Off with my head!
Typical! On a day on which, for various reasons, I feel more anxiety than even my usual background levels, I face a very uncomfortable 45 minutes on Moral Maze.
Tonight’s issue is monarchy and meritocracy and I have agreed to be on the side arguing that Royalty is bad for social justice. Being the CEO of a Royal Society and having enjoyed reporting to Prince Philip our current, outgoing, President and looking forward to working with Princess Anne, our incoming President, you can see this is a tricky proposition. Sophisticated listeners to Maze know that the panellists sometimes adopt positions to further debate rather than to advertise their own opinions but it still isn’t easy reconciling support for monarchy with a critique of its effects on society.
I thought it might help to rehearse an argument or two with my readers…
There are two defences of the privileged position of the royal family. The first relates to the office the second to the people who occupy the office. Paradoxically, perhaps, the first argument may be easier to reconcile with meritocratic principles.
The fact that a small number of positions which carry notional authority are allocated according to the hereditary principle does not necessarily undermine the idea that all other positions of status and privilege in society should be earned on merit (not ,of course, that they are).
However, the second arguments – one that is implicit in a great deal of the wedding coverage – that the royals are, as it were, special people is more problematic. Whatever the undoubted merits of individual members of the royal family – and my experience of our past and future President shows them to be dedicated to public service – they do not hold the posts because of their own personal virtues.
In this sense the media coverage is in danger of making the Royal couple seem like so many celebrities; famous for being famous. And I have no difficulty in arguing that celebrity culture does damage the idea of meritocracy, not only by the lack of connection between success and ability but also by fostering a sense among the ambitious that ‘making it’ is to do with looks and luck not skill and sweat.
The problem is that the combination of a long term decline in the deference and power we afford Royalty as institution coincides with a 24 news celebrity culture which encourages us to focus on the personalities of the people under the crowns. The Queen has avoided this problem by being both a model citizen and studiously avoiding controversy. Is it all fair or realistic to expect Friday’s happy couple to do the same (for the next seventy years!)?
A second thought – but one which I think goes beyond tonight’s programme – is whether far from upholding ‘British values and traditions’ as some monarchists argue, the survival of (and public affection for) the Royal Family give us a false sense of national purpose and unity. After all, the USA does not have monarch but American citizens’ adherence to flag, constitution and national pride is surely stronger than ours (the same may be said for the French). Will Friday be not a moment of national bonding but an exercise in papering over the cracks of a fractured society with an identity crisis?
Well, that makes me feel a bit better, but not much. To make matters worse I’m up against a couple of really good witnesses tonight so if you’ve nothing better to do at 8.00 (after all you can always record Real Madrid versus Barcelona to watch later), how about tuning in and sending me calming thoughts through the ether.
Our brains hurts (well, a little bit anyway)
I spent some of the Easter weekend reading a draft of a new paper from our social brain project, and very interesting it was too.
In important and systematic ways our modes of thinking don’t function well in the world in which we live : this idea has become ubiquitous and has a variety of expressions.
Derived from behavioural economics, nudge theory is premised on the idea that people sometimes find it hard to do the thing they want to do. Nudge thinkers like Thaler and Sunstein use the phrase ‘libertarian paternalism’ to describe the way their interventions are supposed to help us overcome the failings of our cognitive machinery (for example, our short-termism) better to enable us to do the things we say we want to do (for example, saving for retirement or being potential organ donors).
Recent figures show a rise in the use of anti-depressants and particular SSRIs (although we should be careful about exaggerating the trend) . It is unlikely that this growth has been driven simply by a random increase in individual pathology. The rise seems to imply that more people are having difficulty coping with aspects of modern life and therefore need the chemical balance of their brains adjusted.
A few weeks ago – amidst a great deal of publicity and public interest – Action for Happiness launched. Although its leading figures stress the importance of social environment in shaping levels of well-being, it is also explicit in the institute’s mandate that it seeks to help people create happier lives. Given that most of us presumably want to be happy, this too suggests that there is a problem not just in what, but in how, we are thinking. Action for Happiness endorses greater access to mental health therapies and also the use by perfectly healthy people of mindfulness (a non spirtual form of meditation which helps train your brain to operate differently).
Some people – like the Institute of Ideas for example – are deeply suspicious of all this. It is alleged that we are allowing the creation of a therapeutic state in which politicians and self-interested professionals seek to reduce legitimate social grievances to individual pathologies. But this is to mistake a symptom (official interest and intervention) for a cause (real change in people and society).
In my second annual lecture I suggested society may be entering ‘a period of neurological reflexivity’. By this I meant that a growing awareness of how our brains function, derived in part from neuroscience but also from a range of other disciplines including social psychology, behavioural economics, evolutionary psychology, would become increasingly influential in culture and policy, indeed in our whole idea of selfhood.
In order of priority I would list the causes of this shift as: new scientific insights into human nature and decision making; evidence that very many people (indeed whole societies) are not flourishing despite economic and technological progress; a sense that we may not be well prepared for some of the biggest challenges the 21st century is throwing at us; rising expectations with people wanting to get more out of their long lives in terms of functioning and fulfilment.
Rather than arguing that insights into human nature should be applied in particular ways or for particular purposes (which may be a little premature or even dangerous), the RSA’s interest lies in exploring how new ways of thinking and talking about human brains in modern society impact on people, groups and public discourse.
As we explained in an earlier paper, we are less aiming to ‘nudge’ people to do good, than give them the information which might enable them to better ‘steer’a course through a modern world using a prehistoric brain. Jonathan Rowson’s paper (the one I have just read in draft) suggests a focus on three areas in which insights in the social brain may lead to shifts in chosen behaviour; how we make good decisions despite our cognitive frailties, how we create the circumstances which shape our habits so it is easier to achieve our goals, and how we direct our attention in a world of over-stimulation and information saturation.
There are real challenges with this work. It is multi-disciplinary and complex and it is easy to get lost in a jungle of information. As an organisation committed to concrete innovation, discussing the foundations of consciousness can seem very abstract. But I am convinced that the broad topic of brain and society is going to become even more high profile and influential in the years to come and the RSA has an important role to play in ensuring discussion of key issues is accessible, rigorous and – where it is appropriate - with scope for practical application.
Sport and the Big Society – a new pitch
As Easter approaches perhaps I can be allowed to be even more self-indulgent than usual? I am using today’s post to give vent to a deep frustration and to issue a challenge.
When it comes to the Big Society, kids’ football is an amazing success story. I don’t have the figures to hand (if anyone does, please comment) but I think I recall that on any given weekend more than a million parents are involved in in some way: coaching, organising, giving lifts or just being there to cheer on their offspring. This is in support of an activity which is unambiguously beneficial: improving children’s health, developing their capacity to work in teams, to understand the difference between healthy competition and unacceptable aggression, and to handle success and failure.
Best of all, and again I wish I had the stats to hand, volunteering for kids’ football is not nearly as socially stratified as most other forms of civic engagement; working class and ethnic minority kids and parents are just as likely to get involved.
But there is cloud hanging over the park pitches of England. As austerity bites and as the costs of football rise (kits, pitch fees, ref’s fees, the burden of regulation) many clubs are finding it difficult to survive. Here is one example which has made the news: Senrab– the team which helped develop the skills of John Terry and Sol Campbell – is apparently under threat. Given its famous links and the publicity it has received, Senrab will probably survive but every week many other clubs fold as exhausted enthusiasts give up the ghost.
The big issue here is the amount of money flowing down to community football, and I would be keen to hear from anyone who can comment on that overall picture. But I want to focus on something more specific. One of the problems for tens of thousands of kids’ clubs is not only the cost but the quality of the pitches on which they have to play. After the winter we have had, and now a long dry spell, pitches combine an uneven surface with a high and erratic bounce. It’s like trying to play snooker on corrugated metal. People who don’t play football might think this is all part of the challenge – after all both sides have to cope with a bad pitch and isn’t adjusting part of being a good footballer?
Well, not really. Of course, players have to adapt, especially to different weather conditions. But becoming a skilful player is a lot to do with developing an intuitive ability to judge a pass, predict a bounce and look up from the ball to see options. If the pitch is terrible, it is impossible to develop these skills; good players get demoralised and effectiveness comes down to size and determination rather than skill and intelligence. This is not just bad for the skilful players who get demoralised but for the ones who succeed due to sheer strength only to be exposed if and when they try to play at a higher level. The other problem with standard grass pitches is that they are often simply unplayable. This year my own son’s team played about three games between November and February.
We urgently need thousands more high quality artificial grass pitches. They are always playable and can be played on back to back. Because they can always be used it becomes more economical to install cheap portable floodlights to provide longer playing days in the winter. A collegue here at the RSA contrasts his local town which has four pitches which are all pretty poor and often unplayable with the town in Germany where his girlfriend lives. The German town has a single shared artificial pitch which is played on for ten or eleven hours a day all weekend (and also on some evenings). The one German pitch is not only better but, over the year, provides as much playing time as the four English ones.
The technology of artificial pitches is improving all the time. I met earlier this week with the inspirational CEO of a company called Desso. Pitches are 20% of their business and they are also committed to a cradle to cradle manufacturing process which means pitches get fully recycled when they have reached the end of their lives.
The problem – as it seems to be on so many issues nowadays – is finance. Few, if any, clubs – even if they muck in together – can afford the upfront cost of a pitch. Most pitches wouldn’t anyway be owned by one club, they would need to be managed by a trust which would then cover its costs by hiring fees. The clubs or trust would need a deal whereby they can either lease a pitch or buy it over several years. The risk should be manageable because even if a club goes bust the pitch can be leased or sold on to someone else.
So what we need is easy. An alliance between a bank which is willing to develop a finance package which is simple, and affordable, a supplier of pitches willing to offer a good deal to clubs including support and maintenance (with great sustainability credentials) – judging by the enthusiasm of the CEO, Desso could be such a company, and the FA which would administer the scheme and provide clubs with upfront costs and advice. How about a target of 5,000 more artificial community use pitches by 2015?
As if often the case, this blog is strong on passion but weak on research (comes of being a busy CEO with a butterfly mind). So, there may be an obvious problems with my idea or it might be that there is already some scheme out there just like this. But unless we can enable our youngsters to play football on better surfaces then most of them will not learn the beautiful game but instead – at best – become proficient at kick and run.
Ingenuity, Webby and Fellow (no, it’s not a new design consultancy)
One of my more successful posts in recent times invited people to comment or tweet in exchange for a free copy of Jamie Young’s RSA pamphlet on ingenuity. I think we ended up sending out about 80 copies and from this are also building a network of people interested in the idea.
Jamie distinguishes ingenuity from innovation in general by reference to the frugal use of resources. Ingenuity also involves surprising combinations. I guess, therefore, that RSA Animate is our very own example of ingenuity in action.
The idea of putting together an edited version of a speech (using existing material) with the animation skills of Andrew Park at Cognitive Media (using an existing technique but applying it differently) was an intuitive leap by a member of staff. Now Animate is a global phenomenon with getting on for twenty million lecture views in not much more than the last year.
The latest accolade is for RSA Animate to be shortlisted for a Webby, which is the on-line equivalent of an Oscar. The Webbys are more democratic than the Oscars so anyone can vote. So please vote for Animate here and I promise if anyone from the RSA goes to LA to receive the award it won’t be me but a much more deserving member of our brilliant events team.
RSA Animate was a stroke of genius and it may turn out that no one else can find a cleverer, more compelling better way of visualising ideas. But if you think you can, there will soon be an opportunity to prove it. We have secured funding to create an Animate Mark 2 prize (it won’t be called this) and I will make sure to share the details on this site when they are announced to the world.
It will be fascinating to see the entries. I recently spoke to someone at the British Film Institute who told me she had been looking to fund something like Animate for twenty years (not that she had any money now!). She was sceptical about whether Animate could be matched let alone surpassed.
Given that Animate came from a leap of imagination but the prize will encourage people to think of presenting lecture ideas in new ways as a problem and then to work out a solution, it will be interesting to compare the fruits of the two different processes.
But in case anyone thinks that in boasting of the 20 million views I am being too self-satisfied about the RSA here is a less comforting statistic: fewer than a quarter of RSA Fellows have watched an Animate! This is despite the generally very positive feedback in our Fellows’ survey (some of which I have passed on in earlier posts).
So after you’ve voted in the Webby’s, and after you’ve told your friends to as well, maybe you can tell any FRSA you know about the joys of Animate.
But perhaps this is a failure of imagination on my part. Imagine if instead of converting Fellows to Animate we could convert fans of Animate to becoming Fellows.
That way we could take over the world.……
Will the police take seriously the Westminster Bridge crime wave?
When I was asked some time ago to speak to senior police officers and other policing experts about public involvement, I didn’t see any reason to say ‘no’. The fact that the talk was in Windsor early on a Sunday morning was something of a deterrent, but it’s my job to raise the Society’s profile even if it means unsocial hours.
It’s only when, a couple of days ago, I looked properly at the programme that I wondered what I had let myself in for. For a start the Sunday morning session is the last one in a weekend conference which features a ‘pay bar’ and slap up dinner on the Saturday night. So everyone is likely to be a bit bleary and looking forward to getting home. More worryingly for me, the conference features a really impressive line–up of speakers, all of whom know a great deal about public engagement in policing (unlike yours truly).
Then there is the title of my session; ‘how will the public respond to changes in policing?’. I don’t really understand the question, let alone know the answer. At the moment I am planning to make the following points:
Public engagement with the police is complex. There is a hierarchy of involvement going from general awareness and support through fuller engagement to participation (for example in victim’s charities or restorative justice scheme). There are multiple publics and most of us look at policing from different angles at different times (our views of the police are quite different depending on whether we are a friend of the victim or a friend of the accused).
Public attitudes are idiosyncratic. In recent times, for example, opinion polls have simultaneously found higher than ever satisfaction ratings among those who use the NHS and a majority of the public saying the health service is in crisis. The kind of superficial opinions expressed in polls are heavily influenced by whatever is in the national press.
Third, as revealed in a survey undertaken last year by IPPR, the public’s inclination to engage is moderate. About half those questioned were willing in principle to join neighbourhood watch or go to a local community meeting with the police and about one in five or ten when it comes to more concrete things like volunteering at the police station or being trained to intervene in anti-social behaviour. But in relation to engagement and volunteering, we know people’s actions rarely match their intentions.
In general, we don’t think hard enough about why people choose to engage positively (as distinct from simply protesting against something like a police station closure). Depending on the ask, we can offer material rewards, status, training and skills, or a feel-good feeling of having done the right thing and made a difference. If we want people to get involved we have to think hard about the relationship between the ask and the incentives.
Having said which, the police has no alternative but to try to increase public engagement. Without it the police – like most other public services – will probably have to reduce the service level they have been able to offer in the past.
Unless my wonderful readers have better ideas, I’ll have to hope this is enough.
I have at least got a bit of an anecdote. One of the ways the police have tried to increase engagement is through the police.uk website where people can see a map of crimes in their area. Having looked at it, I’m not quite sure how the information encourages anything but mild anxiety. One of the biggest categories on the site is ‘other crime’ which rather underlines that what we mean by a crime hotspot depends on what kind of crime is being committed.
I went for a run this afternoon in the hope I would get some big thoughts for Sunday’s speech and as I ran over Westminster Bridge I noticed the following: two ice cream vans parked and operating illegally on a red route and over the bus and cycle lanes, two people (with their gangs in attendance) trying to persuade gullible punters to bet in ‘find the lady’ scams and I’m pretty sure I smelled some ‘whacky baccy’ in the air.
That’s five crimes taking place simultaneously within a hundred metres of Parliament. The figures may be showing lower crime rates than for decades but the country is clearly going to the dogs. Where are the police when you need them? Oh yes, in Windsor.
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