Nadine Dorries: People’s Champion or Drama Queen?

 celebrity, government, heroes and inspirational figures, politics, Psychology, religion, Spiral Dynamics, spirituality  No Responses »
Dec 132012
 

Earlier this year Nadine Dorries, Tory MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, told BBC 1’s Daily Politics show that David Cameron and George Osborne were “…two arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of milk – who show no remorse, no contrition and no passion to want to understand the lives of others.” (James Orr, 2012) It was a stunning, biting barb that left Cameron and Osborne flummoxed, with the former desperately stating that he paid just under 50p for a pint of milk.Just a few weeks earlier Dorries had gunned down Cameron and his Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister Nick Clegg in a Financial Times interview with a similar cutting comment: “The problem is that policy is being run by two public school boys who don’t know what it’s like to go to the supermarket and have to put things back on the shelves because they can’t afford it for their children’s lunchboxes. What’s worse, they don’t care either.” (George Parker, Elizabeth Rigby & Kiran Stacey, 2012)

Nadine Dorries in her more usual role in the House of Commons - Copyright © 2012 Press Association

Nadine Dorries in her more usual role in the House of Commons – Copyright © 2012 Press Association

In those remarks, Dorries summed up so perfectly the frustration and anger of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who have been disenfranchised by the Coalition Government’s austerity programme. For everyone who’s lost their job and/or their house (and possibly their relationship and possibly their children and their self-respect) as a result (direct or indirect) of government policy, for a few weeks at least Dorries was their champion. She expertly exposed the hypocrisy in Cameron’s oft-repeated mantra that “We’re all in this together”. By the ‘we’ in “we’re all in this together”, Cameron seems to mean everyone who’s not part of the 1% wealth-owning elite – who have become so prominently the targets of the ‘Occupy’ movement – and their sycophantic puppets like Cameron and Osborne. (Though there is an argument for it as a strategy, Osborne has actually made the British elite wealthier this Autumn by cutting the very top of rate of tax, for those earning more than £150,000 per annum, from 50p to 45p.)To bring out the bitter irony in this, Osborne admitted formally in his Autumn Statement on Wednesday 5 December that the Government will not make its deficit reduction target and that the so-called ‘Age of Austerity’ will have to be extended from 2015 to 2018. In other words, how ever much Cameron and Osborne want to blame the 2008 global crash and the ensuing worldwide recession, the inescapable fact is that their policies are not successful in dealing with the problems. (Governments are supposed to develop policies that deal successfully with what ever problems their country faces. When they fail to deal with the problems, they effectively declare themselves to be incompetent.) So, while they make the poor poorer and the rich richer, the Government has to admit its policies aren’t working.

For their part in blithely acquiescing to both the incompetence and the greed of the Tories, the Lib Dems can expect to lose so many deposits in 2015 that they will be in danger of being wiped out of Parliament. (On the assumption that they somehow keep their seats, it will be interesting to see whether Clegg and Danny Alexander, Osborne’s number 2, abandon the what’s left of the parliamentary Lib Dems and formally join the Tories….)

Since the days of Margaret Thatcher, influential elements of the Conservative Party have been driven by the ORANGE vMEME. (While there were totally-unforgiveable costs to Thatcherite policies in terms of damage done to the social fabric of our communities, especially in Wales, the Midlands and North of England, and the Scottish Lowlands – see The Thatcherite Project is ended. Whither Britain? – they nonetheless restored Britain as an economic giant. Ironically it was Labour prime minister Tony Blair who, by essentially continuing Thatcher’s policies, took Britain to the position of second richest country in the world in terms of gross national product. (World Bank, 2007) Tragically, there seems little ORANGE in the current top Tory mindset. Rather, it seems to be driven by the RED/BLUE vMEME harmonic of zealotry. BLUE in that there is only one way – austerity – and it must be taken, no matter the cost to human beings. RED in that it is short-sighted and concerned only with increasing personal wealth and power and the wealth and power of its in-group, the 1%.

So, when Cameron and Osborne and their hapless lapdogs Clegg and Alexander are revealed so clearly in their incompetence and greed, where’s Nadine Dorries to put the knife in, puncture some over-inflated selfplexes and talk some much-needed home truths?

I’m a celebrity…
Unfortunately, when Dorries should have been skewering Cameron and Osborne (in the Autumn Statement) for the increased tax load they expect the middle class ‘strivers’ to shoulder, her own RED vMEME had led her away from Westminster in an all-too short-sighted pursuit of wealth and power as a contestant in I’m a Celebrity…get me out of here!

With her (partly-plastic) sculptured good looks and a genuine talent for quick-fire put-downs, it must have seemed to both the show’s producers and Dorries herself that she was a natural for I’m a Celebrity. So the antagonism her participation has produced in the Conservative Party ranks, in the media and amongst her constituents appears to have been largely unanticipated. According to a poll conducted by ex-Tory Party Deputy Chair Lord Ashcroft amongst 1500 of the Mid-Bedfordshire constituents, 58% disapproved of her being on I’m a Celebrity,  with 42% disapproving strongly. As for the programme’s viewers, they voted her to undergo the most gruesome tasks (such as eating an ostrich anus) and voted her off at the first opportunity.

Dorries relaxing in the celebrity jungle - Copyuright © 2012 ITV/Rex Features

Dorries relaxing in the celebrity jungle – Copyright © 2012 ITV/Rex Features

As partial justification for appearing on the show, Dorries claimed that, in conversation with other participants, she would be able to get across to 16 million viewers her controversial views proposing lowering the time limit for abortion and school sex education lessons explicitly teaching teenage girls to abstain. This proved to be hopelessly naïve. Those conversations were simply never included in the broadcasts.  The RED vMEME, of course, has no sense of future or of consequences. So it seems Dorries had little notion that her foray into the jungle would enable David Cameron’s RED to have its revenge. Inevitably she was suspended from the party by Conservative Party Chief Whip Sir George Young as soon as it was learned she was heading for Australia. On 27 November, the day after returning from Australia, Dorries met with Young to discuss the situation. A spokesman for Young was quoted after the meeting as saying: “The whip has not been restored and nor will it be until she proves she can rebuild bridges with her constituents, her association and her parliamentary colleagues.” Dorries, it was said, had a fortnight to mend fences with her constituency association. On 10 December BBC News reported that she had indeed secured the unanimous backing of local members. As legally Dorries is the sitting MP until the next election, whether as a Tory or not, the local party felt it was better the constituency had a Conservative MP representing it. However, Paul Duckett, Chair of the Mid-Bedfordshire Conservative Association, added the rider that there was no guarantee Dorries would be selected to stand in 2015. The same BBC News story also carried Cameron’s latest comments: “I believe MPs should either be in their constituencies fighting for their constituents or at Westminster standing up for their area. A lot of MPs were angry that she just waltzed off to the jungle….She has got to earn her way back into the affections of her colleagues.” On 24 November, just before setting back from Australia, Dorries repeated her earlier support for Boris Johnson replacing Cameron, telling The Sun’s Laura Armstrong: “I long for the day Boris Johnson is Prime Minister. Boris is my King of the Jungle.” She also attacked the degree of control exercised by the whips: “There is a real control mechanism under Cameron in Number Ten now. MPs and how they vote are tampered with.” Since the meeting with Young, Dorries has refrained from such inflammatory comments…but no wonder Cameron says she has to win his affections!Whether Conservative Central Office would actually continue to deny Dorries the whip in face of the constituency association’s request for it to be reinstated is a moot point but Central Office does have a history of imposing its will on local party organisations. Such a course could have some justification in a report in The Times on 10 December that a petition calling for a by-election in Mid-Bedfordshire had already collected 700 signatures. (Michael Savage, 2012)

If Dorries continues to be denied the whip, there is speculation she could defect to UKIP, giving them a high profile, glamorous MP with a penchant for publicity for a honeymoon couple of years – after which she would almost certainly lose Mid-Bedfordshire and could be sidelined from frontline politics before she turned on their leadership. If she is reinstated to the Tory whip, what price would Cameron extract and what measures could the whips take to control her?

Dorries’ sheer impulsiveness is reflected in her attacking Labour MP Stephen McCabe on Twitter for reporting her to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, pointing out his own attendance rate was just 63%. McCabe responded by pointing out that he had taken time off to recover from having open heart surgery.

People’s champion…or drama queen?
Nadine Dorries would make a great people’s champion, being very much a working class Tory – unlike the public school boys currently running the Government. She was raised on a council estate on Merseyside, with her parents among the first tenants who bought their council house under Thatcher’s 1980 ‘Right to Buy’ scheme. She worked as a nurse in the days when nurses were not considered the elite professionals they are now but changed dirty sheets and cleaned up vomit amongst their more ‘medical’ duties.

So Dorries understands the ordinary person in a way Cameron, Clegg and Osborne, with their moneyed upbringings, almost certainly don’t.

However, she is also a very astute woman who ran her own childcare business for 11 years and then sold it to BUPA, with part of the deal being that she became one of that company’s directors. It’s unlikely anyone could do that without a well-developed ORANGE vMEME governing their thinking.

As a self-made woman with working class roots, Dorries has the potential to become a centre of gravity for those on the Conservative benches who are unhappy with the make-the-rich-richer-and-the-rest-poorer policies pursued by Cameron and Osborne. An internal opposition that could exert pressure to ameliorate some of the Government’s more extreme policies.

Unfortunately, Dorries often seems to put her immediate self-interest before duty and then justifies her choices in a manner that seems almost deluded. As with the delusion that the producers of I’m a Celebrity were going to air hours of technical debate about whether the time limit for abortions should come down from 24 weeks to 20.

Dorries also has a history of altering her history to make it seem more dramatic and glamorous. For example, she reduced her age by 10 years when contesting (unsuccessfully) Greater Manchester’s Hazel Grove constituency in 2001. Her 2009 autobiographical account of her 2005 selection in Mid-Bedfordshire reads: “That pride, that sense of achievement, the knowledge that I was selected on the basis of my performance and merit above all other candidates on that day is what enables me to hold my head up high …” However, The Times account paints the selection process as much less of an achievement: “Mrs Dorries…easily beat her 11 rivals and won the plum safe seat on the first ballot at the selection this weekend…. Senior party figures had made clear to local dignitaries that they would like the seat to go to a woman and presented the constituency with a shortlist of seven women and five men to underline the point.” (Rosemary Bennett & Helen Rumbelow, 2005)

Even the degree to which Dorries presents herself as a Christian varies significantly. She told the Salvation Army’s The War Cry: “I am not an MP for any reason other than because God wants me to be. There is nothing I did that got me here; it is what God did. There is nothing amazing or special about me, I am just a conduit for God to use.” (Nigel Bovey, 2007) Yet a few years later, when asked if it was her Christian faith driving her campaign to lower the abortion time limit, she responded: “Not at all. Not even a shred.” When asked about her faith, she said: “I believe in other people’s Gods as well.” (Mehdi Hasan, 2012) To be fair to Dorries, people do change their minds and just a few days before that interview, she told Charles Maggs that she was struggling to keep to her Christian faith in the culture of Westminster.

Nonetheless, such inconsistencies indicate a lack of strong BLUE in her selfplex - and that may help explain why she apparently failed to anticipate such a strong antipathy to her participation in I’m a Celebrity.

What now?
There’s one sense in which Dorries clearly has the upper hand. She’s the sitting MP for Mid-Bedfordshire - and that simply cannot be taken away from her until 2015. How she plays that hand could influence politics in the UK for years to come. She could choose to become a key figure in a constructive opposition within the Conservative Party or she could defect to UKIP and play a prominent, if possibly short-lived, role in their growth strategy. Dorries’ ORANGE can certainly weigh up the strategic options but she will need to develop her BLUE much more to give her the discipline to tow the line when necessary and restrain her impulsiveness. (She’s so impulsive that, if she were a male, she would easily fit many of the criteria for the temperamental dimension of Psychoticism. Unfortunately neither Dorries nor anyone who knows her well is on record as commenting on her sex drive!)

Or she could simply exploit her celebrity. But what a waste of a potential people’s champion that would be!

Schizophrenia and the tragic story of Moby Grape

 celebrity, heroes and inspirational figures, mental health, music, Psychology, substance abuse  No Responses »
Sep 162012
 

Recently, after several years without a turntable, I treated myself to one and started digging out LPs I hadn’t played in years. Among the delights I rediscovered was the music of Moby Grape. Moby Who? I hear you say.

Well, for 6 months or so back in 1967, Moby Grape were the ‘next big new thing’ for the record companies starting to take a serious interest in the burgeoning hippie music scene of San Francisco. Unfortunately Moby Grape’s star did not rise for very long, crashing down in a tragic welter of legal disputes, drug abuse and ‘madness’.

RCA already had an album out by Jefferson Airplane by late 1966. Warner Bros had signed the Grateful Dead but didn’t quite know what to do with them. Quicksilver Messenger Service were just getting going and Janis Joplin was beginning to find her feet in Big Brother & The Holding Company.

For most A&R men/talent scouts filtering into the San Francisco Bay Area, the local hippie bands, with to some extent the exception of the Airplane, were just weird. They didn’t understand the music business. Moreover, in their insular, stoned way, most of them didn’t want to understand that music was a business! Most of the local bands just wanted to play whatever music they and their friends fancied, without the slightest thought of whether their songs could ever be made into hit singles.

The Airplane understood – or at least some of the band’s members did! – that music was a business and that their sense of art sometimes had to be compromised if they wanted to make serious money from their music. Unsurprisingly then, the Airplane were the first of the San Francisco hippie bands to make a record and the first to have hit singles. That band’s ability to balance art with commerciality kept them on the charts for around 25 years while continuing to earn critical accolades right into the late 1970s as the renamed Jefferson Starship before they lost most of their sense of art in the pursuit of money during the 1980s.

Back in late 1966 Moby Grape had a similar ethic to the Airplane – this ethic coming in part at least from sharing one Matthew Katz as manager. (The Grape can also be seen as the first of the many Airplane/Starship spin-offs as singer/guitarist Skip Spence had previously spent around 6 months as the Airplane’s drummer.) While the Grape, with a 3-guitar attack, would jam for 20 minutes just as readily as the Grateful Dead, they understood that pop records needed shortish, hummable tunes with distinctive arrangements. Moreover, unlike some of the local bands, they polished their singing until they could produce the best male vocal harmonies this side of The Beach Boys.

The video below of the Grape performing ‘Omaha’ and ‘8:05’ live on The Mike Douglas Show in 1967 gives a little flavour of the range and quality of the band’s music. Left to right, the band are Spence, Jerry Miller (vocals/lead guitar), Bob Mosley (vocals/bass) and Peter Lewis (vocals/guitar), with singing drummer Don Stevenson behind them.

Play Video

While Warner Bros pondered just what they had signed with the Dead and Quicksilver laughed contemptuously at the men in suits who talked to them about recording deals, Columbia Records loved what they got in Moby Grape after a short but fierce bidding war.

And they thought they knew exactly what to do with them.

Too commercial for their own good…and too badly behaved!
What happened to the Grape is a legend among those who know.

What some rock critics still describe as the best of the San Francisco hippie band records, ‘MOBY GRAPE’, was sabotaged by Columbia releasing almost the entire album simultaneously as singles, thus confusing deejays as which one to push. A substantial section of the ‘underground’ press thought the album was too poppy – too commercial – and declared it ‘unhip’.  Attempts to promote the album nationally were sunk by the Grape themselves who got thrown off a tour supporting The Mamas & The Papas for bad behaviour such as ‘mooning’ the teenage girls in the audience. In spite of all this, the album still made the Top 20.

The recording of the Grape’s second album was moved from Los Angeles to New York City after Columbia released the band were spending more time partying than recording. In New York, however, the band began to fracture, with Peter Lewis walking out to fly home, and some of the partying reached truly epicurean levels. After consuming large quantities of LSD with a self-declared black witch, Skip Spence decided Don Stevenson needed saving from himself and tried to chop down his hotel room door with a fire axe to kill him.

Spence was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and spent 6 months in Belle Vue psychiatric hospital before being released to cut an offbeat solo album, ‘OAR’, regarded by some as a ‘psychedelic masterpiece’ of sorts.

The Grape’s second album, ‘WOW’/’GRAPE JAM’ – though it certainly had its moments – was, unsurprisingly, a disjointed, indulgent affair. However, some of the underground press actually praised the psychedelic effects and the strangeness of some tracks. Still there was enough buzz about the Grape for it to do even slightly better on the charts than the debut.

With Spence incapacitated, the remaining quartet regrouped, recorded the engaging, country-oriented ‘MOBY GRAPE ‘69’ and set about some heavy touring schedules. In spite of this, the album didn’t sell well – and then Bob Mosley quit to join the Marines! At a time when American youth culture was convulsed with antagonism to American involvement in the Vietnam War, Mosley becoming a marine was seen as both bizarre and a betrayal. However, Mosley wasn’t a marine for long, being court-martialled out of the Marines after assaulting an officer and being diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic.

Lewis, Stevenson and Miller made the more than marginally-interesting ‘TRULY FINE CITIZEN’ as a contract filler before going their separate ways.

And that should have been it…but in 1971 the band reunited with all 5 members. Such was the interest in a fully-fledged Grape reunion that the band were able to spurn the Airplane’s new Grunt Records vanity label, to sign with Warner Bros. Unfortunately the resulting ‘20 GRANITE CREEK’ didn’t have quite enough killer tracks to make it a winner and the short tour to promote it was marred by uneven performances.

The band members then found themselves unable to use the Moby Grape name as Matthew Katz, ex-manager now for a couple of years, claimed ownership of the name. The band began a 30+-year battle to regain it.

Various further reunions have taken place since the early 70s and a handful of interesting but unsuccessful albums have been made for minor labels, usually using some variation of the name, to avoid Katz suing. Spence was involved in some of the reunions, usually just for a short while; sometimes Mosley has not been involved in the reunions.

It would appear Mosley coped better with having Schizophrenia than Spence did – though the latter compounded his mental health problems by significant substance abuse (alcohol, heroin and cocaine). Spence spent long periods of time in residential mental institutions or transient accommodation. Both Spence and Mosley were homeless at times in the 1990s, with Mosley homeless again in 2006 when Peter Lewis picked him up from the side of a San Diego highway to tell him the band had finally won their name back from Katz. That, however, was way too late for Spence who had died in 1999 just before his 53rd birthday.

Moby Grape reformed in 2006 partly to help Mosley but news of  a new legal injunction from Katz the following year reportedly led to a partial relapse.

The story of Moby Grape is indeed a tragedy – partly self-inflicted, of course – but no less a tragedy for that. When I think of Spence and Mosley, I must confess that it does irk me that men who have made such outstanding music and given me so much pleasure should have suffered so much.

20% of a group have Schizophrenia?!?
The incidence of Schizophrenia in the general population is around 1%. Even among dizygotic (non-identical) twins who share 50% the same genes, the concordance rate found in most sample groups is less than 20%  – eg: Irving Gottesman found a rate of 17% in 1991. So it is quite remarkable that Moby Grape had a 20% concordance rate among their 5 genetically-unrelated members.

It could, of course, be a huge coincidence. Or, it could be that something in the way the Grape conducted themselves precipitated the onset of Schizophrenia in Spence and Mosley.

While research in recent years has moved the emphasis away from purely psychological explanations for Schizophrenia more onto biological causes, the concept of diathesis-stress (Joseph Zubin & Bonnie Spring, 1977) is still widely accepted amongst psychiatrists and clinical psychologists. In other words, you may have a genetic diathesis or predisposition to develop Schizophrenia – in the same way some people are more likely to develop cancer or heart disease – but it still needs some kind of ‘stress trigger’. For some people with the predisposition, this can be a single, emotionally-overwhelming life event such as the death of a spouse. For others, the stress trigger is more the accumulative effect of certain, dangerous lifestyle choices.

The Grape, certainly in the first flush of money and fame, were notorious for indulging in a party lifestyle. And, in San Francisco in 1967, a party lifestyle almost certainly included vast amounts of cannabis and frequent use of LSD. While the concordance rate linking the onset of Schizophrenia with cannabis use varies from study to study – with the age of the user being a significant variable factor – the association between the 2 is now well-established and generally-accepted – see: Time to turn against Cannabis!

There is almost no available research on whether the use of LSD is linked to the onset of Schizophrenia – though a number of experts have posited, from case studies, that it looks like a connection exists. Certainly, besides Spence and Mosley, there are a number of other high profile rockers from the 1960s who appear to have had Schizophrenia triggered by LSD use – most notably Roky Erickson of The 13th Floor Elevators, Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac and The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson – though Wilson’s illness was later reclassified as Manic-Depressive Psychosis (Bipolar Disorder). (There’s enough similarity between the features of Mania and Paranoid Schizophrenia to perhaps understand how Wilson’s psychiatrist made the misdiagnosis.)

It is, of course, dangerous to generalise from case studies but it is certainly tempting to use them to link Schizophrenia with LSD. So-called ‘acid casualties’ are largely a by-product of the late 1960s. The reason for this may be that LSD declined dramatically in popularity in the early1970s. Even in San Franciso, centre of the hippie culture, the preference switched to a different type of drug. (The Dead’s Jerry Garcia and the Airplane’s Jorma Kaukonen both became heroin addicts; while Kaukonen’s bandmate Paul Kantner was just one of many well-to-do rock stars who went into rehab on numerous occasions in an attempt to kick cocaine.) While LSD enjoyed some revival in popularity in the club and ‘rave’ scenes of the 1980s and 1990s, it has never regained anything like the widespread and frequent use it enjoyed in the late 1960s.

Individual differences and risk
It is probably safe to assume the almost de rigueur heavy cannabis use amongst San Francisco musicians put Spence and Mosley at risk – and frequent LSD use may have increased the risk factor. That they developed Schizophrenia and the other 3 didn’t may well be due to Spence and Mosley having the genetic predisposition while the others didn’t.

That Mosley appears to have coped better with Schizophrenia than Spence was probably due to many factors, particularly social and support networks. However, their Grape bandmates – Peter Lewis in particular – have often been credited as supporting both men, as friends and by seeking to involve them in the various reunions. Undoubtedly heavy substance abuse will almost certainly have contributed to Spence’s continued decline.

Individual temperament may well have been a factor too. Spence seems to have been more of an extravert while Mosley, offstage at least, seems to have been more of an introvert – something of a reflective loner. Lewis’ descriptions of Spence trying to lure teenage girls to his trailer in the 1980s smack of the compulsive ruthlessness of Psychoticism. A temperament high in Extraversion and Psychoticism (Spence) would, according to Hans & Sybil Eysenck (1976), be more likely to facilitate the acting out of Paranoid Schizophrenia than a temperament inclined more to Introversion and Neuroticism (Mosley).

Much of this is, of course, speculation in trying to understand how Schizophrenia could blight the lives of 2 key figures in a band who could have been a major force in rock music in different circumstances.

As I close this blog post with a video below of the 4-piece Grape miming to Mosley’s sublime ‘It’s A Beautiful Day Today’ (from the ‘69’ album), I find it poignant to note that such glad-to-be-alive lyrics came from such a troubled mind.

Play Video

Dawn to dawn a lifetime
The birds sing and day’s begun
The heaven will shine from dawn to dusk
With golden rays of sun  

People on their way
Beginning a brand new day
I love (a-)hearing people say
It’s a beautiful day today

People in the streets
Rushing everywhere
Moving fast and how I know
They got to get somewhere

People on their way
Beginning a brand new day
I love (a-)hearing people say
It’s a beautiful day today

Lyrics copyright © 1969 South Star Music & Blackwood Music

Martin McGuinness for President?

 government, heroes and inspirational figures, politics, prejudice & discrimination, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  1 Response »
Oct 042011
 
Martin McGuinness, the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, always good for a soundbite, is certainly making some interesting news stories these days.

His effective admission yesterday (3 October) that the Provisional IRA did commit murder when innocent people died as a result of their activities is another – major? – step forward in Northern Ireland’s unsteady and decidedly volatile route to a lasting peace. McGuinness told The Independent: “The IRA were involved in quite a number of incidents which resulted in the accidental killing of innocent people and the term used by the relatives of those people who were killed was that they were murdered. I wouldn’t disagree with that. I’m not going to disagree with their analysis of what happened to their loved ones…. I accept that, in the circumstances where innocent people lost their lives, then it’s quite legitimate for the term murder to be used.”

Of course, McGuinness maintains that the army and police personnel and Unionist paramilitaries blown up or gunned down by the IRA were legitimate targets in a ‘bitter war’ - to say anything other would be to disrespect both his own past and the hundreds of IRA members who died or served jail sentences for their cause. Much as his ORANGE ambition is driving him in his quest for the Irish presidency, his PURPLE loyalties and BLUE devotion to the cause will not let him go that far.

Nonetheless, at a rally at Free Derry Corner a few days earlier (29 September), the deputy first minister, after telling a crowd of some 2,000 that his heart went out to all those who lost loved ones as a result of the conflict, added: “I am also conscious of many British soldiers, members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, members of the Ulster Defence Regiment, and my heart goes out to all their relatives.”

It’s easy to dismiss his remarks as the kind of crass manipulation typical of the ORANGE vMEME. McGuinness, however, claims the remarks were genuine and unscripted. If so, then maybe there’s some 2nd Tier thinking emerging in McGuinness’ head if he can genuinely empathise with the former enemy…?

McGuinness the Reconciler?
As  he gets serious about his campaign to become the Republic’s president, McGuinness is presenting himself more and more as a peacemaker, someone able to bring reconciliation to the still-divided peoples of Northern Ireland.

Certainly the close working relationship he formed with the once-hated Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government of 2007 - they were lampooned as ‘The Chuckle Brothers’ by some of those close to them! - is an indicator of how much McGuinness wanted  the devolved government of the province to work. When Paisley’s successor as  first minister, Peter Robinson, had his career rocked by very public marital problems, McGuiness was one of the first to offer personal support.

McGuinness  has even reached into the thorny realms of the religious schisms fuelling much  of the suspicion, distrust and outright contempt between Catholic Republicans and Protestant Unionists.

“]
Martin MgGuinness and David Latimer at the ard fheis, September 2011 [Copyright © 2011 BBC

This  September he got the Reverend David  Latimer of the First Derry Presbyterian Church to be a guest speaker at Sinn  Fein’s ard fheis (annual conference)  in Belfast’s Waterfront Hall. It was a ground-breaking event on 2

accounts. Firstly, it is the first time Sinn Fein’s ard  fheis has been held north of the Irish border. Secondly, it is the first  time a Protestant clergyman has been a key note speaker at the ard fheis. McGuinness told the ard fheis: "In my experience of recent years, many within the Unionist  community are up for a journey of reconciliation and dialogue." Latimer  referred to McGuinness as his ‘brother’ on that journey.

Both  the bravery of the move and the complexity of the issues involved are reflected in the vociferous criticisms of Jim  Allister, MLA for North Antrim and leader of the Traditional Unionist Voice. He called Latimer a ‘latter day Lundy’. (Robert Lundy was the Governor of Derry in 1688 who tried to persuade his Protestant ‘Orange’ forces that resistance to the Catholic Jacobites was  useless - acts portrayed in Unionist tradition as outright treachery.)

This  weekend Latimer endorsed McGuinness’s candidacy for the Irish presidency, saying McGuinness is a man on a journey, able to bring a community attached to the gun and bomb in the direction of democracy and peace. Given the reverend probably doesn’t have the Special Branch bodyguards the deputy first minister has, it’s to be hoped he doesn’t become the victim of some extremist Unionist gunman!

McGuiness the Terrorist?
McGuinness told The Independent most people don’t care if he was in the IRA. This, unfortunately, seems to be a cack-handed  attempt at disingenuity.

It  certainly matters to Jim Allister and others like him. "This latter day Lundy [Latimer] may see McGuinness as ‘one of the great leaders of modern times’, I see him as one of the most unrepentant terrorist godfathers of modern times.”

Which begs 2 questions:-

  1. is McGuinness a terrorist?
  2. can McGuinness be trusted by Unionists?

Martin McGuinness, 1972

McGuinness  doesn’t deny he was once in the IRA. It is claimed by British Intelligence that McGuinness was an influential member of the Provisional IRA Army Council. The Saville Report (2010) indicated it was likely McGuinness had a Thompson submachine gun at the ‘Bloody Sunday’ demonstration on 30 January 1972 but was unable to establish whether he had used it against British soldiers. He was jailed in the Republic for attempting to transport explosives across the border. It is rumoured McGuinness pulled the trigger on several executions – though no credible evidence has ever been produced.

While McGuinness undoutedly saw himself as a ‘freedom fighter’, the actions he undertook, in the eyes of the British state, were undoubtedly terrorism. Directly or indirectly, it is almost certain he is responsible for deaths - murders?

We don’t know for sure, but let’s assume he does have ‘blood on his hands’. Does that mean he hasn’t proved  a very capable deputy first minister? Does that mean he doesn’t now want a form of reconciliation and dialogue between Republicans and Unionists? Can people change?

According  to Sean Kay (2011), McGuiness told him anyone wanting to go back to violence in Northern Ireland would have to go through him.

Nelson Mandela: an example of change
It’s  instructive here to look to South Africa. Nelson Mandela, now regarded as one of the greatest statesman of the 20th Century was jailed in 1962 for conspiracy to carry out a bombing campaign in opposition to the ruling whites’ policy of Apartheid. It is rumoured that, from his prison cell, he helped organise the Church Street bombing in Pretoria on 20 May 1983 in which 19 people died and more than 200 were injured - though insufficient evidence has been produced to substantiate such claims.  However, it is unequivocal that Mandela’s then-wife Winnie endorsed the practice of ‘necklacing’ - ie: placing a tyre around a suspected collaborator and setting it alight to burn them to death. This was stated in a speech on 13 April 1986 as an explicit follow-through of Nelson’s declaration that some hideous punishment must be found for ‘traitors’, exposed during the 1962 trial.

Like McGuinness, it is likely that Mandela had ‘blood on his hands’…yet he became, with the help of Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck (among others), one of the staunchest advocates of peace and reconciliation the modern world has ever seen. He is a true visionary that people around the world call for time and time again, even though his age and health problems clearly limit his potential to nothing other than the most nominal involvement.

So, if Mandela could change, why can’t McGuinness? Mandela never compromised his principle of majority rule for South Africa. But, in changed circumstances and with different voices talking to him, he found a different, more peaceful way of approaching the problem. There is no doubt that McGuinness’ objective is an ‘island of Ireland’, separate from Great Britain. But, if he’s looking at some different ways of working towards that objective than killing Unionists and British soldiers, should we forbid him from pursuing those different ways?

Understanding the milieu
McGuinness and Gerry Adams have, for some considerable time, promoted the view that there is a peaceful - though rather more prolonged - course to achieving the island of Ireland. In promoting that view, they have undermined the hard core who want to bomb and shoot their way to it. In committing themselves to democratic means, McGuinness, Adams and their like are also committed to the principle that they cannot achieve their objective until the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland also want it.

That means patience - the island of Ireland might not happen in their lifetime, if indeed ever. It also means persuasion. Adams has shown himself repeatedly to be a master of persuasion. McGuinness tends to be more straight-talking, with a tendency, in the words of the old proverb, to wear his heart on his sleeve.

That straight-talking could prove endearing if, as he appears to have done at Free Derry Corner, it leads him to an unscripted acknowledgement of the pain and misery of others, of which he is, in some small part at least, a cause. But simply dismissing his past with a bland assertion that most people don’t care about it is either crass disingenuity or a gross misunderstanding of the same PURPLE-BLUE vMEME harmonic driving the core of Unionist thinking that drives Republican thinking. As Derry priest Father Michael Canny has pointed out, McGuinness has a great deal to explain about his relationship with the IRA.

Like Mandela and his aborted bombing campaign, McGuinness has come an awful long way from the IRA gunman who toted a submachine gun on Bloody Sunday. He is one of the true architects of Northern Ireland’s fragile peace and he has been a key participant in making it work. As president of the Republic, with his knowledge of Northern Ireland politics and government, he could be an invaluable asset to the governments of both north and south in promoting greater harmony and cooperation.

To progress his campaign, though, he needs to find it within himself to reconcile his own past with the image he wishes to promote of peacemaker.

The Riots: who’s right – Cameron or Blair?

 celebrity, civil unrest, community, crime, government, heroes and inspirational figures, human rights, morality, politics, Psychology, science, society, Sociology  6 Responses »
Aug 232011
 

Today what appears to be the final battle to overthrow Colonel Muammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya is rightly dominating the news - as it probably will for several days, as stories of valour, celebration, desperation and atrocity are told from the streets of Tripoli. There will also be much speculation about what kind of Libya will emerge from the civil war - even whether the rebels can hold off splintering into their own warring factions. And, inevitably, since the West invested so much in the NATO bombs that so potently aided the rebel victory, there will be speculation as to what the West can do to help build a new Libya that is friendly to the West and accepting of its interests in North Africa and the Middle East.

In and amidst this focus on Libya, we also need continue the debate about what brought violent rioters and looters onto the streets of London and other cities just a fortnight back and what we should do about these issues.

Both David Cameron and Tony Blair had key articles in this weekend’s Sunday newspapers, setting out their positions.

Moral decline, moral panic and folk devils
As you might expect for a piece in the Sunday Express, Cameron was aiming squarely at the traditional grass roots Tories who make up a substantial element of the Express’ readership. In a piece so right wing, he’s almost certainly not comfortable with it, Cameron wrote: “…a social fightback means instilling in our children and young people the decency, discipline and sense of duty that make good citizens.

The first place people learn these values is in the home. That is why I make no apology for talking about the importance of family and marriage. Every government policy must pass what I call the family test: does this make life better for families or worse? Does this make it easier to bring up well-behaved children or harder? Family is back at the top of the agenda.

Children also learn values in schools. Every school should be a place where children learn manners and morals but that is only possible when there is order in the classroom. So we are taking action to restore authority and boundaries, with teachers able to discipline pupils as they see fit and heads having the freedom to set uniform and behaviour policies and enforce them.

But I believe we can and should do more. When we see events as shocking as the riots and so many young people whose lives have no shape beyond the shape of their gang, no purpose beyond the next time they get smashed on drink or drugs, it is clear that the need to restore values calls for something new. That is why this Government is establishing National Citizen Service.”

Though he doesn’t actually use the term ‘moral decline’ in the Express, the tone of the piece is about reversing it and the term is being widely attributed to him and other senior Tory ministers, particularly Iain Duncan Smith. Attributing the term to Cameron and Duncan Smith in the context of blame for the riots fits with the ‘broken Britain’ theme which the likes of Cameron and Duncan Smith have been playing since at least 2007.

With their emphasis on broken - even ‘sick’ – Britain, Cameron and Duncan Smith are playing the old ‘moral panic’ card, first named by Stanley Cohen (1973) in his famous study of media reaction to events like the mods-‘n’-rockers beach fights in the early 1960s. And when Duncan Smith goes on about gangs and gang culture, he’s making them into what Cohen terms ‘folk devils’.

Cohen identifies the process as the media whip themselves up into a frenzy, creating a moral panic and exaggerating the menace of the folk devils so everyone is terrified o them - and this forces the police, local authorities, central government, etc , etc, into strong action to tame the folk devils and quiet the moral panic.

Which is not to say that there hasn’t been a change in morality and attitudes towards “decency, discipline and sense of duty”. As I pointed out in the Blog post, ‘Is Britain really broken?’, in January last year there have been considerable changes in public morality and consequent behaviour over the past 50 years, with the result that many institutions of society - especially the family and education - have changed considerably. Behaviours that were once relatively rare - eg: taking recreational drugs, men and women cohabiting as an alternative to marriage, young women having children outside of marriage, people conducting same sex relationships openly - are now fairly common and some of these changed behaviours are now so accepted they have become the norm.

Nor is this to deny that there is a problem in a number of areas with gang culture. Much of London’s rise in gun crime over the past 5 years has been unequivocally linked to gangs. Clearly there were organised gangs at work carrying out some of the looting during the riots.

Nor is this to belittle any of what went on during the riots. A handful of people died, many more were injured - some very seriously - and many, many more were traumatised by their experiences. Property was damaged and, in some cases, destroyed; and livelihoods were wiped out.

But were the riots really just the result of a changed public morality? If so, why hasn’t the whole country descended into arson and looting anarchy?

Blair and the Underclass
Writing in The Observer allowed Blair to present a more reasonable and reasoned argument to the so-called ‘chattering classes’. His article, ‘Blaming a Moral Decline for the Riots makes Good Headlines but Bad Policy’, is clearly aimed at presenting the Cameron-Duncan Smith approach as over-simplistic. He writes: “The big cause is the group of alienated, disaffected youth who are outside the social mainstream and who live in a culture at odds with any canons of proper behaviour. And here’s where I simply don’t agree with much of the commentary. In my experience they are an absolutely specific problem that requires a deeply specific solution.

The left says they’re victims of social deprivation, the right says they need to take personal responsibility for their actions; both just miss the point. A conventional social programme won’t help them; neither – on its own – will tougher penalties.

“The key is to understand that they aren’t symptomatic of society at large. Failure to get this leads to a completely muddle-headed analysis of what has gone wrong. Britain as a whole is not in the grip of some general ‘moral decline’…

This is a hard thing to say, and I am of course aware that this too is generalisation. But the truth is that many of these people are from families that are profoundly dysfunctional, operating on completely different terms from the rest of society, either middle class or poor.”

Though he never actually uses the term, Blair is clearly referring to the ‘Underclass’ - those of (usually petty) criminal attitudes and behaviour, living beyond the fringes of society. Benefit cheats, prostitutes, small-time drug dealers, burglars, etc, etc, – the kind of characters you see on Shameless - are the kind of people who fit Charles Murray’s (1989) criteria for the Underclass. (See: Underclass: the Excreta of Capitalism in the Society section of the main web site.)

The fact that the looting was largely of luxury goods, not basic essentials, indicates that those looters were not the desperately poor; they already had the basics of life sorted - perhaps through fraudulent benefits claims and/or ‘black market’ jobs and/or petty criminal activity. These looters were people who wanted more and had no hesitation in using serious criminal means to get it.

So far so good for Blair’s theory of the Underclass being a large element in the rioting: the profiles fit.

That is, until you start looking at the statistics on the occupations of those who were processed through the courts in the week after the riots. The most common occupation cited was ‘student’. Despite the best efforts of Lib Dem Deputy Leader Simon Hughes to point out that there are some benefits in the way university tuition fees are to be funded from 2012, undoubtedly the next tranche of potential university students do feel pretty aggrieved. But what excuse do the current ‘students’ have for causing such mayhem? Other occupations noted included soldier, scaffolder, chef, lifeguard, postman, hairdresser, forklift driver, electrician, journalist and an Olympic ambassador. There was even the 19-year-old daughter of millionaire parents in the dock!

An estimated 1 in 5 of the rioters were under the age of 17.

Sorry, Tony! While there can be little doubt a sizeable percentage of the rioters were from the Underclass, there were many who weren’t.

Andrew Gilligan, in the previous week’s Observer, wrote: “There were broadly three groups of rioters – organised career criminals targeting specific high value merchandise; semi-organised youths wanting ‘pure terror’ and whatever they could lay their hands on; and those who got carried away in the excitement. Many of those turned out to be very far from the stereotype of the hopeless underclass.”

A context for the riots
To explore the issues of who and how further, let’s do a bit of scene setting - because, as Gilligan illustrates, it’s a hugely complex issue which neither Cameron’s article nor Blair’s get to grips with successfully.

The country is still struggling to emerge from recession. Public sector cuts are beginning to bite deeply, with hundreds of thousands having either lost their jobs already, about to lose them or worry they are likely to. The private sector, which was meant to pick up the slack of the unemployed from the public sector, is largely not doing this. The rate of business liquidation is still high and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands are being wiped off the stock markets virtually each day. Some ministers, like business secretary Vince Cable and justice secretary Ken Clarke are warning this misery could go on for years and years.

Everybody it seems who understands anything of finance and economics - except Ed Balls! - agrees the cuts are necessary. It’s just the details - how far, how fast - on which most of the major politicians quibble. David Cameron (and Nick Clegg), when first announcing the cuts, promised that everyone would feel the pain equally - that we were all in this together. Except now it seems the bankers who are widely perceived to have precipitated the whole crisis in the first place. They’re back to getting enormous bonuses…even when their banks are mostly-owned by the taxpayer! And then what about the ‘super rich’ - including the multi-six-figure salary civil servants? (Especially those who buy their groceries on their department credit cards!?) There aren’t many stories of 16-bedroom mansions being repossessed or Ferraris and Bentleys being returned to the showrooms because their owners can’t keep up the repayments….

And George Osborne talks of reducing the top rate of tax from 50p in £1 to 45p?!? Has the man no common sense at all? Osborne may well be right when he says that, in the grand scheme of things, the amount recovered by the Exchequer in that 5p difference has little real effect on the country’s finances but that it does scare off many top wealth generators to other more tax-friendly countries…but, George, it’s a matter of perception! While the common folk suffer, the Tories are seen to look after their rich pals and the Lib Dems are seen as weak wimps unable to restrain the Tory greed.

Of course, it’s not that simple; but that’s the kind of message that takes hold not just in the real Underclass but among both those who are genuinely disadvantaged by the cuts and those who aren’t but perceive the way the Government is handling things to be grossly unfair. In Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) terms, the club of the ‘Seduced’ is becoming more and more exclusive while more and more of us, even those don’t sink completely into the Underclass, join the ranks of the excluded ‘Repressed’, no longer able to afford a foreign holiday or buy the kid the latest PlayStation. While we suffer, through the likes of OK! and Hello! and various TV shows about celebrities and the wealthy, we can wind ourselves up with seething jealousy of those whose opulent lifestyles are not in the slightest compromised by the cuts.

Everyone sharing the pain equally…? I don’t think so, Dave!

In vMEMETIC terms, BLUE is disillusioned because people who pay their taxes, conform to the best nuclear family tradition, try to bring their children up ‘decently’ and vote Conservative - in other words, they do everything they’re meant to - only to lose their job through no fault of their own. That destabilises PURPLE, with money worries and a lack of purpose for the newly unemployed putting immense pressure on family life.

And, as anyone who has studied Spiral Dynamics knows, when BLUE order falls apart, the RED vMEME comes roaring through which means power, not order, determines what happens.

An explosion of RED
So now locate yourself, reader, in the late afternoon of Saturday 6 August outside Tottenham police station as the peaceful protest over the police shooting of Mark Duggan turns nasty, just as it seemed to be petering out. Undoubtedly there was real anger at the shooting of Duggan - rumours were flying around that he had been effectively executed! - and at the police being unable to give the protesters the information they wanted about the investigation into the shooting. From reports about him, Duggan’s profile would fit ‘Underclass gang member’ and the protestors could probably be categorised as a mix of Underclass and community/political activists.

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Burning police car, Tottenham, 6 August [Copyright © 2011 ITN/Channel 4

It’s not yet been revealed who it was set the 2 police cars on fire; but, as soon as the police failed to deal with those incidents, they signalled the weakness of BLUE. What followed over the next 3 nights in London was an orgy of RED destruction, self-indulgence and wilful criminality. The more the police failed to control it, the more RED felt free from BLUE’s shackles and able to do exactly what it wanted.

With the ORANGE instant and mostly monitoring-proof technology of Blackberry Messenger (BBM), rioters and looters were able to organise incredibly quickly, easily outstretching those police units that did deploy. Other units failed to deploy properly, watching impotently from hundreds of yards away as rioters and looters tore apart and burned shops.

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Police watching a burning bus, Tottenham, 6 August [Copyright © 2011 Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

Through BBM, the Internet and TV news, the ineffectiveness of BLUE to contain RED was flashed around the country. By the third night, there were copycat riots in various other parts of England - although in Birmingham and Manchester, there appeared to be little burning - more, it was just outright smashing and looting.

Where the BLUE vMEME appeared strongest in some of the London riots was not in the police attempting to maintain order but in the meticulous planning with which some of the looting was carried out.

In the week afterwards the Metropolitan Police came in for considerable criticism. Clearly the Met were caught out by the scale of the violence and there was confusion in their command - journalists David Barrett & Patrick Hennessy claim they were told by some frontline officers that they were instructed not to advance on rioters. Barrett & Hennessy also offer evidence that some officers were reluctant to battle the rioters without assurance that they would be immune from prosecution and/or being sued if rioters were seriously injured in the confrontations. That assurance was not forthcoming apparently. The bizarre situation where police officers were reluctant to do their job through fear of being suspended or sued by violent lawbreakers is the work of the GREEN vMEME, with its positive discrimination to protect the rights of all, including lawbreakers.

The short-term fix: stopping the violence
If we want to make sure nothing like the Tottenham riot of 6 August escalating into a series of riots and looting sprees over 4 days ever happens again, then policing needs to be much more robust. For a start, that means intelligence on those in both the Underclass and the professional criminal networks of whom there is serious reason to believe would jump at the chance of exploiting a riot to loot high value goods. As soon as something like the protest of the 6 August starts, they need to be picked up and held in cells until the protest is over

Then the police response to violent protests must be able to curtail them. Standing back while shops and homes are looted and burned is not an option. As soon as they do that, they signal BLUE has failed and liberate RED to do whatever it wants. If water cannon and rubber bullets are needed, they must be used. In the extreme, when the lives of innocent people are clearly at risk, then the police must be authorised to use live ammunition. If the police cannot curtail the violence, then the army should be brought in.

BLUE must not be perceived to have failed. If it has, then not only does it liberate RED to commit wanton mayhem – but those who are threatened by the mayhem are given the de facto right to take the law into their own hands to protect their families and their property. Vigilantism. When BLUE fails to protect, RED can also dominate in those who seek to fight off the lawbreakers – even though they may trash the law themselves in the way they defend themselves. (See the Society feature ‘When BLUE fails, call for Clint!’ ) We saw proto-vigilantism in the Turkish men who defended their shops with baseball bats and knives and in the Sikhs who rushed to defend their temple from rioters and looters. If not for the calming appeal of the magnificent Tariq Jahan, father of one of the 3 young men killed by a rioter’s car in Birmingham, vigilantism may well have led to some very ugly reprisals and further escalation of the violence.

Do the kind of tactics I am advocating impinge upon the human rights of individuals? Most certainly…but the protection of the community has to be of greater importance than several hours inconvenience for a handful of individuals. Would the kind of tactics I am advocating require additional legislation? Most certainly…then get on with it!

Do police officers still need to be accountable for their actions in what might effectively be a pitched battle? Of course…but, in the heat of battle, you need RED daring much more than BLUE caution. And it must be remembered that the rioters and looters deliberately put themselves in harm’s way. Police officers committing abuses on prisoners after a battle would need to be prosecuted in the usual way.

Would such tactics cost extra money? Of course; but as London mayor Boris Johnson has pointed out to David Cameron, he urgently needs to rethink the Coalition’s policy on cuts to the police forces.

BLUE order must be maintained.

The longer-term: healing sick Britain
Firstly, David Cameron has got to get his head around image management. As was illustrated last May-June by 10 Downing Street hiring a personal photographer for Cameron in the same week he first talked about just how savage the cuts were going to be, he doesn’t always think about how his behaviour may be meta-stated by others.

Allowing Osborne to propose lowering the top rate of tax in the same week as the riots was a public relations blunder of epic proportions!

People in general are much more likely to ‘grin and bear it’ if they really do think everyone is feeling the pain equally. Bankers’ bonuses and ‘fat cat’ public sector salaries being seen to be protected or even championed by government ministers is to invite dissent!

Secondly, as discussed in Underclass: the Excreta of Capitalism, we need to develop 2nd Tier perspectives on how Capitalism operates in the Western world because ORANGES’s combination of drive for profits and labour-reducing technology is putting more and more people out of work or into low-paid menial jobs - with some of those people sinking into the Underclass and swelling its numbers. The ever-widening gap between rich and poor is a recipe for violent disorder. As Gadhafi’s regime enters its death throes, it’s worth remembering that the ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions were initially ignited by poverty and economic hopelessness. Allowing that gap to widen ever further could well lead to more and more violence in the UK.

We need a country where reward in life is related fairly to contribution to society, where there are opportunities for everybody to contribute and where there are clear routes for social mobility. The Underclass then should be small in size, despised by the vast majority of citizens and relatively manageable.

Using the 4Q/8L model, we can see that addresses the lower right quadrant but we also need to address the left quadrants, focusing on culture and individual responsibility.

It’s not possible to turn the clock back to the 1950s and restore those values but we can - indeed, we must – restore the strength of the BLUE vMEME at a cultural level so that it is perceived as a good thing to take responsibility and to support the structures of society. That support should not be unquestioning but, if we are working towards a fair society, then questioning and drive for change should possible from within. As Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) point out, when discussing spiral wizardry, in managing any kind of institution, you need to scan constantly for change - because change is inevitable. Therefore, you need to have strategies to accommodate and incorporate change, rather than suppress it.

In the UK we have a mixed message culture - typified by The Sun regularly engaging in moral panics and calling for draconian measures to deal with the folk devils (RED/BLUE zealotry) while also showing topless girls on Page 3 and female celebrities flashing their knickers in the Entertainment section (ORANGE unashamedly milking RED’s thirst for ‘naughtiness’ and excitement). If we are to change people’s values, then we need to be crystal clear in the messages that are sent out. If the mindset of many is governed by RED, then we can’t demand it instantly change it to BLUE. Clare W Graves showed years ago that changes in motivation don’t work that way. But there are things we can do to encourage vMEMETIC change. Eg:-

  • Reward those who marry – Cameron’s idea of tax breaks for people who marry is one way of doing it
  • Show in simple, layman’s terms the psychological science which demonstrates time and time again that, generally speaking and exceptions apart, people in long-term relationships with a partner are happier (overall), usually healthier and often live longer – and their children tend to do better emotionally, socially and academically
  • Make it cool to conform to ‘family values’ by getting the media to focus on public figures and big name celebrities who do exactly that – thus, making them role models for younger people

Designing the future of the United Kingdom – which is what we’re really talking about - is, however, a remit way beyond this Blog. That’s for the Centre of Human Emergence UK , the academics and the various think tanks, using a MeshWORK process. But what is needed is a common understanding of the sociopsychological forces which have brought us to this present state of being.

In their key articles in the Sunday newspapers, David Cameron and Tony Blair each saw some of the problems; they didn’t see the complete picture. Consequently they could only offer partial solutions which may not work much, or even at all, because the problems are all so interconnected. As Ken Wilber (1996) says, we must ‘transcend and include’ the partial views and solutions to create the full picture of what is going on. Only then can we create sustainable long-term solutions.

Lose a cat, lose a father….

 heroes and inspirational figures, human rights, NLP, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, racism, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Aug 082011
 

Yesterday we – my wife, Caroline, and I – attended a service for the interment of my father’s ashes. A few hours later we picked up a new cat, a 6-week old male kitten we’re calling Basmati - ‘Basmati Rice’, geddit?! Baz, as we tend to call him, is settling in remarkably well and is a real delight after what seems to have been 6 months of loss.

Personally I would never admit to being religious or, in any sense, ‘spiritual’ beyond having a strong but rather vague conviction that there is something bigger than me ‘out there’.  On the odd occasion I do think about it, I tend to think of this ‘something’ in God-the-Father/Allah-the-Compassionate terms – which I attribute to cultural memes rather than any spiritual intuition. And I certainly consider myself far too rational to entertain anything superstitious!

Yet, for several years now, I’ve had the thought that I would lose Artemis, my cat, and Ted Rice, my father, within a very short time of each other. Of course, I could rationalise this by arguing that both were approaching the end of their natural life and had already lived significantly beyond the average age of their sex and species. (Artemis was 19 years old and my father 83.) Or maybe the PURPLE vMEME’s tendency to believe in signs, omens and superstitions was simply tuning into something that rational science can’t comprehend…? Certainly, it would appear from studies of primitive peoples such as the Kalahari bushmen (eg: Richard Katz, 1982) and Australian Aborigine tribes (eg: James Cowan, 1993) that at least some of their number can ‘tune into’ and be informed by something way beyond the ken of conventional modern science.

PURPLE was certainly the dominant vMEME in terms of giving meaning to both relationships…so maybe, just maybe, there was something intuitive in that thought that I would lose them pretty much at the same time…?

Artemis
I acquired Artemis on 5 October 1991. I already had a 7-week-old black male, Merlin, I wanted company for since (just like today!) I worked long hours. My girlfriend of the time knew I was looking for another kitten and alerted me to a kitten some friends of hers had found in a barn on their farm in the hills above Keighley. When I saw this (approximately) 4-week-old kitten, apparently abandoned by her mother, I thought she was the ugliest kitten I had ever seen: a blobby belly on short stumpy legs, ears bigger than her head, bulging eyes, a coat that looked like someone had thrown a range of creams and browns over her in totally random fashion and one half of her face a totally different colour than the other. (Split straight down the middle, like the villain, Two-Face, in the Batman comics!) But, as long-time friend Linda Scurrah commented many years later: “Artemis has grown into her looks. She’s quite beautiful now she’s older.”

Merlin, sadly, didn’t last that long – getting knocked down when he was just over 6 months old. But Artemis survived illnesses, sequential girlfriends and multiple moves, to become a true companion. I talked to her and, to some degree at least, I thought she understood my mood, if not the content of my words.

Pure Behaviourists take the view that animals don’t have cognitions but I am in no doubt that Artemis had certain basic expectations – schemas. She expected stroking if she made certain noises or approached us in a certain way. If she went and sat by her bowl around about evening meal time, she was indicating clearly that she expected feeding.

Some would say I am anthropomorphsing but I am convinced something akin to the PURPLE vMEME functioned in her brain. Throughout all the moves and all the girlfriends, Artemis coped with it all as long as I was there; but, if I had to stay away overnight, I’m told she would prowl the house looking for me and acting distressed. Sometimes, if I just looked at her when I had been ignoring her for a while, she would purr – apparently pleased that I was giving her attention. It appears I mattered to her – that, from her side as well as mine, there was some kind of desire for mutual affiliation. Indeed, I would be prepared to stick my kneck out and say Artemis craved affection. Eg: as she got older, I could still tempt her to a bit of play occasionally…but then she would lick the hand she’d just pawed, look at me in what I meta-stated to be a pleading way and start purring.

Artemis, 2006

I’d also speculate that there was some degree of RED operating in her very basic selfplex. Eg: if I was eating chicken, she would howl at me until either I gave her some or she would get frustrated and try to snatch it from my plate – even though she had her own food down that she was usually quite content with. She knew what she preferred and she would try to intimidate me in to giving her what she wanted.

Artemis was also choosy as to which of my girlfriends she was prepared to associate with…or not. Around 7 years ago Caroline and I were decidedly relieved when Artemis did take to her.

Other prominent temperament traits Artemis displayed included great caution and  nervousness – which may have contributed.to her longevity. Tied in with that,  she was a coward and would never defend her territory. That is, until she  started displaying mild signs of feline dementia and seemed to forget she was a coward, charging at much larger cats and succeeding in driving them out of the garden!

Like most higher mammal pets with their owners, Artemis would not hold  my gaze for more than a second or two – indicating that she accepted I had greater power. However, in the last 6 months or so of her life, Artemis did  take to holding both mine and Caroline’s gaze from time to time. But we  meta-stated it was not in an aggressive way but more as though she was  searching us for something.

Ted Rice
My father was proud of being a right-wing racist who thought the sun shone out of Margaret Thatcher’s backside. He considered the trade unions to be the single biggest threat to the wealth and prosperity of the British people and wanted them tamed again – like Maggie had done 25 years previously! Being a classical music man, he despised The Beatles and the long hair hippie culture of the 1960s. He thought young women should still be virgins when they married and that young men should have short back & sides and wear suits. So when my teenager self grew my hair long, wore jeans, listened to Jefferson Airplane and espoused many of the more idealistic tenets of the hippie culture….!

BLUE was so strong in his selfplex that he considered everyone should listen to the TV news every night because everyone should be informed – it was ‘the right thing to do’. My  mother’s PURPLE village gossip mentality seriously irked him and they had  numerous rows about her finding the housewives’ gossip on the street more  interesting than the state of the British economy or the progress of the latest war in Africa.

There was some partial emergence of ORANGE in that he had ambitions to be a director of the company he worked for and was then able to reinvent himself very succesfully as a health & safety consultant after he was made redundant.

But of GREEN there appeared to be no trace. As said, he was a racist…of the England-for-the-English variety. He was a sexist in that it was understandable if men were unfaithful to their partners but women had to be totally faithful. He had no truck with the idea of human rights, believing criminals deserved to be beaten up by the police and that prisons should be such harsh places that offenders would be terrified of going back to jail. Unsurprisingly he was a staunch advocate of capital punishment and believed corporal punishment should be reintroduced to schools. His limited view of social mobility was that only those who, by virtue of intelligence and/or sheer hard work, could rise above their birth class status should be allowed to get on with it; the state should certainly not award benefits to create positive discrimination for the socially disadvantaged.

For all our cultural and political differences, I was close to my Dad…arguably closer to him than I was to my Mum. Though many of our discussions ended in rows – because of the cultural and political factors! – I could talk to my Dad about the world and what was going on. (Any time I raised anything like a problem with a girlfriend, though, it was immediately passed on to Mum – it was her job to do the emotion work!) But problems at work, too, he would listen and offer his advice. He was immensely skilled in management techniques and provided a very useful sounding board as I tried to fathom my way through various issues. My career and the social, economic and political implications of the news formed the basis of most of our conversations – though increasingly his health problems became a pressing topic of conversation after my Mum died.

Ted, celebrating his 80th birthday

My mother, Betty, died in 2000 (from cancer). For a year afterwards, my Dad was depressed, becoming a virtual hermit and dropping almost all social contacts. Then he developed Myasthenia Gravis, a neurological illness which inhibits the neurotransmitter acetylcholine from working in the  synapses at the muscle platelets, effectively preventing the efferent neurons from sending messages from the motor cortex and the cerebellum to the muscles. A Bell’s Palsy-type face droop in 2001 was followed by a collapse of his lungs the following year, necessitating a 5-month stay in hospital – 3 of them in intensive care. After getting the Myasthenia under control with stupendous amounts of medication, mobility problems and excruciating arthritic pain led to 2 hip transplants. Dad then had a couple of reasonable years before gallbladder problems led to a series of collapses and stays in hospital. By January this year it was clear he was deteriorating, with kidney and liver problems eventually triggering the long, slow, downward spiral to the end. I doubt I’ll ever forget seeing him 2 days before he died, screaming in pain and the hospital staff not able to get the morphine into him fast enough.

For all my ‘psychology tricks’, as I call them, that experience has left a deep wound in me. If it was bad for me, what must it have been like for him?

The downward slope and the aftermath
Already on major medication due to her Arthritis, Artemis began fitting late last year. The fitting may have been a by-product of a botched operation to remove bad teeth that left her temporarily blind and paralysed…but it would have been very difficult to prove. With even more medication, we thought we had got the fitting under control. However, a really severe and distressing fit at Easter, with medication at maximum levels, left us with no other real choice. As Caroline said: “What would happen if she had a fit outside? She’d be at the  mercy of any predator that was nearby – foxes and so on.”

Artemis hated going to the vet’s in a cat carrier. For all the steep extra cost, I got the vet out to our house. It was important to me that Artemis died in her own home, with as  little pre-procedure distress as possible. As she went under, in the conservatory in which she spent so much time, with me stroking her…did it actually make the experience of her passing any less traumatic for her? If I’m honest, I have no idea…but she seemed peaceful. And it helps me…whether or not it helped her.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t give the same consideration - euthanasia – to my Dad. He took another 2 days to die. By the last few hours, they had finally gotten the morphine levels right and he did appear to die in peace…but the 48 hours before must have been a horrendous experience for him.

I was at my Mum’s death bed in 2000. I saw and heard the final intake of breath. (The first time I had seen somebody die in front of me!) Strangely I cried only once for my mother – on a misty November night in the garden 2 months later. I think my focus was so strongly on trying to hold my Dad together in the following months and years that my BLUE never really allowed my PURPLE the privilege of grieving for a loved one. When Artemis’ executioners left - because, being blunt, that’s what we did to her: execution – I sobbed inconsolably for days. My little companion – who at times had seemed unnervingly human and who I sometimes referred to as “my little furry daughter’  – was gone. Even now Caroline and/or I will break into tears, if something triggers certain memories of Artemis. She was such a huge personality and such a part of our lives….

By contrast, my Dad was much less a part of our lives. We  spoke on the phone at least once a week, I travelled to see him approximately once a month – and Caroline would come with me every 2nd or 3rd visit. Christmas dinner with him was an annual ritual.

So far at least, I’ve cried less for my Dad than I have done for Artemis. Again, as with my mother’s death, it’s been all action. As my father’s only child (and the executor of his will), it’s been my responsibility to arrange the funeral, deal with Dad’s financial affairs and apply for probate, and clear out his house, ready for sale. In and amongst these processes, there have been tears but the focus has been mainly on doing rather than thinking. Certainly finding photos of Artemis amongst Dad’s possessions was a trigger for both Caroline and I to shed some tears!

Mum & Dad, 40th Wedding Anniversary

One photo that certainly brought me to tears was the one of my Mum & Dad’s 40th Anniversary in September 1991. Dad was 5 years older than I am now and Mum just 2. They look to be still in their prime, before the cruelties of old age could tarnish and diminish them. My PURPLE feels a great ache looking at that photo. The end of Summer in 1991 was a good time for my PURPLE. Just a few weeks later I would acquire Artemis.

Maybe I‘ll do more crying for Dad – and for Mum? – once everything is done and there is more time for reflection…?

A change in life
I miss my Dad in some different ways to Artemis.

Artemis was in my life every day, working through a variety of situations, ranging from her being a demanding pain to a purring pleasure. Her suddenly not being there any more left a huge emptiness in our lives. One or both of us still think we see her out of the corner of our eyes from time to time. The schematic expectation is still, to some extent, that she is there – or should be there. Caroline and I still hold each other and say we wish we could have her back, we miss her so much.

But somehow the scope of the relationship with my Dad, while lacking everyday impact, was more. Perhaps because of the greater history…? Perhaps because, according to Dale Hay & Jo Ellen Vespo (1988), parents teach us to love them from a very early age…?

Maybe it was simply the cognitive level of the relationship which made it more…? Bizarrely, at the post-funeral bash, I found myself thinking I would have to tell my Dad how pleased I was that my Mum’s relatives were mingling so well with his…when I suddenly realised he wasn’t there to tell anymore! I will miss talking to him.

Then, of course, you can sort-of replace a cat. Not that we feel we could or would want ever to replace Artemis. She will always have a unique place in our memories. But we can get a new cat. We had talked about this possibility and, after my Dad died, Caroline sourced the little kitten who is now Baz. We deliberately went for a male and one who looks nothing like Artemis because we don’t want to find ourselves drawing comparisons. We want to preserve her importance in our selfplexes.

But you can’t even begin to replace a father. (Or a mother, for that matter….)

UPDATE: 14 July 2012.
2 days ago, on the anniversary of his death, after a days’ teaching, I drove from Harrogate to Garstang, to stand by the marker which is all that remains that is tangible of my Dad (and my Mum). It was a near 5 hours round trip to spend 40 minutes with them…but I’m glad I went. On a rare (for this year!) warm and sunny evening, in the tranquil, almost idyllic graveyard of St Thomas, alone amongst the gravestones and the markers, I found that, for the first time I could remember my Dad, without being disturbed by horrendous memories of those last 3 days of his life.

I found that, for the first time, memories came easily to me of when he was younger and healthier…of things we did as a family as well as when I visited them as an adult. For the first time too, I found I could laugh again at some of the memories – at some of the more outlandish and ridiculous things he had said and done. The horrendous final days were still there if I looked for them but they were fuzzy and indistinct – as if partially repressed - so I left them alone and enjoyed my little graveyard reverie of better times.

Over the past year I’ve often moved away from thoughts of my Dad and tried not to engage with them by distracting myself with something else. Interestingly I found remembering my Mum a more easy and pleasant experience. So I’m pleased and hopeful now that I’ll be able to enjoy my memories of Dad.

My intention is to go back to Garstang every year on or around the anniversary of his death and use that trip as a way of honouring him and Mum.

I guess I’ve found for myself some truth in the old adage that pain eases with the passing of time. (For many months, it seemed like it would never ease!)

As for Artemis, we buried her ashes in a little copse on the cliffs above Robin Hood’s Bay and carved her name into the branch of an overhanging tree. As we love the Bay and usually spend a week in a cottage there most years, as long as we can still climb the cliffs, we can visit that copse.

In a strange way, there’s also a connection to my Dad in her burial place. He had always loved Artemis and often asked after her. When he was no longer well enough to visit us, we bought him a little wooden cat, which had something of her ‘look’, to symbolise her to him. As the carving was of a cat all curled up and seemingly very much at peace with itself, after Dad’s death, we took the carving and half-buried it on top of Artemis’ ashes to serve as her marker.

Of course, the world is a busy place and so often we’re too busy to  give much time to remembering those we’ve lost. But it’s good for our PURPLE to remember those in our personal history who have meant so much and to honour our past.

Is the Big Society in BIG trouble?

 celebrity, community, government, heroes and inspirational figures, morality, society, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
May 252011
 

So the day after David Cameron effectively relaunches the ‘Big Society’, with a new ‘white paper’, his key figure in charge of implementing the Big Society, Lord Wei of Shoreditch, resigns….

That could hardly be worse timing! Surely Cameron knew Wei was going?!? In which case it would have been much more politically astute to have rescheduled the launch of the white paper. As it is, Wei’s departure is a gift to Labour, with Shadow Cabinet Office minister Theresa Jowell saying, “….yet again”  the Big Society is “descending into farce. Only a day after Cameron told us all to take more responsibility, it appears that there will now be nobody in his government responsible for bringing the Big Society into reality.”

If Cameron didn’t know Wei was going, then it says something about Wei that he could time his resignation to such negative effect or about either Cameron’s judgement in recruiting such a fickle ally or  Cameron’s treatment of Wei that he could undermine his boss in such a damaging way.

Whatever the circumstances of Wei’s depearture, the effect is damaging both to Cameron personally and to the development of the Big Society concept.

Whether you think Cameron is being honest when he says the Big Society is the thing “I’m most passionate about in public life. This is what is in my heart. It’s what fires me up in the morning” - or it really is just an attempt to distract from the damage the cuts are doing to the social fabric of our kingdom, he certainly seems to be sticking with the theme. Even in face of withering criticism such as that of Jowell who said of the latest Big Society relaunch: “Under the indiscriminate impact of accelerated cuts, the essential elements of community life are slowly being starved of sustenance. What we lose in the next two years may become impossible to rebuild in ten.”

The Big Society and the cuts
Part of Cameron’s problem, of course, is that the cuts are doing very real damage - and the damage is going to get a lot worse before it eases off. Plus, that easing off may be some distance in the future if Vince Cable’s weekend statements about the abysmal state of Britain’s economic prospects are anything to go by. Thus, it may be that Cameron’s cuts and the general economic malaise of the country see damage to our social fabric on a par with the devastation of the traditional working classes in the early 1980s under Margaret Thatcher.

It is, of course, the Coalition Government’s mantra that there really is no way out of Britain’s financial mess other than the 25% cuts programme Chancellor George Osborne decreed last October. For all that Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls is said to really still believe Britain should invest and grow its way out of the deficit, Labour leader Ed Milliband is insisting Balls sticks – in public, at least! – with predecessor Alistair Darling’s view that the cuts should be at a slightly lower rate of 20% and over a longer periodof time. So even though Osborne now acknowledges some need for investment and growth, the major players are pretty much agreed on the cuts – it’s only quite how deep and quite how fast on which they disagree.

The conundrum then is this: when people are losing their jobs…and then their houses…and then their relationships crack under the pressure, will they want to donate to charitable and community ventures from what little money they have? It could be argued that all the newly-unemployed will have the time to get engaged in charitable and community ventures…but will they be motivated to? When you’ve done everything right - done your job to the best of your ability, looked after your family and been a good, tax-paying citizen – only to lose much of what’s really important to you through no obvious fault of your own, do you really want to be told to take on unpaid work to help others by the man who ordered the cuts which have cost you so much?

It’s a slap in the face for the BLUE vMEME. Do what’s right…and you lose almost everything. It’s not supposed to be like this! Since the theory is that vMEMES ebb and flow according to the Life Conditions, if the Life Conditions are no longer appropriate to BLUE, then expect something very different. In the students fees protests last November, we saw a lot of angry RED damaging the property of those the demonstrators saw as being unaffected by the cuts - banks, high-end retailers, Conservative Party headquarters…even Charles & Camilla’s car!

My hunch is that we’re going to see an awful lot more of that kind of thing in the next couple of years. In Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) terms, we’re going to see more and more people no longer able to participate in - be ‘seduced’ into – the consumerist society. Instead, they join the ranks of the ‘Repressed’. What we saw in the student fees protest could also be seen as those who feared they were going to be barred from the ranks of the Seduced - not being able to go to university being perceived as a severe restriction on career prospects.

Of course, the real story is not as simple as that. Students can still go to university and enhance their career prospects - it’s just that the debt incurred works in a different way and may prove more burdensome for many. Unfortunately, the Government is failing it get its message across - even with as formidable a figure as Lib Dem deputy leader Simon Hughes spearheading the campaign to give students the real facts about the new fees structure.

Getting the message across
When it comes to the economy, it seems the Government is not entirely sure just what the message it is failing to get across actually is.

According to Vince Cable at the weekend, Britain’s economic malaise is more than just a return of the old boom-and-bust cycle Gordon Brown supposedly put an end to; it’s also a consequence of an ongoing restructure of the global economy. Eg: “Britain is no longer one of the world’s price setters. We take our prices from international commodity markets driven by China and India.”

This is bad news for Cable’s party boss. Nick Clegg has staked the Lib Dems’ electoral fortunes on the Coalition Government being able to turn the economy around sufficiently by 2015 for there to be a ‘feel good’ factor working for the Coalition partners in that year’s general election. Considering the drubbing the Lib Dems received in this April’s elections, the last thing Clegg wants to hear is Cable saying that Britain will have to get used to being poorer on at least a semi-permanent basis..

In a poorer Britain, of course, people doing it for themselves, rather than relying on a cash-strapped government - the essence of the Big Society meme – might be a highly practical approach. In fact, it may turn out to be the only way some things get done!

The question then comes back to: how do you get people - many of whom will have suffered severely because of the cuts – motivated to give to time and some of the little money they have to charity and community programmes?

That Cameron is not a particularly good communicator - and struggles to get his message beyond his core electorate - is indicated by the failure of the Tories to achieve a majority in the Commons when up against a jaded Labour Government and a prime minister (Brown) perceived by many to be petty and ineffectual. Many Tory campaigners reported they found it difficult to get the Big Society message across to voters on the doorstep – and a number simply dropped it from their list of issues to discuss.

Even now Cameron struggles to define just what the Big Society is, The best he could manage at Monday’s relaunch was: “The Big Society is not some fluffy add-on to more gritty and more important subjects. This is about as gritty and important as it gets – giving everyone the chance to get on in life and making our country a better place to live.”

To underline the Government’s commitment to the Big Society concept, Cameron wants his ministers to undertake a day of voluntary service over the course of the year with a charity or community group.

Yet, how much Cameron fails to understand how messages are received - the heart of Memetics - is demonstrated by his appointing Tory party donor and former ‘non-dom’ tax avoider Lord Ashcroft to head a review of British Army bases in Cyrus. When people are losing jobs and homes and being told by Cameron to give to charity and community projects,  Ashcroft’s appointment (though nominally unpaid) looks like more ‘jobs for the boys’ amongst the wealthy and the elite. No wonder Nick Clegg is said to be furious about the appointment!

A similar insensitivity with regard to how messages are perceived can be found in Cameron’s comments to the Daily Telegraph in April about it being OK to appoint political interns on the basis of personal contacts, rather than the more formal but equal opportunities-oriented basis Clegg was championing. The cynics might point to this and argue from that Cameron is really an old-fashioned Tory who just does as he wishes and only bothers with the ‘little people’ when he needs to exploit them. Certainly at times he seems to run off a RED/BLUE vMEME harmonic of pure arrogance!

Successful communication is about values
Or, more specifically, understanding and appreciating diversity in values.

While RED and BLUE might seem to dominate in his thinking on political appointees, when it comes to the Big Society, David Cameron’s language seems to indicate more that it’s GREEN (look after people on a community basis) and BLUE (because it’s our duty). GREEN thinking is way too complex for most people  – in 1976 James P Shaver & William Strong raised doubts as to whether most people develop beyond what is now termed BLUE..

As for that vMEME, if many people are downscaling from BLUE to RED because of adverse Life Circumstances, then a BLUE call to duty – when they’d done their ‘duty’ and got made redundant as a reward - is not likely to have much influence.

Rather than pitch the Big Society at BLUE and GREEN levels, Cameron would do better to make it ‘cool’ for RED so that helping out in a community project becomes a means of gaining status and respect. A short cut to achieving this would be to get celebrities to volunteer.

The ‘cult of celebrity’ has grown exponentially in tandem with the growth of mass media.  One psychologist interested in our fascination with celebrity is Kate Douglas. Douglas (2003) has suggested that it is evolutionarily adaptive to model successful individuals because, by learning from them, it may shorten our own route to success. So, who better to be seen demonstrating Big Society attitudes, values and activities at a time when many people are struggling to be successful (due to the cuts).

It the people need to learn to do for themselves what the Government can no longer afford to do, then, to maintain our society, the ability of the people to do has to grow at least that little bit faster than the Government’s ability to do decreases. Which means people have to be persuaded to volunteer ahead of the sheer necessity to take it up on themselves.

Which, in turn, means David Cameron has to persuade more than cajole. And persuading means working with what is important to people – their values – more than what’s important to you (your values).

More people in this kingdom think in PURPLE and RED than BLUE, ORANGE and GREEN. Which is why The Sun sells more copies than The Independent and why more people watch Coronation Street than Panorama. Thus, Big Society advocates have got to learn to talk the language of the people they want to communicate to.

So, Dave, maybe give Take That a call…get as many celebs doing Big Society stuff as you can. Make it cool. Make it fun!

…oh, and Dave, if you want to get re-elected in 2015, you’ve got to be seen as more trustworthy than the other lot. No more Ashcroft deals, huh?!

Well, are the Arabs ready for Democracy?

 Afghanistan, Africa, cross-cultural, government, heroes and inspirational figures, international relations, meta-programmes, Middle East, morality, NLP, politics, Psychology, racism, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  6 Responses »
Apr 112011
 

On 22 February David Cameron, in an address to the Kuwaiti parliament, hit out at suggestions the Middle East “can’t do democracy”, saying: “For me, that’s a prejudice that borders on racism.”

Even at the time it was blatantly clear that such statements were part of his and French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign to persuade the United Nations to approve military action against the forces of Muammar Gaddafi viciously and bloodily repressing pro-Democracy rebels across Libya.

A little over 6 weeks later, as NATO tries not to apologise for bombing the hell out of the first armoured column the hard-pressed Libyan rebels have been able to assemble in what is now a de facto civil war…as revolutionary Tunisia and revolutionary Egypt wonder what on earth to do next now they’ve gotten rid of their dictators…and Syrian security forces exterminate yet more pro-Democracy protestors on the streets of Deraa, I’d argue it could be construed as racist not to ask the question: “Can the Arabs do Democracy?” After all, thousands of Arabs have died over the past 3 months in the name of Democracy. If we’re not to devalue their lives, we have to ask whether their sacrifice for their cause is justified. We’d certainly ask it if thousands of demonstrators were being killed systematically by the police in cities across Europe!

So, are Arab peoples significantly different in their genetic make-up from the Europeans and North Americans who do do Democracy? Certainly, from the huge amounts of evidence analysed by the likes of Elliott Sober (2000) in the past 20 years, it would appear not. In which case, if there is a difference in the potential for Democracy, it has to lie primarily in cultural factors.

It’s interesting that it’s generally accepted that, while Europe languished in the Dark Ages, the Arabs not only kept Hellenic science alive in mathematics, astronomy, medicine and Philosophy but added to many of the ancient Greeks’ works. It’s even of note that some attribute the first flourishings of European science coming from the Moorish invaders of Spain bringing Arabic science to the continent. From there the European Renaisssance developed and eventually the ‘scientific revolution’ of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Meanwhile, Arabic science – and, with it, Arabic culture largely fossilised. This digression into the development of science is important because, while the link between cultural and scientific development is extremely ‘rough and ready’, there does indeed seem to be an unexplored correlation. Many commentators – eg: Norman Tebbitt in his August 2005 remarks on the 7/7 bombings – attribute the fossilisation of Arabic science and culture in the late Middle Ages to the increasing stranglehold of Islam on Arabic thought. Others attribute it to the political systems in place. Yet others attribute it to the cumulative effect of a plethora of small things such as the Arabic failure to adopt a patenting system as the Europeans did which made science potentially profitable for its exponents.

Whatever, over an 800-year period – arguably starting with the signing of the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 – the Europeans made a slow and tortuous progress to modern Democracy while the Arabs changed little other than for some of their national borders to be imposed upon them (eg: Iraq, Libya) and to accept some of the benefits of Western science and engineering (medicine, transport infrastructure, etc) during the ‘days of empire’.

In terms of political systems, very little has changed. Some countries like Saudi Arabia still have absolute monarchies while others – eg: Egypt, Tunisia, Libya – had their kings replaced with autocratic dictators who were either military leaders or sponsored by the military.

These are, of course, generalisations – Lebanon, for example, stands out as different in many ways – but the post-colonial history of that country is far from being that of a stable, democratic, unified nation.

In terms of cultural vMEMES, Europe could be generalised in the late Middle Ages as being dominated by RED-thinking despots with a power hierarchy of lords and nobles, with the Roman Catholic Church providing some semblance of BLUE structure and PURPLE clan networks largely suppressed and/or dying out in terms of influence. Now Western Europe (and North America) can be generalised as largely dominated by BLUE political structures (democratic systems) exploited by ORANGE-driven political achievers and business corporates – with some sheen of GREEN influencing moral thinking in social matters, particularly in the Scandinavian countries.

In contrast the Arab nations have largely remained ruled by RED despots, with Islam providing a BLUE veneer of conscience and duty. The PURPLE clan (tribal) networks still flourish in many of the Arabic countries but have been quite suppressed in others – eg: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. The army generals in these countries function in a similar way to the Mediaeval European king’s lords.

So where have these intense campaigns for Democracy in the Middle East and North Africa come from and what does Democracy really mean to the protestors?

Complex ideas for simpler worldviews…?
I’ll never forget, in late 2000, during the HemsMESH project, hearing Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck talk about irresponsible, profit-oriented ORANGE beaming television images of high value/high status items into homes where the thinking was largely in PURPLE and RED. The danger in this, as Beck saw it, was that RED would drive many of those people to do anything to get those items. As they lacked BLUE disciplines and ORANGE planning and RED has no concept of time other than NOW, some of those people would deal drugs, commit burglaries, extort others and prostitute themselves to get what they saw as necessary for the ‘good life’ – Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) concept of the ‘seduced’ criminalised. Those whose thinking was more dominated by PURPLE would most likely feel more alienated than ever from the ‘others’ – those who have the ‘good life’ – effectively Bauman’s ‘repressed’.

Beck was talking about the residents of the South-East Wakefield former mining villages where, until the mines closed, life for a couple of centuries had been little more complicated than going to school to get the basics of reading and writing until you were old enough to go down the pit (males) or get married, have children and look after the household (females). Until the mines closed, their ‘life conditions’ didn’t require thinking more complex than PURPLE and RED. Then, in less than a generation the mines were gone and incomes severely reduced while ORANGE consumerism tempted them endlessly with the ‘good life’ they simply couldn’t have legally without a substantial upgrade in thinking.

Beck’s concerns can be applied in large measure to the peoples in the Arab states whose life conditions, for perhaps centuries, have required little beyond PURPLE and RED. Where more complex thinking has emerged, it has tended be isolated to the universities or repressed or both. It’s no accident that it’s largely been imported workers from the West (management and technology) and places like the Philippines and the Indian subcontinent (more manual labour) who have got the wealth-producing oil out of the ground in those Arab states which have the ‘black gold’.

But especially with the advent of the internet and more especially with the development of social networking (Twitter, Facebook, etc), the Arab peoples have been exposed to complex concepts previously rarely experienced by the average Arab in downtown Benghazi or the backstreets of Deraa. Like the former coalminers of South East Wakefield, many Arabs are being exposed to ideas with which they do not yet have the mental and cultural sophistication to fully understand and assimilate.

The result has been the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ – an angry outpouring of long-suppressed dissatisfaction with the authoritarian regimes which have ruled them largely through the shadowy terrors of a police state. They are driven by a RED contagion that flies in the face of the water cannons, the tear gas, the rubber bullets, the baton charges and all too frequently live ammunition. In spite of the appalling injuries and sometimes death inflicted upon their fellow-protestors right by their side, they come back time and time again, more and more determined to get rid of their autocratic rulers.

Apart from the sheer level of violence inflicted by the state upon the protestors - most obviously in Libya but Syria, Bahrain and the Yemen have also seen levels of violence by the state that are totally unacceptable to most North Americans and Western Europeans – there is a problem in understanding what the protestors want and how they might get it. They certainly know what they don’t want – Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, Ali Abdullah Saleh, etc – as if a collective move-away-from meta-programme was running their heads…. But do they know what they want beyond some ephemeral idea of ‘Democracy’…?

This is where there seems to be a clear lack of charismatic, ‘big-vision’ leadership. There are no Mahatma Gandhis or Nelson Mandelas - not even a Gerry Adams! – to articulate what the new Tunisia or the new Egypt might look like…what model of Democracy they might actually try to implement. So far the Arab Spring revolutions seem to be composed genuinely of the ‘little people’ who had simply had enough of the ‘bad guys’ terrorising and exploiting them and got some ideas of what to do about it from the internet.

So the problem of the lack of leadership also leads to what might be termed a ‘vision vacuum’.

History shows that, where there is chaos and a lack of leadership and vision vacuum, then the vacuum can be filled very easily by those who offer quite an unsavoury vision as long as it is a vision that offers hope and order from the chaos and is accompanied by strong leadership. Just think of what Adolph Hitler offered bankrupt and depressed Germany in the 1930s. Just think of what the Taliban offered ravaged Afghanistan after the failed governments that followed the Russian invasion and withdrawal.

Fortunately – so far, at least! – the Arab Spring seems to be running a move-away-from fundamentalist Islam meta-programme. But how long can the vision vacuums last before people became desperate for strong leadership and someone or something to give them vision?

The West is right to be concerned that al-Qaeda or their ilk could take advantage of the vision vacuums.

How Democracy works
Using 4Q/8L it’s possible to take a sociopsychological analysis of the way Western Democracy works.

Firstly the structure (Lower Right) is largely BLUE in that the political systems are tightly controlled, very bureaucratic and centred on the principle of one (free adult) person/one (secret) vote. The cultures of the Lower Left are all over the Spiral’s 1st Tier but the vast majority of the population’s thinking is in the PURPLE, RED and BLUE zones. There isn’t that sizeable a proportion of the population thinking in vMEMES beyond BLUE. (In 1983 Anne Colby, Lawrence Kohlberg et al found only marginal evidence – around 5% of his samples – of thinking at Stage 5 – the equivalent of ORANGE – in his Stages of Moral Development.) Thus, the ORANGE thinking of key individuals (Upper Left) is able to manipulate less complex thinking in the Lower Left to vote in elections (Lower Right) to their advantage. A prime example of this was the way Tony Blair fought to get and retain Rupert Murdoch’s support for Labour because he knew The Sun - Britain’s most widely-read newspaper – was one of the most powerful weapons in his election armoury. Gordon Brown lost Murdoch’s support in 2009 and the following year Labour lost the election.

Western Democracy is far from being the fair, just and egalitarian concept the West likes to portray it as. Marxists have no hesitation in pointing out how it largely preserves elites. But it does facilitate some social mobility, it does factor in some capacity for change and most people in the Western democracies find it more or less acceptable – and certainly they see it as better than any form of totalitarian or authoritarian government!

If we apply 4Q/8L to the Arab states, we find the Lower Right structure is BLUE enough for the government’s police systems to work but they run on RED power and coercion. There is little BLUE in the Lower Left – in fact, it’s largely fear-conscious PURPLE-dominated. All of which enables RED-led individuals in the Upper Left to use the Lower Right to dominate the Lower Left…until very recently. Now we have an explosion of angry RED in the Lower Left.

Just how much the protestors are driven by RED (and, to some extent, PURPLE) is illustrated by the Libyan rebels who appear mostly incompetent as would-be soldiers and are far too disorganised to take on Gaddafi’s forces who have a strong dose of BLUE military discipline among them. The only time the rebels seem to have real success is when Gaddafi’s forces are reeling from United Nations/NATO airstrikes.

The above analyses of both the Western democracies and the authoritarian Arab states are, of course, full of generalisations. In reality, there are many, many variations which make those generalisations flawed. Nontheless, as a generalisation it can be said that Arab culture and state structures have some way to go before they are ready for Western-style Democracy.

Democracy is said to require:-

  • People be informed enough to take an interest in how they are governed. This assumes a degree of education and intelligence amongst the electorate. Plus, they must have the time and resources to take the interest.
  • It also assumes media, free from government interference, communicating information on the key issues for people to develop an informed opinion. Communicating on issues to the electorate forms a powerful check on what governments do, putting them under scrutiny by the electorate. (Which is why so many leading politicians cultivate the media magnates to win their support.)
  • People doing things the government can’t control. Much in the lives of British citizens is beyond the direct control of governments. Families, religious organisations, clubs and societies, for example, facilitate discussion and debate about public concerns…yet in the UK it is difficult for government to influence them very much.
  • Little desire for radical alternatives. In the UK there is not that much difference between the parties. Those supporting losing parties usually don’t need to fear that their lives will be ‘turned upside down’ as a consequence of their favoured party losing.
    Eg: in the wake of the 2010 general election in the UK, while the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government proposed an average cut of 25% in public sector costs, the losing Labour Party conceded that they intended cuts of around 20% – though at a slower pace of implementation.
    Because there is a maximum term a government can serve in a democracy before another election – 5 years in the UK – the losing party have little incentive not to accept defeat. They will get their chance again at the next election.

Clearly there are a large percentage of Arab populations who are poorly educated, with many illiterate. They are not used to having a free media – though much is being made of the ‘free’ rebel radio stations in Benghazi! Plus, there is a minority – hopefully still rather small – who would like to see the revolutionary states dominated by Islamic fundamentalism.

For Democracy to be sustainable, it also has to be embedded as a cultural norm. And there the strong PURPLE tribalism running throughout much of the Middle East and North Africa presents a real problem. A central concept in Democracy is that, after all the attempts to influence and buy influence, the voter should make up their own mind. In PURPLE tribal cultures, there is effectively no secret vote. You vote how your tribal elder tells you to vote.

It would be wrong to say Arab cultures and structures couldn’t very quickly become democratic…but the seriously-flawed experiment in Democracy in Iraq should serve as a warning that change is unlikely to occur quickly, smoothly or painlessly.

Even more the election of Hamas in Gaza in 2006 is a cautionary tale on how Democracy can go badly wrong if the ground is not properly prepared. The campaign was marred by tribal and gang political violence but the election itself was judged fair by the UN.

And let’s never forget Hitler and the Nazis were democratically elected in 1933!

What now?
It’s a pity the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring have tried to drive out all politicians associated with the old regimes and have refused to accept gradual transfers of power and interim arrangements.

Given the brutal, exploitative and deceptive natures of the old regimes, the mistrust of anyone associated with them is understandable. In light of this, the proposals being put forward today by Jacob Zuma’s African Union delegation to the Libyan rebels are clearly inadequate. The government remains in power, their military entrenched around Ajdabiya and Misrata and able to regroup, and NATO airstrikes are halted. In return for which, the rebels are invited to talk to Gaddafi’s government about a transition to Democracy. No wonder Gaddafi endorses the proposals! Given his past record on broken ceasefires and ruthless repression of opponents, the rebels would be crazy to accept.

However, transitional arrangements, if firm, transparent and monitored by, say, the United Nations, could give the Arab states the breathing time they need to put in at least some of the educational and cultural development programmes they need to create the groundwork for Democracy to begin to work.

Don Beck’s (2000) concept of Stratified Democracy - see Stratified Democracy vs Modernisation Theory – posits that the form of government (Lower Right in 4Q/8L) has to be in line with the cultural level of thinking (Lower Left). Thus, Western Democracy (BLUE with an ORANGE leading edge) is a step too far for peoples whose thinking has mushroomed suddenly from cowed PURPLE to furious RED. What is needed is an interim form of government which rules with some semblance of the old, familiar iron fist but is sympathetic to the concept of Democracy and has committed to a clear and transparent process of transition. But that process may take time – bearing in mind that Walt Rostow (1960) reckoned it could take a century to develop a largely tribal African nation into a Western-style consumerist society – and the process will need to be managed and monitored very carefully indeed.

In this sense, the Egyptians may actually be on their way to getting it right. The interim military government seems committed to turning Egypt into a modern democracy; but, rather than rushing at it, they seem determined to take the time to develop a system that is right for Egypt and sustainable in the long term. Of course, the military government also appear to be using some of the old regime’s secret-police-and-torture repression methods and the violence against demonstrators in Tahrir Square this past Friday night (8 April) does not bode well for the future. But the calls of the demonstrators illustrate just how difficult the transition process may prove. The demonstrators were not telling the government what they wanted for the future of their country - a visionary move-towards. Rather they were telling the government more of what they didn’t want – a nihilistic RED move-away from - getting rid of more old regime members of the government and stopping Hosni Mubarak hanging onto the wealth he amassed from exploiting Egypt.

In  thinking about how the Arab states progress towards Democracy, it may  be salutary to consider the former totalitarian communist regimes of Eastern Europe. Many of them. such as Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states, have successfully morphed into liberal, capitalist democracies over a 20-year period – though not without much turmoil. They also had, under Communism, much stronger BLUE in the systems and structures of the Lower Right, giving them a more advanced starting position when their totalitarian regimes collapsed.

Nonetheless, many of the challenges the post-totalitarian Eastern European states faced will be similar to those the post-autocracy Arab states will confront in the coming months and years.

The Northampton ‘supergran’ and the issues she raises

 community, crime, government, heroes and inspirational figures, Middle East, morality, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  3 Responses »
Feb 172011
 

The footage of ‘supergran’ Ann Timson belting hell out of a bunch of would-be ‘smash ‘n’ grab’ scooter boys at a jewellers in Northampton the other week (7 February, to be precise) has had me musing ever since it was first  broadcast. The fact it is has become a ‘viral phenomenon’, spreading right around the world, has only caused me to muse further.

By pure coincidence, a camera man was over the road filming for a documentary and he managed to capture the entire event on film. The footage was aired on ITN News that evening. Within hours, it was on YouTube and received nearly 6,000 views over the next 24 hours. Now there are multiple versions all over YouTube, Daily Motion, etc, using Superman logos and music like Chris De Burgh’s ‘Lady in Red’, etc, etc, etc. Ann Timson’s onslaught has made news bulletins in the United States, Australia and many other countries.

The event itself raises important questions - as does the fact it has become such a ‘viral phenomenon’. Just in case you haven’t seen it or you need a reminder, here’s the original footage…

Play Video

Ann Timson 
So what made a 71-year-old grandmother with arthritis in her legs all but sprint up the street and take on a gang of young male raiders in crash helmets? Some of them were revving up their scooters, ready for the getaway, while others were pounding the jewellers’ reinforced glass with sledgehammers and yet another was helping himself to the goods through the holes smashed in the glass. 

The danger Ann put herself in was remarkable - as she herself described one part of the tussle: “I landed several blows against one lad on the back of a bike and brought him to the ground. He raised a hammer to me so I just kept hitting out….” 

If it had been a young man full to the gills with testosterone and, therefore driven by the impulsiveness and compulsiveness of Psychoticism, the furious assault on the raiders would have been more understandable. 

But, from several interviews with her in the days afterwards, it appears that, while her actions that Monday were rather on the extreme side, Ann Timson has taken on the ‘bad guys’ many times before. 

Ray Nicholson of Ann’s Spring Boroughs Estate told the Daily Mail: “I’ve known Ann for 20 years and she has always stood up to criminals. Often she got herself into a lot of trouble because of it….‘When she moved in ten years ago it was a nightmare. The police were called every night because of the drugs and prostitution here….I’ve been threatened with a knife on many occasions and I know that Ann has. But she kept going. She kept challenging the criminals and she made life difficult for them.” (Rebecca Camber, 2011) 

Another neighbour, Nicholas Welch, added more detail: “This place used to be a proper dive before she turned up. It was known as the jungle. People were having sex on the stairs and smoking crack in the corridors. But she has played a massive part in changing it. We now have security fences and intercoms that work. We feel safe.” 

Such testimony indicates the importance to Ann’s values of defeating the petty crooks, the gangs and the drugs dealers - and, by so doing, make the local environment pleasanter and safer to live in. In terms of the Assimilation-Contrast Effect, Ann is what Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck would term a ‘Zealot’: driven by a harmonic of RED and BLUE vMEMES, she will seek to dominate a situation to make it the way she knows it should be. 

Ann’s description of how she got involved that day is revealing: “I became aware of a loud revving noise at the top of the street. I looked over and saw a kid run up to the doorway of the jeweller. Three lads followed him and when I saw their arms going I thought the kid was being beaten up. My mother’s instinct kicked in and I ran across the road, shouting at the lads to stop it. Only then did I realise that they were smashing glass and that it was a raid. There was a scooter in my path revving up but by now I was in full flight and I started whacking the lads over the head with my shopping bag…angry that they felt they could get away with what they were doing in broad daylight.” 

I would suggest that Ann’s reference to her ‘mother’s instinct’ kicking in is a folklore explanation she has given herself. There is little evidence that mothers have a ‘mothering instinct’ for the adult male offspring of other women. A cognitive explanation of her actions would be much more viable. She has deeply-ingrained schemas about morality and justice and responded initially to a perception of injustice - one man being hurt by 3 others – and these schemas of justice/injustice were then were activated even more strongly in her anger “that they felt they could get away with what they were doing in broad daylight”. 

It looks to me as if Ann has a ’Crusader’ identity - she crusades against injustice and against those who would make our streets unsafe. What she did, she did from very deeply-held beliefs about what’s right and wrong. 

That she could do what she did – the very real dangers present, the arthritic legs stretched to (and perhaps even beyond) their limit - is testament to the power of belief when those beliefs are inextricably linked to our deepest values. 

It’s not altogether different to the powers of belief - again propelled by a RED/BLUE vMEME harmonic - that led unarmed young Egytian men (and not a few older men and not a few women) into Tahrir Square in the early days of the anti-Mubarak protests, in the face of police tear gas and rubber bullets, sniper fire and horse charges from pro-Mubarak thugs. They knew what they thought was right and they had the energy, determination and arrogance to fight - and, in some instances, die – for it. 

The bystanders 
As remarkable as Ann Timson’s intervention in the raid was, equally remarkable was the failure of the other observers to intervene. No one else in the immediate vicinity attempted to do anything about the attempted robbery until Ann had driven off the raiders, bringing one them down in the process. Then there was a rush to keep the downed raider down and to see Ann was okay. Before her intervention, plenty of bystanders stopped and gawped and drivers turning into the street steered around the scooters – but no one did anything. Even the jewellers’ staff - clearly terrified - did no more than try to get the shutters down. 

Ann herself said she was ‘amazed’ that bystanders did not intervene at the start of the attack. She described herself as “shouting and shouting for others to help and bring them down…They all seemed mesmerised. A lot were standing there filming or taking photos….” 

Psychologists, however, will not be surprised by the lack of intervention from others. The Bystander Effect is a recognised psychological phenomenon – that there is an inverse relationship between the number of people present at an emergency situation and the willingness of those people to offer help. This relationship was first proposed by John Darley & Bibb Latané from their investigations into the notorious murder of New Yorker Kitty Genovase in 1964 when something like 38 neighbours heard her screams and cries for help and/or actually saw part of the attack but did not call the police or otherwise intervene. 

Explanations put forward for the Bystander Effect’ include evaluation apprehension and diffusion of responsibility. Evaluation apprehension is the anxiety produced by the fear that others will be judgemental about your competence in dealing with the situation. Diffusion of responsibility occurs when individuals feel less responsibility for taking action in a crisis when there are others about because responsibility is perceived as shared and, therefore, spread out. The more bystanders there are, the less likely any individual is to act. In effect, everyone puts the responsibility for doing something about the crisis onto others. 

That the bystanders finally realised it was a little old woman screaming for help and that she had succeeded in driving off the raiders may have been the catalysts which finally spurred the onlookers into action in Northampton. 

While there numerous documented examples of the Bystander Effect in history - arguably the greatest and most notorious example being the German people’s acquiescence to the Nazis’ treatment of Jews, Slavs, etc, during World War II - there is an interesting question as to whether the Bystander Effect has become more common and possibly embedded into British culture since World War II. 

Were people more willing to get involved in earlier decades? Did they see it as the kind of thing they should do? 

My father has told me many tales of men, during his youth in the 1930s and 1940s, coming out of their houses to clear away troublesome groups of teenagers. He also told me of vigilante-type groups coming together from time to time to take on gangs that were coming into their neighbourhood. 

How thinkable would it be for male householders in a street to do that kind of thing today? (Unfortunately when people do ‘have a go’ these days, all too often they end up doing it alone! Ann Timson, anyone?) 

My father’s evidence is, of course, anecdotal and may be relevant only to the area of Liverpool in which he grew up. However, I have heard a number of similar anecdotes relating to different parts of the country. 

Attitudes these days towards the idea of ‘having a go’ seem rather mixed. Newspapers like The Sun and the Daily Mail usually can’t find enough superlatives to praise ‘have a go heroes’. However, ‘official’ attitudes are all too often reflected in the words of Detective Inspector Ally White who said of the Ann Timpson incident: “We would like to thank all of the members of the public who assisted in the incident. However, we would always advise the public to call the police if they witness a crime, rather than risking their own safety by getting involved themselves.” 

So the police don’t actually want us to have a go but to rely on them….? So the Bystander Effect is okay with them?!? Perhaps it is becoming embedded in our culture, encouraged by ‘officialdom’? Hmmm….well, the lone constable I stopped to support when he was investigating a late night break-in some years back actually seemed very appreciative of my company till back-up arrived. 

The obvious problems with not having a go and relying on the police are:- 

a) the time gap until they arrive 

b) the fact there simply aren’t enough of them to cope with all the crime being conducted - and there will be even less of them and more people feeling they are driven to crime as a result of the Government’s cuts!

Intervening, of course, can carry serious risks; but, if we are to have a functioning society where people can go about their lawful business safely, can we afford for everyone to be that risk averse? 

If David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ idea is to work - ie: local people band together to do ‘it’ for themselves, rather than rely on government - then can that ‘it’ include have a go’ law enforcement? If it can, then clearly Ally White really doesn’t understand that. But, if it is officially okay to intervene, how close can ‘have a go’ get to outright judge-jury-executioner vigilantism? 

If the nodal BLUE law & order system can’t protect those who put their trust in it, then inevitably there will be a Spiral downshift to RED/BLUE when people will take the law into their own hands in the same way as Munir Hussain - see ‘Munir Hussain and the wrong messages of Judge John Reddihough’ - and Tony Martin have done in recent years, with severe consequences for the criminals they dealt with. 

As the cuts cause the law & order system in this country to malfunction increasingly, perhaps a BEIGE/PURPLE vMEME harmonic will drive more people to have a go at defending themselves, their families and their property. Again Egypt helps illustrate this point - neighbours forming little groups armed with knives, baseball bats and the occasional firearm at the ends of their streets to repel the looters taking advantage of the civic disturbances and rioting. 

The ‘Viral Phenomenon’ 
Why, oh, why has footage of a little old lady swinging her handbag at a - let’s face it! - decidedly amateurish (though undoubtedly thuggish) group of would-be robbers captured so much interest right around the world? 

The answer will lie at least partly in the ongoing failure of BLUE to contain escalating crime - especially violent crime. From the daily routine of murders, rapes, muggings and robberies infesting Johannesburg to Somali pirates reviving the tradition of buccaneering in as bloodthirsty a manner as any of their forbears to the epidemic of drugs and sex trafficking right across Europe and many other examples, the globally-connected world seems to be awash with examples of criminals getting away with it - the message all too often being that crime actually does pay. 

Thus, heroes who emerge unexpectedly from seemingly nowhere and suddenly decimate the criminals are the stuff of folklore. So often, for us as observers - bystanders- they embody our own desire to ‘do something’ and our frustrations at not being able to do so. They take the law into their own hands - as Ann Timson did - when the law is clearly not working. Of course, there may be all kinds of complications when the hero figure does this - there’s good reason why these kinds of heroes are sometimes termed ‘anti-heroes’. 

For a fuller discussion of this point, see the Society feature: ‘When BLUE fails, call for Clint!’ 

The Ann Timson seen in the footage is a small-scale old lady version of the kind of hero figure so often played by the likes of Clint Eastwood or Arnold Schwarzenegger in their action hero heydays. Like we loved them sorting out the ruthless gangsters the law can’t, we love her for sorting out the scooter boys. The fact she isn’t a muscle-bound violent psychopath but a gran-like old lady also conveys the message: if she can do it, why can’t we all? 

Clearly there is a memetic virus effect here. According to a YouGov poll published in the Sunday Times (13 February),   35% of respondents thought Ann was heroic to intervene. 13% thought she was foolish, and 46% said she was both heroic and foolish. Given a list of crimes, 54% said they would intervene if they saw someone burgling a house and 60% said they would step in if they saw an unarmed aggressor assaulting someone in the street. Some 40% of respondents said they would take action if they witnessed a gunman or someone armed with a club assaulting someone in the street, and 29% would intervene on witnessing an armed robbery. 

All hot air and fantasy or real inspiration to action…? Of course, we’ll never know whether the YouGov respondents get involved in breaking up criminal activities. But, if we see more spontaneous group action against criminals and fewer Bystander Effects, then maybe some of that may just be attributable to the inspiration Ann Timson has provided. 

But the very real and increasing need for what is not far off vigilantism says a lot about the effect crime is having on our society and the decreasing capacity of conventional law enforcement channels for dealing with it.

‘Radical Islam’ and the Return of Tony Blair

 Afghanistan, cross-cultural, government, heroes and inspirational figures, international conflict, Middle East, morality, racism, religion, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  8 Responses »
Sep 072010
 

Wow, Tony Blair sure is back in the news in a BIG way! First the Gordon Brown-bashing memoirs, then having eggs and shoes thrown at him in Dublin on Saturday and being a star guest yesterday on the inaugural showing of the new breakfast programme, Daybreak. And, of course, in the Sunday Telegraph both he and Brown were bashed by former Chief of the General Staff General Sir Richard Dannatt for failing to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq adequately. (Dannatt was in uncompromising mood, blaming Blair and Brown explicitly and personally for needless deaths.)

Tony Blair

Perhaps the most interesting set of comments to emerge from the seemingly endless round of interviews the former prime minister has conducted were those to do with ‘radical Islam’ and the threat that would be posed by a nuclear Iran.

Talking about radical Islam in general, he described it to ABC News as “…the religious or cultural equivalent of [Communism] and its roots are deep, its tentacles are long and its narrative about Islam stretches far further than we think into even parts of mainstream opinion who abhor the extremism but sort of buy some of the rhetoric that goes with it.”

Blair told the BBC: “There is the most enormous threat from the combination of this radical extreme movement and the fact that, if they could, they would use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.”

Referring back to 9/11, he said: “If these people could have killed 30,000 or 300,000, they would have.”

Blair’s undoubtedly right about the threat the extremists and terrorists pose in the name of fundamentalist Islam. However, there is a need to be clear about just what Islam, in its most fundamental form, says and requires and how those use it who would dominate others and destroy those they can’t dominate, all in the name of Islam.

There are some similarities with the way the Mediaeval Crusaders twisted elements of the Christian religion to justify horrific atrocities in and around Jerusalem. Their actions were abominable but they didn’t make Christianity as a religion abominable. Nor do the modern fundamentalist Christians in the southern United States who, in God’s name, periodically shoot dead a doctor who carries out abortions. On a personal note, I was a radical fundamentalist Christian for 7 years and I never found anything in either the Bible or the teachings of my Pentecostal church to indicate I needed to go kill some abortionists.

So we need to be very careful about using phrases like ‘radical Islam’. What the terrorists did on 9/11 was abominable but that doesn’t make Islam abominable.

Blair unwittingly illustrates how complex this issue of separating out the religion from those who claim to be its followers when he referred to radical Islamists as “regressive, wicked and backward-looking”. Sounds to me like he’s using what cross-cultural researcher John Berry (1969) called an imposed etic – treating other cultures as though they should be operating from our values and then judging them negatively because they don’t. So they take Islam’s requirement for women to dress modestly to the extreme of the burka… But consider this: in the wake of the 1995 Bradford riots, one Muslim rioter told a friend of mine that it was all about driving the pimps and drug dealers out of the Manningham area. He concluded with: “Our women can walk the streets safely at night now. Yours can’t.”

Better to wear a burka or have prostitutes and drug dealers on your street corner…?

Can we deal with the terrorists?
Blair may be confusing the nature of fundamentalist Islam with those who seek to dominate and destroy in its name but he’s ‘bang-on’ in describing the determination and ruthlessness of such people. Personally I have no doubt that some of them would indeed use nuclear, biological and/or chemical weapons if available when a high value target could be attacked.

Large-scale acts of destruction so appalling they defy credulity pepper the history of our planet when the BLUE vMEME is seeking to establish its one right way to be. From the Jewish genocide of the Amorites and the Hittites in Biblical times through the Catholics and Protestants torturing and murdering each other in their thousands in the early Renaissance (eerily paralleled in the Sunni vs Shia atrocities in the districts of Baghdad) to the industrial-scale death machines of the Nazi concentration camps, to Pol Pot’s extermination of the Cambodian intelligentsia in the 1970s and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Just some of BLUE’s handiwork, made that much worse when RED-driven demagogues – eg: Adolph Hitler, Slobodan Milošević – use PURPLE tribalism and racism to reinforce the notion that they are doing the ‘right thing’.

An al-Qaeda suicide bomber setting off a suitcase nuke in Manhattan or central London is not just a figment of the 24 scriptwriters’ fevered imaginations. It really could happen; but, in real life, it’s doubtful there would be any Jack Bauer to save us at the very last second.

It’s a delusion to think you can deal with peak BLUE. You can’t because it only recognises one right way in that scenario and any deviation from that one right way is a corruption and must be eliminated. It’s that simple. That absolute.

As I argue in the Global feature, ‘Killing the Terrorists’, you simply cannot negotiate with peak BLUE. You can only kill it. Utterly. Completely. And without mercy.

For a year or so now, views have been expressed by certain American politicians and senior military figures that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable on a purely military basis…so it’s time to talk to the Taliban. And it was reported a few days ago that Afghan president Hamid Karzai has now set up a ‘High Peace Council’ to do just that.

Such moves will be seen by hard BLUE as signs of weakness, reflecting the moral corruption of both Karzi’s government and the whole American ethos. To the extremists amongst the Taliban, the American (and British) ringing of hands over dead and maimed soldiers plays badly when contrasted with the implacable fortitude of their brave suicide bombers and confirms to them that they are morally superior…that they are right.

American commander in Afghanistan General David Patraeus’ approach is perhaps more realistic. Those Taliban who renounce violence are invited to rejoin mainstream (if there is yet such a thing!) Afghan society. He’s not rushing to talk to the extremist leaders. Rather, he’s whittling away at the edges of the Taliban camp, offering a way out for those are not quite so absolutely sure of their cause and/or are simply sickened by the brutality of the war.

Movements rarely stay static in terms of every member consistently adhering to its tenets absolutely for the rest of their lives. Circumstances change and many will adapt to the changing circumstances. In the early 1990s it happened in both South Africa and Northern Ireland that positions amongst a body of members (the ANC and the Provisional IRA respectively) began to shift significantly. As Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck demonstrates with the Assimilation-Contrast Effect (ACE) (2003), without taking any pressure of the unremitting hardliners, this is the time to negotiate with the more reasonable.

It’s interesting that the Basque terrorist group ETA announced a truce this Sunday gone in a manner that was so reminiscent of the IRA in 1994 - fumbling, half-hearted, non-specific…reflecting the internal struggles and convulsions to get it this just far from the usual violence. It’s to be hoped the Spanish government responds with a multi-level approach - courting the ‘reasonables’ to the negotiating table while continuing to try to kill the extremists.

Similarly a multi-level approach is required in Afghanistan…

# The war must be pursued - there must be no let up militarily for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Ironically, Gordon Brown was right in November last year when he said that our soldiers were fighting them in Afghanistan so that there would be less likelihood of having to fight them on our own streets, in the ruins of our own bombed cities.
And when the tide turns, those who insist on fighting on must be destroyed. Utterly.

# Petraeus’ idea of escape routes for those Taliban whose commitment to their cause is shaky needs to be expanded upon. And they should be given every support in integrating into whatever it is Afghan society is becoming - including engagement in the political process.

# The Afghan economy and social and political infrastructure needs support and direction in developing. This is what we should have been doing during the wasted years in Iraq.

# The form of government Afghanistan develops needs to respect its traditions, respect the overwhelmingly-dominant religion, Islam, and reflect the tribal nature of the country – what Don Beck calls Stratified Democracy (2003) - rather than be tied to the Western dogma of one man/one (secret) vote.

What about moderate Muslims?
There are hundreds of millions of Muslims throughout the world who have no interest whatsoever in the establishment of a global Muslim caliphate. Many would be appalled at the thought of living under Sharia law.

Like Christians and Jews, they will be of varying degrees of ‘devotedness’, ranging from those who visit the Mosque only when pressured to by family and are really quite partial to Western ‘sins’ such as non-marital sex and getting ‘blathered’ (on alcohol) to those who take the Qur’an and Hadith quite literally and wouldn’t dream of not following all the rituals every day as required of a good Muslim. Those towards the latter end of that spectrum may well want the government of their country to be more influenced by notions of religious morality in its lawmaking but they’re not about to take up arms and plant bombs in furtherance of such desires.

In terms of Tony Blair’s unfortunate use of the term ‘radical Islam’, this is ‘moderate Islam’. So what has Blair got to say to them? For that matter, what do we have to say to them? It’s one thing to fight back against so-called radical Islam but how do we engage with moderate Islam? If Blair’s worldview is not to slip into the ‘Crusader mentality’ which so bedevilled George W Bush’s first responses to 9/11 and we want to avoid the West vs Islam ‘clash of cultures’ war some have mooted, then we have to find means to enable moderate Muslims to interact positively with the West and its libertine culture without disrespecting Islam.

There are obvious and not-so-obvious shifts taking place naturally anyway. You only have to walk around certain parts of Birmingham and north London on a Saturday night to see young Muslim men drinking coke while their white mates down pints of beer and young Muslim women dressed more modestly than the white girls at the next table…but only a little more modestly.

But we could do with managing such processes more deliberately so that the engagement and integration is smoother - eg: helping the young Muslim man who’s started dating a non-religious white girl deal with the reaction his family is likely to experience. Or creating more facilities to help devout Muslims carry out as many of their prayer rituals as possible without serious disruption to their work.

Of course, pretty much everything recommended above costs money at a time when the capitalist world is still teetering near the edge of global bankruptcy; but, from a 2nd Tier perspective, we’re looking to develop longer-term strategies for a safer world. From the macro - isolating and/or destroying the Taliban – to the micro - a Muslim/non-Muslim romance, it needs to be done.

Contrary to some of the stereotypes that get bandied about in the media, there are serious Muslim intellectuals, academics, clerics and politicians grappling with these very issues and who are only too keen to engage with their Western counterparts in developing ways to deal with them.

Bafflingly, sometimes it is the Western counterparts who are slow to engage.

In April this year I wrote ‘Why is the West ignoring a leading moderate Muslim?’ This concerned the publication the month before by Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a leading Islamic scholar, of a detailed 605-page fatwa against suicide bombings and terrorism. It said that terrorism cannot be justified under any pretext through allusion to any real or alleged instances of injustice and there is no space for terrorism in Islam. I wrote the Blog in frustration at how little political and media attention had been paid to this groundbreaking fatwa. That the Blog was  republished by ul-Qadri’s people on his institution’s web site perhaps reflects their frustration too…?

Has Tony Blair, in his concern about ‘radical Islam’, been talking to this pillar of ‘moderate Islam’ who is deeply concerned about the attempted hijacking of his religion by extremists to justify terrorism?

Well, have you, Tony? If not, why not? This enquiring mind wants to know!

The Iran Question
In one of his interviews, Blair said that Iran was one of the biggest state sponsors of radical Islam and it was necessary to prevent it by any means from developing a nuclear weapon.

“I would tell them they can’t have it and, if necessary, they will be confronted with stronger sanctions and diplomacy. But, if that fails, I’m not taking any option off the table….I’m saying I think you cannot exclude [military action] because the primary objective has got to be to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon.”

2 years ago I wrote ‘Iran: jaw, jaw or war, war’ as an Integrated SocioPsychology commentary on an Israeli air force exercise to test their capability to bomb the Iranians’ principal nuclear facility at Bushehr. At the time I was castigated for the piece by one of my A-Level Psychology students who is half-Iranian…but I stood by it then and I stand by it now.

Regardless of the ‘right’ of one country to develop nuclear weapon capability when others have it, a nuclear Iran is simply not practicable. The Israelis will not tolerate the concept – and, given Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s overt hostility to the state of Israel, who can blame them?

What is important - and this is what I think Blair is getting at - is that it is a coalition of countries that restricts, forcibly, if necessary, Iran’s nuclear ambitions. An Israeli attack on Iran, however ‘surgical’, would destabilise the little steps various elements in the Middle East are taking towards a workable, comprehensive peace beyond the current armed truces. It might even result in all-out war.

Far better that the ‘Quartet on the Middle East’ (United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and Russia), for which Blair holds the position of Envoy) manage the Iran-constraint policy. Preferably by diplomacy. By sanction where necessary – as has proved necessary. By force, if no other way.

Blair is absolutely right.

And the Quartet must act strongly enough to keep the Israelis out of it.

Welcome back, Tony Blair…?
Not that he ever really went away…but he’s certainly been dominating the news this past fortnight in a way he hasn’t since Gordon Brown moved into 10 Downing Street.

Back in 2001 I was mightily impressed with Blair. He sold the American invasion of Afghanistan to the world – even learning enough about the Qur’an to justify it to the leaders of Muslim states in terms of their own values. It was a remarkable job. (I doubt George W Bush would have even known where to start!)

I was so impressed that, for a time, I wondered if Blair was able to self-actualise into YELLOW thinking. But then came Iraq. (Even now it appears his RED won’t let him be shamed by admitting he was wrong on Iraq.)

Blair was a giant of his times, setting the style of the modern British political leader – David Cameron and Nick Clegg still come off like Blair wannabees on occasion! As has been said many times, perhaps more froth than substance; but a very artful persuader nonetheless.

His return to the daily headlines is welcome - not least for the fact it’s a timely reminder to the Labour leadership contenders what a charismatic party leader should look and sound like.

The fact he’s chosen to major on ‘radical Islam’ as one of his key themes is good in one respect. He’s solid steel on the need to tackle the extremists at a time when most Western leaders are more focussed on the body bags being flown home than what might happen if the extremists aren’t stopped.

But his language and choice of terminology is still regressive from where he seemed to be in 2001. If the extremists are really to be stopped, then they need to be isolated from the broad body of Muslim opinion using ACE-based strategies. Strength is just one (very important) tool. The broad body of Muslim opinion rejecting terrorism and its advocates unequivocally is arguably more important in the longer-term.

Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri’s fatwa is a foundation stone to that strategy. Tony, pick up the phone and give him a call.

‘Liberal Conservatives’: new politics?

 Afghanistan, community, government, heroes and inspirational figures, Psychology, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  2 Responses »
May 142010
 

The first day of the Tory/Lib Dem coalition we had Nick & Dave: the Love-In in the Rose Garden which more than a few commentators likened to a wedding, such was the bonhomie and adoring gazes between the principals. Yesterday we had Vince Cable, the Lib Dems’ voice of sensible moderation, and William Hague, the conservative of the Conservatives, sharing the walk along Downing Street to David Cameron’s first cabinet meeting. Not to mention the bizarre spectacle of Lib Dem anti-nuclear spokesperson Chris Huhne taking charge of implementing the Tories’ plans to build more nuclear power stations! Today, of course, Cameron’s at war with a number of his own backbenchers over the intention to fix the level at which Parliament can be dissolved prematurely at a vote of 55% of the House of Commons (up from a simple majority of 51% and making it that much more to get rid of them). At least the Lib Dems are only being berated for this ‘stitch up’ by members of another party (Labour)!

Undoubtedly the week since the general election results were declared has been one of the most interesting in modern British politics!

The 55% no-confidence level stitch-up is, in fact, a key plank in the Tory/Lib-Dem agreement which, theoretically, ties the 2 parties to each other for the to-be-fixed 5-year life of this Parliament. This straightjacket, it is claimed, will give us the stable government we clearly need to steady the markets and to start to tackle the huge problems Britain faces.

But the story of this historic coalition – the first since the Second World War and the first time Liberals have had seats in a non-wartime cabinet since 1922 – may be in trouble even before it has begun. Not only are there very noisy grumblings about the ‘unconstitutional’ 55% but grassroots Lib-Dem activists are mounting a campaign to force Nick Clegg to put the coalition agreement to a full vote of the party membership. Meanwhile a number of Tory MPs have said they will campaign outrightly against the Lib-Dem-driven proposal for electoral reform once the legislation for the referendum is pushed through.

A number of seasoned political commentators are also far from convinced. Eg: the venerable Max Hastings, writing in the Daily Mail (12 May), says: “Nick Clegg has climbed into bed with the Tories, whom most of his supporters hate, for a political price that is more than a pittance, but scarcely worth the price of their souls. More than a few Tories, in their turn, are dismayed that David Cameron has made a deal with a party of hookers.” He goes on to describe the coalition as: “…a pantomime horse doomed to fail”.

Of course, putting together a government from parties, which have been staunch rivals since the Victorian times when William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli used to square up to each other across the dispatch box, is going to be problematic. Not least because these 2 historical political giants still infect their respective parties with their memes.

While economically Cameron might be Margaret Thatcher’s grandchild, his emphasis on social responsibility and talk of society’s obligations to the underprivileged and disadvantaged show clear strands of Disraeli’s political DNA surviving and replicating through generations of Tories to infect his thinking. As for the Lib-Dems, while they might in title be Liberal Democrats and have a touch of the centre-left about them, at heart the likes of Simon Hughes embody old Gladstonian Liberalism.

But some would declare us now to be in a post-ideological age where stolid pragmatism is more important than unthinking devotion to principle. Perhaps it was that kind of thinking that led the Lib Dems to leak that Monday’s (doomed) flirtation with Gordon Brown and Labour (far more, it was previously thought, their natural allies) was just going through the motions, to appease the party activists, and that the object of desire all along had really been the Tories?!?!? Maybe it was similar values that led David in the Rose Garden to declare that a minority Tory government, negotiating policy by policy support with the Lib Dems, just wasn’t inspiring; he just had to have a full-on relationship with the man he had only a couple of weeks before, as one reporter reminisced, referred to as a ‘joke’?!?!?

If pragmatism does have the upper hand over principle, then maybe…just maybe…the coalition does have a chance of succeeding. In which case, Clegg’s fine words about a “new kind of politics” might not turn out to be just so much hot air.

As for Cameron, he is reputedly talking about the ‘Liberal Conservatives’?!?!?

Some overlap of values?
On the face of it David Cameron appears to be dominated in his thinking by the ORANGE vMEME. He is concerned with progress, achievement and wealth. In these respects, he is very much Thatcher’s grandchild. Beneath this is a solid BLUE desire for order, stability, duty and conservatism (small ‘c’). Thus, his natural approach to the fiscal deficit is to cut, cut and cut public spending while looking for opportunities to liberate wealth-generating entrepreneurism.

Yet there is also a touch of GREEN liberalism in Cameron’s thinking. (Goodness, he’s even on record as supporting civil partnerships for gay and lesbian couples!) And it’s the work of the GREEN in his selfplex which enables Cameron to at least understand where the Liberals are coming from.

As for Nick Clegg, his near-naked ambition shows strong ORANGE at work beneath the publicly-voiced GREEN-derived mantras of the Lib Dems. Ostensibly, Clegg’s ORANGE ambition pulls him down from GREEN ideals to do the ‘dirty deal’ with Cameron which has so unnerved many Lib-Dem activists.

It’s interesting, looking at the footage of him and Cameron on the steps of 10 Downing Street and in the Rose Garden, how alike they seem. The same age, similar youthful good looks, slim, modern haircuts, sharp suits…they could almost be peas from the same proverbial pod.

If they can get on on a personal level and they can use each other for mutual progress, there is every possibility the core of the coalition will work – and the ruthlessness and cunning of ORANGE will enable Cameron to outwit the rigid BLUE of the Tory naysayers while Clegg undermines the lofty principles of GREEN-led Lib Dems simply by being in government, having a highly-visible profile and gaining credibility with the electorate.

Of course, there is a real risk of divisions in the ranks being driven and/or manipulated into real splits, with one or both parties splintering in the stress of being in a coalition with those they had previously despised – and that’s probably a higher risk for the Lib Dems. However, a real partnership between Cameron and Clegg, even if one of mutual use, should, theoretically, work. And, if the partnership works, without the parties splintering under the pressures of coalition, then maybe we really are into “a new kind of politics”.

2nd Tier thinking
After the Regent’s College summit last June, when we started putting together the Centre for Human Emergence UK, there was some considerable debate amongst the core team, as to how we might engage with politicians in developing ideas for the regeneration of British identity and culture. By and large the consensus was that the Lib Dems – at least, as a party – were most likely to be receptive to the kinds of ideas we were beginning to formulate.

The reason for this perception, partly drawn from portrayal in the media and partly from the direct experience of some of us in meetings with Lib Dem politicians, was that GREEN was so strongly dominant in much of the party’s collective selfplex, compared to the BLUE and ORANGE vMEMES driving the Tories and BLUE and GREEN motivating Labour. (These vMEMETIC ascriptions are, of course, huge generalisations about the 3 parties.)

If we were to find 2nd Tier thinking – or at least a readiness to move to 2nd Tier thinking – we thought we would be much more likely to find it amongst the Lib Dems.

So, a year later, with the Lib Dems forming a minority element in the new government, how does that perception stand?

Well, there was little in the Lib Dem election manifesto to indicate that the primary vMEME driving their thinking was anything other than GREEN. (Which doesn’t mean other vMEMES didn’t exert their influence – just that the overriding impression is one of it being a GREEN-led agenda.)

Since GREEN, in its desire to bring about fairness and equality, can actually become unrealistic in its expecations, the Tories’ BLUE and ORANGE demands on their policies being adopted by the coalition in areas such as immigration, defence and fiscal management is probably no bad thing. The Tories’ insistence on no joining the euro for the life of this Parliament is also no bad thing, given the mess the Eurozone is in – but longer term that may need to be reviewed, both from a pragmatic as well as an ideological angle.

The coalition programme, from what we know of it so far, can almost certainly be described as coming primarily from BLUE and ORANGE, with some GREEN initiatives. So it’s not the strong GREEN-derived  programme a pure Lib Dem government might have attempted to implement – but then it’s also without the worst excesses a strongly GREEN agenda might have contained.

So far, at least, there seems little on offer for people whose values come primarily from the PURPLE and RED vMEMES lower down the Spiral. As all too often in modern British politics, their needs get ignored by the political cognoscenti, making them easy prey for the likes of the British National Party. Hopefully, the Tories proposed cap on non-EU immigration might help those people feel they are not totally ignored by the political mainstream.

This disconnection with communities dominated by PURPLE and RED thinking – particularly the traditional white working class – is just one reason why programmes produced by BLUE and ORANGE and even GREEN are not enough in themselves. It requires full 2nd Tier thinking to perceive the full range of needs and desires on the Spiral.

So we’re back to the question: where is the 2nd Tier thinking in our leadership?

The effects of dissonance
Between 9/11 and the build-up to Iraq, I thought I detected an amount of 2nd Tier thinking in Tony Blair. The way he courted Muslim leaders in the wake of 9/11, using Qur’anic text and Islamic concepts to persuade them to at least not oppose the American invasion of Afghanistan seemed to me to display the remarkable ability to work with people in terms of their own values. Then came the blind alliance with George W Bush and the blunders people are still paying for with their lives in both Afghanistan and Iraq. After that, Blair was always ‘damaged goods’.

Yet no other 21st Century Western leader has impressed me with that quality of thinking. Even Barrack Obama, for all his initial promise, now seems bogged down and uninspired.

David Cameron certainly doesn’t impress me he’s got that kind of vision. At least not yet. Nor does Nick Clegg. Vince Cable maybe. Certainly the man is a treasure for his erudite wisdom and seemingly-unflappable composure – but he’s yet to master projecting himself as a charismatic figure in the mass media. William Hague is even worse at handling the media; though, years after fluffing his go at leading the Tories, he is at last starting to be recognised for his incisive judgements.

So what hope of 2nd Tier thinking in our new government?

Ironically it may actually be the stresses and strains of coalition – the very same pressures that lead commentators like Max Hastings to declare the coalition doomed – that make the difference.

Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) identified dissonance as being a critical component in any process of change. And dissonance there will certainly be as the 2 coalition partners try to come to terms with people and policies they have publicly despised until now. So this key to change will certainly be in abundance.

The actual triggers for neural change, which would enable Cameron, Clegg and their colleagues to self-actualise into 2nd Tier thinking may actually come about via the incredible surfeit of ideas – memes – involved in the huge internal and external dissonance which will beset the coalition. Susan Blackmore (1999) hypothesised that it is was memes – the sheer scale of ideas – early hominoids were dealing with which led to the development of the human ‘big brain’. So could it be that it is the sheer scale of the problems they face which will force the thinking of Cameron, Clegg, etc, up the Spiral…?

If so, are there any signs of the potential Beck & Cowan state is also necessary for progress up the Spiral?

Well, consider this from Clegg: “I hope this is the start of the new politics I have always believed in – diverse, plural, where politicians of different persuasions come together, overcome their differences in order to deliver good government for the sake of the whole country.”

It’s a good talk, isn’t? Let’s now hope they walk the walk!

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