Emerging needs (3) – Ties that bind?

Emerging needs (3) – Ties that bind?

Torrey Orton

November 19, 2009

So the Oz coal industry is not spending its governmental freebies for "clean coal" development research and commercialisation. Almost no-one with industry awareness, except the industry mouthpiece Australian Coal Association, thinks they are even trying. How can this be so? There's a host of factors, one of which I want to enlarge a bit. It is the natural entropic forces in organisations, specifically the multiple creature comforts of present arrangements, especially for large and deeply embedded organisations, of which coal is one. Ties that bind.

Try the American automobile industry for another – with decades of encouragement to build useful and energy efficient cars, they've done little, even in the face of dramatic innovativeness from their close worst enemy, Toyota. Their leaders rode to a Congressional hearing on their futures in private planes at the edge of the great downturn. Didn't they know? Obviously never thought about it. Ties that bind.

A micro lesson on resistance

A lesson I learned a while back in executive coaching is that a key development moment for a major shift in coachee approach occurs when he/she doesn't know what to do in a critical workplace relationship. Typically, this is when a personally 'tried and true' approach fails repeatedly with one person or group. The exec is stymied by their own inability to work in a different way. Even high levels of notional motivators like failure to meet objectives, KPI's and similar Taylorist contrivances do not provide the energy and discipline required to change their behaviour. That executives are systemically impervious to disincentives (except in placing their own remuneration pleas) is increasingly acknowledged. Ties that bind.

To do differently – to become effective in the area of agreed ineffectiveness - they would have to learn a new approach. That involves a period of personal vulnerability. This period has two main steps: acknowledgment of the specific incompetence and learning the new one. Resistance flowers in the uncertainty (and implicit loss of face) that accompanies the acknowledgment of incompetence and then flourishes in the anxiety of learning new behaviour. Ties that bind.

Acknowledge the stymie

The pathway to a solution is simple: acknowledge the stymie. But this usually includes acknowledging a weakness – namely not knowing what to do. Around that dilemma many exec's get stuck in their habitual range of communication competences. Many relationship breakdowns can be tentatively sourced to this failure. I'm not the first person to discover this, so it must be hard to learn. I can only guess that it's too hard to be included in leadership trainings or is on the very hard end of the learning spectrum for such events and so few are pushed to extend themselves into this territory of personal vulnerability. They probably would not get a bonus for trying and might get a career limiting file note for embarrassing the leadership. Ties that bind.

Among many factors, this may be a difficult learn because workplace social system(s) are resistant to change, like families, cultures and major human institutions. The resistance arises from the very functionality that is suspect – traditional ways of doing things. Its source is the tension between the ease of present need fulfilment arrangements and the threats of new ones. Few people go into any form of perceived dark night willingly (and those who do personally – the suiciders / euthanasiers - are vilified for weakness, self-indulgence and disrespect of the god(s)).

An outstanding bind – whistle blowing

We are increasingly in a bind about a number of things. The typical diversity of the responses is on with issues like climate change, health reform, and economic system constraints. Not a few ring appropriate alarm bells on each of these – each a whistle-blower of a sort. Trouble is, we have become inured to the whistle and demonise the blowers, unless they shrill for our ties that bind.

It seems that governance can never catch up with work arounds. Wholly normal and wholly necessary…just who we have to work with. If we can notice our own bindings we may do better speaking to others of theirs.

These are the ties that bind.

Rectifications (18) – Tragedy is….

Rectifications (18) – Tragedy is….

Torrey Orton– November 18, 2009

Tragedy is the stuff of everyday life now. It, and its associated feeling grabbers - the "loving family", the "caring" father, mother, family who have been beset be trouble(s) of various types, are our daily companions in the print and virtual press. This irritates me for the usual reason: yet another important word demeaned by overuse.

So, what am I squawking about again! Perhaps I'm lacking a good replacement for it - another term for fully fledged tragic events. I feel that 'tragedy' has lost its power through indiscriminate application. A bit like 'fantastic', 'awesome' and the other denatured exclamations. That's why they have to be reinvented about half generationally I suppose.

To shortcut my rising argument, let's go to an idea of what tragedy may be. It's a bit academic but can be made everyday usable.

"In tragedy, there seems to be a mix of seven interrelated elements that help to establish what we may call the "Tragic Vision":

• The conclusion is catastrophic.
  
• The catastrophic conclusion will seem inevitable.
  
• It occurs, ultimately, because of the human limitations of the protagonist.
  
• The protagonist suffers terribly.
  
• The protagonist's suffering often seems disproportionate to his or her culpability.
  
• Yet the suffering is usually redemptive, bringing out the noblest of human capacities for learning.
  
• The suffering is also redemptive in bringing out the capacity for accepting moral responsibility"
  

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/trag_vsn.html

One typical opportunity for an access of public tragic sentiment is road accidents, especially multi-party, multi-death ones. These are so predictably young men in drug and/or drink assisted excesses with uplifted senses of immortality. Supply your own recent example here. Note that the stereotype is beginning to be breached by the spread of similar behaviour among women of the same age. Binge babes and boys.

Now, such incidents qualify as tragic because they are (1) catastrophic, their outcomes (2) seem inevitable, (3) they definitely are beyond the limits of the participants, (4) the participants suffer terribly for more or less time and (5) the suffering seems disproportionate to the drivers' mistakes.

However, they fail to qualify as tragic on the remaining two criteria. (6) The suffering seldom seems redemptive; no one seems to learn from it. The young continue to prove themselves vulnerable to terminal velocities. And, (7) finally, the drivers are often not around to take responsibility for their mistake – so redemption is short-changed once again.

I'm all little inclined to withdraw criterion 5 from the qualification list since the judgment of disproportionate damage to the drivers seems arguable. Anyway, perhaps what we have in the more personal events like driver risks (drink, showing off, and fatigue allatonce) raised to the level of near inevitability are instances of the banalities of youth.

As you see, a modestly close look at what characterises 'tragedy' seems to come out around more than 70% on the side of the present liberal usage. In its worst employ, 'tragedy' is anytime where anything gets hurt in anyway. Many of the everyday "tragedies" meet the better part of the minimal criteria for a tragedy.

We certainly cannot say that someone who falls in the line of a freely undertaken duty died tragically because they were in the line of duty. Police, soldiers, and fire fighters come to mind. Are all large scale death events tragedies? How can tsunami victims and terror victims be equated? If the natural events become signal national historical events like Gallipoli or 9/11 do they automatically qualify without regard to the provenance of the event?

So, where we can we find the real thing? What is a tragic event which fulfils the criteria, especially being an event from which we can learn something? Are we in some now, as a race (the human one I mean!)? GFC, Climate Change, fluid and food declines, for instance? Were historical tragedies recognised in their times?

 

 

 

A Harvard state of mind??

A Harvard state of mind??

Torrey Orton

November 17, 2009

When Harvard surfaces back to back in HIGHER EDUCATION (The Australian Nov. 11, 2009 pg. 28-29) I take notice because I worry about any transfer of American 'solutions' to our very different context. Two academics extol the thinking of current Harvard President Dr. Faust as a model for Australian universities (Macquarie and Melbourne).

fantasyWhat they did not do was present the rest of what she said, nor show any awareness of former Dean of Harvard College Harry R. Lewis's Excellence Without a Soul – How a great university forgot education (2006). He says, "In this book I explain how Harvard and our other great universities lost sight of the essential purpose of undergraduate education." I commend it to your readers along with that of former Dean of Yale Law School Professor Anthony Kronman's Education's End – Why our colleges and universities have given up on the meaning of life (2007).

Between the two they give backgrounds to President Faust's call for renewed vision. They are stories of wounded institutions whose hearts have been victims of the great modern mendacities – the equation of education with technique at the service of present powers. Looking at them (Harvard and its peers) as lights on a hill is a fantasy. They are fighting a similar fight to Schwartz and Armstrong, coming off notionally stronger foundations, though perhaps more corrupted.

The fantasy of the fact

The fantasy of the fact – the evidence is always partly what we need it to be; the other part is theirs!

Torrey Orton

November 9, 2009

The evidence is often partly what we need it to be, unless we are arguing against ourselves. Even then there is a self-fulfilling bias towards our perceived self-interest. So, the facts cannot be determined without a determination of accountabilities. That is, only on very special occasions, or concerning very neutral matters, can the facts by untainted with the interests of the argument. Even academic facts are often disputed in much the same way as ones of public interest. The accountabilities here are the purposes and powers of the contestants, plus their personal needs. So, for example, it is surprising to see a very smart and thoughtful thinker pretend that there are neutral facts in the euthanasia debate. Christopher Pearson would have churches or pro-life groups commission new surveys with "non-emotive language" to ascertain public mood on matters self-terminating. Who could judge "non-emotive" non-emotively?

Thus, much political discourse these days is concerned to shift the accountabilities. Watching our parliamentary process is like watching a collection of fighters with no memory for the sides of issues they have been on and hence no shame about the sides they take over time. The present confected boat people threat is an instance. There is increasingly no other side at all and, hence, decreasingly decisions which are accountable – they are too short term to be effective (see Brian Caldwell in the AGE 021109 on the Federal Government's "education revolution" and time).

We know that ideas come positioned by our natural inclination to prejudge an argument on the back of our perception of its provenance. This may be condensed into useful economic mantra like: "When buying beef in Paris, read the provenance label before judging the visuals before you". This natural inclination is expressed by the pointing out the facts which the other side(s) have avoided, misread, misrepresented or just failed to acquire from the point of view of one's own facts. Such a move, which appears to be neutral, scientific, and balanced, can be just another tactic in the struggle the facts are meant to clarify, expand or conclude.

This is a serious problem for evidence-based, evidence supported or similar practices of various descriptions. It is most obviously a problem in political discourses because they are positioned to defeat the other and at once avoid accountability – the artefacts of a spun world. For other discourses – professional, family, religious – where personal interests are also at stake and accountability cannot be obscured, what constitutes the evidence is disputable for other reasons, too. One example of this is here:

"Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who has been active in the "Perestroika" movement, said that the question should determine the method. If you want to test cause and effect, "quantitative methods are the preferred way to go," he said, but they can't tell "how political phenomena should be understood and interpreted" — whether a protest, for instance, is the result of a genuine social movement or an interest group, whether it is religious or secular."

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/books/20poli.html

There, nicely poised, is a fundamental problem with science: that as you become clear about facts, you cannot sustain a similarly clear interpretive picture about them, the picture which gives them meaning by placing them in a worldview. The science Smith is talking about is intrinsically uncertain in two other key respects: (1) predictions are approximate, until they have happened; and, (2) the probabilities established by statistics are, even very high ones, never apply to a single case. A tipping point can be assumed to occur eventually, like the farmer's rain, but the second, minute and hour of which day in what place and by whose agency cannot.

It seems I am arguing a relativist line. I would, but not as the only line. My concern is that in large scale, complex public policy and action domains, the possibility of shared understanding and commitment is declining with the rising failure of the scientific to convince us. The more science we have the less we can understand. This leaves us in the hands of our leaders and they are tainted in matters of public trusts.

For me at this time my wonder is how we can find or create appropriate common grounds in some of our major life domains – health, education, and the key challenges facing us across them in climate, fuels, foods, finances...

Anger channelling – effective or expressive

Anger channelling – effective or expressive

Torrey Orton

October 30, 2009

Months ago Hamid and Charles wondered what effective anger channelling would look like. They were picking up a line in my post on popular anger. The six months since then has seen an increase in popular public angers, notably to the level of scaring people like Thomas Friedman a few days ago – a guy who has seen a few things while wandering across flatter and hillier parts of the planet.

In the intervening months little has emerged to increase my awareness of channels I would likely choose for my angers, though I find myself continually looking at Comment and Letters pages for examples and models. Someone else's initiative I could join would be nice. Finding Don Watson interviewed recently and visiting the website spawned by his earlier writing (www.weaselwords.com.au) gave no solace to my shared anger at the linguistic (evidence of the) corrosion of basic social functions. Maybe we don't do popular anger and I'm unAustralian in my aspirations for more of it.

Sources – public and private
My most constant acquaintance with unresolved anger, aside from my own, is in therapy. With great regularity my patient clients with anxiety/depression related difficulties have substantive early abuses in their personal histories, often multi-generationally. This pattern has most recently been re-aired in the backwash of the arrest of Roman Polanski a while ago. Lurking in the interior of the veiled awareness of their abused childhoods, often extending well into early adulthood, are family systemic and peer group systemic threats to self. Coping with them at the time they are occurring involves a fine dance of conscious self-protection from these dangers and avoiding offense to their powerful authors. Especially critical is not allowing anger to surface, since that may be seen as a threat inviting even more vigorous abuse.

One can find this, too, in abused populations who are victims of racial, ethnic or other stereotypically driven abuses. Whole countries like Greece, China and Korea still show effects of longterm foreign domination. Individuals and groups learn to repress and deny their anger at felt injustice(s). The aversion to confrontation is so great people literally cannot speak their hurt directly. Equally, once freed of their oppression(s), the injured groups often cannot stop talking about the past that is so much with them. Their talk, organised as a group action, is one way to channel anger. The objective is to shame the oppressors, and maybe gain retribution or recompense. The enduring effort of surviving "comfort women" to win Japanese acknowledgement of their victimisation is a well known example. Reconciliations are another objective, seldom (?) successful, even if the once victimised are now the powerful as in South Africa. On the other hand, face-the-victim processes for personal injury criminals have some positive results, particularly if the criminal is early in their possible career.

Mixed feelings, often conflicted (an anger source itself)

One of the discoveries which open the door to moral complexity is that of conflicted feelings about acts of perceived goodness or badness. Even minor ones often suffice to elicit an emotional array about people well-known to us that leaves confusion in its wake. Where the origin of abusive treatment is within family, it is usually undiscussible. Failure to abide by the rule is punished by indirect or direct threat of emotional exile.

We could say that the existence of real moral simplification (black and white thinking) is among the leading indicators of social cohesion within groups. How better to identify a robust group than by its resistance to acknowledging, or, better, pursuing the ethical shortcomings of its members?

The latter is, however, an accepted indicator of under-development of personal ethics. Its organisational version is on show daily: the Catholic Church's repeatedly reported knee-jerk denial / obscuring of sexual predation; NFP organisations' abandoned children hostel's multidimensional predations; corporate boards unable to restrain greed in management or even apply preset performance indicators to executive remuneration; footy players distressing women or each other ….

In therapy, the mixed feelings of traumatised children are expressed in adult squeamishness about tagging their parents with any accountability for the agreed traumas. Often initially the traumas cannot be recalled, being locked in memory out of direct access. Sorting them out is essential to righting the wrongs (setting responsibility where it belongs: with those in power at the time). Once sorted, the anger can be addressed to managing the present state of the abusive relationships. This is not sortable by changing the way we think about abuses – i.e. changing the way we value them by portioning the experienced violences into non-catastrophic mind-bites. It requires action - actual or virtual – to hold the continuing forces of abuse at bay even in their weakened forms of the family social system: aged parents, the variously affected and denying siblings, etc.

Different angers – levels
Anger can loosely be thought of as having two experiential sources: (1) undesired violations by others and (2) frustration of our appropriate aspirations through our own or others incompetence to support them. Some helping fraternity folks divide angry feelings from angry behaviours. This, and its sibling – the division of thought from feeling in CBT – are on the verge of relegation to a subservient role therapeutically as the indivisibility of thought, feeling and action are demonstrated by multi-modal research in these areas. Recent work on thought/feeling integration makes this distinction functionally meaningless, since there is no thought which does not have a feeling component, nor a feeling which does not have a behavioural component. This is the practical meaning of 'non-verbal' and 'habitual'.

Channels – pathways and platforms for action

There are a number of action channels, spread over two basic levels: actual (real, authentic) and virtual (technically mediated). These two flow into each other of course when the interaction becomes live (therefore real and authentic) while still being technically mediated (phone, etc.) Means of expressing anger (and most other feelings) are many and employable at either level. Here's a start at the micro level: two people. (Plug in your own two party scenario at this point.)

For example, I want to deal with a difficult issue with a person who matters to me. The issue is so volatile, and we have handled it so badly in the past, that there is justifiable anger arising from objective disrespects on both sides. How I start to re-engage will make all the difference to the possibility of a different result from the repeat failures we have achieved so far. The start has to flag that something new is intended without getting into the substance of things too early. A new shared ground has to be prepared.

This will partly be old ground recovered from joint history, and partly new ground created for this event. The old might include shared history, experience and values; the new, opportunities for growth or development that did not exist before now and the mutual interdependence(s) which can bring them to life. It ensures actual continuity and engages the shared history as a context for future activity.

I might send these thoughts in an email, written in a spare, agenda-offering style - for discussion, a precursor to a talk. If I wondered about his accessibility to email – some folks don't turn it on every day or more than once a day – an SMS noting that it is on the way would be appropriate. It's all virtual to this point. The rest unfolds in conversational steps like those mentioned here where a delicate entrance to a potentially indelicate subject is sketched out as a face-to-face event.

Join 'em
More recently, in trying to find a way to channel my anger more concretely I sought out an appropriate NGO as the prospective beneficiary of ½ day per week of my time pro bono. I overcame previous doubts about my ability to stick with anything too narrowly focussed by choosing one in the environmental domain. I realised (again) that such groups have to take a whole of system and systems viewpoint on their efforts – therefore allowing my broader unresolved interests some room to play, too. So, it looks like I've found something to join. I expect it will become a source of new bloggables.

Rectifications (17) – Trust, or confidence?

Rectifications (17) – Trust, or confidence?

Torrey Orton– September 27, 2009

Thanks to Effective Negotiation Services, I learned 20 years ago that trust is as useful as the predictability which underlies it… that when people invite our trust as a condition of an agreement or a commitment to action, we should respond with doubt. About 10 years ago I learned in working with Dr. Terry Reilly that the domains of activity which affect trustful feelings number somewhere around 8 minimum. These are real values and processes of relationship among colleagues and in other commercial relationships – some values like fairness, reciprocity and equality; others processes like transparency, openness and information. All can be operationalised. They need not merely be espoused.

Recently, in the flush of interpretation released by the GFC, trust is enjoying a comeback in 'behavioural economics'' claim to replace the mathematically wondrous and empirically simplistic market fundamentalist paradigm. Unfortunately, it's a comeback with no feedback. There is assumed to be a causal link between trust and willingness to participate in commercial transactions, especially the most vaporous and greatly more damaging of them, the financial ones. We are talking here of something called "public trust" – an attribute or affect of people en masse. For example,

Take my word for it, your money's safe

Saturday, 24 October 2009 Australian Financial Review Howard Davies

I was relieved to find something a little more robust for Howard Davies from a few months back with a notionally serious research base in view. In both pieces a slide between "confidence" and "trust" occurs throughout. It goes like this:

"…. So the net is that this research suggests there has been a sharp loss in trust in the financial sector, that that lack of trust can have damaging effects on finance and investment, and that so far government interventions have not been successful in offsetting the consequences of the crisis for confidence."

Confident, but not trusting

Trust and belief (some times in the cloth of faith) are often confused, especially by those who are only recently coming out of the paradigmatic dark to find it is a normal human emotion affecting all manner of relationships. This is may be what's happening with LSE Director Davies' slide from trust to confidence. The latter is an empirical term; the former an ethico-moral one. Both slide into each other from their respective bases, but 'confidence' retains its empirical reference to predictability and concreteness, while 'trust' retains is ethereal values tilt. So for example, when used with respect to people, one might express confidence in another's ability without endorsing the trustworthiness of their intentions or commitments.

Thus you will find in articles of its type that, if we could only repair trust then the masses would once again believe in banks and such instrumentalities, and growth could reignite. Some dozens of them have appeared in various guises over the term (to date) of the GFC. What they pretty regularly fail to do is to say what actions would be likely to rebuild the lost commodity (trust being like esteem and other commoditised emotions taken as entities which can be built explicitly). Some wise guy remarked in passing recently that the repair of certain damages to his community would take two generations at least. Our lost trust has been being eroded for a generation at least for many of us.

A concert of actions

The 11 causes of the GFC advanced by Daniel Yergin might make an interesting starting place for more concreteness in our reflections. If we need, as many believe, to reduce the prospects of more GFCs, then specific actions are required, probably in some intentional concert, for our confidence in institutions and persons to grow in to trust again rather than blind faith. This concert will be assisted by focus on specific actions, not on aspirational trustful outcomes treated as the actions – e.g. the "putting in place" of this and that as if that were the end. We know from the struggle for transparency through mandated processes like Freedom of Information that a put is never a practice.

What causes us to do things?

What causes us to do things?

Torrey Orton

October 25, 2009

The GFC has spawned a literature of expositions on its causes and their effects. One of these recently suggests 11 causes in search of a narrative. The effects are, in turn, causes of further effects – they 'make' us, or allegedly 'make' us, do things like buy less, save more, cry out about greed, etc. This is roughly the story of life, these narratives of description and explanation from which we give meaning to our experience. They also, as Daniel Yergin says in The Guardian a few days ago, provide a guide to future causes, to future actions we might want to take if we knew we could take them. That is, if we see ourselves as causes.

To cause is to relate

People in my trade – helpers of various denominations – work on the assumption that we can help others to become better causes, better agents for themselves (and for others as appropriate). We also assume that being an effective agent or cause, is a central part of well-being. Also, for now, we assume that the principle form for the giving and receiving of causes – for being effective – is our relationships. However there are reasons to wonder, only one of which is the GFC, whether we can cause things as we used to, whether we can be effective in this world.

 

Our relationship processes and mechanisms attune us to possible pleasures and dangers. They are designed to assist getting things done and telling us how the effort is going. Any particular 'effort', any solo or joint activity is supported by sensors which look forwards, sideways and backwards from the moment the activity comes into awareness until it fades out of it. These sensors are especially attuned to the others in our relationships about the 'effort'. When attuned, they ensure the greatest natural congruence of thought, feeling and action (mirror neurons) among relationship members, or even non-members.

 

Even after the effort fades, of course, traces remain through which much of the actual experience can be accessed. This system is the foundation of evidence-based human activities in the original sense. It does not require a lab to operate. In fact, no lab can operate with its facility and appropriateness. A lab is too slow and narrow because it is a ponderous, conscious activity system.

 

Relationships are meaning making memory systems. They also are systems of intent. For us, action is not like a sand grain sliding down a pile from the tipping point on. For us, action must be sustained, usually by motivation. In this sense, only human (or other conscious) action is caused. Inability to cause others to do or be things is sure sign of an injured consciousness and a deprived life. However, like the sliding sand grain at tipping point, even our started but unsustained action(s) can produce ripples expressing the implicit power of the initiative.

Intent and harm

In therapy intent appears clearly as the triggers of various anxiety spectrum syndromes. These triggers are mainly non-verbal: body language, tone, pace…all the emotional aspects of communication through which we express our intent and interpret others' towards us. Our predisposition to hear intent where none exists is a marker of the importance of danger detection in our totally functionality.

 

Human intent comes in two main forms: the personal and the institutional. Our attunement to personal intent, as sketched above, does not help us much with institutional intent. The latter is often slow, long-term and barely perceptible compared to the short, sharp impacts of personally driven dangers. One result is that people may blame individuals for having bad attitudes or intentions towards them when the attitude is discussably institutional or systemic in origin.

A bad queue

One slight example. A work colleague complained about the attitude of the wait-staff at our local preferred café, characterising them as arrogant and dismissive. I asked what gave her that impression and she replayed an incident of apparent service disregard earlier the same day. In addition, she didn't get her coffee until it was cold.

 

On further exploration, I was able to show her that the disregard she felt stemmed from the way queuing is handled there. It works by customers presenting themselves in the right place and in the right order – in other words, a small self-organising system. There are no signs directing customers to a waiting area or the appropriate verbal protocols to achieve successful ordering. The cold coffee resulted from the staff seeing her and recognising her and producing the coffee. They left it on the counter expecting she was going to pick it up.

 

But, for instance, failure to say "I'm next" as needed, would lead to apparent disregard by the wait-staff. They depend on customers to control who's next themselves. And, voila, failure to do so produces a perceived disrespect and the story unfolded in my colleague's mind from there, cooking up into a tale of intentional disrespect. I guessed correctly that the wait-staff would have no idea they had created this impression either.

 

To cap it off, my colleague is a sometimes unassertive person who isn't comfortable performing as the queuing system requires. So, I coached her in the system, including a little voice projection often required in the ambient noise. She came back next day and said it worked exactly as predicted and she felt recognised, served, positively regarded and previous impressions deleted! She got her coffee hot, too.

 

Jane pointed out that this little system is defective and my colleague had a right to be angered by its failings. A good point, and also one which reveals that the personal and institutional may seldom be clearly distinguishable in daily life. The two causal sources may be mutually reinforcing. This is most obviously so where the systems are big need systems like health, education, work and so on, as discussed next.

 

Intentional bad effects

There are, of course, much more invasive institutional disregards, or actively damaging impacts. These occur especially in core well-being institutions like the health, education and legal ones which may variously discriminate against certain members of societies. The history of change in such discriminations is the story of the slow extension of fair treatment to total populations. They are notoriously slow progresses.

 

Some damaging institutional impacts are actually the objective of marketing. It intentionally sets out to pre-condition our decision-making at levels below consciousness – by drip-down familiarisation, so to speak. Where those subject to the drip are unaware and undefended from the process and its effects, the damage may be great. Current struggles over "sponsorship" of state schools by food brands are prompted by one such potential damage. Sponsorship's dubious nature is magnified by recognising that the argument for marketing and advertising is raised by those champions of choice, the market fundamentalists around us. The objective of the marketing, of course, is explicitly to restrict choice. John Roskam's argument for Big Mac schools is characteristically disingenuous. What would Adam Smith say?

Where to next with this expedition? Perhaps into the occasionally perverse world of science and causes. One example of this is here:

"Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who has been active in the "Perestroika" movement, said that the question should determine the method. If you want to test cause and effect, "quantitative methods are the preferred way to go," he said, but they can't tell "how political phenomena should be understood and interpreted" — whether a protest, for instance, is the result of a genuine social movement or an interest group, whether it is religious or secular."

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/books/20poli.html

 

There, nicely poised, is a fundamental problem with science: that as you become clear about facts, you cannot sustain a similarly clear interpretive picture about them. The science Smith is talking about is intrinsically uncertain in two key respects: (1) predictions are approximate, until they have happened; and, (2) the probabilities established by statistics are, even very high ones, never apply to a single case. The technical problem is that what constitutes the evidence is disputable.

 

For us, this means especially they don't predict for individuals. In these small spaces survive a host, a forest of exceptional knowledge practices ranging from standard doubt to marvellous interpretive schemes like horoscopes. I mean neither any harm here. But harm may come from inappropriate application of these schemes to daily life. If you feel a dilemma coming on, and you like them, see you here again shortly. This dilemma matters, to me at least. It has major impacts on my profession and my social concerns.