Moral Panic and the Great Horsemeat Scandal

 civil unrest, community, crime, government, Health, morality, politics, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
Feb 212013
 

The current furore over horsemeat being found in some processed foods shows the media still likes to create what Stan Cohen (1973) termed a ‘moral panic’. The ‘folk devils’ this time around initially were food processor Farmbox of Aberystwyth and  the Peter Boddy Slaughterhouse in Todmorden who, it is alleged, knowingly introduced (unregulated) horsemeat into the British human food chain. Increasingly there is talk of an ‘international criminal conspiracy’ – led by no less than Environment Secretary Owen Paterson who was reported by the Daily Mail’s Tom Kelly (among others) to have said (12 February): “’I'm concerned that this is an international criminal conspiracy here and we’ve really got to get to the bottom of it…. This is a conspiracy against the public. Selling a product as beef, and including a lot of horse in it is fraud.” Kelly goes on to speculate that the Italian and Polish Mafias are behind the operation.

Rightly there are concerns about food hygiene standards not having been adhered to and that there is a risk of dangerous substances entering the human food chain through unregulated meat. The only substance to be identified so far, however, is the veterinary drug phenylbutazone (‘bute’) which was found in less than 4% of horsemeat-contaminated samples taken in the 9 days of 30 January-7 February. As the BBC’s Medical Correspondent Fergus Walsh has written, based on information Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies provided: “In order to get a single therapeutic dose of bute from horsemeat you’d need to eat 500-600 250g horse burgers. That’s an awful lot of meat.”

Walsh goes on to write: “you assume that there is a strong health angle to the horsemeat contamination scandal. The evidence so far would suggest otherwise. This is a food fraud rather than a food safety issue.” Clearly the labelling of some of the foods under scrutiny may have little correlation with what is actually inside the packaging and that substances potentially harmful to humans are entering the food chain – albeit in almost microscopic amounts.

So the ‘Great Horsemeat Scandal’ appears to throw up 2 issues:-

(i)             Does the poor regulation of food processing pose a genuine threat to human health?

(ii)            Is consumer confidence in meat processing and the labelling of food undermined…and, if so, how can it be restored?

The answer to (i) has to be Not so far but potentially Yes. If – and, to some extent, it is still ‘if’ – regulation of food in and into the UK has been circumvented as easily as it appears to have been by entrepreneurial but relatively low-level criminals, what would happen if an intelligent and well-funded terrorist organisation wanted to infect the human food chain in this country with a deadly bacterial and/or chemical agent…? The results would most likely be catastrophic and scarcely bear thinking about. Thinking about them – and hopefully preventing them – is the job of the Government’s ‘COBRA Committee’, MI6, the police anti-terrorist squads and other pertinent agencies. Preventing such an attack is a considerable task one can only hope the COBRA planners are wised up to.

Point (ii) is a strange one. A number of polls were reported on 18 February – most notably The Herald (Michael Settle, 2013) and The London Evening Standard (Press Association, 2013) – which were remarkably consistent in reporting that around 25% of the sample groups questioned will now buy less processed meat, with a further 15%+ saying they would do so if they could afford to. Around 20% have already started buying less meat per se. Just short of 70% trust food labelling less and a little over 60% will buy more unprocessed meat from local butchers. Of course, these are self-reporting surveys and subject to all the usual caveats about results from this research method. In terms of whether we have a full-scale ‘moral panic’ on our hands in the way Cohen meant when describing media reaction to and manipulation of the ‘Mods vs Rockers’ conflicts that blew up in several English seaside towns in the early 1960s, it’s difficult to conclude from the polls reported. A 25% change in meat shopping habits – assuming it’s both enacted and sustained – is certainly significant and would seem to give the lie to Angela McRobbie & Sarah Thornton’s (1995) contention that the very concept of a ‘moral panic’ is now outdated. Nonetheless, the fact that 75% of people seem to be willing to carry on buying meat as they did before…while being very suspicious of what the label actually specifies…could be said to lend some support to McRobbie &Thornton’s view that the public are just a little too sophisticated nowadays to be taken in in quite the way they used to back in the 1960s and 1970s.

It’s also worth noting that investment in the food retail sector has actually risen since the start of the year, with shares rising 6.2% in total and 1.2% in the week ending 16 February, the worst week of the scandal. (James Davey & Neil Maidment, 2013) Clearly such people are not panicking!

Why don’t we kill folk devils in Britain?
As a sociopsychological commentator, I’m fascinated by the ‘monster story’ the media has created, the public uproar that results and the pressure this puts on politicians to ‘do something about it’ – all classic features of Cohen’s moral panic concept. TV, radio and the internet all attract greater numbers of viewers wanting to learn more – especially if there is a possibility they and their loved ones may be at risk. As for the printed media, they can bask in a boost in newspaper sales – short-lived though the boost may be. Meanwhile pertinent politicians, civil servants and local government officers desperately look for someone else to blame and to be seen to be either doing something about it (if you’re part of the government machine) or harassing Government to do something about it (if part of the opposition).

Moral panics, of course, illustrate the power of certain memes to spread virally, through the media, and infect our schemas. So the issue becomes personal to us: it matters. To borrow from Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs concepts, the lower down the Spiral the vMEME which is engaged by the issue, the more powerful and emotive the response and the more people are likely to be activated to respond. Thus, a scandal about food products consumed by millions touches a BEIGE nerve – it can comprise the evolutionary driver to survive – possible even the evolutionary driver to reproduce.

A BEIGE/PURPLE vMEME harmonic comes into play if we have children of our own or just generally value children. Now, it is not just our own survival which may be compromised but perhaps that of the next generation. There is a risk to the replication and carrying forward of our genes.

Thus, even though the real risk to public health seems very small in the ‘Great Horsemeat Scandal’, it touches upon fundamental (evolutionary) values shared by most people at a very deep emotional level.

In 4Q/8L terms, the BLUE structure and processes of the Lower Right Quadrant that consumers trust in have failed. In Functionalist terms, a vital ‘organ’ of society (the food supply) has been compromised. Thankfully, the failure is small but the hullabaloo is huge, with the media running it as a headline story for over a month now. The ORANGE vMEME of the newspaper and the news programme editors has jumped at the opportunity to sell more newspapers and attract more viewers. However, as noted earlier, while the headlines have got the politicians performing on every news bulletin, either condemning the latest revelation or promising some new action, the response from the general public has been relatively muted. There have been no abattoir owners lynched for putting children at risk; not even a boycott of Tesco or Asda for retailing contaminated food!

But then, apart from a potshot through the window of one of the homes of disgraced ex-NatWest boss Fred Goodwin, no bankers were killed or even assaulted in 2008-2009 – and they were the catalyst for the financial meltdown which did real and lasting damage to the economy of this country which the people will pay for over perhaps the complete decade to come. And this despite the media pillorying bankers on and off for several years!

In some parts of the world, mobs would have formed to kill the folk devils – eg: in Jamaica last year a spate of mob killings of men suspected of child abuse and other sex crimes was reported (Michael Aitken, 2012). But this kind of mob violence against people is a rarity in the modern UK. (Riots damaging property and challenging the police are more common – from the Toxteth and Brixton riots in 1981 through to last Summer’s riots across England.) Perhaps it’s something to do with being ‘British’ – eg: it’s just not ‘cricket’ for a mob to hack a man to death or torch him with a ‘flaming necklace’.

Certainly there seems to be something in the collective psyche that by and large inhibits people from forming vigilante mobs.

And this presents  an interesting conundrum in analysing responses to the ‘Great Horsemeat Scandal’. Spiral Dynamics orthodoxy has it that, as Life Conditions in the Environment change (Lower Right Quadrant), so there should be a vMEMETIC adjustment in the collective cultural (Lower Left) and individual psychological (Upper Left). Yet, despite a clear failure of BLUE systems in the Lower Right, there has been little change in the Lower Left or Upper Left. Usually, when BLUE fails, there is a regression to the RED vMEME. Certainly this can be read as a factor in numerous civil conflict situations in the UK, from the Catholic communities in Northern Ireland in 1969 calling for the IRA to protect them when police failed to prevent Protestant gangs burning them out of their houses to the spread of looting riots last Summer when the police were widely perceived as unable to protect property. But, when it comes to mob attacks on individual folk devils, it seems the Brits just don’t do that sort of thing.

It will be interesting to see how the growing ethnic diversity in Britain affects such behaviours in the coming decades.

Resolving the Great Horsemeat Sandal
“The consumer cannot be left to face a Catch-22 where they can either pay for food that complies with the highest standards of traceability, labelling and testing or accept that they cannot trust the provenance and composition of the foods they eat,” Anne McIntosh, cross-party chair of the Commons Food & Rural Affairs Committee, said last week. (Davey & Maidment)

However, the British Government is locked into the European Union Food Information Regulations (2011) which means food and labelling standards could not be lowered legally even if the Government was inclined to do so.

To comply, therefore, there will have to be more tightly-controlled processes carried out, audited and enforced by highly-trained specialists. The BLUE vMEME will naturally drive these processes but getting it right to the perfectionist standards BLUE will aspire to will not be cheap. DNA testing can cost up to £500 per sample. As Peter Garbutt, chief livestock adviser for the National Farmers Union, puts it: “Producing high quality, fully traceable, high welfare standard livestock costs money to put on peoples’ tables.”

According to Davey & Maidment, analysts believe value lines, such as frozen beefburgers or spaghetti bolognese ready-meals, are currently so cheap and profit margins so thin that supermarkets have little room for manoeuvre. That means increased margin pressure for already squeezed suppliers and price rises for consumers.

Neil Saunders of the retail research agency, Conlumino, comments: “I don’t think there’s any way that we can escape the viewpoint that the price of having guaranteed food in terms of it contains what it says it contains is ultimately higher prices. We might be speaking about a couple of pence on an item, because this is a game about volume.”

Davey & Maidment cite market research agency Kantar as stating this will accelerate food price inflation, already running at 4.9% in the 12 weeks to January 20 as a result of high commodity prices.

So the moral panic the media have attempted to create will cost us all dearly. The likelihood is that, as living standards in general have declined since 2008-2009 and, in particular, since the Coalition Government introduced its austerity programme in 2010, paying more for food will come to be accepted by most people as just another element in that decline.

The irony, as Fergus Walsh points out, is in the question: “How many of us have unwittingly eaten horsemeat and how long has the mislabelling of products been going on?” Walsh goes to note: “Horsemeat is popular in mainland Europe, in countries like Italy, France and Belgium. It is a lean meat…widely used overseas to build the strength of patients who were convalescing.”

So, while the labelling should reflect accurately what’s in the packet – and something does need to be done about that – we’re now going to pay higher prices to avoid mistakingly eating a perfectly healthy meat product.

Oh, the power of memes and moral panics!

Austerity and the Euro – an Appalling Lack of Quality Leadership

 business, civil unrest, cross-cultural, Europe, government, politics, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
May 202012
 

Well, the Eurozone crisis has certainly dominated the news this past week or so – and the Greeks are once again at the centre of it. But this time it’s different. This time it’s not so much the ORANGE vMEME of the ultra-rich financial speculators effortlessly wrongfooting the BLUE-dominated fiscal technocrats in Brussels and Berlin which is causing the problem - though the speculators are still making plenty of money! Rather, it’s the people - the newly-poor, crushed and deprived by the austerity measures wreaking havoc with lives right across Europe - who are democratically electing populist politicians and extremist politicians promising them relief from the austerity. (21 of the Golden Dawn’s neo-Nazi candidates made it into the Greek parliament in the 6 May election.)

New Greek elections in mid-June are tipped to give an outright victory to the leftist Syriza bloc which, if Syriza’s leaders stick to their guns, means forcing the European Union to renegotiate the second bailout deal agreed in March, so the austerity measures the Greek are forced to endure are that much less severe. That or Greece tears up the agreement and effectively leaves the euro.

Merkel meets Hollande, 15 May. Copyright © 2012 John MacDougall/AFP
Merkel meets Hollande, 15 May. Copyright © 2012 John MacDougall/AFP

In trying to predict what will happen – or what should happen – the pundits are all over the place. And so are the politicians! German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble hinted as far back as early March – before the second bailout deal was finally agreed – that Germany might be prepared to see Greece leave the euro. In their first somewhat-underwhelming summit on Tuesday (15 May), German Chancellor Angela Merkel and new French President François Hollande made it unequivocal that they wanted Greece to stay in the Eurozone…yet only days before Merkel had been backing Schäuble’s position. The 2 positions are not, of course, mutually exclusive: it’s quite possible to want Greece in the euro ideally but be prepared to see the country leave if it doesn’t fulfil the criteria to continue to be a member.

The Foolishness of the Austerity-Alone Agenda
Hollande is being portrayed in some quarters of the media as a naïve simpleton who thinks, in Ed Balls fashion, that you can spend your way out of the kind of massive debt crises befuddling much of Europe. If Hollande does think that way, it’s not clear from his public policies that is what he believes. In public at least Hollande isn’t saying No to austerity; he’s saying let’s have less austerity on one hand and develop growth strategies on the other. We’ve yet to have any evidence Hollande knows how to grow an economy…but at least he understands the importance of growth. For all my initial enthusiasm for the Coalition in the UK – see: ‘”Liberal Conservatives”: new politics?’ (May 2010) - it quickly became apparent that the new British government had little vision beyond its dogma of introducing swingeing public sector cuts - see: ‘Cameron & Clegg: where’s the vision?’ (July 2010).

In retrospect it’s astonishing - and can only be attributed to BLUE’s myopic determination to do ‘the right thing’ - that the likes of Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron really believed their national populations would passively accept having their living standards decimated.

People have lost their jobs, their homes and sometimes their marriages and families as an indirect – and sometimes direct - consequence of the austerity programmes introduced by these leaders. Imagine: your BLUE has done ‘the right thing’ your country expects of you (obeyed the laws, done your job to the best of your ability, paid your taxes, got married and produced children, bought a house with the biggest mortgage your salary can justify and consistently maxed out your credit cards in the name of consumerism and supporting the retail economy)…and then you lose everything because the government or a government-funded agency has taken your job away. Meanwhile, you see that ‘1%’ allowing servile politicians - hey, George Osborne! - onto their yachts and into their mansions and those same servile politicians then increasing tax allowances for the mega-rich – hey, George Osborne! - so they get even richer! No wonder BLUE subsides, betrayed, and RED takes to the streets and the barricades. Syriza saying No to the second bailout deal - and all the trauma that will produce – may yet be a preferable alternative to a people’s revolution and/or an Army takeover. (Greece is no stranger to either!)

Sarkozy is, of course, now consigned to the dustbin of history by an electorate not prepared to accept more and more years of austerity. (If he is remembered at all, beyond having a wife distinctly more glamorous than him, it will be for leading the West into the dubious but nominally noble role of being the Libyan rebels’ airforce in their 2011 struggle to oust Mouammar Gadhafi.) As for Cameron, the violence of last Summer’s riots - see: ‘The Riots – who’s right: Cameron or Blair?’ - may just have given him the ‘reason’ to turn the police loose Gadhafi-style on the next lot of anti-Government protestors rampaging through the streets of London, judging from the astounding amounts of rubber bullets the Metropolitan Police are reported to be stockpiling. Even Merkel is no longer looking so invincible, with her Christian Democrats suffering heavy defeats to anti-austerity parties a week ago in the their once-safe region of North-Rhine Westphalia.

It’s a 2-dimensional view, worthy of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, to think that a single strategy can solve what, in reality, are multi-faceted problems. Thatcher thought that freeing up the financial services to generate wealth while doing away with the old ‘heavy industries’ and the trades unions that went with them would solve the UK’s lack of competitiveness. What those policies resulted in was a fabulously wealthy south-east of England - so rich it pulled Britain into the Top 4 richest nations on earth (as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP)). Yet much of the Midlands, the North of England, South Wales and the lowlands of Scotland were turned into industrial wastelands characterised by high unemployment, broken communities and broken marriages, failing schools and sky-high truancy rates, widespread alcoholism and substance abuse, and rocketing crime rates.

As Britain is now statistically in a ‘double dip recession’, I can’t help having some sympathy with Ed Milliband’s repetitive chanting that this is a recession “made in Downing Street”. While just about everyone on the Labour front benches, from Alistair Darling, Labour’s outgoing Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2010, through to Milliband - with the exception of Balls - recognised the need to take radical action to cut the deficit, they also warned continually against cutting too fast and too deep. They recognised the dangers both to the economy and to the social fabric of the UK. Cameron and Osborne took no notice of such warnings - even when this February 2 credit rating agencies, Moodys and Fitch, warned that the UK’s austerity programmes were so severe that they risked strangling any putative growth. Even this Friday, in a speech to business leaders in Manchester, Cameron was defending the government’s economic and fiscal policies, without accepting any criticism of them. In the same speech he paid only a fleeting, cursory recognition that a second policy of stimulating growth might also be necessary.

So, for the time being at least, Britain is stuck in austerity, thanks to Cameron; while Greece and other parts of Europe are stuck in austerity, thanks to Merkel and Sarkozy. If growth policies do emerge to balance out the austerity programmes, they are unlikely to come from such leaders - their BLUE thinking is too limited to the single strategy of public sector cuts: the ‘one true way’. Osborne epitmoises this BLUE-derived cut-and-do-nothing-else railroad thinking. From his first financial statement in 2010, he has done almost nothing to encourage business growth.

It seems it may need new leaders to bring in new multiple strategies which can combine reducing public sector profligacy with fostering private sector growth. So far at least, the Greek Syrizans are vehemently anti-austerity but have not voiced any viable alternative. Hollande was elected on an anti-austerity/pro-growth manifesto. The realities of being in power and having to negotiate with Merkel (who openly championed Sarkozy’s re-election bid) seem to have tempered Hollande’s rhetoric in the short time since his victory. While he wants a new focus on growth - but doesn’t say how he will stimulate French private sector growth - he is now giving more credence to the idea of some degree of austerity in Europe as a whole, at least.

With the BLUE conformity to society’s expectations failing to maintain stability and security, people’s PURPLE gets frustrated and bewildered, leading to a partial breakdown in social norms - what Émile Durkheim (1895) termed ‘anomie’ – which allows RED to self-express in what can often be a quite dangerous way. Beliefs about what is appropriate behaviour start to morph and change. As Susan Blackmore (1999) has shown, when old memes start to become dysfunctional, new ones rapidly take their place.

The riots and looting in Britain in August 2011 illustrate only too well the dangers of austerity programmes leading to widespread anomie in the specific sense that Robert K Merton (1938) used the term. When ORANGE-driven consumerism continues to promote high-value goods as socially desirable and indicative of status but there are fewer and fewer legitimate BLUE/PURPLE routes to obtaining those goods due to austerity measures, then it is predictable that RED self-expressive and self-indulgent thinking will dominate in the minds of some and they will then ‘acquire’ those goods by whatever means available to them.

By its very nature Capitalism cannot stop producing/providing and selling what it produces/provides. Otherwise there is no revenue from which to pay wages and overheads and derive profit. Austerity is, in a sense, anti-capitalist because it limits the legitimate ability of the market to buy what the Capitalists produce/provide. The only way to then get what the Capitalists tell you should have is through anomic means. Just one small example of what Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1848) were getting at when they talked about Capitalism having sown within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

Beneath the Surface of the European Union
On the surface, the Eurozone crisis and the controversies about austerity are about European countries racking up unsustainable amounts of debt - hence the austerity programmes to reduce the debt. Additionally, certain countries - most notably Greece but Eire, Portugal, Italy and Spain are also in similar messes - allowed their debts to build up to the point where they no longer could generate the revenues to service those debts as the markets lost confidence in those countries and interest rates rose. (Friday’s downgrading of Spanish banks by Moodys illustrates this perfectly.) Hence, the need for bailouts from the EU and the International Monetary Fund for these countries just to keep going.

But why are there such discrepancies amongst the countries in the EU? How come Germany is the only nation in the EU with really solid growth (in terms of GDP), the Italian economy hasn’t grown in 10 years and Greece is effectively bankrupt?

It’s about far more than differences in geographical location and natural resources, as some commentators would have it. It’s deeper and more fundamental than that. It’s about values. Alan Tonkin (2010), in his Global piece, The EU: an Organisation divided by Values, presents a basic overview of the values mix in the different member states and shows that there are clear values faultlines in the composition of the EU. Germany, Britain and, arguably to a lesser extent, France are driven by what Alan terms ‘BLUE Order and ORANGE Enterprise’. In contrast, he sees the Mediterranean nations of Italy, Spain and Greece as rather more relaxed, with PURPLE and RED more to the fore.

Of course, such ‘broad brush’ analyses are vulnerable to criticisms of playing to stereotypes. Yet there may well be some accuracies in such national stereotyping - how ever ‘politically incorrect’ the GREEN vMEME may make that seem.

A personal anecdote…Krissy is a young German woman working as a nanny in the Harrogate area of the UK and currently a participant in my latest ‘Introduction to Psychology’ adult education class at Rossett School. One ‘homeplay’ I set the class was to observe over the following week instances of each of the vMEMES as they went about their daily business. When they fed back at the next session, Krissy spoke at length about how much BLUE she saw in herself and in her friends and relations back home - indeed, in German culture as a whole. In effect, Krissy was confirming the stereoptypes of Germans as being:-

  • Ordered, disciplined and hard working
  • Highly procedural and efficient
  • Intolerant and punitive of people who are not like them or their values

- all characteristics produced in the selfplex by the BLUE vMEME.

Of course, one case study proves nothing. Nevertheless, Krissy’s thoughts do appear to support the basic stereotype of Germans. In which case, there may be some degree of accuracy in stereoptying of national groups. However, as Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck demonstrated in South Africa in the early 1990s - see: Don Beck & South Africa - it’s not being in a certain racial or ethnic group per se which produces attitudes but it is the vMEMES which dominate in the culture of a group.

Accept the broad brush stereotypes Alan Tonkin points to and accept that these come from vMEMETIC cultural domination as a ‘working hypothesis’…and it becomes possible to use 4Q/8L as an instrument to identify key factors contributing to the malaise afflicting the EU.

The rules and structures of the EU are located in the lower right quadrant and are largely derived from over-mature BLUE with some strong mixes of ORANGE and some fewer but nonetheless influential splashes of GREEN. The overall culture of Germany is in the BLUE-ORANGE zone - lower left quadrant – and, thus, is well-equipped to take maximum benefit from the EU structure. Greece, on the other hand, if dominated in its culture by the less-complex vMEMES of PURPLE and RED, is very ill-equipped to cope with the structures, procedures and demands of the EU.

Evidence of the weakness of BLUE and the strength of RED comes from the problems the Greek government has with tax collection. Greek culture is not heavily imbued with memes about ‘doing the right thing’. Evidence that ORANGE in Greece is in short supply comes from the fact there are such low levels of enterprise and business growth activity.

As Alan Tonkin hints, a key threat to the EU is that fact that more member countries are centred lower down the Spiral than are centred in the BLUE-ORANGE zone. In part, this explains why so much responsibility for the success and sustainability of the EU falls upon those countries centred higher up the Spiral – especially Germany.

Memetic and vMEMETIC changes can also be seen in attitudes amongst German electors. Once the staunchest advocates of European integration, resentment is growing at German wealth being risked to bail out a country with little or no short-to-medium term prospects of economic growth. At a cultural level, there is a longer-term danger of Germany becoming exhausted with supporting the European project and sliding into BLUE/PURPLE protectionism.

Hollande, Obama, Merkel and Cameron at Camp David, 19 May. Copyright © 2012 Associated Press
Hollande, Obama, Merkel and Cameron at Camp David, 19 May. Copyright © 2012 Associated Press

Whither Europe?
Yesterday the leaders of the G8 met at Barrack Obama’s Camp David retreat in Maryland.

Briefing the press afterwards, Obama said there is an “emerging consensus” that European countries must now focus on jobs and growth. That isn’t quite the tone of the official communique which stated  that the G8 leaders had committed themselves to promoting growth alongside fiscal responsibility. The communique also added that, with regard to what strategies might put be put in place, “the right measures are not the same for each of us”.

In other words, despite Obama’s disengenous optimism, there is no real concensus among the leaders. Cameron appears to have come around a little bit to the view of Obama and Hollande that there must be  a new focus in the Eurozone on growth. However, reducing the deficit remains his overrriding concern at home. Merkel is still wedded to austerity and is said to be concerned that the German viewpoint wasn’t given adequate consideration at the summit.

When the world is said to be on the brink of financial meltdown, this is a demonstration of an appalling lack of qaulity leadership. And it shows all too clearly that most of them don’t ‘get it’.

The botched manner in which the EU has allowed the Eurozone crisis to rumble on for over 2 years, with austerity put forward for most of that time as the only possible solution is an appalling indictment of the lack of higher level thinking of the leaders.

Even more telling is that they treat the Eurozone crisis as the issue: if they could only stabilise the euro, things would be OK! Unfortunately, that is a ‘sticking plaster’ solution to a gaping wound which the crisis has exposed. It is a failure to recognise that the problems with the euro and the ‘debt mountains’ accrued by many member states are symptomatic of more fundamental problems. As we considered earlier, it is the values differences created by different vMEMES in the 4Q/8L lower left quadrant which is the real source of many of the EU’s problems - as Alan Tonkin identified 2 years ago.

Acknowledging this, of course, means facing up to the stark reality that not all member states are equal and, therefore, cannot all be treated the same. This is anathema to the GREEN vMEME which has influenced certain elements of the German political intelligentsia for many years - a factor which may help explain why Germany has allowed itself to get sucked into some very unnatural and unequal partnerships.

In understanding how this mess has come about, it is necessary to keep in mind the original aim of the EU: to contain West Germany (as it then was), increasingly resurgent economically (after the country was devastated at the end of World War II) and to minimise the likelihood of Germany and France ever going to war again. On the basis that countries which are economically interdependent rarely end up going to war with each other, the original European Coal & Steel Community was launched in 1951. The economic aim was to serve the political aim.

Again, when many of the former Soviet bloc countries joined the EU in 2004, it was politics driving the agenda - with economics having to meet the political needs. The political aim was to safeguard these countries from either disintegration and social chaos and/or to minimise lingering Russian or Communist influence. But, of those countries, only Poland so far has shown the potential to be a significant European economic power on the same level as Germany, France and the UK.

Yet, although the EU is driven by political agendas, the politicians, if indeed, they have the will, are unable to persuade their electorates that direct political controls - ie: some form of federalism - are necessary to manage some level of EU-wide fiscal and economic policies. Without that, we get exactly what we’ve got: Greece ‘cooking its books’ and running up vast quantities of debt, dependent on German hard-won wealth to bail it out.

Once you consider it from a 4Q/8L perspective. a straightforward union of nations containing Germany at one extreme, dominated culturally by BLUE and ORANGE with some GREEN, and Greece at the other, dominated by PURPLE and RED with some BLUE, was never going to be an easy match-up. Even with federal controls!

It may indeed be that some form of federal Europe is not acceptable to the peoples of Europe - but that has yet to be tested electorally, so  we don’t know for sure it isn’t. However, if centralised control isn’t acceptable, then Europe has to find another means of managing the divergent cultural values of its member states.  On Friday David Cameron said: “Decisive action is needed by the Eurozone. They cannot go on kicking the can down the road.” While Cameron’s superficial analysis appeared to go no deeper than the woes of the euro, his criticism of the inertia of the EU leaders was spot on. They cannot go on kicking the can down the road – but the can is more than the problems of debt and the common currency: the can is the fundamentally-flawed structure of the EU which gives equal status to countries with wildly-divergent values and, therefore, wildly-divergent aims.

It may be that the EU, instead of treating its members as if they are all the same, has to apply differentiated strategies to them. It may even be that there needs to be differentiated tiers of membership whereby Germany, France, the Benelux countries, the Baltic states and perhaps Poland form one tier; and perhaps the others are split between 2 other tiers, based on a banding of GDP:debt ratio? Each tier would have a different set of obligations and a different set of benefits? EU members which don’t use the euro would form a totally different category of membership?

What ever steps are taken- undoubtedly, tentatively! - to do something about the present crisis – and it’s hoped it is at least a sticking plaster job! - the EU needs fundamental reform. Cameron has talked about ‘bold initiatives’ being required with regard to the Eurozone. In that respect at least, he is right. But any intiative – no matter how ‘bold’ – will only work to a degree unless the EU tackles the values divergences within its membership.

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.

Should the BNP appear on the Beeb?

 community, cross-cultural, Neurological Levels, Psychology, racism, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  13 Responses »
Sep 062009
 

There are few things guaranteed to get the knickers of the British ‘chattering classes’ in a twist more than the British National Party (BNP). It’s bad enough that they exist at all – that they are gaining significantly in electoral support in 21st Century Britain is simply unbelievable!

And now the BBC are considering having them on ‘Question Time’…how utterly disgraceful!!

People who vote BNP are clearly small-minded, uneducated, unthinking and immoral racists.

It’s a harmonic of the BLUE and GREEN vMEMES which condemns the BNP and which condemns those who vote for them. It’s a variant harmonic of these vMEMES which has led the Equality & Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to take the BNP to court on the charge that the latter’s constitution is discriminatory as it does not allow membership to those of a non-white ethnicity. And it’s another variant harmonic of these vMEMES which has drawn up the forthcoming Equality Bill 2009.

The problem with these approaches is that, rather than understand what it is about the BNP that gains support from substantial numbers of people, they attempt to suppress the BNP. However, Nick Griffin and the top echelon of the BNP are smart characters. They have got a 7-week adjournment on the EHRC case; and Griffin is making it clear the BNP has to adapt, to find ways of complying with the inevitable tighter legal restrictions. In how ever the BNP changes, though, Griffin has made it clear they are not going to compromise their “core principles”.

We can legislate to make it more difficult for the BNP to do what they do; but that is not going to undermine their support. It may even increase it, as what they portray as ‘persecution of true Britons’ may well strengthen their sense of solidarity as a persecuted minority. By making out that they are being persecuted unjustly, the BNP are likely to draw in those who may be only slightly sympathetic to their stance on race and repatriation but will rally to their cause because of the perceived injustices. (From Griffin’s statement on the EHRC case, it would appear this is at least one route the BNP are going to go down.)

The problem is you can legislate against discrimination – speech and behaviour based on prejudice – but you can’t legislate against prejudice (biases) because people’s thoughts are their own private experience.

Is racism natural?
That’s the question one of my A-Level Psychology students asked me when the class was discussing Henri Tajfel & John Turner’s Social Identity Theory (1979) in relation to Prejudice & Discrimination.

Tajfel (1970) showed that, as soon as you categorise people, they invest themselves in the identity and well-being of the group of people with whom they have been categorised, aborbing its values and norms. Because their selfplex – their sense of who they are – is tied up with that group, they need their group to be at least safe and preferably superior. The In-Group/Out-Group Effect. What drives this investment in the group is the PURPLE vMEME’s need to find safety in belonging.

PURPLE needs to know how to identify which tribe it belongs to and who “is not of our tribe” – using markers such as nationality (English vs Scots), names (Singh vs Kahn), football scarves (Millwall vs West Ham), religion (Protestant vs Catholic) and, of course, colour of skin (black vs white).

So it’s not racism per se which is the problem, it’s PURPLE’s need to discriminate between members of the tribe and those who are not members of its tribe. And this is why ‘education’ is only partly successful in persuading people to turn away from the BNP. It’s not so much a ‘skills & knowledge thing’; it’s a ‘values & beliefs thing’. As Robert Dilts (1990) showed with his Neurological Levels model, Identity and Values & Beliefs influence behaviour far more than Skills & Knowledge. You can tell me all you want about how unfair and evil racism is [knowledge]; but, when I hear about the ‘other tribe’ getting the few jobs going or getting better handouts, then what’s important to me is the survival of my tribe [values].

As Marilynn Brewer & Donald Campbell (1976) demonstrated, competition for essential resources will significantly increase hostility towards out-groups – effectively the formation of a BEIGE/PURPLE survival-of-the-tribe harmonic. Last year the more forward-thinking commentators did predict a rise in racial tension and support for the BNP as the recession bit. Where are the BNP at their strongest? In the towns and cities of the Midlands and the North of England where there are large immigrant communities and the decline of the traditional manufacturing industries has already resulted in high unemployment amongst unskilled and semi-skilled young males all full of testosterone and only too ready to defend their ‘turf’ against the out-group. All it needs is a RED-driven leader (Griffin) with a slight sheen of BLUE patriotism, telling people they are doing the right thing in defending ‘our turf’ to exploit that frustrated in-group angst and we have the kind of problem the BNP are facilitating.

A superordinate identity and common values are needed
Way back in 1954, in their famous Robbers Cave study, Muzafer Sherif, O J Harvey, Jack White, William Hood & Carolyn Wood Sherif (1961) showed that groups conflicted by identity and competition could be brought together if they needed each other to address common goals. Andrew Tyerman & Christopher Spencer (1983) found that shared goals and values actually made inter-group conflict more difficult to create in the first place.

Samuel Gerner et al propose, in their Common In-Group Identity Model (1993), that it is possible to bring together conflicted groups by creating a common identity to fight a common out-group. Eg: English and Scots become Britons to fight Germans. Eg: Sunnis and Shi’ites become Muslims to defend Islam against Christians. PURPLE can expand to include all within a super tribe to defend shared values. However, learning from Sherif et al and Tyerman & Spencer, it needn’t always be explicit threats that lead us to unite; but aspirations and opportunities can also lead us to a sense of common identity in a super tribe. Eg: Britons and Germans become Europeans in the pursuit of greater wealth for all their peoples.

GREEN’s fallacy is to assume that we can all be the same. We can’t. We have different traditions, norms and values. And even within each tribe, there are vastly different temperaments and intelligences.

What’s needed is not a top-down BLUE/GREEN suppression of organisations like the BNP and their riotous close cousins, the English Defence League – though carefully-considered legislation can place useful restrictions on the out-and-out extremists and education has a role too – eg: unrestrained Fascism led to the Holocaust.

What’s really needed is a bottom-up building of confidence and respect between the tribes, based on common needs, goals and aspirations, whilst acknowledging difference.

If it serves my purpose, I may even come to gain value from the difference. 50 years on from the first waves of immigration, millions of Britons, whose grandparents would have considered Asians and West Indians inferior species, eat in Indian and Jamaican restaurants because they enjoy the food so much. Racism died in part at least on the football terraces because so many good black footballers came through from the 80s on – after all, what white football fan is going to throw racial abuse at the black footballer who scores goals for his team? (Of course, as Spiral Dynamics clearly demonstrates, values are all too often contextual. The white football fan who praises his team’s black goal scorer, may still vote BNP when he’s made redundant and the BNP tell him the government is forcing employers to take on more black workers.)

When it comes down to it, most members of most tribes want decent jobs with reasonable wages, good schooling for their children, freedom from the fear of crime, effective healthcare, etc, etc. So there are a large number of self-evident shared needs, goals and aspirations. What is needed is the belief that it is by working together, rather than fighting each other, that those needs, goals and aspirations can be achieved. Eg: unite to put pressure on the local health authority to improve maternity facilities. Eg: unite to set up neighbourhood watch schemes. Etc.

Ideally this bringing together of the tribes should be structured as a MeshWORK, using 4Q/8L, to ensure that all the issues relevant to a locality are tackled together in a concerted way. This should enable all relevant points to be covered in a transparent manner, thus catching those half-hidden things that are often overlooked but emerge later to cause immense amounts of trouble.

Of course, there may not be enough dissonance in such a process to bring the out-and-out extremists to the point of change – especially if they are high in Psychoticism (as some of them do indeed appear to be); but, if the more moderately-minded come to trust the process, then it leaves only the true hardcore, still dangerous possibly but isolated and without any real powerbase any longer.

So should be BNP appear on ‘Question Time’?
The arguments will run from Margaret Thatcher’s ‘starve them of the oxygen of publicity’ stance – which led, in the 1980s, to the ridiculous situation of silhouetted actors reading out paraphrases of IRA statements – to the let-them-appear-in-all-their-full-nastiness-so-people-will-realise position.

In fact, it’s a tough one to call. When even China and Iran can’t keep news they would rather suppress from appearing all over the Internet, the ‘starve them of the oxygen of publicity’ stance clearly isn’t going to work. On the other hand, some people watching Nick Griffin on ‘Question Time’ will say to themselves: That guy makes a lot of sense – I’m going to vote BNP – because he’s appealed to their values.

In fact, it’s also a red herring. Think of when Tony Blair (1998) said: “Labour will be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime.” We can be tough on the BNP but we also need to be tough on the causes of BNP – and that means understanding the very real needs, goals and aspirations that BNP voters have and finding ways of meeting those legitimately through cross-cultural, common identity means.

Afghanistan: sex or starve! What's the issue?

 Afghanistan, American Foreign Policy, community, cross-cultural, human rights, international conflict, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Aug 172009
 

If the stories are true - and there does seem to be some confusion in the accounts – then Hamid Karzai’s government sneaked into law on 27 July an amended version of the Personal Status Law for Afghanistan’s minority Shi’ite population. (Around 15% of the country’s 30 million citizens – the vast majority of whom are Sunnis, to whom the new law does not apply.) 

The coming into law of this measure certainly does seem ‘sneaked’. With the likes of Barrack Obama, Gordon Brown, France’s Human Rights Minister Rama Yade and NATO boss Jaap de Hoop Scheffer joining the international chorus of protest against the original version of the bill in the Spring, Karzai promised to review the measure before implementing it. Now, just days before the increasingly tightly-contested elections, he appears to have sneaked it into law with some different words but the same meanings.

Human Rights Watch says it has seen a copy of the final law that requires Shia women to satisfy their husbands’ sexual appetites at least every 4 days, an article which critics have said could be used to justify marital rape. It enshrines a husband’s right to withdraw basic maintenance from his wife, including food, if she refuses to comply with his sexual demands. (Cue: Western media frenzy about frustrated husbands starving their wives…!)

The law also requires women to get permission from their husbands to work and grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers. Additionally, it is claimed that it effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying ‘blood money’ to a girl who was injured when he raped her.

The law was designed, initially in secret, by a powerful, hard-line Shia leader, Ayatollah Asif Mohseni, and is supported by conservative Shia leaders in parliament. And it is clearly the votes of Shia fundamentalists Karzai is hoping to win with this measure.

The fact the new law is actually in flagrant contravention of Afghanistan’s post-Taliban constitution simply doesn’t seem to bother Karzai. Small wonder that the Pashtun people, who comprise most of the Taliban’s cannon fodder, regard Karzai’s people as far less trustworthy than the fundamentalists.

Which leads to the question: has the West once again, through an inability to understand cultural differences - different memes for the BLUE vMEME - inappropriately backed unhealthy, corrupt RED? (In recent history just think: the Shah in Iran…Saddam Hussein in Iraq….)

Perspective needed?
Of course, to Western GREEN, Karzai’s new law is horrendous – a betrayal of both the rights of Afghanistan’s post-Taliban women (supposedly protected by the constitution) and the democratic values the West’s costly military mission is meant to support.

But maybe some perspective is needed here…?

Certainly Karzai’s regime is riddled with corruption. The man himself appears neither to have the dread authority of a feudal lord nor the understanding of Western-style Democracy and the commitment to make it work. As such, he seems unfit to lead Afghanistan through the transition from primitive theocracy vs warlord banditry (pre-2001 invasion) to multicultural Democracy, the West’s avowed aim for this society. Yet the West, by its espousal of the bloodstained warlords of the Northern League and its use of their men as its footsoldiers in the 2001 invasion, approved corruption, blood lust, rape, torture, war crimes, etc, by small-minded leaders. What kind of people did the West really expect to emerge from the dust of battle to assume power in its new regime?

Karzai’s record shows him to be a formidable operator but he seems completely at sea at times in mastering his own government. It’s not beyond possibility that he personally is relatively clean; it’s just his regime, born from the Western-backed excesses of the Northern League, seems irredeemably corrupt.

If Karzai is becoming more and more a weakling desperately trying to cling to power through foul means or fair, then let’s not forget WHERE he came from and WHO put him where he is.

As to marital rape - and Mohseni denies his law explicitly authorises this as Islam is against women being forced to have sex – how ever offensive the very concept might be to sophisticated Western thinkers in the first decade of the 21st Century, let’s not get too precious about this. It was only in 1994 that the Criminal Justice Act made marital rape illegal in the UK.

Though there’s a good deal of no-consequences RED driving decisions at the personal level – eg: the recent expenses scandals – at the strategic/policy level British political thinking tends to have been dominated post-1960s by the BLUE, ORANGE and, increasingly, GREEN vMEMES. Afghanistan is largely dominated by the PURPLE, RED and, to some extent, BLUE vMEMES. So it’s perhaps unreasonable to expect Afghans overall to share the same values as a modern Western democracy. On the Spiral their thinking overall, as a society, is just not where much of the West is…yet.

(Which is not to say there aren’t individuals and even sections of Afghan society with much more complex thinking, just as there many parts of Britain where PURPLE and RED dominate the thinking of local populations, rather than BLUE or ORANGE.)

Using the Lower Quadrants of 4Q/8L, therefore, we can see that, if there is to be balance - homeostasis – then the thinking of the people in terms of what is socially acceptable behaviour (Lower Left) – has to be reflected in the laws under which they are governed (Lower Right). Actually, when you think of the Personal Status Law in these terms, Karzai has matched a law specifically to the sub-culture concerned. How ever offensive GREEN-led Westerners might find this law, in terms of 4Q/8L, it may not be too bad a match.

As to males having exclusive guardianship of children, as any Social Anthropologist will tell you, pre-industrial societies in Africa and the East often have had ways of managing descent and parenting which seem at odds with modern Western values - yet these ways have worked successfully for their societies for generations.

When the Western media work themselves up into the kind of outraged frenzy they have over the past 48 hours, it does nothing for the causes of our troops and diplomats in Afghanistan. All it does is drive another wedge between the Afghan government and the West and convince the hardliners that we have no understanding or respect for their values.

Of course, the Personal Status Law should be reported on - as should the marches against it in Kabul in April by women protestors (and the rough treatment they received) - but in ways that seek to understand it in terms of their culture primarily, rather than ours. Otherwise, we operate from 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.

Afghanistan has greater priorities – first things first!
In the grand scheme of things, allowing a smallish ethnic minority to conduct their marital relations in a way many Westerners consider offensive these days is proverbial ‘small beer’.

What is ‘big beer’ is defeating the Taliban militarily while sucking their less ardent supporters into more mainstream politics. Using the Assimilation-Contrast Effect, we need to draw the moderates into consensus, not drive them into the arms of the extremists by condemning their values.

Does that mean I would condone a woman being faced with having to give in to her husband’s demands or going without food? Does that mean I want women being controlled by men?

Not a bit of it! But I don’t have to share Ayatollah Asif Mohseni’s values to appreciate that they are what we have to work with for that group of people.

From Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (1943) through the Graves Model (1971) to Spiral Dynamics (1996), the principle is clear: lower level needs and aspirations need to be met before people can move onto higher level needs and aspirations. First things first! PURPLE tribes need safety and security and good intra-tribal health which their leaders’ RED does not abuse to the point where trust in them becomes compromised. BLUE needs to really get into the machinery of the state to make it more efficient and less corrupt. BLUE also needs to dump the RED-BLUE zealots out of the mosques and make sure what is taught is focussed on those Pillars of Islam, such as Zakah (charity), which build up community cohesion.

Then ORANGE entrepreneurship can get on with wealth creation and the development of future-focused leaders, allowing GREEN to start to work its way through with the egalitarianism which will undermine male control of women and eventually outlaw marital rape.

Working through 4Q/8L’s Lower Quadrants, we need to make sure every level is developed healthily…organically. We can’t jump levels or apply incredible pressure and expect it all suddenly just to fall in place. Each level needs to be nurtured to its nodal peak and then encouraged to give way to the vMEME which is next.

Thanks to Don Beck’s MeshWORKS (1998) concept, it is possible to work with multiple vMEMES at once, thus making the process both faster and much more integrated. But close attention still needs to ensure that, as one vMEME’s health is developed, it supports the development of the health of the next vMEME above it on the Spiral.

Thus, from an Integrated SocioPsychology perspective, through gritted teeth, we can let Hamid Karzi introduce his ‘obnoxious law’ as a means to an end, knowing the respect it shows Shia traditions and values will help to minimise drift to the Taliban. And we know also that, eventually, GREEN will be strong enough in Afghanistan to dissemble that law.

But only if we work with the values those people have now – what is – rather what we think they should be. As John Berry undoubtedly would say, healthy cultural development is grown, not imposed. It’s a mistake the West has been making for 600 years – and it’s time we stopped!

Why we must win in Afghanistan

 Afghanistan, American Foreign Policy, cross-cultural, government, human rights, international conflict, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  11 Responses »
Jul 152009
 

The West simply cannot afford to lose its war in Afghanistan. As the soldiers’ bodies come home in ever-increasing numbers, pressure will inevitably grow for a withdrawal. Already an unpopular war in continental Europe, it will become increasingly difficult for the American and British governments to keep their resolve if media and public pressure focus on the costs in terms of lives and money and there is little sign of real progress.

Unfortunately military experts anticipate 2-3 years of hard combat and several more years of Western military presence if the South of the country is to be stabilised. But, if we don’t pay those costs, then the Taliban are likely to take over government again in Kabul. It is thought that, in spite of their apparent significant defeat in the Swat Valley, their eyes are set next on Islamabad and the prize of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Even if Pakistan doesn’t fall, Afghanistan will continue to flood the West with heroin (in spite of the Taliban officially being against opium production!) and it will almost certainly go back to being a training camp for al-Qaeda terrorists.

What do we need – another 9/11 or 7/7 – to remind us what British and American troops are fighting and dying for?

Part of the problem: the nature of the Taliban
When the Americans smashed the Taliban in 2001, they were perceived by many Afghans to be liberators. The Taliban’s 5 year regime had been brutal, repressive (particularly for women and non-Muslims) and economically disastrous.

What should have been the opportunity for the West to be seen as helping the Afghans rebuild their shattered country was fumbled when George W Bush decided to bring down Saddam Hussein. American energy went into first of all justifying an assault and then pursuing a war that turned into a bitter, costly and lengthy occupation. Not only did the reconstruction of Afghanistan go very much on the back burner; but increasingly the war in Iraq was seen as an anti-Muslim war in most Muslim countries – with the result that many young Muslims from relatively moderate backgrounds were radicalised. The mess in Iraq helped breathe new life into the Taliban who began to creep back in force while the Americans were too busy trying to prevent outright civil war in Iraq.

What also helped the Taliban come back was that the government structure the West helped set up and is now trying to sustain is demonstrably corrupt – arguably from Hamid Karzai down. It needs to be remembered that many officials, especially in local government, were once the bandit leaders of the Northern Alliance which the Americans used as their ground troops in 2001. Using the Northern Alliance that way certainly saved thousands of American soldiers’ lives but it also opened the door into legitimate government for those who were ruthless robbers and murderers. In Spiral Dynamics, terms the RED vMEME was given the opportunity to use BLUE structures for its own ends – so all but inevitably it lined its own pockets! In the South of the country locals say they prefer to use Taliban judges rather than their government counterparts because they are more honest.

In the South (and across the border in Pakistan) the Taliban are increasingly becoming indistinguishable from the Pashtun people. The Pashtun tribes are a good home for the Taliban. For the most part, rural, poor and religious, the Pushtans have little in common with the urban elites of Kabul – looking to gain from the Westernisation of their country – or the other tribes from the North. The Pushtans are primarily dominated by PURPLE tribalism, undoubtedly led by leaders with strong RED while the mullahs peddle a RED-BLUE hardline form of Islamic zealotry. The BLUE-ORANGE-GREEN values the West wants to promote of respect for human rights, gender equality, religious moderation and one person/one (secret) vote Democracy simply don’t fit with the Taliban/Pushtan mindset. The values mismatch is huge.

When the Americans smashed the Taliban, they drove out what little BLUE culture there was in Afghanistan. As we know all too well, when BLUE goes, RED steps into the vacuum. No wonder Afghanistan is a violent and corrupt place! When the Taliban started to creep back, they offered some sense of order against the corruption and secularisation emanating from Kabul. If the Americans had hoped ORANGE-driven modernisation would take root in Kabul and spread from that centre, it was a clear lack of understanding that, for healthy ORANGE to grow, there needs to be foundation of strong, healthy BLUE. Although they were very different countries, the collapse of Communism in the USSR and Yugoslavia did not open the door to ORANGE’s MacDonaldisation strategies; instead the loss of that BLUE superstructure let loose RED gangsterism and PURPLE tribal enmities. If anyone in the White House or the Pentagon had thought it through, what has happened with the resurgence of the Taliban was, in fact, predictable.

The problem with the convergence of  ‘Taliban’ and ‘Pushtan’ is that the Pushtans comprise around 40% of Afghanistan’s population and are the largest single ethnic group. That’s an awful lot of people to fight.

Part of the Problem: the West is confused
What do we want in Afghanistan – other than for our soldiers not to be killed and our much-needed money to be haemorrhaging away? (It is estimated that the war will cost Britain £3.4 billion this year alone.) And once our objectives are clear, do we know what we have to do to achieve them?

Beyond ‘winning’ – presumably meaning breaking the Taliban for good? denying al-Qaeda the use of Afghanistan? – and getting out, it’s not entirely clear just what the objectives are. Certainly, as in Iraq, not enough thought has been given to the post-invasion reconstruction – and what thought has been given has been based on erroneous assumptions. Ie: that with a little money and a little effort, we can make them just like us – capitalist consumers. It’s a mistake the West has been making repeatedly ever since Walt Rostow (1960) came up with his 5-stage Modernisation Theory for saving the Third World from Communism.

What Spiral Dynamics shows us is that we have to work with where people are at – and, if the Pashtuns aren’t ready yet for gender equality, then we need to put that on the back burner until they’re ready to grow into it. Offending their values is just going to get them reaching for their AK47s.

Our objectives need to include helping develop an Afghanistan where the tribes can co-exist peacefully, where people can take pride in being Afghan, where there is respect for a universal and fairly-applied legal system. Gender equality and one person/one (secret) vote Democracy can come further down the line. What matters now is that people feel safe, have respect for themselves and others and there is confidence in the government and the law. And, of course, that law needs to be compatible with a form of Islam that emphasises charity, faith and order. Such an Afghanistan would be distinctly unappealing to the Taliban who feed on dissatisfaction.

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg recognised some of this when he said NATO should not be over-ambitious “by trying to import overnight a Western-style democracy in a country that has never had a functional government” but instead should aim to stabilise Afghanistan “to provide a space for the state to grow.”

If we are clear on our objectives, then can we implement the strategies to achieve them?

Because it contributed significantly to the relative calming of Iraq, the concept of high visibility patrolling the streets with the overtly-stated aim of protecting the ordinary citizens from the insurgents (Taliban) is being tried now in Afghanistan. High visibility, of course, means easy target – and that’s one of the reasons the British casualties have increased. (Apart from the fact the troops claim to be significantly under-resourced – attributed by many commentators to be result of big cuts in defence spending. (A lack of big picture thinking in BLUE-ORANGE short-sighteness!)

Lord Paddy Ashdown, himself a former royal marine, thinks the protect-the-citizens strategy is an error – saying: “The army’s job in a war is to find and kill the enemy.”

Actually we need both strategies. Protectors of those who are reasonable and want to be safe and proud. Killers of those who are determined to kill us and cannot be reasoned with. But no more robot drones wiping out innocents at wedding parties! Thankfully, all of this – including avoiding civilian deaths – is endorsed by the new NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal.

We must find ways of removing the dissatisfaction that the Taliban feed off. Strong support in Afghanistan for an Islam that emphasises charity and justice for all. Rebuilding the physical infrastructure. Redeveloping the economy, including crops that are a viable alternative to opium poppies. Creating hope. Building a sense of national identity. Etc. Etc.

As part of building a national identity, we need to find ways to demerge ‘Taliban’ and ‘Pashtun’. As a people the Pashtuns have a proud and ancient heritage, their traditional Pashtunwali code of honour promoting self-respect, independence, justice, hospitality, love, forgiveness and tolerance. It’s a stain on that code that they allow the brutal and repressive ways of the Taliban to influence them to such an extent. Like many peoples in our troubled world, the Pashtuns need to rediscover themselves.

Some of what is needed in Afghanistan, I have mentioned above. But what is needed really is a full MeshWORK analysis, looking through 4Q/8L at the health of all the vMEMES in play and then deciding what needs to be done. Multiple strategies will need to be employed simultaneously so that nothing is missed. And, as much as possible, the decisions and actions need to be undertaken by Afghans – otherwise they are the work of an occupying force. And, if the decision-making isn’t ‘democratic’ but the Afghan way (tribal/feudal), then we westerners need to allow them to be that way.

Yes, it will be hellishly expensive – in both money and lives – but we are in a war and wars are costly. The sooner Britain and the United States – and Europe, for that matter –, accept we are at war, the better. Plus, it is a war we have to win. But it is a war of hearts and minds as well as bullets and bombs.

The Sons of Iraq – a step towards Stratified Democracy?

 American Foreign Policy, international conflict, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  No Responses »
Aug 282008
 

The level of violence in Iraq has decreased to the point where troop withdrawals by both the British and the Americans are once again being discussed seriously. Iraq and the United States have reportedly set a preliminary timetable to start withdrawing American forces from Iraqi cities from next June, according to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari last week after his meeting with US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.

The Zebari-Rice agreement would link troop reductions to the achievement of certain security milestones. But, given how cautious President George W Bush has been to committing to a timetable for American withdrawal, for his Secretary of State to agree to one at all is an indicator of how much better things have become.

And, of course, a few weeks before, Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a statement to Parliament announcing the intention to further reduce British troops in 2009.

Who would have thought it a year ago? Certainly I didn’t when I wrote ‘Iraq – time to stand aside…and let them get on with it?’ for this Blog last June.

So, what’s changed the battleground so much in the past 14 months?

Partly the much vaunted ‘surge’ of American troops in Baghdad, while merely displacing many insurgents to other parts of the country, did create short-term some of the essentials for peace at least in parts of the capitol – short-lived windows of opportunity, some of which do seem to have been used.

Partly it’s the training and arming of the Iraqi military and police who have experienced success in a number of operations against the insurgents. As they have grown in confidence and expertise, so the Coalition forces have dropped back from true joint operations to becoming more background support.

This, of course, has emboldened Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki who is celebrating any and every victory of the Iraqi security forces and now pushing for the Americans to leave. (Recent government successes in Basra, Sadr City and Mosul seem to have convinced Maliki’s inner circle – cue groupthink! – that Iraq’s army does not need American help as much as it used to.)

However, a key factor in the calming of Iraq has been the so-called ‘Sons of Iraq’ – men paid $300 a day by the Americans to keep the peace in their area and to inform on anti-American insurgents and al Qaeda personnel. The Americans provide (very) basic training – but no weapons – and they are only allowed to take defensive action for and within their own area. Most of these vigilantes are armed – indeed many are former insurgents changed sides – and there have been reports of offensive actions, brutality and reprisal atrocities. Hardly surprising, given the blood feuds and tribal and religious enmities in Iraq! Yet by and large the Sons have had a positive and calming effect, first helping the Americans and Iraqi combat forces clear out al Qaeda fighters and then keeping them, other insurgents and criminal gangs out of their districts. And in some areas – such as Risala – the Sons have got involved in the infrastructure repair first the Coalition Provisional Authority and then Maliki’s government have often failed to provide, organising rubbish pick-ups, rebuilding schools and installing street power generators.

There are now reported to be over 100,000 Sons of Iraq on American pay. Approximately 80% are Sunni and 20% Shiite. General David H Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq, has told Congress that the rise of the Sons has reduced American casualties, increased security and even saved American taxpayers money – “The savings and vehicles not lost because of reduced violence far outweighed the costs of their monthly contracts.”

Yet Senator Joe Biden (installed this week as Barack Obama’s running mate) is just one prominent American politician who has raised concerns that, by facilitating the Sons, the United States is perhaps unwittingly creating an alternate army to the official one and one inherently weighted against Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government.

For Maliki the Sons are a real problem. Not only is his government running slow on the agreement to absorb around 25% of the Sons into the Iraqi security forces but Sons leaders are now being targeted for arrest and the government is working openly on strategies either to disarm the Sons or drive them away. There seems little intention to pick up American projects aimed at developing vocational skills and employment prospects amongst the 75% of the Sons who never had any chance of going into Iraq’s police or official army.

Iraq is a patchwork of PURPLE and RED

As much as the Americans had a plan for Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, it seems to have been little more than to somehow magically impose the one person/one (secret) vote Western model of Democracy.  This was supposed to somehow magically turn Iraqis into a democracy-loving neo-modern people.

 

After several false starts and an awful lot of casualties, the ‘democracy plan’ has given Iraq a government of mainly Shiites, with a Kurdish rump who can barely be bothered to disguise their longer-term intention of creating a separate Kurdistan carved partly from Northern Iraq and partly from Eastern Turkey. All efforts to bring the Sunnis into the government have failed. There have been many more casualties and even the Shiites are split into several different rival factions, with most notably a very tense truce only just holding between Maliki’s government forces and the southern militia of Muqtada al-Sadr.

 

Those who know Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck’s (2002) concept of Stratified Democracy will not be surprised that the ‘democracy plan’ has not worked. The ‘democracy plan’ was very much the product of BLUE thinking – there is one way to create representative government of a people: the one person/one (secret) vote Western model. Stratified Democracy proposes that there are several different ways of creating representative government, each related to the cultural mindset of the people requiring government.

 

Saddam Hussein’s RED vMEME ran Iraq like his personal fiefdom. It is probably the closest recent times have seen to an approximation of a medieval kingdom. Saddam was the king; the generals were his scheming lords; and the lords ‘lorded it’ over the serfs (the ordinary people). And just like in Medieval England, the King’s structure favoured Normans over Saxons, so Saddam’s structure favoured Sunnis over Shiites (and Kurds).

 

And, just like parts of the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, when the governing repressive BLUE or, in Saddam’s case, RED-BLUE structure is removed, what emerges is PURPLE tribalism. The mindset of the repressed people’s does not usually jump up the Spiral to BLUE or even ORANGE as one person/one (secret) vote democracy requires but settles down into natural PURPLE with the RED of some individuals driving them to become the new local leaders. They lead the tribe initially in the interests of the tribe – though as their power grows, their RED may well lead them into personal aggrandisement.

 

Thus, Iraq has become a patchwork of tribes led all too often by those with a nose for power.

 

In 4Q/8L terms what we have is a form of government (Lower Right) that matches the mindset of the people (Lower Left) with the thinking of the individuals who become leaders (Upper Left) just far enough ahead in complexity to manipulate that government.

 

The story of the Sons of Iraq illustrates these points rather well.

 

In the 2-3 years following the invasion Sunni tribesmen allied themselves with al-Qaeda in a bid both to drive out the invaders from their land – territory is very important to the PURPLE vMEME – and to prevent the Shiite majority from gaining the upper hand in the government of the country.

 

What has come to be known as Sahwa – the ‘Awakening’ – began in Anbar in late Summer 2006 when the tribal sheikh Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha broke his ties with al-Qaeda and approached the American military with the offer to turn his guns away from the Americans and onto al-Qaeda. (Some accounts have the first breaks with al-Qaeda occurring in late 2005.)

 

Risha’s motivation was not to embrace the Western model of democracy but to drive out al-Qaeda whose extreme religious zealotry and brutality in the pursuit of their war was increasingly alienating and disgusting their more moderate Sunni allies.

 

There were also disputes over who controlled what trade and territory – remember how important the land is to the PURPLE mindset!. But perhaps even more unsettling for Risha and other Sunni leaders was the flagrant disregard of al-Qaeda for their traditions. According to David Kilcullen, a counterterrorism expert and sometime advisor to General Petraeus, a key al-Qaeda strategy for embedding themselves into local communities in Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan was to marry senior operatives to local brides. Among Iraq’s Sunnis it was simply not their tradition to marry their women “to strangers, let alone foreigners”.

 

Although Risha was assassinated by al-Qaeda in September 2007, Sahwa continued to spread throughout Sunni areas, facilitated by the American military. According to Washington Post staff writer Greg Bruno: “In nearly every case, local security forces were created from the ground up, with sheikhs, tribal leaders, and other power brokers entering into security contracts with coalition forces.”

 

While few other than Bush and Maliki have been so brave/foolish as to say al-Qaeda is beaten in Iraq, the turning of so many Sunnis from insurgents into American allies has most definitely led to major successes in Iraq.

 

The question now, for observers and policy-makers alike, is where do the Americans, the Sons of Iraq and Maliki’s government go from here?

 

Avoiding tribal warfare in Iraq

Walt Rostow (1960), founder of Modernisation Theory, saw traditionalism (PURPLE tribalism) as the greatest hindrance to developing Western-style consumer societies (the product of BLUE-ORANGE workings) in Third World Countries. Those who chose to ‘democratise’ Iraq should have taken note of Rostow and other sociologists like Talcott Parsons who saw the need for major shifts in values if traditional societies were to be modernised.

 

Apparently there were those in the Pentagon in 2003 who wished to engage with Iraq at a tribal level. It’s a pity their voices didn’t prevail. Thousands upon thousands of lives might not have been wasted and ruined!

 

An American infantry officer interviewed by the BBC this week conceded that districts under the control of the Sons of Iraq were effectively run as if by mafia-type gangs.

 

The approach of Stratified Democracy is to deal with whatever form of government works best for the mindset of the populace. If the men of the tribe are happy to live and sometimes die by the autocratic orders of their sheiks, then that works for them at this time. In these Life Conditions, as Don Beck might say.

 

Trying to impose Western-style democracy is pointless. All that has done in Iraq is to put in charge of a would-be monolithic structure a tribal leader, Nuri al-Maliki, whose RED looks first and foremost for the interests of those Shia tribes loyal to him. It is unlikely Maliki can bring a peace to Iraq which benefits all its many tribes.

 

The Americans clearly want out of the fighting in Iraq – though they equally clearly they have a strong interest in the oil there; and there is also much speculation that they would like permanent military bases there. (Ready to take on the Iranians, if need be, presumably…?)

 

The danger is that, by the Americans withdrawing as an intercessionary force  and leaving Maliki in power, already starting to pursue overt anti-Sons of Iraq/implicit anti-Sunni strategies, Iraq will be spiral down into large-scale religious and tribal warfare.

 

Those who would bring peace to Iraq need to deal with the tribal leaders as they are – often autocrats – and find the common ground between them. Maliki is, effectively, not a prime minister of a unitary and united country but one of the more powerful tribal leaders and needs to be treated as one – without, if this is possible, him losing too much face. (RED won’t be shamed!)

 

The in-group/out-group functioning of PURPLE is vulnerable to super-identities being created. For example, sparring ‘Yorkshiremen’ and ‘Lancastrians’ will respond to the call to be ‘Englishmen’. ‘English’ and ‘Scottish’ – at least in the past! – have responded to the call to be ‘Britons’. A number of people across Europe now see themselves as ‘Europeans’. The lower-down identities are still there and can be aroused – often with highly-negative consequences – if the suprer-identity breaks down. (Viz: Yugoslavia.) But the successful creation of a suprer-identity can unite lower-down identities – though the supra-identity often requires a substantial amount of maintenance.

 

Iraq, if it is to avoid tribal warfare, needs its super-identity rebuilt (for a uniting PURPLE) while the interests of the RED-driven leaders need to be aligned as far as possible.

 

Interestingly the Sons of Iraq might offer some possibilities here. First, the name refers to the geopolitical entity of Iraq – something all the tribes (at least the Sunni and Shia tribes!) can relate to. Secondly, there are 20,000+ Shiites among their number. How did they get there, sharing an identity and a cause with over 80,000 Sunnis? Granted the Sons of Iraq is actually an umbrella name for a number of diverse and independent groups – but does the concept offer some possibilities for bringing Stratified Democracy to Iraq?

Tribal War in South Ossetia

 American Foreign Policy, human rights, international conflict, schemas & memes, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
Aug 152008
 

As the Russian-Georgian conflict in South Ossetia inches towards a volatile, dangerous and perhaps quite short-lived peace, it is a good time for those who would intervene – ‘soft cops’ like France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy and ‘hard cops’ such as American Vice President Dick Cheney – to study the nature of such conflicts, how they arise, how they can be managed, hopefully resolved and, better still, prevented. Better informed, their interventions may have a chance of working.

With ethnic Russian breakaway forces in Abkhazia equally determined to resist Georgian attempts at reintegration and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pronouncing that Moscow cannot work with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, with both armies bloodied and ready to resume combat at the slightest provocation, with civilian dead estimated in the thousands and the two governments hurling accusations of ethnic cleansing and would-be genocide at each other, there is every potential for an awful lot more lives to be lost in the next few months.

At root South Ossetia is a conflict of PURPLE tribalism. The PURPLE vMEME seeks security in belonging; in belonging to some, it demarks itself from others – all too easily leading to prejudice and discrimination against those who are “not of our tribe”. Thus, it marks the tribe of Lancashire as distinct from the tribe of Yorkshire and the clan of MacDonald from the clan of Campbell. But where super-identities can be created, Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen are both ‘English’ and MacDonald and Campbell are both ‘Scottish’ and England can be marked as distinct from Scotland. English and Scottish can – and have been – ‘British’  when dealing with external ‘beyond’ challenges – eg: building the British Empire and fighting the Germans in two World Wars. Now, of course, Britons and Germans are ‘Europeans’. Yet still there is prejudice between Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen and between MacDonalds and Campbells.

Racial, religious and political differences can all be used as tribal markers by PURPLE. In fact, anything that distinguishes your own tribe from another.

So ethnic Russians, as they see themselves, are not from the same tribe as ethnic Georgians, as they see themselves. The ‘other lot’ are not from our tribe.

That, in itself, need not be a problem. Psychologists from Clare W Graves (1978/2005) to William Samuel (1996) have reported that studies of tribes untainted by anything beyond their own tribal existence describe them as showing little aggression. When they do become aggressive, it is a defensive aggression to protect themselves and/or their resources – and one of the most important resources for a tribe is its land. So South Ossetia, like Bosnia and Kosovo before it, is a tribal conflict over land.

Unfortunately there seems to be little appreciation of PURPLE tribalism in the more sophisticated thinking of key Western policymakers. Some 12-years-plus after the start of the tribal wars which tore Yugoslavia apart, the United States’ invasion of Iraq got bogged down in internecine tribal wars which the invaders had failed utterly to anticipate. Even now it can be argued that one of the single biggest obstacles to progress in Iraq is the US determination to impose one man/one (secret) vote democracy – a BLUE system beyond the understanding of many Iraqis whose PURPLE looks to their tribal leaders to be told what to do and how to think.

RED exploiting PURPLE

Of course, the situation in South Ossetia is more complex than a straight-forward tribal war. Like Bosnia and Kosovo, South Ossetia was part of a BLUE large-scale governmental hegemony in which a number of tribes were compacted together into a super-tribal identity. In part, the tribes were encouraged to associate into that super-identity – eg: Yugoslavia: ‘all the Slavs’. In part, the super-identity was imposed through a totalitarian police state – eg: both the USSR and Yugoslavia – with any dissent being ruthlessly crushed.

When those hegemonies began to collapse at the end of the Cold War – what emerged from their suppressions? Primarily PURPLE tribalism. Because the supra-identities were tied into the governmental hegemonies, they tended to melt away with them. Even Czechoslovakia disintegrated once the structure of totalitarian Communism was dismantled.

But the Czech and the Slovak tribes parted company without bloodshed. Why then, in the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, have the partings been so brutal and bloody?

Dr Jerry Coursen (2001), a neuroscientist and Complexity Theory expert from Arizona State University, has put forward the idea that RED inevitably emerges in the leadership of a tribe. (Logic: to be a leader, no matter how low profile, RED must be there in the asserting of your ideas.) RED – and vMEMES higher in the Spiral – then exploit PURPLE tribalism for their own agendas. Since RED is focussed totally on itself and doing what it wants to do, the cost to others is unimportant. Depending on temperament – ie: if there is high Psychoticism – and what schemas are held – eg: killing is OK – RED may actually gain pleasure from the exercise of  brutality.

One of the most significant examples in recent times of RED exploiting PURPLE tribalism was Slobodan Milošević’s emotive address to Serb nationalists at Kosovo Polje on 24 April 1987 after they had been roughed up by the police, largely composed of ethnic Albanians. As Milošević was reputed to have said, the (BLUE) dream of Yugoslavia died that day – and his own ascent to power began. And how many people died over the next 13 years as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of Milošević’s lust for power…?

In South Ossetia there are striking similarities in the way Mikhail Saakashvili used the issue of the secessionist provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and talk of reclaiming Georgian land to propel his presidential re-election campaign at the start of 2008. The assault he unleashed on Tskhinvali on 8 August was out of all proportion to the provocative attacks on Georgian forces by Ossetian separatists over the preceding week and, even by conservative estimates, careless of the loss of civilian life in the extreme. Another sign of RED driving Saakashvili’s thinking was the apparent blindness to consequences. Russia had given explicit warnings it would intervene if there was a major military offensive by Georgia.

In comparison to the ruthless and bloody strategies of Milošević and Saakashvili, the so-called ‘Velvet Divorce’ of the Czechs and the Slovaks was helmed by ‘big picture’ thinkers like Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar who saw the need for and the benefits of separation and planned it in meticulous detail. Neither side was significantly disadvantaged by the separation and relations between these two tribes are often described these days as “better than ever”

RED is far from being the only vMEME to exploit PURPLE in the South Caucasus. American BLUE/ORANGE  – which views the RED/BLUE policies of the Russian government and their sometime echoes of the Communist era with deep suspicion – has encouraged the idea of Georgia and the Ukraine joining NATO. Thankfully, wiser (and more complex-thinking) voices such as France and Germany have stalled this extreme provocation to the former Cold War enemy. In the meantime Western ORANGE has profiteered by selling arms on a sizeable scale to the Georgian military.

No wonder that Russian BLUE is sceptical of American airforce planes flying in humanitarian aid to Georgia’s civilian victims of the Russian counter offensive!

Vladimir Putin, good Kremlin despot

Although now prime minister, rather than president, Vladimir Putin is still widely acknowledged as the principal decision-maker in the Kremlin. Given the ruthless manner in which he pursued a military solution in Chechnya, the Russian military response to the Georgian onslaught on Tskhinvali was entirely predictable (except presumably to Saakashvili’s myopic RED!).

RED, clearly, is a major player in Putin’s vMEME stack. However, he also shows much BLUE in his thinking. In many ways, he is what Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck (2003) would call a ‘Zealot’. He knows how it should be and he will make that happen.

After the chaos of the immediate post-Communism years, when RED ruled much of Russia through widespread corruption and the activities of Mafia-style criminal gangs, when many people in Russia were longing for the ruthless discipline of the Communist years to return, Putin was very much the man for the job.

Under his iron fist, Russia has reinvigorated itself and prospered mightily from its gas and oil businesses. If ORANGE does flit about in Putin’s thinking, it is often put out of business by RED and BLUE. If Putin does often seem like an old-style leader of the Soviet Union, well, that’s because at heart he is. He even uses Russian’s mushrooming economic clout as a weapon to keep order in Russia’s interests. The most notable sufferer of Russian strategies in this way has been the Ukraine’s struggle with the prices for the Russian gas on which it very much depends.

American Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice showed just how much she doesn’t get it when she said, “This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslavakia, where Russia can invade its neighbour, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it. Things have changed.”

Not in Vladimir Putin’s head they haven’t. He’s doing what a good Kremlin despot does. He’s keeping order on behalf of Russia’s interests.

And what can the US do about it other than huff & puff and sell more arms to the Georgians? The American military are already failing to win two wars – in one of which they invaded a sovereign country, occupied its capital and overthrew its government. With the Iranians also still dragging on not going nuclear, overt military operations in the South Caucasus – even in a very limited manner – is not an option. No American GIs are going to die for Georgia.

So what to do…?

Essentially RED has to be restrained and the PURPLE of both Georgians and South Ossetians made to feel safe.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s 6-point ceasefire plan is a good start but it’s merely a short-term holding operation. It doesn’t even attempt to address the underlying tribal disputes but calls for ‘international negotiations’ on the future status of South Ossetia and Abhkazia.

According to reports coming out of  Tbilisi and Gori, many Georgians blame Mikhail Saakashvili for the mess their country is in. Now would be a good time for a vote of no confidence in him in the Georgian Parliament, leading to fresh elections. The last thing the United States should do is attempt to shore up Saakashvili’s government. He has to go.

Of course, the US has to go through the motions of chiding Russia for its military intervention in Georgia but relations should be re-normalised as soon as possible. Putin has given the Georgians a very bloody nose for daring to attack Russian citizens and it will be some time before Georgia’s military infrastructure is back to where it was. His popularity is as great as ever and the Russian electorate generally seem pleased with the decisive response. Putin can afford to be generous and the US should show him and his country the respect his RED requires, drawing him into co-operation, rather than berating him into a dangerous isolationism. And, of course, since it was Georgia who pushed skirmishes onto a war level so the US has reason it should follow to stop selling Georgia arms – on an unofficial understanding the Russians also stop arming the separatists. (Putin’s RED should enjoy this top level negotiation behind closed doors!)

The difficulty between now and any conference on the future of South Ossetia and Abkhazia will be the very real likelihood of Georgian reunionist extremists and the separatist militias keeping the conflict going at a very low level – but always with the potential for it to explode once more. All interested governments will need to work at restraining those they can influence and to avoid getting sucked into military operations again.

Then, as they approach the ‘international discussions’, all negotiators need not only to understand the dynamics of geopolitics but also how PURPLE tribalism works. South Ossetia particularly is an interweaving patchwork of Georgian and Russian villages, with a high representation of both tribes in many of them. What ever solutions are proposed, they need to both honour the tribal identities and fulfil PURPLE’s need to feel safe by belonging.

In any part it plays in such negotiations, the United States needs to lose its dogma of one man/one (secret) vote democracy. Many of those attending a conference to resolve a PURPLE-driven conflict will have the RED-fuelled mindset of a warlord, rather than a liking for Western democracy. Solutions proposed need to take in the current level of thinking of those involved – not seek to impose some idealistic but unrealistic and unworkable form of government. Don Beck has put forward the concept of Stratified Democracy – the development of forms of representative decision-making pertinent to the cultural mindsets of the constituent populations. (In 4Q/8L terms, this is matching the Lower Right Quadrant to what’s prevailing in the Lower Left.) Barack Obama needs to understand this and flow with it. George W Bush appears not to understand this – and there’s precious little evidence John McCain does.

NEETs – are the Tories on the right path?

 community, education, Psychology, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  2 Responses »
Jul 222008
 

What a pleasure when, from a SocioPsychological point of view, some of the politicians appear to be getting it right for once. Or at least partly right! Taking some tentative steps on the right path, maybe….

David Cameron and David Willets have declared they want to solve the ‘NEET problem’ as part of the Conservatives’ plans to sort out ‘Broken Britain’.

In case you’re not familiar with ‘NEET’, it’s the acronym for ‘Not in Education, Employment or Training’ – and the London School of Economics says that 18% of 16-17-year-olds are NEETs. (Department of Children, Familes & Schools (DCFS) data about a year ago had the figure at around 11%. Although we didn’t call them NEETs back then, the focus of the HemsMESH project 1999-2001 was how to make unemployed teenagers more employable. The national average then was said to be 14%.)

According to research by think tank Reform, NEETs are more likely than their peers to use drugs, be involved in crime, have poor health and have children young – nearly two-thirds of NEET females were mothers by the age of 21, six times the rate in the rest of the population.

Willets, Shadow Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities & Skills, has drawn increased attention to NEETs this week, with a particular emphasis on their negative impact on family life. It seems that many young women are preferring to raise their children as single mothers rather than be partnered long-term with a man who had no means of support and no apparent prospects.

According to Willets, “One of the things some lone parents say is, where are the reliable men with whom they can have a stable relationship?”

Willets has been influenced by William Julius Wilson (1987) who has been studying this problem in depth in American cities. Wilson is concerned that, via a combination of drugs, prison and being on welfare, the ‘marriageable pool’ of men in some US cities is now dangerously low.

So Cameron and Willets are proposing a £100M fund to allow social enterprises such as charities to provide vocational training. The latter says, “There is a particular problem about white, working class men and we are not providing them with the first steps to useful skills. When we do that, I believe we could make them much better bets as a partner. When these young men have got a useful skill and are then holding down a job, at that point they will also be able to hold down a relationship. They will be people who can then live up to family responsibilities.”

On the face of it, the Cameron-Willets proposal seems to add little to the bill introduced to Parliament in January by Ed Balls, DCFS Secretary of State, which will extend the school leaving age to 18 by 2015 and force schools to extend the range of vocational qualifications on offer to Sixth Formers. Balls’ proposals  would oblige all 16-18-year-olds either to stay on at school or undertake a full-time college course or enter employment which also provided accredited training. They even included a £100M ‘safety net’ for NEETs!

What does seem to be different about the Cameron-Willets proposal is allowing for social enterprises previously outside the education system to deliver vocational training.

And, of course, Willet’s highlighting of the effect the ‘NEETs problem’ is having on the formation – non-formation?  – of stable male-female relationships at the young and poor end of the social spectrum.

Do they really want to be there?

In 2004 the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) was introduced. This means-tested benefit gave poorer students up to £30 a week to encourage 16-year-olds either to stay on in the Sixth Form or study full-time at a further education college.

At the same time a number of secondary schools began surreptitiously lowering the entry standards for Sixth Form. Generally speaking, most schools formally set the bar at five A*-C GCSEs (including Maths and English)  but they have the discretion to consider individual cases on their own merits – and when each individual case comes with funding….

For many young peopel EMA was a real lifeline from relative poverty to educational opportunity. For others, it was a ‘doss’ – the chance to not have to go out to work and have an extra two years at school not doing very much at all. For yet others, who lacked the wherewithal to find and impress a would-be employer, it was perhaps the only alternative to the dole.

As a part-time secondary school teacher, I saw the quality of Sixth Form students plummet – in both attitude and aptitude –as the take-up of EMA increased. My classes now divided broadly into three groups:-

  1. Bright, highly capable students who wanted to be successful
  2. Fairly clever but uninterested students who would deal with their boredom by being disruptive – sometimes they would truant and then try to persuade the class teachers to sign their EMA forms to say they had attended!
  3. Fairly limited students who could be persuaded to work hard sometimes but who were too easily distracted by the second group

It was frustrating to find the opportunities of the bright and committed students reduced by the disruptive behaviour of the uninterested students. It was heartbreaking to see the limited students struggling with material beyond them and interesting to see how many teachers would find ways to cheat – particularly on coursework – in the interests of their students.

There has been for some years now a growing emphasis on vocational education – usually (but not always) targeted at the more academically-limited students and usually in the form of National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) or some variation thereof. However, there are serious doubts about the ‘economic value’ of NVQs. Professor Alison Wolf of think tank Policy Exchange said in January this year: “Low-level vocational qualifications, notably NVQs, have, on average, absolutely no significant economic value to their holders. This is especially true if they were gained on a Government-financed scheme. These are also the qualifications which will be offered to most of the 16 and 17-year-olds forcibly obliged, under current proposals, to continue education and training.”

While much of the Cameron-Willets proposal seems merely to reflect well-advanced Government plans, David Willets does seem to favour a more hands-on form of vocational training – apprenticeships of some kind? – provided through means other than schools and colleges. He is of the view that many NEETS have already dropped out of school and do not want to study for anything remotely involving any form of exam.

The detail of the Cameron-Willets proposal is yet to come – but, going by the sketchy interviews and discussions so far, it might just be that, on this occasion, the Tories’ thinking is actually closer to the values of the people they are concerned with than is the Labour Government.

We don’t need no education!

The words of the Pink Floyd classic, ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, really do ring true for a small but significant minority of youngsters – the NEETs?

 

At least they don’t want the education being offered by the ‘system’. It’s one of the biggest fallacies in contemporary policy-making to think that truants are missing out on their education. Not true! They’re learning how to take drugs, have sex, steal from shops, find their position in gang hierarchies, etc, etc – and just generally survive, often on dangerous estates that really are ‘concrete jungles’. They’re getting an education alright – but not the one most of society wants them to have!

 

School often doesn’t work for these children because they enter it with their parents’ values – infected with their parents’ memes. Their parents don’t value education as such – so it’s no surprise they don’t. Failure to conform – in everything from dress to not doing homework to thumping that really annoying kid on the next desk (just like Dad told you to!) – results in punishment and the reinforcing of the schema that school isn’t where you want to be. Academic failure usually follows behavioural difficulties and then the only way then to gain the esteem of others for the emerging RED vMEME is via what Nicholas Emler (1984) calls negative reputation….How many times can you cause the teacher to stop the lesson? How many detentions can you rack up? How many times can you get dragged off to be shouted at by the headteacher. And, if you feel like a break, really push it and get yourself excluded for a day or two! What a hero you are to your fellow ‘bad lads’!

 

As Robert Dilts (1990) shows clearly with his Neurological Levels model, it is Identity and Values & Beliefs which drive Behaviour. You can try to pump all the Skills & Knowledge possible into them but it’s unlikely to be taken on board if it doesn’t fit with what’s really important – and it certainly won’t change Behaviour.

 

If either Ed Balls or David Willets really wants to deal with the ‘NEETs problem’, then, as 4Q/8L shows, they have to find a way of working with the values not just of individuals (Upper Left) but the entire culture (Lower Left) and social institutions (Lower Right) of the areas these children live in.

 

Willets at least recognises, however indirectly, that values are involved in tackling this issue. But a £100M and some social enterprise-run vocational schemes are only a drop in the ocean of what’s needed.

 

A MeshWORK Approach

What is required is a large-scale fully-coordinated/joined-up MeshWORK programme which works with the young people, the schools, the parents, the youth workers, local employers, the local NHS, etc, etc, etc, to examine and treat the health of each vMEME at both cultural and individual levels.

 

There are encouraging signs that the politicians are beginning to link things up. David Cameron has said the Conservatives will support the Government’s newly-announced welfare-to-work reforms. These will pressurise some of the NEETS into going on training schemes as a precursor to work. For some the welfare reforms will actually bring them to a point of contemplating their own survival – and there’s no vMEME more powerful in motivating action than BEIGE! (After all, why else should NEETS go on Willets’ vocational training?) A few weeks back Gordon Brown announced financial incentives for poor parents who enrolled their children in schemes to improve their development.

 

But it all needs drawing together into a cohesive superordinate MeshWORK package that can, in a planned way, address a multiplicity of issues on several different levels at the same time. A whole-scale systemic solution, if you will.

 

A part of that MeshWORK package needs to take a Structural Functionalist (Lower Right) view of what type of work is and could be possible and what we want schools to do in relation to preparation for work. British industry once employed huge numbers of low ability, poorly-skilled manual labourers – the kind of work many young people who are now NEETs would have gone into when they left school at 14. While the work was sometimes dangerous and often poorly paid, it at least gave the men purpose and some kind of living, with the status of ‘wage-earner’ – a key to healthy PURPLE in a Western lower working class culture. Now those kinds of jobs are in short supply and we are told we need highly-skilled, flexible workers capable of at least semi-autonomous thinking ahead. In other words, we’re approaching the level of ORANGE in complexity of thinking for many ‘ordinary’ workers.

 

Only today’s ‘ordinary’ is very different from the ‘ordinary’ of 40 years ago. For many grandchildren of miners, seamen, farm labourers, conveyer belt workers, etc, it is just too far a jump in values without substantial assistance.

 

Brown and Balls are taking steps in the right direction. Cameron and Willets, the detail depending, may have even better steps to take. And, for these steps, the politicians should be acknowledged. But it’s still some considerable way from providing the systemic solutions that will really make the difference.

Tariq Ali gets Benazir Bhutto wrong!

 American Foreign Policy, government, society, terrorism  14 Responses »
Jan 012008
 

So that old agent provacateur extraordinare, Tariq Ali, has attacked the naming in Benazir Bhutto’s will of 19-year-old son Bilawal as her successor as leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, describing it as “a digusting medieval charade”.

(His article was the front page lead story in the New Year’s Eve edition of The Independent – and he appeared on that morning’s editon of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, reiterating his position.)

In describing the succession of Bilawal as “medieval”, Tariq was spot on! Moreover, his description of Asif Zardari, Bhutto’s widower (and Bilawal’s father), as a “feudal potentate” – a Lord Chancellor or Grand Vizier? – who will run the party until his son is old enough, is also pretty close to the mark.

Where Tariq misses the point is to call it “disgusting” and a “charade”.

He goes on to say: “How can Western-backed politicians be taken seriously if they treat their party as a fiefdom and their supporters as serfs, while their courtiers abroad mouth sycophantic niceties concerning the young prince and his future?”

The point is: this is very much how the politcians in Pakistan must act if they wish to design an alternative government to the military dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf!

Tariq goes on about the need for democracy in Pakistan. Though he doesn’t use the exact words, he seems to mean Western-style liberal democracy. (Interesting, given his history as a Trotskyist and onetime leading member of the International Marxist Group!)

Presumably the kind of democracy that Pakistan doesn’t seem to aspire to, given the convoluted history of corrupt (or allegedly-corrupt) elected despots and military dictators who have ruled the country for most of its post-colonial existence.

Presumably the kind of democracy the United States has failed to impose on Iraq, demonstrating for all the world to see that you cannot impose a government the vast majority of the people are not prepared to tolerate. (Even if you have the mighty muscle of the American army to back you!)

Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, when he was very much the bête noire of the British establishment, Tariq Ali appeared to be driven by a RED/BLUE vMEME harmonic, a skilled and cunning advocate of a Marxist-Leninist approach to society and government. These days there appears to a decidely-GREEN tinge to his thinking; but that thinking still appears to be resolutely 1st Tier.

What Tariq needs – what Pakistan and Iraq (and Afghanistan and many other so-called ‘developing’ countries) need – is a very different approach than Western-style liberal democracy. Good, effective government for and representation of the people can take a number of very different forms (whatever George W Bush and his groupthink cronies might believe!).

Stratified Democracy
Drawing at least in part from his experiences in helping to design the early-mid-nineties transition in South Africa, Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck (2002) is in the process of developing what he calls ‘Stratified Democracy’.vMEMES which underpin and drive that mindset. This can be illustrated by looking at the 4Q/8L schematic Beck (2000) developed from applying Spiral Dynamics to the work of Ken Wilber. Check which vMEMES are driving the cultural mindset (Lower Left); then check which kind of societal institutions vMEMES create (Lower Right) to get a ‘best fit’.

While Beck has yet to produce defining statements about Stratified Democracy (and there will need to be a number of them!), effectively he means matching the form of government of a society to its cultural mindset.

Once you look at Pakistan from the perspective of 4Q/8L, it is no surprise that a large number of people (especially the rural poor and the urban disenfranchised), led by the PURPLE vMEME, focus on the charisma and magic-making power of their leaders (to whom they feel affiliated by tribal loyalty or some other form of belonging). To such mindsets the personal power and responsbility a Western-style liberal democracy would give them is nothing like as attractive as seeing the ‘magic’ qualities pass from generation to generation in a dynastic manner – as it is perceived it has from  Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, to her and hopefully now will to Biliwal.

This mindset is ripe for exploitation by RED. (And Benazir clearly had plenty of that – just look at her fatal to-hell-with-consequences exposure of her head from her protective vehicle so she could revel in her followers’ adulation!)

Tariq Ali can bleat on about Asif Zardari’s alleged corruption. Providing PURPLE feels secure and has a sense of belonging, it doesn’t matter obviously that RED is corrupt, treats them as serfs and exploits them. What else would a feudal monarch do? And besides, it’s the serf’s lot in life, providing the monarch keeps order. Thus, tribes historically have mutated into feudal kingdoms.

The most recent modern example of a true RED feudal kingdom was Saddam Hussein’s pre-invasion Iraq, where his generals played the role of the ‘noble lords’ – frequently plotting against him and periodically being culled by their master. The hapless Iraqi people played the abused serfs. Saddam threw away an estimated 100,000 lives in the 1991 Gulf War and then diverted much of the revenue from the Oil-for-Food Program away from its intended recipients (hungry and sick Iraqis) and into his own coffers. Why? Because he was ‘king’ and he could do what he liked.

(The problem with a RED feudal kingdom is who occupies the throne. King John had a good head for finance and knew when to cede just enough power to keep power. And it could be argued Benito Mussolini was doing reasonably OK until he started trying to impress Adolph Hitler.)

Yet did the Iraqis eagerly grasp the chance for Western-style liberal democracy the invading Americans offered them in 2003-2004? No. Rather, there was a centring lower down the Spiral as PURPLE tribal loyalties (exacerbated by BLUE religious divides) re-emerged in the absence of a ruthless monarchial figure. (To some extent, the picture of re-emerging PURPLE tribal/ethnic loyalties after the death of strongman Marshall Tito also helps explain the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.)

 

Multiple vMEME Leaders
Of course, to see societies as simply dominated by PURPLE’s tribal loyalties or RED’s power pecking order is too basic.

Islam provides a strong BLUE veneer in many countries in the Middle and Near East; and the lawyers’ protests, which contributed significantly to the development of the present crisis in Pakistan, were a real manifestation of BLUE outrage (admittedly stirred up by some RED demagoguing!) at Musharraf’s removal of Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry.

Nor is the Western world of liberal democracy free from strong PURPLE influences. Though ORANGE uses her to generate large amounts of revenue from tourists, the majority of Britons still favour having a queen of royal lineage and there is some considerable anticipation of Prince William ascending the throne (assuming Charles can somehow be bypassed!). As for the United States, how many Americans liked to think that they were on the verge of having their very own dynasty in the Kennedys…? While the second Bush has lost so much favour it’s unlikely that line will produce another president in the near future, a number of people are getting very excited about the prospect of a second Clinton in the White House. (There does indeed appear to be ‘magic’ in a name!)

So an effective leader needs to be able to talk multiple vMEME languages. Neither of the Bushes were good at it. Tony Blair, prior to tripping himself into Bush Jnr’s Iraq trap, excelled at it. Talking revenge and justice (RED/BLUE) with Bush post 9/11 and then using some very different BLUE memes from the Qur’an to persuade Muslim world leaders not to oppose the American invasion of Afghanistan.

Benazir Bhutto could talk GREEN human rights, ORANGE money opportunities and BLUE military processes with Western leaders. In Pakistan she became the princess apparent, ready to ascend the throne and rule like a queen, a PURPLE/RED harmonic just right for so many of her people.

Had she lived and been elected, she may have been sensitive enough to Western pressure to keep it clean this time and possibly even help lay the foundations for the dominating Pakistani mindset to move higher up the Spiral. Though would she would have been any better than Musharraf at dealing with the dysfunctional BLUE of Isamic extremism…?

Tariq Ali would appear to have been so sucked into BLUE/GREEN ideals of Western politics, he has lost touch with his own origins. Benazir passing the claim to the throne to Biliwal, with Zardari as Grand Vizier, might indeed seem “a digusting medieval charade” to Western eyes immured in liberal democracy. But, to the medieval eyes of the Pakistani rural poor and urban disenfranchised, it makes a lot of sense.

With a cultural mindset (Lower Left) largely in the PURPLE-RED zone, Western-style liberal democracy (created by BLUE and ORANGE and refined by GREEN) is quite simply a mismatch for Pakistan. The form of government (Lower Right) must match the mindset and needs of the people to be governed in the first place. Then the higher vMEMES of the leaders can aspire to development of the cultural mindset.

Tariq Ali. for all his considerable intellectual prowess – like so many decision-makers and commentators in the West - needs to understand this intuitively if he is to make sense of what is happening in Pakistan (Afghanistan, Iraq, etc).

Don Beck and Elza Maalouf of the Centre for Human Emergence Middle East anticipate significant work in the Palestinian territories (including addressing aspects of Palestine’s relationship with Israel) during 2008. It will be interesting to see how the concepts of Stratified Democracy develop further from that work.

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