The rule of anarchy

The most stupendous revolutionary poem ever written in English is Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy (www.artofeurope.com/shelley/she5.htm). Shelly wrote this after hearing of the Peterloo Massacre. The poem describes a vision of an evil masque in which a parade of ghouls (murder, fraud, hypocrisy and anarchy) appear wearing masks resembling the political leaders of the day. The most terrible ghoul is anarchy, who resembles King George IV.

Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw -
'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!'

With a pace stately and fast,
Over English land he passed,
Trampling to a mire of blood
The adoring multitude

Shelley’s association of anarchy with the supreme authority and power of the state differs from most popular uses of the word, in which ‘anarchy’ is used to designate a disorganised powerless multitude in which private appetites are fulfilled by force. Shelley’s view (and mine) is that most people, left to themselves, will organise their lives peacefully. The main causes of violence and hatred are the abuse of power and the love of power respectively. These are more likely to emerge from those who have already accumulated power, seek more, and fear its loss.

The control of the powerful has therefore become the major political and legal enterprise in any society. This takes the form of ensuring decision-making is shared with representatives of those affected by the decisions, that proper deliberative procedures are followed, and that decisions are implemented on the basis of clear rules rather than arbitrary favours to cronies and courtiers. Needless to say, societies which operate in this way tend to make better decisions which command greater consent. They also tend to be more prosperous: people will work to accumulate money if they can be assured it will not be seized from them by some arbitrary decision.

These principles are well-understood when people think of societies and governments, but not when they think of big organisations. Corporations, banks and universities can all experience the rule of anarchy. Rules may exist in the organisation, but they are by-passed by the powerful. Off-the-cuff decisions replace due process and the thorough discussion of options. Arbitrary favours are handed out to cronies and lovers. The central aim of the organisation becomes the accumulation of prestige, wealth and power for the small ruling junta. Such organisations, like some banks recently and many commercial organisations in the past, make increasingly grandiose and inept decisions, and crash to disaster. Commentators are then amazed that such apparently powerful and dominating figures - like Fred Goodwin (formerly of the Royal Bank of Scotland) or Kenneth Lay (formerly of Enron) - should fall so suddenly. To appreciate their achievements, we need to return to Shelley:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away"

Great crackpot ideas of the past

Some people collect train numbers, some collect beer mats. I collect ideas. The most prized items in my collection are the great crackpot ideas that have inspired men to gleefully slaughter each other over the past decades. We could order these into a top ten, ranking them by millions of deaths through war and starvation, but this would take more research than I have time for at present. So here’s one great crackpot idea to be going on with: The peoples of the world can be arranged into separate states, each of which should comprise a distinct nation.

The ‘nation-state’ is a great crackpot idea because the peoples of Europe and the rest of the World have not distributed themselves into neat geographical clusters. Of course, rulers have tried for centuries to make their subjects more homogeneous, usually by attempting to eliminate inconvenient groups that persisted in adhering to minority religions, languages or customs. The ‘nation-states’ which dominated Europe after 1918 sought even more vigorously to make reality fit the crackpot idea, with mass transfers of population, suppression of minority languages, and exterminations. The creation of the European Union is an admission by all but a few recalcitrant nationalists in Europe that the nation-state has been a catastrophe for the continent, and that a muddled unity is preferable.

There are lesser crackpot ideas too. These cause havoc and dismay but do not usually involve major loss of life. An example is the research assessment exercise (RAE) for allocating funds in British universities. This allocates about £2 billion/year, according to a grading of ‘research excellence’ across all disciplines. These grades are assigned by a series of expert panels based on their assessments of published research papers submitted by universities, and on various intangible fudge factors like ‘research impact’. RAE assessments are completed every few years. The total cost of this exercise has been estimated at £47 million, mainly in the time spent by university staff in preparing submissions for the expert panels.

What makes this a crackpot idea is not just the high transaction cost of the exercise, but the impossibility of grading all human knowledge from genetics to philosophy on a simple rating scale. Most academics could probably agree about the leading centres in their discipline, but there would be probably be little reliability in any ratings beyond that. To complicate matters, there is some excellent research in some mediocre university departments and vice-versa. Academics would also struggle to reliably rate research which crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries or which challenges dominant paradigms. Watson and Crick were lucky to have done their research before the RAE existed.

To make matters worse, the RAE grades past research, not current performance. Because of the long intervals between assessments and the delays in academic publishing, some of the research assessed may be based on laboratory or fieldwork almost a decade old. Panel ratings are therefore exercises in the history of knowledge. There is an interesting contrast when academics bid for funds to carry out new research projects. In this case, the research councils and the various charitable research funding agencies assess the academics’ recent performance and the prospect of a useful outcome from their proposed research project. Unfortunately, research funds are limited, and academic staff spend much of their time preparing research bids with limited chance of success.

The obvious solution to all this would be to close down the RAE, and transfer the funds to the research councils. This would also release the high transaction costs of the RAE. Why won’t this happen? The answer is that however crackpot an idea, it generates its winners and losers. The universities which gain most funds from the RAE worry they might lose by an alternative system. Besides funds, the RAE assigns esteem, and esteem counts for a lot in the competitive and hierarchical world of universities. Central government is also a winner: it can enforce regular changes in the formulas used to calculate the allocations of funds following the RAE, and thereby remind those working in higher education of their subordination to the state. There are important lessons of power here: use complicated rules to disguise the exercise of your power and to divide those you rule into squabbling factions. Get clever people to spend all their time in silly competitions, and they will pay less attention to the serious business of challenging your power.

Bullying as a career

Some years ago, the Government tried to improve the recruitment of teachers with the slogan ‘You never forget a good teacher’. That may be true, but you never forget really bad ones either. Most of all, you never forget the school bully. Bullying at school causes absenteeism, illness, and even suicide. Even after leaving school, the pain can live on. I know of friends who have had chance encounters with school bullies years later, and felt the same daggers of pain, anxiety and humiliation.

School bullies are usually portrayed in fiction as thick and cowardly, who inflict cruelty because of psychological abnormalities. In fiction, they are defeated in the end. But this is wishful thinking. An alternative fictional school bully is shown in Michael Palin’s Tomkinson’s Schooldays. Here, the school bully enjoys the exercise of cruelty, but uses it to gain exceptional favours including access to cigars, whisky and the pleasure of attractive young Philippine women. In Tomkinson’s Schooldays, being a school bully is an important career, leading directly to the Cabinet.

Bullying has been a profitable career for many others. Those who enjoy personal power over others and exercise it cruelly will not only succeed in life, but will usually accumulate an adoring circle of cronies. This is because bullying serves many functions. Apart from the obvious gains of encouraging compliance, it can generate solidarity. In mediaeval Japan, the shoguns created a caste called ‘burakumin’, who were assigned the most inferior status in society. All others could share the joyful common task of bullying and humiliating them. The British Conservative Party has a successful history of building support by identifying groups of victims who can not fight back, from immigrants, to single mothers, to the chronic sick on benefits.

In some cases, bullying is a response to specific impediments to management. An example would be in universities, where many staff are on ‘open contracts’ and can not be dismissed except for gross misbehaviour. University leaders wish to enhance the prestige of their institution (and hence themselves) by expanding research. Research is deemed to be an exceptional intellectual skill, not available to people who are committed to lesser forms of scholarship such as teaching. University leaders therefore aspire to recruit researchers in place of teachers, and offload teaching to even lowlier staff. But if teachers are open contract with a full workload, they can not be made redundant. Bullying is therefore employed. This can take the form of denigrating their work and closing the courses they run, excluding them from senior positions, allocating them to inferior work spaces, and threatening disciplinary action for minor (or no) infractions.

Heaven forbid that you might think this true of my own dear university, led as it is by saintly figures thinking only of the welfare of the staff and students in their charge.

The generation of heroes and the generation of would-be heroes

I recently saw the film The Ipcress File on television. This was first distributed in 1965, the year I began living in London as a university student. The Ipcress File was a kind of antidote to the James Bond spy films, and emphasised the routines, the crowded working conditions and the everyday incompetences of working life. But the film had a special significance for me because of the profound influence its hero (played by Michael Caine) had on my life. When I was a teenager, no hero ever wore glasses. It seemed that wearing glasses (which became essential from about the age of 13) was therefore to be consigned to a secondary role in life: I would be behind the lines, in the backrooms, but never the hero winning the medals and the beautiful women. Michael Caine in The Ipcress File was the first ever hero on film to wear glasses. His character was from a working-class background, had a disrespect for authority, knew his classical music and was an excellent cook. He also succeeded with attractive women. He thus (I believed at the time) provided a template for my own life. I began to listen to classical music, and learnt how to cook. The attractive women came, although not quite in the numbers I had hoped for.

Seeing The Ipcress File also made me reflect on why I wanted to be a hero in the first place. Born in 1946, I was raised in the shadow of war. My parents and all the members of their generation had stories about the War. One of my uncles had been in the Eighth Army in Africa and Italy, and another in the Airborne forces from D-Day onwards. My father had been unable to serve on health grounds, but all civilians were on the front line when the air raids began. There were gaps in local streets where bombs had fallen, the centre of town (Birmingham) had ‘bomb sites’. A local wood was full of rubbish left behind by American troops who had been stationed there. Comics, films and newspapers were dominated by stories of the War. Heroes were everywhere. ‘Heroism’ was more than bravery in the face of the enemy: it meant endurance and stoicism, a sense of common purpose, and a willingness to sacrifice for the sake of others. Many members of my generation absorbed these values, even though there was no war left to fight. The substitute for some of us was politics: an heroic struggle against oppression and injustice which involved marching but no gunfire. We followed the campaigns in the USA against segregation as if it was our own battle. We marched against nuclear weapons, and when we came of age, we marched to support Dubcek and oppose intervention in Vietnam.

Of course, our generation of would-be heroes was pushed aside by younger people not raised in the shadow of the War and who responded to the peacetime values of self-enhancement, both financial and psychological. These new values became important in the later 1960s. Sexual hedonism and drugs were followed by searches for mystical enlightenment. Eventually, most people realised that financial and psychological enhancement could best be attained by an endless sequence of purchases. These values came of age politically in this country in 1979, and still dominate the political class. As a result, politicians still talk like members of rival firms seeking to persuade reluctant consumers to buy their products. When faced with real crises, like recession or global warming, they lack the skills or the understanding to mobilise mass support. There is once again a need for politics to be an heroic enterprise, but we have no heroes any more.

The Chaos in our High Streets

English high streets have become places of nomenclatural chaos. Visitors to this pleasant but damp island will have noticed that although the high streets of our cities and towns bear the marks of a varied history, they all contain much the same shops. The only exceptions are the small market towns not yet captured by the armies of Marks & Spencers, WH Smith, River Island, Greggs etc, as well as the specialist areas of large cities such as the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham. Small local shops are usually explicit in what they sell (with the exception of hairdressers who usually use punning names like ‘Headmasters’, ‘Hair Today’, ‘Headstrong’ and so on). The real problem lies with the multiples. Here are some examples of misleading names:

▸ Currys. Despite my persistent demands at our local branch for a chicken tikka marsala, they insist that they only supply electrical goods.

▸ Boots. A series of mysterious stores which sell make-up, medicines, domestic goods and lots of other things, but no footwear.

▸ Thomas Cooks. The name suggests that these are either restaurants (staffed by people called Thomas), or shops selling kitchenware. All they seem to sell are holidays and foreign currency.

▸ Office. A recent arrival in my local high street in Worcester. Demands for stationery were not welcome, and all they stocked were women’s shoes.

▸ Bank. The most confusing of all. No savings facilities, loans or credit cards, just piles of clothes on sale.

This trend to name shops after things they do not sell must come to an end. Our government must act in the name of health and safety, security, or any of the other reasons they usually summon up to order people around.

The Laws of Information No. 3

The third law of information is:

3. Data that is collected to measure performance loses validity.

First a confession. In the late 1980s, I worked as Director of Planning and Information in a mental health service in the NHS. One of my tasks was to organise the statistical returns on clinical activity for despatch to the Department of Health. At that time, these were based on a set of standard definitions called the ‘Korner system’ (after a woman who chaired a committee which recommended them). Our service included a brilliant and very hard-working consultant psychiatrist for the elderly. She believed that assessments of new patients should initially be in the patient’s own home (a ‘domiciliary visit’ or ‘DV’). Since she was an orthodox Jew, this meant a lot of walking when her duty days coincided with the Sabbath. Unfortunately, the Korner system required information about scheduled outpatient clinics but not domiciliary visits. Following the Korner rules would have meant that our most active consultant would appear as our least active. This was obviously unjust, so I modified the returns for her clinical activity to record each DV as an attendance at a (non-existent) outpatient clinic.

Paradoxically, my data-adjustment produced statistical returns which were a more accurate reflection of clinical activity than would have been the case without such adjustment. Nonetheless, they became an inaccurate record of inpatient clinics in the service in which I worked. I suspect that data-adjustment in the desired direction was and is rife in the NHS. Although this is dishonest, it can cause far less damage than changing reality to generate honest statistics. A well-known example of changing reality in the NHS is to make patients wait in ambulances outside A&E departments. This reduces the time the patient spends in A&E for the purposes of official statistics, and hence enables the hospital to meet a government target. There are many, many more examples in the NHS of how meeting centrally-imposed targets can damage patient care.

This is not a recent phenomenon. The whole technology of corporate strategic planning and management by targets owes its origins to Gosplan, the state planning commission in the USSR. Studies of the Soviet economy in the 1960s and onwards were full of examples of how rational responses by individual enterprises to centrally-determined targets could produce absurd results. These included the shoe factory that met its target number of shoes by producing shoes all in one size, and the steel factory that met it target for weight of steel by producing a few huge ingots.

The rise of the celebrity wedding

Last week, I did not attend a family wedding. To be more accurate, I drove my mother (who is almost 90) to the venue and picked her up afterwards, but was not invited as a guest. The wedding took place in a splendid castle rather than a church, lasted most of the day, and (according to my mother) was like a long enjoyable party. Many of the men wore kilts, while the bride had no need to blush since she has lived with the groom for several years. My mother had a wonderful time.

This kind of wedding is increasingly popular, and is modelled on the celebrity example. As social relationships within communities weaken because of commuting (for both men and women) and the domination of television, people take their guidance on how to live their lives from the examples of celebrities. Tradition, religion and morality become less important than an outward display of mimicry. The greatest celebrity events are weddings, held in private so that exclusive rights for photography can be sold to Hello or OK magazines. The event is therefore staged with the care that would be expected of a film or a play in the West End.

The celebrity example means that many people now regard a wedding as an opportunity to star in their own theatrical event. This has inflated the cost of weddings, which have become the largest single item of expenditure for many couples apart from buying their house. People can not usually afford such an event when they first live together, and so weddings are postponed for many years. This has a profound effect on the meaning of the event. A wedding of this kind is no longer a commitment by a man and a woman to live together and support each other through life, but is instead a party to celebrate several years of sustained cohabitation. It is no longer a union of two families celebrated in their presence, or for that matter in the presence of the public.

So church bells will ring less often across the fields of my village on a Saturday, and weddings will become private fancy dress parties for ageing couples.