I think that an explanation for today's long essay, of some 5,000 words, might be useful.
It was very hot yesterday morning, so hot that Jacqueline and I did not feel like going birdwatching in the morning. We did, instead, set off to sit in the garden of the Poets' House Hotel in Ely, to drink coffee.
And then the conversation began.
Jacqueline wanted to discuss the role of the Fabians in Labour history. A long time ago, I was a member. I knew enough to start that conversation.
Then she brought up the Rockefeller Foundation and its impact on medicine and education in the first decade of the 20th century, a topic she has studied extensively. We began to explore that and its consequences, a theme we had discussed before.
Then we drew parallels, and I brought in a discussion of Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian statistician working in the 1830s and 1840s, and his introduction of the concept of “the normal person” as a consequence of his work establishing averages in human physique and behaviour.
At this point, we had found a rich vein to discuss and let the conversation roam, noting and recording it as we went so that we knew the direction in which we had travelled in our discussion around the normal person, the continuing prevalence of this concept in current political debate, and notable thinkers who challenged the concept, including Nietzsche and Aristotle, the latter being a particular favourite philosopher of both of us.
From there, it was just a step to consider how a politics of care might be very different from the stereotypical politics of the assumed “normal person”, which is common to all neoliberal political parties at present, including both Reform and Restore.
What we realised was that we had found the defining difference between those neoliberal politics of slightly varying hues and the politics of care. All neoliberalss, including those on the far-right, assume, paternalistically, that there is a “normal person” whose needs they must satisfy. The politics of care is fundamentally different. It presumes that the role of politics and of the state is to assist a person to fulfil their own purpose, which need not be normal at all, and around which diversity is permitted.
It was as if a canyon had opened, a rift had been discovered, or even a new paradigm had been noted. I confessed to some excitement as a consequence.
Despite that, we went to Welney and birdwatched during the early afternoon, with the highlight being a garganey, which is always a treat.
On my return, I did, however, get to work. The notes and recordings were all poured into ChatGPT to try to give them some useful structure, but that was not very helpful, as it risked losing the richness of the conversation we had enjoyed. So, I set out to craft an essay and, by 9 pm, the one I published this morning was complete.
Jacqueline then edited soon after dawn this morning, as she is an earlier riser than me.
Is this the last word on the subject? I am sure it is not. This is too powerful an idea not to return to sometime, and if this became part of a book, it would undoubtedly need to be revisited. But I now think I have a useful philosophical foundation for the idea behind the politics of care about which I've been talking for so long.
My question, then, is a simple one. Do you agree? Is this useful? What does it miss? What does it add? Please let me know, but please also note that we are out visiting friends for much of today, and moderation will be slow. For that, I can only apologise, but after a day in which I did considerably more writing than I expected, I think I, and we, deserve a day off.
PS. This was not my most productive day of writing. The last chapter of The Joy of Tax, which is more than 9,000 words, was written and edited in a day.
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I was on the train home on Friday, and young man who like me was on a bike, well his bike kept falling over in the carriage. So I advised him to lean the bike in a lot more to stop it from falling. And then he struck up an amazing conversation with me. He told me right off the bat that he had ADHD and he’d been visiting his family in the town I worked in because he no longer could live with them and was in care (he’d been violent at home etc., and needed space). He did boxing (dscipline); his ADHD was also a ‘super-power’ he called it – he could focus on things in the right conditions. The conversation went all over the place, from IT design to why I was still working with dodgy knees at 60 with 7 more years on the clock and he (at 23) did not have a job. I was amazed at his candour, and could only make him feel comfortable to keep him going which was fascinating.
I was left with a number of profound feelings; Hope – we can talk to each other if we are courageous enough to despite how different we are, learn and understand each other; admiration – this young chap was full of self awareness. But also, he was so natural in his disposition that maybe something is wrong with society – and not him and others like him? Thinking about I.T. and marketing – I feel that we are increasingly expected to conform to models of human attitude with ever decreasing acceptance of individuality? Is this why diagnosis of ADHD etc., is going up? Because we are making life harder for a lot people? Is diagnosis now ‘revolt’?
Read this morning’s essay PSR!
I try to have as many conversatiions of the sort you had
Rhey are always worthwhile
Talking yes, but even more important is active listening. (Which is implicit in how you describe your inspiring encounter.)
The powers that be don’t listen much to psychologists and sociologists. They listen more to economists -supposedly the ‘harder’ science – has lots of maths and graphs. But we know it is not. Often a bit like theology.
I noted in Friday’s Guardian an article on unemployed young people in the Netherlands. This bit reminded me of the Funding the Future discussion.
“Tim Versnel, the head of employment at Rotterdam city council, said it had responded to a recent rise in youth unemployment with a more caring strategy and intensive courses. The council works with well-known local employers and a mentoring organisation to support chronically unemployed young people in particular, who often grew up with domestic violence or mental health issues.
“Our approach had been mostly geared towards education and finding a better way into the labour market,” Versnel said. “We’ve switched to a more caring approach: mental resilience training, help with substance use, financial literacy. A more whole-of-life approach, instead of specifically job training and applying for vacancies.”
I know it can work
I am sure it can.
I think many organisations go beyond what is normal when recruiting and look for the ‘norm’, tending to recruit in their own image. So the BBC is often accused of recruiting within a small gene pool of ex-public school and Oxbridge and with it a particular view of the world. IBM, for whom I used to provide services, didn’t like facial hair and dress codes were very strict. When they introduced ‘dress down Friday’ in the 1980s, many employees waited for their bosses to dress casually rather than take the initiative themselves. So there might be a continuum of Normal – Norm – Institutionalised to describe what organistions value among employees. The very real down side of such thinking is the stifling of creativity, which is perhaps why companies like IBM, once the biggest, most valuable Company in the world became something of a bit part player in the technological revolution of the 21st. century. A similar pattern was in evidence at Motorola, with whom we also worked. We developed a training programme to encourage greater empowerment among the workforce, which Motorola then ‘rolled out’ to their worldwide workforce in a desire to standardise empowerment with no acknowledgement of cultural differences.
Thanks.
“Despite that, we went to Welney and birdwatched during the early afternoon, with the highlight being a garganey, which is always a treat.”
Where are the pictures??? Pictures please!
There were none. Sorry!
T A R A!
Might it be that conversations, not least non-verbal conversations, with keen attention being paid to deep listening, are of paramount value in the following?
1) Helping each of us to better understand and enable ourselves
2) Ditto other people
3) Ditto ever affecting contexts
4) Ditto current theories, propagandas and practices
5) The assesment and possible development of what could/should be
6) Positive social pleasure
P. S. What might be the reasons/purposes of conversation not being more prominent in the National Curriculum?
As a lecturer I have always practiced what I would call dialogic pedagogy. It is based on the principle that we learn when engaged in an equal dialogue with others. I always tried to teach from the position of partial knowledge that students and teachers explore and discover new knowledge in mutual endeavour born of curiosity. Needless to say much of this takes the form of conversations of various sorts.
I really enjoyed your long article. I have long felt dissatisfied with the prevailing view of how things should be: what is acceptable and what is frowned upon, what is “normal”. I studied Sociology at University and felt as though I’d caught an incurable disease as, from then on, I seemed to see the world differently from how it was presented in everyday life. My career was spent working with and on behalf of children in trouble. I find your posts inspiring, to some extent because they resonate with my own feelings, but, more importantly, they represent all the background work that I should have done myself to further inform my own thinking! Your sharing with us the background to some of your posts makes us feel connected to you even if we do not respond. You really bring them to life.
I have been very fortunate in my life, I have had the opportunity to ‘flourish’ which many others do not get. Because I am a bit lazy I have not, I am sure, fulfilled my potential but I have had a lot of happy experiences which others might not get. My flourishing has been in singing and a bit of am-dram. I have been reading ‘The Book of Birds’ by Robert MacFarlane & Jackie Morris and, because he says it should be read aloud, I decided to record the individual pieces and post them on a WhatsApp group for my friends. I thoroughly recommend this book.
Thank you – for bith parts of your comment