Another Milestone!

 "Peripheral Vision” has just celebrated the 400,000^th click. That’s just under 40,000 a year – about 100 a day. Not great – but I don’t do it for the fan mail…I do it from my own recognition that, until I have struggled to express in writing what I understand about a subject, that understanding will be deficient.

I’m confident I understand an issue but, when I start putting that understanding into words and sentences, I suddenly realise that there are things I didn’t actually understand    

One writer offers no less than 15 justifications for why people should blog. I would go with nine –

1. You’ll become a better thinker. Because the process of writing includes recording thoughts on paper, the blogging process makes you question what you thought you knew. You will delve deeper into the matters of your life and the worldview that shapes them.

 2. You’ll become a better writer.  – once, that is, you start to reread your material or get feedback which shows your text was ambiguous…

 3. You’ll live a more intentional life. Once you start writing about your life and the thoughts that shape it, you’ll begin thinking more intentionally about who you are, who you are becoming, and whether you like what you see or not. And that just may be reason enough to get started.

 4. You’ll develop an eye for meaningful things. By necessity, blogging requires a filter. It’s simply not possible to write about every event, every thought, and every happening in your life. Instead, blogging is a never-ending process of choosing to articulate the most meaningful events and the most important thoughts. This process of choice helps you develop an eye for meaningful things.

 5. It’ll lead to healthier life habits (although my partner doesn’t agree!)! Blogging requires time, devotion, commitment, and discipline. And just to be clear, those are all good things to embrace – they will help you get the most out of your days and life.

 6. You’ll inspire others. Blogging not only changes your life, it also changes the life of the reader. And because blogs are free for the audience and open to the public, on many levels, it is an act of giving. It is a selfless act of service to invest your time, energy, and worldview into a piece of writing and then offer it free to anybody who wants to read it. Others will find inspiration in your writing… and that’s a wonderful feeling.

 7. You’ll become more well-rounded in your mindset. After all, blogging is an exercise in give-and-take. One of the greatest differences between blogging and traditional publishing is the opportunity for readers to offer input. As the blog’s writer, you introduce a topic that you feel is significant and meaningful. You take time to lay out a subject in the minds of your readers and offer your thoughts on the topic. Then, the readers get to respond. And often times, their responses in the comment section challenge us to take a new, fresh look at the very topic we thought was so important in the first place.

 8. It’ll serve as a personal journal. It trains our minds to track life and articulate the changes we are experiencing. Your blog becomes a digital record of your life that is saved “in the cloud.” As a result, it can never be lost, stolen, or destroyed in a fire.

 9. You’ll become more confident. Blogging will help you discover more confidence in your life. You will quickly realize that you do live an important life with a unique view and have something to offer others.

 That puts it rather well – although I would amplify the first point by emphasising the sharpened critical faculty regular blogging also brings to the reading of what others write. Thomas Hardy was spot on when he (apparently) said - “How can I know what I think until I read what I write?" You thought you knew something but, when you read back your own first effort at explanation, you immediately have questions – both of substance and style.

But this also conveys itself very quickly to changes in the way that you read other people’s material – you learn more and faster from a critical dialogue (even with yourself) than from passive reading…..

 That’s why they say that the best way to learn about a subject is to (try to) write a book about it (rather than reading several books). It sounds paradoxical (as well as presumptuous) but it’s actually true – and the reason is simple.

Translating your imagined understanding into a written summary allows a dialogue with the books – which has the added advantage of helping you better remember the issues….  

Blogger Duncan Green makes another important point that –  

regular blogging builds up a handy, time-saving archive. I’ve been blogging daily since 2008. OK, that’s a little excessive, but what that means is that essentially I have a download of my brain activity over the last 7 years – almost every book and papers I’ve read, conversations and debates.

Whenever anyone wants to consult me, I have a set of links I can send (which saves huge amounts of time). And raw material for the next presentation, paper or book.

 

Blogging as a giving account of one's life

I notice that I am not the only person who reflects on the year’s blogging experience. Chris Grey is an organisational theorist who started a blog to accompany his fascinating book A Very Short Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap book about studying organisations – and has a post identifying some of the year’s themes (as well as readership stats)

I particularly liked the description of his working method - 

I also try to include in each post copious links to a wide variety of media sources and, to a lesser extent, academic works. I don’t know how many readers follow these links but at any rate I feel better-informed as a result of digging around to find them.

Typically, I think of a topic on Friday morning, ponder it during the day and write the post on Friday evening (yes, my life really is that exciting). Most posts take two to three hours to research and write.

I’ve been blogging since 2009, with a resignation from a major project in China I was leading in 2010 leading to a slow withdrawal from the paid labour front and giving me more time to enjoy the stretch of country between the Carpathians (where I summer) and the Balkans (where I winter) and to read, write……and muse…..

And last year I collected the year’s posts, put them in chronological order and wrote both a Preface and Introduction for In Praise of Doubt – a blogger’s year which tried to answer such questions why anyone should be bothered to read my material – and also why some of us have developed this blogging habit -

My claim for the reader’s attention is simply expressed – 

·       experience in a variety of sectors (and countries) – each closely manned with “gatekeepers” whose language and rules act to exclude us

·       the compulsion (from some 50 years), to record what I felt were the lessons of each experience in short papers

·       Long and extensive reading

·       A “voice” which has been honed by the necessity of speaking clearly to audiences of different nationalities and class

·       intensive trawling of the internet for wide range of writing

·       notes kept of the most important of those readings

·       shared in hyperlinks with readers

I confess somewhere to an aversion to those writers (so many!) who try to pretend they have a unique perspective on an issue and whose discordant babble make the world such a difficult place to understand. I look instead for work which, as google puts it, builds on the shoulders of others……my role in a team is that of the resource person….who finds and shares material….

Perhaps my father’s hand is evident in the format and discipline of the blogpost – he was a Presbyterian Minister who would, every Saturday evening, take himself off to his study to anguish over his weekly sermon which he would duly deliver from the pulpit the next morning……Arguably indeed the dedication given these past 7 years to the blog is a form of “giving of account” or justification of one’s life!!  I have grown to appreciate the discipline involved in marshalling one’s thoughts around a theme (in my father’s case it was a biblical quotation).

I rather like the format of a blogpost of some 700 words (at most a couple of pages). Management guru Charles Handy famously said that he had learned to put his thoughts in 450 words as a result of the “Thought for the Day” BBC programme to which he was a great contributor.

For me a post written 4-5 years ago is every bit as good as (perhaps better than) yesterday’s - but the construction of blogs permits only the most recent posts to be shown. A book format, on the other hand, requires that we begin……at the beginning ... It also challenges the author to reflect more critically on the coherence of his thinking ……. 

The photo is of a new Bekhiarov I acquired this week (with, lower, the first one I bought from this great BG realist) - both from the great Absinthe water colour gallery in Sofia where I found this week a wonderful 400 page catalogue of the International Watercolour Society's 2016 exhibition in Varna - with a superb global collection. This is their 2013 catalogue

All in a day's "work"

One of my favourite bloggers - Duncan Green – makes the important point that –  

regular blogging builds up a handy, time-saving archive. I’ve been blogging daily since 2008. OK, that’s a little excessive, but what that means is that essentially I have a download of my brain activity over the last 7 years – almost every book and papers I’ve read, conversations and debates. Whenever anyone wants to consult me, I have a set of links I can send (which saves huge amounts of time). And raw material for the next presentation, paper or book.

Green is spot on about the help a blog like mine offers in finding a reference you know you have but can’t remember…....you just type in the keyword – and, hey presto, the relevant post with its quotes and hyperlinks generally appears immediately – a record of your (and others’) brain activity that particular day. 

I also have a file of more than 100 pages for each year with raw text and  thousands of hyperlinks which didn’t make it to the blog……an amazing archive of months of brain activity which, of course, needs a bit more time to access…… 

As I’m being more parsimonious in my blogging these days, I thought it would be amusing  simply to copy and paste one of these pages.....links which have so far not been incorporated into any post.......

It gives an even better record of my “saves” and brain activity…

Like all blogs, it starts with the most recent……sometimes the subject of the link is clear, sometimes it is a "lucky dip"......

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2015/11/11/book-review-conceptualizing-capitalism-institutions-evolution-future-by-geoffrey-m-hodgson/

English poets -
Kingsley Amis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MXMVeAbxRg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1PGaBDV2nY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HZts8JafW0

Philip Larkin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqa6L22m0rY

WH Auden

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUGVqup9ZGo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvezOvM_VgQ

http://blog.webofstories.com/

http://www.webofstories.com/themes

http://www.webofstories.com/play/diana.athill/57;jsessionid=BDEFF14755CC99C48CFA31321162AE39

http://www.patmcnees.com/telling_your_story_29161.htm

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/13/extra-virginity-tom-mueller-review

Helmut Schmidt Obituary 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/10/helmut-schmidt#comment-63107089

a couple of years ago  we got a glimpse of Helmut Schmidt’s long love affair with painting - http://www.zeit.de/2013/20/kunstsammler-helmut-schmidt/komplettansicht - not least those of the German Expressionists. 
See also this video

http://culturmag.de/rubriken/buecher/theo-sommer-unser-schmidt-der-staatsmann-und-publizist/16183

and, for those, not familiar with Germany this little E-book of mine - “German Musings”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/10/helmut-schmidt

In autumn 2008, shortly before his 90th birthday, he gave an extraordinary, 70-minute television interview, publicising his new book, Ausser Dienst (Out of Service), a reflection on a long life. The programme revealed as never before a man who not only had no religious convictions but blamed clerics – Catholic, Protestant, Islamic – for the mutual intolerance he identified between Christianity and Islam.

 He admitted that he was not “a seeker after truth” but he took an interest in all manner of philosophies and was a particular admirer of Confucius. He developed a friendship with Hans Küng, the progressive Catholic theologian whose views antagonised the Vatican. In a masterly analysis of the world financial and economic crisis, he regretted that none of those responsible for the credit crunch would be brought to book. As an experienced economist, he dismissed the generality of contemporary politicians, including George W Bush, as economic “dilettantes”.

 He revealed that his political hero was Anwar Sadat, the assassinated Egyptian president, who had been a close colleague and friend.One of his watchwords (and another of his English puns) was: “The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.” This could have served as Schmidt’s political epitaph when his eight-year chancellorship ran down to its frustrating end.

 He was not a “conviction” politician and his heart never got the better of his head, but a democratic leader needs a party, and in both Hamburg politics and his own family tradition, the SPD was the only place to be. In exchange for a power-base, Schmidt gave the party eight more years of power in Bonn and two federal election victories before the inevitable falling-out between the ideological left and the centrist master of realpolitik. But in the constrained art of government in difficult times, there was never a safer pair of hands.

http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/photo-gallery-helmut-schmid-t-life-in-pictures-fotostrecke-131808.html

Heimat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0_wEa4cfAs

http://classes.uleth.ca/201201/germ2300a/Wanderer,%20kommst%20du%20nach%20Spa...%20(German%20Edition).pdf

http://www.decitre.fr/media/pdf/feuilletage/9/7/8/2/0/8/1/2/9782081246331.PDF

https://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2015/11/09/ensemble-1010-explore-europes-20th-century-fault-lines/

http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-karl-ove-knausgaard-cant-stop-writing-1446688727

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/08/new-democrats-sound-alarm-over-sanders-clinton-leftward-march

 “There is no question that the prevailing temper of the Democratic party is populist: strongly sceptical of what we like to call capitalism and angry about the perceived power of the monied elite in politics,” said PPI president and founder Will Marshall.“But inequality is not the biggest problem we face: it is symptomatic of the biggest problem we face, which is slow growth.”

tony hancock’s half hour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5UKNdLU5eA

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/09/why-i-wear-a-poppy-despite-naysayers

About God 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s47ArcQL-XQ

another 50 academics speak about god

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Gt4WSK_NlQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHv__O8wvZI

"Europeans can't blog"

It appears that Europeans can’t blog - or at least the economists can’t – which I find surprising in view of the number of such blogs I can find. The argument, however, is that

European blogs are still very much “unconnected”. That is, they use hyperlinks far less than their American counterparts - or do it but in a way that doesn’t create two-way debate. In brief, Europe has bloggers, but no blogosphere: it lacks a living ecosystem to exchange and debate
Linking to some newspaper article, even with a discussion section, does not create a two-way discussion (…) and linking to articles on your own blog is nice, but not really a sign of an interlinked blogosphere.

The article recognisese that the language barrier does make a European discussion more difficult – but makes two other interesting points. First that there are few European blogs dealing with economics which aggregate relevant blogs in the way this fascinting American one does . And that the culture of open discourse is underdeveloped in Europe. Especially the last aspect is problematic because it is hardest to change but arguably the most important. As they phrase it, "European economists seem to prefer to spread knowledge rather than stir debate".
The discussion sparked by the article led me to this excellent blog portal on European issues which actually links to 900 blogs on EU-related matters.
The new LSE blog on European politics and policy makes a point which I have made here myself -

I also do not see a relevant EU-focussed academic blogging community. There is so much EU research out there, so many specialists on a wide range of EU topics, but they are not out here debating their research and their specialist topics, neither with each other nor with the rest of the world. The don’t bring the academic debate on EU affairs to the digital public and they therefore miss the great chance of making academic research on EU matters more connected to reality and reality more connected to what we find out in often years long research process.
For me, the EUROPP blog is a chance to foster academic involvement online, in the EU blogosphere and beyond. This will only work if those writing here are aware what is written elsewhere in the digital sphere, if they react by linking and debating what was said by others, by going to other blogs, fora, Facebook discussion threads and if they involve in the discussions where they happen instead of just leaving self-sufficient texts here on this blog.
Good blogging is quite easy if one takes the time to do a little research and to understand the dynamics of these discussions In this sense, blogging is like academic work: Cite others, add your own thoughts and knowledge – and once you know roughly what you have found or what you want to say, go to fora where the debate is already going on.
The EU blogosphere is like one of the academic conferences you can go to, and the state of this conference is not bad at all – but I’d say it could be much better with the involvement of more academics.

Is blogging useful only to the blogger?

The last few days have been glorious – I was sunning myself on the terrace yesterday afternoon – and today has dawned bright and cloudless. With the extra hour’s gift this morning from summer-time ending during the night, I skimmed through the blogs I have bookmarked. It made me think about their value. Many books have been written recently about blogging – its nature and its possible social and intellectual consequences The New York Review of Books reviewed some of the books and blogs at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21013 and http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22960

My "About the blog" section tries to explain my motives for this blog - I'm trying to make sense of my professional life and to see what I can usefully pass on to to others! So the blog is a discipline on me - not yet perhaps offering the reader very much (except pretty pictures!)

What about the blogs I look at - how useful do I find them? Of course my bookmarking is a highly selective activity – reflecting the interest I have in books and organisational change. The book-bloggers are a special breed – generally retired people who have the time to pursue and share their passion for reading – generally novels. For a sample see - http://www.britlitblogs.com/
I have, so far, bookmarked a hundred-odd general bloggers whose writing reflects some of my interest in understanding social, economic and organisational forces in the world – and in contributing to “positive change”. Who are they?
The first category is those who are paid to write – journalists, think-tankers, academics. They write well – but generally in specialist mode. They focus on a specific event and then relate this to some more general principles. Journalists (such as Ian McWhirter) and think-tankers (such as Matt Taylor (RSA Head) and Gerry Hassan) find this an effortless task. Academics such as Paul Krugman also have their journalistic side.
Then there are the overtly “political blogs” – politicians and party supporters – most of which confirm how low politics has fallen. So much self-centred and petty comment. Of course there are exceptions and I will add a link when I can find one!!

Then there are more theoretical blogs which have an interest in a discipline such as economics or sociology on theory and are generally written by struggling post-graduates. For example http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/ or http://thesociologicalimagination.com/ or http://www.themonkeycage.org/. They give an insight into the soulless world of academia!

Some blogs are like helpful librarians – referring you on to interesting articles you would otherwise miss eg http://don-paskini.blogspot.com/ And there are digests of blogs eg http://scottishroundup.co.uk/These I enjoy.

Blogging, I seem to be saying, may be good for the blogger - in raising their profile or helping articulate inchoate thoughts - but what does is actually give the reader? The gems I look for are the free-spirits – those not attached to institutions such as the BBC, academia or think tanks who have had some experience of the real-world; are not specialists and continue to have an open mind. One such person seems to be Scott London - see his comments on dialogue http://www.scottlondon.com/blog/archives/61

Diaries, Memoirs and Blogs

Amongst my most treasured possessions are some notebooks of my grandfather and father from the 1930s as they trekked and camped in north-western Scotland (these came to me in 1990); and my mother’s tiny common place book (extracts accompany this post) which came to me on her death in 2005…..

She was the wife of a Scottish Presbyterian Minister from the late 1930s and the friendship and hospitality which I remember at our home (as well as the stringencies of the times) are evident in the quotations chosen by my mother….they express sentiments which profoundly affected my upbringing (the photo below is from her 100th birthday celebrations. 

Although I know that both of my parents were very proud of the distinctive path I chose for myself, I’m not sure if they would altogether approve of the element of egocentricity which a blog implies….    

My first ever diary (which I rediscovered recently) was about a bike trip from London to Toulon but I started the habit only in my 40s when I was a reforming politician in Europe’s largest Region. For 16 years I actually held down a position at the heart of policy-making and, in the 1980s, kept a large A4 diary into which I would paste relevant cuttings, papers and articles and scribble my thoughts on project work.

I still have 5-6 of these diaries - others I donated to the library of the urban studies section of Glasgow University (when I was a Fellow there for a couple of months in the early 90s) in the fond belief that some researcher of the future might find these jottings about the strategic management of Europe’s largest local authority of interest (!).  

Memoirs have been given a bit of a bad name by the egocentricity of politicians - although some time back I identified some 20 life-accounts which gave superb analyses of times and lives. And I failed to include such things as Count Harry von Kessler’s amazing memoirs from the 1880s through to the second world war (he was an amazing cultural figure) and the rather more depressing ones of Viktor Klemperer covering the Nazi period.…I suppose the best contemporary exponent of the Diary in the UK is…. Alan Bennett who is excerpted from time to time in the London Review of Books….

Nowadays the energy people used to devote to their diaries tends to find its outlet in blogging…..although books made from blogs do tend to be frowned upon…

Not that this discourages me as you will see from the list at the top right corner of this blog…….

I personally have made a good living from words – both spoken and written – although the balance between the two changed significantly after 1992. In the 70s and 80s it was the spoken word which earned my modest keep (as a social science teacher) - although the papers, journal articles and even a small book I wrote from my experience as a political manager also helped develop a wider reputation.
 .

From the 1990s, the written report was the lynchpin of the project management system which lay at the heart of my work universe - as a well-paid consultant in the EC programmes of Technical Assistance to ex-communist countries. My job was to transfer experiences – and perhaps lessons – from government systems and agencies of Western Europe to those in Central and Eastern Europe and central Asia. 

Fortunately I had a bit of preparation for the role – being a member in the last half of the 80s of various European working groups working on urban issues.

The work in “transition countries” the 90s and noughties was a real eye-opener - giving me a vantage point to identify the various patterns in systems of local government and Civil services. Suddenly I was seeing similarities in the powerful influence of informal processes in Austrian and Dutch systems – let alone Italian and Romanian!

Even so, switching roles and developing new skills wasn’t easy – and it took me almost a decade before I was able to produce the coherence of In Transit – notes on Good Governance (1999) and essays such as - transfer of government functions; civil service systems;  decentralization; and Training that works! How do we build training systems which actually improve the performance of state bodies?. This material forms the “Lessons from Experience” section of my website - Mapping the Common Ground

As I was starting to phase out my project management work in 2010 or so, I started blogging - using my work experiences and reading since the 60s as the main focus of posts which now number almost 1,200. Some of these I’ve used to produce E-books – on such topics as “crafting more effective public management”; and cultural aspects of Bulgaria; Romania; and even Germany;

But for some time I have been trying to produce a little book from the many posts I’ve done which bemoan global social, economic and political trends….It was actually in 2000 I first wrote an essay expressing concern about global trends and asking where someone of my age and resources should be putting their energies to try to “make a difference”….

Seventeen years later I’m still not sure what the answer to that question is – although it’s clearly in the area of mutuality …….but rereading and editing the posts (which cover a decade) has made me realize that it’s actually quite useful to see the process of one’s thinking “longitudinally” - as it were. Tensions between lines of thought can be seen – if not downright contradictions. Far from being a nuisance, these help to clarify and develop…And one post tried to put a lot of the economic books into a typology – allowing me to see gaps in coverage….

On the other hand, blogging requires a very different set of skills from that of writing a book which flows and has coherence…..

At the moment the book bears the title “Dispatches to the post-capitalist Generation” (an early version is here) and has sections entitled “Our Confused World”; “How did we let it happen?”; “The Dog that didn’t bark (covering the decline of the political party); and “What is to be done?” (a question I’ve used for quite a few of my papers in my lifetime)    

The other thing I’ve realized as I reread the draft is that my blog is at least partly a tribute to those writers who have kept me company at one time or another on my journey of the past 60 plus years. My earliest memory of what I might call “seminal” books are those of Bertrand Russell – and then the titles of the 1950s – Tony Crosland’s revisionist “Future of Socialism” (1956); and two New Left counterblasts - Conviction (1959) and “Out of Apathy” (1960). 
University – particularly the political and economics streams I opted into from 1962 – was the profoundest influence on my mind. The key influence may have been Karl Popper’s The Open Society – but there were others such as historian EH Carr and scholar of religion Reinhold Niebuhr….

A couple of years ago I listed the 50 or so books which have made an impact on me here – and here

In what I call the “restless search for the new”, we would do well to pause every now and then and cast our minds back to such books and try to identify the “perennial wisdom” embodies therein…. Intellectual histories are quite rare - notwithstanding the great efforts of people like Russell Jacoby, Peter Watson, Mark Greif, George Scialabba and even Clive James..... perhaps the direction in which I should be taking this draft??????

Confession Time

Apologies to my loyal readers for my (abnormally) long silence of the past month…I made the mistake of collecting and reflecting on this year’s posts with a view to writing a proper introduction and conclusion to the 2015 volume which is due shortly. 
I got as far as a draft Preface – but the harder I thought about the posts and how the issues they raised might be pulled together in a coherent conclusion, the more depressed I became about the impossible task I had set myself. To pretend that one person has anything original to add to the thousands of scribblers whose writings so learnedly analyse the world’s ills……..!!  

It was Duncan Green’s blog which brought me back to earth – in a post about the limited use academics make of social media - by reminding me that - 

a blog is a ‘web log’, i.e. an online diary. Regular blogging builds up a handy, time-saving archive. I’ve been blogging daily since 2008. OK, that’s a little excessive, but what that means is that essentially I have a download of my brain activity over the last 7 years – almost every book and papers I’ve read, conversations and debates. Whenever anyone wants to consult me, I have a set of links I can send (which saves huge amounts of time). And raw material for the next presentation, paper or book.

In the past 18 months I’ve taken to raiding my posts in order to compose what are now ten E-books. I have to confess, however, that none of them attempted an overview.....  

Green is spot on about the help a blog like mine offers in finding old material...you just type in the keyword and the relevant post with its quotes and hyperlinks generally appear immediately – a record of your brain activity that particular morning. I also have a file of more than 150 pages (for each year) with raw text and several thousand hyperlinks which didn’t make it to the blog……an amazing archive of months of brain activity which, of course, needs a bit more time to access……  

The problem, of course, is when your brain switches off – as mine seems to have in the past couple of months!! Only 3-4 books have engaged my interest – eg Theodor Zeldin’s The Hidden Pleasures of Life; and, more recently, Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything – a writer, I must confess, whose celebrity status had until now discouraged me from reading her stuff… This review explains why her new book is so well worth reading. But I have not been encouraged to excerpt either of these books….. nor to comment on the surprising victory of an old leftist in Labour’s leadership contest. Somehow I have lost my capacity to believe in the possibility of “change for the better”…..

I have, in the past decade, become increasingly sceptical of the writings in my own professional field about the possibilities of “reform” efforts actually improving public affairs and services for the better - but I had still been a bit shocked this year by the pessimistic tone of some of the post-mortems which key political science figures have been delivering on their retirements after some 40 years of analysis and exhortations…..

If that’s how the key figures feel about their work, what hope is there for the rest of us?

I hope shortly to upload an early version of the 2015 E-book and share some of my preliminary thoughts about the task I set myself…… 

The photo is one of series I have of marvellous Uzbek terra cotta figures which I acquired in Tashkent in the 3 years I spent there from 1999

Celebrating the Open Free Spirit

In the eleven years of blogging, I occasionally muse about the nature of blogging. When I’m in a (self-) critical mood I refer to it as an extreme form of self-advertisement; in more benign moods I talk about its role in clarifying confused thinking….

And, of course, I’ve noticed that most serious blogs specialise in a particular topic – be it novels; economic, political or legal commentary; the EU; social policy; Marxist economics; a particular academic discipline etc 

What I haven’t paid enough attention to is how few serious blogs there are – like this one - which challenge these boundaries and choose to tramp or trespass in what I have called “NO Man’s Land”. The other image I have used is that of the butterfly which gracefully alights for a few moments on a flower and then moves on. I should perhaps be more careful in my use of that image/metaphor since the butterfly’s life is a short one   

So in closing, for the moment, this series of “posts…so far this year”, I want to try to identify those few blogs which set their face against being enclosed by boundaries and range more freely.  

1. Let me start with someone who has sadly gone silent these past couple of years – a retired Liverpool academic, Gerry of How the Light Gets In whose material  makes for great reading - with celebrations of the history and landscapes of NE Engalnd – as well as cultural and literary events all covered in loving detail. Hopefully Gerry will find his voice again…

2. Then a blog from a Bulgarian woman long resident in the US – Maria Popova - whose Brain Pickings focus on the timeless and uplifting advice of creative writers such as Ursula le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell and Rebecca Solnit

3. Then there’s my current favourite blogger, Canadian Dave Pollard of How to Save the World whose blog exudes the integrity of someone searching for what is worthwhile in life and living  

4. Another blog which defies classification is RioWang – which is half travelogue (but of such way-out places as Iran and the Caucusus ) and half celebration of the remnants of old Jewish history in such places. This, for example, is the latest post which includes a classic Persian song

5. Brave New Europe is a leftist site with an open and creative selection process

6. The Worthy House is a blog I hesitated to include – since its over-confident, ant-leftist tone sometimes offends me but the sheer range of its reviews warrant its inclusion. See for yourself with these reviews of the important book The Geography of Thought; Banfield’s The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (to which I often refer in the posts); and Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs of which they seem none too fond.

But why can I find only a handful of blogs with such an open spirit?

Posts This Year – Part V – the last few weeks

Post Title	Inspired by	The basic message
Demons and Demos	A Polish right-wing philosopher challenges liberal democracy	Identity politics has indeed gone too far
How America Lost its Mind	A 3 year old article with that title	is puritanism and post-modernism really to blame?
The Dethroning of Reason	Remembering the debate in the 1970s about “muddling through”	Did post-modernism and behavioural economics really start the rot?
Positive Public Administration	A long-overdue Manifesto	We have become too cynical about institutions
Feelings	“Nervous States” book by William Davies	How did experts initially get their status – and then lose it so recently?
Head Hand Heart	David Goodhart’s latest book	The devaluing of manual and technical work and the overestimation of the university
Links I Liked	The accident of genius; how a 1977 report changed the UK	30 years after Thatcher’s resignation, we still don’t have the measure of her
Humankind	Rutger Bregman’s latest book is a model of clarity	His argument that humans are basically altruistic doesn’t quite convince – altho he adds the rider about “power corrupting”
How Myths take root and are difficult to shift	A reread of Bregman’s book	One of my famous tables - with 22 of Bregman’s exploded myths explained
Covid19, governments, Science and Lies	I get fed up hearing the UK PM talk about “following the science”	Governments can’t avoid choices and values. Experts have their limits
The Continuing Saga of Brexit	2 of my favourite blogs	The endgame
Whatever happened to peak oil?	Reading at last J Michael Greer’s “The Long Descent” (2008)	I realise how little I understand about energy issues
The 2020 posts …..so far	This is the time of the year when I start to think about the annual E-book of posts	It is an opportunity to reflect on the blog’s distinctiveness – and what it might be doing better
Perennials - II	I like to think that a post of several years ago can still be read with benefit	why straddling boundaries gives insights
Mapping the Common Ground	A book-length report from a fascinating new think-tank with teams in 4 countries	Gives a detailed insight into the UK of 2020 – using the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt
Le Temps Perdu III	The third of the series	Why we should turn off the News
Between the Lines - IV	I’ve started – so I’ll finish	What I would like to be distinctive about the blog
The blog that keeps on giving	Dave Pollard’s blog which, like mine, is also one of the few generalist blogs	The importance in these times of good questions – and of not being put off by the lack of response