RSA - 21st Century Enlightenment - Matthew Taylor's Blog

I have been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) for a while, and enjoy the combination of intellectual challenge with a rather laid back approach to things. Founded in a coffee shop in Covent Garden in 1754, by William Shipley, the RSA has a wealth of achievements and famous Fellows in its 250-year history.  There are now about 27,000 Fellows across the world. The great thing is that it is not an old, stuffy kind of place - on the contrary, the house in John Adam St, London is a very chilled place to hang out, meet and chat. (No, this is not advert for the RSA - just how it is).

Matthew Taylor took over as Chief Executive in 2006, and has worked hard to continue the process of renewal. In the past week, the RSA rolled out a new tagline for the brand and it's activities - "21st Century Enlightenment", which I like a lot.

 From Matthew's blog:

"From this week, RSA Fellows and observers may start to notice a new strap line appearing on our website, at our events and in our materials: ‘RSA: 21st century enlightenment’.

This has emerged from a pretty extensive conversation involving RSA staff and Trustees and is based on research with Fellows and partners. We wanted something broad enough to reflect our heritage and cover the range of our activities but also bold and interesting. Rather than spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on a face-lift our approach is, as it were, to drop the phrase into conversation and see what people make of it.

The reason I liked 21st century enlightenment (despite having lots of ideas of my own) is that it has two meanings. The ‘soft’ interpretation is simply that the RSA seeks to enlighten people as to the nature of the modern world and the best ideas to make that world better. With an amazing programme of lectures and events, not to mention the website and Journal, we can certainly claim to be meeting this objective.

The ‘hard’ interpretation is an unashamed championing of the values of the Enlightenment, the era in which the RSA itself was established.

If I can be excused a very superficial reading of history, the idea I associate with the Enlightenment is this: There is a good way to live one’s life but this ideal does not rely on rules handed down by kings or bishops but can be derived from an account of the kind of society in which we want to live and the kind of people we are and have the capacity to be.

In the past I have spoken about a social aspiration gap, defined as separating the kind of future most people say they want for society and the kind of future we are likely to build relying on current patterns of thought and behaviour. This gap can be seen to have three dimensions, three ways in which we the people must develop to close the gap. Collectively we must be more engaged, more self reliant and more pro-social.

Personally, I believe there are many things wrong with modern society including our, as yet, inadequate response to climate change . These challenges help to make the case for us to live differently. But the case for 21st century enlightenment does not rely on these pressures. Being engaged, self reliant and altruistic is the way to live the good life in the good society.

As someone who calls themselves progressive, I worry sometimes that people who share these values feel the best way they can make the case for a different way of living is to say we are in a crisis, whether environmental, social or economic. In this way progressives can sound very much like pessimists. On occasion, for example, environmentalists sound like they would be disappointed if a technology was invented which took carbon from the atmosphere without us all having to stop travelling and shopping.

The point for me is not that human beings have failed to achieve progress (who among us wish to return to a time when the average life expectancy was less than forty?) but that more is required of us and more can be achieved by us. This can be a century when the human race not only meets the challenges it has created for itself, but when it can aspire to reach a higher level of functioning with more and more of the human race feeling more able to discover and express their full capabilities. This is the ideal of 21st century enlightenment.

I realise this all sounds rather trite. Whether the new strap-line works is more about what the RSA does than what it says about itself. This means our lectures, our research, the feel of our House and most of all the ways we support our Fellows to be a force for good. Of one thing I am reasonably confident; this is an account of our mission of which our founding fathers (they were all men) would approve."

I couldn't agree more - and look forward to gettting increasingly involved with the RSA.

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Jaron Lanier at the RSA - "You Are Not A Gadget"

One of the things I really enjoy as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (the RSA) is attending their thought-provoking talks and conversations. Last night Jaron Lanier was talking about his new book, "You Are Not A Gadget". He is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author.

As the talk synopsis said, Jaron is worried that " Individual creativity has begun to go out of fashion. Machines, specifically computers, are no longer just tools to be used by the human mind - these days, we treat them as if they are altogether better than humans."

In essence he is saying that we should all be pro-internet, pro-technology - but there are certain myths (e.g. "everything that's best is free", "social networking is always a good thing") and certain problems (e.g. "our gadgets/technology drive us not the other way round") that we should fight against. Only by challenging these can we nurture individual creativity (and thus further develop our own humanity).

Jaron wrote an article for the WSJ earlier this month - and rather than try to further explain his proposition, let me extract a couple of paragraphs from that article ...

"Most people know me as the "father of Virtual Reality technology." In the 1980s and 1990s, I was a young computer scientist and entrepreneur working on how to apply virtual reality to things like surgical simulation. But I was also part of a circle of friends who tried to imagine how computers would fit into the peoples' lives, including how people might make a living in the future. Our dream came true, in part. It turns out that millions of people are ready to contribute instead of sitting passively on the couch watching television. On the other hand, we made a huge mistake in making those contributions unpaid, and often anonymous, because those bad decisions robbed people of dignity. I am appalled that our old fantasies have become so entrenched that it's hard to get anyone to remember that there are alternatives to a framework that isn't working.

Here's one problem with digital collectivism: We shouldn't want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don't get innovation.

If you want to foster creativity and excellence, you have to introduce some boundaries. Teams need some privacy from one another to develop unique approaches to any kind of competition. Scientists need some time in private before publication to get their results in order. Making everything open all the time creates what I call a global mush.

There's a dominant dogma in the online culture of the moment that collectives make the best stuff, but it hasn't proven to be true. The most sophisticated, influential and lucrative examples of computer code—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or Adobe's Flash— always turn out to be the results of proprietary development. Indeed, the adored iPhone came out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth."

You can read in full Jaron's article here.

What was also interesting was that Nico Macdonald, the RSA's event moderator, encouraged the audience to comment and ask questions in real time via twitter, complete with its own hashtag. Here's a sample of the stream ....

@ThinkAboutArt Thanks to Jaron Lanier for stating that artists deserve the dignity of their own creative work!! http://bit.ly/8Q4CpP #rsalanier

@mahemoff "The Machine Stops" is one of the most prescient things ever written acc to Lanier #rsalanier

@milwardoliver Interesting thought out of #rsalanier that children on facebook have their growing up recorded in digital form without the ability to forget.

@mickyates "The geeks have created a world that benefits geeks - so others are denied chance for own personality formation" Jaron #rsalanier

@tomux @melex #rsalanier. It's like a health-food movement for the internet generation. We should eat more broccoli.

@petemarcus Economic model of 'free' doesn't work. Web does not provide bounty if you give your stuff away for free. #rsalanier

@petemarcus Originally PCs allowed consumers to also be creators. New devices like Kindles only make us consumers now. #rsalanier

@melex #rsalanier Lanier concludes that he's not anti-tech per se, but is against 'ritualistic, anti-human design'. Hear hear, sense at last.

@mickyates It's not a problem with the internet - that's brilliant - it's the dogma of the "open/free culture" of web 2.0 that's the issue! #rsalanier

So, quite an event - and an exercise in the new (social media) and the old (the RSA - or more completely the "Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce - a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress", founded in 1754) that was fascinating in its own right.

The RSA's founder, William Shipley, would have been proud!

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Time for business to take a lead - a post from Matthew Taylor, RSA's Chief Executive

From Matthew Taylor's blog at the RSA (Royal Society of Arts) ....

Time for business to take a lead

December 22, 2009 by matthewtaylor
Filed under: Politics, Public policy

My breakfast yesterday was at an event to mark the latest edition of the excellent Times science supplement Eureka. The event featured a fascinating but largely depressing panel discussion about the fallout of the Copenhagen Summit. It got me thinking about climate change through the prism of my old friend cultural theory.

As regular readers will know, the theory suggest there are four fundamental ways of thinking about social change; the individualistic, the egalitarian, the hierarchical and the fatalistic.

Fatalism is the default option for most people. Climate change is a huge, complex process that no individual or community can affect alone. Tackling climate change is in large part about shifting this sense of fatalism.

Copenhagen was all about the hierarchical dimension of change: top down, strategy led, enforced through rules. But it largely failed. This reflected three problems; first, the difficulty of leaders committing to definite sacrifices in the short term for possible gains in the long term; second, the failings of international governance and, in particular, the idea that 192 countries could all reach a far reaching agreement; third, the difficulty of reconciling national political pressures to the demands of global decision making. An important point made at the Times breakfast was that even if the summit had agreed legally binding targets, it is very unlikely that President Obama could have got them through Congress (remember what happened when Al Gore signed up to Kyoto).

This is why the commitment of each country to lay out its national commitments by the end of January 2010 may be a good thing. It may be easier to stitch together an international plan from national agreements than to make a global deal and then try to impose it on suspicious national populations and parliaments.

On the egalitarian front – that is change driven bottom up by shared norms and values – the debate on climate change is in danger of shifting away from those who want action. I wrote recently that more and more people I meet from the political right talk about climate change in the same way they refer to the European Union, as a kind of conspiracy dreamt up by meddling lefties looking for a way to justify state interference in our lives. This mixture of right wing belief and populist anti establishment feeling can be very powerful. Over the top language from environmentalists calling for an abandonment of Western lifestyles doesn’t help. Climate change scepticism has been growing steadily in the USA, it has become the rallying call of the right of centre Australian opposition and it will no doubt be used by leaders and oppositions in other political systems.

Individualists argue that the best way to tackle climate change it to look to markets, innovation and technology to find solutions. The story here is mixed. On the one hand we hear serious industrialists arguing that all cars could be electric within a few years; on the other hand, it is easy to be seduced into complacency by wacky schemes like piping sulphur into the atmosphere which are not only unproven but could prove on closer examination to be impossible or even counter productive.

So, overall, things look pretty grim. Going back to the European Union analogy, I think business has a major role. Back in the mid-1990s business leaders argued strongly for the UK to join the euro but as the popular backlash grew (egged on by the media and note how the Express has now become outspokenly sceptical) they were less and less willing to put their head above the parapet.

In terms of encouraging political leaders to get their act together, in relation to tackling right of centre suspicion and in relation to fostering technological innovation the global corporate sector is vital.

But will it step up to the plate? When I asked this question on Monday, James Cameron (FRSA), Vice Chair of Climate Change Capital was very upbeat about business commitment while other speakers talked about the growing market for low carbon products and services. But Times Editor James Harding introduced a note of caution. If you ask the CEOs of the FTSE 100 if they care about climate change they will all say the right thing, he suggested, but if you ask finance directors in the same firms you might get a very different response.

In the wake of Copenhagen there is a huge opportunity for international business (including investors) to take a lead in demanding and shaping global action. And they have a window of opportunity ahead of next year’s Mexico summit. How about a New Year declaration from ten of the world’s most powerful corporate figures: Mittal, Buffet, Brin, Voser? Sadly, I don’t have their blackberry numbers but if you do feel free to forward this post.

via matthewtaylorsblog.com

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"How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb"? ... from Matthew Taylor's blog at the RSA

I thought a few times about posting this, but I then realised that humour (of whatever description) is a part of a Leader's tool kit. And Matthew always has an angle worth considering.

And I am not so sure about the PC'ness of this, so please make your own mind up and let me know. Here goes:

......................................................................................................................

From Matthew Taylor's blog, at the RSA ...

Having ranged over social segregation in Northern Ireland, climate change and poverty this week I want today to discuss the vital issue of jokes and gender (don’t worry I wrote this blog in my own time!).

Excuse the generalisation, but women are less enthusiastic than men about jokes.

Despite having a Monkhousian memory for jokes, I tend to be with the women on this one. Too often jokes are an alternative to wit. Joke tellers break up and dominate conversation rather than letting it flow and develop. A well told, well-timed joke is a minor art form. It can create a bond of subversive intimacy between teller and hearer. It can be a harmless release from constraints of identity and taboo. The exchange of jokes can be a special form of gift in which you keep the gift you give and appreciate it even more. Also, in a fascinating way I can’t explain, jokes seem to have an independent life cycle; even the best joke stops being funny when it has been told too many times, while some are like desert flowers blooming for a few days before shrinking away again for years.

This is the subtle theory but too rarely the clunking practice. Let’s be honest, most jokes aren’t very funny (if you want proof think of a subject and then Google ‘jokes about x’). Also, which may be what women sense, there is often an underlying aggression in both the content and form of the joke, the implication that anyone who doesn’t ‘get‘ it is inadequate.

Having shown how right–on I am empathising with a feminist critique of joke telling, let me now make a sexist assertion. Some of my favourite jokes are what might be called anti-jokes, and generally I find that women don’t get them.

By an anti-joke I mean one that derives its humour from in some way subverting the joke form. This might be its sheer silliness. As in

A white horse walks into a pub.
The barman says ‘how funny, we’ve got a drink named after you’
‘What,’ says the horse ‘Norman?’

Or it might be that they lack a conventional joke device or punch line. As in the famous bees joke:

Two beekeepers are chatting. One says to the other, ‘ So how many bees do you have then?’

The second beekeeper answers, ‘Oh about twenty thousand’.

The first says, ‘Twenty thousand, eh? Right. And so how many hives do you have?’

The second answers, ‘ Ten hives’.

The first says, ‘Ten? Hmmm, twenty thousand bees, ten hives. Hmmm.’ He nods approvingly.

The second beekeeper asks, ‘So how many bees do you have?’

The first says, ‘Me? Oh, I’ve got about a million.’

The second beekeeper looks surprised. ‘A million! Holy cow, how many hives do you have?’

The first answers ‘Oh just the one hive’.

The second is astonished. ‘A million bees and only one hive???’

The first pauses and thinks, realising the gravity of the situation.

He says ‘Yeah well. Sod ‘em, they’re only bees…’

Anyway, I’ve had this theory for a while and this week I got to test it. Last Tuesday a friend told me what I though was a great joke (ironically, provided to him by his daughter). Since then I have told the joke to twenty people – 12 men and 8 women. So far only one woman liked it, and she had heard it already, while four men thought it was funny.

Now, I realise that the most obvious conclusion to draw from a positive response rate of only 25% is that the joke is simply not funny. But it could also be taken as evidence of my gender analysis. So here is the joke (which I fear may be even less successful in written form). I am asking my readers to give it a mark out of ten so I can then undertake a rigorous gender analysis and on that basis either abandon or reassert my theory:

A man walks into a pub. He has an orange for a head.

The perplexed barman says ‘Sorry mate but I can’t help noticing you’ve got an orange for a head. How did that happen?’

‘Ah’ the man says ‘it all started when I bought a brass lamp from an antique shop. When I cleaned it a genie appeared and said he would grant me three wishes’

‘Oh, I see,’ says the barman ’and what was the first wish?’

‘The first wish’ said the guy ‘was that I be always surrounded by attractive women’. Saying this, he clicks his fingers and he is immediately surrounded by attractive women

‘But what about the orange for a head?’ says the barman

‘Ah well’ says the man ‘my second wish was for my wallet always to be filled with fifty pound notes’. Saying this, he produces his wallet which is indeed filled with fifty pound notes

‘But what about the orange for a head?’ says the barman

‘Yes, I’m coming to that’ says the man ’it was all because of my third wish’

‘Yes?’ says the barman leaning forward in anticipation ’and what was that?’

‘Well’ says the man ‘I wished I had an orange for a head ‘

PS the answer to the joke in the title is, of course (and possibly appropriately), ‘that’s not very funny’.

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Zizek, Hayek – and Simon Cowell

From Matthew Taylor's Blog, at the RSA

Zizek, Hayek – and Cowell

November 25, 2009 by matthewtaylor
Filed under: The RSA

‘Zizek is untwitterable’ was a pithy tweet on last night’s RSA lecture by one of the world’s foremost philosophers. The great man’s lecture was dense, edgy and erudite. Like a good wine its after taste is more affecting than the first impression.

One passage came back to me last night running home (for fitness purposes not because I was being pursued by lust-crazed fans). Zizek was discussing the idea that a viable and orderly social democracy could be based on a deal whereby we give total power and status to a super rich knowledge elite in exchange for all citizens – regardless of merit or effort – being guaranteed a basic income. He dismissed this, in part because he said it took no account of envy. Zizek quoted Frederich Von Hayek who argued – against advocates of social justice – that the poor find it easier to accept the wealthy if they think their fortune is unmerited. For the masses to accept that those at the top deserve their success means the majority have to accept not only that they are poorer but they are less virtuous.

This echoes the point made by Michael Young in his 1956 satire ‘the rise of the meritocracy’ and again in one of his final articles in 2001:

“The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get.

They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody’s son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side”.

All this made me think of our attitude to celebrity. We want to think two things about celebrities. Either that they are simply blessed with a talent we don’t have (which is bearable for us as it’s not our fault that we are not gifted), or that they are deranged and damaged (which is bearable because we choose not to live their crazy sad lives). If it is possible to think both things at once all the better.

Much less attractive to us is the idea of people whose specialness comes from simply working hard and sticking at it. We might say simply that this is boring but maybe ours is a defensive reaction to not wanting to be made to feel that it is our own fault that we have not excelled.

So on X Factor we like Leona Lewis for her talent or Jedward for their deranged desire to be famous even while losing their dignity. As for the rest – hard working, not bad but not special singers – well, they leave us cold. And as that’s all that’s left to fight it out, I won’t be watching any more.

Matthew always manages to take a different take on issues right in front of our noses - Simon Cowell, your reply, please?

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What would you give a busker if you didn’t have any money?

From the RSA - Connected Communities Blog

What would you give a busker if you didn’t have any money?

November 17, 2009 by Jonathan Rowson
Filed under: Cohesion, Connected Communities, Social Capital

Prompted by Mathew Taylor’s recent blog on the cultural life of the London Underground, I remembered an aspiring musician who told me that she always gave money to good buskers, because as a matter of principle we should support what we value, and because she feared she might be in the same position some day (she is now a vet).

But what do you do when you really like a busker’s music, want to support their endeavour, but find that you are genuinely out of change? A quick ask around the office led to ‘a kiss’ and ‘a smile’ as the main suggestions, while many spiritual traditions would suggest offering a prayer, or simply a heartfelt positive thought for the person’s wellbeing, which is surely worthwhile. But man cannot live on smiles, kisses and good vibes alone. There ought to be a more tangible non-monetary expression of regard.

What if you were to offer some nourishing thoughts or advice? You could write them your favourite quotation on a piece of paper and drop it in alongside the twenty pence pieces, or perhaps advise them on where to have lunch (Mooli’s would be my suggestion).

Sounds wildly unrealistic and impractical? Perhaps. But now imagine you walk past the same musician every day for several weeks so that you effectively enjoy hours of the fruits of their skill and time. How could you pay that back in kind? Perhaps you could help them improve their second language, fix a leaky tap, or cook some lemon rice.

Maybe. But at the end of the day, surely people want money – universal vouchers that give you the freedom to get whatever you want, rather than relying on the relatively limited set of whatever skills or products people around you can give?

Certainly money is the preferred form of exchanging value, but many argue that something vital about human meaning-making and social connectivity has been lost in the process. By mediating human contact, money lubricates the free exchange of skills and products, but also contaminates it.

A few years ago a friend hired a van and helped me to move flat in london, and in return I gave him some chess tuition. We didn’t haggle too much about the relative time, skill or value of what we exchanged, and seemed to sense it implicitly. On a large scale, you cannot build an economy on this sort of model, but at a local level, especially when money is tight, we need to consider ways of reviving this form of exchange.

Some communities are already doing so with the idea of time banking, and the classic expression of related forms of exchange is Avner Offer’s paper Between the Gift and the Market: The Economy of Regard, which is far too rich a tapestry of ideas to summarise here, but one signature quotation of Offer’s might whet your appetite:

“Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines wellbeing.”

So the next time you pass a busker doing their job well but don’t feel like reaching for your wallet, be patient, and consider what you might be able to offer each other.

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Connected Communities

From the RSA website, Jonathan Rowson's blog on "Connected Communities" ...

David Cameron’s speech at the conservative party conference indicated that the conservative party might be interested in the work of our connected communities project, so I decided to take a closer look.

The RSA is a charity, and strictly non-partisan, but Mathew Taylor [Chief Executive of the RSA] has previously given his thoughts on Progressive conservatism and it seems important to engage with the main ideas of the would-be next government as fairly as possible.

Cameron repeated one of his more memorable signature lines: “There is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same thing as the State.” This line sounds like a suitably respectful departure from Margaret Thatcher’s most famous “There is no such thing as society” quote, but in fact, when you read Thatcher’s original, and typically decontextualised quote, in full, she was saying something quite similar (to Women’s Own magazine, October 31 1987):

“I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.”

Ten years later Tony Blair spoke of the need to combine rights with responsibilities, which again makes you wonder if they all mean much the same thing, with only slightly different degrees of emphasis. However, the tone of Thatcher’s quote is rather different, and more combative in spirit than Cameron’s distinction, or Blair’s juxtaposition. When Thatcher says ‘there are individual men and women and there are families’, I don’t sense she is thinking of community, and her vision of the social world does sound relatively atomised.

Cameron clearly sees community ( “the ultimate warm fuzzy” as a recent RSA seminar attendee put it) as part of the picture of a healthy society, as he made clear in his speech:

"So no, we are not going to solve our problems with bigger government. We are going to solve our problems with a stronger society. Stronger families. Stronger communities. A stronger country. All by rebuilding responsibility".

Read the rest of the post ...