Matthew's RSA blog

Do as I say, not as I do...

Yesterday we had David Runciman discussing his book Political Hypocrisy. Then today, Mangus Linklater comments on a similar phenomena in The Times.

Runciman begins his thesis by arguing that the easiest way to defeat a political opponent is by showing them to be a hypocrite. He then takes us through a history of policital hypocrisy and ends by defining two types of hypocrisy in the political sphere.

The first is personal hypocrisy, when, as in the case with Eliot Spitzer in New York, ones personal behaviour doesn’t match up to the political ideals that you have been advocating. The second is political hypocrisy, when a politician draws a veil over the political realities of a policy in order to deceive the public.

We, the public, are obsessed with personal hypocrisy which blinds us to the political hypocrisy taking place all around us. We hold politicians to impossible standards, comforting ourselves with the thought that they chose to live their life in the public eye, and therefore they must be the best of us.

And yet I wonder, given that we are all hypocrites in one way or another, aren’t these politicians that we castigate just demonstrating that which we say we want – humanity. There is nothing more human than the desire to hide your worst self, and surely that is even clearer in the mind of a politician.

We need to realise that if a politician has made mistakes in their life, or changed their view on a political position, that may well make them better people, and better able to make good policies in the future. It is not a character flaw to change your mind.

What is different and objectionable is when people judge others. That’s ultimately why the Conservative’s ‘Back to Basics’ policy failed. It sounded as though they were judging the public, and so when their personal peccadilloes came to light it was so profoundly damaging.

The public is easily swayed by the rhetoric of hypocrisy precisely because the public has lost trust in politics and to a certain extent in themselves. Although the argument still rages, again see the Daniel Finkelstein piece from this week, we can at least say that rising affluence is not resulting in rising levels of contentment and fulfilment. People are apparently less happy today, less content despite being more materially affluent than any time in history. The perception gap that I have referred to so many times is part of the public hypocrisy – enough is never enough.

Arguably, democratic politics contains at its very heart a meta-hypocrisy. On the one hand politicians pretend that it’s about doing what people want, when in fact representative democracy is little more than the process by which we can get rid of bad governments.

On the other hand politicians claim the public complains too loudly about their every decision; as if, somehow, our politicians would attain a state, where their behaviour would delight us.

We the people are constitutionally dissatisfied. These two myths, that of democratic accountability and of political venality are the two expressions of the position we find ourselves in – we are a people unwilling to be governed and yet not ready to govern ourselves.

This is a much more profound ‘hypocrisy’ than politicians who call for virtue but are sometimes guilty of vice.

I completely agree with Runciman’s recognition that hypocrisy is a particularly English, or at least English-speaking phenomena. I was reminded of the fact that not all countries have this puerile obsession with politicians bedrooms by the famous Mitteraund response to the Parkinson and Hawke affair when he said “Imagine having to resign because of adultery. If we did that in France, there would only be the poofs left in the cabinet!”

Mohamed, Osama and Steve

It has been a mammoth week of lectures with some super-stellar names. We continued our partnership with booksellers Blackwell's on Tuesday as we welcomed poet Simon Armitage to the house all the way from the hills in Yorkshire. Simon treated attendees to a reading from his new book, Gig: the life and times of a rock star fantasist as he regaled us with tales of a life intertwined with music, gig-going and poetry.

On Wednesday we saw a totally different crowd of lecture-goers stream into the Great Room as Charlie Leadbeater and Matthew Taylor discussed the ever-changing and collaborative nature of world of the web. This coversation was continued by Jonathan Zittrain on Thursday evening as he pondered the future of the internet. Lucky lecture-goers received a free copy of his new book with the generous support of AOL.

For our weekly RSA Thursday we were delighted to have Steve Coll over from America as he lifted the lid on the Bin Laden family and gave some interesting insights into a family whose power and money have been used to frighteningly varied ends.

We are pleased to also announce a few new additions to our May events programme;

On Tuesday 6 May, at 1pm Ray Tallis will be speaking about the most complicated part of our anatomy, the head.

RSA Screens continue at a gallop as we welcome director, Joshua Dugdale for a screening of his carefully crafted documentary, The Unwinking Gaze in which he followed the Dalai Lama for 3 years chronicling the many challenges that he faces.

And to continue our partnerhsip with Channel 4 we will be screening film-maker and journalist, Jon Ronson's Reverend Death.

We hope to see you all soon at some of the fantastic events that we have coming up over the next few weeks. As always, our events are all available as podcasts so if you missed any of this week's four remarkable and varied speakers you can listen again. 

We do

Last night we had a great lecture from Charlie Leadbeater discussing his new book We Think. The book has got interest and praise, not just for its content but also how it was written – collaboratively, via Charlie’s website. It may well be the first wiki-book

One connection I made was between Charlie’s thesis and Brooke Harrington who spoke here last week on her book Pop Finance. I asked Brooke whether Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone and the foremost exponent of the breakdown in social capital, was interested in the 20 million Americans taking part in investment clubs.

Brooke surmised that Putman didn’t investigate this on the grounds that investment clubs aim to make money. But, as she points out in her book, there’s no correlation between the financial success of the club and its long term future. There are clubs which make no money but are still meeting and investing, just as there are some clubs which are financially successful, but break-up due to personality clashes. In the final analysis, it’s all about people voluntarily doing stuff together.

I similarly asked Charlie what he thought about Putnam’s thesis. Does the rise of forms of on-line collaboration like Wikipedia and Linux disprove social capital theory.

The answer in part is Putnam was looking at distinct forms of social capital, arguing that the capital communities most need is the type that is declining fastest. So for instance, in deprived communities, what’s needed is ‘bridging capital’; people who are not in work having contact with those who are and thus creating opportunities through networks and connections.

The problem with the simplistic social capital thesis is that it seems to imply that after 150,000 years of human evolution in which we have been hard wired as a social species we have suddenly decided to retreat from the public sphere.

What I take from both Charlie and Brooke is that Putnam was mapping less a fundamental shift in human nature and more was the decline of old collectivist institutions. These institutions – think political parties, think trade unions, think established churches - are characteristically bureaucratic, rigidly hierarchical, and culturally self-denying (‘you have boring meetings to make the world a better place’).

What Putnam didn’t see was that alongside the decline of these institutions what would occur is the emergence of ‘new collectivist’ institutions – like investment clubs and on-line social networks - which are less bureaucratic, more dispersed, more subtly hierarchical, and more self-actualising (or what ordinary people tend to call ‘fun’).

Human beings do still want to do good stuff together, but because our lives and our expectations have changed we want to work together differently. This is what we’re trying to do here at the Society. RSA Networks is one way of doing that, but there will no doubt be others – such as this blog. One way of defining my mission for the RSA is to build on the great traditions of this old collectivist institution, but work with Fellows to turn it into an exemplar of a new collectivist spirit. 

Speed dating, parking tickets and English pubs

This week Tim Harford entertained and informed a packed Great Room audience by showing how economics form an important part of many of our daily decisions, whether we realise it or not. With some revealing anecdotes from his new book, The Logic of Life, Tim explained the powerful rationalities that affect our choices - whether we're on a speed-date or trying to decide if it's worth risking that parking ticket. Those of you in the audience would have noticed that this event was being filmed; this is for our new exciting events strand, Vision. Along with our new website, we will be launching RSA Vision soon which will give you all the opportunity to watch some of your favourite events again and again.

On Wednesday Polly Toynbee chaired an excellent panel discussion on how we can reverse the worringly persistent correlation between how well-off a family is and the quality of the place they live in. And we rounded off our week with Paul Kingsnorth in conversation with Martin Wright, debating whether the proliferation of chain cafes and the demise of the humble English pub signals a deeper loss of national identity and character. A spirited DSA audience probed and prompted Paul with some great questions as he introduced some of the challenging themes that he writes about in his new book, Real England: Battle against the Bland.

We were delighted to get back some stats from our web team today who not only told us that over 60 people listened online live to Jeremy Deller's recent event but that it has been downloaded as an mp3 file over 1000 times. To listen again to any of our events from this week or before visit the audio pages of our website.

Memoirs of life, love, death and art

We shot into April at the speed of light with a busy week in the lectures team. First up on Monday evening we continued our education series with Edge on developing the potential of every pupil. Geoff Mulgan of the Young Foundation opened the discussion about diversity of provision in the education system, an area of special interest to the RSA as we look ahead to the opening of the RSA Tipton Academy in September. We were delighted to welcome Anders Hultin to the event to speak to us about the Kunskapsskolan in Sweden, an innovative system of preparatory schools which he co-founded.

On Tuesday evening, the novelist Julian Barnes spoke to a packed and attentive Great Room about his memoir of life, love, death and art - Nothing to be Frightened of. This was the first in a new series of collaborations with bookseller Blackwell and we are very much looking forward to welcoming poet, Simon Armitage as our next speaker.

MT has already blogged on our great event on Wednesday with Michael Landy, Neil Boorman and Daniel Miller so I won't elaborate any further than to say that the audio podcast will be available soon for any that missed out on that fascinating discussion.

And to wrap up the week, we welcomed veteran foreign correspondent Robert Fisk to our RSA Thursday stage. After shoe-horning as many people as possible into the Tavern Room, Robert shared memorable moments from his incredible reporting career and caused a great queue of people after the lecture who were eager to question the great man himself.

We slow from a fast gallop to a steady canter next week, and we kick off our week with Tim Harford revealing the hidden logic of life... prepare to be enlightened!

Just how do you get to Australia without stepping foot on a plane?

We returned to the office from a snow-covered Easter to an exciting week of events.

We kicked off on Wednesday with Rt Hon Jack Straw MP who spoke to a heaving Great Room about building community confidence in the criminal justice system. The lecture was a great opportunity to launch the RSA's new Prison Learning Network and we had some excellent questions from the audience, you can listen again here.

Later that evening we screened No End in Sight. Nominated for an academy award for best documentary feature the film was the first of its kind to chronicle the reasons behind Iraq's descent into guerilla war, warlord rule and anarchy. Director Charles Ferguson spoke about making his first documentary film and what led him into the gritty world of documentaries from an earlier career in software technology.

Finally we wrapped up with this week's RSA Thursday, by welcoming slow-traveller Ed Gillespie to the RSA to prove that you don't have to get on a 747 to holiday in Australia you just need a lot of time....Read his blog about his 361 days of slow-travel global circumnavigation here.

We draw a quick breath before we launch into the Spring programme. No rest for us as we have just announced our April events, you can see the full list here but highlights include: Julian Barnes, Tim Harford, Jonathan Powell and Charlie Leadbeater.

Hope to see you all at JAS soon

New Horizons

This week we explored new horizons by filming our speakers for the first time. Clay Shirky fulfilled the title of his talk, “Here Comes Everybody” by packing out the Great Room and leaving the chair of GDAC to fend off a huge number of calls from disappointed people who couldn’t get in. Clay told us it was the best audience he’d had recently – it’s nice to know we have the best audiences as well as the best speakers.

We also filmed the eminent Sir Ronald Cohen who shared his thoughts on entrepreneurship. After finishing the talk early to accommodate his busy schedule, he found that his popularity had beaten his diary - and signed books for a very long queue of people in the lobby. Many thanks to him for giving up this extra time as well as sharing some valuable insights.

And speaking of new horizons, Liz Winder, our Head of Lectures and member of the RSA family for eighteen years, is leaving to explore some of her own. (The Chair of GDAC has been so distraught she could barely concentrate on Monday night’s “Damages”). Matthew has paid formal tribute, but the Lectures team would like to add that Lectures life will never be the same again. To say that Liz has been the mastermind of many Lectures triumphs, and the best manager any of us could hope for, simply wouldn’t be enough – and there also aren’t sufficient words to express how much we will miss her.

Liz’s best moments include an event with Ronald Reagan which was followed up by tea with him and Nancy; the BBC “Any Questions?” event with Lord Tebbit and Peter Tatchell together, and more recently events with Al Gore, Kofi Annan, David Cameron and Alistair Darling. Her worst moments include finding out that the office of a top international speaker had neglected to put his speaking engagement in the diary…but all ended well as the person in question ultimately honoured their commitment!

So long Liz – it’s been wonderful working with you and we envy whoever bags you next!

A fond farewell

                            

This week lecture-goers braved wild weather to enjoy two events. First we enjoyed a range of views on Future Radio. A lively debate, the only point on which everyone agreed was that digital radio needs an optional “crackle” button. Manufacturers, take note!

Our Thursday lunchtime debate was no less contentious, as we featured Counterknowledge, Damian Thompson’s fiery polemic against all forms of modern quackery. A packed audience witnessed Damian defying death by aconite (in a practical demonstration of the dubious claims of homeopathic medicine) and were exhorted to sharpen their critical faculties, vigorously defend free speech and renew the public sphere – entertainment and enlightenment in equal measure!

This week’s GDAC (Glossy Drama Appreciation Club) examined the film “The Other Boleyn Girl” – with initially surprising but ultimately satisfying casting of the Boleyn sisters, it’s well worth a look. But can there be a hotter Henry than Jonathan Rhys-Myers of “Tudors” fame? The club is split on this burning issue – but the Chair is definitely voting for Rhys-Myers – sorry Eric!

Also under discussion was BBC4’s “Mad Men” – perhaps too early for judgement but good to be reminded of a time when smokers weren’t confined to shivering outside pubs!

But all this jollity is but a feeble attempt to lighten heavy hearts…. Next week, we are losing our highly respected and much loved head of department. We’ll be looking back at her finest and favourite moments next week, and wishing her well after her dedicated eighteen year service with the RSA.

Brain Food

RSA Screens is going from strength from strength as we started this week with acclaimed British director, Nick Broomfield’s controversial new film, Battle for Haditha. This is a war film about ordinary people in an impossible situation, chronicling a series of of still disputed events which led to a number of tragic killings in Iraq in November 2005. A packed Great Room came to see this special screening and pose a series of challenging questions to the great man himself.   

From matters of life and death to yet more questions about the very fundamentals of human existence. Leading experts in the practice and philosophy of medical science, Adam Zeman and Ray Tallis continued our popular RSA Thursday series with a revealing exploration of the brain, from atom to pysche. Despite ever more astonishing scientific advances, Zeman and Tallis agreed that we still struggle to bridge the explanatory gap between the physical brain and the mind. Food for thought of the very highest order...

Now to highlight two very exciting events coming up in our Spring programme:

We will be welcoming one of culture’s wisest observers and a regular writer on all things to do with the internet Clay Shirky. Clay will be exploring the impact of online social networks on the fast-changing world around us.

Finally to coincide with the launch of the RSA’s new Prison Learning Network, Rt Hon Jack Straw MP will be examining the major issues in prisons policy today.

A lighter blog next week as the Chair of the GDAC (glossy drama appreciation club) returns to fill you in on all the gossip!

Read all about it....

Another week, another wide-ranging spectrum for the Events team. We began the week with academic Richard Sennett discussing the innate human quality of craftsmanship, how it has been lost through industrialisation and ways in which it can be rediscovered. 

We continued with Sudhir Venkatesh, a young American sociologist whose groundbreaking fieldwork was featured in Freakonomics. Sudhir held the audience in thrall as he recounted his unique experience of following and even befriending a crack dealing gang in Chicago, with compelling frankness. Read his fascinating tales in Gang Leader for a Day.

And speaking of frankness, we rounded off the week with some concerning insights into the current state of UK journalism. Nick Davies’ new book Flat Earth News has caused a firestorm of debate in the media blogs but Adrian Monck was on hand to quote from The Art of Ballyhoo (Harpers Magazine, 1927) to remind us that fears over the corrupting influence of big business interests, the forces of commercialisation and the pr machine are nothing new…plus ca change…