A school for shepherds
Is paying attention too much to ask? What does it take to pay attention to the big questions behind the spin?
When there were still Primary Care Trusts I did a study of the use of business information by ten adjacent trusts. One interview with a Commissioning Director is seared into my memory. I asked our question: what information do you use to make commissioning decisions? Commissioning health care was the purpose of PCTs and her core role as a Commissioning Director. She said that she would love to take a couple of days to think about that. What I heard was that she didn’t have time to think about what her job was and how it could best be done. And that what was stopping her was the organisation and its response to its regulatory environment.
For those who can still manage to care about reorganisations in the NHS, my experience of CCGs is that they are much, much worse than PCTs at understanding the job they are there to do. And I gather the Lansley reforms are on their way out, too. If you have any idea about the waste of health care billions that we are talking about here, you will have as little confidence in management at all levels as I do. Remember that just maintaining the internal market costs £15bn per year without doing anything.
But this is not about healthcare, it is about paying attention. I have written this blog with Philip for over a year now, one a week without missing. What effect has that had on me and my thinking? Well, maybe you have your own views on that! I have certainly moved from a somewhat arms-length and detached amusement at long and complex words and concepts to a more upfront and involved stance. And I have certainly moved to a more intuitive and even empathic understanding of the reasons why people like the Commissioning Director above can’t do their job.
Why is it that people in public life fail to ask even the most basic questions about what, why and how? When I look at a year of writing 2000 words a week and trying to make them interesting to friends and colleagues as well as to casual readers, I can see a change in my ability to nail the basic questions. Fifteen years ago I wrote a book, Trust and Mistrust, and as I remember the process of writing with John Smith, we kept throwing away text as being too circumspect, and going for something blunter and more direct.
What makes Happy Ever After [Escaping the myth of the perfect life, Paul Dolan] somewhat radical, at least by the standards of popular psychology, is its recognition that these narrative traps aren’t simply inexplicable mistakes we happen to make, but the products of ideology. They may not serve us, but they certainly serve the system in which we find ourselves embedded. Oliver Burkeman
The myths and narrative traps work at the subconscious level to keep us controllable by others without our consent. Forcing myself to describe the nature of those myths and narratives and how they end up controlling us takes my own awareness into a more conscious place. That is the service I am looking to do for readers and hence for myself and Philip.
Sterile and fertile
I am starting an online course with Didi Pershouse, on Regenerating the Soil Carbon Sponge for Flood, Drought, and Wildfire Resilience. Gosh. Didi is concerned to bring into awareness the myths we have created around cleanliness. Her book, The Ecology of Care, has this quote:
Bacteria are not germs, but the germinators — and fabric — of all life on earth. In declaring war on them we declared war on the underlying living structure of the planet — on all life forms we can see — and on ourselves. Stephen Harrod Buhner
We have explored in previous blogs the importance of the life of our bodily biomes: the gut biome, the skin biome, etc. How these bacteria create for instance all the biochemical substances that our brains use to function, like serotonin. And how our notion of medicine is to kill off these bacteria in case they are harmful. It turns out that the massively complex biome in a healthy soil is what supports the whole of land-based life including ourselves. And we see conventional agriculture suppressing that life in order to “control” or “optimise(!)” the growth of crops and livestock. And it doesn’t work for all the same reasons — we saw some of this in last week’s blog.
I had not sufficiently understood the close philosophical alliance between sterility and science, even though it is symbolised so prominently in the white coats of scientists and doctors. Scientists really are the ones who take the wings off the fly to see how it works. They try to hold everything constant except the parameters of their experiment but life doesn’t work like that. There are endless papers pointing out the nonsenses that are produced by trying to simplify natural systems but it doesn’t seem to stop people’s desire for this “rigorous” “scientific method”.
The sorts of results that come from disassembling the fly are typically attractive to corporates who find it easier to convert the so-called results in seemingly-scalable, commercial opportunities. The sales proposition has to be simple enough to be attractive not matter how wrong and wrong-headed it is. So the people working on actual valid responses to our planetary crisis are not governments and corporates and others with power and a stake in the system, but alternative types whose knowledge comes from passionate engagement not from big science.
I keep circling round again to Nora Bateson’s understanding that scalability is a disaster. Fertility is inescapably local and particular. Of course there are principles, some of which are valid across whole regions, but the supply of nutrients, the cooling of local weather, resistance to flood damage, the development of thriving vegetation are all local and particular events. If we are not capable of observing principles as they unfold we will turn solutions into more problems. You want a recipe? Forget it, that is not your life, or your life support system. There is no alternative but to engage and to live this stuff.
In the last blog we spoke of multi-species solutions and we can reiterate that frame here. Which aspects of the soil fauna and flora, which fungi in partnership with which plants will find the path to regeneration against all the odds? Who do we need to learn from this time? The list of potential collaborator life forms is essentially infinite: that is how we get there.
Observing life
The scaled up “solutions” that create an endless supply of new problems are both the result of sterile thinking and have the effect of sterilising future thinking. That is the shape of what we face. When someone says we need to be able to roll that out across the country, just smile and walk away.
The opposite of that doomed behaviour loop is observing life. Life finds a way. There is no environment on earth where life does not find a way — there is slime inside the old reactor vessels in Chernobyl that digests the radioactive elements. When we step outside our hubris and our need to “manage”, we can find the patience to observe the process that reclaims what we have spoiled.
So this year of blog posts is also our notes, our field observations of what is happening and what sense we can make of it. We have had a few comments and highlights and the world is always richer for readers observations of the life they can see. The patterns that grow and become visible are visible on the basis of that record. There is a strong link between creativity and the unexpected. The patterns that we fail to see because we do not expect to see them are the most liberating patterns.
An unlikely confirmation
At some point my daughter taught bottom set maths in a comprehensive school in the Northwest of England. Her pupils were largely the sons of sheep farmers who knew that they would run the family farms and that school was not awfully relevant. My daughter devised ways to get them engaged with the maths syllabus, in their own environment, but the headteacher was not actually interested in education. So be it.
I am reading James Rebanks’ wonderful and angry book The Shepherd’s Life. It starts with his own rejection of school in a close and rebellious parallel. One of the things that irked him then was the teachers’ questions about the beauty of the mountains and the Wordsworth heritage. But here is the kicker: Rebanks didn’t know — and I didn’t know — that one of Wordsworth’s reasons for being enraptured by the Lake District was that its people were not the creatures of the aristocracy as elsewhere in Britain; they were independent of mind and action and entirely self-sufficient. In fact, the Lake District is the largest area of common land in Europe, organised and administered of course by the commoners themselves without the “help” of bureaucrats or indeed of school teachers. As it has been for hundreds of years.
The crowning glory is that The Shepherd’s Life is such a great and lucid book.
Fascist food
Another running theme of these blogs has been food and dietary guidelines. This week as I write there is a big new push to control what we eat that goes by the name EAT/Lancet. The Lancet of course being a medical journal.
Not only does this “new” push double down on the grotesque mistakes that have already been made in food guidelines that have led to our epidemic of obesity, ill health and chronic long term conditions, but the language starts to tighten into the possible need, if people do not follow this wonderful advice of their own volition, to coerce them for their own good. This is like the QOF programme that spent £30 billion to improve the nation’s health by putting everyone on drugs which had, according to official figures, zero impact.
In this “study” the lead researcher in Harvard has massive undeclared conflicts of interest from both big food and big pharma. The programme is supported, financed, by a raft of big food companies whose products we would all do well to avoid. There appears to be targeted advertising by Google that reminds me of electoral interference via Facebook.
I interpret all this as a slightly panicky response to these people losing the initiative to the grass roots low carb movement that so many people are joining and successfully healing themselves. As the data from maverick doctors and nutritionists becomes more and more convincing, the response of the establishment is precisely that doubling down on their mistakes and dirty campaigns to discredit people whose results are incomparably better than their own.
So, the science-that-is-actually-antiscience thread that runs through these blogs has just received massive confirmation. All the people that have been telling me to just wait and things will change need to understand the damage that will be done to people’s lives by this new push. You will, whether you like it or not, consume this crappy food and damage your health. You will be a dutiful consumer and buy what we persuade you to buy.
The icing on the cake is the save-the-planet message. Also devoid of respectable science and pushed by people, literally, who don’t take their own advice and who live a private jet lifestyle that flies(!) in the face of their own professed concerns. Utterly despicable.
