Boing!
This short post has three elements: self promotion, self indulgence and humour amusing only to its author (‘no change there’ I hear you chorus). If you have anything better to do with your time (eg watching paint dry, re-reading the Thompsons business directory, removing the Madonna or Queen songs which have unaccountably got on to your ipod playlist) I strongly advise you to do so.
On Tuesday I went to Leyton Orient to see the West Brom second string win 2-0 in the Inter-city Poundstretcher Vase (aka the Carling Cup). Apart from a great last minute goal from New Zealand wonder boy, Chris Wood, it was a pretty grim game, of which it could fairly be said ‘neither team deserved to win’. Still, at least there were two chances to go through the West Brom fans’ goal celebration ritual.
This comprises the supporters jumping from one foot to the other and punching the air out of time shouting ‘boing, boing’, followed by a discordant but strangely uplifting rendition of Psalm 23 (The Lord’s My Shepherd) and ending with the ungrammatical but elegant simplicity of ‘The West Brom’ clap, clap, clap ‘The West Brom’ clap clap clap. The whole thing lasts about a minute and has over the years occasionally been rudely interrupted by the opposing team equalising.
The next day, as is my habit, I visited Boing – the excellent unofficial West Brom supporters’ site – to see whether my player ratings matched those of other fans. As you will see if you visit it, Boing is to website graphics and technology what West Bromwich town centre is to urban aesthetics.
So…imagine my surprise and delight when a colleague at the RSA (presumably looking for a rise, clever girl) referred me to a link to my 21st century enlightenment talk (‘46,000 views and counting’ now you ask). The link is on what it turns out is one of the world’s most hip blogs (formerly a ‘zine and web site). Its slogan is ‘brain candy for happy mutants’ and its name is?
No really, this is worth waiting for…
Oh, how I laughed. Oh, how I patted myself on the head. Oh, how I marvelled at the inability of my long suffering PA Barbara to see this as the most exciting thing to have happened all week.
The Tories steal a march …
On my way to Manchester for the RSA event at the Conservative Party Conference. The Conservatives have made an impressive start to the week; party strategists knew their key vulnerability was the charge of lack of substance to Tory plans. With their welfare to work plan and pensions reform, they have effectively buried this weakness, whilst also looking more credible than Labour in relation to reining in public spending.
Meanwhile, Labour’s plans to impose a pay freeze on well paid public servants look more like a political ploy which is, incidentally, highly centralising in its implications.
On pensions, I hope we can persuade the Conservatives to link the raising of the retirement age to the reforms set out in our Tomorrow’s Investor report. The new Pensions Policy Framework, set to be introduced in 2012, is basically right but without the reforms proposed by the RSA, the package will not work and could even be counter-productive.
PS: One of the blog posts I most enjoyed writing was – strangely enough – when West Brom lost in the play-offs. Having written yesterday about how I wish we used football to instil good character as well as physical fitness, it was great last night to see another example of football at its best. When Richard Dunne scored for Aston Villa against his old club, Manchester City, not only did the Villa fans celebrate, but also the City fans cheered the achievements of their former hero. It was a rare moment of generosity. We West Brom fans like to think of ourselves as the best in the country, with our capacity for humour and self-deprecation, but as far as I’m concerned, Manchester City take the crown – for the time being at least.
Ringo, Paul, my big toe and meta-cognition
Last weekend Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney were reunited in New York to launch an initiative from the Foundation of cult film director David Lynch. The aim is to get a million American school children to take up transcendental meditation. Apart from seeing the two Beatles together, I found the event fascinating because I am myself half way through a mindfulness stress reduction course, based on meditation techniques.
I am not a brilliant student. Bring prone to anxiety, self obsession and hyper activity I have further to travel than most people to reach meditative calm. And working twelve hour days it isn’t easy to find the 20 or 30 minutes to practise.
Even so, I am an enthusiast. Apart from the feeling of well-being and refreshment after meditating (a bit like the serotonin rush after a run), I now have moments in my day to day routine when I feel a sudden openness to the world around me. I haven’t yet been able to use meditation techniques to calm my frequent surges of over-excitement or anxiety but I am hoping this will come with practice.
One of the occasions when I found meditation really helpful was a week or so ago. I had submitted to one of our leading ideas magazines a long article on the social and political implications of behavioural and neuro-science. Late in the evening I got an e-mail from the editorial team saying, basically, ‘nice idea, rubbish article, start again’. My immediate response was a three step waltz of self righteous fury, embarrassment and denial. But after twenty minutes of concentrating on my big toe (you are supposed to scan the whole body but I stuck with the toe as it was the furthest away from the madness threatening to engulf my mind) I was through the worst: the editors were right - I could and would do better next time.
The problem with my article was that its core thesis, if it can be called a thesis, was facile: ‘there has been lots of interesting research and it might have big consequences for all of us’. I failed to establish a core argument; what really are the big ideas from brain and behavioural science and why is it that these ideas could and should change the way we think about ourselves and our society.
So between the meditation, the small matter of running the RSA, and the uninvited black clouds of profound thoughts (why the hell didn’t Tony Mowbray stick to his guns and insist on keeping Kevin Phillips at West Brom, why do I keep finding so many hairs in the bath after my shower, what is it in my diet that makes me so windy in the mornings) I have been rehearsing a central thesis.
So far I have this. We tend to put the divide between the conscious and the unconscious mind in the wrong place. We massively exaggerate the role of conscious thought in our day to day actions and interactions. Nearly everything we do we do automatically as a consequence of the interplay of our genetically given and socially modified brain and the context in which we place ourselves. In this there is not much to distinguish human beings from other animals. Instead, the important line is between day to day behaviour and a unique human faculty – meta-cognition, thinking about thinking.
As brain and behavioural science advances, we are opening up major new meta-cognitive possibilities. We may have little conscious control over what we do most of the time but the new science is helping us to see how we can shape our day to day automatic responses by understanding our idiosyncrasies (see behavioural economics and social psychology), shaping our environments (to create the best conditions for well being and altruism) and rewiring our brains (for example using CBT and meditation).
Our brain is, as the determinists argue, a computer which responds automatically to stimuli depending on its pre-programming. But human begins have the unique ability to re-programme themselves, removing the bugs that were built in at birth or develop with day to day use, developing useful firewalls (between physical reactions and psychological over-reactions) and making the computer better at interacting with its environment.
Ringo and Paul see transcendental meditation as a proven and effective method of re-programming. They are right. But over the coming years we will learn much more about how to improve the functioning of the day-to-day brain that dictates our every action.
Tony McNulty, MPs’ pay – what is the answer?
I was queuing for a chicken balti pie during half time at the Hawthorns at the weekend when a couple of Albion fans approached me;
‘Alright, mate?’ they said;’ ‘we were just saying how much we appreciate your blog, though it;s true what they say at IPPR, you do go on about yourself a bit too much. We are a trifle concerned that you have done so little on cultural theory recently. Is this because you don’t feel it has any intrinsic relevance to the fundamental societal questions arising from the economic crisis?’
At least I think that’s what they said. After watching West Brom for 90 minutes I fell into a deep torpor and required a combination of electric shocks and hypnotism to be brought around, so my recollections are a bit fuzzy.
Unlike West Brom’s current team I try to satsify my fans, so here is a cultural theory analysis of the disastrous saga of MPs’ salaries and pensions, opened up again by the tale of Tony McNulty claiming for his parents’ house.
Thinking of the system of remuneration as a public policy problem. the four cultural theory perspectives might come at it this way:
The egalitarian perspective: MPs should be paid no more than the average wage. Only people who are strongly principled will then choose a career in politics, and the public will respect their representatives as having the right values and motives.
The individualist perspective: MPs should be paid well to ensure public office attracts talented people. If individual MPs choose to donate their salaries to Party or community activity, that’s up to them. If voters think an MP is being greedy they can show their displeasure at the next election.
The hierarchical perspective: We need to balance the need for talented people to come into politics and government with the need for the political establishment to have legitimacy in the eyes of the people.
This explains the mess we are in. The present system – a modest basic salary but lots of scope for MPs creatively to add to it with various allowances – is a classic clumsy solution.
The problem comes with paradigm four: fatalism. As I have suggested before, in cultural theory each way of viewing the world has a benign/engaged and a malign/disengaged form. So, for example, individualism can be creative and brave but also selfish and irresponsible. The dichotomy for fatalism is between a benign indifference (‘I don’t really care what happens so I’m happy to let other people decide’) and cynicism (‘those in power will always screw the little man’). Which is where the mass media come in. Engaged as they are in a battle to prove that politicians are even less principled than newspaper owners and editors, they seek to exploit the problem of MPs’ pay.
No doubt the present system could be better designed and enforced (and Tony McNulty does look like he stretched the rules to breaking point) but would any radically different, neater, system work? We could have MPs on £110,000k a year with no allowances and constantly subject to the critique that they are an out-of-touch, privileged elite. Or we could have MPs on average wages which would stop many talented people from entering politics and, probably, encourage other forms of abuse.
Fundamentally, it’s not the system of MPs’ pay and allowances that creates the problem, nor even the way MPs work the system; it is the nature of the problem itself. How do we pay politicians in the public interest? This would be a hard problem to solve in the best of circumstances but it is nigh on impossible in the face of media determined to prove that all politicians are second rate money grubbers.
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