Calvinism, confirmation bias, county councils and the Big Society

November 22, 2011 by
Filed under: Public policy, Social brain, The RSA 

I don’t have any Calvinist influences in my life or family history, so it has always struck me as odd that I seem to be an instinctive believer in predestination. There is a Margaret Atwood novel – I think it’s Bodily Harm – in which she describes a strongly Calvinist community in which the sense of fatalism in the face of God’s plan led people to assume good fortune would sooner or later even out. ‘For us’ I recall Atwood writing ‘good luck was bad luck’. 

This mirrors my own neurotic tendencies. I had a good few days last week with a positive reception for the first edition of my Brain Culture radio programme (edition two is on Radio Four at four this afternoon), lots of good reaction to my blogs on a hope bond for the young unemployed and various signs of further progress by the RSA. When West Bromwich Albion won at the weekend I knew things were too good to last. 

And so it was. Yesterday was a stinker. A trusted expert friend told me the bond wouldn’t work, a key stakeholder – positive about the RSA last week – was back in critical mode, and for the first time ever I got a complaint from someone who had booked me to speak (not that I’m taking that lying down, oh no!). When at bedtime I got an email titled ‘RSA project update’ I hardly needed to open it to know it would report somewhat underwhelming findings. My instinctive belief in predestination combined with confirmation bias to create a solid wall of pessimism. 

What possible relevance does this have to the Big Society? This morning I crawled out of my bed of despond to speak to the County Council Network conference in St Albans. I’m glad to say that my talk seemed to go down pretty well (yesterday’s complainant needs to know just how completely and utterly alone he is in the world, oh yes!). 

Beyond saying that I am still in that dwindling band of people who think the core concept is insightful and important, I made four points about the scale of the Big Society challenge: 

1. It needs to be seen as a long term process of social and cultural regeneration. Using the categories developed by Ron Heifetz, it is an ‘adaptive challenge’ not a ‘technical problem’. 

2. Building the Big Society requires a new social economy of place, a way of understanding, measuring and enhancing the hidden wealth of care, compassion, trust and solidarity. Key to this is a much better qualitative and quantitative understanding of social networks. 

3. The Big Society approach cannot just be about greater citizen engagement and responsibility in relation to those non statutory services that are bearing the brunt of current cuts, such as libraries and the youth service. It must also lead to a ‘re-socialisation’ of core public services like schooling, primary care and policing. These services need to be reconfigured around their core; the relationship between public servant and citizen (not just immediate user) in pursuit of shared individual and social outcomes. 

4. The Big Society approach requires individual reflexivity and organisational ‘clumsiness’.

By the latter I mean solutions which draw on differing and inherently competing models of change. This takes me back to a regular subject of this blog in former years: cultural theory with its four paradigms of individualism, egalitarianism, hierarchy and fatalism. But similar points about clashing models are made in this paper by RSA Fellow Eileen Conn (she contrasts the ‘vertical hierarchical’ model of public agencies with the ‘horizontal peer’ model of community organisations), or this excellent post by RSA Fellow Tessy Britton which distinguishes the ‘consumerist’, ‘representative’, ‘charitable’, ‘challenge’ and ‘creative/collaborative’ modes of social action.

The point is not to privilege one over the other of these modes (although Tessy is pretty clear about her preferences) but to see the validity and power of, and the inherent tensions between, each. 

In relation to individual reflexivity, a forthcoming RSA paper entitled ‘the hidden curriculum of the Big Society’ will argue that the Big Society requires citizens who are capable of greater autonomy, responsibility and solidarity. These attributes are in turn associated with a higher degree of mental complexity, which survey evidence suggests is only currently possessed by a small minority of the population. 

Big Society citizens need to be thoughtful, ethical, connected people who – among all these qualities – are aware of, and able to mediate, some of the cognitive frailties which arise from trying to negotiate a modern world with prehistorically evolved brains. 

I guess one sign of such an ethical ‘ubermensch’ (I know strictly speaking that’s a contradiction in terms but give me a break), would be an ability to withstand superstition as well as illusions such as confirmation bias. 

I guess this means I’m not good enough to be a proper Big Society citizen. Never mind, I will draw comfort from the undeniable fact it is definately my turn for a better day on Wednesday.

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Comments

6 Comments on Calvinism, confirmation bias, county councils and the Big Society

  1. Tessy Britton on Tue, 22nd Nov 2011 4:15 pm

    2. Thanks very much for mentioning the Participatory Paradigms post in your blog Matthew. Just to add a little – I agree that each of these participation narratives does have inherent strengths, validity and power – that was to reason for doing the analysis – but I would suggest that the opportunity that is evolving through the Creative/Collaborative paradigm is that because it appears to make such good use of research and innovative thinking, it may prove more effective and practical – particularly where other forms of participation are increasingly failing us already.

    I count myself amongst the dwindling band (as you describe it) who think that the core concept of Big Society is insightful and important.

  2. Wes G (@DJWESG) on Tue, 22nd Nov 2011 4:41 pm

    3. “These attributes are in turn associated with a higher degree of mental complexity, which survey evidence suggests is only currently possessed by a small minority of the population. ”

    This is also the same group of people the ‘powers that be’ are most afraid of, perfect recipe for conflict imo. How will one both agree and disagree with this group? how will communities interact with these groups/ individuals?

    The rest i very much agree with, education being the key to a productive forward thinking civilization. But that one point is nagging at me.

  3. Michael on Tue, 22nd Nov 2011 5:04 pm

    4. Suggest you go home and dig out that CD of “Things can only get better”, and review your collection of “access all areas” passes and lanyards, and remind yourself of past keynote speech triumphs.

    Hmmm…On second thoughts probasbly much better to have something nice for dinner and a drink. Then watch Jools Holland at 10pm for the superb Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.

  4. oldandrew on Tue, 22nd Nov 2011 7:12 pm

    5. This reminds me of G.K. Chesterton’s discussion of the “Fabian Calvinism” of Shaw, which can be found here:

    http://www.readbookonline.net/read/19314/55243/

    In fact now I think about it, a lot of what follows that might be relevant to you.

  5. Stephen Layland on Wed, 23rd Nov 2011 12:38 pm

    6. A Stooge or merely In Denial [a.k.a as if only just workings of ones Confirmation Bias, so that's OK?]

    The danger of accepting the half truth is that most will unkowingly [willingly?] swallow the wrong [the given] half – more nearly the whole Big Lie. Double Plus.
    Adapted from various quotations

    Combine the following two:

    It’s for their own good of:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

    It’s about pushing power down and seeing what happens.
    Cameron [speech] July 19 2010

    Add a dash of cherry-picked quotes from Huxley’s Brave New World Revisted (1958)
    Over-orgnaisation

    Big Society or just the same old Big Brother, behind the facade! We are all in it together, indeed.

    As the machinery of mass production is made more efficient it tends to become more complex and more expensive — and so less available to the enterpriser of limited means. Moreover, mass production cannot work without mass distribution; but mass distribution raises problems which only the largest producers can satisfactorily solve. In a world of mass production and mass distribution the Little Man, with his inadequate stock of working capital, is at a grave disadvantage. In competition with the Big Man, he loses his money and finally his very existence as an independent pro­ducer; the Big Man has gobbled him up. As the Little Men disappear, more and more economic power comes to be wielded by fewer and fewer people. Under a dic­tatorship the Big Business, made possible by advanc­ing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Busi­ness, is controlled by the State — that is to say, by a small group of party leaders and the soldiers, police­men and civil servants who carry out their orders. In a capitalist democracy, such as the United States, it is controlled by what Professor C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite. This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country’s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feel­ings and the actions of virtually everybody. To parody the words of Winston Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by so few. We are far in­deed from Jefferson’s ideal of a genuinely free society composed of a hierarchy of self-governing units — “the elementary republics of the wards, the county repub­lics, the State republics and the Republic of the Union, forming a gradation of authorities.”

    Propaganda Under a Dictatorship

    In the Brave New World of my prophetic fable, tech­nology had advanced far beyond the point it had reached in Hitler’s day; consequently the recipients of orders were far less critical than their Nazi counter­parts, far more obedient to the order-giving elite.

    “Many a man,” said Speer, “has been haunted by the nightmare that one day nations might be dominated by technical means. That nightmare was almost realized in Hitler’s totalitarian system.” Almost, but not quite. The Nazis did not have time — and perhaps did not have the intel­ligence and the necessary knowledge — to brainwash and condition their lower leadership. This, it may be, is one of the reasons why they failed.

    Thanks to technological prog­ress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God. Nor is it only on the technical front that the hand of the would-be dictator has been strengthened. Since Hitler’s day a great deal of work has been car­ried out in those fields of applied psychology and neu­rology which are the special province of the propagandist, the indoctrinator and the brainwasher. In the past these specialists in the art of changing people’s minds were empiricists. By a method of trial and error they had worked out a number of techniques and proce­dures, which they used very effectively without, how­ever, knowing precisely why they were effective. Today the art of mind-control is in the process of becoming a science. The practitioners of this science know what they are doing and why. They are guided in their work by theories and hypotheses solidly established on a massive foundation of experimental evidence. Thanks to the new insights and the new techniques made possi­ble by these insights, the nightmare that was “all but realized in Hitler’s totalitarian system” may soon be completely realizable.

    Arts of Selling

    Truth and reason are Jekyll’s affair, not his. Hyde is a motivation analyst, and his business is to study human weaknesses and failings, to investigate those unconscious desires and fears by which so much of men’s conscious thinking and overt doing is determined. And he does this, not in the spirit of the moralist who would like to make people better, or of the physician who would like to improve their health, but simply in order to find out the best way to take advantage of their ignorance and to expolit their irrationality for the pecuniary benefit of his em­ployers. But after all, it may be argued, “capitalism is dead, consumerism is king” — and consumerism re­quires the services of expert salesmen versed in all the arts (including the more insidious arts) of persuasion. Under a free enterprise system commercial propa­ganda by any and every means is absolutely indis­pensable. But the indispensable is not necessarily the desirable. What is demonstrably good in the sphere of economics may be far from good for men and women as voters or even as human beings.

    P.S.
    Cultural Theory. Beyond the 2*2 Grid Group

    Matthew has obviously been too busy [with his Radio4 Brain Culture http://www.radiotimes.com/programme/nqg4h/brain-culture-neuroscience-and-society to be trusted to keep providing readers with links to the more telling [tell-tale] neuro-related features in the New Scientist – as might puncture the ballon of ones Confirmation Bias, if only it would allow it.

    The devil’s in the ackward details – in the 5th, or should it be the protean 1st Act – eh?

    S

  6. Stephen Layland on Tue, 13th Dec 2011 12:44 pm

    7. It has been suggested that I should be a little more specific about my rather cryptic point on the implied harm of not retaining the protean seed at the core.

    I would liken the error and harm to that of an ectopic pregnancy – promising but ultimately doomed, unable to thrive.

    The dispositional optimist would mildly resort to quoting the only seemingly valid false-dichotomy – that “anything is better than nothing”. That would accept the wreckage of history – including collateral damage – at the very highest and longest-term extent.

    The only challenge and almost unique opportunity is [had been?] how to finesse the historical trajectory and seemingly fateful [actually just logical] end that would come from just following the dictates of “practical reason”

    A Klee drawing named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. — Walter Benjamin,
    Ninth Thesis on the Philosophy of History

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