish… captain of the hockey team, a prefect”. Burbidge, a reactionary patriot, argued these criticisms injured British post-war recovery. There was scorn for Grigg, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Australian Prime Minister.

But Grigg was no anti-monarchist. He was Lord Altrincham, distinguished WWII Guards officer. Thirty years later the Queen’s private secretary, Martin Charteris, thanked Grigg publicly for his remarks. It nudged monarchy to adjust.

Grigg wrote it was tradition that demanded his voice. “Shinto-style” worship of monarchy is a popularist phenomenon, undermining legitimacy.  Here was an interface between the ancient symbolic and modern literal. Grigg’s writing carried a marriage between literal and symbolic worlds, seeing little separation; versus Burbidge who planted a country flag in modern territory. Out of the two stark moments who was fully participatory in a changing world, and conscious of its complexities?

Cyril Connolly asked at the end of the 1930s what new literature would stand around for the next ten years. What qualities will carry ‘the good’ into the future, and what are we “unnaturally” praising that will not stand the test of time?

The answer from tradition is action which has the literal and symbolic mixed within them. The ability to see the microcosm and macrocosm in a relationship. He spotted T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats were a good bet. We ask now what speech, mood, worlds provide a genuine context.

The ordered and apparently coherent worlds of Old Diplomacy, the pre-war period, and the statecraft of post-war reconstruction, contained the seeds of our world of scrabble-politics and recipe-management. The rules-based American establishment was caught in similar frenzy to Britain. Britain saw re-ordering of its social-contract, its top-tier aristocracy and establishment-religion sliding out of mainstream influence. As such we have gradually shifted to the modern literal where an expertocracy narrow channels of thought.

This has meant opportunism fights strategy; ‘the professional’ pokes mandarins; the technocrat bars intellectuals. America’s old guard termed this an ‘attack of the primitives’. Literary criticism has disappeared as a halter on hack-journalism. The commentariat give little space, moving from one trench to the next.

These are tussles of geopolitical sentiment. New Zealand writer Gordon McLauchlan, in The Passionless People, attacked his own people as “smiling zombies, the living dead but happy enough about it, even smug”. Literal hopefulness misses the arcane world. New leadership inserts the humanness of leading, necessarily, but does not join it to grand doctrines.

The current UK political class is difficult to satirise. When satire no longer works, unthinking deference to small ideas has been at work for too long.

There are major reforms pending in the UK, from health to welfare, but we do not know yet what ‘big ideas’ will underpin. Politics suffers from its shrunken vocabulary. Literalism has made it harder to speak into the complex.

The doctrine of the literal says it is alright to act without any commitment to understanding our place in the universe. And this is where much pain arises, as the literal modern acts with full commitment but not from where they think they are in the universe.

Grigg, and his type of private conscience, has been overwhelmed by the noise of popularist opinion. Despite Britain’s ancient and modern governance being unique amongst liberal democracies. At stake currently is our participation in the universe. Can we locate ourselves properly and fully, in order to engage with sufficient confidence?

The British admixture of medieval monarchy and modern nation-state make Britain a royal republic (old and new). The English ‘revolution’ was 140 years ‘ahead’ of France’s. Monarchy was conceived in a mythic space, where notions of time and space as territory were little known. Medieval minds were also occupied with heavenly cosmologies, imaginations.

Enlightenment thought, along with modern map-making, offered new images of the world from the 15^th century onwards. The emergence of international sovereign territory, with its boundaries, came to offer physical space as more real than imagined. The modern nation-state emerged out of a medieval fog of ambiguous authority, city states and village clamour.

Burbidge was really slapping Grigg with a territory map. Grigg appealed to tradition’s multipolar transcendent reference points, beyond geography. And the doctrines that emerge from modern literal consciousness can take on a life of their own.

Western business has suffered similar challenges of imagination and boundaries. The tradition of trading exchange (mercantilism), floating values, porous boundaries, has gradually fallen under the growth of institutional regulation, bureaucratic fixity and Fordist hierarchy.

We sometimes refer to these tensions under the amorphous term: Globalisation. Badly defined it means internationalisation of trade. This underplays its usefulness. A more compelling development is:

Modern globalisation is the spread of two contradictory aspects of modernity, solid and liquid. The term ‘modernity’ (modernité) was first used in Charles Baudelaire’s essay The Painter of Modern Life in 1863. Society no longer ‘tattoos’ us with its traditions; we wake, paint ourselves as we choose. The Latin root of modern is modus, meaning now, used in the fifth century to mark the Christian-era as emergent from a pagan world. So ‘the new’ is always popping up in the ancient. It is not new.

So what of solid modernity? This is a perception of progress through replacing tradition’s symbols (mythology) with an administrative logos (rational literalism) e.g. rules-based economies i.e. nation-states and their first agents, institutions. With their consequent reduction in the participation of the citizen.

Our primitive pre-logical intuition formed from immediate participation with the world, gradually was replaced by the state’s agents framing our exchanges with each other. The chaos of modernity, ripping up the agrarian rhythms of natured time and space, replaced by the legal state (nations as a collection of laws). The world of demarked time and space, required categoric language: category speechness, we might say.

Liquid modernity? Erosion of national boundaries so institutions and communities can by-pass solid modernity’s vertical structures and interact. In fact, a cry from tradition, to restore a multipolar mix of the symbolic and literal. A neo-medieval appeal.

We can put aside the notion of post-modern (loss of shared meaning, and thereby end of participation in the world) as people are participatory in modernity. They desire its technology, and, no longer wish to exit shared consciousness, but rather re-enter as participants. They are wedded to domesticated lives. The post-modernists’ view of language as dis-locating has received an interesting rebuttal. That language works well within boundaries e.g. cities. Wherever we go we pull down shared meaning which allows us to enter into participation.  

What has this meant for firm strategy? Solid-modernity has gradually, and unwittingly, produced the doctrine of The Efficiency State. Modern management focused on progress as speed and scale. Language as functional rather than structural. Meaning it is partly language that drives institutional separations of activity. Economics prefers its vocabulary-set, and gets confused when sitting down with foreign policy’s lexicon.

From solid-era cottage-industry, to factory, to Ford’s production line, to lean integrated extended global supply chains, the efficiency fly-wheel has spun faster, not least in literal and categoric minds, susceptible to solid modernity’s reductions. Modernity requires its officer ‘to see’ activity, and map it, often ponderously.

You will recall the doctrine of critical mass and economies of scale that dominated the industrial era up until the 90s. The acquisition-as-growth, asset stripping, shareholder-value of the 80s.

And the ultra-lean philosophy of the 21^st century. The latter driven by the astonishing spread of liberalising democracies and willingness of China et al to serve as factories-to-the-world, taking care of the labour-intensive low value activity.

Business models have tended to remain imagined as left-to-right transformation models, from the 19^th century. Raw materials arrive, executives determine how value is increased, with the consumer at the end of the process, who may or may not choose to buy. Speeding this continuum is inevitable.

This was the Era of Modern Management. Observable movement of capital, its deployment. And management had a quasi-religious status i.e. the executive as oracle and arch-functionalist.

The doctrine of efficiency, super-integrated supply chains, the world as an ever-expanding open space, now had its educated executives, with analytical philosophies promoted by scientific management from the American school.

The left-to-right model, with management oversight, started to change with the advent of the Internet. Relatively quickly the consumer no longer appeared only at the end of the supply chain.

They started to know more about products than the sales team, with inventories visible online. Amazon’s retail website meant consumers were interacting with product before it was manufactured. The consumer entered the creative process without executive control (in overplayed jargon, co-created).

Coupled with capital flowing at the speed of light, markets moved from observable managed processes to increasingly biological ecosystems. Imagined more than plotted. Management as a concept has yet to catch-up.

The traditional balance between labour and capital is being lost, as globalised capital disproportionately gains higher returns. Adam Smith did not envision monopolies and the modern money society, but conceived a natural moral effect of free markets.

The steady erosion of national boundaries following the Berlin Wall’s demise freed up liquid-modern globalisation; an appeal for a neo-medieval world, a network society, ambiguous, boundaryless, dis-integrated. This is the tug of tradition, the desire to root time and space back into the domestic dullness of ordinary life, free from modern order.

As a result we are in an economic re-set. But critically how does firm governance react to biologically behaving markets, and the loss of ‘managed economies’. Britain finds itself at this interesting crossroads. The extreme limit of solid modern progress, and planned economy has been reached, embodied in the European Union. It was meant to be a supranational entity (organic sharing across member states), but became The Super State, and ran into the ‘collective intuition’ of the hi-sea-faring, globally-minded, provincial English.

The future then is a re-entry of the non-participatory citizen and business into the fray of politics and geopolitics.

What is interesting is that the shadow of our working-class communities, their enduring cultural features, are that they mixed the literal and symbolic more naturally than the still nascent middle-class. The working-class is an enduring culture. It is really still there, not as a collectivised body, or movement, but in cultural linguistic terms. The middle-class has no culture to speak of. No natural language-set. They have capital, equity, aspiration of a kind, but no criss-crossing cultural roots; so draw on working-class legacy, to borrow symbolic meaning.

The middle-class populate technocratic roles. It is a syncretic class, borrowing from ‘all over the place’ to establish itself. The British middle-class to some degree is arriving into the American middle of the 1960s. As Britain adopts America’s money-society, narrowing its class-ladder, it has also adopted its: “bone-breaking burden of selfhood and self-development…” (Herzog, Saul Bellow’s creation, explores the educated middle space of 60s America, with its multiple paths.) Such is the nature of ‘excessive rationality’, leaning us towards the literal and visible, at the cost of wider meaning.

Philip Roth, recorder of American provincialism, offers also the interface between modern educated characters and their small-town settings. Britain has borrowed its post-war consciousness from American optimism without spotting the US is a “frontier tradition, accepting the democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard…” (The Human Stain). What the British middle has missed is this process led to depoliticisation, and a loss of the symbolic. Grigg’s arguments about change were located in a 1950s Britain that had still, then, a grand synthesis. His remarks could be located within a whole. Any new synthesis can only be established locally. The patchwork of institutions that oversaw and managed British decline has to enable differently, and allow its communities to construct new syntheses.

Having drawn on odd voices of Connolly and Grigg, risking fogey-eccentricity, they need odd balancing with Conor Cruise O’Brien’s. He countered directive voices with a recognition that for all their good, he remained in favour of concepts that included: “freedom of speech and of the press, academic freedom, independent judgement and independent judges”, than urgent ‘mobilising forces’. The rational force to ‘get there’ has meant popularism. This brought in leaders tempted to participate in “monolithic lie-structures”, but for no obvious purpose. The long-term value of “time-lagging” symbolism against the over-rationalising industrial ‘advanced countries’ is worth our re-engagement. Literalism gets people into a knot.

HARRY and Meghan’s docuseries is the first fully-formed independent critique from within this normally well-managed monarchy. Its impact is inevitable. Largely as the British constitution is discourse-based, and any new narrative will be felt keenly. That is, the constitution is referent to the long-text of British history. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s rostrum, Netflix, found a mass audience. Diana, Princess of Wales’s 1995 first-person-account was with the BBC’s Panorama TV programme. A late-evening gotcha format for the serious-minded.

Meghan, especially, embodies the rights of freeborn ‘Englishwomen’ everywhere. America continued a tradition of English expressiveness that we have steadily lost. The US spirit instinctively grasps that discourse is like cheese, where complex processes get to work, and tastes different over time. It is worth noting the backdrop to English, then British, democracy has been the inexorable transference of power. That steady movement from church and aristocracy to, as we see in the early 20th century, a fuller democratic nation-state. So there is a political pressure towards ongoing constitutional evolution that is distinct from the forces within American polity. Where Britain is shaped by priests and princes, then politicians, America has to keep asserting moral reasoning today via its painters, prose writers and politicians. Because, as Saul Bellow, America’s most revealing 20th century writer would say, if its writers did not address moral reasoning, American business would.

Historically, English expression had been narrowed by the stiffened shirts of the English academy. Men like F. R. Leavis (The Great Tradition, 1948), who added to England’s post-war privileging of hi-art and hi-science. This emphasis on a hierarchy of the arts received a challenge in the 1960s. But the 20^th century racked English sensibilities with self-doubt about correct form. The old-hierarchy of the arts has now been wobbled. Hello! magazine offers human struggle as does Homer’s Iliad, if not more. The gods in both are just as fickle. But we still suffer the anxiety of formulaic speech forms.

Meghan’s target audience is not me though. As a millennial she is concerned with the generation below. Those who intuitively prefer a speech-act referent to the self. When I travel anywhere in the car with my Gen Z daughter, a Michelle Obama podcast hijacks the sound system. The life-narrative, honed through American self-help literature is easy to imbibe. It is free from hard concepts, grand theory, and is fully domesticated. It does not need, as the English often do, the heavy filter of irony (allusion to the fact).

Baby boomers like me underestimate the podcast. We are catching up though. Lefty Alistair Campbell (former UK Labour Party Prime Minister Tony Blair’s press guru) and righty Rory Stewart’s (ex-true-blue UK Conservative Party Secretary of State) The Rest is Politics is the UK’s No. 1 podcast. It is not Tonight at the London Palladium, but sufficiently popular to perform live at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Weird, as the Brits do not do serious politics.

The banality and venality has stirred a healthy interest in politics as knockabout light entertainment. But more importantly, appalled as well. In the sense that can such crass incompetency get near, let alone into, high-office. Captains of corner shops smell rampant cronyism. And are now newly engaged.

Netflix has challenged the BBC’s journalistic stance. The BBC has persistently avoided criticising the British monarchy. Veteran BBC journalist, John Simpson, who started his career there in 1966, writes: “Throughout its history I’ve been careful to note how timid [the BBC] always was. One of the things I’m most proud of during my time there is how it’s thrown away the timidity. It hasn’t thrown away the caution, and there are many times when I think the management is too cautious, but it doesn’t genuflect before authority in the way that it used to.” With the exception of the monarchy, which it still covers with a measure of reverence. Fellow veteran BBC broadcaster from the 60s, David Dimbleby, adds: “And I think it’s a taboo subject in this country to talk about [monarchy]. It’s certainly a taboo subject for the BBC to talk about. I think it’s a very strange institution to have in the 21st century.” It is not strange of course. It is part of a consistently preferred constitutional polity. What is strange is that it has taken Netflix and the Duchess of Sussex to raise debate. Credit: The Guardian and Metro

Meghan’s narrative, along with my critical feminist daughter’s, are both shaped by bi-directional debate flowing across podcast-world. They do not plug into MSM (mainstream media) like baby boomers. As a young child I nibbled the edge of my bedtime digestive biscuit at snail’s pace to catch the 9 o’clock news on the BBC (Vietnam, moon landings, Northern Ireland, Soviet Union night after night). And Britain had only just added a third TV channel.

Or put more simply Meghan is a voice formed within her generation. Conservative parties and movements everywhere have miscalculated. They have relied on young liberals turning into crusty conservatives. For the first time this established trend is slowing. My daughter’s cohort will punish the UK Tories (Conservative Party) in 2024, they promise. Tory MPs are resigning now in confident knowledge careers are over.

Worth adding that genuine conservatives, of which there are a few left on both sides of the political divide, are quite comfy with ideas of human difference, and the complex forces that make economies function. It is neoliberals who crashed conservative parties, imposing market dogma upon valuable institutions. In a volte face the welfare state, long target of neoliberalism, has now become part of the national architecture, with the Tories forced to defend it from Liz Truss’s market fundamentalism.

It was a different use of neoliberal ideology that restored market forces under Margaret Thatcher (Britain’s Prime Minister in the 1980s). Hers was a re-engineering of a collectivist hi-tax, hi-spend interventionist state; open-heart surgery, stemming a jugular that was pumping blood onto the ceiling. Albeit crude surgery, which left the patient scarred. What followed was a steady 30 years of improvement however.

Where short-lived recent Prime Ministers have lost the plot early, Thatcher erred towards the end. Mrs T proposed a community charge, or poll tax (so-called as every voter had to pay), a per capita, flat rate tax, where every member in a household contributed to local government funding, rather than a rate based on a house’s potential rental values, paid for by the householder. Suddenly the poor were paying the same as the wealthy. 14 million householders paying domestic rates based on property value, switched overnight to 38 million adults paying the same as each other. Truss’s government miscalculated similarly. Borrowing money to reduce the tax burden on the wealthiest in the vague hope the rich would use the bonanza to kick-start a zombie economy stuck in low growth.

I bother you with this minutia because it shows what odd logics grip minds. Recent PMs and Thatcher found their logical plans elegant and pleasing to the eye. Coherent and irrefutably sound. In the same way populist far right figures do throughout history. But such modes ignore the vast irrationality surrounding such discrete logics. When you stop putting your logic into a structural relationship with other logics infantile functionalism emerges.

In truth Conservative Party governments have been an odd admixture of free market and state interventionist policies. Bailing out banks, and spending £70 billion on furloughed workers one moment and wishing to cut workers’ rights the next. There is no evidence that protecting employment hurts performance. Profits yes, but not performance. But in some quarters sounding tough feels like leadership. Waving a discrete logic in a foggy world garners adherents to your unities. In constitutional terms we see the frailty of governments. The rise of fierce logics, and lowering of rationality.

Back to Meg. And her rationality. It takes an American spirit to speak into a moribund UK landscape. T. S. Eliot did the same 100 years ago. Today’s American is more English than the English. We forget this. Eliot and Meg are not as far apart as you think. Poetry remains the confessional. The Waste Land (1922) was a stream of consciousness confessional if ever there was one. That is to say Eliot’s disturbing, gushing, clunky, prescient, dystopian, hopeful groan at the funeral of la belle époque (Europe’s beautiful era). His images have not just travelled well, they have become increasingly affirmed as prophetic.

Meg’s narrative will similarly rise and fall, and rise again over time. A sensitive man like King Charles III, who has championed sustainable economies before their time, will inevitably be drawn to respond in some form. His book, Harmony, is critically developed. He is a major correspondent, so engagement will arrive. He exercises freedoms then that his subjects do not. The king waxes, whilst the kingdom wanes as a place of dialogue.

And it is worth reminding here that the American Constitution is a topping and tailing of the English constitution. Meg’s freedoms are built on political freedoms in place long before the American Revolution. The Revolution did not pull ideas of self-government and representative assemblies out of the ether. The Revolution captured the English model in order to conserve it, not rip it up. Not so much a revolution, as an evolution. So, you may say, Meg is more in touch with history that most.

Americans are schooled in their constitutional history, and told a grand story.  Few Brits know what a constitution is in the first place. They are told the UK is a constitutional monarchy. Which means very little to anyone. It is meant to mean a nation-state with an unwritten political contract. No ten commandments to learn by rote. No political code chipped in granite. But rather a long amorphous history of events that soak into national character and intent. A kingdom of values, preserved in an anointed family. A sceptred (imperial) history.

This is, bear with me, based on a rational set of ideas, explicable; and importantly, needing constant telling as each generation forgets exactly why bejewelled monarchs are there amidst the technological and urban. Importantly, rational structures like this are frequently illogical. And critically, it is possible to be without logic, but still be highly rational.

Central to Britain’s illogic is maintaining monarchy as a long-running pantomime. Magical, mysterious, with villains and heroes. Panto is a unique British music hall and Vaudevillian children’s opera. For adults. Double entendre and sexual innuendo, defeat metropolitan sensibilities: “Laugh at dotty Widow Twankey, boo and hiss the evil Abanazar and cheer on our hero Aladdin”. But when looked at as part of nation-state continuity it becomes highly rational to maintain a system that is trusted and wins allegiance. That is there is a state architecture which knits the parts into a structural whole to the extent it accretes legacy values such as generational solidarity.

The European Union did not evoke moral force as it is a hodge-podge of member state constitutions that have yet to coalesce rationally. It means too little to its member state citizens. It was logical to form a union of European former warring states. But not rational, as the parts cannot form a whole.

Critically, a coded constitution is logical. Clear. And this is its problem. The more you write down in short-form, or boiled bullet points, the more you are held to ransom by these principles. America is screaming at itself, because it is debating the logical meaning of its code. A hiding to nothing. God, guns and gays, the foetus and the flag, are intractable circular arguments. Never approach these debates directly and logically. Replace them with other conversations. The US’s earnestness about bedroom morality is a product of trying to define the ‘right behaviour’ of its citizens. And this is what revolutionary Republics get stuck with for some time.

Revolutionaries understandably make sense of their violence by finding common ground in a hurriedly written statement of intent. We the people etc. But to be logical is to seek a boxed truth that makes immediate sense to the protagonists at the time. But over time becomes horribly irrational.  Complex argumentation requires indirection, deviation, digression and extended discourse, but never definition. Do not bother suggesting gun control. Brits discuss the weather, Americans own guns. They are symbols of identity. But do discuss values and social contracts. These shape identities and symbols over time. Guns make sense to America. A risk society.

And this is why Meghan has struck a nerve in the British consciousness. She has learnt the art of indirection. To talk about this, discuss that, over there. Language is funny that way. We can talk about many things, but given the right moment, a timely set of discourse often points to the underlying thing, that sits beneath the froth and bubble. Netflix being an organ that bothers the existence of the BBC as a state broadcaster. Aunty Beeb (the affectionate nickname for the BBC’s warm tones) has been particularly understanding towards British monarchy, reflecting its largely high approval ratings. But on-demand streaming services are eating into the BBC’s model of scheduled mass audience programming. Few used to match BBC originality, where producers were given creative freedoms to experiment. Until Netflix.  

One thing the American constitution did that has supercharged its voice is they federalised, devolving powers. Britain’s great mistake was to overly concentrate power in its parliament. Pulling inwards the sensibilities of its people. Meg is reminding Britons of their core English rights, and rights that America distributed out from its parliament to its satellite states. Washington is then seen not as mother parliament, but an ogre, a threat to freedom (and attracting periodic assault). This dialectic underpins an armed citizenry. Such disdain for power is working. America’s six battle fleets roam the high seas as guarantor of NATO not because the government chooses this commitment. Because its citizens prefer it.

The UK is all up for devolving power. It is needing to happen urgently. The UK depoliticised itself after WWII. Plugging into light entertainment as a sinecure for serious engagement. And now, after the success of ‘Brexit Boris’ (UK prime minister Boris Johnson, who pushed through the withdrawal from the European Union), and the failure of ‘peacetime Boris’, the long journey of re-ordering Britain’s constitution is open for mature debate.

Harry and Meghan, English free spirits, at home in the American confessional, are heroes to some, whilst Ruritania’s King Charles III is villainous to others. But not as many as you should expect. The monarchy is seen for what it is by the British. A better contingency, or proxy for a President Tony Blair. We see the pain of Emmanuel Macron’s French presidency and wince. Nevertheless, the UK audience is split, and is free to cheer one side or the other. And this is what the Brits and Americans love. The dressing up. Cinderella goes to the ball in each generation.

And this performance of monarchy presents at times the sheer silliness of Britain as a rational project. Others may despise a fully functioning monarchy as archaic but they will first have to construct an argued opposition to its role within a constitution that appeals to its people. It is fair to say withdrawing from the European Union is like Florida departing the United States. Economic illiteracy. But a fair proportion of Brits regard departing the Euro club as as inevitable as the England football team skying penalty balls into Row Z of World Cup stadia. And necessary.

For the UK’s political beingness is rightly or wrongly rooted in parliamentary sovereignty. If there was a shorthand description of the UK constitution, it would be: ‘any agreement that parliament can get the king to sign off’. For the UK monarchy is a working monarchy, doing the bidding of the government. It dare not do otherwise. Remember the sitting monarch has his throne in the UK parliament’s second chamber (the House of Lords). He pops in annually to give ‘his’ government’s major policy speech. Written by government. It reminds that the king is controlled by parliament, and sits there under sufferance. It reminds parliament that the king is preferred to a politicised head of state.

To contradict everything above, the UK does, in many senses, have a written constitution. In truth every written record of British political history, every document, grand charter, reform, amasses into a rational whole. In a sense it is logical to have an American Constitution, with its 27 amendments. But as argued here, what is logical is not always rational. It is rational for the UK’s constitution to be referent to the whole of history.

People demand logic as it is explicable, but dismiss reason, as it is amorphous. To put together a rational argument is exhausting. It requires constant re-asserting and even the person doing the telling has to re-examine what they are trying to say. And each time they lay out their reasoning the story gets told differently.

It is highly rational for Harry and Meghan to tell their story as a counter-narrative. They are moderns in a dialectic with tradition. As one of the last full-scale working monarchies Britain enjoys the absence of party politics in large parts of its state architecture. To remove politics from life and replace it with discourse should be one goal of the nation-state. If you do not, what do you get?

You get free speech. Or rather you get the American version. Which is largely screaming and shouting. Do not get me wrong. America will come good. It will make it. But only when it removes the logical inferences in its code, and replaces them with a more reasoned discourse. It seemed logical to the Enlightenment spirit of the Founding Fathers, those men of reason, to capture their vision in pithy logical statements. No need for logomancy. European duplicity with meaning needed ironing out with puritanical force. Only to discover it has locked the nation into a hi-literalism that is in part irrational.

Britain had two great prose writers until recently. Martin Amis and Hilary Mantel. Both capable of social criticism that is now too rare in Britain. Amis wrote almost exclusively about the English underclass. John Self and Lionel Asbo were the pantomime villains of broken Britain. The paradox being that the British working class has a rich culture which defies its apparent economic variability. But, to its enduring credit, is fundamentally a genuine cultural movement. Warm, authentically rooted in values that sustain it. Producing people of character and heart. Whereas the British middle class is devoid of any diverse history or substance. Those that enter it regret its limited aspirations. Once there you cannot escape it.

Mantel enriched her working heroes, Thomas Cromwell and Cardinal Wolsey, as men of interest. They gained power because of their streetwise assimilation of the world around them. Prepared to implode, it was they who Mantel suggested could see the world they had climbed into. They had the best view, because the roots of power lay in the street, and probably in the sewer. The richness of the Tudor court displayed the rational nature of power. The church gradually, over the next 500 years, gave away its dominance to parliament.

Dame Hilary Mantel died this year. At the tender age of 70. I found her an inspirational figure. As free as Meghan in her discourse. Her prose were second to none. Even Vladimir Nabokov or Saul Bellow. The great Russian-American honest brokers of contemporary literature. Why I felt grief at her passing I am still examining. Largely I sense it was because she managed to speak about the English. She risked using her voice in the risk averse post-critical UK. A place that has gone too quiet.

The House of Commons, the dominant chamber of the UK parliament, with its elected officials, is still referent to a second chamber, The House of Lords: “The Lords Spiritual are made up of the Archbishops of Canterbury and of York, the Bishops of London, Durham and Winchester as well as specific bishops of the Church of England. The Lords Temporal are made up of Life Peers, the Earl Marshal, Lord Great Chamberlain, Hereditary Peers elected under the Standing Orders”. Language of another period. In other words the sons and daughters of the gentry, as well as military leaders, and public figures in the arts and business. That is those defined by aristocratic conditioning, combined with an expertocracy. The ennobled with the technocratic. The ancient with the modern.

Noble efforts are made to make this second chamber fully elected. This is logical. Let the people decide who sits in power. But this remains irrational. The ability to construct a good argument is not dependent on coercing voters through false promises. British politicians are party animals, whipped into submission against their own individual views.

And the life peers, those nominated by the Prime Minister, are a rag tag of experienced citizenry, who have been round the block, as well as politicians sent to out to grass. There they offer a different texture of argument.

These are then rational anachronisms mixing with logical modern technocrats. For modern experts are logical types, whilst those rooting their contribution in tradition lean towards historic precedent. This is horribly over-simplified, but the dialectic between logic and reason is worth visiting. What is logical to one, is evidently horribly irrational to the other. The two in interplay create an interesting dynamic. Hilary Mantel and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex would have been equally interesting interlocutors. Mantel offers in an Evening Standard newspaper piece: “I must admit, I love Meghan Markle… I was so sorry she left because I thought that took some of the jollity out of life”.

Mantel’s writing explored the Tudor court through the eyes of Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell. A man from the streets (whose father is something of a local entrepreneur, so not quite as grimly low-born as Mantel’s portrayal) whose life experience and industry made him useful to Henry VIII: Cromwell had a “grim reputation for blood first and bargaining later”. Henry was an educated man, and an innovator, as is King Charles III. Henry laid the foundation of modern Britain née England. Charles will recognise the already transformed Britain of today. Acknowledging that his mother’s generation waited too long to accept that Britain’s future rests on innovation. The Greatest Generation, my parent’s and Queen Elizabeth’s, were rational spirits, with a keen sense that the absurdity of a declining empire could be mitigated through resilience, humour, wit and charm. That work is done.

Mantel has Cromwell helping Henry grapple with the transference of power under the English Reformation, securing the king as supreme head of the newly birthed Church of England. In effect doing the tyrant’s bidding. A fixer-in-chief with administrative nous, and not a member of any bloc of power represented by the nobility. That is, dispensable. Cromwell was the leading Brexiteer of his day. He would have listened carefully to Meghan, as he had met her kindred spirits in the Tudor court many times during his tenure. She would have been installed by him as part of the complex architecture of power, where discourse from any quarter had value.

“THERE is one thing we could still ask of Herr Brandt: what exactly were you doing during those 12 years away from Germany?” Pitched in 1961, the question was timed to intercept future chancellor Willy Brandt’s rising star. The inquisitor, Franz Josef Strauss, conservative leader of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), had fought in the Wehrmacht on Eastern and Western Fronts. Brandt, armed with a pen, wrote extensively from exile.

Germany and the EU say Auf Wiedersehen to ‘Mutti’ this year. But Angela Merkel’s centrist politics, pro-European, pro-Western stance have roots in the centre-left’s reforms of the Brandt era. Reforms so extensive they re-shaped civil society. Civil society being a bland phrase that slips off the tongue, without meaning much to anyone. But Merkel’s years in power have much to do with the maintenance of the distinct German civil landscape. 

Before immersing in the subtle variations between UK and German social petri dishes, it’s worth re-understanding that for Western democracies civil society is core to a nation’s social and economic well-being. Entities within civil society, from the press to the scientific community, sports clubs, churches, guilds, societies and trusts distribute power. Maddening for absolutists; who take aim, railing at its most visible symbols i.e. journalists, scientists, election officials, eventually becoming entangled by these benign bodies, led by blithe technocrats. So significant to country performance are these social units that Thomas Hobbes, in his preference for despotism, called them worms, eating their way into the body politic.

Angela Merkel’s CDU is hoping that recent state elections are irrelevant to this autumn’s general election. This might be wishful thinking. The roller-coaster effect of the pandemic has eroded her legacy of consistency. Relatively new CDU party leader, Armin Laschet, was appointed after Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer lasted only till January this year, and less than 14 months in total. Laschet has enjoyed four governments headed by Merkel, but might be heading for new reckoning. With only 73 days at the helm at the time of writing, it’s not a cliché to say Merkel is a tough act to follow.

Marginally more cunning than US presidents, Henry VIII issued the Statute of Uses to weaken trusts, but was stymied by parliament. Trump supporters’ march on parliament was similarly processed by the legal system. The leadership equation inferred by all this is, less is more, as executive power is distributed to the many, not the few. Of course, if civil structures mean authority is less concentrated, but the consequence is western society flourishes, then the more we are likely to wish for moderating figures like Brandt and Merkel to secure top tier leadership roles. Sustainable change here then, in the Western context, is gained by indirection not direction. Efforts to overpower or force through appear to destroy the fine balances of collective will, disengaging the population. At the very least, ‘strong leadership’ in Western democracies is a conundrum.

Likewise, corporations deploy committees, policies, systems and processes to sieve power into digestible chunks. So fine are these balances, that excess authority can be toxic. None of this is good news for Alpha Males in the full grip of self-efficacy. The last serious efforts in UK history to squash ‘the worms’ was during The Restoration, but by then civil society had wormed its way deeply into a corporeal nation-state, and filled out the public sphere. Blind allegiance to the crown was not seen again.

Before we suggest the German worms of civil society have an edge over the UK’s, the CSU and its sister party, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), are enjoying the same bumpy ride as Boris Johnson’s UK Conservative Party. These parties’ parliamentary members are being queried over mask-procurement contracts. Worse still the CDU suffered their poorest showing to date, in the March 14^th state-elections. Angela Merkel’s departure after 16 years as chancellor could include her party exiting government altogether. With six months till the general election her legacy of maintaining the German Miracle (Wirtschaftswunder), in the face of major tests, might still be tarnished. (EU commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, once Angela Merkel’s preferred candidate for German presidency, has been accused of slowing Europe’s vaccination rate by her team taking too long over price, supply and liability of vaccines.)

And so for Germany this and other factors, such as opening up and shutting down the economy, bureaucratic slowness handing out aid, has done its damage. But overall the CDU/CSU coalition has still dominated. Occupying 51 of the 71 years of the republic’s post-war democratic journey. But The Greens are knocking at the door of power. Those with ideas are in the ascendancy. And the CDU is without them.

For former chancellor Willy Brandt’s party, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), their day may then return in the autumn, along with the liberal Free Democrats (FDP). Many are waking to the possibilities of booting the conservatives out of power. Not to diminish Germany’s current pressures, from Russian to Chinese relationships, these woes are still less momentous than the post-war crisis of ‘nation re-building’. Germany’s admittance to the emergent rules-based global community depended on its relationship with both west and east’s diametrically opposing ideologies. To the newly created West Germany’s benefit the Western allies guided the creation of coalition-government as the new normal, thus limiting power returning into the hands of extremists.

For the British, cross-party coalitions are alien. More so since power-sharing tasted odd when David Cameron (Conservative Party) and Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrats) occupied the same stage in 2010. It was the death knell for the liberals. Their support falling away. The horse trading of coalition not so much appals, but bemuses an electorate who link ‘large majorities’ with the ‘exercise of good power’. Compromise is weakness; landslides equal strength. But the nature of Germany’s polity has served it sufficiently well for it to become the world’s fourth largest economy.

But coalitions suggest much socially as well as politically. It infers agility, and critically, for Western democratic structures, the ability to compromise. Utopianism has been the ever-present demon at the door of British politics. But the enduring success of social conservativism in Western democracies has left both main parties almost indistinguishable from each other. Labour’s Tony Blair was charged with continuing the free market vision of Margaret Thatcher. Labour’s core vote, the ‘English Working Classes’, have now vanished, leaving the labour movement adrift. Large residues of that social group are aspirational and independent. Artisanship is well-paid.

Under the leadership of Keir Starmer, a serious interlocutor, Labour is not devoid of ideas; far from it, but in Anglo-Saxon politics charisma equates to confidence. The absence of a procrustean head, able to charm and shapeshift, leaves a movement with over supply of deficit theology. Tending to be against not for doesn’t win elections. The burst of support for Jeremy Corbyn’s version of left-leaning social democracy had gathered around vague grievances with no central theme.

There is no sign of the UK parliament changing its system. Germany’s politics of necessary compromise have provided what economies love best, stability. Coalition government naturally instils a structural focus (concerned with the interconnecting whole), versus the two-party system’s functionalism (pragmatically aligned with a handful of key election winning causes). The latter limits how parties shapeshift at each general election. UK conservatives have had to steadily steal, from under the noses of the labour and liberal movement, social democratic and socially liberal sensibilities; further leaving the Labour and the UK’s Social Democratic Party reflecting on their core offering. Where 19th century Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli said ‘he could see a conservative voter inside the working man, in the same way a sculptor saw an angel in a block of marble’, conservatism has continued to reach out to the expanded middle classes, including the former Labour heartlands of the UK’s industrial north, who are increasingly invested in civil society, generating a naturally socially conservative mood. And while UK conservatives are broadening their church, enticing liberals, progressives and the remnants of single issue parties, like the United Kingdom Independence Party, Labour’s anchor has remained fixed to the labour movement; a phrase needing explanation to those under 45.  

At this juncture Willy Brandt’s name surfaces as a reformer-in-chief. In 50s Germany he’d already reckoned the labour movement was failing. In contrast to the reforms of the British labour movement, which have fizzled and popped for decades, The Godesberg Programme was affirmed at the SPD party conference in November 1959. It jettisoned its association with Marxist dogma and as a traditional workers’ party. Whether this was prophetic or instinctive, it certainly seemed risky. A risk that has now seen it more out of power than in.

Willy Brandt chaired the SPD from 1964 to 1987. His symbolism extended to a consistent pro-European, pro-Western vision. Unimpressive to at least one US president, popular amongst European intellectuals, his worldview undoubtedly shaped by his time in exile. Arriving in Oslo in 1933, he spent seven years in Norway, moving to Sweden for five more, returning to Germany after the war at 32. He wrote prodigiously, and said these were his happiest years.

This move was further sealed with the SPD’s approval for partnership with NATO and other Western institutions. Brandt’s exile in Oslo had left a deeply affective image of peaceful liberal democratic society, influencing the movement of his own party towards the centre ground; as soft and as uncomfortable as this over-occupied space has become. The long journey from his socialist ideals towards anti-communism and a clear vision of social democratic values was nearly complete by this point. 

The desire for extended dialogue with opponents mark him out as a durable, albeit highly emotional, figure in an arena always inviting the individuals to colour themselves with stage paint. Although he knew how to adopt a pose. Whether looking at home during the traditional ticker tape reception in New York in 1959, as Berlin’s mayor, or as chancellor, dropping to his knees in front of the Monument of the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw on a cold December morning in 1970, in an apparent gesture of contrition. The latter of which split opinion, as much as dropping to a knee does today.

The context for this shipping overboard of a party’s core principles lay in pre-WWII Europe. And I’d argue fomented in the minds of European exiles like Brandt. It’s those who have escaped, and in particular those who have seen the speed of societal collapse, who are most prepared to hasten the pace of power distribution. Vienna’s Stefan Zweig, Michael and Karl Polanyi, Prague’s Ernest Gellner, Poznań’s Zygmunt Bauman, Motihari’s George Orwell, all write with a prophetic quality that is missing post-Blair. Social media has lit up personalities not ideas. But this exilic grouping were keenly aware of the deceptions of single issue thought, hi-culture, and dominant ideologies; seeing danger in concentrations, be they single-metric measurements or scientism. Their corpora counters zeal and gives space to the unknowable and uncertain.

Zweig records the ‘unconscious citizens’ of “Vienna… [who’d become] supranational, cosmopolitan citizen[s] of the world” having little comprehension of looming totalitarian rule: “…I did not guess, when I saw… exiles [from Nazi rule], that their pale faces heralded my own fate, and we would all be victims of this one man’s raging lust for power”. He noted Germany’s hunger for order and security eclipsing notions of justice and the good. Gellner, in subtle ironic tone, offered: “This theory of democracy has had a considerable vogue of late… It is associated with the ‘end of ideology’ theme”. The relatively short descent from unassailable hi-culture of imperial Europe into totalitarian nightmare left little doubt that the socio-political structures required considerable reform. Reforms in large part absorbed from an English history of civil society. The horror of concentrated power propelled post-war German politicians to accelerate reforms. Günter Grass gifted to Brandt the slogan: “Dare more democracy”. He was among the many intellectuals who supported Brandt’s pluralism as a response to ‘strong leadership’.

Britain post-Brexit is at another cross-roads. It’s facing the challenge to ‘dare more democracy’ or modernise. For the two are somewhat oil and water. Modern managerialist government ministers who nobly seek to ‘be data led’ tend to run up against the evolutionary requirement for their ministerial departments to take the long view. For institutions are by definition concerned with the structural elements of change wrought by pluralist societies, with the latter’s proliferation of groupings. Complexity is not captured by surveys, but rather by institutions as intellectual repositories, capable of using intelligence. Constructing a dominant metric is often purely for window-dressing during a time of crisis.

And it’s the careful reform of institutions which sit at the heart of UK future success. Daring more democracy within government is always a starting point. As difficult to deny as calling for more prayer in church. Who could possibly object? The strange conundrum arises then of lessening ministerial authority, in order for them to have to present increasingly compelling arguments that win hearts and minds, rather than just securing unquestioning obeisance (which for many is considered ‘leadership’). Added to this is the paradox that institutions rarely evolve into ‘a performance culture’, preferring instead sub-optimal consistency. Power that is concentrated rather than spread erodes that sub-optimal regularity that is intrinsic to functioning civil society; and leaves institutions on the whole heading towards long-term ineffectiveness. The best remains the enemy of the good.

Brandt faced this intentional built-in dilemma having done the hard-yards of preparation in both exile and mayoral duties. German ministers had considerable independence to act, thus requiring Brandt to persuade rather than dictate. The exhausting requirement to maintain ‘natural authority’ rather than threaten, restores organic balances at the heart of a mature national economy. That doesn’t mean leaving the incompetent and blindly resistant in positions of leadership. But measuring competence appropriately becomes important. The tendency to promote those who are ‘on message’ and thereby supplicant, has been a rising trend since the later years of the Thatcher government. Johnson has a stooge-ocracy, some say. He is early in his premiership but appears as over-aligning as Thatcher’s later tenure, as well as Blair, who both eroded Cabinet’s role. Blair’s ‘change mantra’ lacked the intellectual rigour that a Cabinet setting would have provided. As his post-politics wilderness years will testify.

The benefit of de-centralising power is it wards off what Gellner terms ‘infantile functionalism’, both within the institution and across the social consciousness of the national populace. The tendency for institutions to replicate themselves endlessly is the outcome of over-direction externally. The latter being the consequence of over-modernisation. Citizenry who have suffered over-direction from central government tend to be ‘totally committed’ to narrow change agendas. Structural reform requires a depth of argument that moderates charismatic leadership.

Gellner refers to the temptation, when faced with distributed power, of adopting ‘total commitment’ to single issues, as the means to initiate change. And draws the analogy with religious observance where an original doctrine of ‘justification by faith’ steadily backslides towards the dogma of ‘justification by total commitment’. If any members propose facilitating questions, under their initial doctrine of faith, then a dogmatic ‘strong leadership’ is tempted to paint these folks as less than ‘totally committed’; and thereby apostate. Gellner says this is the dilemma for modern institutions. Those that rely on over-aligned zealotry erode effective doctrines within a few decades. Those that facilitate dialogue extend their lifespan, spreading ownership amongst an increasingly engaged community.

Maintaining the analogy, faith, of course, isn’t the absence of doubt, but rather the pursuit of what Paul Tillich called: ‘ultimate concern for what is ultimately important’. Which is only achieved through the deployment of all faculties and a concern for the broad structural view, including doubt. Infantile functionalism, as Gellner termed it, is the enforcement of unquestioning adherence, as well as the over-exercise of power, to force an institution to go in a direction it can’t naturally. Leaders with ‘ultimate concern’ install dialogue within systems and processes, as they understand it’s through indirection and questioning that affordable performance evolves.

As we’ve seen with the pandemic, institutions do not overnight become agile civic-emergency organisations. Institutional structures are built to protect core services and are by definition deliberately slow evolutionary structures. Western European governments’ slow response is due to precisely their decentralised institutional and democratic structures. A single issue threat like pandemics require specialist task-focused structures and agencies to be formed; and these, as we’ve seen, are expensive as they require hi-performance cultures; but in time they themselves are institutionalised to ensure new capabilities are maintained over the long-term.

And ironically, Britain’s future hi-performance is dependent on further distributing power outwards, both to the regions and its institutions, and restoring trust in these bodies. As we’ve seen with any structure that invites ‘total commitment’ there is a steady depletion of growth and development. Even bright new commercial organisations establish early institutional frames that are naturally programmed to evolve autonomous thinking. Putting in place appropriate people and resources early, leaving the resultant mix to learn and lead are acts of courage in themselves. The strategic leader is primarily concerned with the overarching structures, including the structure of the future. If an organisation cannot learn and lead itself from within, because it is throttled from the ivory tower above, any success is often short-lived or achieved at the long-term cost of talent; who migrate to better environments, leaving the dogged and resistant to dig-in to their well-formed trench system.

Although it was the allies who set up structural reforms, it was Brandt’s alignment of government philosophy to liberal democratic principles, within the vision of unification, that amounted to structural thinking. Giving space for extended dialogue within and without, his commitment to liberal democracy is admirable, even if he lost key party figures on the way to the increasingly successful CDU. Now, as the centre-right faces a crisis of imagination, we can’t help note the way Angela Merkel apologised for her government’s failings during the Covid crisis as hinting at more than it being a warm affection-seeking gimmick. Was it possible she meant it, and was ultimately concerned?: “This mistake is my mistake alone.” Yes, approval ratings for the CDU have dropped, but her apology is reminiscent of old-style statecraft, even if still odd language for the current season of infantile functionalist government, which seeks to arrest volatile trends generated by social media. Was this genuflection by Merkel evidence of the long-shadow of Brandt’s marriage of vision and pragmatism and holding nerve through the long-cycles of change? 

AMERICA goes to the polls on 3 November. The popular vote (aggregate of all votes) is trumped by an Electoral College system. Small states are kept warm to the federation by being gifted proportionally more Electoral votes than larger counterparts. Enviably, independent states act as countries within a country. By contrast, post-war statism continues to choke political grassroots in the United Kingdom.

For Trump’s achievement (aside from not going to war, a feat in itself) is stoking engagement amongst young voters; and he’s achieved it at the scorched earth level of the disenfranchised American underclass, in addition to Baby Boomers’ standard allegiance. The latter having shaped US and British politics since the early 90s. The Tories did not Brexit because it is theirs or Labour’s passion. Remember Heath’s passion and Wilson’s ambivalence towards the European project. And it was as much a hot debate then.

Millennials and Gen Z will represent 40% of the US electorate this autumn. A shift happening everywhere in the West. Issue-based young voters’ influence is gradually eclipsing party-based Boomers’. Educated millennial women with degrees will have a view on one Boris Johnson. Some of the underlying positive US economic metrics will nudge US voters towards Trump. Even so he is still looking at losing by five points in the popular vote, and 70 votes in the Electoral. If Johnson arrests the UK economy by 2024, he will still have a difficult job engaging the emergent political class.

Below the surface younger voters have another layer of changing experience that leads them towards change. Their structure of rationality no longer takes its cue from an unquestioned authorised canon of scaffolded knowledge, one largely formed in the early 20^th century. Boomers, known for their chopped logics, binary and reductionist views, and so-called ‘common sense pragmatism’, are faced with Gen Z’s preference for the individual’s lived experience as the arbiter of truth.

Which brand of Camelot will Americans choose?: John F Kennedy held an interesting place in the minds of Western Europeans, symbolising Western democratic principles that had rescued Europe and set it on a path out of demagogic imperialism; offering a clean, white-goods model-society, a life-style. But the myth of American innocence finds its full stop in this coming election. A known known in Biden versus the colour and carnivalesque of Trump. Biden’s cool-charisma, a restoration of a US Camelot, a measure of the JFK myth making; versus a Trump presidency where there is a measure of real politik, the ‘eat what you kill’ Wild West that doesn’t lack its own integrity. Gore Vidal revises Kennedy: “I never believed in Jack’s charisma… one of our worst presidents…; but Jack had great charm. So [had] Obama. He’s better educated than Jack. And he’s been a working senator. Jack never went to the office – he wanted the presidency and his father bought it for him.” (Quote from Melvyn Bragg interview – Times Newspapers Ltd, May 2008).

As the election carnival float leaves town what if we take a closer look at the sociological landscape beneath the hoopla. I argue we rarely shine a light into the dark corners of the shifting Western mind and socio-linguistic structures which give rise to voter intentions and consumer behaviour.

Christopher Hitchins said that the noise you keep hearing in the background is the ‘falling scenery of the British Empire’. This backdrop was held up by our addiction to the scaffolding of bold reason. The sort of reasoning where all logical statements ultimately interlock into a neat irrefutable phalanx. And we Boomers have spent our time trying to stick the scenery back rather than push it over. Thatcher gave it a meritocratic shove of course. Her not being ‘a suburban housewife of little import’ but a major actor on the stage.

To consider how the dominant prism of Western rationality is revolving let us turn to the ordinary younger man and woman at the bus stop as a way of seeing how new generations will think over time. Where the Boomers are a Gutenberg generation, educated with the ‘authorised canon’ of knowledge, Gen Z are bi-directional learners, educated by ‘chasing the deer through the woods’ of a socially mediated encounter with knowledge. Where I sweated Shakespeare and logarithms by rote new generations are ‘educationally present’ in a number of different universes of meaning at the same time, with the classroom being just one. Their minds juggling multiple space and time encounters. Where I walked continuously through left-to-right time-and-space younger generations skip endlessly around chopped reality.

Boomers’ privileging of scaffolded rationality as arbiter of ‘good knowledge and action’ now looks rather ponderous. Where my education implanted a rationality constructed floor by floor towards a completed curriculum, framed by the view that logic intersected with other logics, to form a coherent overarching whole; we now find such notions harder and harder to promote. One of the later fathers of modernity, Friedrich Hegel, put forth that there is an upward and forward movement of progress based on a regular interchange of ideas (dialectics). Based on the assumption that there is something inherently rational in the effort to map the structure of the universe as a form of cartographical exploration, enabling a steady advance of human society. Diametrically opposed to such an imperialist rationality was Hegel’s arch-enemy Søren Kierkegaard. Hegel’s universality of reason is challenged by Kierkegaard’s view of good human action being born out of the absurdity of lived experience (dialogics), in all its particularity. One that is closer to younger generations’ privileging of the individual’s worldview. A worldview that is cosmologically more discrete than Boomers’ desire to construct a shared canon of experience.

So, imagine for a moment you are at the bus stop, listening in to contemporary language in all its individuality if not absurdness and consider this from both a Hegelian (dialectical) and Kierkegaardian (dialogical) perspective:

“I love you!” says the man.

“I love you too!” says his lady friend, both sheltering from the drizzle.

What makes their love-making more profound is the desperation in his voice. What he meant was: “I really do love you; don’t you believe me?” and what she meant was: “Don’t worry I know you do.”

What we like about the phrase ‘I love you’, is the level of risk in saying it out loud. Speaking out loud here is a leap in the dark; a form of irrationality based on its inherent absurdity (we never know what love is ourselves, let alone expect someone else to know, so here in this vignette it represents my attempt to pose ‘a moment’ of typical absurdity). It is different from ‘love ya’ pop lyrics which dissipate into the ether. Bus stop man and woman are genuine interlocutors who are present in the same moment and have raised the stakes of their existence by attempting to say something quite transformational. Søren Kierkegaard would regard them as ‘knights of action’ not as ‘knights of resignation’.

That is to say neither are living off the memory of past love but are in the act of creating it. Here Kierkegaard attacks Friedrich Hegel’s notion of knowledge as a universal experience. To live by shared understanding of the universe, even shared ethics, is a form of resignation from the potential creation of the new. In a dialectical society (shared canon of knowledge) we become selves based on what we know universally (knights of resignation) rather than ‘leap into the unknown’ (knights of action).

Kierkegaard borrows the epic imagery of Abraham lifting his knife to plunge into his son Isaac. Christopher Hitchens said if God asked him to do that to his children he would say to God: ‘F*** you!’ Hitchens was a romantic idealist whose affection for rationality and knowledge as the basis of the good life was unbounded. Kierkegaard’s understanding of action was rooted in the fact that knowledge is frail and rarely forms the basis of action. Even Hegel states: ‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.’ Meaning seasons of life are rarely understood until a pool of knowledge grows sufficient to explain in rational terms; and knowledge’s coherence is too late to be genuinely useful. As opposed to living sensually, and thus avoiding the ponderous notion of rationalising experience post hoc.

Rationality on one level then is the ‘knight of resignation’ and the potential enemy of action. As we are forced to wait for the critical mass of reason to gather a force of argument sufficient to garner societal approval. It lives on its past provenance that then awaits the appearance of further philosophical critique to form the basis of solid knowledge (arguments we recognise). Hitchens dismisses Abraham’s act as barbarism. But for Kierkegaard Abraham knew his action of lifting the knife would be followed by another ‘inspired action’, one that resolves the situation. Importantly, Abraham did not need Isaac for his own meaning and worth in the world. He was not resigned to give away his life in order to preserve his son. Shockingly unethical. And that is Kierkegaard’s point. Timely action requires independence of spirit. One free from argumentation, explanation and endless life-sucking analysis.

Nietzsche’s cynicism that ‘we do not love our children but love what they can do for us’ points to our struggle to exist without the props of other people. Kierkegaard invites the good life as one lived without fear of loss. For Kierkegaard Abraham lifting the knife precipitated an alternative pathway. But in the act of irrationality and absurdity the world was changed. Waiting for the owl of Minerva to gather knowledge from sufficient data would be too late for a world needing change now. Hence Kierkegaard took aim at Hegel for slowing the world down to a grim rational dialectical process of constipated slow change. One that Gen Z equally finds ponderous. The Hegelian self is a ‘knight of resignation’ waiting for information, rational arguments, known knowns to form, before s/he takes a step forward. And voila: the modern Western democratic world where injustice waits for the law to catch up with it.

This brings us to John Major. I am reliably informed he was more impressive in person than he was televisually. Gravitas travels through airwaves and either dissipates or concentrates. Bus stop man’s tremor was partly his cluelessness as to how his self travelled through the night-time drama. The action was a risk of unknown quantity. Because what they could not do was put their text of experience into a con-text. The passer-by on this occasion had more con-text and brings it to bear on their moment of consummation. Paul Ricœur infers that hearsay then becomes an even more potent form of learning than formal knowledge. As our hearsaying does not disrupt the event itself.

And therein lies the problem of modern progress. The more technologically urban creatures we evolve into the less potential for us to exchange agreed experience. We have tried to resolve this through modern knowledge. But this has only compounded the struggle of ‘meaning what we say’. The extent to which knowledge is a genuine reflection on experience is a growing question. Often modern knowledge is a treatise on largely one form of knowledge: the denotative. To denote is to label. This is the equivalent of a clay pigeon shoot. Up flies the clay of experience and we instinctively take aim, unloading both barrels.

Periodically we hit the clay of experience and congratulate each other on labelling successfully an agreed experience. Even if the clay was only grazed. It is still in our view ‘true knowledge’. We have all agreed that a chair is a chair. Putting aside semiotics and Plato for one moment. We apprehend a new experience and our first action is to share it and then label it, and then agree its value. This happens in such short order we ignore what has taken place. In seconds we have gone from an unknown to a known. But in truth, as Sartre would agree, we have gone from stumbling apprehension of the unknown, to it being a foregone conclusion called: modern knowledge.

What has taken place is profound if not momentous. As genuine power sits in the space between apprehension of ‘the new’ and how this datum is converted into what we innocently term modern knowledge. Who decides on this process? Which committee double checks for authenticity? In truth the accident of experience collides with the accident of social agreement on ‘what is knowledge’.

This brings us back to John Major, and TV. TV has shaped knowledge and the modern landscape quite like nothing else. The eye of the beholder was ripped from its ‘point of view’. It meant we no longer communally stood on the same spot to review a shared way of seeing. We all began to encounter the same image from a profoundly mobile perspective. Here our bus stop anxiety can be understood. Our two interlocutors look generationally from the same pool of perspective. But their different paths of formation are strikingly separate.

Enter the postmodern fraternity to cheer the last point. I am ushering them away for now. They have had a good go at arguing for complete fragmentation but our physiological selves offer boundaries which they struggle to dispute without excessive solipsism. Our consciousness still operates in tandem with our embodied selves, and these selves share a physical milieu, which is persistently static enough to say we inhabit the same wider landscape. Our movement within that landscape still retains a physical boundary for the potential of experience to be shared. There is enough in our milieu to make life interesting and varied. And there is an ethical reason for accepting our milieu as saturated with enough repeatable encounters for us to learn about them and re-apply them when we encounter a similar situation. I am therefore not arguing for post-structural (loss of real world beyond our senses) landscapes where all experience is divorced from other’s experiences (postmodern fragmentation).

If there was infinite variation then knowledge will fall away completely as we would be stumbling blind through endless new encounters. Hence art. We introduce art because it disrupts the hard patterns of urban modern life which has become overly repetitive. As John Self says in Martin Amis’s Money: “Taking a leak is boring, isn’t it, after the first few thousand times? Whew, isn’t that a drag?” In other words modern experience, under a rationally ordered urban existence, has become too repetitive. Not because of modern architecture alone, but minds bent towards an overly reasoned order of society. This overly familiar landscape diminishes our ability to locate ourselves. Recovery is always found through new contexts but also through exchange of experience. And art restores this foundational counterbalance to hyper-rationality.

And art has to be re-inserted between apprehension and knowledge. That space between encounter and its social agreement. This is the space good education operates. But do not suppose for one moment that this space is open. The space is crammed with media, of all kinds. For media means middle. We might say all major domains have their central operational HQ in the middle space. The lecturer at the front of the class is in the middle. The news anchor too. They portray knowledge as a known known. Our role again is to recognise there is an antibiotic treatment known as: connotation.

To connote is not to denote. It is to allude to the potential of experience. Hence power is operating most keenly in the ability to insert the possibility that there are infinite ways to interpret a new apprehension. Modern anxiety is rooted in the horror of the scale of life’s contingency. Kierkegaard would say anxiety is the awareness of our requirement to make choices. A clear indicator we are alive. To enable a community to see that all of history is open and available for redescription is a remarkable achievement. John Self, in his descent, adds: “Television is cretinizing me – I can feel it.”  Politics, in truth, is inserting the necessary doubt about the forms of knowledge that TV, education, party-politics, or other power bases say are not up for negotiation.

As when knowledge is boxed for consumption, through labelling, we recognise rationality has been at work. That rationality has a source and we can trace it back to either money or vested interest. Whether it is the authoring of an ancient text or yesterday’s tabloid, nothing at all comes without a political interest. This is decidedly uncomfortable, as something within us demands a pure experience, as we want to exclude any possibility that a rich encounter comes without prior manipulation. Nothing wrong with gasping at the waterfall and celebrating its wonder; but inviting a community to only stand in wonder, and imposing an interpretation is too near to an imperialist rationality.

So we shoot at the clay but often only clip the edge of experience. But if we take a community and shoot collectively we might hit more. Nothing gains the attention of central government than a collective community clay shoot. Post-war rules-based leadership tried to argue that communities needed their encounters with the world moderated through supra-national institutions. And this is partly true. Poor leadership says we will hold communities in infancy well into their adult lives. Listen carefully to narratives from popular media and marketing. A fundamental Adult to Child relationship. Someone recently stated a woman of 16 frequently has more capacity to assume responsibility than a man does in his 50s. Is this partly due to the male socialisation and institutionalisation? The willingness for male identity to be drawn from occupation not collaboration? Increasing capacity for relational fairness comes early in feminine socialisation. Vulnerability towards others invites others towards us. I encounter constantly the exhausted Alpha Male in touching distance with their vulnerability in their 50s. Only to let it slip away.

What is noticeable about Alpha in his ‘prime’ is that power is predicated upon conquest. Feminine socialisation may on occasions feel it needs to dominate to achieve similar heights, but I wonder what if we combine the two leading traits into a whole. Modern egalitarian societies have flattened usefully, but only on the surface. What Alphas should explore is their presence in the middle space without pointing at objects and naming them. To occupy the space between apprehension and knowledge long-term is to create meaningful spaces ready for communal interchange. This is very difficult when hyper-individualism remains so dominant.

The French Revolution of course attempted to deal with many of these concerns of ‘the middle space’; between religious hegemony (mythos) and nascent reason (logos). “Messianism, [is] the mania of incarnations so carefully inculcated by Christian education…” So says Michelet’s introduction to the fifth volume of his History of the Revolution, dated 1869. As Conor Cruise O’Brien points out he is referring not to Christ but to Robespierre and Napoleon III. Power rests heavily in the middle space and often with one or two individuals. Removing these individuals just leaves the space for others to occupy. Revolution is an attempt to adjust the middle spaces between hierarchies. The hierarchies do not go away but rather they reform, and can reform more oppressively as history tells us. But the principle is reforming of the middle space offers a wider encounter.

With Western economies struggling from limited social mobility the emphasis turns to education as the key mediator. Not for the access that merit alone attains but the potential of personal formation. The awareness of con-text for our bus sheltered couple is something of a destination. The angst of ‘love’ can be added to with inflections. If Tristram Shandy is right and ‘love is a situation’ then the word love connotes an infinite variation of meaning. If you do not immediately agree then what does ‘love’ denote? Point to the object that the sign signifies. Hence Shandy takes every deviation possible, with ‘love’ only ever as analogous to events.

At the bus stop we are now aware of the gap between the sensibility of love as a series of possibilities; all of which were momentarily boiled down to ‘I love you!’. If the passer-by was of the literal variety they might say: ‘ahh, how sweet’. Before wending their way into the night. If the passer-by notes the tone and texture of the ‘I love you’ they are likely to perceive the danger our male interlocutor was in. His love appealed, hoped, faded, fell; all between the utterance of the ‘I’ and enunciation of the ‘v’ in ‘love’. Power existed in the ability for Lover A to arrest themselves at the moment of vocalisation and reckon with Lover B’s potential disappointment for becoming the object of unequitable hope. No human can satisfy another’s hopefulness, nor should they.

Gen Z’s concern for the meaning of love and experience to be extricated from rationality and into the type of digression Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy allows is commendable. That is to return to more dialogical connoting of life as crucial to the joy of being, versus Boomers’ rationalising of encounter into a known known; as articulated in the dialectics of modern knowledge (to know categorically). Here then are the layers beneath the political allegiances on the surface.