We want happy people in a Big Society. We want excellent schools. We want, we want… Who wants to be happy in actual fact? Do we really want excellence in an inane grinning fashion? There is something dreadful about ‘being happy and excellent’. It’s all too artificial. Some politicians’ suggestions that teachers are ‘put upon’ I suspect is the allusion to the fact they’re ‘grinning’ all day long offering the false construction of a ‘happy school’ where all the boxes are ticked but they’ve no time to read for themselves or maybe inclination to read and form their independent opinion. Curriculum ‘B’ demands no opinion other than prescribed! Flipping burgers and reports all day long denudes the intellect.

In the Sam Mendes directed film, American Beauty, magazine writer Lester Burnham is reaching a mid-life crisis. The back plot sets a scene of the Utopian ideal of middle-class and respectable suburban America, with its ideals of hard-work and family values. But this life has become too sanitised and banal for Lester. The plot presents a life-time of conformity to the ‘beautiful ideal’ with Lester reacting manically, embarking on increasingly drastic and regressive life-changing actions as he tries to escape ‘his life’. He stares into his work computer contemplating his reflection; the straight columns of text on the screen resemble the bars of a prison cell with Lester trapped within. Lester fantasises about leading a life other than his own. In the end Lester pursues his fantasies in the real world only to meet a messy end at the hands of his neighbour, an American Marine Colonel. The Colonel’s own dual existence of archetypal war hero in public and confused sexuality in private unravels after Lester thwarts his approach. There are other such dualities in the film but dominant is the Beautiful American modern-life metaphorically  represented by the femme-fatal college-cheerleader friend of Lester’s daughter who offers herself as a perfect and worldly ‘prize’ but in reality her ‘true self’ is vulnerable and fearful.

These dualities run as loose patterns or motifs through the film, sufficiently loose to inspire multiple interpretations. Lester and the other characters are ontologically trapped in the ideal modern life they did not choose for their selves.  Being referent to your ontological ‘self’ and not an ideal given by the society you are born into is a meaningful liberation, suggests the cinematographer. But does anyone know what ‘being true to your ‘self’’ really means? What is self precisely or even loosely today? And how is ‘self’ crucial to
leading and has leading been trapped in a modern Utopian ideal formed outside of the individual’s true experience?

Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s Bulldog, offered his modern vision against the significance of ‘woolly’ literature, with all its ordinariness, dismissing its value as a poor relation to his master’s discoveries: “the ‘aesthetic faculty’ needed to be ‘roused, directed and cultivated’ by science”. Could he have said anything else given the time and space he occupied?

He goes on: “literary culture, while imparting a ‘sense of beauty’ and ‘power of expression,’ was unable to furnish a ‘criterion of beauty’ or ‘anything to say beyond a hash of people’s opinions’.” (White, 2003). A criterion of beauty is a ‘dreadful project’. Like explaining art by virtue of the artist’s DNA predisposing his brush strokes. Knowledge frequently wishes to usurp wisdom as the wily native whose life on the Savannah shouldn’t represent more than our Western university professor. Very unseemly. Imagine saying ‘I love you darling – I know this because due to the determinist nature of the universe I had no choice’. Charmed I’m sure.

This denigration of the human textual existence against the shiny new didn’t stop or maybe inspired his grandson Aldous Huxley to use the ‘aesthetic faculty’ in Brave New World to leave I suggest a more lasting impression. Huxley’s title offers the dualities of modern life in all its systemised potential. Huxley visited Los Angeles and described it as a city of ‘dreadful joy’. And his Brave New World is a happy place but with deadened consciousness. Like Zygmunt Bauman’s zombie modern institutions. They’re dead but alive and don’t respond to leaders pulling the levers of change as no-one is listening anymore. It’s what we wanted from our modern society but having built the ideal existence we know something real is missing. Lester lives in his ‘American Dream’ existence; he has everything the 1950s marketing man offered but still he fights to find the real. He makes the mistake of thinking he’s entitled by indulging his self rather than making sense of his self.

Cities are divided places; railways, canals, bridges and barriered ring-roads dissect communities allowing commerce to accelerate unhindered. A post-industrial patchwork has left isolated zones known now by their economic and social characteristics. Some areas are what Frederic M. Thrasher called ‘delinquency areas’. Bits of ‘turf’ where seeping damp of deprivation sits opposite red chino’d deli-land. Cafe Society cranes up at high-rise poverty and the High-Risen peer down, both bemused at a gulf which was once bridged by the aspiring working-classes. Except the working-class as we knew it has long disappeared.

Thrasher’s contemporary Ezra Park mapped the city phenomenon of crime-ridden Chicago. A city awash with the dispossessed as is London; where little patches of terror brutalise its occupants for whom being upwardly mobile means an apartment on the next floor. Few who condemn the current miscreants of the UK riots would venture into the dark alleys of 1960s’ concrete modernism, designed by idealists in horn rims. Taking a wrong-turn in London late at night is for many an eye-opening experience.

Former communities are now often populated by people, as Michael Green put it, who are alone: lots of contacts but no relationships. These are frequently men supported by the state living in multi-occupancy properties. Where I sit in my study (spare bedroom) I gaze at the backs of the tall elegant town houses not far from the city centre where wasted and unshaven men are at a loss for large parts of the day. They’ve drifted from family and relationships into isolation; lifestyles that are in direct parallel to 20s’ Chicago. Here suicide rates and mental illness fester.

As in the ‘furnished rooms’ of Chicago here the ritual of family life, such as sitting at a meal table, has long disappeared. Life has no rhythm or cadence that beats out purpose. The rampaging young men crossing the boundary of their ghetto in London are out to experience what many take for granted; a sense of ownership of a wider world before being corralled back to a zone demarked as economically and socially alien. Possession of a Blackberry is no longer a symbol of yuppie-wealth but a signifier of the depersonalisation and commercialisation of relationships.

To address this requires a change in the structure of society. You don’t have to have the brains of a holidaying politician to know Her Majesty’s Collectors of Taxes soft-peddle on the millions owed by corporate business after being suitably wined and dined; that MPs smashed and grabbed for years and ex-bankers are paid £600k per annum after impoverishing the nation for the next decade. People are not stupid. They know the system is intrinsically staked to ‘the haves’. We know the Tories are happy to have indebted students as the indebted stay in work despite poor terms and conditions. People make connections between the leitmotifs of existence and craft a theme-to-life.

The grand tokenism or the exaggerated gesture of middle-England sweeping their streets for a day doth Big Society not create. It’s as valued as genuflecting energetically at Sunday Service. It does mean reversing inherent injustices of a hyper-consumerist world and the mantra of ‘wealth, beauty and success’. ‘Well-being, self-respect and dignity’ are messages that don’t involve an economic exchange primarily but do lead to better economics. These are core assumptions about how our economy functions which if re-taught lead to surface practices that become intuitive. Telling the oik who drops his litter to put it in the bin, often followed by massive amounts of swearing and abuse, doesn’t scratch core values that are only found in liminally formed communities. It’s obvious isn’t it when you think about it.

‘Toothless poodle’ is a rather harsh phrase. But ‘poodling’ is frequent mockery for those bodies set up to protect us from wanton hacks or country leaders currying-favour with allies. Glistening in the sun what do our cherished structures serve? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak hit the nail incredibly hard last year. She wrote a fizzing critique which keeps re-surfacing like a shiny penny. But firstly think how much decision-making for ‘us’ takes place through the institutions of state, far beyond our franchise. Quite a bit, yes?

And how much do we proudly point the visitor to our shores to our Western society’s sophistication and its ‘trusted’ institutions? But institutional life is spent. Gayatri picks on the example of the rise of secularisation as an unquestioned, in my view, institutional vision for a better society. Run with her gut below:

“The fact that in the 18th century in Europe it was possible to create such a system [no moral references] has a lot to do with the class structure brought in by capitalism… On the other hand, there are folks who say that secularism is Orientalism. That is also nonsense. What we have to do is not be so taken by the European picture that we either slavishly follow it, or slavishly deny it. The issue is to look at our world, and see… class-fixed secularism… remember that even in democracies, universal suffrage is a very late date, so therefore the people who were upholding secularism were in fact the white guys, Christians, people of property and so on, right? So that doesn’t make secularism bad, it just makes it race and class specific and in many ways launders Judaeo-Christianity, so that Judaeo-Christian religious observance is given comfortable niches within secularity, and everything else is “tolerance.” It’s the only instrument we have.”

That’s quite a dense piece but what Gayatri is saying, in my view, is that there is an assumption that if there is a political vision of a secularised and institutionalised world, as we’ve seen in Europe, that it will arrest a moral decline. This is naive as secularism isn’t ‘value neutral’. Within its appearance of ‘non-religious fairness and inclusivity’ there are those with privileged positions (classes) who will enjoy exploiting the inherent and persistent reality of unfairness and exclusivity. We need the ‘moral position’ (transcendent) to drive for equality she cries. It won’t happen via secularisation as a ‘project’ in and of itself.

But, more importantly, it is offering the suggestion that any movement or ‘good’ that ends up going from vital and light-on-its-feet to an evolved institutional structure such as the building-centric-church in this country is tantamount to the death of purpose. We see in the UK our declining church sitting in comfortable niches, giving in to the surrounding institutions, led by those for whom change is anathema. And the problem is a collective one of human leadership. All social entities that lack questioning slide into brittle crystal palaces.

Emerson offered that an organisation is the ‘lengthened shadow of one man’ (Murdoch and Ford aside). The charismatic founder who expended their spleen in getting movement remains so deified to the following crew they can’t exorcise his or her ghost from the board room and the journey of vital society into dessicated Institution begins. Somebody else said if you speak the truth and question the inherent rightness of ‘the group’ you’ll sound as if you’re from Neptune; so your life is on the line as few will respond.

So, for secularisation read modern institution; for modern institution read comfortable niche. When someone invites you to sit on a council, board or sub-committee consider the invitation very carefully. You are about to enter a comfortable niche that might award you the gong of ‘toothless poodle’ unless, and only unless, you offer a question that relates to the very existence of all around.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2010/01/from-one-third-world-woman-to-another.html

Three things hit home from chatting to family and friends this week:

!) The home is precious and becoming a luxury few can afford

!) Lack of housing stock is a Social Catastrophe not being addressed

!) Inequality is now demarked by ‘living space’

Growing up by the sea I love space, endless horizons, being at the edge of the world; but all people need space, elbow room and air to breathe. But this country is compact and not bijou. Its attitude to ‘a country fit for heroes’ has slipped to pile-’em-high and watch-’em-fight-it-out.

Buying our first flat in Sussex in the late 80s Thatcher’s Free Market Revolution was up-and-running and going to change our lives forever. It did. It meant if you had bought your home in the 70s you could pay your mortgage and save on an average salary. A house was less than three times that salary. After Thatcher’s Big Bang property prices became an insanity many have enriched themselves on. But at a price that will be paid by our children. This really is a Brave New World.

An average salary won’t buy you a house any more; you are at home with parents wondering what the future holds. Your degree will leave you indebted and facing the remote prospect of buying a very modest flat or house that will now be 10 times your salary leaving you with no disposable income. A 40-fold increase in property prices was never sustainable but we watched voyeuristically and unquestioningly.

We have let Free Market mantras run riot and we have a neo-con government that is as blue-rinsed about letting the gap between winning and losing widen, as did its predecessors. But, there has never been a Free Market. As one writer offers, Free Markets are for others. The Free Marketeers are as protectionist, corporatist and as interventionist as the Socialista. The free marketeers won’t build. It doesn’t get more restrictive.

Oh, by the way we in the UK owe £1.4tn also! But that aside it is living space that we took for granted and is now the precious need for children to develop their full potential. UK living space is the worst in Europe. We are a small island you say, but only 11% of our land mass is built upon. Successive governments spit in the wind about building programmes. But one way to generate new heat in the economy is to build sustainably (not like the Irish banks!).

If we don’t we will face a long slow decline. We will have good waistlines, rosy cheeks but emaciated communities. 3.5m children live below the poverty line in this country and many are in high-rise damp ridden hovels. We may not be able to address the parenting that deprives of emotional bliss but we can knock these shacks down and build decent spaces on green field sites that are better placed for human beings than keeping land-owners’ bank balances secured.

It took two world wars to move the British government to demolish this country’s slum dwellings. What will it take for this current government, a government who are probably the most existentially secure group of individuals in the history of so-called democracy, to recognise the slow car crash of no-home-owning for the indebted generations. Again, the answer is to build, build and build. But that will require not just a change of government but a change belief, values and action.

The appeal of stream of consciousness writers like Faulkner, Joyce and then Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway appears to be that they removed us from the tyranny of clock time.

“Clocks slay time. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”  The Sound and the Fury.

In other words remove clocks and there is no time, it’s a social construct. Only the Eternal Now. Faulkner also slayed grammar and convention; writing in idiom and free from snobby rules that infect forms of expression. The import is that we are governed as slaves to external conventions; in the West we worship at the altar of Time, served by Progress, served by Convention. Hit these hard and all is good; we are Good…. some disembodied voice says. Watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror reverses the exchange process; its stream of consciousness leaving chronology in the bin. YOU end up working hard to establish meaning rather than meaning being served up like sugar on a donut Hollywood-style.

Here’s a new twist from Derrida’s angle on time, from that newspaper’s Book Blog: “…Meanwhile, new technologies are dislocating more traditional notions of time and place. Smartphones, for instance, encourage us never to fully commit to the here and now, fostering a ghostly presence-absence. Internet time (which is increasingly replacing clock time) results in a kind of “non-time” that goes hand in hand with Marc Augé’s non-places. Perhaps even more crucially, the web has brought about a “crisis of overavailability” that, in effect, signifies the “loss of loss itself”: nothing dies any more, everything “comes back on YouTube or as a box set retrospective” like the looping, repetitive time of trauma (Fisher). This is why “retromania” has reached fever pitch in recent years, as Simon Reynolds demonstrates in his new book – a methodical dissection of “pop culture’s addiction to its own past”.”

Pop culture feeding on itself. TV analysing TV.  Suggestion is no-one is expressing the new as the trite and pulp-nostalgia is too available. Walter Benjamin’s striking observation 75 years ago that modern people cannot exchange experiences might re-apply as a modern people who prefer the regurgitation of past experience than embracing the new. Something here about new forms of expression being long-structures-of-thought as in autoethnographies; novels; essays. Essay writing reminds me of school. I never quite knew what an essay was but we always had  to write a lot of them. Do children still write these? Should they? The long-structures of writing slay clock time in a better fashion than listening to Madness and thinking of 1979 maybe?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/jun/17/hauntology-critical

Sitting in Pitlochry’s Festival Theatre today (after seeing My Fair Lady last night) having coffee with Luke and reading The Scotsman; was treated to a sparkling interview with John Berger in the centre supplement.  Berger is like Michael Polanyi. One of those hugely influential writers to a generation of readers but who, for some reason, doesn’t leap to the next generation without a helping hand. A re-presentation is needed. Berger, an artist and art critic first, offers this:

“”Too many of today’s problems result from not seeing clearly”, Berger says. He talks about the “new financial order” which he describes as “economic fascism … where the virtual is more important than the real and the productive. It produces a growing opposition between the rich and the poor, and in all the thinking and the reasoning that goes on, the sense of what exists at ground level is absent.”

“He thumps the table quietly with both hands, as if to demonstrate its concreteness.

“”The situation with Dominique Strauss-Khan (the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, charged with sexually assaulting a chambermaid in a high-class New York hotel), whatever else it’s about, it’s about not seeing, it’s losing that connection with the real. I don’t know exactly what happened, but what’s absolutely clear is that it was incredibly stupid of him. I mean – ach!” He almost spits with contempt. “It’s as though that kind of suite which costs £3,000 for 24 hours that he hired, that blinds the occupant to any real sense of what is on the ground.””

http://living.scotsman.com/features/Interview-John-Berger-author-.6779229.jp?articlepage=2

Or to be precise 12 Angry Men, one of the finest Hollywood offerings – the 1957 version of course; and the outstanding Lee J Cobb, whose character (Juror No. 3) explodes his way to the film’s denouement: “You lousy bunch of bleeding hearts!” Yes simplistic but nevertheless revealing that our most powerful driver of change and leadership practice is frequently less shareholder value than our selves (a deliberate gap in between those two words). Peter Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology (something that needs a better word than ‘system’) is given star treatment here as Cobb’s complexity is unpicked as he reveals he hasn’t been trying the accused but his own son. How much of our practice is consumed with exorcisms of our own messy journey?   We lead through ourselves warts and all is the image we might take from the jury room and maybe boardroom. Research in the area of ‘becoming a leader’* suggests that leadership learning is difficult without a forensic – to keep this metaphor rolling – analysis that goes beyond the rhetoric. This is less systems thinking as I suggest system implies strong patterns whereas an ethnographic worldview (leaders as a cultured being) prefers motifs and resemblances; suggesting leadership is intuitive and felt instinctively more than programmes accompanied by any certainties.

John Berger asks why does the artist start with his first brush stroke at the top of the canvas rather than the bottom. The answer is the artist intuits this decision but cannot know why. In fact to seek to know why is spurious and counter to the art itself. Art is the antithesis of a system. It is freedom itself. Paradoxically, the challenge might be then for leaders to not only know their world but to know themselves, or possibly their being; a suggestion we take from Cobb’s coming to terms with himself at the end of the film. Cobb is the boor round the table where Fonda begins the process of change via a question to himself, not an assertion of fact. He simply proffers ‘I’m not sure’. An admission rare and suggesting considerable personal security. It’s rare for leaders to offer their uncertainty; as their followers tend to then fling themselves into the trenches when the comfort blanket of charisma is stripped back to reveal the Gollum-like-figures within. But the transparency of leaders coming-to-terms with their predilections, or in some bankers’ cases, peccadillos, might save us all.

* http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Managers-have-Learnt-Lead/dp/0230220959/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1305907987&sr=8-1-fkmr1

My first visit up to the ‘all seeing’ Castle Hill in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, yesterday with Mark to shoot a video introduction to an international variant of one of our MBA modules, but this doubled nicely as a video blog on my current research. Particularly keen to share thoughts on the nature of slow change and how embedded ideas (worldviews) drive change more than the charismatic individual (Soren Kierkegaard’s notions). It struck me afresh being up there how the convergence of ideas (more so than one off events) moves the world on and how spotting these subtle (Peter Senge’s observation) and less seductive and charismatic ‘images’ deserve our attention; that is the desire is to pull away from the organisational frame of reference on leadership primarily and put into the mind the notion that our practice is infused by our residual worldview. The notion of our ‘opinion’ and ‘position’ influences our practice more than the abstractions of theory. Also, that theory is partly a ‘history lesson’ on how the world was when that particular fragment of reality was observed and scribed. How much then is our leadership practice a fitting of the world to old frames of references so we can please seductive theory than paying attention to the here and now and offering a unique and original description of the world as we are experiencing it? Here is video link:

Public access: 

Students: https://unitube.hud.ac.uk/view.aspx?id=5251~4n~NRVv9hmG

Britain is in danger of looking a little lost and confused. The reeling back with distaste over the US’s triumphalism at the demise of Bin Laden reveals Britain’s lack of clear worldview. At the end of WWII US Secretary of State Dean Acheson said ‘Britain has lost an Empire but not found a role in the world’. Not a lot has changed.

Our poor rhetoric has spun ever since. Churchill said he’d always look across the Atlantic than to Europe. Thatcher said ‘Nothing good comes from Europe’. It was Europe who stood by and said little when the Serbs reaped a whirlwind and it was only American decision making that stopped their bloody onslaught. Blair acquiesced effusively to the neo-cons over Iraq. It was the CIA who radicalised the Mujahideen unchallenged. Today we can’t differentiate the good from the bad over Bin Laden. We continue to be in a paroxysm of poorly expressed critique towards our allies. Why? Because we don’t know our own position from which to build a carefully articulated independent worldview.

In other words Britain is the master of ambivalence. Worst still it is being a poor friend to the US. By giving such a limited challenge to the US over Iraq Britain let down its ally badly. Just when a restraining buddy was needed we back slapped our way into disaster. A monumental tragedy for the world. That was the time to say ‘stop, think and wait’. 14 of the 17 9/11 terrorists were Saudis but Iraq became the subject of a ‘revenge strategy’. What Elliot Leyton terms a ‘violent act to assuage a violent wrong’, America was giving in to its own instincts; and doing exactly what Bin Laden wanted, reacting with hatred. By questioning badly the commando raid on an enemy leader’s compound we are showing poor friendship. This form of operation is the approach to terrorism that we should have adopted all along. To attack the perpetrators and not the communities that have to suffer their bullying presence. Have we learnt nothing from Northern Ireland?

If you board an aircraft in the early hours having signed your last will and testament with the very real prospect of not returning, with the likelihood that your enemy has a contingency for just such an operation then it is fanciful at best to presume you can knock on the front door and ask to be let in for tea and cake. You enter of a world of confusion and terror and if the Americans have learnt anything they will have judged that success in these circumstances comes down to clinical skills. In the past America will have put a cruise missile into the compound and bred a new generation of militants; instead they saved the lives of innocents by risking the lives of their own men and women.  That’s the sort courage I applaud. The disaster of the Iranian hostage rescue, Operation Eagle Claw, and Somalia, haunted America’s military for years. They have the opportunity now to win friends and influence the world. The young Americans on the streets whooping it up can be understood but that shouldn’t overshadow that America might be turning to ‘smart tactics’ and should be encouraged along this road.

Unlike France who have an ideological anti-American position Britain has the opportunity to say ‘no’ to America when it’s in a rage and looking for someone to hit and ‘yes’ when they adopt smart tactics (and being a little realistic in accepting that a qualified success is better than an unmitigated disaster). Our role should be as a strong but balanced critic of all its allies, speaking its mind and showing we have a confident independent foreign policy position.

The causal factors for terrorism are alienated people groups. People who feel hopeless and marginalised. The West’s Imperialism has left its legacy of poorly structured nations whose peoples’ voices are unheard. These are the conditions that ferment Bin Ladens and until we can engage with the communities across the world from whom we extracted ‘globalised value’ we will continue to sow the seeds of our demise. America’s hegemony alienates, as did ours, and it’s a long careful path to restoring their standing in the world. Not by water-boarding or indiscriminate bombing but by courageous restraint.